But Enough About Me (9 page)

She was talking with what seemed to be an assistant about procuring organic food. As she chatted, she gestured with her arm and released a little cloud of incense scent, which I surreptitiously sniffed. Patchouli? Myrrh? I took a deeper sniff. Sandalwood? Chinese Rain?

She hung up the phone. “Thanks,” she said with a half-smile. Then she turned to Lenny, who was lingering nearby, and the two of them glided out the door, presumably to go have sex somewhere.

I barely had time to recover from grooviness overload when I had my second encounter with a boldface name. I was walking purposefully past
Jann's office in my new Doc Martens—worn, daringly, with a dress—when I heard a commotion. “I know the answer! I know it!” some guy was hollering in an oddly familiar voice. All of a sudden, Jann popped his head out of the office and looked around. His eyes fastened on me. “Come in here a minute,” he said. Then his head disappeared.

Weak-kneed, I walked in and almost collided with the barrel chest of Sylvester Stallone, exalted hero of all of my Jersey comrades, who loyally forgave the release of that year's
Tango & Cash.
At that point, I hadn't realized that most celebrities are smaller than expected, so I was amazed to see he was around five foot nine.

“Your boss and I have a bet going,” he boomed at me.

“Yes,” said Jann. “We want to know who it was that said, ‘Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.'”

I looked from one to the other and I cursed, for the umpteenth time, my state school education. How I wished I could just rattle off the answer.

Do something. “I'll find out!” I piped. I scurried out the door and zoomed down the hall toward the research department. “
Bartlett's Quotations
!” I barked to a guy who was quietly reading. Without looking up, he handed the book to me. I paged through it with shaking hands and found the quotation. Lord Acton. It was Lord Acton! Of course!

I raced back to Jann's office and burst in. “It was Lord Acton,” I announced in a bemused way, as if to confirm what I knew all along.

“I was right!” said Jann.

“What?” blustered Stallone. “Ah, jeez.” Keyed up, he reached over and gave me a playful punch in the arm. I reeled backward and almost fell over, my arms pinwheeling. They both laughed.

“Sorry, kid,” he said.

That was my last celebrity encounter for at least a year, until I was given my first assignment, a ten-minute phone interview with Mary Tyler Moore for a special television issue that the editors were putting together. She and I were to discuss
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and even though I
had seen every episode, I amassed research for days and wrote out pages of questions.

When she called, right on time, I said what I had rehearsed, which was, “Hello, Ms. Moore. It's a pleasure to talk to you.”

“Ohh,” she said in that lilting, friendly voice of hers. “Just call me Mary.”

Phone interviews are odd exercises because you must conjure up an intimacy in short order and with no visual cues. Are they smiling? Frowning? Although sometimes, under the cover of anonymity, both parties can slip into a cozy, confiding tone.

Not in this case. “I saw you in FAO Schwartz a few weeks ago,” I said, deviating from my script. Ugh, what was she supposed to say to that?

“Oh, ah, yes,” she said helpfully. “I was buying something for a friend's son.”

I was so nervous that I wasn't listening. “You were signing some autographs,” I said. I was doing the classic, useless, dead-end move of flummoxed fans: pointing out something that said celebrity did. (“Hey, I saw you on the
Today
show.”)

“Yes,” she said.

Silence.

“You should have won the Oscar for
Ordinary People,
” I went on desperately.

“Thank you,” she said.

Silence.

I scrambled onto stable ground with some questions, and as she gamely answered I constantly interrupted her so that our conversation was in mosaic form.

“It's interesting that—”

“What?”

“I was just saying that it's—”

“—it's interesting, then? What's interesting?”

“That—”

“Right.”

After ten minutes, it was all over. I signed off by telling her it was my first interview. (Another mistake: Hey, seven-time Emmy winner! They sent an amateur to talk to you!) She faked surprise.

“Well, you did wonderfully,” she said graciously. I will always be grateful that she was my first interview.

My first prolonged face-to-face encounter was about as far from Mary Tyler Moore as you could get.

“I have a ‘q and a' for you,” said Karen, one of my editors, stopping by my desk. “He's sort of difficult, but I think you can do it. You'll have to go to his hotel.”

