Life in the Hollywood Lane

Onward Ho, Right? Yeah, about That

Even the song about big, loud dreams and clouds didn’t lift my spirits as I drove. I switched the radio station to something gloomier. I had a dream like that, I thought. Maybe it’s time for something else.

People can’t be a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) actor until they’ve been in some SAG movies, and they can’t get into SAG movies until they’ve become a SAG actor. For the non-SAG to land a part in a SAG movie, actors have to know someone who can open doors. And I do.

My agent, a doppelgänger for Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! (slightly smaller hats, though, but just as flamboyant and enthusiastic), is on a first-name basis with many of the casting directors. Cara can get meetings at Paramount, Universal, TriStar, everywhere. She puts us in for everything she possibly can—TV shows, movies, commercials—for twelve to fourteen hours a day, hardly even coming up for air. If we want to meet with her we have to feed her by taking her to lunch or dinner (never breakfast). She lives on peanut butter on crackers, otherwise, and happily so. When she gets paid those huge sums (not! at least not often) for getting us gigs, she lavishes it on…us. She spends it all on her flock of ducklings, as she calls us, paying for headshots, video reels, and lunch if we’re between jobs.

She gives us something special that we can’t get anywhere else: a touch of old Hollywood. Hundreds of old-time gadgets and gizmos and prints and paintings celebrating the Golden Hollywood Era fill her home/office. But it’s not just in things that she gives the feel of old Hollywood. Some days she can look like the other Bette, although pronounced differently, as well: Bette Davis—on a good day…..well, usually, that is. She has her moments after pulling an all-nighter for us, and then she’s Bette on a bad day…and I’m talking like straight out of Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? How could one person look like Bette and Bette? Well, Cara pulls it off somehow.

She’s seen so many trends and fads and phases come and go. She was first to get on the techno-geek train, just before all the TV shows suddenly had a beautiful killer with black-rimmed glasses who can work a computer like it’s a child’s toy in order to take over the world. She saw that trend coming, along with many, many others.

High tech she’s not. Usually some Millennial intern volunteers do her tech tasks for her like update the website and do the social-media stuff. It’s usually some young softies who wanted a brush with the Hollywood dream without having to go through the heartache—live the palm tree, convertible, Malibu, Hollywood Reporter thing until it got boring, because they were completely missing the point, and then go back to Kentucky and Iowa. 

Over the years I’ve helped Cara do submissions for “breakdowns,” as they’re called…the casting directors put out a list, a breakdown of the kind of characters they’re looking for in upcoming filmings. For some cop show, for instance, they could ask for “Caucasian man, 35, drug addict” and “African American woman, 42, steely-eyed scientist.” These are for acting roles, those with lines. There are other companies that handle the extras. For main TV shows, the ones with the leads already established, the roles can be very small all the way up to the main guest star. During pilot season, when the networks (and Netflix, et al.) are putting together new shows, the breakdown includes the leads. For movies, the list can go on for pages. Sometimes no age, race, or gender is mentioned, so Cara puts in most of her peeps. Oh—the hours and dedication this woman puts in is beyond the beyond.

So…love? No agent loves her actors more. She never had kids. She’d been proposed to numerous times, but “Getting hitched and starting a family never seemed to be the right thing to do at that particular time,” she’d laugh. We were her kids, and she loved us beyond the norm. I’m not sure my own mother loved me more. For some of us, this was the first motherly love we really received. (My mom tried, truly. More about that in a bit.) And it is totally reciprocated; her actors swoon over her, fuss over her, and stumble over each other to dote on her. She calls us all honey, and we all call her dear. One of the biggest surprises about LA is how often everyone calls everyone dear. It reminds me of my long-gone grandparents.

Another thing to get used to in LA is how people shower little gifties on each other all the time—even if the two people just saw each other two days ago. I’d never seen anything like it, but I quickly learned: never show up anywhere empty-handed. They also do that double-sided-air-kissing-face-to-face-touching thing like they do in Europe.

I walked into Cara’s office bearing flowers for her. Even all the movie mementos and posters didn’t pick up my spirits.

“Hooooonnnnnnneeeeeeey!” She flew across the room, arms outstretched, and wrapped me in her hug. No one else hugs like that. It’s so wonderful to get that hug any time, but especially after a rock-solid audition, then four callbacks, and still not get the role. And even more especially today. We did the double-sided-air-kissy thing about fourteen times.

“Honey, how are you doing?”

She’d been at the memorial since she’d been Cyndi’s agent, too, at one point, but we hadn’t really talked.

“Maybe you could send me out for another zombie audition,” I groaned. “It wouldn’t be acting.”