“No they don’t,” I kept reminding her. No one goes from goody-good to baddy-bad overnight, I said. The kids and the administration and the parents who’d been called, as well as those who’d simply heard about the incident via gossip, all knew that. But even I could see the way some of the mothers in the yard would look at us whenever I picked up my daughter from school on Fridays, our appointed afternoon of bonding. Crazy mother, I could almost hear them thinking as Sasha would hop onto the back of my Vespa. No wonder the kid got into trouble. Then, clutching the keys to their SUVs, they’d say something artificially benign like, “Is that thing safe?,” and I’d picture the family of five plus a chicken I’d seen in Malaysia, balancing on a single scooter, or the chic woman in Rome, wearing her infant in a sling as she zoomed around the streets of Trastevere, or the father on his Vespa in Paris, carting his two kids home from school—one in front, one behind, none of them wearing helmets—and I would sigh in defeat and say something appropriately cheerful and idiotic like, “Well, I haven’t crashed yet!”
When some of the parents push me on it, as they inevitably do, I tell them I’ve been riding scooters on and off for twenty years, ever since I moved to Paris after college, and I know no better or cheaper means of navigating a city, with or without a kid in tow. Unlike many cities around the globe, where safe urban bike paths have been established—we’re getting there here in the United States, but we’re not there yet—our cities are far more dangerous to bicyclists than they are to scooterists, who use normal traffic lanes and go the same speed limit as cars instead of having to ride between the parked cars and the traffic. Yes, I’m burning fossil fuels, and I feel appropriately guilty about that, but I’ve never owned a car, and a single gallon of gasoline—the entire capacity of my gas tank—lasts me a whole week. I can make it from Leo’s day care uptown to my office downtown in fifteen minutes or less. Crosstown journeys, where public transportation in my city is at its weakest, are a breeze. As an added bonus, every mundane trip to fetch a kid from a play-date or to go to the grocery store or to meet with an editor or to take Jacob back and forth to his Star Trek audition turns into an exhilarating moment of transcendence and beauty.
Next stop after the ear fitting was a costume fitting on the studio lot, which because we’d arrived in LA on the first day of the Writers Guild strike, was tricky. Jacob’s driver, a Teamsters union member, refused to cross the picket line in his vehicle, so we parked just outside a lesser-known entrance and crossed it on foot. This was merely a symbolic gesture from one union member to another, as we were on a tight schedule with little room for Socratic debate. “We’re just going for a costume fitting,” I said, by way of apology to the team of two picketers handing out leaflets at the lesser-known entrance, and the writers said no problem, it was cool, so long as neither of us were writers.
“But, Mom,” said my son, “you’re a—”
I squeezed his hand, hard.
“Ow! Jesus, Mom. What the hell?”
When we were safely inside, I explained that the kind of writing I do—books, magazine articles, essays—doesn’t count as writing in Hollywood.
“What does it count as?” said Jacob.
I thought about it for a second: my books take years to write, and I get paid very little; a TV script can be dashed off in a few weeks, and its author gets paid a bundle. Lunacy, I thought.
Michael, the costume designer, was unhappy with the thickness of Jacob’s Vulcan costume. I would describe the costume, but I can’t. Or I could, as long as you wouldn’t mind a Vulcan nerve pinch to the neck immediately afterward. As I write this, Star Trek is still months away from hitting the theaters, and I am still bound by the terms of my nondisclosure agreement. So I’ll just speak in general terms and say that the costume was, well, there’s no other way of saying it: it was a dress. My son was wearing a dress.
This would not be the first time Jacob had worn a dress, nor would it be even the second or third. When he was two, he found a floral Ralph Lauren dress, size 2T, that had been given to his little sister as a baby present, and he put it on and twirled around in it to the theme from Titanic. He appropriated Sasha’s tutu soon thereafter, which he paired with a birthday hat (and not much of anything else), and then about a year later he borrowed his friend Emma’s sequined Little Mermaid gown, which he would slip on after his bath.
