Actress: Unauthorized Memoirs Ch. 01

Who was this woman anyway? Just some frustrated secretary taking out her anger on women younger and more capable than she was because she ended up being a stupid secretary and not the famous actress she wanted to be? It was obvious that she was on some power trip because she had no real clout in the entertainment industry. It was obvious that she got off on abusing her low-level authority by debasing someone who was obviously a threat to who she thought she was.

But all the rationalizing of the situation in my head was useless. The fact was that she did have power over me and if I did not succumb to her demands, I would not get the audition I knew I truly deserved.

Convincing her, though, that I was sincere was another thing. But I was sincere. Getting the audition and getting the part was everything to me. And, deep down, I really would do anything I had to do to make it.

And then it started to click. She understood those facts.

"So?" she asked calmly, standing up and walking to the front of her desk. She crossed her arms as she rested her body against the edge of the metal surface and stared at me. "Convince me of your desire and understanding of proper behavior."

I made sure to lock eyes with her before I took a deep breath and began to speak.

"I apologize for my behavior in the parking lot. I have no issues with any necessary requests made by The Agency. I understand it is completely a privilege to be here and I would beg you to believe my sincerity in trusting me to know when to open my mouth and when to keep it shut."

While I was practically beaming with pride over my eloquent delivery, she was suspicious still. She didn't take her eyes off me as she approached me once again, bringing her body to within inches of mine and staring me up and down as she had before.

"So Miss Jones has no issues with being told what to do and not protesting any demands now or at a later date?"

"No, I do not," I replied promptly without turning my eyes from hers. I was determined to maintain my composure, no matter what.

A few seconds passed before she spoke again.

"The Agency," she began sternly, "has a strict policy forbidding the wearing of any underwear at its auditions. Kindly remove your panties and hand them to me."

"What?" I replied totally shocked, not sure if I had heard her right. She just glared at me and raised her eyebrows to make clear that she had said what I thought she said. My heart jumped. "This bitch is crazy," I thought.

My mind reeled in outrage at what she had just said to me. She knew it, too, but I didn't let my eyes drift away from her cold stare nor would I let her think that any hesitation on my part meant I was not for real. I knew she was power tripping on me but I still can't believe I let myself get caught up in the moment and did what I did.

I proceeded to slide my hands under my dress and pulled my white panties to the floor, slipping them off each leg and handing them to her. She took them in her hand and went back to her desk. She laid them on the top of my headshot then sat down and started writing something. She picked up the phone while I waited nervously.

"Yes, this is the front desk. I have a Madison Ava Jones here that I am sending up." There were series of pauses while she spoke. "Yes, she has been prepped. I noted some things on her file. Yes, she has."

She hung up the phone, finished scribbling more notes, then looked up. "There are three rules for the audition. Failure to follow all of them at any time will result in your dismissal. Rule one. No talking to any other actresses. Rule two. You will stand and wait until you are called. Rule three. You look down when speaking with anyone from The Agency. Understood?"

"Yes."

"Repeat back to me."

I repeated back the rules to her verbatim, wanting more than anything to just escape from her office. She sat back down and took my panties from on top of her desk. I heard a harsh mechanical noise and saw that she had dropped them in the paper shredder.

"Take your headshot and proceed to the third floor," she said without looking up. "They will give you further instructions there." I hesitated for a second. She looked up and then motioned with her eyes at my headshot. "Goodbye."

I cautiously reached over and slipped my headshot from her desk then headed out.

"Good luck," she called to me warmly.

"Thank you."

A wave of relief radiated through my body as I left her office and headed to the elevator. Never in my wildest imagination would I have ever thought I would have to be subjected to such bureaucratic humiliation simply to attend an audition.

I just hoped that I would never have to see that woman again and that I could now focus my mind on my dramatic performance. I took several deep breathes. I reminded myself that I belonged here and wasn't going to let anyone stand in my way, especially some unhappy slut of a secretary who was too stupid to understand the difference between some ordinary girl off the streets and a properly trained actress.

The elevator doors opened to the third floor and I exited to an eerie silence. But as soon as I turned the corner, I was astonished to find the hallway absolutely jammed with bodies as far down the corridor as I could see. It was so deeply filled with other actresses that it would have been impossible simply to walk through to the other side without forcing bodies apart.

"Madison Jones?" asked a man at the front of the mass of bodies, dressed impeccably in black dress pants and a white Oxford shirt.

"Yes."

"Take a number and wait to be called," he instructed me pointing to a red ticket dispenser against the wall that looked like it had been taken from an old butcher's shop. I looked back at him to show that I understood and an expression of fury spread across his face.

He spoke to me in a slow, scolding tone. "Do. Not. Look. At. Me. Again."

I immediately looked down and heard the sound of snickering laughter in the hallway. I could feel the wall of stares from the other girls. I pulled a white-colored paper number from the dispenser. Number 269. I looked up at the electronic display on the wall. Number 12. I took a place against the wall and prepared for the long wait.

