“So they say.” He chewed thoughtfully on his chocolate croissant. “They say they wrote the show for me, and they can’t help that the network is hot for Selene. They talked pretty big, when they were trying to get me for this. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have entertained some of the other offers I had. At least I wouldn’t have to live here. Sorry. No offense.”
It happened to be one of Tess’s least favorite phrases, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too bit of rhetoric that demanded the listener forgive the speaker for saying something impossibly rude.
“If the show goes,” Tess said, “you’ll be here quite a bit.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And in winter yet. I don’t do winter.”
“It’s relatively mild.”
“No such thing to someone like me, who grew up in Florida and has lived in California since age sixteen.”
“How did you get into acting?” She knew, of course. She could recite much of Johnny Tampa’s biography from memory. But she was trying to get into a groove with him, find an innocuous topic that they both could enjoy, and she figured that Johnny Tampa was one of Johnny Tampa’s favorite subjects.
“Mickey Mouse Club,” he said.
“So you were in the Mickey Mouse Club and then you went out to California to do” – she pretended to grope for the name of his first show – “High School Confidential.”
“I went out to California with nothing promised to me. But my mom believed in me, and she agreed to go out for a year, see what I could get started. The year was almost up when I landed the featured part on High School Confidential, then got the lead in The Boom Boom Room. And the rest is history.”
Of a sort, Tess thought. If one had very low standards for what constituted history. “But you’ve been taking some… time off, as of late?”
He had moved on from the chocolate croissant to a Napoleon. It was hard for Tess not to wonder if he was a bulimic, albeit one who had mastered the binge without learning how to purge. Tess hadn’t eaten this much even in her competitive rowing days. Or, come to think of it, her own bulimic teens.
“You’re very polite,” he said. “Everybody knows what happened to me. I left television to make movies, and not a single one of them hit. It wasn’t my fault – in every case, I could show you what rotten luck we had, none of it connected to me – but you get only so many chances. That is, if you were a star on television, you only get so many chances. Meg Ryan was on a soap. Julianne Moore, too. Hilary Swank did a bit part on my show. But they weren’t well known when they started making movies. I wonder if they have any juice here. I would love a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”
He looked around with the expectation of someone who usually had a person at his beck and call, but then life on set was like that, in Tess’s limited exposure to it. For the leads, it was a magical world of enabling elves. Makeup people appeared to touch up the actors’ faces, food kept arriving, transportation was arranged. The theory seemed to be that the actors shouldn’t expend any energy on activities beyond their performances.
“What do you do with your downtime? Here in Baltimore, I mean.”
“Read, mainly. I like science fiction.” He sounded a little defensive, but Tess was charmed. In most actor interviews she had read, the oh-so-serious thespians were always claiming to be reading Faulkner or Pynchon, or the cool book of the moment. She never believed those actors, but she had a hunch Johnny Tampa was telling the truth.
“Have you made any friends on set?”
“I like the guys in the present-day scenes – but I’m not with them that much. Actually, it’s not a bad thing for my character – I’m isolated, the way he is, cut off from old friends and family, in a strange place. It’s good for my character,” he said, making the point a second time, as if trying to convince Tess – and himself. Tess couldn’t help noticing, however, that he omitted any mention of Selene, with whom he had the bulk of his scenes.
“Do the cast and crew interact much? Socially, I mean.”
He looked wary. “Some. There was a party when we came back this summer, after shooting the pilot in the spring. Sometimes, on a Friday night, there will be something impromptu. But the crew works too hard to socialize much, and most of the cast is pretty settled. Plus, they’re East Coast-based, mostly from New York, and they go running home the first chance they get.”
On a personal level, Tess liked him for not taking her up on the opportunity to gossip about Selene. But it wasn’t helping her job at all. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone – or one little lie.
“Selene suggested to me that you had something going with Greer.”
His eyebrows shot up – no Botox in that forehead. “Something going with… that’s stupid. Why would Selene say that? Greer was engaged. And fifteen years younger than I am.”
More like twenty, Tess thought.
“But she knew something about the steel industry. Said her old man had worked in it, that she could help me fill in some things about what it was like.”
“That was-” Tess had been on the verge of saying, That was Alicia’s father, Greer’s father was a teamster. But she didn’t want to stop Johnny, now that he was beginning to open up. “That was nice of her. Did you learn about her family and come to her, or did she volunteer to help you?”
“It just came up one day, during the lunch break. She began bringing me books, even went to the library and printed out some newspaper articles on Beth Steel.” Tess resented the local shorthand for Bethlehem Steel in Johnny’s mouth. “She helped me a lot. Flip and Ben – look, no knock on them, they’re great writers, and they’ve given me an amazing opportunity – but all they know is Hollywood, and the kind of jobs people have there. They don’t know what other people do most of the day, if they don’t do it on a movie set. Oh, they think they do. They think that lawyers spend all their time in court making big speeches. They think doctors rush from emergency to emergency, in between banging nurses in the supply closet, and that reporters run around thrusting microphones in people’s faces.”
He had a point. True, every job needed to be dramatized in a film or a television show, but the real nature of work was something missing in much of what Tess watched, which had always puzzled her. She was fascinated by what other people did, how they spent their days. This may have been the consequence of an adult life spent as a professional observer – first as a reporter, now as an investigator.
Now that Johnny had gotten going, he was hard to stop. “I needed to know what this guy did with his days. Mann is like Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz. It’s not logical for him to want to go back to modern-day Baltimore – his industry is dying, there’s enormous pressure on his family, his job is drudgery. But it’s home, it’s what he knows, and not even Betsy Patterson, the beautiful belle of nineteenth-century Baltimore, is reason enough to stay.” He finished off his orange juice. “It was better. When they said good-bye in episode eight. And I’m not saying that just because they’re building up Selene’s part. That’s the show I signed up to make. Now that they’re dicking with it-”
Two women with strollers – hip moms, in stylish clothes and fresh makeup, their children tricked out like the accessories they were – had stopped on the sidewalk outside Bonaparte Bread and were peering inside the restaurant, their attention obviously focused on Johnny Tampa. They pointed at him, laughing and nodding, as if the plate glass that separated them was just another television screen, as if he couldn’t see them. He appeared – not oblivious, exactly, but resigned to such gawking.
“So Greer helped you, out of the goodness of her heart. And was there anything Greer wanted from you?”