Homesick (12 page)

“Brotherhood is such a powerful habit of the heart that even when only one person reaches out to do right, the impact can be lifelong,” Cliff writes. “If I had not encountered this habit of the heart when I was young, I could have left the South embittered and hurt. Instead I left with purpose and a plan. I could not have done so without the memory of these acts of brotherhood. I needed to see them practiced in front of me to believe that they could happen.”

4

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“Dowwn-towwn,” my teacher said.

“Daywn-taywn,” I repeated.

“Dowwn-towwn.”

“Daywn-taywn.”

We went on like this for hours. “Every time you pronounce the word that way,” Henry said, “you must get a toothache.”

My teacher was Henry Jacoby, a legendary voice coach who lived on West End Avenue in a massive, shadowy prewar building. And in those early days I spent in New York, I passed many an afternoon there with Henry, trying desperately to flatten out one of my most obvious hometown holdovers—my Southern drawl. I had to, for I was going to become an actress.

Much to my delighted surprise, my modeling career had taken off more quickly than I’d dared to hope. My break came when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike. A friend of a friend worked at an ad agency that was desperate to find an actress for a Maybelline cosmetics TV spot. They hired me for the princely sum of $100 an hour. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It seemed as if, after years of floating down a lazy river, I’d suddenly hit the rapids.

But when the TV commercial division of Wilhelmina started sending me out on more auditions, I ran smack into my first professional challenge: I didn’t know how to act. I was fine one-on-one with the camera, but as soon as I had to exchange dialogue with another actor I’d freeze up. Time to start taking some acting classes, I thought. Learn the craft. Lose the drawl.

Henry, God bless him, was probably eighty years old when he took me on as a student. His building was close to Lincoln Center; on the elevator ride up to his flat, you’d inevitably hear pianists practicing in their apartments, and opera singers working out the kinks in their arias. I was still wide-eyed enough that walking the halls of Henry’s building made me feel I was taking a leap down some Gotham rabbit hole.

Henry was so ancient, and his flowing white hair made him appear to be an angel. He was the kind of aristocratic character you move to the big city to meet. Whenever the phone would ring in the middle of a lesson, he would raise his bony finger like a wizard’s wand, and say mischievously, “Saved by the bell.” During our lessons Henry would strike notes on the piano, and teach me to sound them out in response. He had a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
close at hand, and at the end of every lesson he would open it and ask me to recite a passage. As someone whose accent marinated in the Mississippi mud, I had the hardest time with words like “downtown,” those diphthongs coming out like two long flat notes played on a trumpet.

It turned out I had a good ear for accents, though, and with a little hard work it wasn’t long before I’d conquered my drawl. I worked a lot on the quality of my voice, to make it less nasal and more throaty. Plus, it helped that I wasn’t hanging out with a bunch of Southerners, tempting my ear to fall back into my old familiar cadences.

But good pronunciation wasn’t going to save my acting career. So I started studying with a teacher named Bob McAndrew. It was one of those life-changing decisions. Under Bob’s guidance I began a transformation from quiet, introspective, small-town girl to confident woman who was unafraid to take big risks on the public stage. More important, for the first time I began to see, and to believe, that there was something more to me than a pretty face.

I continued modeling to pay the bills, but discovered that acting was my true passion; it held out a promise of personal fulfillment that modeling could not. Being judged simply on your looks twenty times a day is a rotten way to earn a living—for me, at least—and it’s bound to turn you into a neurotic mess. For every person who flipped through my portfolio and thought my look was great, there were ten others who’d hand it back with a curt “Thank you” and escort me out the door. I relentlessly pounded the pavements of lower Manhattan, where many of the top fashion photography studios were, repeatedly submitting myself to this cattle-call rating of my appearance. At times it felt like a nonstop parade of rejection, but soon enough I started encountering a little acceptance, too—enough that I was finally able to quit asking Mama for money, and to live pretty well as a twenty-two-year-old.

But it was a dehumanizing kind of work, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take it for long. Acting class was where my heart was. Bob McAndrew taught at an acting school in the theater district on the West Side. The owner was a well-known acting coach, but if you had no experience you went to Bob’s class. We first met in a small theater within the American Place Theatre building on West Forty-sixth Street. The students sat looking down from the audience onto the tiny stage, where we’d do endless exercises, and lots of listening. Corbin Bernsen was in my class; years later we’d work together again, on
L.A. Law
and the movie
Hello Again,
and it was like a little two-person class reunion. We were all nobodies then, but being in a New York acting class seemed at the time to be the most meaningful thing I could possibly do with my life.

Bob left to start his own acting studio in the Forties between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and we followed him. It was like a little club. Our group spent almost a year together in this class, young, eager, and intoxicated by hope and possibility. We produced plays to showcase our acting chops for agents; everybody would pitch in and help with scenery and sets. After our performances we’d all go out for beers and talk late into the night about what we were going to do with our lives once we got our big break. I was coming out of myself, learning how to enjoy life.

