Leading Man (15 page)

Typical LA transplant, I blew most of my money on a car—a vintage Porsche Speedster. It had enough miles on its odometer to reach Venus, but the dual-tone black and cream leather interior had me at hello. I’d never purchased something so expensive. My hands were trembling as I signed the paperwork. When the young, shaggy-haired salesman at the specialty dealership handed me the keys, I nearly gave him a hug. Then he slipped me a CD. “It’s my band,” he said. “Maybe you could write about us in
KNOW
?”

This sort of thing happened a lot once I moved to LA. The Realtor who rented me my loft had written a
film script—when he found out I wrote about movies for
KNOW
, he asked me to take a look. When the guy who cut my hair on Main Street in Santa Monica found out, he gave me his head shot. I thought I understood how preoccupied this city was with celebrity, but as a resident of LA, mingling with the natives, I began to see just how deep the obsession went. In New York, status was measured in square footage, with cocktail party conversations inevitably turning to real estate. Manhattan or Brooklyn? Do you own or rent? Co-op or condo? But in Los Angeles, status was calculated on a different scale. It was all about proximity to fame. If someone told you that her dermatologist’s daughter once dated Scott Baio’s best friend’s brother—that was fungible social currency.

As a writer for
KNOW
, I wasn’t able to make anybody famous. I was only able to make already-famous people slightly more famous. But my job gave me access to the overlords who did have that sort of power. One of the first things I did when I moved to LA was drive my sporty little convertible into the back lots and meet with the major studio heads. I’ll never forget their gigantic, meticulously decorated offices. One looked like the wicker wing of the Getty Museum, with an enormous straw sculpture of an ancient Japanese warrior-god looming in a corner. Another had been done up to resemble a Hamptons beach house. I met with one studio head in the biggest conference room I’d ever seen, just the two of us sitting at a table so enormous you could land a Harrier jet on it. There were no smoking signs all over the building, but he lit up a big fat stinky cigar anyway.

“They let you smoke in here?” I foolishly asked.

“Who are
they
?” he answered, puffing fumes in my face.

From my encounters with Hollywood’s great-and-powerful Ozes, I got a fresh perspective on fame. Meeting studio chiefs and producers and other industry bigwigs was like getting a tour of Detroit by the heads of the car companies. I saw the assembly lines where celebrities were manufactured, the boardrooms where they were marketed, the showrooms where they were wheeled out to the public. I learned the vernacular of the industry (“first dollar gross,” “fuckability quotient”), as well as the strange geometric theories that ruled the city (in Hollywood, the people of the world were divided into four “quadrants”—male, female, over twenty-five, and under twenty-five—with the ideal movie appealing to all of them in equal measure). To these titans of showbiz, fame was nothing more than a commodity, like lumber or steel, that generated billions of dollars a year. As one exec proudly put it during lunch in the Warner Bros. commissary, “Celebrities are America’s number two export, after munitions.”

I moved to Los Angeles just as the town was gearing up for the high holy days: awards season. That was an education in itself. I’d been in LA for the Oscars before, as well as the Golden Globes, but I’d never experienced the frenzy that consumes the city in the months and weeks leading to the ceremonies. I’d never seen the backstabbing politics so close up, either. Just a few weeks after I arrived in LA, in November 2005, I got a call from an “animal activist” who tried to get me to write a story about how he felt sheep and horses and other critters had been mistreated on the set of
Brokeback Mountain
, which was up for Best Picture that year. He
was particularly upset that an elk had been given anesthesia during a hunting scene. Weirdly, the number that popped up on my phone’s caller ID had the same first six digits as a major talent agency that happened to rep an actor in
Crash
, which was also up for Best Picture (and won).

The most astounding thing about awards season, though, was the parties. They weren’t merely lavish—they were better produced than some of the films being celebrated. Many were held in old-school Hollywood hotspots like Skybar and Spago, but the most dazzling soirees took place up in the Hills, at the private residences of studio heads and super-producers. I thought movie stars lived well, but these guys had palaces that would impress an Iraqi dictator. One night, just before the 2006 Oscars, I nearly stripped the clutch on my Speedster inching uphill behind a mile-long line of cars and limos heading to the home of Jay Moses, chief of Monarch Pictures, the studio that produced the Jack Montana movies. Moses owned not one, not two, but three mansions on neighboring plots, along with two guest houses and a separate building just for his private screening room. As if that weren’t space enough for the party, a giant tent had been erected on one of his lawns. Inside, I could hear Beck playing. Not on a sound system—live, onstage.

