Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (34 page)

It makes me sad that Jane never got to truly express herself via her own considerable writing ability. Instead, she spent her time rewriting everybody else and making their output go from great to brilliant or even from crappy to saleable, the latter of which is even more of an amazing accomplishment, come to think of it.

As an assistant to Jane, a lady who lunched (with a bunch of ladies who found her to be more than a tad gauche since she was a working woman) but who would also wear the same Chanel suit days on end and roll up its designer sleeves in order to make more time to work, I had so many brushes with celebrity that my Rolodexes became quite pregnant with it. Once, after I spied his contact info on the office Rolodex, Jane let me have a letter from her files from former client Vincente Minnelli in which he described old friend Orson Welles, using Marlene Dietrich as a prop:

“Orson always insisted he was a gourmet, although at that moment, he was tucking away a two pound lump of ground beef as Marlene Dietrich and I shuddered.”

To Jane, it was just correspondence in a client’s file, but to a celebrity gourmet like me it was a delicacy to savor.

And having Mr. Minnelli’s widow’s home address, I did what any self-respecting gay fanboy would do—late one January, I sent a Valentine’s Day card to Liza in care of her step-mother. I enclosed some tear sheets from a fabulous
UK Vogue
cover spread she’d just done. It was the
Results
era and I certainly got some—she returned all the pages signed as well as a glossy photo, inscribed to me personally. This in spite of the fact that Lee and Liza did not get along. Vincente Minnelli had willed his home to Liza with the stipulation that Lee be allowed to live there until her death. Who knew Lee—so famously guarded about her age that she said, “A woman who will tell you her age will tell you anything!”—would live to the age of 100? A decade into her post-Vincente residency, and with Liza attempting to get Lee out of the house, Lee sued Liza for elder abuse, but it was all resolved and the house was sold…with Lee still in it—which is exactly where she remained until she
became
remains and moved into her
Cabin in the Sky
, and the new owners, after years of watching for that kettle to boil, finally got to live in their own home.

My Rolodex had plenty of perplexing celebrity entries—Where in the world had I gotten Tichina Arnold’s cell? After my phoners with them for the magazine, how in the world had I resisted calling back Channing Tatum and Chris Carmack until the police called on
me
?—but most of them were nonetheless rooted to a very specific time and place. None more so than the card for the Efron clan.

I never had Zac Efron’s cell number, but instead had memories of working with him that were suggested by his parents’ home address, scrawled in the days when I decided capital Es should be three parallel lines floating one on top of the other, with no spine—like Mitt Romney. I had the Efrons’ address because back before
High School Musical
was in session, they were thrilled every time their elder son would appear in the pages of the magazine I edited so they wanted me to mail them copies. They also loved our photo shoots and wanted, as many newcomer celebriparents do, free images to use as headshots. Headshots would often be circulated and wind up in the pages of my competition so I eventually learned to say no. I wasn’t there yet when Zac came along, so I granted them a handful of adorable photos taken by the ultimate teen-market photographer, Tony Cutajar. That photo shoot came before my steely resolve on the issue was in place and also came before Zac fixed his teeth—I never minded the gap, but he did.

Zac was one of my favorite stars I ever worked with, partly because we at the magazine felt like we’d discovered him. We hadn’t really, but we
were
the first teen magazine to notice him and splash him on our pages. He was one of the pre-stars we kinda forced down our readers’ throats every chance we got. By the time he was guesting on an overheated nighttime drama called
Summerland
, a Lori Loughlin vehicle peopled by unnaturally sexy actors of all ages, we were giving Zac full-page pinups. Endearingly, he loved the attention. He was one of those kids who had a bright future but didn’t look down his eventually-perfect nose at the teen press.

We were all in platonic love with Zac, a minor on the verge of being major. He was taken anyway—rumor on the set was that he’d dumped a longtime girlfriend and had begun dating co-star Vanessa Anne Hudgens. That rumor and the one that he was gay were equally omnipresent and seemingly conflicting. But not necessarily—perhaps he was just an excellent multitasker.

