The Five Acts of Diego Leon Page 14

  “Register?”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “That’s where you gotta start.”

  All the big studios hired extras through Central Casting, Charlie said.

  “Go on,” Diego urged. How could he have not known this before? In all his reading, Diego had never heard anything about Central Casting. How could he have missed it?

  He said, “Each studio hires through the office. You walk in there, and they have you fill out forms, have you tell them your height, your weight, just all the basic stuff. You give them a photo, and they give you a number to call if you wanna check in and see if there’s anything.” He talked about a large switchboard with lights that blinked off and on, manned by operators whose only job it was to answer. “ ‘Try again,’ ” he explained. “That’s what they say. Over and over. ‘Try again.’ ‘Try again.’ ”

  “And what if you get something?”

  “Jackpot!” Charlie shouted. “Operator tells you to report to a certain studio stage at a certain time.”

  “What if there’s nothing?” Diego asked.

  “Then it’s back to the same old thing,” Charlie said, pointing to Diego’s mop. “But every now and again you’ll get lucky. Get called out of the blue if you’re what a casting director needs and such. They’ll tell you where to be and you go.”

  It’s the only way to do it, Charlie explained. You register with Central Casting. Then you call, you hope and pray. If your number doesn’t come, you try again the next day, or the next, or the next. In the meantime, Charlie said, you read Cast Call. You look for open calls for auditions. You try out for everything no matter how serious or outlandish, how vague or how specific. You call, you hope, you audition, he said. Over and over.

  “Wow,” Diego said. “You sure know a thing or two about this game.”

  “I do,” he said. “Did my time. Hoped to make it into films, but at this point I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m still looking, though. For a chance to work somehow in the business.” Charlie looked at Diego. “You look a bit bewildered, kid. Why don’t I give you a hand?”

  “How?” Diego asked.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll take you down to the Central Casting office. It’s a zoo, but I think I can get you through the front door. The gals down there know me very well.”

  “You’d really do that for me?” Diego asked.

  “Why sure. Afterward, I can take you to Frontier Pictures. I can get us through the front gate on account of I worked there designing props. I can show you how the operation works. All that. What do you say, pal?”

  “That would be swell,” Diego told him

  They shook hands just as the sun was breaking through the fog outside.

  The next morning, he and Charlie took a taxi up Vermont, past Santa Monica, Fountain, and Sunset, where they were dropped off because Charlie said he felt like walking the rest of the way. On Hollywood Boulevard, they waited on the trolley platform for the next train. Charlie was an odd fellow, Diego thought, the kind of guy who went through life as though absolutely nothing bothered him or spoiled his mood. He seemed to possess the mind and sensibilities of a child, struck and awed by the simplest things, chipper all the time. Still, he didn’t mind Charlie. It was nice to have a friend.

  On the way, Charlie talked endlessly about his first year in the city. He’d been a sick boy, and an isolated dairy farm in Wisconsin wasn’t exactly the best place for an introverted, awkward child prone to illnesses and bouts of nervous attacks. After high school, he completed college with a degree in art and painting. His parents wanted Charlie to seek out new adventures, and the boy was eager to get out and see the world. The mysterious illnesses continued to plague him, and his physician, along with his mother and father, urged Charlie to consider moving to California, just for a little while.

  “ ’Course I was thrilled,” Charlie said, over the ding of the trolley car and the honks of car horns and trucks as they traveled west on Hollywood Boulevard. “New situations, new people, that gets me excited, makes me feel alive.”

  He told Diego that he had lived at the Ruby Rose for several years now. Many people had come and gone, he told him, so it was hard to keep track of who was who and it was hard establishing lasting friendships. But the place, he said, was swell, real swell. Charlie kept on talking—there wasn’t even an opportunity for Diego to interject, so he just sat back and listened. He told Diego how one of his professors in Wisconsin had a friend who painted sets for movies out here in Hollywood, how he was put in touch with this man named Heiny, and ain’t that a kicker of a name? I bet his wife’s name is Fanny, Charlie said, slapping his knee. He spent time with this Heiny fellow, painting sets in a small back office, away from all the hustle and bustle of the studios. He was let go when the studio had some financial troubles.

