Leading Man (9 page)

Then, in 2002, Sammy got one of the leads in a small indie drama called
Losers Weepers
. It was about two sisters in the 1950s who inherit and run a failing Italian restaurant in a small town on the Jersey Shore. One sister, played by Christina Ricci, is a hard-nosed realist who keeps the books; the other, Sammy’s character, is an emotional
chef who creates magnificent gourmet meals that none of the local rubes appreciate. When their longtime waiter quits to join a rival restaurant, the sisters place a help-wanted ad. Enter Marc Anthony, playing a dishy immigrant “guido” just off the boat from Rome. Both sisters end up falling in love with their new waiter and go to war with each other for his affections.

It was shot in just five weeks at a rented studio space in the Chelsea Piers for only $3 million, less than the moisturizer budget on one of Johnny’s films. But it was the most charming, delightful little picture I’d seen in years. And Sammy—she was beyond enchanting. She must have trained like crazy for the role, because she handled a chef’s knife like a juggler handles pins. In one scene, her character power-chops a bushel of carrots while having a screaming argument with her sister. The blade flashes so fast, it could almost qualify as a special effect. In another scene, Sammy’s character is making bread with Marc Anthony’s. She massages and kneads the dough so sensually, so carnally, the movie should have been rated NC-17.

I saw the film at its “premiere,” which took place in a screening room in TriBeCa. There was no money in the budget for klieg lights or red carpets or any sort of festivities—just a table in the lobby with a tray of crusty Brie and a few bottles of warm chardonnay. I’d been dreading going, not because I didn’t want to see the movie, or Samantha, but because I knew Johnny would be there. I’d managed to steer clear of the star since that near-miss at the
Canterbury’s Pilgrim
debut four years earlier, but my luck was running out. This was his wife’s big night. I
would finally have to meet him. At least this time I hadn’t brought a date.

But as I stood at the entrance holding flowers for Sam—something I never thought to do when we were still a couple—I didn’t see Johnny in the crowd. And a meager crowd it was. Only about thirty people were milling about the lobby, mostly dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The only two stars in attendance were Sammy and Christina Ricci, who were in a corner chatting with some agent types. When Sam saw me enter, she smiled, waved, and made a beeline for me.

“I’m so glad you came!” she said, giving me a big hug before taking her roses. “I know it’s not exactly Grauman’s, but I wanted you here. I’m really proud of this movie. To tell you the truth, it’s the first thing I’ve done I’ve actually wanted you to see.”

“Where’s Johnny?” I asked. I figured he was in the men’s room or outside taking an important call. I was still bracing for the handshake I’d been putting off for years.

“Oh, Johnny couldn’t be here,” Sammy said, a little embarrassed. “He had to go to Cleveland for a meeting with one of the merchandisers. There’s a problem with the new Jack Montana action figure—the head keeps popping off whenever you move the arms. Toys “R” Us is threatening to sue. But Johnny’s already seen my movie. His production company helped finance it …”

“He’s in Cleveland?” I repeated. I couldn’t believe my luck. Once again I’d managed to postpone the inevitable. Even better, I had upstaged my movie star rival. This was the biggest moment in Sammy’s career, the opening of
her very first film, and he couldn’t bother to be here for it. Sammy had never missed one of Johnny’s premieres. She was arm candy for her husband at countless showbiz events. But he went to Cleveland because he was more interested in his action figures. Actually, when I thought about it, Johnny and I had a lot in common. He was selfish and self-involved, too. The difference, though, was that I had learned my lesson. I had wised up. I had shown up, with flowers. “I’m sorry to hear I missed him,” I lied. “I was really looking forward to meeting him.”

Losers Weepers
ended up being released in eight theaters, where it grossed a grand total of $225,000 and was never seen again. It didn’t even make enough money to justify a video release. I tried to get
KNOW
’s film critic to see it—a rave review in the magazine could have made all the difference—but he couldn’t have been less interested. “I despise movies set in the 1950s,” he told me after I explained the plot of
Losers Weepers
. “I find the era depressing.”

“Really?” I pressed him. “
American Graffiti
?
Diner
?
Raging Bull
? You find those movies depressing?
The Godfather
? You find that one depressing?” He wouldn’t budge.

