Leading Man (4 page)

Until I read in the papers that I had it all wrong.

A few days later, I plugged my phone back in. It was time, I decided, to face the music. The phone rang almost immediately, but it wasn’t Sammy. “You’re coming tonight, right? You
are
coming.” It was Robin calling; she was talking about a
KNOW
party that was being thrown that evening.

Every couple of months,
KNOW
threw a promotional event at one of the hot New York nightclubs. This was back when subscriptions were booming and the magazine industry was still in a partying mood. It was also the tail end of the clubbing era, when places like Nell’s and Limelight were still so cool even people who lived on the Manhattan side of the bridges and tunnels would wait on line to get in. The lines were especially long when
KNOW
threw a party, with mobs of photographers pushing at the doors to get in. (Guests at
KNOW
’s bashes ran the gamut from supermodels to secretaries of state.) Best of all, the magazine’s staffers had insta-passes to the center of the bacchanal. We got to stroll past the crowds, pinch the noses of the gorillas guarding the velvet rope, and saunter straight on into the club. Still, I wasn’t feeling much like socializing.

“Oh c’mon!” Robin moaned into the phone. “It’ll be
fun. Maybe you can steal some movie star’s girlfriend. I hear Jim Carrey might show up tonight. You can leave with his plus one.”

The idea of going home with anyone other than Samantha made me sick to my stomach. Not that I could get a movie star’s girlfriend to talk to me, let alone leave a party with me. But I couldn’t stay holed up in my studio apartment for the rest of my life. And I knew Robin wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

There was a guy playing show tunes with a pair of spoons and some water glasses
—KNOW
always arranged “kooky” acts to entertain its guests—as well as about three hundred revelers drinking and dancing. The club was in an ancient brick building on Twenty-fifth Street—a century earlier, it had probably been a textile factory filled with child laborers—that had been gutted and converted into a multilevel hipster paradise. Every dimly lit floor was decorated with pool tables and leather Le Corbusier loungers.

Jim Carrey wasn’t there, but I spotted a slew of other, lesser celebrities. I saw Jeremy Irons chatting with Gary Sinise at the bar. I saw Linda Evangelista and Helena Christensen scarfing down shrimp at the seafood buffet. I saw Kyle MacLachlan and Dan Hedaya standing on the same line for the men’s room. Years later, after I became a more seasoned entertainment writer, I’d attend Hollywood parties that would make this one look as lame as a
Real World
reunion. But at the time, a close encounter with any celebrity, even Dan Hedaya, seemed new and
exotic to me. It was at this party, and others like it, that I first came to the realization that the famous were different from you and me. In fact, I began to suspect that they weren’t even the same species. They seemed to exist in a whole different dimension, a mesmerizing, alien world filled with bursting flashbulbs and bustling red carpets and vastly superior bone structure.

The world Sammy had just moved into.

I wandered through the club, observing famous creatures for a while. Then, at the bar, I ran into Ernie Moore, one of the few stars at the party I actually did know. I had interviewed the intense young Method actor just a month earlier, over lunch in SoHo, for a 150-word article on a Montgomery Clift bio-pic he was about to start shooting. It was my biggest story at
KNOW
so far; mostly I’d been getting assigned fifty-word obituaries on retired financiers and diplomats for the Endings page. But when one of the entertainment writers got stomach flu, I was asked to fill in at the last minute, like an understudy getting a big break. There wasn’t enough light in the nightclub to read a wristwatch but, true to form, Moore was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. “Hi!” I said, extending a friendly hand. “Nice to see you again.” Moore peered over his eyewear. “And you are …?” I’d yet to learn this cruel lesson: No matter how many hours you spend with a celebrity, no matter how many glowing things you say about them in print, they almost never remember you. To the famous, journalists are as nameless and faceless as the back of a cab driver’s head.

This seemed like a good time to make my exit. I was
looking around for Robin to say good night when the crowd started to surge and thicken. Suddenly, I found myself pressed in among a sea of bodies. The doorman must have lost control, because photographers had broken the barricades and were now inside the club, elbowing through the masses with their clunky cameras. Slowly, I started working my way toward the exit, trying not to think of headlines like
NIGHTCLUB CRUSH KILLS CELEBS (AND OTHERS)
. But just as I was about to make my getaway, I spotted the one celebrity I really didn’t want to see. It was Johnny Mars, grinning and nodding to the throng as his bodyguards cleared a path in my direction. Hanging on his arm was the one person I didn’t want to see more—Sammy. I had to get out of there, but the paparazzi were going wild setting off an explosion of blinding camera flashes. I was trapped by the crowd, being swept ever closer to the hot new couple.

