Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (19 page)

Immediately, the Curmudgeon exploded into a red-faced fit.

“YOU DON’T SPEAK!” he shouted, his puffy, cataracty eyes practically spinning, while his liver-spotted hands shook with rage.
“YOU SIT THERE AND YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP AND YOU
LISTEN
!”

Completely horrified by his reaction, I instantly shut up, and wrote fake notes onto my version of the script as he continued
his bellowing. As it started to sink in, I vacillated between wanting to flee and being completely shut down: frozen, unable
to think, feel, breathe. There had been dozens of times in my past when I had found myself in the role of receptacle for a
man’s misplaced rage, and in those times I would simply settle into a strange, trancelike complacency. It never mattered how
scary these bursts of madness were, nor how irrational; I would sit through them in a muddled paralysis, willing myself not
to cry, mostly believing that
they
were
right
. That night, as I stared at the blurred type, writing dummy notes in the margins of my script, was the first time I recognized
this pattern, the first time I was acutely aware of where I went in these moments. “Something about this,” I thought as I
sat there that night, “feels comfortable.” It was a scene I knew, a scene I had played countless times, as familiar as if
I had written it myself. I had always been conscious of the mixed emotions I had about being a woman, sometimes wondering
in that abstract way that you do whether things would have been easier, whether, if I had been exactly me in terms of looks,
personality, and talent but a guy, not a girl, I would have been easier to hire, to admire, to love. But lingering on these
questions, these concerns, wasn’t my thing; frankly, I found them boring. Still, something about being on the receiving end
of the Curmudgeon’s vituperation that night, sitting there beneath my familiar mask of apathy yet so utterly shaken to the
core, made me look into the deep, dark vat of my feigned toughness and see that what it actually held was profoundly internalized
shame.

I barely made it to my car before I disassembled after the Curmudgeon’s class. Blinded by tears, I drove into the night, sure
I would never make anything of myself, sure I was, once again, wasting my time, my money, wondering why nothing ever worked
out, and feeling doomed to failure, heartbreak, and bad luck.

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” my mirage Mamet told me as I sobbed. “It’s not about luck; luck is an accident. You want
to write; it’s hard work. You want to like yourself; stop fucking hating yourself.”

“Right,” I said. “Like it’s that fucking simple.”

“It
is
that fucking simple: You have created a habit, a bad one. So change. Create a new one. A good one.”

I thought about the brio I’d once had when I’d studied with Mamet and company, how confident I had been then that there was
nothing I couldn’t pull off. It had only been ten years since I’d graduated, and yet I could no longer summon any of the dauntlessness
that had once been so easy. Maybe none of it had been real; maybe it had been merely a masquerade, a puffed-up bit of stage
business with no real foundation to support it. Maybe it had been dampened somewhere along the way, snuffed out after the
various plunders, the rejections, the if onlys, the almosts. Or, maybe I had, in my infinite lack of self-regard, simply frittered
it all away.

“Remember,” the phantom Mamet said, “if you go to hell, you shouldn’t be surprised by the heat.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked.

“It means that there are no easy answers and no magic tricks. I told you before: be brave, be strong, tell the truth. It scares
you? Fine.
Do it anyway
. You want to feel better about yourself? Very simple:
exercise your will
. Make a decision, then fucking stick to it. The end.”

I slept for almost twenty-four hours straight following the Curmudgeon’s blowup. When I awoke, I decided to schedule the visit
with a psychic that my friend Kate had bought me a year and a half before as a thirtieth-birthday gift. I had wanted to “save
up” for when I felt really in a psychic pickle, and there was no better time than when I was losing my mind, at the end of
my tether as an actor, and getting reamed by grumpy old gropers.

