Hooked on a Dream of Stardom

Sunny Knox’s parents were horrified when their only daughter announced she was quitting Ohio State University and going to Hollywood to become a star. What about her dream of becoming a television anchorwoman? What about finishing college?

Unable to dissuade her, Knox’s parents took the next best step: They cut a deal. They’d support her for three months. If she didn’t land a movie job by then, she’d return home and get her diploma.

Maybe she would succeed. She always had. She had been high school homecoming queen. Her grades were excellent. She had been captain of the gymnastics team and a cheerleader for football and hockey. In Dayton, Ohio, she was a somebody.

But in Hollywood, she was a nobody.

“I am so lost in this stupid town,” she wrote in her diary in mid-1992, two months after she arrived. “Shuffled in among the half-hearted and the has-beens, looking like every other starving actor, only maybe smiling a little bit more than the rest.”

Knox was--and remains--one of the tens of thousands of wannabe actors--young women and men with Teflon egos, boundless chutzpah and enough arrogance to think they will rise where countless others have fallen. They are the waitresses, secretaries and bartenders who tell you without blinking that this is going to be their year, who like addicts insist that all they need is one more try, one more fix, to make it.

They live in a world in which someone like Knox can leap one hurdle after another, feeling breathlessly alive with success, only to look at herself and realize she has scarcely advanced. Last year, her fourth in the business at age 23, she earned about $4,000.

Knox and her contemporaries obsess about the quality of their “head shots”--every actor’s calling card--and the typeface of their resumes. They can recite a litany of unlikelies who succeeded: Holly Hunter was a temp. Demi Moore worked for a debt-collection agency. Meryl Streep, Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner and Kelly McGillis waited tables. They clasp these tales like good-luck charms as they ward off rejection, humiliation and unwanted passes.

“I don’t think people realize this city can rape you, rape your spirit,” Knox said.

To partake in this American ritual, to join the endless crop of fresh hopefuls who buy the equivalent of a lottery ticket every day, it helps to have what MGM Pictures chief Mike Marcus, a former talent agent, wryly calls “a little blindness to certain reality.”

Deborah Stammler works as a part-time secretary, making about a third of what she earned as an accountant in New York. She came here at 30 and began learning hard lessons immediately: Minutes before she boarded her L.A.-bound plane, a thief’s hand deftly reached over a restroom stall and stole her purse. She landed penniless. After three years, she has a handful of minor gigs to show for her trouble.

Yet she, like most, remains undaunted. “I want to be in the club,” explains Steve Cassidy, 31, who supports himself as a carpenter (reminding himself that Harrison Ford did the same thing). “That’s exactly what it is--a club. And the rest of us are crashing the party.”

Dawn Grabowski, 25, came here from Florida, audacious enough to think she could be an actress despite having cerebral palsy and needing crutches to walk. After two years and occasional roles as an extra, she eats a lot of frozen burritos and Noodleroni. Living off disability payments, she owes $7,000 on her credit cards and endures skeptics like the producer who said: “Obviously, you can’t run . . . how could we ever use you in our movie?”

Grabowski, at least, has an agent. That puts her ahead of Paula Helaine Kahlenberg, for whom getting an audition means reading ads in trade papers.

At 26, she lives with her parents in North Hollywood while plotting her career. If she’s asked to play a sexy role, she frets about what her mother will think. Just before she speaks onstage in acting-class talent showcases, she feels like she’s going to throw up and worries she’ll forget her lines. She dropped her last name professionally because she thought it cumbersome.

Yet Kahlenberg, a receptionist, dreams about how David Letterman will playfully embarrass her one day when she’s on his show to promote her latest movie. He’ll roll an uncut clip of her commercial for world harmony, in which her only line (fiducia, Italian for peace) was edited out.

Paula Nicolas, who grew up in affluent Los Altos, near San Jose, faces a different set of hurdles, in part because she’s black and feels she must battle to play more than stereotypical roles.

Nicolas, 24, the daughter of two doctors, once had a manager. But she fired him because he wanted to teach her to talk “more black” by putting a cork between her teeth.

Her worst moment, however, had nothing to do with race. It came at her first audition two years ago when the casting director said: “That was good, Paula, but I’m wondering why you didn’t face the camera.” She has gone to dozens of auditions since. She’s developed immunity to competitors’ bone-numbing glares and stares she calls “Jedi mind-warping.”

