Leading Man (21 page)

When I arrived at Celebrity on Friday night at 7:30, I couldn’t help but be impressed. The fake paparazzi at the entrance went berserk when I stepped onto the red carpet, snapping pretend pictures and begging me to pose for their prop cameras. Of course, they also went berserk over the elderly tourist couple who arrived before me, and over everybody else with reservations that night. The extras pretending to be customers in line for a table were pretty convincing, too, although they had the easiest acting jobs in Hollywood. All they had to do was stand behind velvet ropes and gawk with wide-eyed astonishment as “celebrities” filed into the dining room. When I got to the hostess
station, there was a moment of confusion when the hostess realized I was meeting Suki herself for dinner. That made me an actual VIP. She was trying to figure out how to suck up to me for real, instead of just make-believe.

Suki kept me waiting at our table for fifteen minutes, which was about average when interviewing famous people, even famous restaurateurs. I was glad for the time it gave me to watch Celebrity in motion, to observe the clockwork of the operation. I noticed, for instance, a blond woman in a blue dress get up from her corner table and walk over to another table halfway across the room. She asked the delighted diners for their autographs, and jumped and yelped with over-the-top enthusiasm when they signed her pad. Less than five minutes later, she did exactly the same thing to another table. Like the fake paparazzi outside, the fake autograph hound in the blue dress might as well have been an animatronic robot. She repeated the same thirty-second script over and over again. I was truly in awe of what Suki had accomplished here: she had turned fame into a post-ironic theme ride.

“I’m Suki Monroe,” she said, sneaking up on me from behind. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

I had to admit, the black silk turban took years off her face. Or maybe it was Botox. Around her throat, a two-carat red diamond glittered in a platinum choker like a tracheotomy by Tiffany. She was an attractive, extremely well-put-together forty-six-year-old multimillionaire. From the clips I’d read, I knew she could also be a prickly interview subject. But even for a famous diva of the LA foodie scene, coverage in a major national magazine like
KNOW
was a big deal (after all,
Time
had been running puff pieces on
Wolfgang for years). So Suki was on her best behavior. Better than best: the truth is, we had one of the mostly bluntly honest conversations about fame I’d ever had with anyone who ever had any. Carla was spot-on—Suki was right up my alley.

“Do you know why everybody wants to be famous?” Suki asked me while we nibbled on salmon canapé appetizers. “Have you ever thought about fame, I mean
really
thought about it? What fame is exactly? Why people are so obsessed with it?”

“As a matter of fact—” I started to say.

“I’ll tell you why,” she went on. “Fame is the ultimate status symbol. And status, when you cut through all the crap, is what life is all about. Everybody wants to feel special. Everybody wants to think that they’re better than the next guy. Everybody wants to be higher up on the food chain than their neighbors. And there’s nobody higher on the food chain in our world than celebrities.”

“It’s interesting that you say that because—”

“Most people in their daily lives never get to feel special in that way,” Suki rolled on. “Most people never even encounter a celebrity in their lives. And if they are lucky enough to see one, or even shake one’s hand, it’s a big moment. They take pictures to show their friends. It’s like some of that celebrity specialness has rubbed off on them. It gives them bragging rights. It gives them status: ‘I’ve met Jimmy Kimmel, have you?’ ”

I felt the phone in my pocket vibrating. I wondered if it might be Samantha. It had been four days since our night together at the Shui, and I hadn’t heard from her yet, by letter or by phone. But it was only 8:20 in LA, 11:20 in
New York. That was a little early for Sammy to be calling. Unless sleeping together had bumped me up to an earlier calling time. I did my best to ignore the vibrating while I listened to Suki explain fame.

“What we’re doing here at Celebrity,” she said, “is democratizing fame. We’re giving everyone a chance to experience it. For once in their ordinary lives, normal folk get to feel like the most important people in the room. They get to have the status. And even though everyone knows it’s fake, that they aren’t really celebrities, they still get a rush out of it. They still get to feel what it’s like. They get to be famous without having to do anything to earn it. Except, of course,” she added with a grin, “pay the check at the end of the night.”

“Yes, but isn’t there something sort of sad about that?” I said, finally managing to squeeze in a question. “Doesn’t it say something kind of pathetic about human beings—that fame is the thing that gives us the most status? Rather than, say, intelligence or empathy or bravery?” I could feel my phone vibrating again. Jesus, Sammy, hold your horses.

