Men, Women & Children Read Online Free PDF

actress, just like her mother, Nicole, had been. Nicole had a moderately successful career as a character actress in the 1950s. She appeared in only a handful of films, but her career gave her the chance to socialize with various people who were prominent in the entertainment industry and even become romantically involved with some of them. When she was in her early thirties, she was involved with three different men, any one of whom could have been Dawn’s father. Upon becoming pregnant, she made the decision to move back home with her parents and have the baby. Once Dawn was born, Nicole had difficulty imagining herself moving back to Los Angeles in an attempt to pick up where she had left off. So she stayed in her hometown and raised her daughter by herself.
    When Dawn graduated from North East High School, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her own dream of becoming an actress. She was not met with the same early success as her mother, having been cast in a play or student film once or twice a year, but nothing substantial. As an attractive young woman, she had engaged in relationships with several men who subsequently expressed their intent to marry her and raise a family, but she wouldn’t allow a relationship to stand in the way of her career goals.
    On her twenty-eighth birthday, she was celebrating by drinking with some friends at Bar Marmont. She began to think about the fact that she was getting older, about the fact that even the inconsequential auditions she forced herself to go on were generally filled with girls ten years younger than her, about the fact that maybe her lifelong dream was over. That night a television producer of moderate success bought her a drink, convinced her to give him her telephone number, and took her out to dinner the following week.
    After a little more than a year of dating, they moved in together. A few months later he sold a show to CBS and in celebration he bought her a Mercedes with monogrammed seats. The show required an actress for the small role of an attractive, but slightly older, next-door neighbor. He promised Dawn that if CBS were to order the pilot to be produced he would give her the role. CBS did order the pilot to be produced, and he was true to his word, but the pilot didn’t test well and the show was never ordered to series. Dawn was unimpressive in her minor role and, as a result, drew no new attention from agents, managers, or network or studio executives.
    Two weeks after the pilot was officially rejected by CBS she became aware of the fact that she was pregnant. Her boyfriend reminded her that he had always maintained he never wanted children and said that he would have nothing to do with the child if Dawn elected to give birth to it rather than abort. He told her he would pay whatever amount of child support was required of him by law, but would in no way be a father.
    The combined emotional trauma of the failed pilot, and the subsequent disintegration of the longest relationship she had ever had, led her to move back in with her mother in her hometown, just as her own mother had done. Hannah was born nine months later, and although the living arrangement was initially supposed to be temporary, the three generations of Clint women had lived under the same roof ever since that day.
    At an early age Hannah told her mother and grandmother that she, too, was very interested in acting. Nicole, having more years of insight into what the pursuit of such a statistically improbable goal can do to a person psychologically and emotionally, warned Dawn to encourage Hannah’s interest in other areas. But Dawn, having been so close to some success of her own in this area without really getting what she felt was a fair shake, saw in her daughter the opportunity for another chance.
    Because her child support checks were moderately substantial, Dawn never needed to have a job. She devoted every waking hour to making sure her daughter would find the success as an actress she