Leading Man (13 page)

The day I was leaving for Rome, just a few hours before my flight, the interview finally happened. We conducted it at the superluxe Plaza Athénée, in the Royal Suite, a four-thousand-square-foot two-bedroom architectural ode to excess filled with stunning French antiques, embroidered silk drapes, and Italian marble mosaics. Blaring from a fancy Bose stereo was a track from the new CD Courtney would be releasing in a few months, a sexy dance tune called “Contaminated.” You couldn’t say she didn’t have a theme. Scattered around the vast living room were garment
bags packed with priceless French fashions, most delivered gratis by their designers, each hoping Courtney would be photographed wearing his label. That’s one of the ironies of celebrity: The famous can buy whatever they want, but people keep giving them stuff for free. On an armchair in the corner was the script for
Nap and Jo
, along with some biographies of Joséphine de Beauharnais and a book of vocal exercises Courtney’s dialect coach must have given her.

Courtney, it turned out, hadn’t stepped foot outside of the suite since checking in ten days ago.

“I know I should be really excited about all this—being in Paris and making my first movie and all,” she said in an accent as thick as grits. “But to tell you the truth, I’m really homesick. I miss my dogs. I miss my mom. I miss Alabama.” She began biting at her fingernails, which had been nibbled to stubs. “Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to survive three whole months here. I wish I’d never agreed to make this movie. It’s making me miserable and we haven’t even started shooting it yet. I just want to go home.”

I couldn’t help myself. I actually felt bad for the kid. Not too many years ago she’d been playing with dolls. Now she practically was one, trapped in a $15,000 a night Barbie dream house.

In Rome, even the cab drivers have a certain dolce vita pizzazz. The one who picked me up at Leonardo da Vinci Airport wore a white silk scarf that flapped rakishly out
the car window as he sped along the E80 toward the city’s center. When we circled the Trevi Fountain near my hotel, I wanted to lean out my own window and shout “
Ciao
, baby!” to the whole gorgeous town. Visiting Rome always made me feel like Marcello Mastroianni.

On this trip, I’d be interviewing Leonard Cox on the set of
The Halo Helix
, a religious techno-thriller with a high-concept hook that was getting the actor in trouble with the same critics who would later demand that Tom Hanks be excommunicated for
The Da Vinci Code
. Leonard was playing a handsome young Vatican priest who discovers a secret plot to resurrect the body of Jesus Christ by cloning fossilized DNA discovered in the recently unearthed Tomb of Talpiot, the burial ground where Jesus’ body is believed to be interred. The experiment goes horribly awry, naturally, and the replicated Christ takes off on a murderous rampage. Not surprisingly, the real Catholic Church had already condemned the film as blasphemy and a boycott was being organized in America, even though nobody outside the production company had yet to see a minute of footage.

“I don’t understand why everyone is so upset, I really don’t,” Leonard said, chain-smoking cigarettes in his trailer at Cinecittà Studios. He was dressed in full priestly regalia, including a clerical cassock and cape, and a black cap with a pom-pom on top. A few of his character’s props—a gold cross, a leather Bible, a vile of Jesus’ chromosomes—were on the coffee table, along with Leonard’s script pages and several empty bottles of Rossa Toro, an Italian energy drink.

Famously brainy, Leonard had dropped out of Harvard
Law School to pursue an acting career, and succeeded brilliantly. But when it came to people skills, he was considered to be kind of an imbecile. He not only waged creative battles with his directors and producers, but also with set designers and costumers and even the craft services caterers. Screenwriters particularly hated his guts—along with rewriting his own lines, Leonard would take it upon himself to rewrite everyone else’s, too. His meddling added months to production schedules and millions to budgets. But his movies usually made money, and were always critically applauded. Journalists loved the guy. You could turn on your recorder, go out for a cup of coffee, and when you returned an hour later you’d have a tape full of killer material. “These Catholic protesters,” Leonard went on, “what’s their beef? We’re making a movie here. Just a movie. But they’re acting like we’re molesting baby Jesus, for Christ’s sake. Like we’re finger-fucking the Virgin Mary …”

After the interview, I took a long stroll through Rome, making stops at the usual tourist traps. The Colosseum. The Pantheon. The Spanish Steps. The ancientness of the city put me in a pensive mood. If I’d been born here two thousand years ago, I asked myself, what sort of person would I have been? A scribbler of scrolls, perhaps? An interviewer of ancient Roman celebrities? Tell me, Plautus, what’s your new play about? Marcus Aurelius, if you were a tree, what sort of tree would you be? Forget two thousand years. I’d been born just thirty-five years ago, and I still wasn’t sure what sort of person I was. I wondered if this was what I was going to be doing for the rest my life, hopping from city to city, making the air my
home, turning myself into the
Flying Dutchman
of the 747 fleet.

