by Emma Dibdin
On this, he has a point. I’ve seen news stories created from much less.
‘It’s my own fault,’ he murmurs. ‘I should’ve known better than to get involved with her – I knew she was too young, and a little flighty. But I didn’t know she had such a temper.’
‘Was there any warning? That she was planning something like this?’
‘I don’t even know what that would look like,’ he says, hopelessly. ‘She’d certainly been unhappy, but it was an inconstant thing, with us. Kind of volatile. We broke it off for good about a week ago – or I suppose I did, in the end.’
‘And she didn’t like that.’
‘Well, it was mutual, I thought. It’s not as if I dumped her out of the blue.’
‘Do you know what she’s saying? The details of it?’
‘That I was a monster. Beat her up, called her terrible things, made her miserable, tried to control her? I mean… my God, anyone who knows Amabella, the one thing they’ll say is that nobody could control that girl. She’s headstrong. You’d be a fool to even try.’
‘Well, I don’t know much about the legal side, but from my perspective the restraining order is the part of this that looks worst.’
‘It’s a temporary restraining order, and they hand those out like candy – there’s no hearing, nothing. My lawyers didn’t even get the heads up until it had already been filed, it’s a total racket.’ He doesn’t even sound angry, I realize, just truly bewildered. ‘I mean, we never even lived together and I think I probably went to her apartment twice? Maybe three times in our entire relationship? The idea that I’m going to show up there, it’s just so strange.’
‘It’s for show. She knew “judge granted a restraining order” would look bad for you.’
‘I mean, the truth is most of our relationship was conducted in public to some degree. We spent a lot of our time out – she always liked to be seen, you know, to be in the right places, events and so on. If I’d been the kind of boyfriend she says I was… It just doesn’t make sense that nobody else would have witnessed it. It never happened, there is not a single person who will back her up.’
‘That’s good. If it’s just her word against yours, and people start coming out in support of you—’
‘What are people saying?’ he asks me, with a vulnerability I’ve never heard in him before.
‘Well…’
I open Twitter on my phone, along with the comments sections on the three news stories I read earlier, and skim a selection.
‘I met Clark Conrad once and he was the sweetest most lovely man. No way he could ever do anything like this.’
‘I’ve always found something slightly creepy about Conrad. His Nice Guy thing is too carefully honed not to be an act.’
‘why are so many people jumping to conclusions based on one allegation? has he ever been accused of anything like this before? seems like you want him to be guilty.’
‘I know for a fact Clark isn’t capable of hurting anyone, much less a person he loved. People who read everything they see on the internet are part of the problem.’
‘Oh look, another woman coming forward about abuse in Hollywood, another online mob just chomping at the bit to discredit her.’
‘Does anyone else find it creepy that his ex-girlfriend looks like a clone of his daughter? I thought this Amabella chick was Skye.’
‘This is AWFUL Clark and his family have been through enough! This scheming bitch is taking advantage when he’s vulnerable.’
‘What exactly do you people think she has to gain by lying about this? How does this help her in any way? She has plenty of her own money, and she’s going up against one of the most powerful men in the industry.’
‘Pretty convenient she’s just coming out with this now her divorce is finalized. She got nothing in that settlement (pre-nup) so she needs to go elsewhere for her next payout. Anyone who doesn’t see this for what it is is a moron.’
‘It’s amazing how much more willing people are to believe that women are lying than they are to consider the possibility that a man they admire might not be a good person.’
‘Those bruises are FAKE, I am a certified nurse and that is not how bruises would present after the kind of attack (and timeframe) she says happened. Can’t believe people are buying this, it’s full Gone Girl shit.’
‘It’s a mixed bag,’ I tell him, honestly. ‘But a lot of people are on your side. And this is before you’ve even said anything, which is why I think you should say something.’
‘Peyton and I did talk, briefly. We’re issuing a denial, kind of a boilerplate thing, just making it clear that the allegations are untrue.’
‘That’s not going to be enough. Even if it doesn’t look bad to most people, there will be enough media outlets that spin it so that it does. I promise you, there are a huge number of media companies right now on the verge of collapse, just panicking and looking for any way to get traffic so that they can keep themselves afloat, and a story like this is like a lifeline to them. They’re not going to let it go. So you might as well try to take some control of the narrative.’
‘Why do I need to hire a crisis manager, when I have you?’ He says this not sarcastically, but with real admiration.
‘Well, maybe you don’t. Because I have an idea.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘I want to write a real profile of you. No Q&A, no softball questions about your house, just an in-depth piece about who you really are.’
‘After this, and after what I told you last night, that’s what you want to write about?’ He shakes his head incredulously. ‘You must be a masochist.’
‘Come on.’
‘What reputable outlet is going to run a piece like that right now? And risk looking like they’re supporting an abuser?’
‘It’ll be a tougher sell than it would have been two weeks ago, for sure. But people will want to hear your side of the story, and I think a lot of editors will jump at the chance to give you a platform to tell it. I already have an in with Reel.’
‘Reel? They’re a trade.’