She works five nights a week at the House of Blues in Hollywood. One evening she took off her plastic name tag before waiting on Robert De Niro and John Singleton because “in the next five years when I go before them in an audition, I don’t want them to remember me as a waitress.”

If it is any comfort, the struggle is widespread. About half of Screen Actors Guild members earn less than $10,000 from acting, well below the federal poverty line. Last year, about 30% had no income.

“It’s such an aphrodisiac, this business,” said Coleen Graham, an ex-actress who runs a church outreach program for performers and athletes. “You have just enough people telling you that you’ll be the next Julia Roberts.”

Plenty of Optimism

When Knox came here, lured by promises made by a talent agent who saw her at an Ohio State acting seminar, she was drunk on such hopes. She wouldn’t even consider waiting tables, she was so convinced that she was destined for stardom. When she called her folks, she spun webs of deceit: she was about to land a major commercial, she was on the verge of scoring a solid film role. Every call was loaded with possibilities. The blue-eyed petite blond, who prided herself on her all-American girl-next-door look, just seemed to burst with optimism.

But as the three-month succeed-or-come-home deadline arrived, it all seemed like a lie. The unthinkable had happened: She was no closer to fulfilling her dream than she had been on the day she arrived. And she was dead broke.

She was too embarrassed to beg more money from her parents. Not because they didn’t have it; her father is a dentist and her mother is a travel director. But to ask would be an admission of failure. Sure, college was a good idea, it was just that. . . .

The final sentence always trailed off. Knox was hooked. She couldn’t return to college because she now believed what she had been telling her parents. She was one break away.

Yet as her parents’ money ran out, her confidence faltered. Her stomach ached with hunger. More than once she looked through a restaurant window, saw a half-eaten sandwich, darted in and stole it. Then she would go home, to a studio apartment overlooking Warner Brothers studios, and cry, humiliated by her weakness.

Her diary, a small red book covered with a design of peacock feathers and filled with lined paper, became her best friend.

“My time will come. It will. It will come! (Soon.)”

--Diary entry, July 1, 1992.

When she went to auditions, she cranked up her bright smile. She believed it was only a matter of getting the right people to see in her what she saw in herself. At an audition for a three-year role in the soap opera “General Hospital,” Knox waltzed up to the casting director and said: “Look no more. I have arrived. I’m your girl.”

She still recalls the casting director’s expression. “I think he thought, ‘Bless her little Midwestern heart, she must have just gotten off the plane.’ ”

She didn’t get the part.

“I thought, how can I not book [get a part]? What’s wrong with these people? I’m wonderful,” Knox said.

“I won’t let them break me! Don’t let me lose myself . . . Don’t let me become hateful . . . “

--Diary, July 5, 1992.

Her downward spiral accelerated. “It hit me, I’m alone,” she said. “It’s me against the world. I didn’t come here to be a waitress or a secretary, I had to act.”

Like so many before her, she fleetingly considered prostitution. But she recoiled at the thought.

“I hate going to bed hungry. But it’s O.K. I’m O.K. Think about happy things. Good times will come soon. God does provide.”

--Nov. 14, 1992.

“My car & I go hungry. We’ve both run ourselves dry once or twice.”

--December, 1992.

Making Ends Meet

Knox celebrated her first Thanksgiving alone in Los Angeles eating lettuce and California rolls. Then she finally gave in and looked for a job. At the Hollywood Diner, the manager told her he had no openings.

“I’m not leaving until you hire me,” Knox announced. She started as a hostess and soon was promoted to waitress and more tips. One waitress job gave way to another as she relentlessly auditioned for parts. She checked ID cards at a gym; she worked as a nanny.

Rehearsing for a play, Knox had a call from her agent saying she’d won a part she’d auditioned for as a worker in a McDonald’s commercial. She burst into tears of joy. “I’ll never be hungry again.”

The ad eventually paid $8,000. It was the break she’d been waiting for. Knox’s slow ascent, inch by inch, had begun.

Within six months of the McDonald’s ad she landed an audition for the part of a runaway on TV’s “Beverly Hills 90210.”

But when she showed up for the audition the casting director looked at her skeptically and groused, “You look like a cheerleader, not a runaway.”

Knox wanted to curl up and disappear. It was that pink lipstick, she thought--a runaway probably wouldn’t even use lipstick and if she did, it wouldn’t be such a wholesome, innocent color. Why hadn’t she just applied Chapstick?

Shoving aside her embarrassment, she read through the part. To Knox’s astonishment, the casting director asked her to come back and read for the producer.

