Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (35 page)

But even if I didn’t appreciate the Mickey Mobster treatment from Disney Channel on not using the shots, I
did
know where my bread was buttered and I also am not a person who thrives on hurting others or wallowing in conflict. (Actually, I am. I guess I just liked my Disney Channel friends too much to stay mad.) So we killed Zac’s nipples. Such was the strength of my promise and that of my photographer, the photos never saw the light of day, not even after he started posing shirtless in mainstream magazines, not even after lurid shots of Zac in the shower—taken on the
High School Musical
set—started popping up on eBay.

Now, you’d have to beg him to keep his clothes on. But why would you?

In exchange for killing the
Broke
-Zac
Mountain
spread, I continued to have a wonderful relationship with Disney Channel—they truly kept the magazine in business for most of my run with it—and also with Zac.

My relationship to someone like Zac was a good example of the change of pace the magazine afforded me when it came to stars. Instead of being the disconnected fanboy looking up to the celebrity, because of my job and my age relative to theirs (toward the end of my tenure, I was routinely old enough to be the father of the kids I wrote about), I was more than a fan. I was actually in a position to help, albeit in a tiny way, create a kid’s stardom. I was a small part of the Zac Efron story, a producer rather than a passive consumer. It was exciting being involved on the other end of things. And it was quite easy for me to suppress my starfucking inclination to be gaga until such time that it would be appropriate; yes, I got my picture taken with every star I worked with, and yes, I made sure to rustle up an autograph or 26 from them as well, but I got my job done first and I always made sure any starfucking was well-timed and consensual. There are too many gushing fans in the teen-mag biz as it is—I’ll never forget being at a BBMak showcase and watching the boys, who were admittedly among the sexiest (and most legal) boy banders, working the female teen editors, going so far as to give them wet smacks on the lips. For some of the fangirls-turned-editors, those might’ve been their first kisses on the mouth from guys.

I only had one more Zac stare-down with Disney Channel, and this time, they blinked like Daisy Duck.

After a big interview session during which Zac and Vanessa (who’d since dropped the “Anne” and, though we didn’t know this at the time, her clothing for countless cellphone nudes) had loudly talked about vacationing in Hawaii, I decided, “Why shouldn’t teen magazines get photos of
our
biggest stars romping on the beaches just like all the grown-up magazines?” So I called up my contact at Splash News, a paparazzi outfit, and gave them the info about where Zac and Vanessa had said they’d be heading.

Within days, I was looking at the most scorching-hot photos of Zac and Vanessa making love (in the old-fashioned sense, not literally) under the sun on the beach, photos I instantly knew would become iconic. Zac and Vanessa’s fans were so geeked over their relationship they’d christened them “Zanessa” and spent all their time on message boards arguing about the status of their romance, which helpfully paralleled the status of their
HSM
characters’, albeit with more probable fucking.

I had to pay a lot, but it was worth it—when the photos ran, the issues sold better than any others I’d ever published. This was hot stuff for kids, but still, I felt, appropriate. Yes, they were mostly naked, but what are you going to wear while making out on a beach if not a swimsuit?

I received a call from a Disney Channel publicist who was hot and bothered, but not in the way Zanessa were. She asked me how I could run such sizzling photos and implied that the network was up in arms, but I calmly told her, “There’s nothing wrong with these photos. And you can’t be mad at me—every single teen magazine was bidding furiously to run them, so if I hadn’t, someone else would have. And they look great. And finally, they both announced to all of us exactly where they were going to be, so don’t try to make me believe for a second this wasn’t intentional. This will only raise their profile.”

Raise it, it did. As well as gracing multiple covers of my own publication, they were all over the adult glossies. Zac became an overnight sex god for adults as well as teens and those photos were used forever and a day, until he bulked up to the point that the beach shots looked dated. I’d gotten my shirtless Zac photos after all, and if his camp had been worried about him looking gay as they had with the killed studio shoot, they needn’t have worried about such a thing from viewing these photos—he so was all over his girlfriend I had to choose around the shot where he was adjusting an erection in his board shorts.

A lifelong starfucker, I had finally helped create a significant moment in a legitimate star’s career. I was making the kind of news that fans would always remember about Zac and what’s-her-name.

Zac was already a household name by the time he did his last good deed for my magazine, which was agreeing to fulfill an old contest that he and Disney Channel had okayed but that his new PR people had not—“Win a Date with Zac Efron.” It had taken a
year
to get through to him while the poor winner was tormented by her jealous friends and badgered by her rightfully skeptical mommy, but once he was reminded that he’d promised and that a winner had been waiting for her chance to meet him, he agreed happily. It was only a 15-minute meeting in the lobby of his agent’s office building, but Zac, by now a huge star, nonetheless poured on the charm. Dressed in skinny jeans and a plaid shirt, he crept up onto a bench next to our winner like a cat and sat, propped up on one elbow, with his legs wide open in her direction. The body language was as erotic as any teenage girl should ever have to handle, and to this day I think she might have gotten the nicest prize in teen-mag history, even if it was short and sweet. She probably felt like Vanessa had on that beach, and again, there was no doubt in my mind that he was in full control of his image and was giving her a heart a-Zac on purpose.

