Sidney Sheldon - A Stranger in the Mirror

“How long have you been in Hollywood, Jill?”

“About two months.”

“How many agents have you been to?”

For an instant, Jill was tempted to lie, but there was nothing but compassion and understanding in the woman’s eyes. “About thirty, I guess.”

The agent laughed. “So you finally got down to Rose Dunning. Well, you could have done worse. I’m not MCA or William Morris, but I keep my people working.”

“I haven’t had any acting experience.”

The woman nodded, unsurprised. “If you had, you’d be at MCA or William Morris. I’m a kind of breaking-in station. I get the kids with talent started, and then the big agencies snatch them away from me.”

For the first time in weeks, Jill began to feel a sense of hope. “Do—do you think you’d be interested in handling me?” she asked.

The woman smiled. “I have clients working who aren’t half as pretty as you. I think I can put you to work. That’s the only way you’ll ever get experience, right?”

Jill felt a glow of gratitude.

“The trouble with this damned town is that they won’t give kids like you a chance. All the studios scream that they’re desperate for new talent, and then they put up a big wall and won’t let anybody in. Well, we’ll fool ’em. I know of three things you might be right for. A daytime soap, a bit in the Toby Temple picture and a part in the new Tessie Brand movie.”

Jill’s head was spinning. “But would they—”

“If I recommend you, they’ll take you. I don’t send clients who aren’t good. They’re just bit parts, you understand, but it will be a start.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful I’d be,” Jill said.

“I think I’ve got the soap-opera script here.” Rose Dunning lumbered to her feet, pushing herself out of her chair, and walked into the next room, beckoning Jill to follow her.

The room was a bedroom with a double bed in a corner under a window and a metal filing cabinet in the opposite corner. Rose Dunning waddled over to the filing cabinet, opened a drawer, took out a script and brought it over to Jill.

“Here we are. The casting director is a good friend of mine, and if you come through on this, he’ll keep you busy.”

“I’ll come through,” Jill promised fervently.

The agent smiled and said, “Course, I can’t send over a pig in a poke. Would you mind reading for me?”

“No. Certainly not.”

The agent opened the script and sat down on the bed. “Let’s read this scene.”

Jill sat on the bed next to her and looked at the script.

“Your character is Natalie. She’s a rich girl who’s married to a weakling. She decides to divorce him, and he won’t let her. You make your entrance here .”

Jill quickly scanned the scene. She wished she had had a chance to study the script overnight or even for an hour. She was desperately anxious to make a good impression.

“Ready?”

“I—I think so,” Jill said. She closed her eyes and tried to think like the character. A rich woman. Like the mothers of the friends that she had grown up with, people who took it for granted that they could have anything they wanted in life, believing that other people were there for their convenience. The Cissy Toppings of the world. She opened her eyes, looked down at the script and began to read. “I want to talk to you, Peter.”

“Can’t it wait?” That was Rose Dunning, cueing her.

“I’m afraid it’s waited too long already. I’m catching a plane for Reno this afternoon.”

“Just like that?”

“No. I’ve been trying to catch that plane for five years, Peter. This time I’m going to make it.”

Jill felt Rose Dunning’s hand patting her thigh. “That’s very good,” the agent said, approvingly. “Keep reading.” She let her hand rest on Jill’s leg.

“Your problem is that you haven’t grown up yet. You’re still playing games. Well, from now on, you’re going to have to play by yourself.”

Rose Dunning’s hand was stroking her thigh. It was disconcerting. “Fine. Go on,” she said.

“I—I don’t want you to try to get in touch with me ever again. Is that quite clear?”

The hand was stroking Jill faster, moving toward her groin. Jill lowered the script and looked at Rose Dunning. The woman’s face was flushed and her eyes had a glazed look in them.

“Keep reading,” she said huskily.

“I—I can’t,” Jill said. “If you—”

The woman’s hand began to move faster. “This is to get you in the mood, darling. It’s a sexual fight, you see. I want to feel the sex in you.” Her hand was pressing harder now, moving between Jill’s legs.

“No!” Jill got to her feet, trembling.

Saliva was dribbling out of the corner of the woman’s mouth. “Be good to me and I’ll be good to you.” Her voice was pleading. “Come here, baby.” She held out her arms and made a grab for her, and Jill ran out of the office.

In the street outside, she vomited. Even when the wracking spasms were over and her stomach had quieted down, she felt no better. Her headache had started again.

It was not fair. The headaches didn’t belong to her. They belonged to Josephine Czinski.

During the next fifteen months, Jill Castle became a full-fledged member of the Survivors, the tribe of people on the fringes of show business who spent years and sometimes a whole lifetime trying to break into the Business, working at other jobs temporarily. The fact that the temporary jobs sometimes lasted ten or fifteen years did not discourage them.

As ancient tribes once sat around long-ago campfires and recounted sagas of brave deeds, so the Survivors sat around Schwab’s Drugstore, telling and retelling heroic tales of show business, nursing cups of cold coffee while they exchanged the latest bits of inside gossip. They were outside the Business, and yet, in some mysterious fashion, they were at the very pulse and heartbeat of it. They could tell you what star was going to be replaced, what producer had been caught sleeping with his director, what network head was about to be kicked upstairs. They knew these things before anyone else did, through their own special kind of jungle drums. For the Business was a jungle. They had no illusions about that. Their illusions lay in another direction. They thought they could find a way to get through the studio gates, scale the studio walls. They were artists, they were the Chosen. Hollywood was their Jericho and Joshua would blow his golden trumpet and the mighty gates would fall before them and their enemies would be smitten, and lo, Sam Winters’s magic wand would be waved and they would be wearing silken robes and be Movie Stars and adored ever after by their grateful public, Amen. The coffee at Schwab’s was heady sacramental wine, and they were the Disciples of the future, huddling together for comfort, warming one another with their dreams, on the very brink of making it . They had met an assistant director who told them a producer who said a casting director who promised and any second now, and the reality would be in their grasp.

In the meantime, they worked in supermarkets and garages and beauty parlors and car washes. They lived with each other and married each other and divorced each other, and they never noticed how time was betraying them. They were unaware of the new lines and the graying temples, and the fact that it took half an hour longer in the morning to put on makeup. They had become shopworn without having been used, aged without mellowing, too old for a career with a plastics company, too old to have babies, too old for those younger parts once so coveted.

They were now character actors. But they still dreamed.

The younger and prettier girls were picking up what they called mattress money.