The Actress
Los Angeles, California 1994
Hollywood could be cruel, but it was mostly cruel to dumb people. Sure, she'd played the game, too: in three years, she'd been through three agents, more than a hundred and seventy-five auditions, and exactly one callback. That was to play a French maid. She looked the part, but she could not do accents.But she was smarter than the system. She had forged a career as an actress anyway, in the courtrooms of the state of California. Or, rather, in the small offices used for depositions before insurance-company attorneys, where she presented a variety of injuries under a variety of names. The insurance company lawyers asked her questions, and she answered, very sweetly and convincingly, in her own flat Oregon accent. |
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She specialized in on-the-job accidents, all unprovable soft-tissue injuries. Boxes fell on her; chairs overturned; pictures threw themselves off walls and onto her back or neck or head. As she gained a reputation among crooked doctors and lawyers, there was demand for her services throughout Southern California.This was not exactly Shakespeare, but it paid much better than Shakespeare. In fact, she was doing so well that she was able to afford a bungalow in the Los Feliz district, where the most fashionable young movie stars lived, and hang out at the same restaurants and nightclubs they did. She traveled with a car and driver, too. They were sent by her lawyers. She couldn't be expected to drive in her condition, whatever it supposedly was at the time.Her life was good, until Martin Florence came into it.
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Martin Florence was a beautiful man. A beautiful man is an expensive proposition anywhere, but particularly so in Los Angeles, where masculine beauty requires the kind of hair care, manicures and bodysculpting unthinkable to a good-looking man in, say, Wisconsin. Such things were not always affordable to a first-year tax law associate, so Martin had gotten into the insurance scam game. It was Martin's idea that she move beyond small workplace injuries into total disability, where the real money was. His idea was for her to play a gifted and well-insured dancer who had been hit by a truck, leaving her unable to ever walk again. He would set everything up: crooked doctor and crooked chiropractors, crooked witnesses, even a crooked ballet master who would testify to the divine quality of her lost pirouettes.But she didn't want to be totally disabled. She liked her freedom, and pretending to have a wrist or back injury had never interfered with her daily amusements around Los Feliz. There was always the matter of insurance-company spies, and although going out of the house in a wheelchair would be a possibility, people might remember the tragic case of the disabled dancer when she wanted to be healthy again. Martin, however, insisted. He said the case would pay for a tropical vacation long enough for the transitory California population to forget the whole thing. Over dinners and drinks and soft kisses by the Pacific, he suggested that it might pay enough for both of them to take a tropical vacation, together. And she agreed. Martin Florence was a very beautiful man.
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Of course, the insurance company could be expected to look more closely at such a big claim. But Martin was sure her emotional performance in the deposition, plus the site of her lovely self in an old-fashioned wooden wheelchair, would sensibly persuade them to settle.It did not. Perhaps the company sensed something fishy; perhaps it was just too much money to pay out without a fight. The case would have to go before a jury. This was a headache, because the fastest trial date available was six months away. That was six months she would have to either feign a disability or sit around her house with her blinds drawn. Martin hired a crooked maid to bring groceries, and he came over himself sometimes with movie videos. The wait made them grow short-tempered with each other, and then the crooked ballet master died in an actual car accident. Martin had a great deal of trouble finding another one.The insurance company doctors examined her, too, among them one young blue-eyed doctor who seemed to take her injuries very seriously. |
When the trial date finally arrived, she felt a rush of excitement. She was an actress accustomed to performing for just a few lawyers and a couple of paralegals. This was an audience of dozens. She took real joy in her performance: she put everything she had into it, crying all the way through the trial, even during jury selection. When she was on the witness stand describing the tragic fictitious accident, rivers flowed from her squeezed eyelids.The rest of their case went less smoothly. Martin, inexplicably, had introduced a truck into evidence at the last minute, and it bore no signs of having hit anyone. The insurance company's lawyers made a great deal of hay with that. Then her own crooked doctor, who had been taking on an awful lot of these cases, mixed them up and got the details of her injuries wrong.She waited for the jury verdict the way a lesser actress might wait for an opening-night review. |
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It went against her. There were no damages awarded.She was crushed. Now, she felt like crying for real. It was tempting to get up and walk out of the courtroom, showing the jury exactly what she thought of them, but that risked prosecution for insurance fraud. Instead, she wheeled herself to her car. While she was waiting for the driver to help her into it, the young insurance-company doctor approached her. "Miss," he said, "this was a miscarriage of justice."He knelt down by her wheelchair and took her hand."I see a lot of these cases, and most of them are fakes. I take pleasure in making sure aren't compensated, and that if at all possible, they go to prison. But your pain is real." He smiled, and gestured towards the courtroom. "Sometimes I can't stand this cynical world we live in," he said. She looked into his lovely blue eyes, and for a moment wished she were not already spoken for. |
She was not, as it turned out. Martin Florence stopped returning her phone calls as soon as the case went against them. For several days, she sat around her house with the blinds drawn, trying to figure out what to do.What was really eating her was the insult to her acting ability. In her first chance in the big leagues, she had failed abysmally. It shook her confidence. Maybe she was really no good, or only good enough for small performances, like those in windowless deposition offices. She thought of leaving Los Angeles, of resuming her old career, the small injuries, someplace else. But where else but Southern California would she find such a large, fertile assortment of the wealthy and the gullible? Again and again, her thoughts drifted back to the blue-eyed doctor. He believed in her. He believed in her acting. Surely if she could convince one person, and a medical professional at that, she had the potential to convince many more. The longer she thought about it, the more she thought of her defeat as a challenge. It was at such desperate turns of fate that losers quit, but winners kept fighting. She could do it. She would attempt another total disability case, and she would win! |
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She went out the next day. Tempting fate a little, she stopped first at her favorite coffee bar, but no one seemed to notice that she'd been rolled through just a couple of weeks ago in a wheelchair. Finally, she parked her car in front of a beauty salon, where an inexpensive dye-job would leave her once again free to pursue her art.There, taking in his mother for a platinum frost, was the young blond doctor with soulful and, as he looked up and watched her stride in confidently on two good legs, widening blue eyes.A smart girl, she moved that very afternoon to New York.
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