Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  “Best on the island,” he said, with understandable pride.

  I asked him about hot water. Where did he bathe?

  “Hot water is not good for the skin,” he said, explaining that he bathed in the sea or in the rain, which kept his hair shiny and soft.

  I then noticed his toilet seat. It was hanging from a banyan tree like a child’s swing. He could move it whenever he wanted and for whatever reason: according to the prevailing winds or rain, or if he just wanted to change the view.

  “This is where I pray,” he said, showing me the porch.

  “When do you pray?”

  “I have to be in the mood,” he said.

  “What do you pray to?” I asked.

  “To this beautiful place,” he said, raising his hands to his home, “and then the entire island, and the sea, the wind, too, the fruit trees, the chickens, the sun, the stars, the moon.”

  How lucky, I thought, that Jarmin had become my friend. After visiting his incredible home, I concluded there really wasn’t much missing in his life except taxes, traffic, and other people’s noise. Perhaps he was the most successful man I had ever met. No money, few possessions to worry about losing, no ambition but to be kind to strangers who might seek his help as we did that stormy night. Two days later, as we were about to cast off, he handed me a small package. Inside was a slip of paper with a mailing address (he hoped it would work but wasn’t sure) and a surprise gift: a bracelet made from rooster feathers, a memento I treasure. Even now, so many years later, it remains a reminder of its wise creator and the lesson he taught me: true luxury is a life well lived.

  The Only Thing You Can’t Make More of Is Time

  My life was a nonstop hustle, busy with my growing business (one that I would later lose, a story for another book), when I learned my father was traveling west for a fishing trip. Herbert Avrutus, his friend and the doctor who delivered me, had a cabin in Butte, Montana. I decided to clear out for a few days and join them, as it was considered among the finest places to fly-fish.

  But it was not my father’s favorite. He’d always loved the Margaree River, up in Nova Scotia, where he caught a monster salmon on the first day he was there—and never again in his life. He came back with a tam-tam hat that he wore on the rivers from then on, and which I still wear today. One day, we promised, we’d return together to fish the Margaree.

  I drove from Los Angeles to Butte, wondering if this might be the last time I’d ever see him. He was getting older, the aches turning to illnesses, and had some light dementia. It was hard for me to see him that way, to grow old with him, a reminder of the ticking time bomb of life. He had been so vivacious for so long.

  As I drove, I remembered a time my father came to visit me in Los Angeles. He came often during the winters, spending a month at a time. While he never met Fernando Lamas, we spent a lot of time with Esther Williams, his widow. I remained friendly with her. When she was invited to parties and events, I’d accompany her. She was such a lovely woman, and she met my family when they’d come out for their winter visit. Once, we met up with Esther and went to dinner at Le Restaurant, a famous place back then. We picked her up and I drove their car, Fern’s old Rolls-Royce, through Beverly Hills. We were all having a blast. We had the volume up on the radio, listening to swing music, and passed the famous fountain near the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  “How about a dance?” my father asked her.

  “But of course,” she said.

  I pulled the car over, we opened the doors of the Rolls and put the music on even higher; my father and Esther got out, and he started dancing with her around the fountain.

  My father was a wonderful dancer. He could buck and do a swing and a wicked Charleston. I watched them there I felt so proud of how far I’d come. In the eyes of my father, now dancing with Esther Williams in his arms, moving with her around a fountain in Beverly Hills, his feet gliding and a smile across his face, this was success. We were living life at the fullest, together.

  But now our time was short. I arrived in Butte and we fished for days. The Jackson and the Jefferson as well as some smaller streams. We had the best time, laughing together as we always had. Perhaps we laughed a little harder. After all, how many more chances would there be?

  On the last day of the trip, as the day was growing late, I was getting anxious. Storm clouds swirled above us in the big sky. Even though I had grown and had children of my own, I didn’t want to leave him. I was thinking, “Jesus, I have to say good-bye to him.” I really didn’t want to. I never did.

  When I was a child, after my escape from Phelps, my father was the one who was forced to take me back. I had been used to my mother leaving me. But that day, driving up the driveway at that school, I couldn’t hold back the tears. And neither could he. When he drove away that day, that hit me harder than I had ever been hit—before or since. It took me a long time to come to terms with that moment of abandonment by my father, despite the fact that he had little choice. Now here I was, a man, having to do the same to him. Just toward sunset, when the evening hatch was on, the time came to part ways.

  “You better get going,” he said as we walked up the dark riverbed.

  “I know,” I said. I thought about staying another day to be close to him, so we could just keep fishing, so I didn’t have to say good-bye. But I knew that postponing the trip wasn’t the right thing to do either. All things must come to an end.

  He turned and we hugged. I kissed him on the cheek, smelling his old Bay Rum aftershave and Palmolive soap. I put my arm around him. We stood silently for a moment, together, in that magnificent place. And then we split. He walked up the stream. I couldn’t move. I just watched as he ambled away. He paused once and turned around to check on me. He waved a final good-bye and then disappeared.

