Leading Man

by Benjamin Svetkey

  When the article came out, the same week my episode aired, I stopped at newsstands all over New York to gaze upon my furry face. Within days I started getting letters from readers requesting autographed copies. I felt like an idiot writing my name on my picture with a Sharpie, but I answered every piece of mail, just like a real star (or a real star’s assistant). It didn’t take long for me to grow a star-size ego, as well. When I scrutinized my face in KNOW, I started to notice a tiny red vein in my left eye—a flaw that would have been airbrushed away had I been a real celebrity. I cursed myself for not demanding photo approval.

  A few weeks later, as I was waiting in line at a video store, I experienced another drawback to fame. Let’s just say I was doing research for that big exposé on the adult movie industry I’d been planning to get around to writing. When it was my turn at the register, I removed the video from under my arm and discreetly slid it—my renter’s ID card covering the naughty bits—to the skinny, bespectacled nerd behind the counter. He read my name, looked at my face, read my name again, then looked at my face. “You’re the guy who wrote about Dark Matter in KNOW magazine!” he informed the whole store. “You’re the guy who got to be an alien!” I smiled grimly and nudged the video closer to the kid, hoping he’d put it in a bag already. “This is so cool!” he said, picking up the box and waving it around. “I can’t believe you’re renting a video in my store!”

  Finally, I experienced the final stage of the celebrity life cycle, fame’s death throes. I turned on a new episode of Dark Matter and saw that my hamster was being played by another actor. In fact, he’d been given lines to speak! To think, I developed that character, I brought it to life, and now some upstart in rodent ears was taking over just as the part was getting interesting. I knew exactly how Bette Davis felt at the end of All About Eve.

  I may not have been a real celebrity, but I got to live like one, especially when traveling on assignment. At the end of the 1990s, before terrorism and stock market crashes erased the last vestiges of glamour from jet travel, there was a luxury service between New York and Los Angeles called Imperial Airways. It operated the most pimped-out commercial fleet in the sky. The front end of its lavishly configured DC-8s and 727s had private berths, like on a train, so that first-class passengers could slide shut a frosted-glass door and cross the country in privacy. Even Imperial’s “coach” section, where I usually sat, had cushy oversize red-leather swivel-loungers, provided linen and crystal dinner service, and was always packed with celebs. It was like the Golden Globes at thirty thousand feet. I loved it.

  I became a frequent flyer on Imperial, shuttling between the coasts once or twice a month for interviews. When I landed in LA, I would always rent a zippy convertible and stay at the posh Four Seasons Hotel, the pale pink palace on the east edge of Beverly Hills that was the red-hot center of Hollywood’s mediaverse. This was where the studios put up talent from out of town, where many of the film industry’s junkets were held, and where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity in a swimsuit at the pool. The Four Seasons had a frequent-stayer bonus: After forty visits, they gave you a terrycloth bathrobe, the fluffiest on Earth, with your initials monogrammed on it. I had two of them. During a brief hipster stage, I grew a goatee and switched to the grittier Chateau Marmont on Sunset, where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity overdosing at the pool. But eventually I shaved and returned to my fortress on Doheny. The Four Seasons felt more like home to me than home. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t see any problem with that.

  When I first started spending time in LA, I made the mistake of comparing the city’s geo-demographics to Manhattan’s. Beverly Hills was the Upper East Side with palm trees. Venice was the East Village with sand. West Hollywood was Chelsea with actual, atmospherically created rainbows. After a while, though, I began to see that the true comparison wasn’t with New York City, but with Westchester. Being in Los Angeles, I realized, was a lot like being sixteen years old in the suburbs when my dad went away on a business trip and left me home alone with the keys to his Cadillac and a cookie jar filled with “emergency” cash. LA is a city filled with grown-up children spending money they shouldn’t be spending and driving cars they shouldn’t be driving. It’s a town without any adult supervision.