Before the second reading, the casting director wondered aloud whether Knox’s eyes were actually that shade of aqua-blue. Then she asked Knox to take out her contact lens. She obliged, placing them in two Dixie cups.

“Just guide me into the room for the audition,” Knox told the casting director as she bumped into a stool. “I’m fine, absolutely fine.”

After the reading, she felt her way to the door. She landed the part. Her mother visited the set during the filming and pulled a camera out of her purse and asked one of the show’s stars, Luke Perry, to stand with her daughter.

Six months later, Knox hit again. This time it was a low-budget movie.

Waiting in a print shop for copies of her resume, she was approached by a man in jeans, flannel shirt and baseball cap. He identified himself as a producer and asked if she were an actress. Riiight. But figuring you never can tell, she gave him a resume. She got the female lead in “Backlash,” a movie released in Europe. For several months of filming in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe, she got room, board--and about $500.

“It wasn’t about the money,” she said. “I just wanted to work.”

Knox’ life had begun to change. She’d become involved with the Los Angeles Church of Christ. And she’d fallen in love with a man she’d met at the gym. She hoped he would propose.

So when she landed the part of a sidekick on the syndicated television show “Xena: Warrior Princess,” she turned it down--a seemingly inexplicable decision for a wannabe. The role would have paid her about $8,000 a week for five months, she said. But it also required her to go to New Zealand. At the time, she believed the show was slated to run outside the United States, making it less attractive. (In fact, the show began airing here in September.)

Knox, then working as a live-in nanny, had simply become convinced that she could become a star without compromising her personal life. “It wasn’t like [the role in ‘Xena’] could really make my career,” she explained, a year and a half later, with a trace of discomfort. “I’m going to work because I am good.”

Her personal manager agreed with her decision, saying it could have trapped the actress rather than boosting her professionally. “Sunny has got this spark; she’s got a lot of talent,” said Susan Livingston, who began working with Knox after the “Xena” dilemma.

Several months later, Knox landed a funny bit part on “The Tonight Show” as a Valley girl whose Val-speak is so thick that host Jay Leno cannot understand her. Actress Alicia Silverstone--a recent escapee from wannabeland--was her translator. Five months after that, Knox got a part on another TV show, “Night Stand,” a spoof of talk shows.

Her biggest wish came true. She and Matt Knox got engaged. He had a jeweler copy the daisy-shaped ring that she had so admired on the finger of Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle.” They got married in September. Matt strode down the aisle as the theme song from “Rocky” filled the church. Minutes later, the theme song from “Last of the Mohicans” played and in floated Knox, wearing an ankle-length gown adorned with applique daisies.

In December, she and Matt, a former singer and semipro hockey player, became interns of the church, an arrangement that pays their rent and expenses. It also requires them to hold Bible study groups. For Knox, it’s an ideal setup, allowing her flexibility in scheduling auditions.

Last week, she auditioned for a minor part in an NBC movie based upon Danielle Steele’s book “Full Circle.” She and a handful of other blond 20-something actresses made the first cut. The role, a young version of the female lead, had no lines.

For this audition, Knox’s concern was her age. After the first round, the casting director told her to look older when she returned. She put on powder, blush, eye shadow, lipstick. She dressed in brown pinstriped slacks with a brown blouse and brown boots. She took off her wedding ring and put on a short silver-and-bead necklace.

Not having time to read the book, she didn’t know who the character was. “What does 26 look like? What will I look like in three years?” she asked, studying herself in the mirror before leaving home.

At the NBC studio, the women were ushered one-by-one into a room with the producers. As she waited, Knox’s face was tinted an eerie crimson as a red light blinked overhead, indicating auditions were underway. She crouched forward on the blue Naugahyde bench, insisting she wasn’t nervous. She glanced casually at the other waiting wannabes, each one stealing looks at the others. (“Everybody always checks everyone out--it’s the same way on the beach.”)

Once again, she was on the cusp. Once again, she felt giddy with hope. They called her name, and in six minutes the audition was over. As soon as the door shut behind her she began the mental exercise of stopping herself from caring about the outcome. There’d been a moment of confusion--her handshakes with the casting directors were awkward. Would that prevent her from landing the part? She shook it off.

“You just shut it out,” she sighed. “You psyche yourself into forgetting about it. I’ve been this close sooo many times.”

Her instincts were good. A few days later her manager called. The producers had changed the character’s age from 26 to 35. She didn’t get the part.