Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
UNTITLED KEVIN WILLIAMSON
She was a hostess at Morton’s Steakhouse in Burbank, Calif.
Many opportunities came to move up to server or bartender, but she never took any of them.
“I didn’t want to make too much money,” said Mariana Klaveno, who graduated with the class of 1998 from St. John-Endicott High School.
“Klaveno” is the stage spelling of Kleweno.
She now stars on the CBS television show “Stalker,” the latest in a list of credits which include HBO’s “True Blood,” “Dexter” on Showtime, and “Devious Maids” on Lifetime.
During her seven years at Morton’s, remaining a hostess was strategic.
“If you make too much at your day job, you can become un-motivated,” Kleweno said. “I had to keep thinking, what am I doing for my career today. For lack of a better term it’s really easy in L.A. to just chill. It’s really easy to let the years go by.”
Kleweno moved to Los Angeles the summer after graduating from the University of Washington with a B.A. in Theater. She backpacked in Europe for a month with a college friend, came back to the family farm north of Endicott for three weeks, helped with harvest and then drove south.
She first stayed with her oldest brother, Brock, in a studio apartment in Silver Lake, near Dodger Stadium. They would be roommates for seven years, beginning when he first was a student in cooking school and then while he built a career as a chef.
Arriving in Hollywood, 22-year-old Mariana’s first order of business was to get a job.
She had worked at a Morton’s Steakhouse in Seattle and it happened that they were opening one in Burbank, right near Warner Brothers Studios, Walt Disney Studios and NBC/Universal.
“That was a restaurant connection I had at least,” she said.
So the unknown, aspiring actress got a recommendation from Seattle and within days had an offer.
She was in L.A., had a day-job and a place to live. The effort at the dream then hit the ground in earnest.
“I knew enough to be terrified,” Kleweno said. “But I was more terrified of not trying.”
The first break
As a farm girl growing up on the Palouse, the youngest child of Patrick and Daryl Kleweno - fourth-generation farmers - she recalled always wanting to pursue acting.
“I remember she could act,” said Roger Beck, a longtime teacher at St. John-Endicott High School, who directed Kleweno in two plays. “She had a great presence on stage and knew how to create a character.”
It was part of an ambition Kleweno kept mostly to herself.
“I was kind of secretive about it,” she said. “Where I’m from, nobody really does that. But my older siblings are so successful, the fourth kid can always be a wildcard.”
Starting out in Los Angeles, Kleweno got new headshots taken and walked back and forth to the mailbox, sending hundreds of them out to agencies.
Her first representative came after Mariana had been in L.A. for two years. She had a manager before - referred through a male hairdresser - and then the general manager of Morton’s referred her to a well-established agent who often came into the restaurant.
She got called in to audition.
She went and, with other actors, did a scene from a “Friends” script. Mariana played Rachel.
The agent signed her.
She simplified the spelling of her name so people could pronounce it.
“And they still can’t, really,” Kleweno said with a laugh.
She had seen the simplified Klaveno spelling on headstones at the Endicott Cemetery.
More auditions came, with many gaps between.
“There’s so many months that go by with not a lot going on. It takes a long time,” she said.
Back in Eastern Washington, her parents supported her from afar, happy that her brother was there with her too.
“That made us feel very good,” said Kleweno’s father, Patrick. “You didn’t worry about things.”
Enrolling in acting classes in Studio City, she met a community of actors and eventually landed her first speaking role.
The line was, “Hi.”
That was the whole line.
“As long as we knew she was happy, we didn’t ask a lot of questions; such as ‘do you think you got this part or that part,’” said Patrick. “We supported her and were very proud of her. She just kind of chartered her own territory.”
During this time, on late nights at Morton’s, writer/producer/director J.J. Abrams and his writing partner on the T.V. show “Alias” would come in.
Kleweno seated them, as hostess, making sure they got a certain booth which would allow him to plug in a laptop.
One night, months into this, Abrams asked her something.
“Are you an actress?”
She said she was.
“And he scolded me,” Kleweno said, explaining that he asked her why she didn’t say anything.
She didn’t feel it was right.
He told her to send in head shots to the “Alias” production office.
She went home and labored over a cover letter full of inside jokes about the show, which Kleweno was a fan of.
She sent it off from that same mailbox and in a couple days heard back that they “loved the letter” and invited her to try out for a role, which she got.
“Then it was just many years of guest starring roles, T.V. movies. Every year the jobs getting a little bigger,” Kleweno said.
I-405, the 110,
La Cienega to Wilshire
By this time, she had memorized how long it took to get from anywhere in sprawling Los Angeles at which time of day to get back to Burbank in time for work at Morton’s. If there was a 3 p.m. audition in Santa Monica and her shift started at 4 p.m., it was possible, but more than likely out of the question. She would call and plead if need be.
“All of my bosses were very understanding,” she said.
