Still, no matter who I went out with, I would always panic. I would wake up in the middle of the night next to a woman I barely knew and suddenly the walls would begin closing in. I’d stagger to the window, gasping for air. It was like claustrophobia, or gamophobia, or coul-rophobia (or is that fear of clowns?). Whatever phobia I was suffering from, it made me feel as if the girl in my bed, whoever she was, had been the worst decision I’d ever made. It made me feel as if I’d stepped into a bear trap, and that I would need to chew off a limb to get free. To make matters worse, I was terrible at breaking up, no matter how much practice I got. To do it properly takes spadework. You have to seed the ground with subtle hints of dissatisfaction—calling off dinners at the last minute, sulking for no good reason—so that it’s not too much of a shock when you drop the ax. There were times, I confess, when I took the easy way out and simply stopped answering my phone. “You’re an asshole,” one of my dates succinctly scrawled on a postcard she mailed from across town. She had a point.
In my defense, I did occasionally break the pattern. Every once in a while, I managed to keep a relationship going for whole weeks at a stretch. Sometimes even for a couple of months.
Darcy and I got into a fight on our very first date. We were at my apartment, in bed, and we started arguing about Cuba. I have no idea how the subject came up, but suddenly we were debating whether Castro had been good or bad for the Cuban people. I consider myself a card-carrying member of the liberal media conspiracy, but fiery, dark-eyed Darcy was an old-fashioned red-diaper baby from a famous family of wealthy American communists. Her great-grandfather had been one of the Hollywood Ten. Compared to her, I was a goose-stepping Nazi.
“Look at the literacy rate in Cuba!” she shouted, pulling the sheet up over her chest. “It’s ninety-eight percent!”
“Terrific!” I shouted back, covering my privates with a pillow. “Too bad there’s nothing to read. There’s no free press!”
We kept this up for months. We would fight, break up over some stupid argument, and then get back together again for a couple of weeks. For me, the comforting knowledge that a split was always imminent was the key to making the arrangement work. For Darcy, it must have been maddening. After we broke up for the last time, I heard she joined the Peace Corps and moved to China. If I could have gotten that far away from myself, I would have.
After Darcy, I met a bubbly blond stage actress at a bar in SoHo. As we sipped dirty martinis, Mindy told me about her role in an off-Broadway play that required partial nudity. To demonstrate how comfortable she was with the part, she lifted up her shirt, right in the middle of the bar, and revealed her flawless breasts. We went out for about six weeks. I never used the word “girlfriend” and never permitted her to call me “boyfriend,” insisting on a rigid no-strings policy. It wasn’t that monogamy bothered me—I didn’t cheat on Mindy—it’s just that after Sammy, the only way I could sustain even a short-term relationship was by pretending I wasn’t in one. Mindy was a good enough actress to play the role for a while, but eventually she got bored and moved on to more interesting parts. She’s now married to a hugely successful hedge-fund manager.
Jen was a knockout fashion stylist who happened to be the girlfriend of a semifamous TV actor—Derek Meecham, the guy who played Joey’s dumber brother for a half season of Friends. I met her at a magazine photo shoot in TriBeCa and we instantly hit it off. Luckily for me, she’d been feeling ignored by her semifamous boyfriend and was having doubts about their relationship. As far as I was concerned, the fact that she had a semifamous boyfriend only made her more attractive. Here was my chance to do to a celebrity what a celebrity had done to me. Even if he wasn’t really a celebrity. After about a month of secret dating, though, I discovered that I really liked Jen. She was sweet and vulnerable, but with a wicked sense of humor and a dead-sexy way of telling dirty jokes. Then, one night as we lay in bed, she made a deal-breaking mistake. She suggested she break it off with the semifamous boyfriend. “So we can be closer,” she explained, cuddling. “So we can be together, for real.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. I was too busy studying Jen’s ankles. I hadn’t noticed it until just then, but they were starting to look thick.
One of the things making it especially hard for me to fall for another woman was the fact that Samantha seemed to be everywhere I turned. Within a few months of moving in with Johnny Mars, she was suddenly popping up all over TV. I’d be lounging at home in my boxer shorts, flipping channels, and—bang!—there she’d be in a laundry detergent commercial playing a pretty young mom in an apron. I’d try to watch Melrose Place and—boom!—there’d she be in the background, an extra at Shooters Bar. One night I spotted her on a slab in an episode of Law & Order. Even as a corpse, she made my heart go pitter-patter. I was glad her career was going so well, but this was getting ridiculous.