A week later, I arrived for my afternoon appointment at the Oakwood Apartments in Studio City, where the psychic had a small
room. I had never been to the Oakwood, though I had passed it countless times on my way to and from the Valley for auditions
and jobs, but as I pulled into the visitor parking, it occurred to me that this was the very same temporary housing complex
that Jane had suggested to me nearly three years before when I was in need of lodging. The lobby, resplendent in beige and
fake wood veneer, was teeming with child-star hopefuls from all over the country, rehearsing auditions with their stage mothers,
their bored siblings, meanwhile, plopped aimlessly on the carpet at Mama’s feet, playing jacks or coloring, building up resentments
for future dramas of their own. In the psychic’s tiny room, for the next two hours, I listened to predictions I knew would
never come true:

I would move to London.

I would have three children.

I would have problems with my feet.

In the not-so-recent past, I would have clung to the clairvoyance of strangers as though each absurdity were a decree. (To
wit: Once, in the aftermath of breakup number two with the Jazz Musician, I called a psychic in Tennessee, who spoke to me
in the voice of one of my ovaries. Apparently, this was where my “spirit life” was located. Wacky, yes, and even wackier that
my “ovary” had a thick Southern accent, and still . . .
I believed.
) But by the time I stumbled into the Oakwood, I had long since given up thinking that these things yielded much. Driving
home after the session was over, however, I had to admit that there were three things the Oakwood psychic had said that piqued
my imagination: I would publish a book; I was a moment away from meeting the man I would marry; and finally, before either
of these things could happen, first I had to go back to singing, something I hadn’t done or even thought about in years. Why
these three prophecies gave me pause when the aforementioned “foot problems” struck me as insane, I don’t know; they sounded
just as far-fetched as anything I had ever heard before, and yet they rolled over and over in my mind.
Singing.
I had sung as a child; it was how I had started as a performer and what had led me, ultimately, to acting. Then, once I became
a “serious actor,” singing became a thing of the past. For a brief while, when I was with the Jazz Musician, I took it up
again, singing little gigs at the Knickerbocker in the Village, at an Italian joint in the theater district, and even at a
small room in Harlem, where they paid us in smothered-chicken dinners. As much as I enjoyed it, though, by that time in my
life it was really just a way to be with my boyfriend. When we broke up, I could barely listen to standards, let alone sing
them, and so, when the Jazz Musician left, so too did my desire to be a chanteuse. It all felt like another lifetime ago.

Several weeks after my visit to the Oakwood psychic, we all gathered for my friend Monty’s birthday party at the Dresden Room.
Everyone was there: T.J., Kate, me, and assorted others, toasting Monty and listening to the dulcet tones of the Dresden Room’s
Marty and Elaine, the duo immortalized in the movie
Swingers.
Marty and Elaine were generally known for singing a deranged operatic version of the sound track to
Saturday Night
Fever
, but on occasion, they also invited people to sit in with them. After several rounds of drinks, Monty asked me to sing, and
though it had been years since I’d done so publicly, I was just drunk enough to do it. With my friends cheering me on, I called
the tune—Cole Porter’s “All of You”—and though I counted off a languid tempo, Marty and Elaine only play one speed: fast.
Nevertheless, it all went so well, and I received such a rousing response, that they let me sing a second tune. When I finished,
I was approached by a man who offered me a job singing with his big band at the Atlas Bar and Grill. Rehearsals would begin
the following month. I was excited, but I knew it was one thing to sing drunk with the spastic Marty and Elaine to an equally
drunken crowd and quite another to do it professionally. I needed a piano player to rehearse with so I could get back into
shape and work up my old song charts—but where?

The following week, I attended a performance of a play that Monty was understudying the lead in, and while Monty was good,
the play left much to be desired. I found myself zoning out, listening to the music that punctuated the scene changes, played
offstage by an unseen pianist. It was the same style of hard-bop jazz that I had heard in New York all the time, but found
rarely in Los Angeles. The play, though interminable, finally came to an end, and while waiting to give Monty my congratulations,
I ran into the artistic director of the theater company, whom I also knew.

“Listen,” I told him, “I’ve got to meet that piano player. I need to hire him for something!”

At that moment, a boyish-looking guy in a suit walked through the theater doors and into the lobby, drinking a Coke.

“Here he is right now,” said the artistic director. “Joel, Nancy. Nancy, Joel . . .”