More auditions, more rejection came and more nights at Morton’s.
On a certain Valentine’s Day, Kleweno found herself working in a packed restaurant, with an overflowing toilet in the ladies’ room. The hostess had to take care of it.
“This is really what I’m doing, I thought,” Kleweno said. “Working in a restaurant, Valentine’s Day is always the worst - extremely busy and chaotic - but I hate Valentine’s Day to this day, even though I’m happily married.”
Nonetheless, there were continuing auditions too; standing in lines of women that looked like her.
“You’d get a script and think, ‘I’m perfect for this,” she said. “You go in and there’s 15 other versions of you. You’re getting rejected constantly, so I would assume I didn’t get it and move on… any other way is not a healthy way to live your life.”
Sometimes she did get it, and her career would move forward.
“I really built it brick by brick,” Kleweno said.
After a while, the construction got easier.
“Not all rejection is bad, not all rejection hurts,” she explained, citing the myriad of reasons for why someone is chosen or not chosen for a part.
“The best feedback I got was one time I heard back that, ‘she’s just not the girl,’” Kleweno said, referring to how talent is just a part of what casting directors and directors seek for a role.
“There’s still some things that would get to you, though” she continued. “You do care. And it’s our job to care, to feel things, to make an audience feel things.”
The bigger break
In 2008 she got her biggest thrill yet in her burgeoning career.
Living in Koreatown, near downtown Los Angeles, still with her brother, she got a part as a single-episode guest star on HBO’s “True Blood,” which was filming its first season, with nothing having aired yet.
The small guest slot grew into a series regular for two years.
“That just changed everything,” Kleweno said.
But she still worked at Morton’s.
“Most people would have quit long before I did,” she suggested. “I’m too much of my father’s responsible, bill-paying daughter.”
She kept her Saturday night shift at the restaurant - now reporting after a long week of filming, which often stretched into early Saturday morning.
“I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I still had a day job,” Kleweno said. “But I’d seen too many people quit the restaurant after getting a certain part or two and then later they had to come back.”
She finally left before the first “True Blood” episodes aired. It was 2009.
“I think I have to credit my parents for instilling in me those values,” she said. “I never had a credit card, always a debit card.”
Between seasons two and three, she moved to a 1920s apartment building in Miracle Mile, just off Wilshire Boulevard.
Meanwhile the feel of auditions changed.
“The higher you go, the more rejection hurts,” Kleweno said. “The stakes are higher, it’s more about the material. Before, you’re losing out on a guest-spot on one episode of a show (that might never air), now it could be a lead in something very good.”
All the while, there was still downtime between seasons, between jobs.
“As an actor, you always think that your current job is going to be your last,” she said.
Kleweno began doing volunteer work, including for “Art of Elysium,” an organization which sends groups of artists and actors to entertain hospitalized kids.
Ditches
“I wouldn’t wish this industry on anyone,” Kleweno said. “It’s so heart-wrenching. It’s stressful, the pain and fear and self-doubt. But we’re not digging ditches, don’t get me wrong.”
The ditches they dig are more internal.
“It’s no great mystery why so many people (in Hollywood) derail,” she said. “It’s a shock to me that it doesn’t happen more. I was lucky in where I came from, but if you don’t have that stability in your personal life…”
In 2012 she married an attorney originally from Miami.
For “Stalker,” Kleweno plays a Los Angeles Police Department detective working in what is a true-life special division that tracks stalkers. It airs on CBS Wednesdays at 10 p.m.
The show films mostly at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, and she drives the same route to work that she once did going to Morton’s.
The show has a 13-episode commitment at this point.
“From there, you hope to get ‘the back nine,” Kleweno said, of the next 13-episode commitment to make a full season.
After “True Blood,” she was able to pick and choose roles, and there were a few close calls on prominent leads which she almost got.
Kleweno filmed a season of “Devious Maids” in Atlanta, and then last summer shot an independent movie called “West of Redemption” near Cheney. The film will go on the festival circuit next spring, with producers hoping to find a buyer to release the film.
Looking back on her time growing up in Whitman County, Kleweno mentioned teachers Beck, and the late Louise Braun and Arden Johnson, who directed her in small productions.
“And my parents were always supportive from day one,” she said.
Now she has achieved much of what she hoped to do back then, when Kleweno raised pigs for 4H and helped prepare food for the family’s harvest crews.
There was always the fair, too.
“I have so many fond memories of the Palouse Empire Fair, mostly involving the Gravitron,” she said, referring to the carnival ride.
All of it has come to resemble her life now, as well.
“What’s most surprising about this industry is how small it is,” Kleweno said. “Once you really get into it. It kind of becomes a small town.”
So what about Los Angeles, Calif. reminds her of Endicott, Wash.?
“People complain here that it takes so long to get places,” she said. “But for me, I was used to it taking 45 minutes to get to a movie theater.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
Reader Comments(0)