The Alexandrite Read online
Praise for North of Hollywood
First Place Memoir—Los Angeles Book Festival
A Performing Arts Book of the Year—Foreword Reviews
“A touching bittersweet remembrance… breathtaking…”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Applause? Standing ovation! …masterful…”
—WRITERS DIGEST
“Most people don’t know the simple truth that Lenz reveals in this captivating autobiography: Actors are real people, and acting is a real job… We're enthralled by the glamour, but Lenz helps us focus on the real point: The hardest part of a glamorous life, of any life, is to find one's feet and stay standing. Lenz is still standing, and North of Hollywood is a warm, credible account of how he found his place in and out of the limelight… The earned wisdom of a seasoned veteran.
—US REVIEW OF BOOKS;
a Recommended Review
“… An overwhelming sense of peace… poetic prose… The effect is beautiful.”
—FOREWORD BOOK REVIEWS
“An actor’s intimate, sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, and always honest account of making a living while living next to Hollywood legends.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“A poetical, quirky, and heartwarming read.”
——G. L. BLANCHARD,
—author of THE MAN WHO TRADED HIS WIFE
—FOR WOODWORKING TOOLS
“An essential book for anyone who has ever said they want to be an actor and anyone who was lucky enough not to. Compulsively readable! …perceptive and poignant wisdom…”
—MICHAEL KAHN,
artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C.;
former head of drama at The Juilliard School
“Talent to burn.”
—LAUREN BACALL
“I love this book! Insightful, honest, wise, and charming!”
—BERNARD SLADE,
author of “SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR”
“I greatly admired Rick Lenz’s thoughtful and well written book.”
—PETER BART,
VARIETY
“North of Hollywood should be required reading for anyone who aspires to the acting life in New York and the City of Angels. Enchantingly written with a sure hand and a knowing eye, Rick Lenz reveals with enormous poignancy and gleeful insight what it has taken to make one real life work while pursuing the Hollywood dream.”
—ELIZABETH FORSYTHE HAILEY,
New York Times Best Selling Author of
A WOMAN OF INDEPENDENT MEANS
“What a book!! I respected this actor's work and wanted to read anecdotes of his career, etc., and what a surprise! I got more. A superb writer who can so articulate his feelings—his emotional and mental journey through his life and career with ironic and witty humor and a piercing honesty—an actor's internal memoir with none of the ego we connect with an actor's recounting. No self-pity. He lets us into who he is by how he tells his story. It will inspire. Not just a showbiz story, but a universal one. I couldn't put it down.
—JOSEPH R. SICARI,
actor
“Raises the genre of the Hollywood Memoir to an art form.”
—MICHAEL NORELL,
Writers Guild of America Award winner;
two-time Christopher Award winner
“I was totally engaged with North of Hollywood, start to finish. Sometimes it felt like Rick Lenz wasn’t just ‘opening the kimono,’ as they say in business, but was actually peeling off his skin. I admire his courage in telling it.”
—SCOTT CAMPBELL,
author of TOUCHED and AFTERMATH
“North of Hollywood is an often funny, sometimes gut wrenching, and immensely engaging true tale of one actor’s journey … If you want to believe happy endings are possible in real life, even when real life is show business, take a look at North of Hollywood.”
—TOMMY KENDRICK,
ACTORS TALK podcast
The Alexandrite
a novel by
Rick Lenz
CHROMODROID PRESS
Copyright ©2015 by Rick Lenz. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in critical articles and reviews.
For information, contact the author at [email protected].
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Lenz, Rick, author.
The alexandrite : a novel / by Rick Lenz. -- First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-9848442-4-1
ISBN 978-0-9848442-5-8
ISBN 978-0-9848442-6-5
ISBN 978-0-9848442-7-2
1. Monroe, Marilyn, 1926-1962--Fiction. 2. Actors--
Fiction. 3. Performing arts--Fiction. 4. Time travel--
Fiction. 5. Noir fiction. 6. Science fiction.
I. Title.
PS3612.E557A44 2015 813'.6
QBI15-600138
Printed in the United States of America
***
Cover by Foster Covers
Interior by Polgarus Studio
Editing by My Two Cents Editing
Consulting by Outrider Literary
***
ALSO BY RICK LENZ
North of Hollywood
For more about the author and his books, please visit
http://ricklenz.com/
Chromodroid Press
Los Angeles
This book is dedicated to Aaron, Riley, and Frances
and, always, Linda
“(Time) goes backward to an instant so ancient that it is beyond all memory, and past even the possibility of remembering. Yet because it is an instant that is relived again and again and still again, it seems to be now.