After I explained what I needed to Joel, we exchanged numbers and made a plan to rehearse, which had to be put on hold for
several weeks when I booked my second and third
Seinfeld
appearances. This sudden boon to my acting career resulted in the Atlas Bar and Grill job falling through, since I was unable
to make it to rehearsals while I was on the other side of town on a soundstage. With no Atlas job, I no longer needed a piano
player, but when I spoke to Joel on the phone, he convinced me it might be fun to work up an act of our own and see if we
couldn’t get any gigs. Joel knew a bass player and a drummer, and we scheduled a rehearsal session at Joel’s place, a guesthouse
in Beverly Hills. Rehearsal went well, so we set up another, but we also decided that I should first have some rehearsals
alone with Joel so he could work out keys and arrangements for me before we reconvened en masse.

For the next few weeks, every other day, I would go over to Joel’s and work on songs, dragging my big music books from the
trunk of my car, past the pool on my way in, past the pool on my way out. Joel shared his guest house with two sickly roommates:
a mangy cat named Ludwig, whose dull white fur stood up in clumps around his body (and whom Joel was nursing back to quasi
health by hooking him up to an IV every few hours for re-hydration), and a near-dead houseplant named Bruce that he’d stuck
in a dark closet, watering it twice a day.

“He doesn’t look so good,” I said when Joel first introduced me to Bruce, who tilted piteously to one side and whose brittle
brown leaves were so sparse that he reminded me of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. “I think Bruce might be dead.”

“I know,” Joel shrugged. “But I still figured he was worth a try . . .”

I couldn’t help being charmed by Joel’s attempts to save ailing kitties and fading flora; he was very cute, this self-effacing
guy with the sad green eyes and the dry wit, and he had the sort of mild misanthropy about him that I had always found so
fresh and appealing. In time, as we rehearsed songs about love, desire, and dreams, I found myself singing directly to the
tiny bald spot that peeked out from the top of his head. I started to look forward to rehearsing with him just so I could
see him, and soon I was staying longer and longer after we worked, just to tell him stories about my crazy life that would
make him laugh.

After playing just one gig together, Joel and I gave up the act and started dating instead. One day, he gave me his old laptop
and bought me a three-day memoir-writing workshop as a surprise. The workshop, led by a writer appropriately named Faith,
was filled with about fifteen women who routinely used the word “journal” as a verb. I didn’t know what to expect—certainly
not much—but the workshop was amazing: informative without being patronizing, hand-holdy without being treacly. And each of
the three days, I would run home and write all night long. As I read my stories—or, more accurately, fragments, snapshots,
and character sketches—I looked across the circle of desks at caring, attentive faces who who seemed to know what I was talking
about. Aping Mamet and horny apes were a thing of the past, and there was no reason to hide. “Tell the truth,” he had said,
and finally, I felt like I could.

Ten months after our first rehearsal, Joel asked me to marry him; ten months after that, in the merry month of May, we were
hitched on the first day of a new moon. Ludwig died not long after our engagement; I found him, lying curled up in his litter
box. As I knelt crying and petting his matted fur, I couldn’t help relating to the poor soul whose life had ended in his own
toilet. How often I believed my fate would be similar. We had known Ludwig wasn’t long for this world, but somehow both Joel
and I were completely shaken by his passing. Then, a month before our wedding, Bruce came out of the closet. He was not only
alive but thriving, green and flowering. I couldn’t believe it.

“How did you know?” I asked Joel as we stood marveling at the magnificent plant I had taken for dead when I’d met him.

“I just never gave up on him,” Joel said.

And although I knew that Joel felt the same way about my potential as he did about Bruce’s, perhaps his greatest gift to me
was making me see that I had not yet given up on myself.

12. Beverly D’Angelo’s Former Manager

“I didn’t think
it was possible,” my agent said a few hours after I had blown an audition for a TV movie, “but you managed to bore Luke Perry.”