  “So that’s when I decided to become an actor,” he said. “But, aside from a few gigs, I haven’t made much progress in all this time. I take jobs here and there, survive by doing a little bit of everything.” When the trolley reached their stop, Charlie said to him, “Here we are. Central Casting.”

  The Central Casting offices were in a large building on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue. Inside the crammed lobby, they found a long line of people standing along the walls. A woman in a suit went around jotting names down on a piece of paper.

  “Hiya, Birdie,” Charlie said.

  “Hi, Charlie.” The woman stopped, looked up, and regarded Diego. “What’s new?”

  “Aw, not a whole lot.” Charlie put his hand on Diego’s shoulder. “My friend here wants to register. I know it’s first come, first serve and all but—”

  “Sure,” Birdie said, waving her hand. “Let’s sneak you on in.”

  “Hello, Birdie.” Diego removed his hat and reached his hand out. He knew he had to get on her good side. When she took his hand, he leaned in and kissed hers.

  “Oh my,” Birdie said. “But you are a charmer, ain’t ya?”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said an overweight lady holding a small dog on a leash. “Me and Adore been waiting here all morning. You can’t just …”

  Birdie ignored her, though. She led them behind a counter, through a set of double doors, and into a vast room with many windows. Diego saw row after row of desks. At each one sat a secretary, a typewriter before her.

  “Tell them Birdie sent you,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Charlie told her. He looked at Diego. “First chair beside a desk you see empty, go to it.”

  A woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses fastened around her neck with a silver chain and a plain white blouse sat behind her desk pecking at the keys of a typewriter.

  “Name?” she asked.

  He gave it to her.

  She filled out the information on the index cards, the typewriter’s keys clicking and snapping as she hit them. “Very well,” she said. “Address?”

  He gave her his new address.

  “Height?”

  “Six foot one inch.”

  “Weight?”

  “One hundred and seventy pounds,” he responded.

  “Hair color?”

  “Brown,” he responded.

  She looked up, squinted behind the thick lenses of her glasses. “Light brown’s more like it.”

  “Very well,” he replied. “Light brown it is.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Brown,” he responded.

  “Experience acting?”

  He hesitated, thought about making something up, but decided against it. “None.”

  She shook her head. “If I put that down you might as well forget about ever getting called in.” She glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I’ll just put here that you’ve done some theater work.” She removed her glasses and tapped her fingernail against the desk’s wooden surface. After a while she lifted her hands, fingers hovering over the typewriter’s keys, and filled the rest out. “There!” she said, an air of relief in her voice. “Hope
fully that’ll get you something.” She removed the typed card and had him look it over.

  “Thank you,” he told her.

  “There’s no guarantee, of course,” she said. “But at least this way you’ll look more attractive to the studios. Word of advice, kid?” She put her glasses back on.

  “Sure. Yes.”

  “Don’t be so honest. In this town, people get rich by fibbing and go nowhere fast when they tell the truth.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  She took the application containing his information and his picture and added it to a stack next to her phone, then, on a slip of paper, wrote a number down. “Call this number whenever you want to check and see if there’s work.”

  “Very well,” he said. He took the slip and placed it in his pocket.

  Beyond a set of wooden doors there was a hallway, and through a set of windows he saw a long table where several women worked a giant console. This was the switchboard Charlie had talked about.

  Lights blinked off and on, and each operator wore a headset covering only the left ear. A microphone speaker extended out from the side and wrapped around, coming to rest a few inches away from their mouths. A thick black coil reached out from the headset. This had a plug at its end, and the operators jabbed this into the various holes of the console when a light blinked on. They murmured on and on, incessantly, “Try again,” or “Not today.” It was monotonous and repetitive, like a chant, and he stepped away from the glass. All those lights were people, he knew, just like him, desperate for work, hungry for a job, with aspirations and hopes. What would set him apart from all of them?

