Leading Man (5 page)

When the time came, we went away to different colleges, although we made sure we didn’t stray too far apart. I ended up in New Hampshire, Samantha in Vermont. It was only a couple of hours between campuses. Still, we made the most of the drama of our separation. From the long, mopey letters we mailed each other, you’d think we’d been imprisoned on opposite ends of the universe. After graduation, it was Samantha’s idea that we move together to New York. She had prodded me to major in journalism in college—one way or another, she was going to make a writer out of me—and she pushed me to apply for that job at
KNOW
. Sammy picked our studio in the West Village, chose the fold-out sofa bed we bought from a furniture shop on Eighth Street, and decided what take-out dishes to order from the Chinese restaurant around the corner, but I kept the most important power for myself.
I had final say on the video we’d rent from the store on Hudson Street.

When Sammy got accepted to the Concord Theater Festival, I took her out to an Italian restaurant on Perry Street and ordered an $8 bottle of champagne. We toasted her future and I joked about her not remembering me after she got famous. Later that night, we brought a quart of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream into the sofa bed with us and watched the video I’d chosen for the evening’s entertainment. It was
A Hard Day’s Night
. At one point, John Lennon picks up a guitar and starts casually strumming a tune. “If I fell in love with you,” he sings, “would you promise to be true …” Sammy put her head on my shoulder, licked a scoop of Häagen-Dazs, and passed the spoon back to me.

I never saw Johnny Mars coming.

Interviewing celebrities is not as easy as it looks. It’s a delicate process, not unlike coaxing a frightened kitten out from under a bed. To get them to purr into a tape recorder, you have to talk to them in soft, nonthreatening tones. Plenty of ego-stroking is a good idea, too. It establishes trust. Whatever you do, avoid asking questions that require any serious thinking. You don’t want to startle them.

I learned all this the hard way, by trial and lots of error.

It’s not like they gave me an instruction manual when I moved over to the entertainment beat at
KNOW
shortly after Samantha ran off, taking my will to live with her. It was presumed that I was already aware of how to do my job, otherwise why would such an esteemed magazine have hired me? Actually, I had no idea how to do my job. Fortunately, the editor of the Entertainment section didn’t seem to know what she was doing, either. As far as I could tell, Carla Dreysdale devoted virtually all her
time and energy to collecting and playing with the dozens and dozens of snow globes that filled every surface of her sleek corner office. We’re not simply talking about Welcome to Miami–style souvenir globes, although there were plenty of those. We’re talking about rare globes from obscure East European cities, a Spiro Agnew snow globe from the 1968 presidential race, even an antique prop snow globe that was used as a stand-in for the most famous snow globe in all of snow globe history—the one Orson Welles lets out of his hand at the end of
Citizen Kane
. That precious collector’s item got a special place of honor in Carla’s office, a spotlit bookshelf all its own, presumably protected by motion-detecting laser alarms when she shut the lights off and left for the day.

The other writers at
KNOW
weren’t much help to me, either. They were always either flying off on some assignment or barricaded behind their office doors playing Beat the Clock with their deadlines. Some writers never turned up at the office at all; they’d file their stories from Berlin or Budapest, or wherever they happened to be. Then there were a couple who never seemed to leave. This one guy in the Religion section—the Stone Cutter was his nickname—had been locked in his office working on the same piece about fake first editions in the Vatican Library for nearly two years. I wasn’t about to ask him for career advice. About the only person I could turn to was Robin, the receptionist, who actually did offer me some pretty good guidance. “Speak to celebrities as if they were normal people and speak to normal people as if they were celebrities,” she suggested over lunch. “That’s what I do
when I answer the phones. Seems to work pretty well. Are you going to eat those chips?” We became friends fast.

Not surprisingly, I made plenty of rookie mistakes. Like when the magazine sent me on my first trip to Los Angeles for a story on
Star Flight
, the long-running TV space opera about an interstellar battleship marooned in a distant galaxy, and I almost got kicked off the set. It was the first time I’d ever stepped foot inside a Hollywood soundstage, and I found myself so starstruck my jaw actually dropped. There it was, in the flesh, so to speak, the iconic bridge of the USS
Ultimatum
, the spaceship I’d been fantasizing about since I was ten. The cast and crew were on lunch break, the unit publicist had ducked out to take a phone call, and I was all alone. Naturally, I climbed into the captain’s chair. How could I resist? But before my butt hit the seat, production assistants came running from all over the stage, shouting and waving their arms. Sitting on the captain’s space lounger, it turned out, was strictly forbidden.