Sammy spotted me before I could get away. I saw her whisper something in Johnny’s ear and slip out of his protective circle toward me. “I’m so sorry, Max,” she said, grabbing my arm to keep me from running away. “I know I should have told you earlier. I tried to tell you so many times.” She squeezed my wrist and looked for any sign of understanding. “It wasn’t like I planned it,” she said. “It just happened. He kept sending me these flowers, and then …”

Had I been given the chance, I like to think I would have responded maturely. It’s possible Sammy and I might have cheerfully clinked martini glasses and merrily chatted about old times, like characters in a Noël Coward comedy. Then again, I might have reacted more like
Brando in
Streetcar
, tearing at my T-shirt and bellowing at Samantha with brutish contempt. I’ll never know. Before I could utter a word, a bunch of photographers popped up out of nowhere and started snapping Samantha’s picture. “Johnny’s looking for you,” they badgered her between snaps. “Who’s this guy? Why are you talking to him?” When it became clear the photographers weren’t leaving, Samantha gave my arm another squeeze, mouthed the words “I’m sorry,” and turned to rejoin her movie star boyfriend. For a minute, one of the paparazzi continued shooting pictures of me. Another pap grabbed him by the arm. “Forget it—he’s nobody,” he said over his shoulder as he ran after Samantha.

It’d be all too easy to draw a connection between Samantha’s love affair with a movie star and my decision to pursue a career as an entertainment journalist. So let’s get it over with.

As a junior writer at
KNOW
, I hadn’t yet been given a section assignment. I might have ended up pursuing a spot in the magazine’s Politics or Crime pages—those were the macho places to hang one’s byline. I could see myself as a dashing, trench-coated journo ducking past police tape to report on a grisly murder scene, or maybe as a sophisticated foreign correspondent attending black-tie diplomatic soirees at the Palais de l’Élysée. But after Sammy left me, writing about celebrities took on a certain sadomasochistic appeal. Fame had snatched Sammy away from me, but I would keep her in my life by making fame my beat. I would chase after her as a member of the Hollywood media.

To be honest, though, I might well have ended up writing about movie stars even if Samantha hadn’t fallen
for one of them. From the moment I emerged from the womb, I’ve been an obsessive-compulsive pop culture junkie. I spent so many hours in front of my family’s massive color Zenith that I absorbed enough radiation to power a Polaris submarine. It didn’t matter if it was a classic Hitchcock movie or an episode of
Petticoat Junction
—if it was on TV, I watched it. I not only memorized TV theme song lyrics but could recite credits from the closing crawls of sitcoms like
Bewitched
and
Get Smart
(I knew, for instance, that Botany 500 did men’s wardrobe for both). When I wasn’t watching TV, I was devouring pulpy spy novels (all of Ian Fleming’s during eighth grade, most of Alistair MacLean’s during ninth), cracking up to the Bill Cosby comedy albums I found in my father’s collection (until I started buying my own Richard Pryor records), and grooving to Duran Duran on my first Walkman. It was the ideal preparation for a future calling as an entertainment writer.

I grew up in suburban Shady Hill, New York—on the other side of the commuter tracks from Scarsdale—in a house that looked like it belonged on TV. The kitchen, with its lime-green linoleum countertops and daisy-themed wallpaper, could have been Carol Brady’s. The tastefully bland living room furniture might have been picked out by Rob and Laura Petrie—there was even an awkwardly placed ottoman—and the den could have been designed by Ward Cleaver. I had an attic room over the garage, just like the Fonz, although for some reason, girls didn’t come when I snapped my fingers.

My father, an ad exec at a Madison Avenue firm, was a charming, funny, Fred MacMurray–style dad who always
made a point of affectionately ruffling my hair when he got home from work. Mom was a former beauty queen from Brooklyn whose knockout smile had once appeared in a toothpaste ad in
Life
magazine. They were as bright and breezy as any sixties sitcom couple, and just as sweetly corny. One of my earliest memories is watching my parents dancing to music from a transistor radio as they cleaned up together after a dinner party—how my mother laughed when my father dipped her over the sink, dunking her ponytail into the suds. And then, suddenly, without the slightest bit of TV-drama-style foreshadowing, there was the accident that turned our household into a tragic movie of the week.