A couple of weeks later, after
Losers Weepers
ran its pathetic theatrical course, my phone rang at two in the morning. Naturally, it was Sammy. For once, she was placing a local call, from her and Johnny’s penthouse uptown.

“I just wanted to tell you how much it meant to me
that you came to my movie,” she said. “It was my party but you were pretty much my only friend there.”

“I loved it. Honestly. I’m not just saying that,” I told her. “You were fantastic. I still can’t get over how you chopped those carrots. I had no idea you were so handy with a knife.”

“Maybe I can get a job as a chef.” She laughed. “ ’Cause I don’t think I’m going to get many more as an actress.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “You never can tell what’s going to happen. This time next year, you could be as famous as Johnny.”

Six months later, in the summer of 2003, I was in my office at
KNOW
’s New York headquarters opening packages of swag—the free T-shirts and baseball caps and bobble-heads the studios send to reporters to promote new releases—when Carla poked her head in my door. “You know Samantha Mars, right? You went to high school with her or something? Are you still in contact with her?”

“Yeah, I know her a little,” I said. “Why? What’s up?”

“You haven’t heard? Turn on CNN. Johnny Mars has been in an accident.”

I madly flipped through the channels on the TV in my office until I found Aaron Brown behind his desk. A picture of Johnny was boxed off in one corner of the screen. “The extent of his injuries is still unknown, but from what’s been confirmed so far it sounds like it could be quite serious,” the laconic CNN anchor was reporting. “We have a specialist on the phone with us now, Dr. Jordan Charles. Dr. Charles, what can you tell us about
what’s happened to Johnny Mars? What can you speculate about his condition?”

I sat in front of my TV watching in stunned silence as details of the accident slowly emerged. Johnny had been in South Dakota shooting his eleventh Jack Montana movie,
Don’t Tread on Me
, when a stunt went horribly, horribly wrong. They were filming an action sequence on Mount Rushmore that involved Special Agent Montana rappelling down Thomas Jefferson’s face. It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek homage to Cary Grant’s scene in
North by Northwest
. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to be doing the actual rappelling; there was a stunt double on the set for that. But, like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford, Johnny couldn’t resist taking stunt work into his own hands. Among action stars, it was a point of macho pride. Studio executives and insurance bonding companies hated it, but what could they do? If Johnny Mars wanted to hang by a harness from a six-story stone carving of a dead president’s head, who was going to say no?

Johnny had mixed up the buckles on his harness and attached them incorrectly. Making matters worse, he waved away a final safety check that might have caught the error. At first, as the star was winched down the side of the mountain, there was no sign of anything wrong. In fact, Johnny was so coolly confident, he cracked up the crew by pretending to pick Jefferson’s nose. But, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, Johnny’s body went slack, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he lost consciousness. The blackout caused him to flip upside down and his incorrectly buckled harness to snap open. He dangled
for a heart-stopping second or two with his legs caught in the rappelling ropes. Then he dropped forty feet onto an overhang under Jefferson’s chin. The whole thing had been caught on camera by the film crew, including the sickening thud when Mars’s body hit the ground. The only footage on CNN, though, was news chopper video of Johnny on a gurney being loaded into an ambulance. CNN was reporting that Johnny was alive, thank goodness, but had suffered unknown, potentially devastating injuries.

My phone rang. “What time do you want to leave tonight?” It was Robin, calling from her station at the reception desk, reminding me about a theater date we had for that evening. Robin and I went to lots of plays together, mostly the sort performed on tiny stages in converted basements so far off Broadway you needed a torch and compass to find them. When she wasn’t answering
KNOW
’s phones, Robin was an aspiring playwright, and had aspiring actor friends workshopping shows all over town. I wasn’t much of a theater buff, and ant farms were more entertaining than most of the pretentious snooze fests Robin dragged me to, but I was a fan of actresses. I’d sit in my crappy plastic folding chair in the theater and nudge Robin with my elbow whenever a girl I wanted to meet wandered onstage. “Boyfriend,” she’d whisper. Or, “Crazy.” Or, “Mine,” if she happened to have a crush on her too.