“You’re probably right,” Suki answered. “But it’s human nature. People want to be famous because it gives them the illusion that their life is important. That it actually matters that they’re alive. That even after they die, some part of them will live after them. Fame is really a state of grace, only with money and power and beautiful lovers.” A waiter slipped next to Suki to deliver her a note on a silver tray. She unfolded the paper, skimmed its contents, and looked up at me with a smile. “I’m so sorry—I know this is rude—but there’s a phone call I really must
take,” she said, getting up from the table. “It’s Jon Bon Jovi. A real celebrity! We’re doing an event for him. Just give me a moment.”

While Suki was gone, I pulled out my phone to see if Sammy had left a message. But it wasn’t Sammy who’d been calling. It was Robin’s 323 number in Silver Lake. She was still writing for
DINKs
, but had finally moved out of my loft and rented a small house in the hipster enclave east of Hollywood. She even had a new girlfriend. I assumed that was what the calls must be about—Robin had had her heart broken for the umpteenth time. I decided to deal with it later and was about to slip the phone back into my pocket when it started vibrating again. It was Robin calling for the third time. I answered.

“Are you all right?” Robin asked, sounding more anxious than I’d ever heard her before. “Where are you? Do you need me?”

“I’m fine,” I said, puzzled. “I’m at that new restaurant Celebrity. Do you know about it? It’s really wild. You get to be a movie star for a night—”

“Max,” Robin interrupted me, “you haven’t heard, have you?”

“Heard what? What are you talking about?”

“Oh fuck,” Robin moaned into the phone. “I can’t believe I’m the one who has to tell you this. This so sucks.” Her voice had that reedy warble it always got just before she burst into tears. “Max, something really horrible has happened. There’s been a car accident in New York. On the West Side Highway. A really bad one. It’s all over the news. Samantha was in the car. She’s dead, Max. Samantha is dead.”

I don’t recall hanging up the phone. But I do remember that at first I didn’t feel a thing. “How odd,” I said to myself. “Why am I not reacting?” And then, suddenly, the Earth tilted thirty degrees on its axis. The restaurant began spinning around me as if I were in the center of a carousel. I could hear people talking and laughing, but I couldn’t focus on where their voices were coming from. I reached for a linen napkin and, as discreetly as I could, retched in it. When I looked up, there was a blond woman in a blue dress standing in front of me, holding out a pad and pen.

“Excuse me,” she said, acting very nervous. “I’m so sorry to bother you. But I’m such a huge fan of your work. You’ve been such an inspiration to me and to so many others. Would it be okay if I asked for your autograph?”

I must have had a complete dissociative breakdown. I could barely remember who I was, let alone understand why this strange woman wanted my autograph. I took her pad and pen and scribbled the only name I could think of. With flawless penmanship, I wrote, “Samantha Mars.”

After somehow managing to get home, I spent the next three days holed up watching wall-to-wall coverage of Samantha’s death on the cable news channels. Details of the crash were coming in drip by drip, like Chinese water torture.

Sammy had been on her way to Westchester to have dinner with her parents. For reasons nobody yet understood, instead of taking a chauffeured town car, her usual mode of transport, Sammy decided to drive herself in the Mars’s seldom-used BMW sports wagon. The minute she left the garage, she was trailed by a black Ford SUV—license plate 944BBDC—driven by a self-described “photojournalist” named Andrew Leighton. According to CNN, Leighton had a long history as an aggressive paparazzo going as far back as 1993, when John Kennedy Jr. and Daryl Hannah filed a restraining order against him. According to MSNBC, Sammy had complained to friends about Leighton’s black SUV, saying she felt like she was being stalked.

At some point while driving north on the West Side Highway, Samantha must have finally got fed up with being followed. She attempted to elude Leighton. A witness told Fox News that Sammy’s car abruptly accelerated, weaving between traffic in the double lanes, but that Leighton continued pursuing at high speed. Just after Sammy passed the Riverside Drive exit, before reaching the Henry Hudson Bridge, she lost control of her vehicle. It swerved into an embankment and spun around. Leighton slammed on his breaks, but not in time. He plowed head-on into Samantha’s driver-side door, crushing the BMW like a soda can, killing Sammy instantly. Leighton’s SUV flipped on impact and collided with a pillar. He may have taken a few minutes to die.