  Gates marked the entrance to Frontier Pictures. From a little booth, a guard watched the comings and goings of everyone who entered or exited.

  “Good morning, Sam,” Charlie shouted as they approached.

  The guard smiled and held his hand up. He nodded at Diego.

  “Friend of mine here’s new to the film business,” Charlie said. “Thought I might show him around.”

  The guard chuckled. “Have fun.”

  “Thanks, Sam,” Charlie shouted. “I’ll see you on the way out.”

  “Not if I’m dead you won’t,” he responded and laughed so hard at his own joke that it made him cough and cough.

  Charlie led him through the studio lots, weaving between tall soundstages and hand-painted backdrops of a sky, the Grand Canyon, an armada of Spanish galleons sailing across the ocean. There was all manner of activity around the huge lot. Men in overalls and heavy boots lugged equipment back and forth between the gaping mouths of the enormous soundstages, their numbers painted thick and black on the sides and doors. There were floodlights and cameras, coils and heavy metal cases with snaps and buckles. Still others moved stage props—foam chunks of blue ice, cacti, fake boulders and palm trees and birds of paradise. They looked so lifelike, so utterly real, that Diego was amazed.

  “Those must be for some film set in the South Pacific,” Charlie said. “Big-budget number. Frontier’s putting a lot of money behind that one. I heard Levitt’s looking over that one himself.”

  “R. J. Levitt, you mean?” he asked.

  “The very one.”

  Diego had read all about R. J. Levitt in the trade magazines. Levitt had made his fortune selling photo cameras around the turn of the century. He was so successful that he moved out west to stake his claim in California. He bought a plot of land—nothing back then, just several acres on Gower—hired himself a fleet of horses and some two-bit stage actors and former vaudevillians, and started filming them riding around the Hollywood Hills, pretending to shoot at Indians and bandits. The silent films were short at first, with no real script or direction, but they eventually grew into larger and larger productions featuring lavish costumes and exotic location shoots, hundreds of extras, and action and adventure. Soon they started playing in the theaters that were springing up around the country. Before anybody knew it, Levitt was at the forefront of the filmmaking revolution that was about to take over the world. His quiet project grew exponentially until he had a troupe of several hundred actors, cameramen, wardrobe, and costume crews. Elaborate sets were built—ancient Egypt, Rome, China—each more spectacular than the previous. The productions became more and more sophisticated and impressive, and people loved it. R. J. Levitt came to define the filmmaking industry and was its first success story. He was said to be ruthless, brutal, crushing any opponents or foe, but Diego admired him anyway. He had the power to make or break a career; if you betrayed him, it was the end. Diego read once in a celebrity magazine that an actor had a falling-out with Levitt over a contract dispute. As a result, the actor’s ties to Levitt and Frontier were severed, and Levitt went as far as to have stories fed to the press about this actor’s extramarital affairs. But Diego also heard there was a soft spot underneath the tough veneer. Levitt had a brother who died of influenza, and he cared for his invalid mother after their father abandoned the family, leaving them in abject poverty.

  “Have you met him?” Diego asked Charlie. They now stood in a great central square surrounded by buildings and a water tower perched on wooden stilts.

  “Who?”

  “Levitt.”

  He laughed. “Oh, no. Mimi Mills. Lester Frank. Those big-time Frontier actors are the ones who’ve met him. Do I look like Mimi Mills?” Charlie pointed to an imposing twelve-story building. It was a dreary and cold structure the color of smoke. “See that?” He pointed to the very top, to a set of windows gleaming bright and white in the morning sun. “That’s where R. J. works. From there he looks down on all of us. We must be like ants to him, scurrying here and there, carrying loads of stuff on our backs.”

