But Enough About Me (4 page)

I gave up trying to escape my family long ago. We were like a boisterous pack of lemurs, twitchy and clannish, leaping frantically out of our den, turning en masse to the left, then to the right, chattering shrilly at intruders. When I graduated from the University of Delaware, I turned around and moved right back home, ostensibly to regroup. Perhaps “graduated” is sort of a broad term, because I was seventeen credits short of a degree. I was just desperate to escape Delaware, with its sprawling campus and its thick-necked frat boys, so I promised my father that I would attend summer school and make up the classes. My dad left Michigan State early to embark on his career at Penney's, so it broke his heart that I would continue the family legacy of being diploma-free. Of his three daughters, only Dinah has managed to graduate college, and no matter what I have achieved since I left Delaware, he periodically brings up those seventeen credits.

“It's never too late to get an education,” he will say.

“It most certainly is,” I reply. “One of my classes is a Biology with Lab. If I go to class at this point, I'll look like Rodney Dangerfield in
Back to School.
”

Then he inhales, and slowly blows out a breath through pursed lips, and I know that he's about to paint a Dark Picture. “Say you apply for a job,
and they do a background check,” he says. “They come to find out that you lied. You can kiss that job good-bye. What if you become famous—say you receive some award, something like that—and somebody decides to look into your past?” He shakes his head. “Kiss that award good-bye. Tell you right now.”

“Who is this investigative team?” I ask him. “And why don't they have anything better to do? And what award am I getting, exactly?” He will not be distracted.

My father is the most genial midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared. This inevitably involves Kissing Things Good-bye. “Looks like mold,” he'll say, standing up and brushing off his knees after inspecting the wood underneath Heather's porch. “Better get that sealed up, or you can kiss this porch good-bye.”

Most often, it is your actual life that you can kiss good-bye. “Huh,” he'll say when you tell him that no, you don't have a carbon monoxide detector. “Guess you didn't hear about that family in the news, down in Trenton. Went to sleep, never woke up. Some sort of problem with the oven. Carbon monoxide detector is twenty bucks. Your call.” Then comes the Sorrowful Head Shake.

If he comes to visit, he will bring along trinkets that are designed to induce complete paranoia: cans of Mace that attach to your keychain, a plastic hood that filters out smoke in case you need to crawl out of your apartment during a fire (“Maybe you're not aware that most accidents occur at home”), a special doorjamb for use in a hotel room to prevent break-ins during the night, when you're most vulnerable. “You've got a constantly changing population in a hotel,” he'll say grimly, handing over the unwieldy, hard-to-pack device. “You think a security guard can keep track of everybody?”

At the very least, he'll show up with a sheaf of papers from the latest
Consumer Reports,
the bible of preparedness, which he keeps in a file cabi
net, indexed back to the Reagan administration. “Think it can't happen to you?” he'll say, pointing with his middle finger to a
Consumer Reports
article on long-term disability insurance. “Most companies are either cutting long-term disability or they never had it in the first place. A car hits you, you get paralyzed. How soon do you think your money is going to run out?” He stares at me, unblinking, his mouth a hard line. “Then what?”

I never know whether these are rhetorical questions, or if I'm supposed to answer him. Instead, his doomsday predictions fan my eternal flame of paranoia, which is always at a low burn. I imagine myself in an airless room, covered in a body cast, my arms stiffly protruding from my thin, dirty blanket. The only thing I can move is my eyes, which are fastened on my home health care aide—a recent parolee, because with my dwindling finances I can only afford someone in a work-release program. He is telling me he is quitting because I haven't paid him in weeks. “Don't make me mad,” he hollers, throwing down my bedpan. “My girlfriend used to make me mad.” I look on helplessly as flies gather on the pan to have lunch. Then they move to my face for an aperitif. “Please,” I whisper weakly, through cracked lips. “Get them off my face.” They crawl nimbly around my eyes.

“Bitch wouldn't shut her mouth!” he screams, upending my bedside tray.

The flies are laying eggs in my eyes.

My father studies my face, which is hypnotized with fear. Mission accomplished!

So it was with trepidation that he allowed me to enter the work force, where I would spend whole days away from his watchful eye. Armed with my partially completed degree in English, I attacked the want ads of the
Newark Star-Ledger
with enthusiasm. Hello, world! I spread out the paper on my folks' kitchen table and studied the ads, which glimmered with promise. I knew that I didn't want to be a teacher, the standard job assumption for an English major. Rather, my dream since I was knee-high was to be a writer for a newspaper or a magazine. As a kid, I devoured any magazine I could get my hands on. My mother's
Family Circle,
my father's
Time—
anything.

