Kira Coplin - Pop Tart

I didn’t have to ask.

I knew exactly how it had happened. I had seen it all first hand.

To the rest of the world, Brooke Parker was an immovable force. To them, she was the girl that sang happy songs with childlike abandon, who gyrated with vampy sex appeal across glittering stages and who lived in a world of feelings instead of facts – a dream, all smoke and mirrors. It was that face they’d seen so many times before – her doe eyes turned toward the camera, radiating the screen as she smiles – a smile that made them wonder what it would truly be like, how it would really feel, to be the kind of girl who had it all.

There are three sides to every story:

My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying.

–Robert Evans

It was unusually warm for February in Beverly Hills. Men in suits beckoned to take their lunch meetings outside while their wives trotted down to Rodeo Drive to spend their hard-earned cash on things like diamond-encrusted purse hangers. I sat at my desk facing the window, watching groups of women saunter in and out of pricey boutiques. Clean-cut boys in ties lounged outside of the Brighton Coffee Shop sipping vanilla lattes, presumably conversing about their mailroom duties at William Morris and favorite movies. As a pack of girls zipped by, arms weighed down with shopping bags from Ron Herman and Hermès, cell phone chimes peeled my attention back to life inside the office.

‘Jackie? It’s your mother.’

‘Mom, I know it’s you, it comes up on my caller I.D.,’ I said, rolling my eyes.

‘How is everything going? How’s the job?’

‘It’s great. Sheryl’s just finishing up a cover shoot for a magazine and then on Sunday I’m assisting her for another job. Not sure yet what it is exactly, it’s on a studio lot in the Valley,’ I told her, trying to sound as upbeat as possible.

‘So, you’re working on the weekends now too?’ my mother asked.

‘When I’m needed,’ I said quickly.

‘Well, this doesn’t sound like a job you had to quit school for…I mean, maybe next semester you could find one like it back in Boston,’ she said.

I inhaled deeply. ‘I didn’t drop out of school for this job. I dropped out because I wanted to take my career in another direction.’

‘Oh honey, you are so close to graduating. You only have four more semesters left…it just seems like such a waste to quit now. Why don’t you just finish and then if you still want to enroll in cosmetology school, do it then.’

‘I don’t want to go to cosmetology school. I want to work on shoots…I don’t need a degree for that, I can do it now and that’s what I’m doing,’ I told her, eyeing the overly Botoxed blond entering the side door to the salon where we rented space. It was my boss, Sheryl.

‘But you’re just an assist—’

‘Mom, I have to go,’ I said hastily.

‘Your father will be home early tonight. I think it’s a perfect time for the three of us to have a serious discussion.’

‘Sure, whatever you want–I have to go,’ I repeated before cutting her off and hanging up the phone.

Phone calls from my mother like that one had become routine during the last six months since I dropped out of Boston University, right before my junior year. Home for the summer and bored with books, I searched for a creative outlet to take my mind off of the grueling schedule that would be waiting for me once again at the end of August.

‘I think I might want to try the whole acting thing again for a while,’ I said to my parents, who were poised on chaise lounges in our house, referring to my brief stint of commercial work at the age of three. My mother grabbed at bits of her graying hair and shook her head. My father just frowned. The endless dabblings of my childhood, which they once considered amusing, had long since grown tired.

Drawn to color and music at a very young age, I spent time experimenting with various artistic undertakings. ‘I am going to learn to play the flute!’ I’d tell my parents at the dinner table, a typical outburst from me.

‘Yesterday it was ballet lessons, and the day before that you were going to learn to play the trombone,’ my mother would laugh.

‘You’re a jack of all trades, kid,’ my father would say as I performed my latest masterpiece for him, perhaps a tap dance routine along the back patio.

The older I got, the more I disliked being good at many things: I wanted to be great at something . I wanted to leave my mark on the world, and somehow an art history degree earned in stuffy old classrooms in Cambridge didn’t seem like step one. Although they had supported my creativity in little ways as a child, my parents were dead set on shipping me out East the day I had my high school diploma in hand. Both of them worked in Hollywood since as long as I could remember and always talked about how brutal ‘the industry’ could be–they strived to keep me away, far away from it. So, when I announced my newly rediscovered acting career the summer after my sophomore year, the word ‘disappointed’ is an understatement.

I spent weeks trying to make the right connections; I even tried to get back in touch with my old agent over at Gersh, only to find out that she was now retired and living in Santa Barbara with her family.

‘Is there anyone you can refer me to?’ I asked.

‘Feel free to submit a résumé and headshot and if they’re interested someone will be in touch,’ she said, as if reading from a script.

I wasn’t going to give up so easily. Instead of wielding a diverse but mediocre portfolio of skills, I wanted to shine in a more singular way. So, when a man from a generic company called Ultimate Casting responded to an email I had sent him, I was thrilled.

‘I think I’ve got something for ya,’ he said. The tone of his voice revealed too much. He called me a knockout and assured me there was a demand for a ‘redhead’ with ‘soft features’ like mine. I could just picture him: hair combed over his balding scalp, Hawaiian shirt stretched snuggly around his protruding belly, short legs kicked up on top of a beat-up old desk, sitting in a minuscule makeshift office somewhere in the Valley, flipping through a roster of numbers and promising idiots like me that he had their ‘star’ on the Hollywood walk.

‘Here’s the deal…we cast for every major network and every major production company in Los Angeles. We don’t make money until you do. I repeat–we don’t make a dime until you’ve booked your first job through us. When you do start working, our service fee kicks in–$69.95 a month…but really, when you think about it, that’s nothing. You can make up to a hundred dollars a day working on movie sets.’ Was he selling me car insurance?

‘Great, how do I get started?’ I was a sucker, and I knew it, but these were desperate times…and I was desperate. If it got me out of the house two days a week it was better than nothing. At the very least it would prove to my parents that I was on my way .

Shelling out a portion of my ‘allowance,’ a mere $100 a week in exchange for picking up dry cleaning and odd chores around the house, I was relieved when Ultimate Casting booked me a job–and even more relieved to hear that the production was legitimate.

‘It’s a five-day shoot on the Warner Brothers lot,’ said the same supposed frump of a man who had called me the week before. ‘And it’s a period piece, so they want you to sleep in rollers at night. Keep ‘em in until you get to the set the next day. Call time is 7 AM each morning.’

Making it to the Valley from Beverly Hills at the crack of dawn, my head covered in pink sponge curlers, was not quite my cup of tea. The seventy-five-dollar per day fee I was promised didn’t quite average out to a fair amount once it was broken down by the long hours that seemed to drag on forever. My last morning on set, I sat groggily in the makeup chair, waiting to get powdered. The makeup artist who tended to the girl next to me, her brushstrokes creating a completely flawless look in seconds, struck me. She was an artist and hers was a real-life canvas, one that would be seen on film, by millions of people worldwide.