CELIA BLANDINGS STOOD IN the musty smelling wings and waited for Billy Blumenthal to finish chatting with the author of Misconceptions, a new thriller about a woman who was supposed to be pregnant but wasn’t. She had read the Xeroxed script over the weekend and knew it needed work. But with work, there just might be a commercial hit about to emerge. Billy had personally called her, as well as her agent, asking her to come in and read with Deborah Macadam, the movie star who was playing the pregnant lady who wasn’t. Celia would play Macadam’s sister, a perky, funny, sexy lady who gets knocked off in the middle of the first act but returns mysteriously halfway through the second act. If she got the part.
She had known Debbie Macadam off and on for nearly twenty years, from University of Minnesota days where they’d worked under Doc Whiting on the Showboat. They had even roomed together for six months in a stucco earthquake trap in the hills above the Chateau Marmont and Sunset Boulevard, back before Debbie had gotten her big break in the Michael Caine picture. Now Debbie caught sight of her and came running over to give her a hug. She was wearing white housepainters’ overalls and a tee shirt under the bib top. Debbie was a nice girl, and God knew she was built for the part. Her breasts looked bigger than ever, like someone about to start nursing triplets. “The dairy,” Debbie had always referred to them, as if they were the family business. In a way, Celia guessed, they were.
“My God,” Debbie sighed, “I hope you get this. I’d get to kill you!”
“But I’d get to come back from the dead and scare your pants off—”
“Happens all the time,” she laughed.
“But what brings you to work in this dump?” The off-off Broadway theatre was tucked away, three flights up in a rundown Chelsea office building. The dust in the wings had dust of its own.
“Shows everyone how committed I am to my art.” She bit a thumbnail, chipping the last of the polish onto her lower lip. “And, you know, the producing thing …”
“The producing thing?”
“Universal’s producing. They own the screen rights. If it works, I get the pitcha. It’s worth it, believe me, for a marginal movie star with big tits and iffy legs.” She batted the long lashes that lay like grillwork over enormous brown eyes.
“Who is also not getting any younger,” Celia added.
“Aha! That’s where you’re wrong. Three years ago I was thirty-four and you were thirty-four. How old are you now?”
“Thirty-gulp-seven.”
“Right. But I am thirty-one! Read it in Liz Smith’s column yesterday in the News. That’s what happens when you have William Morris in your corner. You’ve signed a pact with the Devil, but suddenly you’re getting younger. Soon I’ll be a college girl again, then going to the orthodontist in knee socks, then diapers—I recommend it, dear.”
The stage manager brought them hot coffee, and they were suddenly chatting easily about the old Hollywood days, the marriage that each had buried in the past, the way things were going now. Celia said: “Sometimes I think about this acting thing and I really do have doubts.”
“Oh, it’s not much,” Debbie said. “But it’s what we do, my darling. It’s too late for me, I’m in it. Not complaining, mind you, but it ain’t gonna last forever. You could still get out, though. You could do something else.”
“I can?”
“Linda Thurston,” Debbie whispered enigmatically.
“Good Lord! You remember that?”
“Are you kidding? If I had a Linda Thurston, I’d be gone. Eat all the pasta I wanted, the hell with it. It’d be me and Linda all the way—”
“I doubt that—”
“Take my word for it.”
Then Billy Blumenthal was crying her name, kissing her cheek. “Celia, Celia, last time I saw you, you were engulfed—I mean positively dwarfed—in a fur parka in the snow at the Anchorage airport! And here you are, springy and wearing—da-dum—a skirt! Have I ever seen you in a skirt? Indeed, have I ever set my peepers on those toothsome stems?” She hadn’t set her own peepers on Billy since the Alaska Rep three years ago, and he hadn’t changed.
“Peepers? Toothsome stems? Ick.” Debbie Macadam made a face.
“Your chest, darling, and Celia’s legs, the makings of a master race! Come, come, Celia, meet our author, Mr. Levy. Have you had time to glance through this, dear girl? Good, wonderful. Morris, I want you to meet Celia Blandings who’s ready and willing to expire in act one …”
So they all gathered around a card table under a single dangling light bulb and began reading Celia’s sides. The laughs were there, not quite actor-proof maybe, but close. Levy read some stage directions and Billy cocked a head, eyes closed, listening to rhythms and speech patterns. He’d want just the right contrasts. The physical ones were all in place: dark, active, lean Celia would play just fine off busty, swaggering, fair Debbie. And they read and read and read. The problems were with structure rather than dialogue, which made Levy’s problems sizable but not impossible. There was something worth fixing.
Celia’s mind wandered off, the lines already sticking in her head. Incredible—Debbie was thirty-one now instead of thirty-seven. What did it all mean? Maybe it wasn’t much of a life, maybe Debbie really had given it some thought. But remembering Linda Thurston! How had she managed that? Debbie had never seemed to be paying any attention, and suddenly a decade later, in a dreary dusty theatre, she trots out Linda Thurston. Clearly, miracles would never cease.