  Behind the soundstages, mammoth scaffolds and the facades of churches and buildings rose so that the whole sky was a jumbled mixture of architecture spanning thousands of years of human history. Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, Sumerian ziggurats, Buddhist shrines, office buildings, and grass huts smashed and collided into one another. It was timeless there, no real past, no real future.

  After a while, Charlie said, “Well, let’s move on.”

  But Diego wanted to stay there, in that magnificent studio lot where French cancan dancers walked alongside nurses, where police officers mingled with criminals, where barons in fancy top hats and tuxedos shared cigarettes with homeless men in rags. It was all absurd and funny and dizzying. And yet he felt at home there, among the costumes and extravagance, among the chaos and commotion. This was where he wanted to be, where he needed to be.

  At Joe’s, Charlie sat next to him, a toothpick in his mouth, scanning the ads for audition calls. When he came across one he liked, he whistled and said, “Yes, indeed.” Meanwhile, Jean was arguing with a customer who was accusing her of overcharging him. The man wore a coat, the elbows worn, and trousers too short for him.

  “That’s not what the menu says,” he said to Jean, who stood near the front door, one hand on her hip. “Rat finks is what you guys are.”

  “Harry, go or I’m calling the police,” Jean said.

  “Aw,” said the man. “Keep the lousy nickel. You’ll never see good old Harry in this establishment again.”

  “Then adiós,” said Jean.

  “Adiós indeed,” said Harry, then stormed out.

  Diego couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone speak in Spanish. The word sounded so far away to him, so unrecognizable, that he felt as if he could no longer pronounce any of it if he had to.

  “Adiós,” he said in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” Jean said, coming around the counter. “Can you believe that guy?”

  It wasn’t his time to leave, he thought, wasn’t his time to say adiós to all of this and board a train back for Mexico. He had to give it time. And he had a friend to help him now. He looked over at Charlie, his eyes squinting over the small print of the ads, circling things with a pencil.

  “Nothing for the likes of you, buddy,” he said, putting the ads down. “I’m sorry
to tell you.”

  Diego picked it up and looked for himself, just to be sure. There were ads calling for “leggy beauties with dancing experience,” “children six to eight months of age for a baby food advertisement,” and “blond-haired gents with broad physiques and acting experience who aren’t afraid of danger.”

  Diego tossed the magazine aside.

  “Cheer up, pal,” Charlie said. “Your ship’s bound to come in. One way or another.”

  3.

  February 1928

  DIEGO HAD SPENT MONTHS THIS WAY. HE WORKED AT THE DINER and called the Central Casting office each day. Clearly it wasn’t working, so as 1928 began, Diego decided to add a tactic to his strategy. He would go on open calls whenever he had free time.

  One day, before taking the trolley, he stopped by the Western Union office on Sunset and wired his grandparents a message:

  WORKING NOW. MAKING MONEY. WILL RETURN SOON. I PROMISE.

  DIEGO

  His first year in Los Angeles was quickly coming to a close, and he still wasn’t sure what he would do. There wasn’t enough money for a return ticket, though, so Diego figured the best thing for now was to remain, to continue along just as he had. He caught the trolley a few blocks away and watched it inch down the street, gliding over the metal rails that shone in the strong morning sun. Several stops later, he exited.

  The open call was being conducted in a small office above a shoe store, and after walking a few blocks down the boulevard, darting past honking cars and lumbering buses, he found the place and climbed a set of dark and narrow steps up to a door and entered. The room was crowded with men and women, some pacing back and forth, others sitting down in one of many chairs pushed up against the wall, reading the newspaper or glancing around impatiently. Diego was uneasy, but he tried his best to hide it—he knew it was important to exude confidence.

  “You there,” said a short lady wearing too much perfume and rouge. “You.” She had on a polka-dotted blouse with a plunging neckline and billowing sleeves. “Are you here to audition?”