I didn't care who it was. “I'll do it,” I volunteered, leaping up out of my chair. “I'm in.” For the love of sweet Jesus, sit down, I told myself. No need to stand.

“Good,” she said. “Here's the number of his publicist. Set it up as soon as you can.” She rushed off, distracted.

I looked down at the paper. Oh, God, no. Johnny Rotten. The moody founding father of punk was prone to outbursts, or, worse, would occasionally refuse to talk at all. I loved the Sex Pistols so much that I decided to forge ahead. He seemed to have a sense of humor, anyway. When Malcolm McLaren discovered him, he was wearing an I Hate Pink Floyd T-shirt, and how could you go wrong with someone who once called sex “two minutes of squelching noises”? Still, the memory of his notoriously combative exchange with a hopelessly uptight Tom Snyder on his late-night TV show lingered unpleasantly in my mind.

On the day of the interview, my knees were literally shaking. I timidly made my way to his New York hotel room and knocked on the door, which was ajar. Nothing. After a few more knocks, I pushed it open.

He sat sullenly at the window with his back to me. He had on some sort of plaid suit and his hair stood up in angry yellow tufts. Then he slowly turned his head.

“I hate your mag,” he said sourly. Then he turned back around.

“Now, Mr. Rotten—,” I began.

“—Horrible,” he said in a singsong voice, like a child. “Horrible, horrible, horrible.” He stared out the window.

I stood, immobile. What to do? Clearly, he wouldn't care that I was a “big fan.” Did he want me to leave? I reasoned that I should act as he was acting.

“Well, you obviously want publicity or I wouldn't be here,” I snapped. One of my knees was jumping crazily. “So let's just get this over with.”

He stayed motionless. I looked around his hotel room in desperation and spotted a room-service tray that held a half-eaten bowl of cereal and a large container of milk, which I recklessly picked up.

“Wow. Milk,” I said. “Pretty punk rock.”

To my profound relief, he turned around with a smirk.

Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots was moving restlessly around his cavernous hotel room in Beverly Hills. He sat down. He stood up and paced, unsmiling, then sat down again. Recently sprung from rehab for heroin addiction, he looked far from healthy but still decadently glam in his tight jeans and black T-shirt, his nails polished dark, his near-translucent skin eerily pale.

He was rhapsodizing about heroin, clearly one of his favorite subjects. “I love to do it,” he said. “I'd love to do it right now.” His long, dry, twiglike fingers plucked insistently at his jeans while he talked. It looked like he could rub them together and a fire would start. “If I had some of it on me right now, I guarantee I could get you to do it in a second,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.

I told him I was too afraid. He fastened his flat gaze on me with new intensity. “Then I would say, ‘Afraid? That's okay. I'll show you how,'” he said. “I've got two clean needles in my pocket. If you don't want to shoot up, you can snort it, or smoke it.” He leaned forward. “It's the best high you'll ever get. It's like you're being embraced by God.”

My heart was hammering.

“The first time I ever did it, I felt like I found the keys to unlock the doors to all the secrets.” He leaned over and inspected a silver room-service tray that sat between us. He selected some roasted vegetables and dropped them into his mouth. “I don't eat very much, you know,” he said. His fingers were shiny with oil.

“It goes right to the pit of your stomach,” he continued. “Then it crawls up to your lungs, then it rushes to your head. And it's warm, and you just close your eyes and smile. And…it's hard talking about it.” His eyes searched the room. “I wanna smoke a cigarette or something.” He jumped up and darted over to the minibar, grabbed a few vodkas, and pleaded with me not to tell his publicist. He poured them into a cup, glancing furtively at the door and theorizing that if she didn't get too close, she would assume it was water.

He continued to press me to try heroin, telling me in a clear, quiet voice that if I simply said the word, he would order a limo and he could indoctrinate me as the car drove through the Hollywood Hills. This is the paradox of an addict: Ten minutes prior, he had been saying with obvious misery that drugs had stolen his soul and ruined his marriage, that he had turned his brother on to them, transforming him into “one of the undead.” Now he was regarding his mesmerized visitor with vampiric greed.

For a moment, I thought about it. If heroin happened to be on your to-do list, there would certainly be worse ways to try it than with a slinky rock star as your limo glided through the gardenia-scented canyons of the Hills. And while he wasn't particularly vigorous, drugs hadn't affected his darkly glamorous looks—aside from his eyes, which were expressionless like two black, shiny buttons.

