Leading Man (10 page)

“You just want me to introduce you to the actress who plays Sally,” Robin said, deflecting the compliment.

“Actually, the one who played Peppermint Patty was kind of cute.”

“She’s a lesbian,” said Robin. “Only a lesbian could truly capture that character.”

“Peppermint Patty was a lesbian?”

“Oh, c’mon,” Robin said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “She wore Birkenstocks. She coached a softball team. How many clues do you need?”

“By the way,” I asked, “where was Snoopy? How come he wasn’t in the play?”

“Snoopy?” Robin answered, straight-faced. “Snoopy is dead.”

Both Patty and Sally were indeed cute, and the actress playing Lucy wasn’t bad either, but I hadn’t nudged Robin in the ribs once during the play. I just couldn’t get my mind off Mars’s accident. I kept seeing the image of Johnny’s body being loaded into an ambulance. I kept thinking about Samantha. I tried to recall my last conversation with her. We’d had one of our late-night chats about a month earlier. Mostly we talked about movies—she had just seen
The Dancer Upstairs
, I had just seen
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
. Johnny had just left to start shooting
Don’t Tread on Me
. It was weird, but suddenly Sammy seemed farther out of reach than ever. Before we got to the restaurant, I made Robin wait while I tried calling Sam again on my cell phone. Her voice mail was still full. Robin put her arm around me and did her best to cheer me up. “Let’s get drunk,” she said.

The Corner Bistro is a hole in the wall at the corner of Jane and West Fourth Street that happens to serve New York’s finest hamburgers—and cheapest beer. The place was always packed with an esoteric crowd—artists dressed like homeless people, or homeless people dressed like artists, I could never tell. The
Charlie Brown
gang
took up the whole back room, where the booths were located. Robin made a beeline for Peppermint Patty. I couldn’t blame her. She was an adorable pixie. The cute spray of freckles on her nose did wonders to soften the piercings on her eyebrow and lip.

After a few beers, I began to loosen up. I even tried flirting with Sally for a while, although slurring has never been my best pickup technique. Then, as was bound to happen, the subject of Johnny Mars’s accident was broached. The actor doing the broaching was the guy who played Schroeder, a handsome but pompous Kevin Kline type who’d been annoying the waitress all night by barking beer orders in mock-Shakespearean oratory (“Wench, more ale, anon!”). When I first spotted him onstage crouching over his keyboards, I took an instant dislike to him.

“I worked with Johnny Mars once,” the pompous guy announced to the room. “I had a role in
Rocket’s Red Glare
 …”

“Some role!” one of the other Dirty Halos interrupted, laughing. “You played a hotel bellboy. You were on-screen for two seconds …”

“I still worked with him,” pompous guy continued.

“You didn’t work with him—you worked with his
luggage
 …”

“
Rocket’s Red Glare
—is that the one where Johnny Mars throws the bad guy off the Golden Gate Bridge?” asked Sally.

“No,
Rocket’s Red Glare
is the one where he throws him from the Washington Monument,” Peppermint Patty
said. “
Give Me Death
is the one where he throws him off the Golden Gate.”

“Worst actor I’ve ever worked with,” pompous guy continued, undeterred by the interruptions. “Seriously, the man could not remember his lines. They had to hold up idiot cards with his dialogue written on them. And that voice! Like a mouth full of wet paper towels.”

“I saw him in
Coriolanus
at the Public Theater,” the actress who played Marcie chimed in, pinching her nose. “I don’t know why he keeps trying to be taken seriously as an actor. Isn’t it enough being a movie star?”

Robin was giving me concerned glances. Listening to a bunch of downtown theatrical poseurs deride the acting chops of my ex-girlfriend’s critically injured husband was not the sort of cheering up she had in mind for me. She could see that the conversation was getting on my nerves. And that I was finishing my fifth beer. “Has anybody seen
Seabiscuit
yet?” she said, changing the subject. “I hear it’s really good …”

“A toast to Johnny Mars!” pompous guy went on, ignoring Robin. “Living proof that it’s better to have luck than talent!”