Having completed my acting classes and polished up my fresh new north-of-nowhere accent, I was ecstatic when my agent called to say she’d landed me a two-day role on
One Life to Live:
Nurse Bunny Cahill. The name alone should have told me something about the nature of the role. Nurse Bunny was in love with a doctor, and almost every line she uttered had to do with offering him food: “Would you like some Chinese food, Doctor?” “I’m having apple pie á la mode—would you like to join me, Doctor?” (Years later David Letterman would have some fun with this, stringing all of Nurse Bunny’s little one-liners together: the accumulated screen time couldn’t have added up to more than two and a half minutes.) We weren’t talking Tennessee Williams here.

Call me naive, but I was startled to see what an assembly line soap-opera production was. The director was invisible, hidden off in a booth somewhere, and the whole process churned along like a machine—efficient, businesslike, but sterile, and not at all what I’d been looking forward to after all those good creative sessions with Bob McAndrew. There was none of the spontaneous creativity, none of the camaraderie—not to mention, of course, none of the great material. Before too long I was offered a regular role on another daytime soap; I was flattered that the producers liked me enough to ask me, but if this was what acting was, I just didn’t want any part of it. Big break or not, I turned it down.

I’d reached a crossroads. Something inside was telling me I might have what it took to make it as an actress. But with precious few acting jobs on the New York stage, and little TV and movie production in New York at the time, what choice did I have?

I thought: Sela, if you can make it here, you can sure as hell make it in Los Angeles. New York had put me to the test, and gave me a hint about what I might really have been meant to do with my life. I had no idea where my destiny was going to take me, but I knew beyond a doubt that it wasn’t back home to Mississippi. New York had shown me that. But I’d done all I thought I could do there. If acting really was my calling, I convinced myself, there was only one way to find out for sure: pull up my still-forming New York roots, go to Hollywood, and roll the dice.

I packed up my things and bought a one-way ticket to L.A.

That January day in 1983, I stepped off the plane at LAX with nothing but what I could carry in a suitcase, the name of an agent, and a promise from a friend that a Hollywood buddy of his would meet me at the airport. Where I got the courage to trust this stranger to pick me up and deliver me safely to a hotel, I’ll never know. It just seemed like a chance worth taking.

And I got lucky: The stranger turned out to be a sweetheart. He drove me straight to the Beverly Hills Hotel, the pink stucco palace on Sunset Boulevard, where we met his sister in the famous Polo Lounge for lunch. They invited me to a party that night at one of the hotel bungalows to watch the miniseries
The Winds of War.
I met a guy there named Mark, who was the assistant to a studio big, and he invited me to join him and his friends the next day for brunch. And so I did. Within twenty-four hours of arriving in Los Angeles, I had a network of interesting new friends. It was a lovely introduction to my new city.

This was so different from my experience in New York, where people tended to be insular and defensive, and you felt as if you had to fight for everything. Was everything in L.A. going to be this easy? Surely not, but I had reason to hope.

I stayed at the Beverly Hilton for two weeks, and by the end of that time I’d landed my first movie role: through a friend of a friend, I was cast for a part in
The Man Who Loved Women,
a Burt Reynolds movie. What a moment! Burt was at the peak of his career at that point. To make sure I could handle the part—which wasn’t much more than a single scene—the director, Blake Edwards, sent me to an acting coach: Nina Foch, who’d been nominated for an Oscar for her role in
Executive Suite
in 1954. It was magical: There I was sitting at her house up in one of the canyons, the two of us being served tea by her Asian butler as she instructed me on the role and steered me toward classes I should take. The sun-drenched languor of Los Angeles was a world away from the harried, gray intensity of Manhattan, but I loved it in the same way. Once again I seemed to have floated into a heady new landscape worlds away from what I’d left behind.

I don’t mean to give the impression that trying to make it as an actress in L.A. was easy. It’s just that I had lived for years in New York, where everything is a struggle. L.A. seemed to have no hard edges, at least none that this hardened Manhattanite felt at the time. I did have to return to modeling, though, to sustain my new life. One of the first things I did when I arrived in town was to check in with the Wilhelmina office. When I wasn’t trying to get acting roles, I took modeling jobs—often catalogue work, which is the dinner theater of the modeling world—to pay the rent on the tiny West Hollywood studio apartment into which I’d moved. I didn’t want to model, and I certainly didn’t want to do it for catalogues, but whatever it took to keep my Hollywood dreams alive, I was willing to do. At the time I still believed that the Hollywood Walk of Fame was the road to happiness.

Things moved quickly for me. Five months after relocating I found myself at the Cannes Film Festival, at the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc with a friend who was promoting a movie. We were dining at the hotel’s famed restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, drinking $200 bottles of white burgundy with dinner. It was the most delicious wine I’d ever tasted. Suddenly, the timid girl from Meridian who used to tell secrets to the mimosa tree had plopped herself right in the middle of a jet-setty Hollywood life. Being footloose on the French Riviera is a long way from walking barefoot on the Mississippi Gulf Coast—and I was loving every minute of it.

But it wasn’t as if I’d severed all my connections with the past. For months I actually hung on to my New York apartment, flying back as often as I could to see my friends and reconnect with that city I hadn’t yet had my fill of. And from time to time I came back to Meridian, too, to recharge my batteries and crawl back into the womb. Even when I was just starting out in New York, when I had to eat day-old bagels to make sure I had enough cash to get me through the week, I had always managed to put away enough savings to get home when I needed to. You can always find a way to get home to your mama.