Leading Man (7 page)

Then I nearly let out a squeal. I saw another celebrity on the rope line, a hulking, towering figure who was whipping up the crowd even more than Branagh. It was Johnny Mars. Samantha was trailing a few yards behind him on the red carpet, flanked by Johnny’s publicist and agent, a grim smile pasted on her face.

“Um, hold up a sec,” I told Lacy. “We can’t go in yet.”

Lacy gave me a look like I’d strangled her favorite kitten, but I was frozen on the pavement. Why hadn’t I anticipated this possibility? Mars and Samantha didn’t attend many premieres (the really big stars seldom do, unless the movie is their own) but this was exactly the sort of pseudo-highbrow fare—a Miramax period piece about Geoffrey Chaucer’s love life—that would appeal to the action star’s intellectual pretensions. How could I have been so stupid? But there he was, along with his beautiful wife, drawing more cheers than any of the
Canterbury’s Pilgrim
’s stars. In fact, Branagh and Ormond looked a little pissed off. Lacy, naturally, was thrilled by all the excitement, but I
was mortified. I’d seen enough science fiction movies to know what happened when matter was introduced to antimatter. If I met Johnny Mars it would mean the end of the universe. Or, at the very least, an incredibly awkward handshake.

What was I supposed to do? Walk up to Samantha and say hello? At a public event like a premiere, that wouldn’t be so easy. Before I got anywhere near Sammy, Mars’s bodyguards would have me in a headlock, while I flailed around trying to get Samantha’s attention. Pathetic. And say I did slip past the guards to say hi—or say Sammy just happened to catch sight of me in the crowd—that would be just as bad. Samantha would feel obligated to introduce me to her husband. I’d feel obligated to introduce Mars and her to Lacy, who was now pulling at my arm with all her muscle. “C’mon!” she moaned. “What’s the matter with you! Everybody is going into the theater!”

We managed to get to our balcony seats without being spotted. Lacy was a little annoyed by my behavior outside the theater, but she let it go. As the curtains parted on the screen, she reached across the armrest to give my hand a forgiving squeeze. I didn’t watch the film. Instead, as young Chaucer scribbled in his garret during the opening sequence, I scanned the theater looking for Johnny Mars’s enormous head. It wasn’t hard to spot—it towered like a giraffe’s over everybody else’s in the VIP section. I spent the next hour drilling holes with my eyes into the back of his skull.

Mars was one of those stars, like Robert De Niro and Adam Sandler, who never gave interviews. But a lot was written about him anyway. I know, because after he stole
my girlfriend, I read everything. Just to torture myself. He had a classic action star origin tale. He was born in Alaska, the son of a lumberjack. Moved to Hollywood when he was twenty, where he found work on construction crews that helped build movie sets at the studios. One day while sawing two-by-fours on the Paramount lot, he got tapped on the shoulder by a casting director. Next thing he knows, he’s got a nonspeaking role in
Cyborg Prophecies
, playing a mute robot. Over the next ten years, the roles got progressively bigger (he played a speaking robot in
Cyborg Prophecies 2
, and a hockey star turned prison inmate in
Penalty Box
), until his big break came at thirty, when he got cast as hard-drinking, hard-driving, hard-quipping FBI agent Jack Montana, the role that shot him to the very top of the action A-list. He’d been playing the part, off and on, for more than fifteen years.

The funny thing about Mars, however, was that even though he commanded the adoration of the masses, even though he was a millionaire many times over, even though he could have any woman he wanted (including the only one
I
wanted), he wasn’t satisfied. The ranch in Wyoming, the penthouse on the Upper West Side, the private jets and personal chefs and chauffeur-driven limos—it wasn’t enough. More than all of that, more than anything else, he wanted to be taken seriously.

Ironically, the same things that helped make him an action star—the soaring height, the huge muscular build, the growling voice so rumbling it could set off car alarms—also made him a difficult fit for more serious parts. He was actually a pretty decent actor, but who’s going to buy a six-foot-three, 245-pound Willy Loman? Still, Mars
refused to give up. He was always throwing himself into roles he had no business playing. Macbeth, Ishmael, Jean Valjean. I hated his guts, but there was still a smidgen of fan left inside me. I couldn’t help but grudgingly admire his tenacity. He was determined to prove his acting chops, even though all anybody really wanted to watch him do was push bad guys off monuments and out of airplanes and make jokes about the first step being a doozy.