He made no distinction, however, between a dress and a pirate suit or a coat of armor or a firefighter’s hat. He appropriated them all with equal abandon, standing up on coffee tables and chairs and any other raised platforms he could find. There he would sing and act and perform until he was either hoarse or it was time for bed. Meanwhile, Sasha would stand underneath him in her football jersey—she’d only shop in the boys’ department—quietly observing her brother’s id writ large before shaking her head and slinking back into her room to draw “I want a dog!” next to a girl in a football jersey, which she would then tape to our front door. She’s the real Vulcan of the family—quiet, contemplative, logical—and has been since birth, just as Jacob’s always been the Kirk. The jury’s still out on Baby Leo, but judging by his attachment to his ukulele and Nirvana Unplugged, it’s only a matter of time before he’s skipping baths and shooting smack.
“Can we stiffen it up right in here?” Michael was asking his assistant, fingering the dramatic neck of the dress. “It shouldn’t droop.” Michael, who’s done costumes for dozens of films, is blessed not only with a talent for design and great bone structure—think Mikhail Baryshnikov with a full head of dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses—but with an aura of eerie calm and poise that belied the enormity of the task at hand. Behind him, on a bulletin board, were dozens of fabric swatches and photographs torn from magazines to serve as inspiration for a complicated alien sequence with many extras that was scheduled to shoot soon: Afghanis in burkas, a Tu-areg man in traditional dress, a Cambodian woman sitting on the floor next to a loom, Western models walking down catwalks, alien babies, and a man, of indistinct origins, clutching what looked like Yorick’s skull under his arm.
“No problem,” said the assistant, one of three hovering around Jacob. “We’ll have to tear it apart and build it back up from scratch, but we’ll get it done tonight.” The film was scheduled to start shooting imminently, and the costume production rooms were overflowing with yards of fabric demanding attention. None of the seamstresses, one sensed, would be getting much sleep, perhaps for months to come, but still, you could tell: it was a well-oiled machine. Then again, that’s the kind of grease a big-budget Hollywood production buys you: Michael’s calm, a roomful of assistants, and the ability to completely tear apart and restructure a young boy’s dress overnight.
This stood in stark contrast to the atmosphere on the indie film Jacob had shot three months earlier, the one with exactly. 1 percent of the budget of Star Trek. One particularly chaotic day, along with my regular duties as Jacob’s on-set guardian, I served as Wardrobe (they literally took the sweater off my back and put it on Jacob), on-set photographer (they had none), hairstylist (ditto), continuity (“Um, hello? I’m pretty sure he wasn’t wearing the sweatshirt in that last shot…”), extra (to replace the “Woman walking her dog at night” who missed the train down from Penn Station), animal wrangler (“Oh, man. Anyone have a plastic bag?”), props (“Yes, I have a ten-dollar bill for Jacob to pay the taxi driver in the shot, hold on a sec”), catering (if you count the two cheesecakes I bought, when the crew was threatening mutiny for lack of dessert), and grip (someone had to help them move furniture at 2:00 A.M., or we would have never gotten out of there).
That shoot had spoiled our annual family vacation with the grandparents, cutting our normal two weeks together to four days. My parents took Sasha for the full two weeks while Paul and I took turns dealing with Jacob on set in New Jersey and with Baby Leo back in New York; still, no one was happy about it, least of all Sasha, whose name, in the middle of the costume fitting, was now flashing across my cell phone.
I excused myself to pick it up and heard the squealing chaos of school pickup on the other end. “Mom,” she said, “can I go over to Skylar’s after school?”
“Sure,” I said, pleased that Sasha had recently found a coterie of new friends, two boys and a girl whom she seemed to genuinely like and with whom she made spontaneous plans without my intervention. “Call Daddy. See if he can pick you up on his way home from work.”
“I did. He never answers his cell phone.”
When Jacob was tapped to play Adolescent Spock, we rented a bunch of early Star Trek episodes to show him. What was fascinating—to me, not to Jacob, who was barely three years old when our family purchased its first cell phone—was the way in which mobile phones, tablet PCs, PDAs, video conferencing, and even MRIs were all predicted by the creators of the show. In fact, some say the Star Trek franchise actually motivated the design for many of the new gadgets and doohickeys we now either take for granted or, in my husband’s case, ignore. “Sasha, look, I’m sorry, sweetie. I know Daddy doesn’t always pick up his cell phone, but I’m busy right now. Try to work it out with him, okay?”
