The Body in the Cast Read Online Free PDF

just perceptibly—Max was desperate indeed. If he pulled it off, the same nods could later be translated as “I told you so.”
    The first ringer was Caleb “Cappy” Camson, star of the phenomenally successful TV series “1-800-555-1212” when he was a teenager, later making a graceful transition to films. His
tanned, well-developed physique, thick, dark, always slightly touseled curls, and deep brown eyes with the requisite gold flecks guaranteed any movie in which he was cast at least initially large audiences. Cappy had been in the business long enough to know his limitations and ventured from romantic comedy only for a comic romance. But nobody turned down the chance to work with Max Reed—not even Cappy. He’d modified the curls and agreed to less flattering makeup in order to play the role of the tormented young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale.
    Max’s other orthodox move was to cast Caresse Carroll as Pearl, Hester Prynne’s daughter. Eight-year-old Caresse would be playing a major role; it could be a stretch, but Caresse was a pro down to her toenails. At age four, she’d nagged her mother, Jacqueline, into auditioning her for commercials. “I can do that,” she’d said, and hadn’t looked back. She was the child of choice for a whole string of space alien and horror movies. “It may not be art, but I’m working,” she told her mother at six. Currently, the trades labeled her “America’s Sweetheart for the Nineties” after her gutsy portrayal of a little girl who saves the family split-level after her parents lose their auto-plant jobs by forming a recycling company that ends up employing most of the town. Caresse didn’t have Shirley Temple’s dimples or curly hair. In fact, her features were a bit odd—straight, silken white-blond hair and large aquamarine eyes that Caresse was able to fill with tears, flash with fear, or twinkle with delight depending on the script. But it was her smile that was instantly recognizable to millions of Americans. Warm, engaging, it was the kind of smile that, well, gosh darn it, made you just have to smile right back. An eminently bankable smile.
    Casting her as Pearl months before, Max planned to use Caresse’s pale luminescence to personify the name. The child was a metaphor, he told Caresse and her mother, for the essential innocence of Hester Prynne’s act, a jewel beyond price to be worn proudly at her mother’s breast, next to the scarlet
letter of her supposed shame. Hester herself was Everywoman and Pearl, Everychild. Jacqueline and Caresse nodded solemnly when he’d related this to them in his office early in the fall. Neither had the faintest idea what he was talking about, yet, whatever it was, they both had no doubt Caresse could do it.
    Max knew Caresse was older than Hawthorne’s Pearl, but audiences might find it hard to believe a three-year-old could discourse as eloquently as he’d planned on the meaning of life and existence of God. The director had told his assistant, Alan, that Hawthorne’s book was a canvas—a masterpiece—to which they would essentially be adding brushstrokes, such as increasing Pearl’s age.
    Sitting silently in a chair next to Max since the Carrolls’ arrival was Evelyn O’Clair, who would, of course, play the role of Hester Prynne. Max had cast himself as Chillingworth, the older husband who returns after a long absence to find his wife the outcast of the community for the adulterous conception of a child. The director had felt a little awkward explaining all this to Caresse. He wasn’t used to children, although he would have to be, since Evelyn was about to give birth, fortunately well before the picture started.
    Caresse was getting bored with the meeting. It was a pretty cheesy office, no bar or any evidence of snacks—not even an entertainment system. Just a big desk, a couple of chairs, a