In fact, the main question I’m asked today when I talk about having edited a teen magazine is, “Is Zac Efron gay???” The third biggest number of hits I ever got on my decidedly non-teen, gay-culture blog BoyCulture.com was when I posted a scan of a
National Enquirer
article that suggested Zac had been spotted
holding hands
with a guy. And that was an article with no photographic proof.

What I tell people who want to know is that Zac Efron
can’t
be gay because he never made a pass at me when I knew him.

When I finally met Zac in the flesh, my instinct that he was in the pupa stages of becoming a major star was confirmed ten-fold. He has sparkling blue eyes and an infectious smile, is incredibly cute without being generic and has the kind of outgoing, unobnoxious personality that nobody can be coached to have. My team and I had gone to meet him at a hotel near Central Park and spotted twinsations the Sprouse Brothers in the lobby. (The Disney Channel Upfronts—where the network presents their lineup to advertisers and other bigwigs—were being held in town, which is why Zac was in New York in the first place.) I approached Dylan and Cole and their retinue to introduce myself and from a mile away they were giving me fraternal, if not identical, stink-eye. I couldn’t blame them—I’m sure they had a number of thirtysomething male fans wanting more than their autograph, and for all they knew, I was the king of them. (Never mind the fact that their manager was later in trouble with the law for misdemeanors involving a 16-year-old boy.)

The Sprice became less guarded when they realized they’d worked with me remotely before, but their people skills certainly compared unfavorably to those of the ebullient Zac Efron, who emerged from the elevators alone a few moments later.

Zac was in this pair of severely distressed (they were absolutely despondent), holey jeans he wore frequently in late 2005 and early 2006, and a denim jacket.

“Let’s do this,” he said with the kind of gusto you’d want from a tour guide. He absolutely could not wait to be photographed for the magazine.

It was freezing cold outside, but he gamely led my staff and our photographer all around Central Park, posing with the widest possible grin. Willingness to crack a smile is a major plus when it comes to male teen stars—it’s something later teen idols, like Justin Bieber, would resist doing to the point of…petulance. Which is about as nicely as I can put it.

Zac’s only stumbling block was when we asked him, during our brief, freezing outdoor interview, to name his celebrity crush. I’ve never had this happen before or since, but this red-blooded 18-year-old boy was completely stumped (it was early in his career, so it was the first time he was being asked a question he would later be asked a milion times). He had to ask us, “Who are some famous girls I could have a crush on?” The standard reply then (and for a long time after, even after she’d given birth) was Jessica Alba, so we went with that.

“Oh, yeah…Jessica Alba,” he agreed, unemphatically.

Adding to the confusion over whether he might be gay, Zac told us his fave song to karaoke to was, “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” and that the most-played tunes on his iPod were from the cast recording of the queertastic
Avenue Q
. But Zac was such a frustrated Broadway kid anyway—he had the scores of many Broadway shows but had never seen one, so we surprised him with tickets to
Avenue Q
, which would’ve had him bouncing off the walls if we weren’t outside.

A bit later in his journey to becoming a superstar, Zac was back in NYC for a promo event in support of a small movie he’d appeared in years earlier,
The Derby Stallion
, a boutique project produced by and starring soap actress Tonja Walker, who’d certainly gotten lucky with her casting. I shook Zac’s hand and he asked me if I’d seen the movie yet. I replied,
“Should
I see it?” Some actors are embarrassed by early efforts, so I was just kidding around. He got a very serious look on his face (this happens a lot to me because I still don’t know how to calibrate my deadpan expression for the benefit of the young) and said, “Oh, yes. Definitely.”

It was at this event that I met Zac’s personal publicist and great pal Jeff Ballard, who had bad-mouthed my magazine behind my back but was super nice to me in person. (To be fair, I think Jeff feared we would post cheap candids of Zac as pinups. Which we eventually, understandably, had to do once Zac, like every great star, eventually, understandably became unavailable to pose for lowly teen publications.)