You’d think they could have figured out the teleporter by now. Our family could really use one. Or five.
“But, Mom!”
“Sasha, please.” I turned to Michael. “I’m sorry. I’m just dealing with stuff back at the mother ship.”
“No worries,” said Michael, who looked as if he never worried.
In “The Cage,” the pilot episode of Star Trek we rented for Jacob, the Enterprise was captained by a man named Pike. (William Shatner as Captain Kirk didn’t appear until the following episode.) At one point in the story, another character, Boyce, notes that Captain Pike looks tired. “You bet I’m tired!” says Pike. “I’m tired of being responsible for two hundred and three lives, and…I’m tired of deciding which mission is too risky and which isn’t, and who’s going on the landing party and who doesn’t…and who lives…and who dies.”
Now, granted, I’m in charge of three children rubbing up against the realities of modern-day Earth instead of 203 shipmates rubbing up against futuristic aliens in deep space, and my responsibilities don’t usually involve life and death—although we have had our share of family outings in ambulances—but let’s just say that in my own small way, I understood where Pike was coming from. It’s hard being the captain of a ship, no matter its mission, star date, or battlefronts. Especially when your first officer doesn’t pick up his communicator. “I’ll e-mail Daddy from my phone,” I told my daughter. “He always reads his e-mail.”
The film’s first day of shooting was also our first day on set, at a power plant an hour south of Los Angeles, where Ja-cob would begin a week of martial arts and combat training. Security that day—and every day thereafter—was extremely tight: every car had to have a pass; every Teamster had to be facially recognized by one of the many security guards manning the fenced-off entrance; every actor, when not shooting inside the power plant or sitting inside his trailer, had to wear a full-length black raincoat, with hood, over his costume to cover it from prying eyes. Even so, the paparazzi must have been lurking somewhere in the shadows, because photos of Zach Quinto, the new Spock, would appear on several film and Star Trek blogs the next day, his costume partially visible underneath his raincoat. “We’ve had a security breach!” one of the crew members announced, without irony, the morning this happened. “Make sure you keep Jacob out of sight.”
While I understood the motivation for such high levels of security—to keep the Trekkies out, to keep the material fresh, to surprise audiences with stuff they haven’t already been seeing on the Web for over a year—on some level it seemed excessive. When I was a young journalist covering the Soviet coup, and Yeltsin was holed up in the Russian parliament building, I was able, even with a suddenly obsolete Soviet press pass, to sneak onto the premises, past security detail much less rigorous than Star Trek’s, though then it was the future Russian president’s life that was at stake, not his media freshness.
Jacob would be spending most of his time either in the school trailer, completing his requisite four hours of schoolwork a day, or in the gym tent set up on the outskirts of base camp to train him and Chris Pine, the new Kirk, one of the most arrestingly beautiful humans in our solar system.
I’d sit on a folding chair in that tent with my laptop and noise-canceling headphones, trying to work while Jacob mastered the basics of movie combat—how to fall forward on his forearms, to avoid damage to his face and chin; how to throw a fake punch so the camera doesn’t see it; how to maneuver out of an attack with a backward somersault—when suddenly, in would stride Pine, all six feet of him, wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts. He’d jump rope. He’d run laps around the tent. He’d spar with a trainer, his hairless chest glistening with beads of sweat. I tried to ignore this young man, in the prime of his beauty, just as thoroughly as he ignored over-the-hill, dumpy, big-nosed me, but—here’s to you, Mrs. Koganson!—my powers of concentration were no match for such pheromones. Not a single word I managed to eke out in that gym ever made it into this book.
One afternoon, just as we were sitting down to lunch in the craft services tent, a PA came to fetch us. “Can we borrow Jacob for a minute?” he said. “J.J. needs him.” J.J. is the director of Star Trek.
Jacob, who’d spent the whole morning fighting fake battles and getting bruised, eyed his uneaten food hungrily. “Can I eat my chicken first?”
