Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (4 page)

“You’re a
warrior, not a lover?”

Mick
smiled.
 
“That’s right.”

“That’s
bullshit,” Barry said bluntly.

Very few men
alive would speak to Mick Sinatra that way.
 
Even Mick was, at first, taken aback.
 
He sat there with that broodiness, that sense of inward rage that
sometimes scared Barry.
 
And he had a
right to be scared.
 
Mick was at that
very moment contemplating if he should take Barry’s face and rearrange it.
 
Who the fuck was he to talk to him that
way?
 
But it was Barry.
 
He was older than Mick, wiser than Mick, his
insult came from a good place.
 
Mick let
it slide.
 
“Okay.”

“You can get
yourself a bed action woman any day of the week,” Barry went on.
 
“Right now, behind those very curtains on
that stage, are nothing but bed action females who’ll give their right arms to
be with you.
 
You know them.
 
That’s all you date.
 
But a real lady that can make you laugh?”

“Priceless?”

“Priceless,
Micky!
 
Priceless!”
 
Then Barry exhaled.
 
“Come to dinner tomorrow night.
 
We worry about you.”

Mick shook
his head.
 
“I can’t tomorrow night.”

“Then
when?
 
If not now, when?”

Mick thought
about this.
 
He knew he needed a
break.
 
He sometimes felt as if his body,
his very soul, was breaking down.
 
All he
did was work and worry.
 
“I’ll be back in
town by the end of the month.
 
We’ll get
together then,” he said.

Barry
smiled.
 
“You promise?”

“Get the
fuck out of here,” Mick said with a smile of his own.
 
“I’ll show you promise,” he added.
 
“My word is my promise.”

“I’ll tell
Agnes,” Barry said.

“And tell
her I will not stay if she even thinks about setting me up.”

Barry
smiled. “Deal.”

Enough of
that, Mick thought.
 
“So what’s
shaking?
 
What kind of play is this
supposed to be?”

“A
musical.
 
A rip off of
West Side Story
. It’s called
South Side Story
.”
 

Mick
laughed.

“I know,”
Barry said.
 
“We had ideas in the old
days.
 
Now we have revivals and rip
offs.”

“Have I
walked into the casting call?”

“You have.”

“For?”

“The chorus
line.
 
An all-female chorus line.
 
But they have got to be top notch.
 
They’re the backbone of this play.
 
I’ve got the leads already cast, thank
God.
 
The male and female.”

“Anybody I
would know?”

“They aren’t
slouches in the business, that’s for sure.
 
But I doubt if you would know’em.”

The stage
manager came over and sat beside Barry and Mick.

“How many?”
Barry asked him.

“Fifty-two.”

“Circuit
crew?”

“Most of
them, yeah.”

“Damn,”
Barry said.
 
“I wanted some fresh faces.”

“What’s a
circuit crew?” Mick asked.

“Known bit
players around town,” Barry answered.
 
“They show up for most auditions.
 
Some get a part here and there.
 
Just enough to keep them hungry for more.
 
The proverbial struggling actress.”

“Ah.”

“What most people
don’t know, however,” Barry said, “is that the bit players are the life blood
of our profession.
 
It’s a hardship for
them, but they keep the theater district humming.
 
They’ll never be stars, but when you need a
pro, somebody who knows her way around a stage, they’re the ones to call.”
 
Barry looked at his manager.
 
“They’re ready?” he asked.

“They’re
ready.”

Barry rubbed
his hands together.
 
“Then let’s get this
show on the road.”
 

The stage
manager smiled, then nodded at his assistant.

“Curtains!”
the assistant yelled, and the curtain rose on a stage overcrowded with pretty,
shapely ladies.

Mick leaned
back.
 
He had planned to poke his head
in, give his regards to Barry, and keep it moving.
 
He wasn’t in New York for the hell of it. He
had things to do.
 
But a stage bursting
at the seams with pretty ladies in leotards?
 
He decided to stick around.

It began the
way Mick suspected most auditions began. Girls dancing and prancing in the full
group, then in smaller groups, then in twosomes.
 
But it was during this part of the audition,
the twosomes, where one of the twosomes stood out to Mick.

It wasn’t
that the two ladies were great dancers.
 
Neither one of them were great.
 
The blonde was reasonably good, she had some strut in her stuff, but the
black girl was just okay.
 
But she was
the one that caught his attention.
 
She
knew the routine better than her partner, she was excellent technically, but
her execution sucked.
 
She moved as if
she was trying to remember the next dance step, as if she was trying to get it
technically right, but she didn’t seem to have that natural feel for what she
was doing the way her partner did.
 
And
there was no rhythm to her movements, just movements, which couldn’t be good
for a dancer.

So it wasn’t
the dancing that got his attention.
 
It
was
her
.
 
It was her big brown eyes that looked soft
and hard, cheerful and sad, all at the same time.
 
Mick crossed his legs and stared at her.
 
Because her eyes told stories that
contradicted each other.
 
It was as if
she was brave and then scared, and then brave all over again.
  