Samantha wasn’t turning up at my doorstep at two in the morning anymore. But after she got married she did develop a weird habit of calling me at odd hours, usually from distant lands in far-flung time zones. Once she woke me in the middle of the night with a call from Paris, where Mars was accepting an honorary degree from the Sorbonne.
“Jessica Rabbit or the Little Mermaid?” she began the conversation without bothering with a hello.
“What?”
“Jessica Rabbit or the Little Mermaid?” she repeated more emphatically.
It took my brain a second or two to spin up out of sleep mode and recognize what Sammy was doing. She was playing the game where we’d take turns choosing which pop culture character we’d rather make out with. “Jessica Rabbit,” I answered. “No, wait, what are the biological implications of having a tail?” We used to play all the time back when we were kids. Ginger or Mary Ann? Wilma or Betty? For her, Mike Seaver or Alex P. Keaton? Brandon or Dylan? It had been a while and I was out of practice. “Um,” I said, returning the volley, “Ren or Stimpy?”
There was no reason for the call. Every once in a while, Samantha just needed a reminder that I was there, still floating in high orbit around her life. I didn’t mind. Even in the middle of the night—especially in the middle of the night—I found the sound of her voice soothing.
I saw Samantha in the flesh once in a while, too. Every six months or so we would get together for dinner or drinks in what became, for me, an excruciating exercise in superhuman restraint. I would have to pretend not to sniff her hair when she squeezed past me into her chair at the restaurant. I’d have to try to ignore how soft and inviting her lips looked when I watched her nibble on a piece of lettuce. There was a strict choreography to these dinners. We’d begin by talking about Johnny. How great he was. The amusing comments and brilliant observations and amazing career moves he’d made recently. Then we’d chat about Sammy for a bit, and how great she was, until we moved on to how great I was. But for all the cheery bravado, I wasn’t sure Sammy was doing so terrific. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t.
Being a movie star’s wife had obvious advantages. Money. Status. Even a certain degree of spousal-reflected fame. Sammy didn’t get asked for her autograph, but her new last name definitely elevated her status. She always arrived at our dinners in a chauffeur-driven town car, sometimes even a full-blown limo, and we never had to wait to be seated. Even at the most crowded restaurants, even when we didn’t have reservations, right away we’d be escorted to the best table in the house. But there was a downside, too. So long as she was married to Johnny, Sammy would always be a supporting player in her own life. She’d always get second billing to her husband. No matter what else she did, no matter what she accomplished, it could never compete with being a superstar’s wife.
What’s more, Sammy had to share her husband with the entire world. That wasn’t always a whole lot of fun. Once, at one of our dinners, Sammy told me about a trip she had taken with Johnny to Tokyo. They were met at the airport by hundreds of hysterical fans (apparently, Jack Montana was big in Japan). The mob was so excited by his arrival that the To
kyo police had to swarm in and rescue Mars, but not before a Japanese schoolgirl got close enough to rip a sleeve from Johnny’s shirt. The police quickly hustled him through a security door and gave him a motorcade escort to his hotel. It was an hour before anybody realized that Sammy was still at the airport with the luggage. Samantha laughed when she told the story, but it still sounded pretty humiliating.
Mercifully, Samantha never suggested bringing her husband to one of our dinners. I no longer had the slightest desire to meet Johnny Mars. I’d rather have spent an evening trapped in an elevator with Sissy Skye and her gynecologist-urologist. The closest I’d come to him so far was when I returned one of Sammy’s calls and made the mistake of dialing her home number. Johnny picked up. “Oh, so you’re Max, eh?” he rumbled into the phone. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” I tried to speak but the words caught in my throat. “Um, I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I finally stuttered back. After that, I made it a point never to call Sammy at home.
But I did come perilously close to an in-person encounter with Special Agent Jack Montana in the spring of 2008, about two years into their marriage. The near miss occurred at the Magistrate Theater on Forty-second Street, at the New York premiere of the Kenneth Branagh–Julia Ormond fourteenth-century romance Canterbury’s Pilgrim.