To me, the height of fun wasn't playing outside but pouring myself a big glass of cherry Kool-Aid and settling down with a nice, fresh issue of
Cracked
or
Mad.

I had my first subscription at nine, a monthly for kids with the very seventies name of
Bananas,
available through the Scholastic Book Club at school. How I lived for the arrival of my beloved
Bananas
! All of my favorite stars graced its covers: Farrah Fawcett, Chewbacca, the guy who played Juan Epstein from
Welcome Back, Kotter
(“Bob Hegyes Is a Real Person!” read the cover line). I spent hours poring over articles like “Catching Up with
Logan's Run.
” There was an advice column, groovily titled “Good Vibrations,” and a magic trick of the month offered by Magic Wanda, a kind of female Doug Henning who wore yellow overalls and signed her column “Love, peace and magic.”

Scholastic's sister publication,
Dynamite
, contained my very favorite feature, “Bummers,” a kvetch fest in which kids sent in complaints that began “Don't you hate it when…” If your grievance was sufficiently grating, it would run in the magazine, accompanied, excitingly, by an illustration. “Don't you hate it when your dog gets to stay up late and watch TV when you have to go to bed?” was a typical winner. I was brimming with complaints, even as a young child, so I feverishly composed pages of gripes to the “Bummers” desk. I was sure I had some hits. Don't you hate it when your mom makes you take a bath when you had one last week? Don't you hate it when your parents make you eat natural peanut butter instead of Jif like all of the other kids in the United States? Don't you hate it when you have to go to Colonial Williamsburg for summer vacation instead of Hersheypark, which has rides and a tour of a chocolate factory?

I never won, but it didn't dim my enthusiasm for
Dynamite—
or, for that matter,
Bananas.
I dreamed of working at
Mad
magazine, certain that it was a laff a minute. All I wanted for most of my life was to join the magical world of magazines. The problem, of course, was that I didn't have the faintest idea of how to go about it. During the summer of my senior year in college, I got my toehold with an internship at
New Jersey Monthly
magazine, where I fact-
checked articles on “The State's Best Subs.” If I had more
cojones,
I would have then set my sights on a job in New York, the print media capital of the United States, but in my suburban Jersey bubble, New York seemed as far away as Canada.

Plus, I loved my home state. Ah, Jersey, God's country! New Jersey in the eighties was my lotusland. We lived in a preppy, upper-middle-class town with immaculate sidewalks, but at the end of the day, it was still situated in New Jersey (unofficial slogan: “Parts of it are nice”). If you're from Jersey, you can wear all the preppy clothes you want, but no one will mistake you for a Bostonian. You may have carefully built up a sophisticated veneer, but eventually your Garden State origins are going to surface like a herpes sore. Maybe your nails are just a millimeter too long, or a “Yeah, right?” slips out when you agree with someone. It could be the moment when your hostility rises after hearing the Giants maligned, or—my recent roots-affirming situation—when someone cut me off as I was driving on the Garden State Parkway listening to Bad Company on WDHA, “New Jersey's own rock station,” while munching on a chicken parm sandwich. I sped up to tail them and screamed “Fuck you!” with my mouth full of half-chewed food.

Our town's ethnic mixture was Irish and Italian, and the town was occasionally rumored to be a Mob enclave. There were always whispers about the Badaraccos, the family that lived up our street. Frankie Badaracco was in my sister Heather's class. During recess one memorable day at her elementary school, Frankie was horsing around with a dirt bike. Somehow he managed to jam his finger in the spinning spokes of the wheel, where it sliced cleanly off and flew into the grassy expanse of the schoolyard. All of the kids, baffled and terrified by the sudden vulnerability of the loudmouthed Frankie, stood motionless, as if in a game of Freeze-Tag.

One kid managed to break free of his hypnosis and pedaled his bike frantically to the Badaraccos' house down the street. A few minutes later, a car roared up and Mr. Badaracco whipped out of the front seat, slamming the door. He strode toward us, holding up a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill between his thick fingers. “A hundred dollars for whoever finds my son's
finger,” he shouted hoarsely. The kids, relieved at having something to do, threw themselves into this gruesome version of an Easter egg hunt.

Years later, Heather was in a Hoboken bar, being chatted up by some guy.

“I'm from your hometown,” he said. “I'm a few grades below you.”

She squinted at him. “No you aren't,” she said. “It's a small town. I would recognize you.”