The other young women who were there were of every type imaginable, or at least every type imaginable for a casting call. Blond, brown and red-haired. Innocent blue-eyed white girls. Dark-skinned exotic and ethnic women. Sweet Midwestern girls. Primped home-grown California girls. East Coast-bred and uptight. Southern debutantes. Girls dressed like trailer trash. Girls in perfect Vogue attire. Skinny anorexic bodies. Round buxom bodies. White girls, black girls, Asian girls, Latinas and ethnic mutts all clamoring to stand upright and proper, to look the part of the girl who has already gotten the part.

Despite the fact that there must have been a much larger room in the building to hold an audition, all the waiting actresses were packed into this slim hallway, body upon body, as if they were at a concert and each one was ready to fill the least bit of empty space that might open closer to the stage.

There was an air of anxiety and fear and expectation, not only for the audition, but because of the atmosphere that seemed to be intentionally created. Each girl seemed to be slightly fearful of looking at anyone else for too long and each one seemed to see herself as set apart from the rest.

And the thought that suddenly occurred to me was this. Was I the only one that just went through the strange screening process? Was every girl here sent to a secretary, chastised, had her panties removed and was now standing here in the same confused, bare-assed state that I was in?

The rules I was given now made sense in some perverse way. But why the humiliating preparation? I looked around and every single female there seemed to have that look of being debased. It was like there was a collective understanding that every other girl there knew she had been stripped of her underwear and told not to talk but still proceeded to wait for the chance to audition.

At the same time, though, they seemed to be fine with it or even understood that this was what was necessary to make it. They might even have believed that they deserved to be treated like this in some way. I told myself I must just be imagining all this and I was letting the fears get the best of me.

But I don't think a single female there was as conflicted as I was. I knew that other girls were dumb enough to be harassed or exploited because they were afraid to say something or just didn't want not to be liked. But I was not one of them.

I spoke my mind and did what I wanted. I was raised to be purely independent, sent to the best schools and singled out as someone special that everyone just knew would grow up to be someone. I grew up watching TV every day with my friends and we all understood that what mattered in life, what every girl wants to be when they grew up, was someone everyone recognized on television and in movies. Every other job felt only half-real compared to being famous.

It was still early in the day but I didn't know what I was going to do if I didn't get out of there on time to get to my job waiting tables. My bank account was below zero and I was depending on my tips to make it through the week. But as the morning passed and the other actresses slowly trickled into the next room, it seemed like there was very little possibility of going anywhere.

At least a dozen of the other actresses had been removed for talking to each other already or for trying to ask a question to one of the several men working for The Agency. At first the whole thing seemed absolutely ridiculous but I started to notice that most of the girls being removed not only broke the rules, they didn't really belong there at all. They were either not attractive enough or you could tell they had only mediocre talent or they simply were not willing to make the sacrifices you had to make.

It was 2:45 when my name was called out. I hadn't eaten a thing since eight in the morning and had been standing there waiting for nearly five hours.

"Madison Jones!"

"Yes," I said, plying my way through the still dense crowd of waiting actresses to the man who called my name at the end of the hallway. Several women had been dismissed for failing to look down when they stood in front of the man.

Despite the fact that I was severely fatigued and hungry, I remembered to approach him with eyes cast downward, as insanely as it seemed to do, and take the script from which I was to read. I was ushered through a door into a waiting area cordoned on all sides by black curtains, with a chair and a single light in the center. There was another man there.

"You have three minutes to learn your lines and then the audition will begin."

"Ok," I said sitting down to study the lines. There were nearly two full pages of lines and I had no idea how I would remember anything at this point. I tried to memorize the first few lines but by the time I got to the fourth line, I hadn't the slightest idea what I had just read.

I made another attempt to get through the whole thing just so I could know what it was about but my head was a jumbled mess and my stomach was grinding in hunger.

"Madison Jones!" a man bellowed on the other side of the black curtain.

I hurried through the slit in the curtain, which opened up to reveal an enormous high-ceilinged room with a large, flat wooden stage on one end and a long, rectangular metal table on the far end with a group of five people sitting there waiting.

The table was so far away from the stage that I could barely tell what anyone sitting there looked like. Midway between the table and performance area of the stage were bright film lights set high on the top of metal tripods, pointed unanimously at the center of the stage. There was a camera positioned at the edge of the stage and behind the stage, a massive movie screen on which the image from the camera was projected.

I tried to shield the bright glare of the lights with my hand so I could get a better view of the individuals at the table, but I was only able to catch glimpses of their faces and bodies. I could see that there were four men and one woman and that they were all dressed in blue and black suits.

I paced over to the center of the stage and watched the image of myself come into view twenty feet wide on the screen.

"Hello Miss Jones."

"Hello."

"We understand you had some problems arriving here."

"No, no problems," I said confidently.

"Very well then. State your full name for the camera."

"Madison Ava Jones."

"Age, height and weight."

"22, five foot six, 128 pounds."

"Schooling and training?"

"Wellington Day Prep, Yale Drama, 6 years at Nina Karlvoksky's acting school."

"Very well then. Begin."

I looked down at the script to read the first line as I had already forgotten it. I looked back up and tried to deliver the line that was typed on the page.