  It is also a city filled with beautiful women who dress like porn stars even when picking up a carton of organic orange juice at the grocery store (the men, meanwhile, dress like little boys, in short pants and T-shirts). I thought LA might be a solution to my commitment phobia problem. I was traveling there twice a month but seldom staying longer than two or three days, the time it took to turn around an interview or a set visit. Theoretically, that was also just long enough for a brief romantic encounter. Sadly, though, my plan to make LA my sexual playground didn’t pan out. California-style dating was too alien to me. I never did get the hang of it. In New York, if you met a girl at a party, you might ask her where she went to school or what she had majored in. In Los Angeles, you asked where she was repped and who did her head shots. In New York, when you invited a girl on a date, it was assumed you’d meet at the restaurant. In LA, transport to and from dinner was a complex minuet. Did you pick her up? Or was that presumptuous? Either way, what you drove was critical. In Hollywood, there is no more important status marker than the make and model of your car. I once picked up an LA woman for a date in a brand-new high-performance BMW M3—the rental place had upgraded me from my usual Mustang—and I knew right away I’d be getting lucky. “Wow!” my date said, slowly running a finger along a door panel. “I’ve never gone out with a car this nice before.”

  My real personal life may have been a wasteland, but my relationships with the stars were improving. I began to see myself less as a celebrity whisperer and more as an anthropologist, the Jane Goodall of fame, hacking my way through the Hollywood jungle in order to study the mysterious primates who lived in this strange Serengeti with valet parking. I once flew to LA just to spend an afternoon hovering in a helicopter over the Academy Awards for an aerial photo spread that would give KNOW readers a bald-spot-view of the stars. At eight hundred feet, with a photographer dangling out the window in a safety harness, it felt exactly like we were filming a Discovery Channel nature documentary. As a species, Homo sapiens are drawn toward fame like leopards to gazelles—and I wanted to know how come. When you think about it, the concept of celebrity is relatively new to human society. Yet clearly it triggers primal impulses in us all. What itch in our monkey brains are we scratching when we turn and stare at Val Kilmer in an airport? What ancient Darwinian impulse are we satisfying when we ask Reese Witherspoon for her autograph?

  At the start of the twenty-first century, the whole world seemed to be going celebrity crazy. New celeb-focused magazines were popping up on newsstands every week, while otherwise serious newspapers, like The New York Times, began publishing box office tallies as if they were sports scores. When Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman announced their divorce, the networks interrupted regular TV programming to broadcast the news as though it were the moon landing. KNOW magazine had been bitten by the celebrity bug, as well, and was putting more movie stars on its covers than ever. That was great for me—I got to write a lot of those celebrity stories. I still felt driven to understand the shimmering world that had stolen Sammy from me. I still saw fame as a mystery that needed solving.

  So I expanded my research. I talked to a real anthropologist—a woman who spent years in an actual jungle studying monkeys—about celebrity and why it mattered to us humans. Her theory was that fame was a throwback to the primate need for an alpha male. “In the ape world, the alpha male eats whatever he wants to and sleeps with whoever he wants to,” she explained while I tried not to envision Johnny Mars as a giant monkey swinging in to take my Sammy away from me. “The only difference is that the ape doesn’t get a limousine.” I talked to a psychologist about the phenomenon, and his take was that fame was a sort of mental illness—acquired situational narcissism, he call
ed the affliction. Another expert in media sociology saw fame as a “drug” that had hooked the whole planet. “We’ve all become addicts,” he said, sounding strung out. “There have been studies. People experience withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their dose of Brad and Jen or Justin and Britney.”

  You’d think the best people to ask about fame would be famous people, but you’d be disappointed. Whenever I interviewed a big star, I snuck in a question about the nature of fame and a celebrity’s place in the universe. I’d usually get blank stares and cricket noises. Some stars pretended to hate fame, even though it was obvious they secretly loved it. A few pretended to love it, even though it was obvious they secretly hated it. But not a lot of celebrities seemed to give fame much serious, philosophical thought. Even the smartest celebs—the ones who put on horn-rimmed glasses and discussed Chechnya on Charlie Rose—seemed bored by the subject. To them, it was like the weather. Some days it was nice being famous, other days it was crappy. Either way, they were powerless over it, and therefore not all that interested in it.