I kept waiting to wake up. I could actually feel my mind pushing back against the fact that Sammy was dead, blocking the thought by any means necessary. Any minute now, I told myself, Sammy was going to appear on TV to announce that it had all been an Andy Kaufman–style hoax. She had jumped out of the BMW just in time. Some part of me must have known that she really was dead—I could see an avalanche of grief heading my way—but I clung to denial for as long as I possibly could. Which wasn’t very long.

Watching it all unfold on TV was beyond surreal. Sammy’s death completely took over the news channels. A paparazzo had been involved in a celebrity spouse’s death. That was enough to make it a major story. Except this was no ordinary celebrity spouse. This was Saint Samantha, the poster girl of matrimonial loyalty and sacrifice.
The media went nuts. Comparisons to Lady Di’s crash in Paris ten years earlier were all over the airwaves. One cable anchor went so far as to awkwardly proclaim Sammy “America’s people’s princess.” There was footage of fans laying flowers near the site on the West Side Highway where the collision occurred. There were long shots of Johnny’s apartment building, where the star was said to be mourning his loss. There were interviews with angry politicians promising crackdowns on “the paparazzi menace.” And, of course, there was endless video of Sammy, going to movie openings with Johnny, attending black-tie medical research fund-raisers, that ubiquitous home movie clip of ten-year-old Sammy playing on a beach in Cape Cod.

Robin hovered, phoning multiple times. “I bet you couldn’t have guessed in a million years that this would be the way the story ended,” she said, having a philosophical moment while I watched a computer-generated animated re-creation of the accident on CNN for the hundredth time. I hadn’t had a chance to tell Robin what happened with Sammy the week before at the Shui. Even though I’d been having a meltdown over it, a tiny part of me had been looking forward to bragging. After all, I’d been talking to Robin about getting Sammy back throughout our whole friendship. Now, though, I wanted to keep my night with Sam to myself. It seemed too precious a memory to share.

My dad phoned. You’d think that after his experience losing my mother in a car crash, he would have had something soothing and wise to say. But it was precisely because
of his experience that he knew there were no words for a time like this. “Son, I’m so sorry for your loss” was the best he could come up with. Then he put his new lady friend, Madge, on the phone to offer her condolences. “So, how did you know her?” she asked. Still, I appreciated the call.

Carla telephoned, too, although it turned out she had an ulterior motive. “Max, how horrible for you,” she said. “I know you were friends with Samantha. You were close, weren’t you? You know what might help? Maybe if you wrote something for the magazine about her. It might be cathartic, don’t you think?”

“Carla,” I said, “I don’t think I’m going to do much writing for a while. Especially about celebrities.”

“You want to take a break from writing?” she asked. “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea, Max. How long a break were you thinking?”

“Forever,” I said. “Forever sounds about right.”

After three days, I decided it was time to switch off the TV. It took Herculean strength, but I pushed myself into the shower and scrounged up some fresh clothing. I hadn’t eaten much since throwing up at Celebrity. Robin had brought over a pizza the night before, but it sat untouched on the butcher-block counter in my kitchen. I took out a cold piece and sniffed, then put it back in its box. I looked in the refrigerator, but there was nothing I wanted. Then I opened my laptop and checked my e-mail. There was an ad for discount Viagra, a sale announcement at Fred Segal, a couple of work-related items, and a message from Eliska wondering where I’d been and why I hadn’t
answered her last e-mail. It would have been so easy to write her a short note explaining that a close friend had passed away and that I’d get back in touch with her when I could. But I just didn’t have the energy.

Then I saw an e-mail from Sammy. My heart jumped. But, of course, it wasn’t from Sammy. It was from one of her sisters. She was using Sam’s computer, she explained, to let people in Samantha’s contacts list know that there was going to be a memorial service in New York in one week. Did I want to be put on the guest list? I’d never heard of a funeral with a “guest list” before, but I responded that, yes, by all means, I’d be there. I wondered how many other of Sammy’s contacts were getting posthumous e-mails. I was a little surprised Sam even had a contact list, given that she did so little e-mailing. And then, like a light flipping on in my brain, it occurred to me: I hadn’t been to the mailbox in three days.