Arriving in the Room for the audition, I was introduced by an assistant, then went the usual left to right down the conference
table, shaking hands with the director, the casting director, and so on, and when I got to the dude in the backward baseball
cap, I was stunned to discover that it was . . . ohmygod . . .
Luke Perry
? For some reason, despite the fact that this was an audition for something called
The Untitled Luke Perry Project
, this was terribly startling. I proceeded then to have a thoroughly horrible audition, reading a scene with the casting director
and all the while thinking things like “Luke Perry is leaning back in his chair. Luke Perry is sucking on . . . a lollipop?
A straw? A pen? Luke Perry is taking off his baseball hat, rubbing his hat-head hair ( is his hairline receding?) and putting
the cap back on again. Luke Perry, Luke Perry, Luke Perry (who cares?! You never even watched
90210
!) Luuuuuke Peeeeeeer-rrry.”

It was very disconcerting: I was a shaking, stammering imbecile because I was thrown off guard by
Luke Fucking Perry
. How far I had fallen. Once upon a time, I would go into the Room for an audition and knock it out of the park no matter
who was there. I might not
get
the part, but I was always prepared and ready to roll, totally unfazed by the particulars. Only a few years before, I auditioned
for the film
Quiz Show
. I was put on tape reading a few scenes, and later that day I received a call: you are to come back tomorrow to meet Robert
Redford. Robert. Redford.
Hubbell. Gardner.
I was scared sitting in the waiting room, but Redford (“You can call me Bob”) was so disarming that any fear I had evaporated.
I didn’t get the part, but it was a great audition and remains to this day the best I have ever had. Hubbell—I mean
Bob
—even sent me a personal letter (yes, I have it in a frame) saying how terrific I was, how
hard
it had been not to cast me. (
Oh, Hubbell! Can it be that it was all so
simple then?
) So walking into the Room and seeing Luke Perry should have been a nonevent. But those days were long gone, baby. Luke Perry
thought I sucked. And he was right: I did.

“Honestly,” my agent said, “I really can’t work with you anymore. You’re too much of a loose cannon.”

And just like that, I was agentless again for the first time in years. Not that my agent was so great; she hardly ever sent
me out, and I was always having to hustle casting people who knew me or had hired me before. But a crappy agent, like a crappy
boyfriend, always seemed better than none at all.
Someone
supposedly finds you worthwhile and adorable!

“You seem like the type
America
would like to invite into their living room,” this last agent said when signing me two years before. But not, apparently,
into
her
living room; I rarely heard from her, except when she would call to let me know about an audition I had procured for myself.

After my agent dropped me, I got under my covers and sobbed for a while, then, puffy-eyed and headachy, dragged myself over
to my friend Monty’s, to coach him for an audition. I vowed to him, as I had after every letdown in the past, that I was quitting
show business and getting my real estate license.

“Nance,” Monty said, laughing, “you’d make a horrible real estate agent.”

“Well, then maybe I’ll start designing jewelry.”

“I don’t see you doing anything involving welding either . . .”

The next day, after talking it over with Joel, who was by now my husband, I decided that Monty was right; I didn’t need a
welding torch. All I needed was a new agent. Unfortunately, this proved to be harder than I’d thought: no one was interested
in signing me. “Let me know when you’re in something,” they would say when I called about a meeting. Agents were always saying,
“Let me know when you’re in something,” an update on “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” The thing is, you couldn’t get
in something
without them
sending you out.

“Why don’t you write something for yourself to perform?” Joel said.

I hated solo shows; most were appalling and desperate, devoid of any redeeming purpose, the entire venture based solely on
the actor’s barely concealed cri de coeur, “GET ME AN AGENT—FAST!” But now, I
was
that desperate, and I realized that Joel was right: I needed to write some sort of showcase for myself and get myself new
representation. But the minute I would resolve to do it, I would sink into sickening terror. “What would I do?” I kept asking
myself. “What would I write and how?” It seemed wholly impossible.

“You’re overthinking it,” Joel said. “It’s not like you have to write
Long Day’s Journey into Night
. Take a character sketch you wrote in that weekend memoir thing and, you know, flesh it out, expand on it—whatever. Take
a class, maybe.”