Those who are to meet will meet.”
— A Course in Miracles
“How do you find your way back in the dark?”
—Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits,
screenplay by Arthur Miller
1
Alexandrite: a gem variety of chrysoberyl
that appears green in daylight
and red in artificial light.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1996
At some unidentified point during the first time I live through the following events, it becomes as clear as my muddled brain has ever experienced clarity that most of us do not see what we see or hear what we hear; in fact, we can’t tell what’s going on right in front of us. As a result, few of us understand that life runs in a circle, that it’s forever changing, but always, always in a circle. And the reason for this is, if it wasn’t in a circle, if life went out in a straight line, it would take us away from each other. And that wouldn’t work because we are all connected, made of the same stuff. Most of us, to one degree or another, are terrified of the end of the path we’re on, never understanding that our path is a circle, and that it won’t end—because it can’t.
Curiously—or at least I think it’s curious—what I have just said is something I’ve yet to learn, yet I already know it.
Go figure.
I know this is an odd way to start a story like this—if there is another story like this—but I am experiencing a lot of odd moments lately, and am having a new and alarming sensation of the (forgive me, psychobabble haters) Now in my life. Everything that happens to me is happening as it occurs—not a few minutes ago, not yesterday, not last year, but now.
My name is Jack Cade. I’m a forty-year-old actor, and going through a rough patch in my work life. My marriage is not doing
well either, which is entirely my fault. Sophie is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.
Also, if I want to be totally honest (and what’s the point of writing a journal if you don’t plan to be honest), my career is in the process of falling to pieces.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1996
I go to an audition today—four lines for a cable television movie. It’s for one of those TV characters who knows what he knows with absurd confidence. When I get to the casting studio, I feel pins and needles up and down my spine, and my stomach is dripping acid as if I’ve just taken part in a black-coffee-drinking contest. There are four other actors who look just like me but confident waiting in the outer office. On the walls hang photographs of Cagney, Garbo, Rita Hayworth, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, and as always in my life, it seems wherever I go, Marilyn Monroe.
Inside, I jump all my cues, reading the answers before the character I’m auditioning for has a chance to hear the questions. By then, perspiration is causing my shirt to stick to my chest and back, and it’s clear the producers are not about to hire an actor whose clothing is pasted to him, who looks like he’s just run a marathon and is about to, as the first marathoner did, drop dead.
The producers, who seem knowing and sophisticated beyond their years in their supercasual clothes and three-hundred-dollar haircuts, are disappointed. Who can blame them? They ask for devil-may-care and wised-up—kind of like they are—but I don’t have that on my menu today. I have worried. I have unsure. I have bleeding actor’s ego. Almost immediately, I notice that these foolishly confident TV guys are all wearing Rolexes, except for the doughty TV gal, who sports a large Mickey Mouse watch. I’m wearing a Timex that stopped working last year.
My mother, Rita, looms up in my mind like Gypsy Rose Lee’s mama. She looks disappointed in me. I hate that look.
Passing through the outer office as I leave the audition, I glance at the picture of Spencer Tracy on the wall and wonder if there is anything generous, anything un-ego-bound behind his eyes, anything that, even with the ultimate actor and movie star, one could hang onto that isn’t just part of “The Spencer Tracy Show.”
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1996
I didn’t sleep much last night. I’ve been having a recurring nightmare that I’m in a darkened hallway, standing at the top of a flight of stairs, trying to work up the guts to go down to the first floor. I’m terrified to start down, but there’s a relentless pounding in my brain, and it leaves me no choice. I can see light at the bottom of the stairs coming through a short passageway from the next room.
I’m gripped constantly by two fears: that I am a perverse exception to the larger circle of life I sense in my gut that my life is running in a grinding and infinite loop with no means of changing its course; and that the only way I can possibly escape is to jump from the frying pan into the fire—leap free of the rut I’m stuck in and walk through that passageway into, for all I know, something even more sinister.
I wake up in a cold sweat just before I have to start down the stairs. I’m up for hours sometimes before I’m able to fall back into an uneasy sleep, but Sophie sleeps heavily. She gets up early and goes to work as a private care nurse at the Beverly Vue Apartments for a gentleman she calls “the old boy.” Except for the times I gaze at her as I’m falling asleep, I hardly ever see her lately except in the evenings, and not always then.
Today, the telephone wakes me. It’s the director of a play I’ve been working on, a five-character Hamlet at a tiny nonpaying workshop theatre in West Hollywood. I’m playing Polonius and alternating with the other supporting actors to do the narration. When you do a five-character Hamlet, a lot of things need to be explained.