“Fuck you, you pretentious shithead!” I shouted. Pompous guy wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard about Johnny Mars before—most of it I’d probably said myself. But for some reason, tonight the sentiment was making my blood boil. “I remember you in
Rocket’s Red Glare
,” I lied. “You sucked as a bellhop. You were the worst bellhop I’ve ever seen!” Robin gathered our coats and started navigating us both toward the exit as the room full of actors watched in stunned, open-jawed silence. “And you know
what else?” I shouted over my shoulder as Robin shoved me out the door. “You stank as Schroeder!”

For a few silent moments, Robin and I stood outside at the corner of West Fourth and Jane. She glared at me with an expression I’d never seen on her face before. I was sure she was going to slug me. When she took a step closer, I squeezed my eyes shut and prepared for the blow. But instead all I felt were her warm arms wrapping around me, holding me tight.

The next time I heard Samantha’s voice was at sunrise on New Year’s Day, 2004, about five months after the accident. I’d spent New Year’s Eve on the red-eye flying back from Los Angeles—I’d had an interview with Woody Harrelson, speaking of red eyes—and when I got home at six in the morning, the blinking light on my phone told me I had voice mail. “Hey Max,” Sammy said. “I got your e-mail. Hearing from you meant a lot to me.
You
mean a lot to me. Things are so horrible right now, I can’t even begin to describe it. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you. But I really do want to see you. I
need
to see you …”

She sounded weird, like she was talking underwater, or maybe under sedation. Although, given what she’d been through over those five months, I doubted a drug had been invented that could soothe her pain.

The good news was that Johnny was alive. A few hours after the fall, he woke up in his hospital suite in South Dakota, looked at the room full of doctors and nurses, and said, “Oops.” The fall obviously hadn’t affected his
love of a good one-liner. In fact, incredibly, miraculously, the fall had barely mussed his hair. Aside from a couple of broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, he was otherwise undented. The doctors were astonished. But then they ran a battery of tests and scans to discover what had caused Johnny to black out while rappelling in the first place. They found a tiny cancerous nodule attached to his pineal gland. That was bad news, very, very bad.

As I learned from the parade of experts making the rounds on the cable news networks, the pineal gland is the mysterious pinecone-shaped part of the brain that regulates sleep, aging, sexuality, some motor control, and, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, much of an individual’s personality. Depending on how aggressive the cancer growing inside Johnny’s head was, the prognosis ranged from grim to devastating. Tremors, seizures, temporary or permanent blindness, amnesia, hearing loss, personality changes, premature aging, muscle atrophy, and partial or total paralysis—this was what Johnny had to look forward to in the three, or five, or, if he was really lucky, seven years he had left to live.

According to the experts on TV, Johnny’s was an incredibly rare form of brain cancer affecting fewer than one in a million people. Roughly the same statistical chances, I reckoned, for the son of an Alaskan lumberjack to come to Hollywood and end up one of the world’s most famous action stars. To be chosen by fate for fame and fortune only to have all your success reduced to rubble by a tumor the size of a poppy seed—this was tragedy on a scale that would impress even ancient Greek playwrights. That the disease had been discovered thanks to a freak
accident on Mount Rushmore just made the whole thing all the more appallingly bizarre and ironic.

Understandably, Mars’s first impulse—or the first impulse of his management team—was to get out of the spotlight. Production on
Don’t Tread on Me
was “suspended indefinitely,” as the press release from the studio delicately put it. Johnny, with Sammy at his side, retreated to his Upper West Side penthouse, seldom venturing out for anything but trips to the hospital for more futile medical tests. The media, at the beginning, respected Johnny’s personal space. They treated the star with kid gloves, turning his accident on Mount Rushmore into a public crusade for greater safety on movie sets. Johnny’s beautiful young wife, meanwhile, was given the sobriquet “Saint Samantha,” a reward for her stoicism and resolve in the face of her husband’s tragic circumstances.

“Oh, shut up,” Sammy said when I jokingly used the nickname during another late-night call. She started making a lot of them around that time. Sammy had always been a night owl, but since the accident she’d been having even more trouble sleeping. They were about the saddest conversations I’d ever had with another human being. “Johnny is in denial,” she told me in one of them. “He really thinks he can beat this thing. But he’s deteriorating every day. He sometimes gets so weak he can barely walk on his own. Just getting out of bed and into the bathroom in the morning can be a huge ordeal. One of the doctors suggested he get a wheelchair. I thought Johnny was going to slug him.”