“Oh my God!” the unit publicist shrieked when she returned from her phone call and found out what I’d almost done. “That’s the captain’s chair! Are you insane?”

That day I learned Rule No. 1: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, touch anything on a soundstage, no matter how irresistible the temptation. A little later on, thanks to a slightly more awkward lesson, I learned Rule No. 2: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, no matter how irresistible the temptation, ask an aging starlet about her penis.

It’d been eight months since I started at
KNOW
. Carla called me into her office with an assignment. “You’ll like
this story,” she said as she unpacked a box with her latest acquisition, a snow globe with a miniature Monrovian village inside. “It’s a one-page profile of Sissy Skye. Remember her?” Sure did. She was before my time, but I knew her work. In the late 1960s Skye had the most famous hairdo on planet Earth, a sort of shaggy Veronica Lake–like thing that fell fetchingly over half her face, covering one eye. It was smoldering and sexy. It was also, famously, responsible for one of the biggest hair-related crazes ever to sweep the nation, and probably countless mishaps in junior high school hallways as millions of fourteen-year-old girls stumbled to classes half-blinded by bangs. Even if I hadn’t known who Skye was, though, I would have jumped at the assignment. A one-page story in
KNOW
magazine was a huge opportunity. That was at least four hundred words!

“You know about the rumor, right?” Carla went on, giving her new globe a little shake. “Of course you do—everybody knows about the rumor. I want you to try to get her to talk about it. She’s never said anything on the record about it before—maybe she’s finally ready. If you can get her to talk about it, there’s a chance we could bump the story up to a two-pager.”

“Okay,” I said, pretending to know what Carla was talking about. “I’ll make sure to get into that with her. Ask about the rumor. You betcha.”

“You know,” Carla added, putting down the globe and looking me straight in the eye, “if you can get Skye to open up about this, there’s even a chance of a cover line.”

Later, when I asked Robin what the rumor was, I was astonished to learn that people had been gossiping for
years about Sissy Skye’s anatomical origins. It was an open secret—according to Robin—that Skye had been born with infantile hermaphroditism, and that surgery had been required to make her fully female. It explained, Robin said, why Skye had never had children, even though she’d been married three times. If I could get the actress to talk about all this, delve into her genital history, as it were, Carla had all but promised me a cover line. I had to try.

And so I flew to Hollywood to ask Sissy Skye if she had been born with a penis. We met for lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. It was a favorite hot spot for maturing movie stars—Forest Lawn, my fellow
KNOW
writers had nicknamed it—but compared to the other fossils eating in the Lounge that day, Skye was practically a teenager. She was officially forty-nine in Hollywood years, which meant she was closer to a girlish sixty. But she looked terrific. She still wore her hair in the same shaggy style, although now she kept her bangs from falling into her eyes by sashing it like a curtain to the side of her head with a ruby-and-diamond-studded bobby pin. I couldn’t help myself; I sort of found her sexy. Even if the penis was, admittedly, a turnoff.

I broke the ice with an old magazine interview chestnut—the corny empty-your-purse-so-I-can-describe-its-contents shtick. Skye giggled and good-naturedly spilled her car keys, wallet, and checkbook onto the table. Then I buttered her up by referring to her early work—like the schlocky biker flick
Pussycat Has a Gun!
—as “neo-classics.” She giggled again. Finally, I tiptoed toward the subject of her genitalia. “It must be difficult being
famous,” I said in my most sympathetic interviewer voice. “I mean, how do you deal with the gossip? Over the years you must have encountered at least one outrageous lie you’ve always wanted to correct. Tell me, what’s the most outlandish thing you’ve ever heard about yourself?”

Skye wrinkled her forehead and thought for a moment, then gave up. “I never hear any gossip about myself,” she said, giggling. “Not a word. But I’d love to know what people are saying. If you’ve heard of something, tell me. Honestly, I’d love to hear.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s the rumor about the circumstances of your birth …”

“Really?” she said.

