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In an essay that ran in the Los Angeles Review, novelist Tara Ison writes about her six-month relationship with an actor who has worked enough to be familiar — and be self-centered — but who isn't starry enough that most people instantly know his name. The attraction of the piece for me is not in the interpersonal insights, though they should be illuminating for anyone thinking of getting involved with an actor. I liked her descriptions of the complicated relationship between longtime Angelenos and Hollywood. It's on her website. Excerpts:
They’re everywhere, these relatively famous people. This is Los Angeles. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them here. Just going about their lives. They all have kids, and mortgages, anxiety over where the next job is coming from, a Suburu that needs the oil changed. The dry cleaning needs to be picked up, and the prescription for a child’s asthma. The dog has to get to the vet for shots or getting fixed. The living room couch is fifteen years old, and looks it. They need to read that script before bed, they need to throw in a load of laundry before they take off for a day shoot in Lancaster, then remember to swing by the grocery store on the way home for milk. There’s no ranch in Montana to escape to. There’s no small Southern town purchased for a homey pied a terre. They don’t have assistants. There’s no entourage...I grew up here, and I don’t know another LA native who didn’t, in high school English class, sit next to a some-day cast member from that sitcom on NBC, who didn’t flip burgers next to a now-hot action star, who didn’t go out a couple of times with the guy on that cable show that earns raves but no one watches, who hasn’t worked out next to the girl who played the leading guy’s girlfriend for two seasons on an Aaron Spelling show, who hasn’t maneuvered their cart around America’s latest Sweetheart actress buying a log of goat cheese. We grew up with movie stars, we see them all the time.
We’re comfortable on the periphery of orbits. And despite movie stars’ complaints of the difficulties of a famous face, of privacy constantly invaded, of a relentlessly public and spotlighted life – How dreary, to be somebody! – we don’t really bother Tom Cruise when he’s out to dinner, do we? We’re not going to annoy Denzel Washington when he’s out getting ice cream with his kids. We might elbow the friends we’re with to point him out, or we’ll call a friend when we get home: Hey, guess who I spotted reading Popular Mechanics at Borders? but we just as often might forget....None of the women I know were raised to bask in the reflected gleam of our mates; we’re supposed to shine all on our own. And this is Los Angeles; the damn starshine is everywhere, and I’m too cool to be a sunstruck fan. But How’s the movie star? my relatives ask, delighted with me, and I feel that I have, in fact, achieved something, that some liquid glow has spilled on me. Friends of mine like to refer to him by the names of his more-famous characters or other well-known but highly inappropriate actors; we laugh conspiratorially, we joke about what glittery thing I will wear to the Oscars, and I feel I have a secret access to all the glow. No, tell me it isn’t because of his mid-level, ambiguous, tenuous fame. Tell me is it isn’t the Hirschfeld on the wall. Tell me I am not a mere admiring bog. Tell me it isn’t because when someone asks if I’m seeing anyone and I say Yes, sort of, and they ask what he does for a living and I say Well, he’s an actor, and they roll their eyes, because they live in Los Angeles, too, and we’re all cynical and cool, but then they ask if they’ve seen him in anything, and I mention a few of his credits, just as if I were an actor, too, just like Neil Simon says, and there’s the moment of recognition, that pop, where they say Oh, really?
Hat tip to Risky Biz.