“I can prove it,” he said. “I found Frankie Badaracco's finger.”

What wasn't there to like about New Jersey? I never understood the jokes. I loved piling into my friend Janet's Chevy Impala with my friends and driving down the Garden State Parkway to the Jersey Shore, our perms brushing the ceiling of the car, all of us wearing Original Jams shorts and Esprit T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves. We'd load up with diet Cokes, baby oil for tanning, gum for chomping, and a boom box with cassette tapes of the Police and Prince, and off we would go to Bradley Beach in Point Pleasant, which only cost a dollar to get in. Then we'd oil up and “lay out” for eight hours, cultivating our melanomas in the broiling, polluted Jersey sun. I was the “edgy” one of my friends, because I wore Ton Sur Ton clothes and knew as much music trivia as the guys.

Jersey! I loved the bored, slutty girls who worked at the delis that their families owned, oblivious of the leers of all the men in line as they silently, sullenly handed you your change with your Taylor ham and cheese on a hard roll (“Taylor,” as far as I could tell, meant salty, dark, and leathery). I loved going to Bruce Springsteen concerts at the Meadowlands Arena and yelling “Brooooce!” When I barreled down the New Jersey Turnpike with my car radio blaring, no seat belt, I was at my most ragingly alive.

Celebrities may loathe the paparazzi, but not I. It's never a bad idea to involve them in your story. The presence of a gang of sweaty, shouting photographers can add a frisson of excitement and an action-movie element to an otherwise conventional profile. Although if the two of you are being chased, it might mean that they are mistaking you for a “galpal,” which is incredibly insulting to your celebrity. They are used to scoring models and hot bartenders, not pale, spongy journalists, so do not be insulted if they make an extra, even frantic, effort to evade pursuers.

In one case, when I was in Los Angeles with Ben Affleck, this did not happen. During our meeting, he was fragile and uncharacteristically moody, having recently broken up with Jennifer Lopez. Usually press people adore him because he's bright and quippy and delivers just the right funny, original quotes that add sparkle to a piece. On this day, however, he declined to perform and I faced my usual dilemma: While I understood completely that he didn't feel like being a dancing monkey, I needed to secure a decent interview. My patter flopped (Courtney Love had given a particularly unhinged radio interview that morning and I relayed some of the gruesome tidbits, but he didn't bite), so I asked eight questions in a row about the movie he was promoting. Nice, safe ground, and I saw his tensed shoulders relax a little.

Soon, however, I had to ask him about Jennifer, and I began to sweat. Apparently they had made a pact not to talk about the relationship. “You're not going to get anything,” his rep said. My editors wanted something, anything. You can squeeze a lot of publicity out of even one sentence.

I tried the “let's work together” approach. “You know I have to ask you about Jennifer,” I began as my neck started to itch. He stared at me, his mouth forming a small, ironic smile. Uh-oh. Hives were starting to erupt. This always happened when things got awkward. Why, why didn't I wear a turtleneck?

“Ask away,” he said with a sharp laugh. “You can always try.”

We began a long dance. He claimed that the media turned the two of them into a spectacle; I gently countered by saying that they helped the media along. He argued that they didn't court the paparazzi. They didn't pose for any magazine covers and only did one or two major interviews. They were just living their lives, he said, but the paparazzi captured their every waking moment. My hives, at this point, were in full effect. It's never pleasant to confront people, but when the person is a film star, it adds a surreal element that throws you completely off balance. I prayed he couldn't see that my neck looked like a plate of ziti. Chin down. Chin. Down.

After some tensely polite back-and-forth, he decided to prove his point to me. He grabbed his keys and suggested we go get a taco at Poquito Mas, one of his favorite Mexican joints. “Just watch,” he said, smoothly piloting his black Beemer into the parking lot. “This will take three minutes. Maybe four.”

Sure enough, just as I was placing my order for a veg burrito, a guy in a pink shirt appeared and began snapping photos from a van in the parking lot. Frequently, Affleck said, the parking valet tips off photographers for a couple of bucks. We sat down in the taco joint's outdoor space with our trays. “Hide the tape recorder,” he said quietly. I shoved it behind his supersized soda. I always try to hide the tape recorder, anyway, in the vain hope that the celebrity is lulled into thinking it's a regular conversation. We proceeded with the interview as the guy snapped away. Because we were laughing a lot, Pink Shirt thought it was flirtatious banter and ventured
closer and closer.

