Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

“Are you sure?” Gillian asked.

“Sure, I’m sure,” the actor replied. He pointed to the large, fenced-in field on the corner. “You see that?” Both Monica and Gillian turned to look. “That’s Van Heflin’s horse! ” the actor said, and the girls began laughing uncontrollably.

She passed the car-wash joints now, and the supermarkets and the huge signs advertising the Hollywood cemeteries. She’d never known a place where people prepared for death so vigorously. The first billboard she’d noticed upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1950, almost nine years ago, was one that announced FOREVERNESS as the slogan of a local cemetery.

Driving in from the airport, stunned by the flatness of the terrain and the temporary look and feel of the buildings, dismayed by the browning grass everywhere — “Ain’t had rain for months,” the cab driver told her — she had seen the billboard and suddenly begun laughing hysterically. Today, she no longer found the signs amusing. Perhaps she had simply grown used to them.

She supposed she had grown used to a lot of things in the past nine years. She had even begun to enjoy eating regularly. There was plenty of work out here, especially in television. More and more shows were being filmed here, the medium had forsaken immediacy and succumbed to the technical ease of film, and she had done three or four television shots of which she was really very proud. The rest... the rest was nonsense. “Background action!” and Gillian Burke and a hundred others like her would move into camera range, “Is this child supposed to be yours, Miss? Would you please take him by the hand? Thank you.” Gillian Burke, good for a television or feature-film restaurant crowd, or a young mother at the bus stop, or now and then a waitress, another town, another agent, another medium, another union card, SAG this time, tucked into her purse and ready to show at the casting window. She was not lacking for work, no, and she ate regularly. She was just offbeat enough to go unrecognized in a crowd scene, she seemed real and believable on the fringes of the stage-center glamour, her beauty did not shriek of professionalism.

She would sometimes look at her own face in the mirror, the bangs on her forehead slightly side-swept, the russet hair brushed to the back of her neck, the slanted green eyes. She came over very well in color. She had played an amusement-park scene for Warners, in color. There had been a close-up of her on the roller coaster, flash, if you blinked your eye you missed Gillian Burke’s big scene. But she had not missed herself, she had seen how well she photographed in color, and had seen the authentic terror and excitement on her face as the roller-coaster car swept by, actually six feet above the ground, filmed in front of a process shot of the sky, she had looked very good. And standing in front of the mirror, she would study her body, study the familiar body, good breasts and hips and legs, she knew they were good, but not this year’s model, thank you, not the overblown cowlike commodity they were buying in 1959, and maybe in 1958, and maybe back to the time of Delilah. She would study herself painstakingly, and she knew exactly where she missed, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

One of her friends, a girl of thirty-seven, had told Gillian she didn’t care if she spent the rest of her life doing extra work. She didn’t even want that meaty character role, the speaking part that brings down the house in the third reel, the hell with that. It meant only two days’ shooting, and here’s your pay check, thanks and goodbye. Gillian’s friend wanted the steady extra part, the perpetual girl on the bar stool in a place the star frequented, there all the time, three or four weeks of shooting, that was for her. But Gillian was not an extra, and she knew she was not an extra, and she would not settle for less than what she was.

She was an actress.

They could fill the fan magazines with 38-28-38, they could provide three-dimensional glasses that made the latest siren pop out of the picture and into your lap, they could evolve screens that enveloped you with sight and sound and now even smell, but she was an actress, and this they could not take away from her. She could act hell out of any part they threw her way, and she knew it, and so she waited patiently for the promised trend toward the offbeat, wasn’t Shirley MacLaine a star, look at Carolyn Jones, somewhere there was a place for her, Gillian Burke, and she hoped meanwhile that her envy didn’t show.

She pulled the car up to one of the booths at the studio gate. A uniformed guard stepped out of the booth and smiled pleasantly at her.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Floren,” she said.

“Yes, Miss. What’s your name, please?”

“Gillian Burke.”

“Just a moment.”

He consulted a list of names and telephone numbers encased in Lucite, picked up a phone from the booth counter, and rapidly dialed an extension. He spoke quietly into the phone while Gillian waited. Then he replaced the receiver, came out of the booth, and said, “It’s in building number seven, third floor. That’s room 306. You can park the car right there, inside the gate.”

“Thank you,” Gillian said. She smiled, nodded, and swung the car over toward the diagonal spaces. She parked, turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see her mouth, decided her lipstick was fine, and then combed her hair. An electrician strolling by turned to look at her as she got out of the car and bent to take her black portfolio from the seat. She suddenly wondered if her skirt was too tight. She had worn a matching suit over a pale blue sweater. Now she wondered if the skirt was too tight, wondered if she shouldn’t have put on some jewelry, a string of pearls perhaps, and instantly checked her legs to see if her seams were straight. Oh, the hell with it, she thought. I’m Gillian Burke. I want a pock in the play.

A white Corvette with zebra upholstery was parked in the space alongside hers. A white poodle sat behind the steering wheel, and Gillian wondered if the car belonged to the dog. She smiled and began walking across the lot. A man in a cowboy suit waved at her. An electric cart buzzed by, a man driving, a blond woman sitting on the jump seat, her legs crossed, facing the rear. It was a mild pleasant day, without much smog. She sucked deeply of the California air, and suddenly wished it would rain. It doesn’t rain enough out here, she thought. Rain gives people a chance to relax. She would not acknowledge what she was really thinking about: the theater legend which held that rain meant success — if you auditioned when it was raining, the part was yours; if you opened on a rainy night, the show would be a hit.

She found building number seven and walked back toward the elevator banks. Two screen writers were waiting for the elevator, talking about a scene that was giving them difficulty with the Shurlock office.

“They’re a bunch of goddamn Catholics there, that’s the trouble,” the first screenwriter said.

“What’s that got to do with it?” the second one answered. “The two people in the scene are Protestants.”

“Look, they want us to get them off the bed, we’ll take them off the bed.”

“Where we gonna play the scene then? The floor?”

“The floor, the ceiling, who cares? You want to fight with a bunch of Catholics?”

“I don’t want to fight with anybody.”

“So stop fighting with me . We’ll take them off the bed.”

“Where’s your integrity, Pete?”

“What’s this got to do with integrity? They can do it on a floor as well as on a bed. If it’s the bed they object to, so we’ll take them off the bed. What difference does it make? We have to be fancy? We have to show them on a bed? You know how many people do it on the floor?”