“He’s got you,” I told her. “He’s always been lucky to have you.”

“Well, he needs me now,” she said. “I guess I could be grateful for that.”

She was breaking my heart all over again.

You can’t starve the media forever. Sooner or later the beast grows hungry. Without fresh pictures, the paparazzi eventually got more aggressive and began following Sammy whenever she left the penthouse. Without new facts, the tabloids started mixing truth with gossip. Sometimes even I had trouble telling the difference. There was a particularly nasty rumor going around, for instance, that the only reason Mars had married Samantha was that he got her pregnant, and that Sammy had miscarried a few months after their wedding. Preposterous, I thought, until I realized that the timing sort of made sense. Sammy could have been pregnant that night she turned up distraught at my door at two in the morning.

There were also rumors that Johnny was consulting with quack doctors promising to cure his cancer with “breakthrough” treatments being developed in South Korean clinics. This turned out to be true. Johnny was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on untested experimental therapies that no Western scientist (or insurance company) would touch. Facing such a grim prognosis from his traditional-medicine doctors in New York, what did Johnny have to lose? At least the Eastern quacks offered him hope. But the press had a field day, printing made-up stories about Johnny consulting with a shaman and taking mescaline extract mixed with steroids.

The worst rumors, however, were the ones about Johnny’s
tumor supposedly altering his personality. From the media vantage, personality changes were one of the more sensational symptoms of having a cancer growing in your skull. So there were dozens of items in the tabloids about how Mars had become a monster at home, raging at his wife, firing household staff, making impossible demands of his doctors and nurses. The funny thing was, I knew from my phone calls with Samantha that the exact opposite was true. There had indeed been a personality change, but for the better. Sure, Johnny suffered from bouts of depression and was understandably having a hard time accepting his situation. But now that he needed Sam, he was kinder to her, softer, more loving. She certainly wasn’t getting left behind with the luggage anymore.

Eventually, Mars decided to come out of hiding to “take control of his press,” as publicists say. A crisis management expert was summoned and a media plan was hatched. First thing they did was hire a ghostwriter and commission a quickie memoir. It was written, printed, and in bookstores in under four months, a new publishing industry record. Then, to help plug the book, Johnny and Sammy went on a chat show charm offensive.

“Welcome back to
Larry King Live
. Joining us now from New York, Johnny Mars, actor, health activist, and author of the new memoir
Fight of My Life: How I Lived Before I Died
. With Johnny is his lovely wife, a terrific gal, Samantha Mars. Johnny will be fifty-two years old tomorrow. Happy birthday, Johnny!”

Less than a year had passed since the accident, but already Mars was a sliver of his former self. His once ruggedly handsome face was gaunt and pasty, and his thick mane of hair was beginning to thin. Even Larry King looked healthier. Sammy sat by his side, her arm hooked under his, and gazed up at her husband with Nancy Reagan eyes. She looked skinny. And tired. And not all that thrilled to be on TV.

“So, Johnny, how are you feeling these days?” King began the interview. “You look terrific!”

“I feel terrific, Larry,” Johnny answered, his rumbling voice still capable of setting off seismographs. “Honestly, Larry, I feel like I’m growing stronger every day. I’ve changed my diet. I’ve been living healthier. No more cigars, isn’t that right, Sammy?”

Samantha nodded and continued smiling.

“And I’ve been working with doctors and scientists around the world to find a cure for brain cancers of all sorts,” Johnny went on. “Not just Western scientists, but also doctors of Eastern medicine. They’ve been making amazing advancements in brain cancer treatment in places like South Korea. We’re still a long way from a cure, Larry, but there’s growing hope for people like me.”

“That’s great, Johnny. Sammy, let me get personal with you for a minute,” the talk show host said, turning his attention to my ex-girlfriend. “I’m going to ask what everyone is wondering. What about intimacy? How has all this changed your physical relationship with Johnny?” Samantha looked dumbfounded by the question, and embarrassed, but quickly recovered. “Oh, you know,
Larry,” she said, laughing, “Johnny has never really needed any help in that department. He’s always been
very
healthy that way.”