I was used to seeing celebrities up close, of course, but not casually relaxing together in such huge numbers. It reminded me of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Elmer Fudd works as a waiter at the Macrumbo Room. He serves dinner to animated Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (“Baby wants rabbit …”) while cartoon versions of Frank Sinatra and Ray Milland drink at the
bar. Everywhere I turned, there were cartoony-looking movie stars. In one of Moses’s living rooms, I saw Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman amuse onlookers by pretending to arm wrestle. On line at the seafood buffet, I spotted Reese Witherspoon filling a plate with lobster tails and cocktail sauce. I saw George Clooney chatting up Charlize Theron and Terrence Howard chatting up Michelle Williams. When Nicole Kidman broke her heel on a stone path in the garden, I was there to act as history’s witness. When Sean Penn couldn’t find an ashtray, I was there to watch him stub out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe.

After circling the scene a couple of times, I noticed a commotion at the screening room building. It was jammed with people, so I peeked through an open window. I saw our host, Jay Moses—one of the few men who could pull off an ascot in the twenty-first century—addressing a crowd of revelers. Then I noticed who the head of Monarch Pictures had his arm around. It was Chuck Fuse, the numbskull I interviewed in Prague back in the spring. It looked like he was going to get Johnny’s old job after all. I headed to the bar inside the tent and waited for the bartender to look my way. Standing next to me, waiting as well, was a very thin man wearing a Nehru jacket. He looked familiar.

“I know you, don’t I?” the man asked after studying me for a few seconds. “You interviewed me, didn’t you? At my home?”

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him. It was Alistair Lyon. This guy was full of surprises. The star must have lost a hundred pounds since doing that Winston Churchill movie—all part of preparation for his next
role, as Mahatma Gandhi in a hunger strike drama called
Fast
. Even more shocking, though, was the fact that he remembered me. Movie stars never remembered reporters. Unless, of course, they’re angry at them. When it comes to negative press, celebrities have photographic memories. I tried to recall if there’d been anything in my story about Lyon that the great actor could have objected to.

“Yes, that was me,” I said, bracing for the worst.

“I remember you asked me a lot of questions about being famous,” Lyon said. “Did you ever figure it out? Fame, that is?”

He wasn’t angry. He simply had a good memory. I tried to answer his question. I told him about the four quadrant theory and fuckability quotients and how celebrities were America’s number two export. Lyon nodded politely until I was finished, but I could tell he wasn’t buying it. Frankly, neither was I. I had seen the inside of the factory where celebrities were manufactured, watched them roll off the assembly lines and get packaged for the public. The mystery wasn’t totally gone, but fame was definitely losing its luster. I was starting to realize that the sparkle and glitter that had so mesmerized me—that so mesmerized the whole world—turned out to be mostly marketing.

“Maybe,” Lyon said, with the understated delivery only an Oscar winner could pull off, “you are not looking for answers in the right places.”

Sammy didn’t stop calling after I moved to Los Angeles. But thanks to the three-hour time difference, I wasn’t being startled out of bed in the middle of the night anymore.
Now the phone would ring at around eleven p.m.—two in the morning in New York, Samantha’s bewitching hour. I got the sense that calling me was sort of like a mini vacation for her—a break from the depressing routine of caring for her husband and dealing with crazy Korean doctors and even crazier Alaskan family members. Sammy could relax and be herself and chat about nothing at all. As for me, I was more than glad to be Sam’s holiday destination, her personal Ibiza. But I was also glad I was on the other side of the continent. After that near-kiss in my office, it felt a lot safer.