‘I know, but have you seen their online stuff? They’re doing more and more glossy profiles, junkets, even clickbait galleries. They need traffic just like anyone else, and I think doing this in a trade will look better. We can angle it as a post-Oscar victory lap, what you’re doing next and so on, and then work in the personal stuff in a more subtle way. That way it doesn’t look like you’re trying to get sympathy.’
‘What’s your in with them?’
‘I have an interview with Ben Schlattman about to go live.’
He laughs sharply.
‘Really? Well, if I’m following Ben, I guess I do stand a chance of looking good by comparison.’
I smile tightly, sitting on all the things I wish I could say.
‘Okay,’ he continues, nodding slowly. ‘God help me, but your cockamamie plan is actually sounding good.’
‘As it should. Amabella doesn’t have much of a reputation as it is, so you don’t need to badmouth her at all in the profile, just give your perspective on things, say that you’re bewildered by the allegations and you wish her only the best, and then we focus on your career, your upcoming projects, and your new life as a single father. Because the thing you want to avoid is—’
‘Is what?’ He looks expectantly at me, because I cut myself off.
‘Is for people to start drawing a connection between Skye and Amabella.’ Silence, for a long time, but I hold my nerve.
‘Yeah, that had occurred to me as well,’ he murmurs at last, his head falling back into his hands. ‘God. I just… I hate this. I hate having my family go through this. I hate the chess game of it all.’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t know how any of this happened.’
It’s an impulse, to run my hand through his hair, but once I start I don’t stop, and he doesn’t move. It’s less soft than I expected, more like wire, but warm. After a while, he reaches up and
takes my hand in his and holds it, our fingers intertwined against the nape of his neck.
14
Just as Clark anticipated, the profile is a tough sell. Reel’s editor David calls me back immediately when I email him the pitch, and it’s clear that he’s confused, trying to figure out how seriously to take my claim of access to Clark.
‘Just for my own edification – are you really telling me Clark Conrad has agreed to this?’ he asks, and I say yes, trying not to sound too self-satisfied. David is clearly wrestling with his conflicting impulses to snap up this story, and to protect Reel from the inevitable criticism it will face if it runs a fawning profile of Clark in this particular moment.
‘But isn’t Reel sort of bulletproof in that regard?’ I argue. ‘That’s why I brought this to you, instead of someone in the men’s lifestyle space. The profile can be industry-focused, about what’s next for him after his Oscar win, but I’ll weave in the personal life stuff and you’ll still get all the buzz and pickup from those quotes.’
He still says no, though I can hear in his voice that he’s tempted. ‘Let’s stay in touch,’ he says, obviously unwilling to let me get off the phone, especially when I make it clear that I’ll be taking the pitch elsewhere. But the truth is I won’t, at least not for now, because I don’t know where to start and I have a sneaking suspicion that David will come around. A new spate of articles has emerged pointing out that there was no record of the police ever having been called, either to Skye’s apartment or to Clark’s home, with an LAPD statement confirming as much. A model ex-boyfriend of Amabella’s posted a Snapchat video in which he seemingly called her a liar, facing into the camera with his shirt off as he talked about ‘girls who try to tear you down when they can’t get your money’. And Amabella herself was out at a club in West Hollywood last night, ‘not exactly keeping a low profile in the wake of her allegations of abuse against ex-boyfriend Clark Conrad’, as one tabloid sniffily put it. The comments below the article were even less kind. Clark’s fans have started a hashtag campaign across social media, #WeBelieveInClarkConrad, which has gained support from a lot of industry power players. Already, the narrative is shifting.
The real clincher comes the next morning, two days after Amabella’s accusations broke, when Skye posts to Instagram for the first time since her suicide attempt. The picture was a black-and-white shot from her childhood: in a forest, a young, shaggy-haired Clark grinning at the camera with tiny Skye in his arms.
When I was five, my parents took me to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park on a road trip. I wanted to climb this tree so badly, but of course it was too dangerous and I’d never have made it up there on my own. So my father carried me up on his back, then let me sit on his shoulders to see the view. Just like he’s been doing for me my entire life. He’s always been my rock. There will always be people who try to take advantage of his kindness and his strength, but the truth will always win out.
Skye’s post explodes, of course, prompting media coverage just as feverish as the accusations did, and puncturing any possibility that she and Amabella may be linked as abused women in Clark’s life. It’s less than half an hour before David calls me back.
‘Can you get this done for Friday?’ he asks. ‘We’re on the line with his publicist right now trying to organize a quick shoot – we want to blow this out, maybe even get it into the print edition if we can.’
‘Wait, you’re speaking to Peyton?’ I ask quickly. ‘I’m not going through her on this. I’m dealing with him directly. You can organize the shoot through her if you want, but just make it clear that her purview begins and ends with the photos.’
David clearly doesn’t know quite what to do with this, but when we speak again a couple of hours later, he drily asks me if I’m psychic.
‘As it turns out, Peyton is no longer working with Clark. I guess he fired her this morning.’
‘Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘So I have to ask, can you talk to him and figure out when to get this shoot done?’
‘Sure.’
I can hear the smile in Clark’s voice when I call. He wants to do the shoot not at the house, but at the office he’s just leased to house his new production company.
