He said, “I want to be movie star famous.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool,” I replied, wondering why anyone would want to be famous. “That why you came out to Hollywood?”
“Of course. And the girls too. In my town everyone marries at 20. By 30, they have four kids and watch TV all night. I didn’t want that life.”
His name was Jean-Marc Beaulieu. Everyone thought he was French. He had the look and, when he wanted to, the accent as well. Some even said he could fool a Frenchman—though I always wondered if that was true. It seemed to me they wanted to believe it almost as much as he did.
But Jean-Marc was an American country boy, born and bred in a small Iowa town that smelled of cornfields and diesel. The closest he had come to France was dating a French exchange student. I guess that and the many French books in his library at home. He talked about the streets of Paris as if he had walked them every day as a youth. He learned French as a teenager. Something early in life told him French would be good to know, and by fifteen, he was fluent.
Jean-Marc moved to Hollywood the day after graduating high school. He would have gone on the day of graduation if his mother hadn’t hosted a dinner party for him to celebrate. After the party, he packed everything he owned, went to bed, and rose before sunrise. Then he raced to Los Angeles, stopping only to eat and use the bathroom, drinking Coca-Cola to stay awake.
For all the problems of his life, money was not one of them. His father was a big-time Hollywood agent who represented many of the stars, the kind of man who could make or break a career with a phone call. But the two had never met; word on the street was that he was the sleazy type. He bought his way out of having to raise Jean-Marc. It was supposed to be a one-night stand. But Jean-Marc’s mom didn’t want an abortion, nor a man who didn’t want to be a father. She told him she didn’t want his support, but he could set up a fund for Jean-Marc. He happily obliged, and the day Jean-Marc turned eighteen, he learned of the more than one million dollars sitting in a bank account under his name.
When I met him, it was 1957. Los Angeles still felt young then. The palm trees seemed freshly planted, the streets wide and glistening under the sun as if built for promise. Billboards shouted about Giant and Rebel Without a Cause, names that hung in the air like prayers. Neon signs hummed at night, and everything smelled faintly of gasoline and orange blossoms. People came here from everywhere to act, to sing, to sell, to forget.
We both rented rooms in a crumbling Spanish-style house off Sunset Boulevard, a place with cracked tiles and an old fountain that hadn’t worked in years. The owner lived upstairs and the tenants shared a kitchen that smelled perpetually of burnt toast and cheap coffee. Jean-Marc could have afforded better, of course. There were plenty of modern apartments in Hollywood Hills that his money could have bought outright. But he said this place had “character.” Maybe he wanted to prove that struggle was part of becoming someone, that he wasn’t just another rich kid chasing a dream, but an artist living it.
At night, we’d sit on the rooftop and watch the city lights tremble below us. He’d practice lines from plays I’d never heard of. Once, I caught him rehearsing a speech from Hamlet, whispering to the smog-soaked horizon as if the city itself were his audience.
“I think people come here to reinvent themselves,” he said one night. “That’s the whole point of Hollywood. Everyone gets to be someone else.”
“And who are you trying to be?” I asked.
He smiled. “Someone unforgettable.”
He started taking acting classes in a studio run by a man who claimed to have studied with Lee Strasberg, though most said he just liked shouting at students. Jean-Marc didn’t care. He absorbed every word, practiced until his voice grew hoarse, and spent hours before a mirror perfecting expressions. Sometimes I’d find him pacing the courtyard, mumbling in French, chain-smoking, muttering about “truth” in performance. He’d laugh at himself afterward, saying, “Even the French in me gets pretentious.”
Casting calls became his church. He went to every one he could find, standing in long lines that snaked around the corners of small studios. Sometimes he’d get a few lines in a B-picture. Once, he played a soldier dying in a jungle scene that lasted all of thirty seconds. He must’ve watched that clip fifty times, pointing to his lifeless body on the screen with a child’s pride.
“See that?” he said. “That’s the moment they remember.”
But Los Angeles was merciless. For every lucky break, there were a hundred defeats. Weeks passed when the phone didn’t ring. He’d drink late into the night, telling stories about Paris cafés and riverboats on the Seine, places he’d never seen but somehow seemed to remember. Sometimes he’d play Piaf on the record player, her voice filling that old building with longing.
Once, I asked why he didn’t just go there, to France, if he loved it so much.
He took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled slow. “Because I’d just be another American pretending to be someone. Here, at least, pretending is the point.”
There was something fragile in the way he said it, like the dream was already cracking.
Then came the role.
He’d landed an audition for a major studio film, a war picture set in occupied France. The part was small but respectable: a young resistance fighter, a man who dies bravely for his country. He was made for it. He ironed his shirt that morning like a man preparing for battle, slicked his hair back, and practiced his lines with an intensity that made my stomach twist with something between admiration and worry.
When he came home that night, his face was pale. He poured himself a drink before speaking.
“They liked me,” he said finally. “But they went with someone real. French-born.”
He tried to laugh it off, but his hands were shaking. “Guess the accent wasn’t enough.”
For a while he kept going through the motions. More auditions, more rejections. But something in him dimmed. He stopped talking about fame and started talking about escape. Then one morning, he was gone.
The landlady found a single note on his bed. It said:
“Je vais là où je peux encore croire.”
I’m going where I can still believe.
No one knew where that was.
Months passed before I heard from him again. A postcard arrived one gray morning, postmarked from Lyon. On the front was a photograph of an old stone bridge over the Rhône. On the back, his handwriting slanted and restless:
“It’s quieter here. People look you in the eye. They don’t ask what you want to be, only who you are. I don’t always have an answer.”
There was no return address.
A year later, I went to France on business for the studio, a film shoot outside Avignon. The crew talked about Brigitte Bardot, about the New Wave kids up in Paris shaking up the industry, about how the French were making films that felt real. On a whim, I looked him up. It took a few days and a handful of inquiries, but I found him teaching English and French literature to American exchange students in a small village school not far from the river.
He looked older, calmer somehow. His hair was longer, streaked with sun, and he wore no cologne, no pressed shirt, just a sweater with holes at the cuffs and a warmth I’d never seen before.
We had coffee in a café by the river. He spoke softly, almost shyly.
“I used to think the world was a stage,” he said. “That I could step onto it and become whoever I wanted. But people here… they don’t perform. They just live. You can’t pretend with them; they notice.”
He smiled faintly. “Turns out, I’m terrible at being French. I’m good at being myself, though. It only took me half a lifetime to try it.”
The wind outside rattled the café window. He looked out toward the river, where the water glimmered in the fading light.
“I thought fame would make me real,” he said. “But now I teach kids verbs and watch them laugh when they get it wrong. And somehow that feels closer to truth than any movie ever could.”
We talked until dusk, then walked the quiet streets back toward the school. At the gate, he shook my hand and said, “Tell Hollywood I’m sorry I missed my cue.”
I never saw him again. But sometimes, when the city hums at night and the billboards light the sky, I think of Jean-Marc —not the movie star he wanted to be, but the man who finally stopped acting.
—
Notes
“Someone Unforgettable” is a historical fiction snapshot. While based on real events, the story, characters, and incidents are fictitious.
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