As a writer for KNOW, I got invited to lots of movie premieres. I loved attending them. The roving klieg lights. The shouting paparazzi. The thrill of strolling down a red carpet. It gave me tingles. Best of all, though, if you brought a date to a movie opening you were all but guaranteed to get lucky later. At that time, I was trying to get lucky with Lacy, a super-cute Pilates instructor with delusions of modeling. It was only our second date, but from the way Lacy held my hand during the cab ride to the theater, I was feeling optimistic. Especially since she had told me during our first date that she was a big Kenneth Branagh fan. When we got to the entrance and she saw Branagh himself, in the flesh, glad-handing fans and signing autographs, Lacy let out a delighted squeal.
Then I nearly let out a squeal. I saw another celebrity on the rope line, a hulking, towering figure who was whipping up the crowd even more than Branagh. It was Johnny Mars. Samantha was trailing a few yards behind him on the red carpet, flanked by Johnny’s publicist and agent, a grim smile pasted on her face.
“Um, hold up a sec,” I told Lacy. “We can’t go in yet.”
Lacy gave me a look like I’d strangled her favorite kitten, but I was frozen on the pavement. Why hadn’t I anticipated this possibility? Mars and Samantha didn’t attend many premieres (the really big stars seldom do, unless the movie is their own) but this was exactly the sort of pseudo-highbrow fare—a Miramax period piece about Geoffrey Chaucer’s love life—that would appeal to the action star’s intellectual pretensions. How could I have been so stupid? But there he was, along with his beautiful wife, drawing more cheers than any of the Canterbury’s Pilgrim’s stars. In fact, Branagh and Ormond looked a little pissed off. Lacy, naturally, was thrilled by all the excitement, but I was mortified. I’d seen enough science fiction movies to know what happened when matter was introduced to antimatter. If I met Johnny Mars it would mean the end of the universe. Or, at the very least, an incredibly awkward handshake.
What was I supposed to do? Walk up to Samantha and say hello? At a public event like a premiere, that wouldn’t be so easy. Before I got anywhere near Sammy, Mars’s bodyguards would have me in a headlock, while I flailed around trying to get Samantha’s attention. Pathetic. And say I did slip past the guards to say hi—or say Sammy just happened to catch sight of me in the crowd—that would be just as bad. Samantha would feel obligated to introduce me to her husband. I’d feel obligated to introduce Mars and her to Lacy, who was now pulling at my arm with all her muscle. “C’mon!” she moaned. “What’s the matter with you! Everybody is going into the theater!”
We managed to get to our balcony seats without being spotted. Lacy was a little annoyed by my behavior outside the theater, but she let it go. As the curtains parted on the screen, she reached across the armrest to give my hand a forgiving squeeze. I didn’t watch the film. Instead, as young Chaucer scribbled in his garret during the opening sequence, I scanned the theater looking for Johnny Mars’s enormous head. It wasn’t hard to spot—it towered like a giraffe’s over everybody else’s in the VIP section. I spent the next hour drilling holes with my eyes into the back of his skull.
Mars was one of those stars, like Robert De Niro and Adam Sandler, who never gave interviews. But a lot was written about him anyway. I know, because after he stole my girlfriend, I read everything. Just to torture myself. He had a classic action star origin tale. He was born in Alaska, the son of a lumberjack. Moved to Hollywood when he was twenty, where he found work on construction crews that helped build movie sets at the studios. One day while sawing two-by-fours on the Paramount lot, he got tapped on the shoulder by a casting director. Next thing he knows, he’s got a nonspeaking role in Cyborg Prophecies, playing a mute robot. Over the next ten years, the roles got progressively bigger (he played a speaking robot in Cyborg Prophecies 2, and a hockey star turned prison inmate in Penalty Box), until his big break came at thirty, when he got cast as hard-drinking, hard-driving, hard-quipping FBI agent Jack Montana, the role that shot him to the very top of the action A-list. He’d been playing the part, off and on, for more than fifteen years.
The funny thing about Mars, however, was that even though he commanded the adoration of the masses, even though he was a millionaire many times over, even though he could have any woman he wanted (including the only one I wanted), he wasn’t satisfied. The ranch in Wyoming, the penthouse on the Upper West Side, the private jets and personal chefs and chauffeur-driven limos—it wasn’t enough. More than all of that, more than anything else, he wanted to be taken seriously.