  Every once in a while, though, I’d run into a star who surprised me.

  “Here’s the thing about fame,” Alistair Lyon offered as he did a lazy backstroke across the deep end of his kidney-shaped pool. I was kneeling at the edge, holding my microrecorder over the sparkling water, hoping Lyon’s splashing sounds weren’t going to be the only part of the interview I’d be able to hear on the tape. “It doesn’t end world hunger. It doesn’t cure cancer. Fame doesn’t even cure loneliness. It doesn’t make you stronger or protect you from harm or give you any superpowers. It’s just perfume. That’s all it is. It makes you smell nice. It’s the world’s greatest deodorant.”

  Lyon had gained a lot of weight since winning his fourth Academy Award the year before, for playing Adolf Hitler in The Bunker, a big-screen remake of the 1981 TV movie that earned Anthony Hopkins an Emmy. He was so huge, the waterline actually dipped a notch when he finally hauled himself out of the pool. The fattening up was all part of the fifty-nine-year-old Aussie superstar’s preparation for his next role—he’d be playing Winston Churchill in Ron Howard’s adaptation of William Manchester’s The Last Lion. No actor in the last thirty years had brought to life so many great historical figures. Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Attila the Hun, Francis Bacon, Lyndon Johnson, Julius Caesar, Yuri Gagarin, Buffalo Bill, Babe Ruth, Benjamin Disraeli, Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Hemingway—if he was famous and dead, chances are Lyon had won a statuette for playing him.

  I loved interviewing stars in their homes—you learn so much about celebrities from their tchotchkes. Lyon’s mid-century glass-and-stone mansion in the Hollywood Hills was filled with Eames chairs and Nelson benches and Knoll tables. A vast wraparound balcony off the sunken living room offered a breathtaking panoramic view of the city. Hanging on the walls were more Picas-sos and Pollocks and Warhols than at the Getty. If Lyon weren’t such a world-famous ladies man, I’d swear he was gay—his taste in home decor was that good. Attractive young German-accented Aryans of both genders—Lyon must have picked them up while playing Hitler—were fluttering all over, answering phone calls, mixing pitchers of mimosas, and rushing plates of caviar omelets and other snacks from the kitchen to the pool. The overhead costs of being Alistair Lyon had to be staggering. Luckily, he was rich.

  “The trick to living with fame,” Lyon went on as an assistant wrapped his dripping wet body in a towel as big as a mainsail, “is not to take it too seriously. You shouldn’t cling to it. You shouldn’t try to hold fame in your grip. Fame is like money—you’re just borrowing it. Someday you’re going to die, and somebody else is going to get it.” Another assistant arrived with a platter of freshly rolled sushi. Lyon sniffed a piece before popping it into his mouth. “Do you want to be famous, young man?” he asked, giving me a curious stare. “Is that your dream? Is that why you have so many questions about it?”

  No celebrity had ever asked me that before—interviews were always one-way conversations. I asked, they answered. But now that a star finally had asked me a serious question, I found myself stumbling for an answer. Of course, like every journalist, I’d wondered what life on the other side of the tape recorder might be like. Maybe I was even a little jealous. The actor stuffing his face with sushi in front of me had an earned annual income larger than several European nations. He had a watch on his wrist worth more than most people’s houses. He had a shelf in his living room cluttered with little golden men. What exactly did I have? Still, fame wasn’t something I had ever even remotely craved. I honestly never hungered for the spotlight or fantasized about signing autographs. No, my fascination with celebrity was driven by a totally different sort of ego deficiency.

  “I just want the money and adoration,” I answered Lyon, half-joking. “I don’t care about the rest.”

  In fact, all I really wanted was the girl.

  7

  “I’m on a beach in Mykonos,” Sammy said. “That’s in Greece, in case you didn’t know. And I’m not wearing a top.”