  • • •

  I was fortunate to see him again, but he wasn’t the same. He was sleeping more and more. He’d stopped his daily one-mile hike. He was living in upstate New York in his pre-revolutionary farmhouse. A few years earlier, I had built a house nearby so we could stay close. I was coming back from the airport in Albany and I stopped by to see him as I always did. He was eating his favorite lunch: lox and a bagel. He wasn’t hungry. I ate half.

  He usually delighted in hearing my stories from the road, proud that he had a son who was making “serious money,” who was a success. But this day, he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap. He got into bed and closed his eyes, so content.

  I sat there, watching him for some time, thinking about our life together. All that he had taught me. All that he had done for me. I got into his bed and put my arms around him. After a few minutes, he opened his eyes.

  “Hey, kid,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Next spring, we ought to fish the Margaree,” he said.

  “We will, Pop. I promise.”

  A smile came over his face.

  “I love you, Pop.”

  “I know you do. I love you too, son.”

  And then he drifted off.

  We never did fish the Margaree.

  • • •

  I scattered some of his ashes in the Green River in Vermont, where we spent so many wonderful days fishing together. I visit there from time to time, and when I do the memories come flooding back like the water that runs through the riverbed. The rest of his ashes I keep in his tackle box—the one with the little vise for tying those elegant fishing flies to match the hatch.

  He lived to fish. It’s a pretty great thing to live for. I also believe he lived to love. I know he loved me, and he knew I loved him.

  I think that’s a pretty great thing to live for too.

  FINALE

  Goldsmith?” the casting agent said.

  The wait was over. I walked into the studio. It was cold, dark, and empty. At the center of the stage was an illuminated chair, and I took my se
at there, surveying the space. I had never been in a casting room like this. It was a strange environment for casting. No props. No actors or casting personnel to read with. No one to throw you a line or even a smile. I could see only a camera mounted high on the wall, amid a bank of recording equipment. The box was sending a live video feed back to New York, where the director, the agency executives, and the client were all watching.

  “One moment,” someone said from a speaker, a voice that was so distant it could have been beamed down to me from the moon.

  I was annoyed at the entire operation, and sitting there and waiting for the audition to begin, I decided to remove my shoe and sock. Maybe that would get their goddamned attention.

  The speaker came on again, filling the studio with reverb that echoed in the empty room. It was the director this time.

  “I see that you took your sock off,” he said. “Why?”

  Somewhere, in that moment, it all hit me. I had everything I needed to do this. I had been preparing for this role my whole life. I had almost died at sea and on a mountain. I had met Jarmin and Grace and Eddie Egan and Domenic and Joan Fontaine. I had been caught naked on a freeway in LA and had debunked a miracle worker in the Philippines. Granted, I had never arm-wrestled Fidel Castro. But it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that, with one slightly different turn, I could have.

  Just make ’em laugh, I thought. And then I began channeling my late friend Fernando Lamas, mimicking his Argentinean accent and sentence structure. Everyone always laughed at my Fernando jokes.

  “Don’t you peoples know?” I said indignantly. “This is what’s called an icebreaker. See, amigo? You asked me, didn’t you?”

  Inside the booth, I could hear the echo of laughter.

  “Tell us about your life,” he said.

  I scratched my beard and looked up.

  “Well, it’s a wonderful life,” I said.

  “How did you start out?”

  “When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a hunter,” I said. “I used to hang around in Abercrombie’s gun room and look at these beautiful animals. Don’t get me wrong, I love animals. But you know, I was only going to kill the bad ones. I knew all about it. I even made and hand-loaded my own bullets. And that’s what I wanted to do, until I discovered Lucy.”

  “Who’s Lucy?” the director asked.

  “You don’t know about Lucy?” I said increduously.

  “No.”

  “Well, Lucy was a beautiful girl in the sixth grade. And I had a fancy for her, you know.”

  “So, what happened?” the director asked.

  “You know what happened,” I said matter of factly. “I was an early starter.”

  Behind the camera box, I could hear the agency people failing to stifle their laughter. Down on the floor, I knew it. I had them. I was in control. They never shut the box again.

  “What happened with your career?” the director asked.

  “Well, after Lucy, I discovered the womens. I changed my mind about my career.”

  “What did you want to do?”

  “I wanted to be an ob-gyn.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Maybe around eleven,” I said, relishing now the laughs I could hear from the booth.

  “How did you get to meet Fidel?” the director asked.

  “Well, I thought that you knew about that. You people seem to know about everything. I tell you. I was a runaway. A truant. One day, I fell asleep on a fucking train and I found myself in the Sierra Madre.”

  “What were you doing there?” the director asked.

  “I was hunting for the wild and elusive Litvak,” I said without batting an eyelash. “One day, I came upon a river and I see these ladies and they’re doing their laundry in the river.”

