After Birth
AFTER BIRTH
ELLA
Not all those who wander are lost.
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN
1979
Ten days after her son was born, Ella left in the middle of the night and got on a bus heading west. She planned on staying with her old friend Tamasin Sullivan, whom she hadn’t seen in over six years but had kept in touch with intermittently.
Tamasin had offered her a room in her apartment in Studio City, but at the last minute she’d rented it out after taking an offer to understudy Lucie Arnaz in a national tour of They’re Playing Our Song.
Ella was mad. Not because she’d lost the apartment, but because the offer was beneath Tamasin. She had been a star at Yale Drama. She should have been a star anywhere. But give her a choice, and she’d usually make the wrong one. In 1975 Tamasin had passed up an opportunity to star in a new Broadway show and instead moved to the coast with a hot young actor from The Deer Hunter. The show that got away was A Chorus Line and the hot young deer hunter cooled. Tamasin, for her part, got some jobs in episodic television and finally landed that agent at Sylvan Light, but she was having trouble getting him on the phone. Her career, once so full of promise, petered out as real life interceded.
But like Ella, Tamasin took it all in stride.
On the bus westward bound, Ella was unsure of where she was headed, but quite sure of where she no longer wanted to be. She wouldn’t go back to Kentucky for twenty years, and by then, she would be one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.
But first she had to meet Beanie Rosen.