“I won’t sleep at all tonight, Sam,” he said.
7
Brett Burgess is about my age, not quite as tall as me, a bit broader in the shoulders and the jaw. We met soon after I went out to L.A., he being another young hopeful in that first agent’s stable. (He gave Brett his name, too, just as he gave me “Sam Holt.” I have no idea who Brett was originally.) Brett and I auditioned for the same or similar parts, we worked together just once as World War II German soldiers in a miniseries, and Brett moved over to a different agent very shortly after I made my own switch.
The difference between us is Brett never got a series.
The other difference is Brett is an actor, always has been, has never had any other goal in life. In the early days he was very generous with his knowledge and experience, and I wasn’t overstating by much when I’d told Ross that Brett had taught me whatever I know about acting. Brett has never looked down on me for being just a slob who drifted into his profession and right away grabbed the brass ring, but if anybody had the right to take that attitude toward me, it would certainly be Brett.
That’s why Ross’s noblesse oblige crack had stung, as he’d known it would. I always feel a little guilty toward Brett and at the same time — silly though it may sound — a little envious. It’s true I made the money, got the fame, had what in anybody’s lexicon has to be called success, but Brett is working. He’s a working actor, he gets movie roles, TV roles, small parts in big plays and big parts in small plays, he’s constantly stretching his muscles and practicing his craft, while what am I doing? Stitching back and forth in my lap pool.
Brett was opening that night in an off-Broadway theater near Sheridan Square, in an imported (and translated) Brazilian play called The Two Colonels. He was the second lead, the bad colonel. Our dinner date was for six-thirty at Vitto Impero, an easy walk over to the West Village. Anita Imperato, who has run Vitto Impero ever since she threw her gambling-man husband out seven years ago, had agreed to become a customer in her own joint for tonight and join us at our feast. “Don’t talk about the play,” she said as we all took our places at the round corner table in the back, where a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a big bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water already awaited us. “I’ll want to see it for myself.”
“You coming tonight?” Brett asked her as I opened the San Pellegrino and filled our water glasses.
“No, let’s see what the critics say.” Before anybody could respond to this flat-out contradiction, she signaled for Marcie the waitress and told us, “Angelo says the red snapper is terrific tonight.”
Brett said, “What’s tonight’s pasta?”
Briskly shaking her head, Anita said, “Something with strawberries.”
“In that case,” Brett told the waiting Marcie, poised with her pad and pencil, “I’ll have the tortellini.” Brett believes in a carbohydrate charge before high-tension experiences like an opening night.
I had the red snapper, since that was what Angelo the chef liked at the moment, and Anita had a carpaccio appetizer and a salad, nothing more. She’s a tall and slender woman, Anita, almost bony, and I think she keeps her shape because she’s around food too much, and feels contempt for it. She’s very good-looking, but doesn’t care about that, and therefore doesn’t dress or make herself up to enhance her looks, and so it’s easy not to notice. Her face is a long oval, with features that are somehow both strong and delicate; a small but sharp nose, large acute brown eyes, and long very black hair falling in thick waves around her head.
Anita and I have had a thing together off and on over the years, but she refuses to take it seriously, so it’s never developed into much. In the first place, she thinks it’s ridiculous for the owner of a small-time Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to be hooked up with a TV celebrity, and in the second place, she’s one year older than I am, which is an absurd thing to care about, but she does. Also, she knows I have a girlfriend named Bly Quinn out on the Coast, though they’ve never met. “I’ll just be your New York girl,” Anita says with that crooked grin I like so much. “I’ll just be here to see you don’t lose your East Coast edge.” And she gives me a kidney punch with her hard little sharp-knuckled fist.
Since Anita had started the meal by banning discussion of the play — a smart and thoughtful move on her part, I later realized — we talked instead about other things. Brett had changed New York agents again, The Two Colonels being the first fruit of the change, so we discussed that. Brett’s girlfriend, Maria, who would join us at the theater and I would sit with during the show, was thinking of taking a job with a travel magazine, which would put her out of the country a lot — she was a photographer, had been taking pictures of food for Gourmet the last three years and was tiring of it — and this prospect of a constantly departing Maria was making Brett think about proposing marriage, so we worried that bone for a while, until Anita said, “Brett, is it your idea if she marries you, she’ll give up her job?”
“Well — that job, I guess.” He grinned. “She could still work, believe me, particularly if she wants to go on eating.”
Anita shook her head. “Marry her to keep her home,” she said. “No wonder I hate men.”
“If that’s the only reason I want to marry her,” Brett said, “forget it.” He has a nice easy self-deprecating grin and he leans his head forward a bit from his big shoulders, like a very amiable bear. Most of the time he’s cast as a heavy — like the bad colonel in tonight’s play — but twice I’ve seen him do commercials that brought out that other side of him, and I wish he could get to use it more. In one of the commercials he was teaching a boy how to put a lure on a fishing line, and in the other he was a friendly truck driver explaining motor oil to a kid in a jalopy.
Maybe one of the reasons Brett hasn’t made it is that he’s too nice to be a major heavy and too bull-like to be a major hero. Too bad, if true.
Anyway, I had walked over to Abingdon Square for dinner, and now Brett and I walked back east to the theater, where Maria was waiting for us out on the sidewalk. Brett kissed her and grinned at me, we both suggested he break his leg, and he went away to his dressing room while Maria and I had coffee in a place nearby. I told Maria, a skinny bubbly bouncy black-haired girl, that I’d heard about this new job possibility with the travel magazine, and she talked about it, but not with what seemed like particular enthusiasm. After a while I began to get the idea she had only considered the job as a ploy to get Brett to quit stalling around and propose. I wondered what Anita would make of that.
A few other people I knew were at the opening, including Bill Ackerson, Dr. William Ackerson, my East Coast doctor and Brett’s, a show-biz buff who keeps the Hollywood Reporter and both Varietys in his waiting room. He always dates one or another of his young and beautiful patients; tonight’s was a smiling blond singer apparently named Bunny. Assembling, we all milled about a bit — at that point, you never know if you’re at a wedding or a wake — and then we went in to see the show.
The Two Colonels was intellectual-dumb, so concerned with its meaning and its political symbols that it pretty well left out character entirely and twisted its plot around to look like a wrought-iron fence. Afterward, we told Brett how terrific the play was and how wonderful he was in it — he actually had invested his role with more individuality and interest than had been written into it — and congratulated the rest of the cast and the director.