Recently, I was offered a considerable amount of money just to show up and mingle at a party in Philadelphia. Not to speak. Just to mingle. I couldn’t do it. I imagined myself mingling, and I’m sure more than one person there would have asked what brought me there. “Are you a friend of the host?” “No, I’ve never met him. I’m here because they paid me to come and mingle.” I stayed home.
It all brought to mind another time when I was not only not paid to show up but told if I did show up, I’d be thrown out of the building. When I first came to New York in the fifties, I was able to get a meeting with a major casting director. The woman seemed very pleased to meet me and said I seemed like just the kind of young person she liked to reach out to, a serious, dedicated fellow. I assured her I was, and she said she’d be in touch in a few weeks and would be able to place me in a very small guest role on a popular weekly drama.
I walked out of her office at least one inch off the ground. This was in a period when no one had any interest in placing me in anything, other than on a line to see if there was a cab available for me to drive, which is what I was doing at the time.
On the way to the elevator, I ran into a young woman I knew from Uta’s class. She turned out to be working as the casting director’s assistant. She seemed surprised to see me, and when I told her of the meeting, she said, “I remember you as someone who took a lot of long pauses when you did scenes in class.” She didn’t mean it as a compliment. I instantly became uneasy and assured her that I could go as fast as anyone wanted me to, and all those long pauses would certainly present no… She didn’t seem to be listening, and as she walked away I swallowed hard and said it was really nice to see her.
After about a month of not hearing from the casting director, I called my former classmate and asked if I could take her to lunch. She said she didn’t eat lunch in such a way that I chose not to ask about dinner.
I let another few weeks of silence from the casting director go by before I wrote what I thought was a very friendly letter reminding her of our meeting and told of meeting her assistant and the pauses issue. I assured her there’d be no problem with pauses and hoped I would still hear from her.
What I heard instead from an agent with whom I was having some conversations was that the casting director told him if I as much as showed up in the lobby of the building where she had her office, she’d have me thrown out!
I showed the letter I had written to a couple of friends to see if I had missed something, but no, it was a pleasant letter from a young man looking for a job. I can only assume that what angered her was it was also a gentle reminder of a broken promise. So it wasn’t just teachers who could be abusive.
Later when I was working enough that people had heard of me, I ran into her a couple of times, and she couldn’t have been nicer. Neither of us mentioned the past.
Recently, a friend of mine told me this casting director’s name came up in a conversation with George C. Scott, and he went ballistic, so evidently her hostile nature was not just visited on me. It’s highly unusual when anything is personal. If it’s happening to you, it’s most likely happening to others.
In all this time I’ve never run into the casting director’s assistant, my former classmate. I know she went on to be a producer. If I did run into her, I probably wouldn’t recognize her, and if she introduced herself, I’d probably smile and be pleasant to her as well. Oh, I’m not saying I wouldn’t slip a long pause or two into our exchange.