I was eight years old at the time. I was sitting cross-legged in our den watching
Planet of the Apes
on Channel 7 when I noticed my dad standing by the door, looking stricken. He sat down in front of me on the floor, blocking the TV, and talked in halting, confusing sentences about a trip to the supermarket and brake failure and red lights. I wanted to see what was happening on the TV set. It was the part of the film when the gorillas snare Charlton Heston in a net and he stuns them by finally speaking—“Take your filthy paws off me, you damn dirty apes!” My dad finally spat out the words: my mom had been killed in a car crash.

Dad was never the same. He tried his best to raise me on his own. There were grim outings to Carvel for ice cream, where I would gorge myself while watching him stare into space, his cone melting untouched in his big fist. There were birthday parties, afternoons at ballparks, and all the other moments a boy is expected to accumulate during
the course of a normal American childhood. But for most of it, my father was absent, even when he was standing right there. So I disappeared into my pop culture world, clinging to TV and movies for warmth and companionship. And predictability. Every week, no matter what else was going on around me, I could always count on Jan to get jealous of Marcia. I knew for sure that Gilligan would screw up and they wouldn’t get rescued from the island. Somehow, at the end of the half hour, everything would be okay again, back to normal, everyone happy.

And then, in 1982, when I was twelve years old, while standing on the playground at school, I got smacked in the side of the head with a snowball.

Samantha lived only six blocks from my house, on a cheery tree-lined street called Cedar Lane. Her home couldn’t have been more different from mine. While my house had become as gloomy as a James Agee novel, Sammy’s was as wacky as a Kaufman and Hart screwball comedy. During dinner, Samantha and her two sisters juggled three conversations at once, like verbal plate spinners, diving in and out of the kitchen to help Sam’s mom with a stovetop emergency, while Sammy’s dad tossed scraps from his plate to the dog. The chaos didn’t stop there. Samantha’s room upstairs looked like it’d been hit by a tornado, followed by an A-bomb. Half-read paperbacks were splayed around the floor, homework poked out from under the covers of her old-fashioned sleigh bed, girly undergarments were stuffed under the cushion of a chair. On a
bookshelf, half hidden by an empty box of Mallomars, was that ceramic turtle she had made in fourth grade.

One day when we were about fifteen, we were lounging on the lumpy mattress in her room reading magazines and listening to the radio when Samantha made an announcement. “I’ve decided that I’m going to become an actress,” she said. This made sense. Samantha was an actress even before she knew she wanted to be an actress. But then she went on. “And I’ve decided that you should become a writer.” I was accustomed to Sam’s pronouncements. Just a year earlier, she had declared that it was time I got promoted from her best friend to her boyfriend. She grabbed my head as if picking up a melon and gave me my first kiss. I knew once Samantha made up her mind about something, it was pointless to argue. But I was curious.

“Why do you think I should be a writer?” I asked her.

“Because writers are interesting,” she answered. “And writers and actresses make super-interesting couples. Like Marilyn Monroe and Henry Miller.”

“Arthur Miller,” I corrected her. “Henry Miller’s the one who had the affair with Anaïs Nin—remember that book of hers I showed you?”

“Or Lillian Hellman and Raymond Chandler …”

“It was Dashiell Hammett. And Lillian Hellman was a writer, too, not an actress.”

“Whoever. The point is, I’m going to be a famous actress, so you have to become a famous writer. That way we can be famous together for the rest of our lives.” She peered up from a magazine and gave me a smile. “You better start writing, buster.”

Samantha wasn’t kidding. She threw herself into drama classes and auditioned for every high school musical. She began reading Uta Hagen and would torture me with Meisner Technique acting exercises (she once spent an entire day repeating the phrase, “How could you?” inflected in every variation imaginable). As for my part of the deal, I enjoyed the idea of being a writer a whole lot more than the actual paperwork. I liked to imagine myself as a Fleming-esque figure, tapping out twisty spy novels on a manual typewriter as I swigged martinis and chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. But whenever I actually sat down to try to write something for real, I’d end up drawing doodles of Marvin the Martian. I knew early on that my true calling wasn’t as an author. It was as Samantha’s audience.