For Many, Show Business Is No Business

You’ve probably never heard of Frank DiElsi. Chances are, after this, that you never will.

But those are just odds, and Frank isn’t discouraged by odds. That’s why he and the army of indefatigables he represents are so remarkable.

Frank DiElsi has been trying to make it in Hollywood for a long, long time. Like countless others, he comes from somewhere else, auditions for parts unworthy of his talent, and struggles. He acts, and he writes. He clings to life. People even recognize that he’s good.

“His talent was never an issue for me,” says friend Joe Montegna, a star on Broadway as well as Hollywood, adding: “There’s so many Franks out there, and I was one of them.”

Many actors would envy DiElsi’s career. A dark, intense man built like an animated fireplug, he studied acting in New York with the reknowned Uta Hagen and has since done plays, movies and TV. He sold Hope and Michael a Christmas tree on “thirtysomething.” He’s been on “Designing Women” twice. He passed briefly through “Pacific Heights” and “When a Stranger Calls” on the big screen.

But he makes just $2,000 a year acting, and he’s been around long enough not to want to say how long that’s been. He drives a cab from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. daily just to stay alive. He has no savings. His clothes are hand-me-downs. He doesn’t even have his own apartment. By the time you read this, the guy may be living in his car. But he’s undeterred.

“Acting is not something I do,” he explains patiently. “It’s what I am. I’m just going to keep trying to do this until I die. There’s no going back.”

Show business is full of Frank DiElsi’s, and a noble breed they are. You do not see them at the Polo Lounge. They do not have car phones or import their own spring water. Most never “make it,” whatever that means. But their devotion is utter, and in the climate of compromise most of us inhabit, such determination gives pause.

Clearly, this is not for everyone. The Screen Actors Guild says 80% of its 78,000 members make less than $5,000 a year at SAG work.

“It’s very difficult to articulate how tough it is,” DiElsi says. “The older you get, the harder it is.”

The years spent trying are, after all, irrevocable. DiElsi says he’s pursued acting so intensively that he never had time or energy for a family. “You’re constantly in a state of depression,” he says.

Yet hope springs eternal. Montegna says he spent 15 years struggling before “Glengarry Glen Ross” brought him stardom on Broadway. He recalls that actor Meshach Taylor “lived on my sofa for a month and then moved into his car. Then he got ‘Designing Women.’ Now he’s a real estate mogul.”

Some struggling performers find a sort of equilibrium that enables them to get by while they strive.

Following in the footsteps of Nathanael West, whose dark vision fixed the Hollywood of an earlier era, Mel Green landed a sinecure managing an apartment building, assuring himself decent digs and a small stipend. And he’s established rules to keep the work from getting out of hand. “I try to rent to people without any felonies,” he says.

But success remains elusive. Green’s 36 now, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, he wakes up alone and takes notice of his circumstances: no stardom, no money, no benefits. “My health insurance is handled by Visa at 19.8%,” he says.

Mel has talent too. Earlier this year his one-man show in Hollywood won critical praise. T. H. McCulloh, The Times’ reviewer, said “Back to the Big O,” Green’s performance piece about coming of age in Odessa, Tex., was “always insightful and often hilarious.”

But one of his talents is for bad breaks. “Back to the Big O” opened shortly after America went to war in the Persian Gulf. A writing stint on “Saturday Night Live” was equally ill-starred. He was hired in 1979, around the time the original cast left. Writers and production executives were dropping like flies. Mel was swatted.

Frank DiElsi has been swatted repeatedly. Desperate to get on “Hill Street Blues,” he wrote to Steven Bochco, the show’s mastermind, offering to clean and detail Bochco’s car for six months if his audition wasn’t a knockout, but he never got the chance.

Sometimes DiElsi seems to have raised renunciation to an art form. He attended Princeton University for a while and was even admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He turned his back on his family’s successful business.

And at times he’s angry too. All around him, he sees lesser talents having more success while he remains caught in a Catch-22: He can’t get good parts without a great agent, and he can’t get a great agent without some good parts.

For all his devotion, the parts he manages to scrounge don’t give him a chance to show his stuff. “When I get a job, it’s a job anybody could do,” he laments.

Like most actors, DiElsi learned long ago not to expect fairness from fate. As Montegna says, “If you start to look for fairness and equality in this business, you’ll end up heartbroken.”