Jeff’s days in PR went back to when Rob Lowe was doffing his shirt in the offices of
Tiger Beat
, so he was a pro at inviting the press in while keeping them at arm’s length. Case in point, after our warm chat at the
Derby Stallion
event, Jeff vanished when I wasn’t looking, but later e-mailed to say he wished he’d seen me again because he and Zac had gone to see
Hairspray
on Broadway and would’ve loved for me to join them. I doubt very much he really wanted me there, but it was his way of trying to make me feel as if he might have, which is the L.A. version of sincerity. It would have been amazing to see
Hairspray
alongside Zac Efron a year or more before he wound up playing “Link Larkin” in the movie version, but I hold no grudges and would still like to go see a play with Jeff’s next big discovery.

Perhaps part of Zac’s loyalty to me and my magazine—which lasted far longer than it needed to—was because I’d agreed to kill a shoot he’d done for Rena Durham, a photographer who worked for my magazine quite often. Eighteen-year-old Zac had done a wonderful studio shoot with her one day, and Rena had rushed me the images to consider. I phoned her up and bought them out exclusively even though
High School Musical
had only just aired and it was not yet clear just how ridiculously huge a phenomenon it and he were about to become. Why did I bite? Because Zac went shirtless for half the shoot, wearing only jeans, a cowboy hat and that sneaky, gap-toothed grin. He was well aware of what he was doing, and I knew his inviting expressions would be catnip to the kittens who expected tame titillation from the glossy pages of the magazine.

Unfortunately, a prudish coworker of mine was so attached to Zac she felt the images were somehow unfair game, so she contacted her friend at Disney, Zac’s network publicist, and asked if she’d seen the shoot. Nope, she hadn’t. Zac apparently later gushed about how great the shoot turned out, having seen the photos, but Disney Channel was not amused—shirtlessness was not in their playbook back then, and I received word that they thought the shoot, with that hat, looked too “
Brokeback Mountain-
y.” A none-too-subtle way of saying, “This shit is gay.” Looking “too gay” is the #1 concern among managers and many media companies when it comes to their potential heartthrobs, and was always a concern they had to tiptoe around when dealing with me, since I was openly gay and since they were ostensibly pro-gay, open-minded Hollywood liberals, so they never wanted to appear homophobic.

Plenty of them were gay themselves, but that would never stop someone in search of money from policing the perceived sexuality of someone working under them whose earnings might be affected by it.

So I got the velvet-hammered call to pull the shoot or else. I could have run the shoot, but the photographer was leaned on (she shot lots of Disney kids at that time, and might have never shot another had she not towed the line) and I would have alienated Disney Channel forever. I never bought the B.S. that Zac had been tricked because his family and publicist weren’t around (why weren’t they there in the first place?), or that Zac would have been devastated had they run. Rather, I think those around him made him feel ashamed for not feeling ashamed and probably messed with his head about his personal appearance in the process.

At a later shoot with the cast of
HSM
, Zac came up to me and asked with a wide-eyed, earnest expression, hands buried in the pockets of his parka, “Excuse me, Matt, but who’s in charge of retouching pictures?” When I said I directed such changes, he expressed deep concern about his flawless, alabaster skin, which he apparently thought was flecked with zits. I found out that he later complained that some of the best photos we ever ran showed his non-existent nose hairs.

It’s common enough, as an editor, that I would choose a photo of an artist I felt was amazingly flattering only to have the artist or his/her agent call me up wounded, behaving as if I’d intentionally chosen the worst picture ever taken. It’s a matter of taste and it’s typical for people not to see themselves as others see them. But Zac was different. He was absolutely adorable and seemed to feel he was a gaggle of flaws. I hope he got over that, but considering some of the unhappy news he’s made in recent years, I doubt he did.