She danced as if she was teetering on the
brink of something that could be akin to magic, or total disaster.
 
He couldn’t figure out which.
 
But it was a sight to see.
 
He’d heard about the desperation of these
show business wannabes every time he was in New York or L.A., but he’d never
seen it so starkly.

But it
wasn’t that the dancer was desperate for attention, or even success as the
world would define it.
 
Mick didn’t see
it as that kind of desperation.
 
It was
the kind he saw when he was a kid at the carnival.
 
The animals would be caged and on
display.
 
But you could see the anguish
in their eyes.
 
They didn’t want to be
there.
 
They wanted to roam free, to
finally be who they were meant to be, but they couldn’t figure out how to break
the chains.
 
Because they were desperate
too.
 
Like the dancer he couldn’t stop
watching, they were desperate to live.
 
They wanted to know what uncluttered, unburdened living was all
about.
 
Mick knew that kind of desperation.
 
He felt it, he
became
it, every day that he woke up.

He leaned
against Barry.
 
“Who is that?” he asked
him in a lowered voice.

Barry leaned
against Mick.
 
“Which one?
 
The blonde?”

“The other
one.”

“The black
girl?
 
That’s Rosalind.
 
Roz Graham.
 
Been on the circuit for years.”

“No
success?”

“She had
some moderate success some years back. I even hired her a time or two when I
was directing off-Broadway.
 
But like
most success around here, hers didn’t translate long term either.”

“No big hits
on her resume?”

“No,” Barry
said.
 
“But it doesn’t take a big
hit.
 
Getting parts, no matter how small,
is usually enough of a taste to keep them itching for more.”

“Think she’s
good enough for your play?”

Barry shook
his head.
 
“Not from what I’m seeing
now.
 
She’s not a strong enough dancer
for what I’m going to need them to do.
 
And she’s got some years on her now.
 
She’s not the fresh face twenty-something kid she used to be.
 
Which is another strike against her.
 
My chorus girls need to be girls, not some
dame pushing thirty-three.”

Mick leaned
away from Barry.
 
And continued to watch
Roz.
 
Because he knew that was part of
the desperation too.
 
The years were
closing in.
 
Time was running out.
 
That one big break she thought was going to
set her career on fire was growing dimmer with each passing day.
 
Mick recognized something in her.
 
He recognized her quiet scream.

Up on stage,
as she twirled and lifted and high-kicked, Roz noticed him too.
 
How could she not?
 
The lights were up in the entire theater and,
of all the well-dressed, well-groomed men sitting in the audience, he stood
out.
 
Mainly because she’d never seen him
in the many years she’d been auditioning around the horn.
 
But also because of him. Of the image he
projected.
 
From his thick swath of dark brown
hair pushed back from a face so symmetrical and strong that calling him good
looking didn’t quite capture it, to his green eyes that dazzled even from where
she stood, he stood out.
 
Not that he was
some perfect looking angel to her.
 
He
wasn’t.
 
One of his eyes appeared to be
lazy as hell, and he had that Kirk Douglas-Cary Grant cleft in his chin thing
going on that she never found all that attractive.
 
But whatever animal magnetism was, and
whatever sensuality was: he was it.
 
He
was a freaking contrail of sex sitting there, she thought.

He was also
the only man in the theater who seemed to be assessing, not just her body, but
her
.
 
He was actually looking at
her
.
 
It was unnerving, given that she was trying
to perform, but it was pleasing at the same time.

But just as
she was getting into her full groove, just as she thought she and Betsy were
clicking with their well-rehearsed routine, Barry brought down the hammer.
 
Broadway producers used various terms to get
their point across, but two were very familiar to Roz:
Wait
or
Next
.
 
Wait
was good.
 
That meant they wanted you to
stick around.
 
You still stood a chance
to get the gig.
 
Next
was the death knell.
 
They wanted you to get lost.
 
Your
chances were up.

When Barry
yelled “
Next,”
even before their
performance was over, Roz and Betsy and their collective hearts sank.
 
They both had so much hope riding on this
chance that it hurt to the core when they were rejected.
 
But they were consummate professionals.
 
They knew, if they ever wanted to be a part
of another casting call, they could not delay.
 
They thanked the producers, thanked the director, and got the hell off
his stage.

Backstage,
they made their way to the dressing room without conversation.
 
Rejection had a way of killing good
will.
 
They walked pass the
Wait
girls who still had that gleam in
their eyes, and the
Next
girls like
them, who looked stunned and dazed that their considerable talent had been
judged, once again, to not be good enough.
 
Some were already dressed and were leaving the theater.
 
Others just hung around.
 
The devastation on their faces was as alive
as their heartbeats.

Roz wasn’t
devastated.
 
She’d been in the business
too long to let one audition get her down.
 
But she was greatly disappointed.
 
She needed this gig, not for the money or even the exposure, but for the
validation.
 
It had been nearly a year
since she’d received a thumbs up on any gig anywhere.
 
A year.
 
Even off-off Broadway productions were turning her down.
 
It was beginning to feel as if the ship had
sailed, and she had already missed the boat.