  It was three in the morning in New York—ten in the morning on the clothing-optional Greek beach Sammy was calling me from on her cell—and I had been floating in deep dream space when the phone woke me up. As accustomed as I was to her late-night calls, it always took me a few seconds to rev my brain up to conversational speed. I leaned back on my pillow and imagined Sammy strolling bare-chested on the shores of the sparkling Mediterranean, her naked skin shimmering in the sunshine, until I let a small groan escape into the phone. I covered it up with a fake cough. “What are you doing in Mykonos?” I groggily asked.

  “Johnny is doing location scouting for the next Montana movie,” she said. “They’re thinking of shooting a scene at the Acropolis. They want Johnny to throw bad guys off a European monument in this movie. Something about it being good for overseas box office. Personally, I think it’s a great idea. I love it here. The beaches are spectacular. Did I mention I’m not wearing a top?”

  Sammy could be a terrible tease, but she didn’t mean anything by it. We had known each other so well for so long, it was impossible for her to be anything other than completely herself. I, on the other hand, had no such luxury. I was still cloaking myself in platonic sheep’s clothing, pretending to be fine with being just friends, while secretly hoping that her marriage to Johnny would fall apart. In the meantime, though, I had to be careful. If Sammy knew how I truly felt about her—what picturing her topless on a Greek beach did to my respiratory system—she might pull back. I couldn’t risk that.

  “I’ve never been to Greece,” I said. “I should find a Greek movie set and get an assignment. Sounds like you’re beautiful. It’s beautiful. Greece, that is … being beautiful …”

  “You know,” she said, whispering into her cell phone, “the beaches here aren’t just topless—they’re bottomless, too. But I don’t know if I could handle that. I can’t really see myself being totally naked on a beach, can you?”

  Oh, I could imagine it, all right. In fact, I had enough footage of Samantha stored in the film cans of my fantasy life to splice together an epic longer than Shoah. And not all of it was sex related. Sometimes, for instance, I’d fantasize about time travel. I’d flip the calendar back to the night in 1995 when Sammy turned up at my apartment at two in the morning after her fight with her new movie star boyfriend. In my rewrite, when I ask her if she truly loves Johnny, her big brown eyes fill with tears. “I’m still in love with you,” she tells me. We embrace passionately. The next day, Page Six leads with a story about how Johnny Mars’s girlfriend has dumped him for a dashing magazine writer in the West Village. The Daily News reports that Sammy is “swooning.”

  In another fantasy, I’d travel a little further back, to the day in 1994 when Sammy got the letter from the Concord Theater Festival. In the version in my head, though, she gets rejected and never goes to Massachusetts and never meets Johnny Mars. Instead, she sticks with me. Miraculously, I become a better boyfriend, more attentive, less se
lfish. I remember her birthdays, buy her the sorts of presents she likes, bring her flowers not just on Valentine’s Day but every day. I stop taking her for granted. We get married at her parents’ house, in the backyard, under the apple tree. Sammy’s mom cries at the sight of her daughter in white, just like she did during Sam’s performance in Fiddler on the Roof in high school.

  “How are things with Johnny?” I asked, sitting up in bed, wishing I smoked cigarettes.

  “Super great,” Samantha said. I could hear the waves lapping the shore in the background. According to Sammy, Johnny was always “super great,” but he never seemed to be around. “I haven’t seen him in five days,” she went on. “He dropped me off at this resort in Mykonos and then took off for Athens with some producers. I mean, how long does it take to look at a three-thousand-year-old Greek temple?”

  “It’s a pretty big temple,” I offered. I couldn’t tell her what I was really thinking—that Johnny was probably spending the five days in an Athenian hotel suite, dancing like Zorba on a coffee table while half-naked Greek groupies smashed plates around his feet. How come he was always away whenever Sammy called? Or was it that she called me only when he wasn’t around? Either way, I couldn’t help but wonder if Johnny was faithful to his wife. As a general rule, movie stars aren’t exactly renowned for monogamy.