The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (24 page)

Vatche had been trying his best to convince me to get an agent, or to at least meet with his. He had worked in movies and TV for nearly two decades when I met him and thought I was wasting my time on the outskirts of Hollywood. He introduced me to his agent, David. He was very supportive and nice, and I loved his honesty. He told me that I was basically overqualified for the roles he was going to send me out to audition for.

A week later he sent me to audition for a guest role, the attaché’s wife, on the soap opera
The Bold and the Beautiful
. Vatche was regularly portraying the attaché and had pitched me to be in it as his wife. I was more than happy to hear that I had gotten the part. I had one line: “Good evening, Your Majesty.” The show aired in 1989.

Next my agent sent me on an audition for an Indian role. I told him I did not speak a word of Hindi, but he said it didn’t matter. I went to the studio and noticed a couple of Indian women, almost my age, walking into the casting office before me. They looked beautiful in their traditional Indian dresses. I was in my jeans and a buttoned-down shirt. There was no way I could compete with them. I walked right out.

On the other hand, my third audition was simply odd. David sent me to an office on Hollywood Boulevard and said I had to be there by no later than four in the afternoon. He said it was for a movie called
Mission to Mars
. The scene I was auditioning for took place at a women’s luncheon. But I was so preoccupied trying to find someone to give me a ride to the audition that I forgot I hadn’t spoken with him about the role. I was at the door of a casting office when I noticed the sign on the door that read
NUDITY REQUIRED.

I paused for a second and thought, first of all, David would have told me if this was the case. Secondly, what does
Mission to Mars
have to do with nudity?

“Are you looking for something?” asked a beautiful girl.

I told her what I was there for. She smiled and said that I was on the wrong floor. One floor up, a line of gorgeous, tall, white and blond actresses was waiting for their names to be called. I was sure I was in the wrong place yet again. The two young assistants looked at me in puzzlement and asked how they could help. When I said my agent had sent me, they handed me the designated parts of the script to read, and I prepared to audition.

I looked at the script in disbelief. The audition was for an astronaut’s wife, and the scene was taking place at her home with a couple of other astronauts’ wives, celebrating their husbands’ mission to Mars. I left thinking I was
definitely
in the wrong place. I was neither tall enough, nor was I blond enough, and I was not exactly from Texas or anywhere else in the South. I wondered what David was thinking.

Another time, I went on a casting call for a small part and was sent home because I was “too beautiful” to play a downtrodden Middle Eastern woman.

I was finally able to break into Hollywood in 1990. I was cast as a saleslady in the episode “Nowhere to Turn,” on
Matlock
, starring the late Andy Griffith. Andy Griffith was kind and invited me to have tea with him on our breaks. He often asked me questions about Iran. “Do you wish you could go back there?” is a question I hear all the time. In return, I always say that I will never go back to Iran until it is free. When the
Matlock
episode aired, Houshang threw a small party and tossed confetti into the air. Jaleh cracked a joke and said, “As the line in
All About Eve
goes, ‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’ ” (Yes, yes . . . I know the quote ends in “night,” but Jaleh recalled it as “ride.”)

32

Dissent

V
atche’s support meant a lot to me, and I decided to take the real estate agency’s offer and work with him on the show. I would give an introduction and Vatche would do a seven-minute segment, “Talk with Artists,” in which he would either speak with well-known Iranian artists or review the top movie of the week in the United States, sometimes with expert guests.

It still makes me laugh every time I remember how Vatche and I pleasantly fought over the minutes in our show. It was twenty-eight minutes long, and we had to leave eight minutes out for the real estate agency’s ads. But we kindly lent each other time when we knew a segment was too perfect to cut.

Garnik and Amalia Keshishian from the real state agency offered me a small office in the corner of their agency. Amalia was an incredibly kindhearted woman. She asked me if I would like to move into one of their properties in Tarzana in the Valley in return for half of the salary I had originally asked for.

I immediately accepted the offer. We were already paying a lot of money for a dinky apartment. We soon moved into a beautiful one-story, two-bedroom house, with a charming backyard and a white gazebo at the middle.

ONE EARLY MORNING
while Houshang was in Paris visiting his sister, I received a worried call at home from Amalia. She said that my office had been ransacked and the outgoing message on the answering machine had been changed to a hate message from a jihadist. “I am a jihadist and I will put a bomb in your office. I will fucking kill you, you fucking infidels.”

Garnik picked me up in ten minutes. They had already reported the incident to the police, and two gentlemen from the FBI soon joined them at the office. They were going over the scene when a call came in at eight-thirty in the morning. They asked me to pick up the phone and see if it was the jihadist. It was. They told me to try and engage him for as long as I could so they could trace his call.

The caller immediately bombarded me with obscenities. He called me names including “whore,” “traitor,” “infidel,” and hung up before I had a chance to say anything in return. I was shocked. The authorities asked what I thought might have ignited such hate.