The funny thing about watching stuff blow up on a soundstage is that it’s almost always boring. Film crews make a big fuss about it, passing out foam earplugs and ostentatiously shouting “Fire in the hole!” before rolling the cameras. But it inevitably involves hours of tedious waiting as safeties are checked and double-checked, and the blast, when it finally goes off, never looks or sounds as fiery as it seems on the screen. Besides, on the film set I was visiting in Prague—a $100 million Jerry Bruckheimer action movie called
Boom!
—I would have been better off saving the earplugs for the dialogue.

Not that I was complaining. Prague was one of my favorite spots behind the old Iron Curtain. I loved the city’s ancient clock towers and stone bridges, not to mention its dirt-cheap beer and delightfully seedy all-night casinos (one of my favorites was located right next door to the Museum of Communism). Also, I had a particular interest in
Boom!
’s leading man, Chuck Fuse, the twenty-nine-year-old ex–X Game champion who was transitioning into acting. He certainly had the hair for a big-screen career—an overgrown pompadour so wavy his stylists probably needed Dramamine to brush it. There were rumors that Fuse was being considered to replace Johnny Mars as Jack Montana. Nobody at the studio would say so in print—nobody wanted to appear callous, especially as Mars continued to deteriorate—but the franchise must go on. Obviously, a hit with
Boom!
wouldn’t hurt Fuse’s odds.

Before taking off on my grand tour of Europe, I’d had lunch with a studio executive at Elaine’s in New York. When he suggested that replacing Mars with Fuse would be an opportunity to “reboot” the series and make it more “relevant” for younger audiences, I wanted to smash his face in with my tape recorder. I reminded the exec that the last Jack Montana movie had grossed $340 million domestically, whereas Fuse had yet to earn enough to pay for a Metro Card. I wasn’t sure why, but since Johnny got sick, I’d been feeling strangely protective of my girlfriend-stealing nemesis. Maybe it was because his illness made him less threatening. Or maybe it was because it’s difficult to stay mad at someone who has a terminal disease—death has a way of making everything else seem petty. Or maybe it was because you never get over your first screen idol. No matter how much I hated him, a tiny part of me couldn’t help but continue to worship the guy.

Don’t get me wrong—I was still in love with Johnny’s wife. I still secretly fantasized about winning Samantha back. But I could no longer cast myself as David up against Goliath. Now I was slinging rocks at a guy with a brain tumor. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to give the fantasy a happy ending. Say, for instance, Sammy hadn’t spotted that ceramic turtle in my office the night we snuck away from the paparazzo. Suppose I had leaned in for a kiss, and she had kissed me back. What then? Somehow, I couldn’t see Sammy leaving her husband for me. As much as I wanted Sammy, Johnny needed her. Did I really want to be the guy who stole the wife of a dying man? Could I live with myself? Could Sammy love such a person? It was all enough to make my head explode.

I arrived at Barrandov Studios in Prague just in time for the first detonation of the day. Everybody was stuffing foam into their ears while Fuse, wearing a Navy SEAL wet suit and carrying a bazooka, took his position on the set, crouching behind a prop tree from where he would fire a prop rocket and blow up a prop Hummer full of prop terrorists. But as I put foam into my ears and braced for the explosion, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. I saw a girl perched on a stack of boxes near some video monitors, her nose buried in a thick book. The detonation was seconds away, but I couldn’t stop staring. She was wearing slim-fitting jeans and a snugly tapered white cotton blouse, with the bottom buttons left undone. A lock of honey-blond hair kept falling into her eyes, which she absently swatted away. For once, the explosion really was a doozy, but I barely noticed it. As if in slow motion, the breeze from the blowback caught the girl’s shirttails, flapped them open for an instant, and exposed her bare belly button. My blood jumped.