"The dream is always the same," I stuttered. It came out flat and there seemed to be not a single sound in the room except for the muttering of the line and my heavy, nervous breathing after I spoke. I turned to see myself shifting nervously on the giant screen. I could see that I looked as vulnerable and half-naked as I felt.

"Again Madison."

I took a deep breath and repeated the line with more energy. "The dream is always the same."

"Again Madison."

I repeated the line again.

"Again."

I repeated the line as asked and then was just as quickly asked to repeat it over and over and over. Each time that I was about to proceed to the next line, I was immediately cut off and commanded to repeat the first line.

I lost count of how many times I was asked to repeat it and was afraid to protest or inquire if they wanted me to say anything else. I tried once to say the line in a different way but was instantly scolded.

"If we wanted you to do it differently, we'd say so," the woman said.

"Ok, I'm sorry."

"Again."

I continued to repeat the line each time they asked until they finally stopped.

"Thank you. We'll be in touch if we're interested. Please exit to your left. Have a good day."

I stood there for a moment not having any idea what that meant. I hesitated while I thought of something to say and then exited as told.

It was only when I was back in my car that I was able to go through what had just happened in my head and try to figure out if the audition had gone well. I was already late for work, though, and the whole morning seemed to be a blur anyway.

My boss simply rolled his eyes when I walked in an hour late. I went to the back to change clothes and suddenly remembered I had been stripped of my underwear. I didn't have any other pair to put on. I changed into the short skirt and black top I had in my car and eased myself back into the grind of waiting tables, grabbing bits of food from the kitchen when I could in order to feed my hunger.

Even after all the waiting and humiliation I had gone through, compared to the monotony of serving food to strangers, I was already missing being part of the world from which I had just come.

I knew that people in the business could be demanding and extreme in their personalities, but it was something with which I had been prepared to deal. And after all the months and months of working as a grunt in the business, spending all my time serving hamburgers and fries to obnoxious tourists at the diner where I worked, I was really ready to do anything to make it. I'm not sure exactly when the text came into my phone but I only noticed it just as I was leaving work.

"Call back for today's audition. 10pm tonight. The Agency Building. Room 503."

It was already nine o'clock and I went home immediately to change. After all the anxiety of thinking that I had failed in my one and only chance to be noticed by The Agency, I realized that it was all just catastrophic thinking. I'm not sure why I even doubted myself. Of course I was going to get a call back.

I went home and changed into a light blue Betsey Johnson summer dress with a matching ribbon that tied just below my breasts and a white g-string underneath. I refreshed my makeup, added a touch of pink lipstick and straightened my hair as much as I could.

The Agency Building was in the center of Culver City, but at this time in the evening, only a handful of commuters were on the roads going in that direction. It never really occurred to me why the call back was in the evening and why it was so immediate but I really wasn't in any position to question it.

I parked in the underground lot and hurried to the fifth floor. The secretary had already left for the day and there didn't seem to be anyone else working in the rows and rows of gray cubicles nor in the executive offices bordering the edge of the floor. I found room 503. The door was closed and there didn't seem to be anyone else around. I knocked and a voice immediately told me to come in.

A man was sitting at his desk and talking on the phone. He motioned for me to take a seat in the Eames-style leather office chair opposite his desk. He continued to talk on the phone for a few minutes. I tried not to listen in and he eventually finished the call.

"Michael Fullman," he said curtly, reaching over to shake my hand.

"Pleased to meet you," I said.

He simply nodded back coldly. "So Madison, how do you think the audition went today?"

"I think it went well."

"Do you?" he responded guardedly.

He leaned back in his seat and into the light from the lone lamp beside his desk. It occurred to me that he was one of the men at the long table at the audition.

He was in his early thirties, with perfectly combed brown hair and brown eyes. He was dressed in a very expensive and conservative white Oxford dress shirt with a solid navy blue tie. He stared straight at me with hardly a blink. His eyes were intense and were disengaging me from my own thoughts.

"Madison, tell me what you think makes a great actress," he said bluntly.

"Well," I said trying to clear my thoughts and sound succinct, "I believe a great actress is many things. What I think is most important is that she inhabits the role she is playing, that she does the research and preparation to be ready for her role, that...well I was taught over many years all the nuances of performance and how to act for the camera and how in all great movies the viewer forgets he is watching an actress and...."

"Madison," he said, cutting me off.

"Yes?"

He stood up and walked around to the edge of his desk, resting himself against it so there were only a couple feet between the two of us. He never stopped with his intense stare he had locked on me. Looking up at him now made me a little fearful but at the same time feel protected by his calmness.

"The only thing that matters in this business is obedience. Obedience. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand. It's important to follow the needs of the film and I think I've been trained over many years in school..."

"Madison," he cut me off again. "You are not listening. I don't care about your training or beliefs. I don't care about your opinions. The only thing that matters is that you do as you are told and that you are obedient. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I think."

"First of all, you did not get the part today."

I sank back at his blunt notice.

"You are nowhere close to the level of obedience and training The Agency demands," he went on. "Most everything you have learned about movies in school and up to this point is fiction. The only thing that matters is that you speak when and how you are told and that you move when and how you are told. There is no...no creative performance," he went on motioning with his hand in the air.