I’M ALONE IN THE DARK, locked up, with nobody to hear my cries. They’ve taken him from me. Nobody believes me. She is a liar, a thief, and a fraudster, and probably a murderess. She’ll kill him for sure.
Not only does she want me out of the picture . . .
She wants me dead.
THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL.
THE MINUTE I LAID eyes on him I knew he was dangerous. Why, I wasn’t sure, but I also sensed I needed him in some unfathomable way. I, just like everyone else in the company, was in awe of him.
It’s a great thing when you know you’re going to see the person you’re crazy about, every single day of the week. Except Sundays – the day we had off. During rehearsals, that is. Once a show is up and running, though, you perform Sundays.
Then there are the “dark” days: Mondays. Dark, because the theater is empty – no performances. Dark for me because I knew I wouldn’t see him.
We were well into week three. Every day I was a bundle of nerves because I knew how lucky I was to have the job. It had been drummed into us at drama school that acting was a thankless career, that only a few lucky percent “make it” and to expect to be either unemployed or learn to love the second string to your bow, because that second string would become your lifeline – your bread and butter. And forget about being a movie or TV star, or even less likely, a Broadway success story – you’d be lucky to get a commercial, lucky to do regional theater. Lucky to get any job at all.
I’m not sure why Daniel Glass picked me for the role. A friend of mine, who also went up for the part—way more beautiful than I consider myself—lost out to me. Her agent told her they said she was “too sophisticated” that they were looking for “somebody with simplicity yet with integral strength.” What the hell that meant, I wasn’t sure. Trying to get inside the minds of directors and producers is an enigma to me. All you can do is be yourself at the audition and hope for the best, hope your lucky number comes up. That you win the lottery.
Because that is what being an actor is all about. Playing the lottery.
In my mother’s day things were even tougher. There was no YouTube, no Internet. They had to send out their 8 x 10s in large manila envelopes via snail mail. Knowing that nine times out of ten, their expensive black and white photo with a résumé stapled to the back, would be thrown into some casting director’s waste paper basket. It cost her a fortune. Once, she told me, she got chased around the “casting couch”. Literally. A big time British director, famous for vigilante movies, called her in one day. She was over the moon with excitement. She finally had gotten her break, she thought. She was dating my dad at the time, a penniless guitarist back then. The director asked her to come to his “office” at his house. But he didn’t ask her to read a script, that day; he made her an offer, instead.
“You can spend ninety-five percent of your time with your penniless guitarist, but the rest of the time I want you to accompany me to premieres, to play my girlfriend—be on my arm,” he told her.
She laughed and asked him if he was kidding. Then she found herself running circles around the casting couch while he chased her. When he realized she was serious and it was a definite “no”, Mom told me that he turned aggressive and shoved her out of the front door, his gold medallion swinging on his hairy chest. As if the medallion had a life of its own. Shunned. Pride hurt.
I wish my mother were here now to guide me, to give me a hug when I break down from the pressure of wanting to be perfect. Nobody understands that actors are the most insecure human beings alive. Even the stars, even those who are constantly working—even they suffer from the fear of being less than wonderful. Actors want to shine, we want to please people and, above all, we want to be loved.
I wanted to please Daniel Glass.
I would have done anything for him.
And I did.
FALL 2013.
“YOU’RE LATE,” he says, as I try to slip surreptitiously through the swing doors of the theater,