I told Robin about Johnny’s accident. “Fuck,” she muttered into the phone. Then, after a moment of silence, “Have you talked to Samantha? Are you going to call her? You should call her. Or maybe send a card—a card would be nice.”

“Her husband just fell off a mountain onto his head,” I snapped. “I don’t think Hallmark makes a card for that.”

“Just let her know that you’re thinking of her. That she’s on your mind. That’s true all the time, anyway, but she needs to know it. Jesus, what a cosmic screwing. All that money and fame and power, and something like this can still happen to you. What a story. I bet they make Johnny Mars the cover this week.”

They didn’t—Condoleezza Rice got the honor—but Mars did get a cover line and four pages inside the magazine. Mars was all over the front pages of the afternoon tabloid editions, however. I saw a copy of the
Post
in Carla’s assistant’s cubicle.
MARS CRATERS
! shrieked the headline. The photo was a publicity shot from one of Johnny’s early Jack Montana movies, showing the ripped he-man dangling shirtless from a flagpole on top of the White House. I saw on TV that media camps had already sprung up outside the hospital in South Dakota where Mars had been taken and also at the star’s apartment on the Upper West Side. I couldn’t figure out why paparazzi would be gathering outside Mars’s home in New York when everybody knew he was thousands of miles away. Then it hit me: they were hoping to get a good wife-in-distress shot when Sammy left the building to rush to her husband’s side. There were photographers waiting for her at the airport, as well. Suddenly, Samantha was news. As far as the media was concerned, she was Johnny Mars’s potential grieving widow.

I tried calling Sam but her voice mail was full. I tried writing an e-mail but my fingers froze on the keyboard. What could I possibly say to comfort her? Of course, I
felt terrible about Johnny’s accident, just like everyone did. Maybe even more terrible, since I was also feeling guilty. I had hated the man. I had wished evil upon him. And now evil was upon him in a way you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I mean, he
was
my worst enemy, and I wouldn’t have wished this on him. And yet, if I had to be honest and confess my ugliest impulses, I was also wondering—I couldn’t help myself—if this might be the way I was finally going to get Samantha back. That made me feel even more guilty.

Mostly, though, I was just worried about Sammy. The poor girl had to be scared out of her mind. I prayed she hadn’t been watching Dr. Jordan Charles on CNN. “A fall like that could have tragic consequences,” he had told Aaron Brown, stating the all too obvious. “A drop like that could easily kill a man.”

“Dear Samantha,” I finally tapped onto my computer screen. “I don’t know what to say. Literally, I’m at a loss for words. I’m just not a good enough writer to tell you how I feel today. You know how much I care about you—you’ve always known—and that I’d do anything in the world for you. Please let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to help. Even if all you need are arms to hug you or a shoulder to cry on …” I wrote a few more lines, more or less in the same vein, clicked the Send button, and headed out the office doors toward the elevator banks, where Robin intercepted me. “You’re going,” she said. “You
are
going.”

I didn’t have a choice. Even though I was in no mood to go to a play, this wasn’t just any night at the theater—it
was the opening of Robin’s own work. No less a company than Dirty Halos, the ultra-hip acting troupe with a theater in Chelsea, was mounting a production of
You’re Going to Hell, Charlie Brown
, the comic-tragic satiric masterpiece Robin had been toiling on for a year. I was going.

I had to hand it to Robin, it was a clever premise for a play: Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang were now grown-ups in their late twenties living in New York, dealing with adult issues like binge drinking, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. Linus was a broker on Wall Street, Schroeder was the keyboardist for a Brooklyn hiphop band, Pigpen was working for an Internet startup, and Lucy was an assistant editor at Condé Nast. But Charlie himself, now a homeless heroin addict turning tricks in the Bowery, stole the show with the darkest, funniest monologue in the play. “Good fucking grief,” he told the audience as he lit a cigarette on the stage. “That little red-haired bitch stole my money! I can’t stand it! I just can’t stand it! AAAUUGH!” He was still wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a black zigzag stripe around the middle.

“Brilliant,” I told Robin as we walked down Eighth Avenue after the play to join the Dirty Halo actors at the Corner Bistro. “Honestly, Charles Schultz has to be spinning in his grave. I’m so impressed.”