When I finally pulled my eyes from the back of Mars’s head, Julia Ormond was up on the screen in a suit of armor, kissing Kenneth Branagh. I had no idea why. I hadn’t been following the plot. I looked over at Lacy, who was smiling in a daze, a Twizzler dangling from her mouth. She was clearly entranced by the film. Then I looked for the nearest exit.

“Lacy,” I whispered in her ear. No response. “Lacy,” I repeated a little louder.

“Mmm?” she answered.

“I have to go.” It was true. I couldn’t stand another minute of looking at Johnny Mars in his VIP seat, his big beefy arm wrapped around my dainty Samantha’s shoulders. But Lacy gave me a look like she’d caught me molesting that kitten I had strangled earlier.

“What?” she asked, her voice rising in anger. “Are you nuts!” The couple in the row in front of us turned around and glared. “What about the party afterward?” Lacy went on, ignoring the commotion we were starting to cause. “You have to take me to the premiere party! I want to meet Kenneth Branagh!”

“You can still go,” I whispered, reaching into my breast pocket for the party tickets and stuffing them into her lap.
“You can still have fun. I just can’t be here right now. I’m really sorry.”

“Oh, no!” Lacy all but shouted. “I’m not going to the party by myself. You have to go with me! We’re on a date!”

People all around the balcony were starting to shush us. I’d never been shushed in a theater before and didn’t know what to do. So I started shushing, too. Big mistake. “YOU’RE SHUSHING ME?!” Lacy yelled into my face, so loudly that people in the orchestra section began turning around to glower. “YOU DON’T SHUSH ME!” A few more seconds of this and we’d draw the attention of the entire theater, including Mars and Samantha. I did the only thing I could. I hid my face in my jacket lapels, climbed over Lacy’s seat, and dashed as quickly as I could out of the theater. The last thing I heard was Lacy yelling after me. “ASSHOLE!”

Once again, I had to concede this point.

As a member of the Hollywood press, I saw fame from the outside looking in. I was a Talmudic scholar of pop culture, but never part of the biblical text. On one occasion, though, I did get a tiny taste of what life was like inside the fishbowl. In the fall of 1999, my picture was in
KNOW
magazine. Not even my father recognized me—my face was covered in fur and I was wearing large prosthetic rodent ears—but I was in
KNOW
all the same, just like a real celebrity.

This was for a story on a sci-fi TV show called
Dark Matter
, about a microscopic alternate universe that existed in subatomic space. The concept was based almost entirely on the classic stoner epiphanot in
Animal House—
“Okay, so that means our whole solar system could be, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being …”—but the series became an instant cult hit. So my editors arranged for me to appear in one of its episodes as an alien extra—a sort of human-hamster hybrid—then write about the experience for the magazine.

I arrived at the Paramount lot at six in the morning and spent three hours in a makeup chair being turned into a “VIP alien,” as my hamsteroid character was described in the call sheet. I learned that I’d be making my TV debut as part of a crowd of aliens waiting in line at Passport and Immigration Control at an interdimensional space-port—a long panoramic shot of assorted otherworldly travelers getting their space luggage checked and their space documents stamped by customs officer robots. But when I stepped onto the soundstage and saw the other extraterrestrials, I felt a pang of alien envy. They had much cooler makeup than I did. One guy looked like a Rastafarian orangutan; another like the love spawn of Jabba the Hutt and Mrs. Potato Head. All I did during my seven seconds on film was stand next to a scantily clad reptile woman with four breasts and pretend to make small talk. “Whadya expect?” the lizard lady asked me between takes. “That we’d do scenes from
Hedda Gabler
?”

When the article came out, the same week my episode aired, I stopped at newsstands all over New York to gaze upon my furry face. Within days I started getting letters from readers requesting autographed copies. I felt like an idiot writing my name on my picture with a Sharpie, but I answered every piece of mail, just like a real star (or a real star’s assistant). It didn’t take long for me to grow a star-size ego, as well. When I scrutinized my face in
KNOW
, I started to notice a tiny red vein in my left eye—a flaw that would have been airbrushed away had I been a real celebrity. I cursed myself for not demanding photo approval.