And so I did.

The solo-show workshop I found seemed promising at first: many of the graduates had gone on to successfully produce their
shows; one had been made into a movie. Ours was an intimate group of four writers led by a slack-jawed fellow named Hank,
an amiable if somewhat dull guy who had spent most of his life on a farm in central California. While Hank wasn’t a writer
himself, he was a script consul tant and had helped shape countless scripts for some successful screenwriters, whose blurbs
of recommendation graced the workshop’s pamphlets and ads. The other writers, like me, had no real writing experience, but
after a brief interview-audition with Hank, we were accepted on the basis of our “potential” and our willingness “to try.”
One of my classmates was a woman with multiple personality disorder who was writing a series of monologues and songs from
her various personalities’ points of view. All of her personalities shared the belief that they were God, which was extremely
interesting, if somewhat hard to delineate, and it seemed to have great potential: sort of a musical version of
Sybil
, or
The Three Faces of Eve.
There was also a feminist cowgirl from Mexico who was writing a solo show about being raped by her dad and maybe her brother.
I say “maybe” because it was hard to know definitively, since her writing style was lyrical, symbolic, and dense, often spinning
out into disturbing, invective-laced haiku. The last member of our group was Bob. Bob sold insurance in Toluca Lake. He was
old and alcoholic and never brought in anything to read, so I don’t know what he was working on. But he did comment, a lot,
mostly hostile, offensive remarks about the feminist cowgirl’s stuff, which in turn made her absolutely furious. She had a
great deal of pent-up and not-so-pent-up anger at men, so being treated to Bob’s endless stream of truculent baiting made
for an awfully uncomfortable four hours each week. The feminist cowgirl would read her latest thing for about thirty-five
minutes (we were supposed to bring in fifteen minutes tops), after which Hank would limply ask some innocuous questions about
“tracking” the protagonist’s narrative. Then Bob, unsolicited, would wonder aloud, like a character out of
The Accused
, if rape was something that in some way the victim deep down
really wanted
; wasn’t the sexual revolution meant to free us all of our inhibitions; was memory, in fact, something that could ever be
truly
reliable
, etc., etc., and the feminist cowgirl would grow red-faced and start screaming at him. He would continue in his passive-aggressive
way with lame little musings, she would continue to scream, and Hank, the multiple-personality-disordered chick, and I would
just sit there, shuffling papers, not knowing if we should pipe in or go make some Red Zinger tea. As uncomfortable as it
was, however, I didn’t quit the class. It forced me to write each week, so I stayed for a few months, until I had the faint
beginnings of one of the pieces that would ultimately become my solo show. One day, the feminist cowgirl called me up and
said she had access to the rec room in the basement of a friend’s Mar Vista apartment building and thought it would be fun
to put up an evening of the stuff we had written so far in the workshop. She said that the multiple-personality-disordered
chick was game (she blew Bob off), and she had one other friend who was writing a show about sleeping her way through Burning
Man. I instantly agreed. The rec room was full to capacity the night of the readings, and before I was even done with my piece,
I was convinced that doing a full-scale solo show was the right path. I went home that night, left Hank a voice mail message
that I was quitting the workshop, started writing, and didn’t stop. Six months later, I unveiled my first-ever fully developed
piece of writing: a solo show called
I Slept with Jack Kerouac and
Other Stories.

Inspired in part by my second and final devastating breakup with the Jazz Musician and his insistence that he could no longer
commit because he was “the reincarnation of Jack Ker-ouac,” the three-monologue piece costarred a talking cat and a massive,
anthropomorphized penis shadow puppet, with which I shared a bittersweet pas de deux to Natalie Cole’s “I’ve Got Love on My
Mind.” Joel served as producer as well as musical director (all three monologues were accompanied by incidental music).