‘Your production company? When did this happen?’
‘Well, you know, I saw your interview with Schlattman and I just thought: that could be me!’ he jokes.
‘God, perish the thought.’ I’d actually forgotten the Ben Schlattman piece was going live today, and ironically it’s been more or less buried by all the Clark news.
‘In all seriousness, you did a great job. Ben’s never sounded better, and I know that can’t have been an easy one to wrangle.’
‘Thank you. He’s definitely a character.’
‘I only hope you can do half as good a polish job on me.’
‘Oh, I’m not too worried about making you look good.’
The shoot is arranged, and I tell the photographer where and when to meet Clark at the offices. As for me, Clark suggests that we do the interview over dinner.
‘Back in the day when I actually did one or two of these things, that seemed to be the norm. Do an activity during, make it seem less like an interrogation. One guy wanted to take me paragliding while he interviewed me.’
‘Hard pass. But dinner sounds good, assuming you know somewhere discreet.’
And of course, he does.
Clark Conrad Is Not Without His Insecurities
Published March 3, 2016 on Reel.com
By Jessica Harris
I’m sitting across from Clark Conrad on a sun-dappled patio in Silver Lake, trying to figure out why he’s so reluctant to talk about himself. ‘It’s always seemed strange to me that so many actors are such narcissists,’ he tells me, the corners of his eyes crinkling in bewilderment. ‘Because acting is the opposite of talking about yourself. It’s disappearing into someone else’s skin.’ The decision to speak with me this evening, then, is a conflicted one. But Conrad has had what he drily describes as ‘an interesting year’ thus far, and the forty-five-year-old actor is nothing if not proactive. ‘I started to realize that if you just say nothing, people end up saying things on your behalf. Nature abhors a vacuum, and this business abhors a silence. I figured it was time to say something.’
Conrad has a lot of things to say. He is articulate and measured and immensely witty, his trademark coiffed hair becoming increasingly tousled over the course of the evening as he runs his hands through it. It’s a gesture he goes to when he’s in search of the right phrase; in conversation as in work, he is a perfectionist. We are speaking just three days after the Oscars, where he won the Best Actor prize for his meticulous, nuanced performance in the biopic Armstrong.
‘What do you want from me, here?’ Clark asks, as our waiter refills our glasses of Sancerre. ‘What do people say about these things?’
‘I don’t know – I haven’t profiled a lot of Oscar winners before. Say something winning, yet modest.’
‘What did you call it, a victory lap?’ He shudders. ‘Can’t you just make up something the internet will like and pretend I said it?’
‘That would be unethical.’
I clink my glass against his, and turn my recorder back on.
After a string of acknowledged box office failures including the much-anticipated adaptation of bestseller The Silver Circle, Conrad admits he had a lot riding on this performance.
‘I was at a moment where I was no longer sure of my choices,’ he admits with a wry smile. ‘And Armstrong was the first time I had felt really strongly about something in a while. I knew how great the material was, I knew how great the people involved were, but I was not sure I was the right guy for the role. So that validation meant a lot. What a surreal evening.’
Insecurity might seem a surprising word for someone at Conrad’s height of fame to use, but he uses the word more than once during our conversation. A lack of security marked his early life, too; Conrad was orphaned by the
age of ten. His father, the photographer Philip Conrad, and his mother, a part-time teacher, were both killed in a car accident in 1980, after which he was raised by his paternal grandparents. ‘The first ten years of my life, I would describe as idyllic,’ he admits, recalling his upbringing in the suburbs of San Diego. ‘My parents were as good as it gets, and everything I’ve ever done right as a father, I learned from them.’ But though he has never gone into details, and declines to do so this evening, his teenage years with his grandparents were less sunny, with ‘wrongdoing on both sides. I was chomping at the bit to get out of there once I was eighteen.’
And so, to Hollywood, where Conrad couch-surfed for the better part of a year before landing his first speaking role on All My Children. The pace of daytime did not agree with him, he says, though he credits the show with developing several of the muscles he still uses in his work today. ‘Memorizing twenty, thirty pages of dialogue a day, and regurgitating it all in one take? That’s one hell of a bootcamp, particularly if you never had the opportunity to do theatre.’
It was a full seven years before Conrad landed the role that would become his against-the-odds breakout – the title part in a midseason replacement NBC drama called Loner, about a seemingly cynical and ruthless lawyer moonlighting as a heroic vigilante. ‘It didn’t feel like anyone really had high hopes for the show,’ he recalls. ‘We were coming in at midseason, and it seemed they only gave us the order out of sheer desperation, because they didn’t have anything else to fill the gap. The ratings were rough for that first season, but NBC, God bless them, took a chance on us.’ As many, including Conrad, have noted before, Loner was ahead of its time in many respects, a superhero show before they were a dime a dozen, inspired more by Batman than by other legal dramas. While there are a lot of things about the show that should be laughable – not least of them the lead character’s actual name, Richard Loner – it was consistently so much richer and deeper and smarter than anyone anticipated that it developed a dedicated audience, and a viewership large enough to keep it on the air for five beloved seasons.