“Just say the word,” he told me quietly.

My mouth was dry. “May I use the facilities for a minute?” I rasped. Normally I would never have asked, but ex-users aren't fazed when you disappear into bathrooms.

I closed the door, ran the water, and called Heather on my cell phone.

“Please advise,” I said in a low voice. “I'm in Scott Weiland's bathroom. Listen. He wants me to try heroin.”

Silence. “Now?”

“Well, he has to make arrangements.”

“Are you insane? Get out of there.”

“It's crazy. He's very persuasive. He brought up Keith Richards.”

Heather snorted impatiently. “Everybody brings up Keith Richards as the heroin poster boy. You know what? George Burns lived to be one hundred and three, or maybe it was one hundred and two, and he smoked and drank.”

“I don't understand. What's your point?”

“My point is that he's a rarity. Most people don't live to be one hundred and two by smoking and drinking. And heroin is only good the first time.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone says that. They say you can never achieve the high that you get the first time. Listen, why are you calling me? Are you really asking my advice? And can he hear you talking in the bathroom? What does he think you're doing?”

I thought about it. “I don't think he really cares,” I said.

“My point exactly. Get out.”

I emerged from the bathroom determined to take control of the situation. Before he could resume the Wonders of Heroin seminar, I steered him toward the subject of his new album, which sufficiently distracted him. As I quickly wrapped it up and grabbed my tape recorder, he asked me one more time if I was sure I didn't want to try it. For the first time that day, the corners of his mouth twitched into a smile.

“I'm sure,” I said.

When I got back to my own, decidedly less elaborate hotel room, I did what I usually do to calm myself down: I called my father. He was, of course, always willing to dispense advice, but his actual words were less important than his overall tone. Even the way he answered the phone was in the classic, genial manner of every small-town hardware store owner or Old Spice–
scented Rotary Club guy at a pancake breakfast:
And what can I do for you today? Uh-huh! Well, I think that can be arranged!

“Hello?” he said expectantly, cheerfully. His manner is classic Midwestern Hearty (broad, accessible, pleasant comments laced with wry observations about family) as opposed to Southern Hearty (flirty, teasing) or Northeastern Hearty (remote until the booze kicks in). If I answered the phone at all, it was with suspicion and dread. Not my father. No caller I.D. for him. He'd rather be happily surprised. Maybe it's one of the girls! Or Vern Leister, my old buddy from Penney's! Wonder what he's up to! Or maybe the folks at United Way, needing me to help out this Saturday for the charity golf tournament! Well, I think that can be arranged! Wrong number? No problem! Have a nice day, now!

“Hi, Dad,” I said, shrugging into a hotel robe and clicking on the TV's movie menu.

“Are you in Los Angeles? How did your interview go?” I could hear Lite-FM music playing in the background. My father lived in a soothing, wall-to-wall-carpeted world where the thermostat was rigged on a timer. Everything was easy. Even their gas fireplace flamed up with the press of a button.

“He was a little unhinged. I'm fine, though. What are you doing?”

“Oh, I'm just putting pictures in a photo album and paying some bills. Your mother's outside gardening. Her roses have beetles and she's on a mission. And then, let's see, later we're going to watch a movie that I rented, something Tim Wiggin recommended.”

My blood pressure began to drop. This was just what I needed. “What did you rent?”

“I knew you were going to ask me that. Let's see. Uh…it's in the living room somewhere.” There was the sound of him rummaging around. “I never know where your mother puts things. Oh, I don't know where it is. I think it's called
Little Foot.
”

Movie titles were not my father's strong suit. “I can't say I've heard of
Little Foot,
” I said carefully. “Do you know who stars in it?”

“Oh. Jeez. The guy who was in that crime show in the seventies. You know.”

“What's the plot?” I prompted. “Is it some sort of Native American drama?”

He thought for a moment. “It might be. No, wait, it isn't. I think it's about adoption.”

“Well, it's not important. Are you two okay?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “You all right, honey? Are you having some room service? You should relax. Treat yourself.”

“I will,” I said.

I didn't tell him about my encounter. Why worry him?