I was beginning to suspect that the hermaphrodite story wasn’t 100 percent true, but it was too late to turn back. The penis had left the station. “You know,” I finally blurted it out, “the rumor about you being born with male sex organs?”

The interview was over. Skye stuffed her car keys, wallet, and checkbook back into her purse and got up from the table. “I’m so sorry I asked you that question,” I said, totally sincere. I made a mental note to shove that Monrovian snow globe up Carla’s nose when I got back to New York. Skye gave me an icy stare. She was no longer giggling. “I’m sorry you asked that question, too,” she replied. Then she dumped my chopped chef salad into my lap and left the restaurant.

So it took some time, but eventually I got the hang of the job. I learned the basic rules of talking to celebrities. How to save the toughest questions for last, so that if the star storms off the way Sissy Skye had I’d still have
enough material in my tape recorder to write a story (I ended up getting only a half page for that interview). I learned to win over stars with flattery, no matter how painfully insincere (“I loved you in
Timecop
!”) but also never to treat famous people like famous people—nobody likes a suck-up.

After a while, I got so comfortable interviewing stars I began to think of myself as a celebrity whisperer. Truth was, though, in my own way, I was growing more and more starstruck. I was collecting celebrities like prizes. After every interview, I would mentally hang a star’s pelt in a trophy room in my brain, another specimen captured. I even invented a home version of the game that I would play when watching TV. Any time a celebrity I had interviewed popped up on the screen, I’d give myself points. Two if I’d talked to them on the phone, five if I’d interviewed them in person, and ten if I’d had sex with them. This last category was entirely theoretical, of course. Although one night I did rack up a record score when I happened to flip on
Entertainment Tonight
and caught a glimpse of Samantha and Johnny Mars on the red carpet at a premiere. I gave myself fifty points and declared myself a loser.

After that miserable parting of ways at the
KNOW
party, Samantha and I became “pals.” She wouldn’t have it any other way. She sent letters. She left messages. She mailed more letters (Sam was the last of the great letter writers; even while we were living together, she’d sometimes send me cards and notes). We were going to be friends whether
I liked it or not. And, whether I liked it or not, nothing more.

Needless to say, I didn’t like it. I shook my fist at the heavens and cursed the name Johnny Mars. How dare this guy who had everything take the one thing from my life that mattered to me? I fantasized about throwing
him
out of an airplane and delivering my own devastating bon mot: “Get your own girlfriend, douchebag.” But Samantha had been the biggest part of my life for as far back as I could remember, and I didn’t know, didn’t want to know, how to have a life without her. Besides, I figured my best chance of winning her back was to stick around, even if it meant masquerading as her buddy. When things went south with Mars—as I was pretty sure they would, eventually—I’d be there to help her pick up the pieces. I just needed to be patient.

In fact, there was a moment early on when I thought I might have an opening. One night, about a year after she moved into Johnny’s penthouse, Samantha turned up at two in the morning at my new apartment, a bigger one-bedroom on a more civilized block in the West Village. As attached as I’d been to our old studio, it was haunted by Sammy’s ghost. I was always stumbling on stray hairclips in the back of the closet or old bottles of her conditioner in a cupboard. I couldn’t wait to get out. The best part of the move, though, was that I could finally buy a real bed and throw away that infernal sofa sleeper. There’s nothing more awkward than having to pause in the middle of a date to wrestle with a spring-loaded mattress that’s stuck halfway out of the couch.

“Can I come up?” Sammy asked through the intercom.
I could tell even through the static that she’d been crying. I pressed the button to let her into the building, then remembered I wasn’t alone. There was a naked girl sleeping in my new bed. This was a fairly common state of affairs at the time. That’s not meant as bragging. Part of it, frankly, was biology, plain and simple—I was a guy in my twenties. But I was also looking for validation. After getting my heart pulverized by Samantha, I needed proof that I was still lovable. Or at least attractive. I needed to know that if Sammy didn’t want me, a lot of other girls did. So I slept with as many of them as I could, and that turned out to be quite a few. “Where are you going?” the girl in my bed—Cecilia, Cybille, Cintra, she had some sort of exotic C-name—mumbled into the pillow as I slipped into jeans and pulled on a sweater. “Nowhere,” I whispered back, inching toward the door. “I’m not going anywhere.”