Traditionally, on most movie sets, the only women I found that interesting were the ones with above-the-title credits. But I decided to approach the girl with the book. “What are you reading?” I asked her. She looked up at me with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen and stared coolly at my face for a long, appraising beat. Then, without uttering a word, she handed me her book. The title was in Czech but I recognized the author. She was reading Hannah Arendt. “Wow,” I said. “That’s heavy stuff. ‘The banality of evil’ and all that.” That was all I knew about Hannah Arendt. The girl wasn’t impressed. “We are not supposed to talk to you,” she said in a sexy Slavic accent. “We were told not to talk to the reporter from America.” She didn’t
seem worried about getting in trouble; just annoyed that her reading had been interrupted. Czechs, incidentally, do annoyed better than anybody in Europe, even the French.

Just then, a Czech production assistant with a clipboard came jogging toward us. He too seemed annoyed. “Eliska,” he said,
“Chuck tě potřebuje k tlumočeni!”
The two exchanged increasingly exasperated Czech banter for a while, both of them waving their arms and rolling their eyes, then the girl turned back to me. “Excuse me,” she said, gathering her belongings and stuffing them into an oversize handbag. “I cannot talk any longer. Mr. Fuse needs translating. Again.” She and the production assistant rushed off, leaving me standing by myself. But I had her name! Eliska. Even better, I still had her book!

It had been a long time since just meeting a woman had triggered such a powerful physiological reaction in me. Rapid breathing. Increased pulse rate. Sweaty palms. Either I liked this girl or I was in the midst of some sort of cardiac episode. But I had to get back to work, so, for the time being, I slipped her book into my shoulder bag and turned my attention back to the set, where Chuck Fuse was standing in a wet suit waiting to shoot the rest of his action scene. He had one line, which he was supposed to deliver in front of the smoldering remains of the Hummer he’d just blown up: “Hope you’ve got insurance.” But the actor was having trouble getting the Czech makeup artist to understand his instructions—he needed Eliska to tell him the Czech words for “more fake blood”—and the sequence dragged on for three hours, with Fuse doing take after take of the line reading. Getting the bon mots just right, he knew, would be critical to his chances of landing Johnny’s old job.

The next day, I interviewed Fuse in his trailer. It was decked out with all the usual movie star gear—a plasma TV with a portable DVD player, a mini kitchen with a fully stocked fridge, a separate bedroom for quick naps (or whatever) between scenes—along with some homey touches Fuse had added himself. Tacked up to one wall was the prototype of the
Boom!
one-sheet, which featured a photograph of Fuse’s naked, sweaty torso, with a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb blast tattooed on his chest. “It’s a fake tattoo,” the actor said, pulling up his wife-beater to reveal a ripped but blank torso. “It was just for the poster. It took them five hours to paint it on me, and another hour to remove it. But it’s way cool, isn’t it? I’m thinking of getting it done for real.”

After talking about acting for a while—“I just go by instinct, dude, I don’t believe in studying”—I decided to ask Fuse about fame. It had been a while since I’d grilled a celebrity on the subject. “Dude, I was destined to be famous,” he said, pulling a plastic comb from his pocket and raking it through the Jeff Koons sculpture that was his hairdo. “I was famous in the womb. People keep asking if I’ve changed since becoming a big star. But I haven’t changed because I always thought of myself as a big star. It was the rest of the world that hadn’t caught up to me.” It was an interesting notion. Maybe some people were born with the fame gene. Like race or sexual orientation or X-Men mutations, it’s simply who you are, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. Perhaps it’s why some people are drawn to crowds and cameras while others shrink away. On the other hand, maybe Fuse was just an egotistical boob.

Normally, with my interview done, I would have left the
set and done some sightseeing. But I still had Eliska’s book. I found her sitting at the same stack of boxes near the video monitor, looking dejected. “Were you looking for this?” I said, handing over her Hannah Arendt. She let out a cheery cry. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “All my notes are inside.” She flipped the pages to show me the tiny Czech chicken scrawl filling up nearly every margin. “It’s for school. I have an exam coming up.” Now that I had rescued her from flunking twentieth-century postwar European philosophy, Eliska seemed slightly more interested in talking to me. But only slightly. Before she disappeared again, I had just enough time to learn that she was a graduate school student at Charles University and was paying her bills by working as a translator on American movie sets in Prague.