Johnny was continuing to decline, in sometimes startling ways. Along with weight loss, muscle atrophy, and spreading paralysis—he was finally forced to take his doctor’s advice and was confined to a wheelchair—he also seemed to be aging rapidly. His hair and facial stubble had gone completely white, his skin was becoming wrinkled, and liver spots had started appearing on his hands. Inexplicably, the only part of his body that didn’t seem affected by the brain cancer was Johnny’s left arm, which remained nearly as beefy and powerful as ever. Johnny’s Western doctors were at a loss to explain it, but his Eastern healers pointed to the healthy appendage as a sign that their medicines were working. “I don’t think Johnny listens to them anymore,” Sammy told me during one call. “He still takes their weird medicine and does their exercises, but it’s more out of habit now. Whenever they tell him how well he’s doing, he just looks at me and rolls his eyes.”

Samantha wasn’t the only one calling me in LA. Much to my surprise, my dad started phoning every so often.
This was a first—when I lived in New York, he always stubbornly waited for me to call. Months, if that’s what it took. An even bigger surprise: he’d met a new lady friend. “We’re not dating,” he made sure I understood when he told me about her. “We just go to the movies sometimes, or have something to eat together.” He’d met her at the gym his doctor had forced him to join after his heart attack. Her name was Madge, she was sixty-eight, and she was recuperating from a heart attack as well. They bonded over their mutual hatred of beta-blockers. It just goes to show, anything is possible.

Robin also phoned—sometimes three or four times a day. She had not been happy about my moving to LA, to put it mildly. “Why would you want to live in Los Angeles?” she had asked with a shocked stare when I broke the news to her. “It’s a giant strip mall. It’s got the personality of a paper napkin. You’ll hate it there.” Robin was no longer answering phones at
KNOW
. Her latest play,
Hamret?
, an update of
Hamlet
in which all the roles had been rewritten for
Scooby-Doo
characters, had been a huge success. The
Times
had given it a half-page rave. For Robin, New York was still a city full of hope and promise. But she was wrong about LA. I didn’t hate it.

For one thing, the work environment was a lot more relaxing in Los Angeles than in Manhattan. The magazine rented a slick suite of offices in a tower in Brentwood for the six LA-based writers, although nobody actually spent time at “the bureau” except to pick up mail and steal office supplies. Unlike
KNOW
’s New York writers, who were always stabbing one another in the back competing for bylines and column inches, the scribes in LA
strove to do as little as possible. There was supposed to be an LA bureau chief—D. B. Martin was the name on the door of his huge corner office—but nobody could remember ever seeing him behind his desk. The only time he surfaced was in public, accompanying a celebrity. One writer spotted him at Christian Bale’s table during the Governors Ball. Another caught him courtside at a Lakers game with Dustin Hoffman. Like Colonel Kurtz, Martin had gone native. The local savages, mistaking his title for power, had adopted him almost as one of their own. He’d become a professional hanger-on. The horror. The horror.

Sure, there was a lot to dislike about LA. The traffic was maddening, the air quality sometimes bordered on sulfuric, and I was dealing on a daily basis with some of the most vicious and scurrilous liars and cheats you could find in any city on any continent—agents and publicists. On the other hand, Los Angeles was the only municipality I knew of with an economy based entirely on creativity. Like Washington, D.C., it was a one-industry town, except the industry here was dreams. That made LA a magnet for all sorts of lunatics, not just the sort trying to become movie stars. If you wanted to invent a new religion, or build cars that ran on french fry grease, or, like Abbot Kinney, build a European waterway on the beach, this city was ready to welcome you with open arms. I loved that about LA.

It was also, in its own spectacularly tacky way, a sexy city. Or at least jiggly. Strolling past the downtown-chic clothing shops on Melrose Avenue was like a trip to Hef World. The sidewalks were jammed with could-be Playmates
in hot pants and halter tops, strutting like strippers on a runway. Driving my Speedster at night along bustling, neon-lit Sunset Strip—“the clitoris of LA,” as Robert Evans once described it, or should have—I’d find myself looking at everything but the road. At every stoplight, there’d be another billboard with a twenty-foot-tall bikini-clad supermodel peddling the latest musk fragrance or underwire bra. It’s a wonder I didn’t hit more lampposts. As far as I could tell, the streets of LA truly were paved with carefree sex. For some reason, though, my GPS navigator kept taking me to Crazy Street.