Celia’s agent, Joel Goldman, was waiting for her, consulting his blade-thin gold watch, when she arrived at the Gotham Bar and Grill on East Twelfth. It was a huge, lofty, understated room, grays and beiges and mauves, with tapestry banquettes and flowers. It was across the street from Fairchild Publications, just down the street from Malcolm Forbes’s magazine empire, at eye level with the opera hangout Asti’s. Wholesale antique dealers nestled like clubs nearby, and the movie theatre in the middle of the block showed classics. It was pure New York. And it was only a five-minute walk from her apartment at the top end of Greenwich Village.
Joel had already ordered a gin gimlet on ice for her, and she took a greedy drink. “How did it go?” he asked.
“Okay. Fine, I guess. I don’t know. It always goes fine, you just don’t get the job. I’m gonna need another one of these.”
Joel beckoned a waiter and pointed to her glass. “Well, Billy was certainly determined to have you in. I think it looks very good, frankly.” He ordered a bowl of mussels for them to share.
She felt like complaining, and carried it on through the mussels, interrupting herself only once, long enough to order a Jerry’s Enormous, medium well.
“The point is, Joel, I’m thirty-seven and she’s only thirty-one, and three years ago we were both thirty-four. The point is, it’s just not working, Joel…”
Joel sipped his Perrier and shook his head. He looked like a grown-up New Yorker in his blue pinstripe suit, Turnbull & Asser shirt, and fresh, trim haircut. He had a better manicurist than she did. He lived on West End with a belt designer called Bruno in what he insisted was an asexual relationship. He was neat and conscientious, and in a general kind of way, the perfect example of a man who had his shit together. He was probably her age, but in his company she always felt like an unappreciative, petulant, jam-spotted child.
“The point, Celia, let me remind you, is that it does work. You work. Right now there’s a Masha you could pick off just like that—”
“Where?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“Ha!”
“There’s a Medea in Seattle,” he said patiently.
“One Medea in this lifetime was enough, thank you.”
“You’re in a mood, Celia. I can’t talk to you.” He prized one last mussel open and did away with it. “Look, you’re an actress of power, presence, style, even wit when properly motivated. There’s a Design for Living in Denver you could do wonders with—just don’t pout. Bruno arose this morning in what looks like a long-term pout, all because of some buckles that cut through the leather or something. I am a man with a load of troubles, Celia, try not to add to them.”
“Well, I do love you when you do your Clifton Webb impression.”
He nodded. “My mother was frightened by Laura while she was carrying me. I understand your frustrations. At least I think I do, but you must understand that I have gifted clients who never work—”
“I know, I know. I’m a wretch, I don’t know when I’m well off. However, as I slither up on forty, I’m sick of running around to regional theatres. I’m sick of wintering at the Guthrie, and I’m tired of summering at the Alley in Houston and having to change clothes half a dozen times a day. Sweaty in Houston. I’ve done my number in Louisville, Cincinnati, the Arena, ACT, Alaska … I’m done with all the funny little apartments and the mouse droppings somebody else didn’t clean up—I want droppings from a mouse of my own. I’m tired of renting cars from Chrome and Punishment—”
He burst out laughing. “That’s very clever, Chrome and Punishment. I must remember that. Go on, I cut you off in mid-kvetch.”
“I’m sick of being a Gypsy.”
“You are also the Kladstrup Koff Kandy fairy, a very nice job, that. Here, stuff yourself with Jerry’s Enormous.”
It was her favorite hamburger. Ten bucks of it filled the plate, along with little frizzled onions, corn relish, bits and pieces, all of which Joel could well afford. He picked at a bit of cold salmon. Looking with some distress at her preparations, he said: “Please, have some hamburger with your ketchup.”
“I’m really serious, Joel,” she said. “I feel like hibernating for a while—”
“Fine. If you can afford it. Can you?”
“In Manhattan? Get serious. Nobody can actually afford a damn thing. It’s all part of the trap.”
“Well, you could get married.”
“Oh, God—”
“A nice doctor, maybe. An investor, a lawyer, even a producer—just not another actor. Merely hire yourself out as a wife.” He reached across the table and patted her hand. “I would be more than willing to volunteer for the position of husband had I not been neutered at an early age by a desperately maladjusted aunt who wanted my mother for herself. Pity.”
While she mopped up the last of Jerry’s Enormous, she said: “I’m thinking of taking six months off and getting down to my life’s work—”
“Oh, no, this isn’t what I think it is—”
“Joel, I’ve wanted to do this all my life. I’ve done a lot of research. This may be the right time. I should give it a chance.”
“Oh, God, not Linda Thurston…” He searched her face. She grinned fetchingly. “It is, it is Linda Thurston. My worst fears realized.” He sighed dramatically, plucked the lime from his Perrier, and made a face as he began to suck it.