Suddenly I remembered the last time I was on Vatche’s segment a few nights before. We had reviewed the movie
Not Without My Daughter
, starring Sally Field. The movie was based on a true story about an American woman, played by Sally Field, who was married to an Iranian, portrayed by the British actor Alfred Molina. The couple visits Iran, but when the wife discovers that her abusive husband intends to keep the family there permanently, she escapes the country with her daughter.

I was very vocal in defense of the wife and of women in similar situations in Iran. Vatche asked what if the story was not based on real events or actual facts. I said, “Come on, everyone knows some Iranian men beat their wives to death in the postrevolutionary Iran. They take advantage of Islamic law.”

The third call came less than an hour later, and it was more of the same. I listened carefully this time to see if I could recognize his accent. It sounded Arabic, but his abusive language was similar to that used by prison interrogators in the Islamic Republic, using graphic sexual language to intimidate and bully. He kept calling me every hour, cursing and describing in detail how I was going to be raped by them if I did not shut my filthy mouth. Each call lasted less than a minute, so the police could not trace him.

Around two o’clock in the afternoon, he called again. I picked up the phone and lashed out at him. I was so sick and tired of his ugly and obscene words that I could not take it anymore. I cursed wildly and was stunned at how many words I could say in less than a minute. All he managed to say was that he would take care of me—he did not call back again.

The police asked me if I had any idea what stopped the caller. I said I thought I knew.

“He must be a Middle Easterner,” I said. “He was caught off guard and offended at having let a woman use obscene words toward him. He wasn’t used to it.”

The police and FBI did their best to look after us for a while, but the man never called back again.

If Houshang had been home, he would have been devastated and furious. I told him about the incident later, and he unsurprisingly became angry. He wanted me to stop working on the show. I reminded him that I was practicing the First Amendment, and that I was not going to sit back and be harassed by a thug.

33

The Sweet Scent of Love

M
eanwhile I was putting all my energy and love into Tara, who was now almost three. She had a strong personality and was beautiful. Her pink-white skin, curly brown hair, big almond-shaped brown eyes, and pinchable cheeks stopped everyone in their tracks. We were even approached by a director of commercials who said Tara would be perfect for baby beauty pageants or a baby commercial. I thanked the gentleman but let him know we were not interested in his offer. Houshang and I had both started acting on our own initiative. Nobody had made us do it. We did not want to force Tara into a world that may or may not be the one she would want to live in.

Houshang had finished writing his new play,
The Sweet Scent of Love
. It revolved around a childless couple in their midthirties. The two are on the verge of a nasty breakup, bombarding each other with abusive words, but a sudden visit from the woman’s uncle forces them to put their dispute on hold. The uncle’s wisdom, plus his gifts from Iran, bring back the loving memories of their early days in their birth country. This sense of nostalgia sparks a reconciliation between the two. Houshang and I were lucky enough to have Daryoush Irani-Nejad, a prominent Iranian actor, portray the uncle while we played the bickering couple.

The three of us read and rehearsed the play in the evenings in our small living room so we could keep an eye on Tara. She would play with her dolls and watch us. I am sure she was wondering what her parents were up to, kissing each other one minute and getting mad at each other the next. She would get worried every time we shouted at each other. But we would make faces to distract her and get her to laugh.

Whenever Houshang wrote a new play, we usually rented a large performance venue for a couple of nights in L.A. like many other theatrical groups. But the time had come for us to rent a permanent place to perform. We decided to form a theater company whose meaningful and humorous plays would make it the most successful Farsi-speaking theater company outside of Iran. We named our company Work Shop ’79, after the workshop in Iran and the year that changed all of our lives. Our workshop is still running today and recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

We were also lucky to find an affordable place in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, in the “Valley of Iranians,” in the city of Encino. The Comedy Club of Encino was a small venue with a capacity of 180 seats. It was busy during the week, so the owner could only let us rent it on Sundays. Considering the importance of the location and its short distance from our home, we decided to take the club owner’s offer and rent the place for a year, having two performances on Sundays with an option to renew the contract annually.

AFTER A MONTH
and a half of rehearsals, and a restoration of the club, we performed the play and were thrilled to find that the audience not only connected with the story but also found it incredibly funny.

We ran our business with family and friends. My youngest brother, Shahrokh—now Sean—an engineer and computer tech, helped us with the light and sound. My sister-in-law Soraya, who was married to Houshang’s brother, took care of the box office. Farhad managed the stage.

Our shows on Sundays were sold out weeks in advance. I looked at the reservation sheets and noticed that a couple of the same names kept appearing week after week. I asked one of them if she had seen the play before, and she said she had seen it sixteen times, bringing her friends and family and, more important, guests from Iran. She said she enjoyed it more and more every time she watched it.

Parents brought their older kids to get a sense of Iranian humor when it comes to love and divorce. Iranian psychologists and family consultants sent their clients to see the play. Young couples contemplating divorce came to see the realistic portrayal of a marriage in disarray and then repair, and were happy in the end. No matter how idealistic the solution may have seemed, the play worked well with its audience.