After we finished our meal, Affleck glanced at him and said, “Uh-oh. He's losing interest. We need to look like we're hiding something.” This was becoming sort of fun. As I took my tray to the trash can, I pretended to do a double take and then squished myself unobtrusively into a corner, as I had seen celebrities do. I crossed my arms and kept my eyes down. He went bonkers. Snap snap snap snap snap. “Let's hold hands,” Ben whispered.

“Too obvious,” I said back.

“Well, then, I'll give you a quick hug,” he said under his breath. He put his arm around me. I tried in vain to relax and assume a loving expression. “You're waaaay too stiff,” he whispered in my ear, which made me laugh. We walked to the car as another photographer pulled up in an SUV and Pink Shirt, three feet away, snapping continuously as he shuffled backward. This is why there are so many shots in the tabloids of famous people looking irritated. Invariably a caption will run that says that the celebrity is frowning because they're heartbroken or fat or rehab-bound or out of work, but ten to one they were just exasperated because they literally couldn't walk forward. If you stop and pose, sometimes they will drift away. Sometimes they yell things. (“Big fan! Big fan! Over here! Can you look in the camera?”) In the case of Pink Shirt, he was eerily silent, even when Affleck asked him questions.

The next day, when I returned to New York, there was a bidding war in the tabloids for the photos of Ben Affleck and his new paramour. One of them paid eleven thousand dollars for the shots. The photo that ran shows Affleck, his arm tightly around me, making me laugh so hard that I'm showing some unfortunate Seabiscuit-style choppers. We looked for all the world like carefree lovers, which neatly underscored Affleck's assertion that despite many shots of himself and Lopez making out in color-coordinated outfits, he wasn't always stoking the media frenzy. After all, he was just getting a taco, minding his own business, right? He proved his point, the photographer got paid, and I got to be Mystery Galpal for the day. Everybody won.

 

A similar fiasco occurred during an encounter in London with Mel Gibson.

We were having lunch at the Ivy, a restaurant that was the ultimate in trendiness at the time of our chat. Earlier in the day, I had joined him at a sound studio, where he was recording dialogue for
Braveheart,
the story of William Wallace, the Scottish rebel who liberated his country from English rule in the thirteenth century. In those pre
–Passion of the Christ
days, Mel still had the ability to quicken the female pulse, and on that particular morning, he was dubbing dialogue from a love scene. The sound room's inhabitants were two schlumpy sound guys, Mel, and me, so as he said the same line over and over to his onscreen ladylove, he directed it at me, just to be goofy.

“Ah love yeh,” he said in a Scottish burr, staring at me intently. “Alwehs hahv.” He wasn't satisfied with the delivery—it was a pivotal moment in the film—so he did the line probably ten or twelve times, while I, God help me, fell deeply in love. I like to think that my presence enhanced his acting abilities on that day, because I stared back at him with the kind of unblinking worship that even the actress playing his medieval sweetheart couldn't have reasonably conjured up.

Then we jumped into a car to head for the Ivy, while Mel and his sturdy English driver joked around the whole way. At the restaurant, he was funny and affable and occasionally ate off of my plate. The food sharing went one step further after he ordered some spinach. As he talked, tiny pieces of spinach took to the air, gently mingling with my fish, like a garnish of chopped parsley. I didn't mind.

As we chatted away, a manager stole over and whispered discreetly into Gibson's ear. It seemed that the paparazzi had been notified and were massing outside of the Ivy. As we got up to leave, Gibson instructed me to keep my head down. “Don't smile or wave,” he said. “Don't make eye contact. Just get into the car as quickly as you can.”

When you see photographers jostle a celebrity, it seems exciting, but it's actually disorienting and—when a lot of them have gathered—frightening. As we attempted to get to the car, hordes of hollering photographers blocked our way, flashbulbs firing. It was chaos. Head down. No smiling. Gibson grabbed my arm and propelled me decisively forward, in a very
Braveheart
manner.

“Mel!” they yelled in the tumult. “Who's the girl?” I suddenly realized that they assumed that he was cheating on his wife, Robin, with me. Which, for a man who fended off strippers, had to be a little bit of an insult, let's face it.

“Who is she?” screamed one photographer. They surrounded me as I attempted to open the car door, one of them stomping on my foot as he got pushed. Gibson's driver quickly forced the door open and shoved me inside. My heart was jumping as though I'd had a hit of crack. How did people get used to this? They pounded on the door of the car and chased us down the street as we pulled away.

When I returned to my office in New York, there was a packet of pictures sent by a news agency waiting in our photo department labeled “Mel Gibson and an unknown woman.” I am smiling. I am making eye contact. I look as if I am atop a float in a parade.