A few weeks later, as I was waiting in line at a video
store, I experienced another drawback to fame. Let’s just say I was doing research for that big exposé on the adult movie industry I’d been planning to get around to writing. When it was my turn at the register, I removed the video from under my arm and discreetly slid it—my renter’s ID card covering the naughty bits—to the skinny, bespectacled nerd behind the counter. He read my name, looked at my face, read my name again, then looked at my face. “You’re the guy who wrote about
Dark Matter
in
KNOW
magazine!” he informed the whole store. “You’re the guy who got to be an alien!” I smiled grimly and nudged the video closer to the kid, hoping he’d put it in a bag already. “This is so cool!” he said, picking up the box and waving it around. “I can’t believe you’re renting a video in my store!”

Finally, I experienced the final stage of the celebrity life cycle, fame’s death throes. I turned on a new episode of
Dark Matter
and saw that my hamster was being played by another actor. In fact, he’d been given lines to speak! To think, I developed that character, I brought it to life, and now some upstart in rodent ears was taking over just as the part was getting interesting. I knew exactly how Bette Davis felt at the end of
All About Eve
.

I may not have been a real celebrity, but I got to live like one, especially when traveling on assignment. At the end of the 1990s, before terrorism and stock market crashes erased the last vestiges of glamour from jet travel, there was a luxury service between New York and Los Angeles called Imperial Airways. It operated the most pimped-out commercial fleet in the sky. The front end of its lavishly
configured DC-8s and 727s had private berths, like on a train, so that first-class passengers could slide shut a frosted-glass door and cross the country in privacy. Even Imperial’s “coach” section, where I usually sat, had cushy oversize red-leather swivel-loungers, provided linen and crystal dinner service, and was always packed with celebs. It was like the Golden Globes at thirty thousand feet. I loved it.

I became a frequent flyer on Imperial, shuttling between the coasts once or twice a month for interviews. When I landed in LA, I would always rent a zippy convertible and stay at the posh Four Seasons Hotel, the pale pink palace on the east edge of Beverly Hills that was the red-hot center of Hollywood’s mediaverse. This was where the studios put up talent from out of town, where many of the film industry’s junkets were held, and where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity in a swimsuit at the pool. The Four Seasons had a frequent-stayer bonus: After forty visits, they gave you a terrycloth bathrobe, the fluffiest on Earth, with your initials monogrammed on it. I had two of them. During a brief hipster stage, I grew a goatee and switched to the grittier Chateau Marmont on Sunset, where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity overdosing at the pool. But eventually I shaved and returned to my fortress on Doheny. The Four Seasons felt more like home to me than home. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t see any problem with that.

When I first started spending time in LA, I made the mistake of comparing the city’s geo-demographics to Manhattan’s. Beverly Hills was the Upper East Side with palm trees. Venice was the East Village with sand. West
Hollywood was Chelsea with actual, atmospherically created rainbows. After a while, though, I began to see that the true comparison wasn’t with New York City, but with Westchester. Being in Los Angeles, I realized, was a lot like being sixteen years old in the suburbs when my dad went away on a business trip and left me home alone with the keys to his Cadillac and a cookie jar filled with “emergency” cash. LA is a city filled with grown-up children spending money they shouldn’t be spending and driving cars they shouldn’t be driving. It’s a town without any adult supervision.

It is also a city filled with beautiful women who dress like porn stars even when picking up a carton of organic orange juice at the grocery store (the men, meanwhile, dress like little boys, in short pants and T-shirts). I thought LA might be a solution to my commitment phobia problem. I was traveling there twice a month but seldom staying longer than two or three days, the time it took to turn around an interview or a set visit. Theoretically, that was also just long enough for a brief romantic encounter. Sadly, though, my plan to make LA my sexual playground didn’t pan out. California-style dating was too alien to me. I never did get the hang of it. In New York, if you met a girl at a party, you might ask her where she went to school or what she had majored in. In Los Angeles, you asked where she was repped and who did her head shots. In New York, when you invited a girl on a date, it was assumed you’d meet at the restaurant. In LA, transport to and from dinner was a complex minuet. Did you pick her up? Or was that presumptuous? Either way, what you drove was critical. In Hollywood, there is no more important
status marker than the make and model of your car. I once picked up an LA woman for a date in a brand-new high-performance BMW M3—the rental place had upgraded me from my usual Mustang—and I knew right away I’d be getting lucky. “Wow!” my date said, slowly running a finger along a door panel. “I’ve never gone out with a car this nice before.”