As I would flip through my old Rolodexes, it was clear to me that even though I’d encountered as disparate a group of bold-faced names as just about anyone ever has, there aren’t many celebrities as good-looking, unaffected, beguiling, or as plain
nice
as Zac Efron. If those qualities are what makes him read as soft to some people, causing them to think he’s gay, or if he really is gay (or just indulges in three-ways with Kellan Lutz by his side…dream big), then he is one
hell
of a homo.

All of my Rolodexes are gone now, replaced by a fat, utilitarian, but infinitely less satisfying Google contacts list. Whether it was cheetah-walking Pola Negri, Wildcats-cheering Zac and Vanessa, catty Christina Aguilera or any of the other famous names into whose paths I’d clawed my way, those Rolodexes were my explorer’s notes from a nonstop celebrity safari.

My dogs, Hyphen and Sash, own about 100 toys, but I can’t remember the last time their co-parent José or I got them a toy that entered into the pantheon of toys that truly drive them crazy like their hard plastic key rings. I used to think it’s because they love to chew, but they could chew any number of other, similar toys, so that’s not the whole picture. Then I thought it was the keys’ forbidden allure—if they chew too long they’re eating plastic, so we take them away after a short time.

“Are you eating plastic?” I’ll ask Sash, and she’ll look at me guiltily, admitting with her eyes that she is, in fact, eating plastic.

I think part of their passion for the key rings is the fact that this kind of toy was among the very first we ever gave them. I think it’s impossible to fall in love with new objects or experiences as hard as you did with certain objects and experiences when you were young and you had so few objects and experiences with which to compare them. And I think that the things we love the most are the things that remind us of when we were kids, or that were among the first things for which our appreciation made us feel we were growing up.

That’s why I think certain objects and experiences hit my nostalG-spot in ways that don’t—and don’t have to—make artistic sense. I can’t really explain why the unintentionally funny movie
Looker
or the intentionally funny
The Golden Girls
or Brian De Palma’s grotesque
Body Double
or the insipid but stylish
The Eyes of Laura Mars
are visual comfort food for me—in some of the cases, I could semi-objectively argue that aspects of them are just plain quality, but overall, it’s not so much about the quantifiable quality as it is about an unquantifiable quality these experiences (more than “shows” or “movies”) produced in me when I was young, and that they still trigger in me now that I’m old and too jaded to jump on every new bandwagon.

I was watching some of those triggers while I spent the past five or so days obsessively picking over all my belongings, another activity always sure to tickle that nostalG-spot. My goal was to organize and hopefully edit; I accomplished that, if only meagerly (I dumped or marked for sale about three boxes’ worth of stuff), but maybe the secret goal was simply to bask in the feelings I get looking at the things I’ve acquired.

It’s blatant materialism, but not in the sense of a Marilyn Monroe character working a guy in exchange for something square-cut or pear-shape. It’s totemic.

While I searched, I spent the largest amount of time on my most personal items—in other words, I skipped my crazy-huge Madonna collection (which might have been self-preservation since devoting any time at all to it, whether to thin it out or simply rearrange it in boxes, would amount to devoting a month that I don’t have to spare) and instead focused on the boxes of childhood mementos, all my sketches and art, the short stories I wrote, my diaries and all my correspondence.

The letters were the strangest part; I had not looked through them in ages. It was like visiting an exhibit in a natural history museum or something—to think that we used to write so much to each other…and so often. When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I loved nothing more than finding (or drawing) an interesting image and Xeroxing it into some kind of bold stationery, then filling five or six pages of that stationery with what was going on with me and the world. I would do this with at least a dozen people, and they would do the same.

I have a terrible memory. Or rather, it’s the Mark Fidrych of memories—meaning I can easily recall certain things (like who Mark Fidrych was) about pop culture or about my life, but have huge gaps where memories of whole people I knew well should be. This is why my diaries and the letters in particular are so valuable to me—they remind me of people who were once so important to me and also remind me of what was so important to us at that time that it necessitated so much venting. Seeing them all again sent me to Google and Facebook, but I didn’t find the people I was most curious about.

I even saved a bunch of the notes I received during my college years from when I lived in that converted hotel the Shoreland in Hyde Park in Chicago at the U of C. Phone and other messages were left at the desk in little boxes just like you’d have done in an actual hotel in the ‘20s. It quickly became very “in” to receive messages this way, and the things written on them (usually by a friend, sometimes as dictated to a receptionist) were always cherished as some kind of proof that we were adults. They’re now a pop-culture history book—a friend asking me to see
Alien Nation
(“a surefire Oscar contender!”), another asking me if were true that Madonna had cancelled the
Blond Ambition
concert to which I had eighth-row seats—it was—and another leaving me a note just so I’d have a note because he knew I’d like that. Moreover, they’re personal-history books.