9
Barney Sparks, of the Sparks Agency, answered his own phone when I called. He must have been having phone trouble on his end, because he practically yelled the address at me and told me to come by the next day around noon. His office was far across town in the West 40s near Ninth Avenue. I figured the safest way to get there was to walk across on 42nd Street, which is not my favorite route because it’s full of hookers and places advertising live peep shows of various kinds, and drug dealers who walk back and forth trying to sell what sounds like “sense sense, sensamelia.” I know that’s some sort of drug but I’m not sure what kind exactly, or even if I’m hearing it correctly. It’s a harrowing walk but at least there are lots of people, whose presence, although somewhat freaky, makes it less likely there will be no witnesses when I’m abducted and forced into prostitution.
It’s four flights up to Barney’s office. I’m puffing by the time I make it to the top. There’s no secretary sitting at the desk in the little front room.
“Hello?” I say to the emptiness.
“Back here, dear!” comes a loud and raspy voice.
There’s a desk with a window behind it and bookshelves on either side, which are stacked to the ceiling with scripts and old Playbills. The titles are written in Sharpie on the edge of the pages so they can be read when stacked face-to-face, and the block print is bold but shaky. Barney wears a light blue sport coat and has thick white hair cropped very close to his head. The whole place smells like cigar smoke and dust, but there’s something comforting about it. I’m afraid my nervousness is obvious, especially when I discover that the only way to sit in the one huge armchair opposite his desk is to sink into it and be swallowed. I fight the chair for a minute, trying to perch daintily on the edge, and then give up and sit back, which at least might make me look relaxed.
“Frances Banks!” Barney bellows.
Even with his hearing aid turned all the way up, he tells me, he doesn’t have the greatest sense of his own volume. He never raises his voice to people intentionally, but he’s always loud. He says volume is his trademark, and the community respects him for it.
“Frances Banks,” he says again. “Great name! A classic! You can BANK on BANKS! I can see the headline in The Hollywood Reporter.” He takes a deep, rattle-y breath, which he seems to have to do anytime he strings more than two sentences together. His breathing is labored and, like his voice, astonishingly loud. “A classy name for a classy gal! Look at YOU! You’re a throwback! A girl next door, with looks like Ava Gardner. Unfortunately you didn’t get her chest—but HEY! I saw your little show thing the other night. My favorite part was when you FELL.”
I’m smiling, but I’m not sure whether he’s teasing me or not. “You’re kidding?”
“No, dear. I’m a sucker for a klutz. It’s where you see what someone is made of. My father, the great Broadway director Irving Sparks, always said: ‘Anyone can smile on their best day. I like to meet a man who can smile on his WORST.’ I was his assistant, as a younger man, just nineteen years old, sitting in the very last row in the audience of Best Foot Forward, when a red-headed chorus girl took a terrible spill. She got right back up and never stopped smiling. I waited by the stage door to see if I might hail a cab for her, and that’s how Mrs. Sparks and I began our fifty-two years together. But HEY. Did I ever tell you about Ruth Buzzi?!”
I wonder if Barney remembers it’s our very first meeting ever.
“Um, no?”
“Wonderful actress, a DOLL, a real cut-up.” Wheeze, rattle, gasp, then: “They called me from the Coast one time, looking for a ‘Ruth Buzzi TYPE’ for a new variety show, and I told them, I can do better than that, I’ve got the real thing! I represent RUTH BUZZI. They said they’d call back. They never called. She didn’t get the job. TRUE STORY. Someday, dear, I predict they’ll be asking me for a type like Frances Banks. Now tell me, what is it you picture for yourself in this terrible business?”
It’s been a long time since anyone asked me that, and I feel suddenly shy. I’m embarrassed to tell a stranger, even a kind one, all that I’ve been hoping for.
“What a dumb question I’m asking! It’s torture telling someone what you want when you don’t have it yet, isn’t it?” Barney says. “How are you supposed to know yet, am I RIGHT?”
That makes me laugh. “Yes!”
“As my father, the great Broadway director Irving Sparks, always used to say: ‘We all have to start somewhere.’ So start somewhere, anywhere, and give me an idea of what it is you’d like to do. Tell me EVERYTHING. What is your DREAM?”
“My dream? I guess, honestly, I just want … to … to work. I really want to work. Here, mostly, in New York. In the theater. That’s what I’ve pictured.”
“Theater is wonderful, I agree, although I think you have a face for film, too,” he says, slapping himself on the chest to help a few coughs escape. “Theater WAS wonderful, IF you were Ethel Merman back in the day. Now SHE had a paycheck. Theater is NOT wonderful today, IF you want to eat, or have a grand apartment, but HEY! Who am I to argue? I’m here to help YOU.”
I feel a surge of pride at Barney’s compliment. “I have a face for film” is the kind of thing I could imagine Penelope saying easily about herself, but I’d never dare.
“Now listen, my dear, I have a good feeling about what I saw onstage that night, and I would like to help you get started. SO.” He claps his hands together once, for emphasis, as if he’s just pulled a rabbit out of his hat and wants to make sure the audience sees it.
I’m stunned.
He just said he wants to work with me. I thought it would be so much harder to get anyone in the professional world to say that, ever. An actual real live agent wants to represent me.
I don’t have to do this alone.
I’m shocked.
“What? Is that … but … really?”
“Yes, dear, really. My father, the great Broadway director Irving Sparks, always said: ‘Cream rises to the top.’ You, my dear, will rise. AT SOME POINT. Who can say when? THAT is a matter of timing, and luck, and how badly you get in your own way, BUT. There you have it. I know CREAM when I see it.”