  “Well, what did you do?”

  “What do you think I did? I fucked them all.”

  “Just straight like that?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, straight-faced. “I fucked them all, and I got quite a reputation because, well, I was incredible.”

  “So how did you meet Fidel?”

  “Well, if you peoples let me finish, I tell you. It was through Che. Che Guevara. You know him, right?”

  “Really. How did you come to know Che?”

  “I rode with him. I let him borrow my motorcycle.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, because he wanted me to fuck one of his younger sisters, to be introduced to being a lady by someone who knew what he was doing. I was honored.”

  “You were that good?”

  “You know, you must read the newspapers in those days. The word, it traveled fast. I met the womens. There was lots of womens and they passed me around. They think that they own me. I let them own me. I have an obligation, because I developed, you know, some special techniques.”

  “What kind of techniques?”

  “Well, I don’t think that I want to tell you peoples,” I said, and as the laughter continued and they took another conference, I became panic-stricken about my truck. Forget about the ticket and fine. My monologue had been going on for so long, I worried the truck could have been towed. La Brea is a busy street. But they wanted to continue.

  “And Fidel?”

  “And Fidel heard about me,” I said, “because I fucked his mistress’s sister, and of course I had to fuck her too.”

  “You fucked them all?”

  “Of course, I fucked everybody.”

  “And what happened?”

  “So he challenged me to a duel,” I said. “Fidel didn’t like the fact that I fucked his mistress or her sister, so he wants to get the pistols. I told him, ‘Fidel, we can get the pistols if you want, but no sense in hurting ourselves. How about we play chess? It’s painless.’ He agreed. So we play chess and I let him win. He gets very upset. He wants to beat me fair and says, ‘Well, we have one more contest, amigo. The arm-wrestle.’ And that’s how I arm-wrestled Fidel Castro.”

  They were in hysterics.

  • • •

  I ran for my truck, expecting to see an empty parking space. It was still there—I hadn’t been towed yet. I got in the truck to head back to the campground. But first I called Barbara, my new agent. I was upset. It had seemed like the audition went well, but I was still convinced I wasn’t the right type for the part.

  “Honey, you made a mistake,” I said. “I’m all wrong for this. Don’t waste their time, my time, and your time. It ain’t going to work.”

  “You’re a good actor,” she said. “Keep the faith and let’s forget about it. It’s out of our hands now.”

  Time went by and I nearly did forget about it. But then I was called back. And there were just two of us. I knew the final audition had been one of my best performances.

  “He was terrific!” Joe Blake, the casting director, told us the following day.

  Barbara agreed with Blake. We were ecstatic.

  “There’s just one problem,” Blake told us. “They think they might want to go younger.”

  Foiled again, I thought, and so heartbreakingly close! How could I put myself in a position to be so crushed? Just like all the close calls before.

  Barbara was furious.

  “Joe, this doesn’t make any sense at all,” she said. “How can you possibly be interesting if you’re young?”

  Her rationale made sense. To be interesting, you have to have had experiences. And to have had experiences, you needed time. And I had spent a lot of time having a hell of a time.

  “Let me call you back,” Blake said, and he called the agency and client to make our case. The next day, I started my career as the Most Interesting Man in the World, a role I had been rehearsing for all my life.

  Epilogue

  The Most Interesting Man in the World. I could have been billed as the Luckiest Man in the
World. In the years that would follow, the most common question I was asked was, “Why do you think the commercials were so successful?” After all, they were. The character became a phenomenon, going viral on the Internet the way few commercial campaigns have before or since.

  My answer? I think they made people smile.

  I got the accolades. But I know that it never would have happened without the incredible young talents who created the brilliant campaign, one that won every award in its field. I will always be grateful to them and the many talented people who worked, wrote, and designed throughout my run.

  And finally, after all those years trying to make it in Hollywood, I became a recognizable star. Even though I wasn’t a lead in major motion pictures, the popularity of my character offered me some incredible experiences. Once, I was in a restaurant in Los Angeles, and I noticed a man approaching me, tall and imposing. He hesitantly and respectfully asked, “Could I get a picture with you?”

  It was Michael Jordan, the basketball player and one of the biggest commercial celebrities ever. And he was asking me for a photo opportunity.

  On another occasion, Leonardo DiCaprio crossed another restaurant to shake my hand. This was not early in his career—he was a bona fide star, and one who was not easily impressed. Yet there he was, coming to me like a wide-eyed kid. Less than a month later, I was in that same restaurant and had the same thing happen to me, only this time with Jennifer Lawrence.

  “You’re the Most Interesting Man in the World!”

  If she said so. We had a very nice conversation about Hollywood and how it’s changed. And how it hasn’t. There is such a shared experience that comes from the rejections and the successes to be had there, and the wild artistry and the unique business environment, that we were able to connect even though we were decades apart in age.