Ironically, the same things that helped make him an action star—the soaring height, the huge muscular build, the growling voice so rumbling it could set off car alarms—also made him a difficult fit for more serious parts. He was actually a pretty decent actor, but who’s going to buy a six-foot-three, 245-pound Willy Loman? Still, Mars refused to give up. He was always throwing himself into roles he had no business playing. Macbeth, Ishmael, Jean Valjean. I hated his guts, but there was still a smidgen of fan left inside me. I couldn’t help but grudgingly admire his tenacity. He was determined to prove his acting chops, even though all anybody really wanted to watch him do was push bad guys off monuments and out of airplanes and make jokes about the first step being a doozy.
When I finally pulled my eyes from the back of Mars’s head, Julia Ormond was up on the screen in a suit of armor, kissing Kenneth Branagh. I had no idea why. I hadn’t been following the plot. I looked over at Lacy, who was smiling in a daze, a Twizzler dangling from her mouth. She was clearly entranced by the film. Then I looked for the nearest exit.
“Lacy,” I whispered in her ear. No response. “Lacy,” I repeated a little louder.
“Mmm?” she answered.
“I have to go.” It was true. I couldn’t stand another minute of looking at Johnny Mars in his VIP seat, his big beefy arm wrapped around my dainty Samantha’s shoulders. But Lacy gave me a look like she’d caught me molesting that kitten I had strangled earlier.
“What?” she asked, her voice rising in anger. “Are you nuts!” The couple in the row in front of us turned around and glared. “What about the party afterward?” Lacy went on, ignoring the commotion we were starting to cause. “You have to take me to the premiere party! I want to meet Kenneth Branagh!”
“You can still go,” I whispered, reaching into my breast pocket for the party tickets and stuffing them into her lap. “You can still have fun. I just can’t be here right now. I’m really sorry.”
“Oh, no!” Lacy all but shouted. “I’m not going to the party by myself. You have to go with me! We’re on a date!”
People all around the balcony were starting to shush us. I’d never been shushed in a theater be
fore and didn’t know what to do. So I started shushing, too. Big mistake. “YOU’RE SHUSHING ME?!” Lacy yelled into my face, so loudly that people in the orchestra section began turning around to glower. “YOU DON’T SHUSH ME!” A few more seconds of this and we’d draw the attention of the entire theater, including Mars and Samantha. I did the only thing I could. I hid my face in my jacket lapels, climbed over Lacy’s seat, and dashed as quickly as I could out of the theater. The last thing I heard was Lacy yelling after me. “ASSHOLE!”
Once again, I had to concede this point.
6
As a member of the Hollywood press, I saw fame from the outside looking in. I was a Talmudic scholar of pop culture, but never part of the biblical text. On one occasion, though, I did get a tiny taste of what life was like inside the fishbowl. In the fall of 1999, my picture was in KNOW magazine. Not even my father recognized me—my face was covered in fur and I was wearing large prosthetic rodent ears—but I was in KNOW all the same, just like a real celebrity.
This was for a story on a sci-fi TV show called Dark Matter, about a microscopic alternate universe that existed in subatomic space. The concept was based almost entirely on the classic stoner epiphanot in Animal House—“Okay, so that means our whole solar system could be, like, one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being …”—but the series became an instant cult hit. So my editors arranged for me to appear in one of its episodes as an alien extra—a sort of human-hamster hybrid—then write about the experience for the magazine.
I arrived at the Paramount lot at six in the morning and spent three hours in a makeup chair being turned into a “VIP alien,” as my hamsteroid character was described in the call sheet. I learned that I’d be making my TV debut as part of a crowd of aliens waiting in line at Passport and Immigration Control at an interdimensional space-port—a long panoramic shot of assorted otherworldly travelers getting their space luggage checked and their space documents stamped by customs officer robots. But when I stepped onto the soundstage and saw the other extraterrestrials, I felt a pang of alien envy. They had much cooler makeup than I did. One guy looked like a Rastafarian orangutan; another like the love spawn of Jabba the Hutt and Mrs. Potato Head. All I did during my seven seconds on film was stand next to a scantily clad reptile woman with four breasts and pretend to make small talk. “Whadya expect?” the lizard lady asked me between takes. “That we’d do scenes from Hedda Gabler?”
Leading Man Page 5