More than anything, I want to say yes. I have a gut feeling about Barney Sparks that tells me he’s the one for me. But something is holding me back. It would be so easy to say yes and leave this room with an agent. Almost too easy. I look around the room, and the walls of old scripts and Playbills that seemed warm and friendly when I first came in now look cluttered and shabby. The leather on the arms of this giant lumpy chair is worn thin, the stuffing is peeking through one of the seams, and the sunlight streaming through the window is cloudy with dust.
I stammer a bit.
“You know, thank you so much, but this is my first, that is, it’s all so new, and—”
“You want to think about it. You have other meetings. That’s wonderful, dear. You just give me a call whenever you’re ready.”
I lurch up from the depths of the giant armchair and clumsily gather my stuff. The meeting is clearly over, but I don’t want to leave yet. Something is holding me back, and I pause for a beat in the doorway.
“You all right, dear?” Barney booms. “You have other questions you’d like to ask?”
“Oh no, thank you. I just wanted to say thank you again. Also, I guess I was wondering if you have any advice for me?”
“Wonderful question. I’ve been around a long time. I’m full of advice. A few things I always tell my actors, should you become one of my actors.”
“Yes?”
“My father, the great Broadway director Irving Sparks, always said: ‘Don’t tell stories of a job you almost got. Learn from a loss and don’t dwell on it. Move on.’ ”
“Okay. Makes sense.”
“Also, I’ve found, when you’re starting out, it helps to keep a written record somewhere of your auditions. Write down who you met and how you felt about it. Write down what went wrong or right. Get yourself one of those, what are they called? Mrs. Sparks has one. A fax.”
“A Filofax?”
“That.”
“I’ve already got one!”
“Well, look at YOU,” he says, beaming. “And dear, if you should someday become famous, don’t write a cookbook.”
“Um. Okay.”
“Not a deal-breaker, if you’re some sort of Julia Child—type person. Just a pet peeve of mine. Actors should ACT. Not sell perfume, or write cookbooks.”
I don’t know what to do with this information.
“Okay!” I say brightly. “Then I’ll keep my baked ziti to myself.”
I’ve never made baked ziti in my life, and with more time I probably could have thought of a more innately funny food, but for some reason it makes Barney Sparks laugh anyway. “Baked ziti! Sounds HORRIBLE!”
His wheezing guffaw follows me down the stairs.
When I get home from the club that night around two A.M., Dan is on the sofa with a beer balanced between his knees and a black-and-white movie playing on the TV.
“Let me guess—Fellini’s 8½?” I say, letting my messenger bag slide off my shoulder onto the floor by the front door. I’m happy someone’s up, happy not to come home to a darkened house after the long day I’ve had.
“Very good!” he says, looking impressed.
“It’s not that hard to recognize—you must’ve rented it five times already this month.”
“I know,” he says, smiling sheepishly. “I hope I’m not driving you guys crazy. Jane was watching it for a while but gave up and went to sleep. She said the last time she sat through the whole thing she dreamt she was eaten by her pillow. It’s almost over—want to watch the end with me?”
I plop down beside Dan on the couch, and take off my shoes to give my aching feet some relief. “It’s about a director making a sci-fi movie, right? Is that why you like it so much?”
“Well, it’s about a director who’s in crisis: he’s blocked artistically, he’s lost all interest in the movie he’s making, and his personal life is a shambles. The fact that he’s making a science-fiction movie is supposed to show that he’s lost all creativity. He’s looking for meaning in his life and his art.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Yup. Just the plain old, everyday quest for the meaning of life.”
A beautiful actress wearing glasses says something to the director, played by Marcello Mastroianni. Her mouth keeps moving even after her voice has stopped.
“The sync seems off.”
“It was the style of Italian filmmakers of the day to dub all the dialogue in later,” Dan explains, eyes still pinned to the screen. “And since they weren’t concerned about recording the sound live, Fellini famously played loud music for the actors during the scenes to inspire them, and had the actors speak generic lines that he replaced later when he decided what the real ones should be. That’s why their mouths don’t match what they’re saying, but also why the movement is so fluid. They are actually, at times, dancing to music.”
“How beautiful!”
On a white sand beach, a procession of the characters from the film mixed in with people dressed as circus performers and clowns, all wearing white, parade by. Then the scene shifts abruptly to a circus ring, empty except for the child who played the young Marcello Mastroianni, who plays the flute as the spotlight on him fades to black. The End.
“Huh,” I say, baffled.
“The end is supposed to show that he’s come to terms with who he is—it’s supposed to show he’s been healed.”
“Huh,” I say again.
“I know. Fellini can be abstract,” Dan says, eyes gleaming. “Watch it with me from the beginning sometime.”
“I will.” I smile back at him, noticing for the first time the flecks of green in his brown eyes. The room seems too dark and quiet suddenly, and we’re sitting too close together on the sofa without the glow of the screen and the sound of the movie in the background to keep us company. I stand up quickly and pick up my shoes from the floor. “I should get to sleep.”
“Sure. Me too,” Dan says, rising and clicking off the TV and the VCR. “Wait—you had that meeting today, right?”
“Yep.”
“How did it go?”
“It was good, really good, actually. But I have nothing to compare it to yet, and I think I should go through the process, you know? So I’m going to take a beat, and, you know, keep my options open.”
I sound odd to myself, as if I’m playing the part of a professional actress who has meetings all the time and is sort of blasé about them. I loved Barney Sparks, I want to tell Dan, but I’m suspicious of anything that seems too easy. I’m not sure why I can’t say that now, and not sure why I didn’t jump at the chance to say yes in Barney’s office.
It feels like I’m an actor in an Italian movie from the ’60s, saying the placeholder lines into the camera, waiting for the real ones that come later.