“No,” said the PA. “J.J. needs you now.”
Jacob put down his fork and stood up. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
J.J. is also cocreator of the TV show Lost. J.J.’s casting director, April, had once called, several months earlier, to ask if Jacob wanted to play a minor role on that show, but it would have conflicted with a family plan, so I’d said no.
Jacob had been upset with me when he’d realized the role I’d turned down on his behalf—the chance to play Ben’s younger self, omg, in Hawaii!—so when J.J.’s casting director called again, asking him to play Adolescent Spock, he happily accepted, not because of any innate love for Star Trek, which he’d never seen, but for the chance to work with his generation’s Gene Roddenberry. Meaning, not much can keep my son from a savory chicken lunch, but the chance to quiz J.J. himself on the future plotlines of his favorite show could.
The PA accompanied us to the parking lot, where J.J. was walking in and around the perimeters of two giant circles marked with tape on the ground, his eye flush up against his viewfinder, while a group of his colleagues stood by. J.J. shares the same black-framed, cool-nerd taste in eyewear as his costume designer, but he wears them unironically: one senses in the man the dutiful bar mitzvah boy he must have once been. His smile, as much a part of his signature look as his eyewear, is genuine, inviting, and he addresses everyone on set with an intoxicating insouciance, as if we were all just hanging out backstage at the high school theater instead of congregating on multimillion-dollar sets.
“Oh, good, Jacob,” he said, when he spotted my son, “glad you’re here. Did you know the second J in my name stands for Jacob? Jeffrey Jacob. Isn’t that cool?” He held the viewfinder up to his eye and directed my son to stand between the two circles on the ground. “Yup,” he said to the large coterie around him, “I knew it. The shot’s not going to work. I need a third bowl.”
An architect holding his rendering, in three-dimensional miniature, of the two giant “bowls” marked on the macadam, nodded his head and stared down at his model, turning it this way and that. The bowls—around eight to ten feet in diameter, if I had to guess—were to be constructed on the Paramount lot and used in a scene that would be shot a month hence, when Jacob would return to LA with my father for another eleven days of combat training and shooting.
The man standing next to the architect, presumably the producer, said, “We can’t do it, J.J. We don’t have the budget for it.”
J.J. turned to me, a woman he’d barely met, as if confiding in a clo
se friend. “Can you believe it? They’re making me beg.” This instant rapport he has with others is hardly fake. Nine months later, when my father would be told he had only two to six months left to live—meaning he would not live long enough to see Star Trek released—J.J. would personally arrange for Dad and Jacob to fly out to Los Angeles for a private early screening.
Now he turned back to the producer. “Come on! What’ll it cost? Thirty-five grand?”
“Twenty-five,” said the producer.
“Even better. What’s another twenty-five grand? We need the shot.”
No wonder Jacob was getting paid scale, and Kirk and Spock would be played by relative unknowns. All that money was going into visual richness, into the filmmaking itself. Which—I had to hand it to J.J. and the producers—was admirable.
“We’re already over budget as it is,” said the producer.
“Okay, so now we’re going to be over by slightly more, and it’ll be fine, trust me.”
The producer smiled warily and shook his head in defeat. How could you say no to the bar mitzvah boy? “Fine. You can have your third bowl.”
“Excellent,” said J.J. Then he addressed my son. “Thanks, Jacob. Really appreciate it. You’re having fun? Everyone being nice to you? Are you getting excited to shoot your scene?”
Jacob nodded and said a clipped “uh-huh” to each question, bursting, I could tell, with his own questions but not wanting to interrupt. Finally, as J.J. turned to head back to the set, my son could take it no longer. “Can I ask you something?” he called out. “About Lost?”
J.J. stopped in his tracks and checked his watch. Then he turned around. “Sure, go ahead,” he said. “But you have to understand I might not be able to answer.”
“I know.” I could see Jacob weighing the various unresolved plot issues in his head, trying to decide which was worth holding up a shoot. “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking: Is Ben keeping Jacob prisoner?”
Hell Is Other Parents Page 8