Kerouac
opened to a favorable review and a “recommended” from the
LA Weekly
, leading, incredibly, to coverage from other papers and magazines, including the
Los Angeles Times
. Suddenly, I started getting calls for meetings, interviews, and auditions and invitations to lunches and brunches. The enthusiasm
of these suitors seemed bound to resuscitate my flatlining acting career, and, even more amazingly, there was interest in
me as a writer as well.

“I knew you could do it,” Joel said, hugging me, after we read the
Times
review online in the middle of the night. “See? All you had to do was put yourself out there . . .”

Hal-le-fucking-lujah!

Here was my door. Finally.

I went to a few meetings with Hollywood big shots—film executives and television producers—ostensibly to “kick around ideas”
about what to “do with me” and to see if there was anything more that could come of this “little live stage thing.” In brightly
lit waiting rooms in office bungalows on studio lots or in mod Wilshire Boulevard agency headquarters, I sat and watched headsetted
receptionists reflexively connecting calls amidst windows with panoramic views of a parched, palm-dotted haze.

“Can I get you a bottle of water?” the assistants asked.

“Sure—thank you.”

“Room temp or chilled?”

It seems silly, but the assistants’ questions made me anxious, as though there were a
right
answer, a more successful-person-sounding answer, an answer given by someone who actually had answers. Surmising that chilled
water would be more likely to make me have to pee, I always chose room temp, though it was all for naught. I never even opened
the bottles. They would sit beside me, uncracked, on coffee tables or conference tables during these meetings, and leave with
me, soon to litter the floor of my tiny car. In time, the passenger side’s floor would begin to resemble a water bottle graveyard,
but I would never move them or throw them away. They were my little parting gifts, proof that I had been there.

The whole water bottle phenomenon seemed so strange to me. As an actor going on meetings or auditions, I was never offered
something to quench my thirst. I was never offered anything at all except warnings posted on enormous angry placards that
hung in the waiting areas of the various casting offices: “
ACTORS MAY
NOT EAT IN THIS AREA!!!
” they screamed from above a comfy couch; “
NO ACTORS ALLOWED!!
” they hissed next to coffee machines and refrigerators; “
ACTORS: CLEAN UP
YOUR GARBAGE!!
” they beseeched. I remember seeing that last one once in an office in the theater district in New York and initially misreading
it as “
ACTORS ARE GARBAGE!!
” But even if those weren’t the actual words, there was no mistaking the sentiment. So the proffered water bottles felt a
little like keys to the city.

I was really excited about these meetings, even though I was never sure afterward what we had really talked about or what
exactly the point was. The meetings were pleasant, the executives complimentary, but an unstated bewilderment hung in the
air, a kind of mental “soooooo . . .” followed by seat shifting. Sitting across from these casual, relaxed people on their
overstuffed leather furniture, I wondered how—or for that matter, when—projects got made. These people did a lot of lunch
and dinner; they went to the gym and played golf; they took their wives, girlfriends, and lovers up the coast to stay in nine-hundred-dollar-a-night
tree houses. I imagined them taking meetings with people like me all day, blithely discussing “high concepts,” “back ends,”
and “protagonist arcs” until it was time to take a lunch meeting, after which they would come back and take a few more meetings
until dinner.

The executives invariably came back a few times to see my show, bringing with them assistants, associates, and colleagues
who sat in the audience chatting while the performance was in progress. Not accustomed, I suppose, to the mores of live theater
and how to exist in an audience, they noisily discussed how to best utilize me and my material as though they were ensconced
in a private pitch meeting. Because a good deal of my show was addressed directly to the audience, I could see them having
these conversations for almost the entire ninety minutes. However weird that was, it was even weirder to show up in their
offices afterward to hear what they had to suggest. One big shot film producer who thought my show might have potential as
a film called me from his car weeping rhapsodies after he first saw it (I’m not kidding; he was
crying
in his voice mail message!). While still enthusiastic when I arrived in his office for a meeting to “suss things out,” he
suggested right off the bat that I should change the title, as it was too “off-putting.” There were simply too many people,
he insisted, who hadn’t the vaguest idea who the hell Jack Kerouac was.
Really?
I was astonished and told him so.