An actor in his late thirties named Douglas Crossley is playing Hamlet. He is also directing. I was told Crossley almost became a star several years ago, having done nice roles in four big films when he was a young man, but evidently he didn’t quite click, because after that he was once again, like most actors, struggling to get by. He’s counting on this production to finally do it for him. I have my doubts.
On the telephone, Crossley says, “Hey, listen, Jack, rehearsal’s canceled today. I’m making a couple of cuts. We’re running too long.”
“Oh, yeah? What are you cutting?”
“Nothing of yours. I’ll see you tomorrow. Three o’clock.”
I hang up, trying to ignore my usual paranoia at such moments. I turn my electric clock toward me and see that it’s five, which is impossible in either direction—the sun is high in the sky. It has to be a Department of Water and Power problem. The people in the San Fernando Valley lose power quite often. It gets too hot, or it floods, or fires sweep through driven by Santa Ana winds which, even if there’s nothing burning, can do plenty of damage, blowing down trees and high-tension lines and tossing huge truck trailers off roads. Sometimes the power sources seem to collapse for no reason at all.
It was windy last night. The Santa Anas have sucked the heat out of the desert and pushed it across the Valley and the LA basin to the sea. Tree branches are strewn across all the yards in our neighborhood and on the street in front of our house. I call up the automated time lady on the telephone (a decades-long sacrament) and reset my clock to 11:45, feeling depressed that so much of the day is already gone.
Looking out the front window, I hardly notice the pretty postal carrier as she drops my mail in the letterbox and moves off to the bungalow next door.
Sipping my coffee, I open an envelope that has no return address. Inside is a pawn ticket. I have no idea what it’s about, and for a fraction of a second, I feel an eruption of déjà vu—a volcano locked up inside me with no vent for its energy, no way for it to identify and explain itself to me. I look at the ticket again, grateful for something to take my mind off my nightmare and show business.
I dress, get into my sun-faded, pale green 1984 Jaguar convertible, and drive the Hollywood Freeway from the San Fernando Valley into the central megalopolitan ooze of Los Angeles. Exiting on Vermont, I make my way to Morgan’s Gifts on a seedy part of Oxford Street in the Wilshire District.
The inside of the pawn shop looks like it’s been put together by a Hollywood scenic designer, from the careful layer of dust on the long file of guitars to the shiny, age-worn wooden counter outside the cage and a bad acrylic painting (there she is again) of Marilyn Monroe visible through the front window.
I’ve never been able to fully account for what feels like my lifelong connection with Marilyn. Staring at this crude rendering now, I know it isn’t a sexual fixation I have on her. Okay, a little sexual, but mostly it’s romantic, something like the sentimental feelings I had toward the girl I gave a bottle of perfume to in the seventh grade. The girl was a beautiful, delicate waif with a sad smile and a look in her eyes that transfigured my awakening teenage passions into something between fascination and obsession. I picked her name in the class drawing for an exchange of Christmas gifts and bought her a bottle of Shalimar that cost me every penny I had. When she thanked me for it, I know I turned crimson; I was unable to say a word to her. It felt like a triumph anyway; I knew from the way she smiled at me that she understood the magnitude of my gift.
On the second of January, the day after Christmas vacation ended, my father died.
Rita sold the house and we moved from Jackson, Michigan, to Los Angeles where, if Rita had her way, I would one day become a movie star. I have no idea what caused her to hatch this notion. Madness is my guess.
But this waif, Marilyn, goes on and on in the back of my mind, always there, as needful of something in me as I am of whatever it is in her. It’s as if we have a subcutaneous interdependence, despite the fact that she departed the world almost thirty-five years ago. There’s something upsetting about the artlessness of this depiction of her. It’s as garish as any paint-by-number piece, but without the saving grace of guilelessness. This artist thought he knew what he was doing, but he had no clue.
The only thing to distinguish Morgan’s Gifts f
rom most other pawnbrokers is a tiny but stoutish woman with a hairline about as high as the first Queen Elizabeth’s after she’d had smallpox. She has a pinkish complexion and is fast asleep in a chintz-covered wing chair near the front window. A strip of midday sunlight creeps up her shins toward her pudgy knees and she breathes evenly through her mouth.
I gaze at her for several seconds and am startled when she abruptly opens her eyes and catches me at it. I look away quickly, as if I’m browsing the shop. By the time I glance back, her eyes are closed again.