Leading Man

by Benjamin Svetkey

  After a few beers, I began to loosen up. I even tried flirting with Sally for a while, although slurring has never been my best pickup technique. Then, as was bound to happen, the subject of Johnny Mars’s accident was broached. The actor doing the broaching was the guy who played Schroeder, a handsome but pompous Kevin Kline type who’d been annoying the waitress all night by barking beer orders in mock-Shakespearean oratory (“Wench, more ale, anon!”). When I first spotted him onstage crouching over his keyboards, I took an instant dislike to him.

  “I worked with Johnny Mars once,” the pompous guy announced to the room. “I had a role in Rocket’s Red Glare …”

  “Some role!” one of the other Dirty Halos interrupted, laughing. “You played a hotel bellboy. You were on-screen for two seconds …”

  “I still worked with him,” pompous guy continued.

  “You didn’t work with him—you worked with his luggage …”

  “Rocket’s Red Glare—is that the one where Johnny Mars throws the bad guy off the Golden Gate Bridge?” asked Sally.

  “No, Rocket’s Red Glare is the one where he throws him from the Washington Monument,” Peppermint Patty said. “Give Me Death is the one where he throws him off the Golden Gate.”

  “Worst actor I’ve ever worked with,” pompous guy continued, undeterred by the interruptions. “Seriously, the man could not remember his lines. They had to hold up idiot cards with his dialogue written on them. And that voice! Like a mouth full of wet paper towels.”

  “I saw him in Coriolanus at the Public Theater,” the actress who played Marcie chimed in, pinching her nose. “I don’t know why he keeps trying to be taken seriously as an actor. Isn’t it enough being a movie star?”

  Robin was giving me concerned glances. Listening to a bunch of downtown theatrical poseurs deride the acting chops of my ex-girlfriend’s critically injured husband was not the sort of cheering up she had in mind for me. She could see that the conversation was getting on my nerves. And that I was finishing my fifth beer. “Has anybody seen Seabiscuit yet?” she said, changing the subject. “I hear it’s really good …”

  “A toast to Johnny Mars!” pompous guy went on, ignoring Robin. “Living proof that it’s better to have luck than talent!”

  “Fuck you, you pretentious shithead!” I shouted. Pompous guy wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard about Johnny Mars before—most of it I’d probably said myself. But for some reason, tonight the sentiment was making my blood boil. “I remember you in Rocket’s Red Glare,” I lied. “You sucked as a bellhop. You were the worst bellhop I’ve ever seen!” Robin gathered our coats and started navigating us both toward the exit as the room full of actors watched in stunned, open-jawed silence. “And you know what else?” I shouted over my shoulder as Robin shoved me out the door. “You stank as Schroeder!”

  For a few silent moments, Robin and I stood outside at the corner of West Fourth and Jane. She glared at me with an expression I’d never seen on her face before. I was sure she was going to slug me. When she took a step closer, I squeezed my eyes shut and prepared for the blow. But instead all I felt were her warm arms wrapping around me, holding me tight.

  9

  The next time I heard Samantha’s voice was at sunrise on New Year’s Day, 2004, about five months after the accident. I’d spent New Year’s Eve on the red-eye flying back from Los Angeles—I’d had an interview with Woody Harrelson, speaking of red eyes—and when I got home at six in the morning, the blinking light on my phone told me I had voice mail. “Hey Max,” Sammy said. “I got your e-mail. Hearing from you meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. Things are so horrible right now, I can’t even begin to describe it. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you. But I really do want to see you. I need to see you …”

  She sounded weird, like she was talking underwater, or maybe under sedation. Although, given what she’d been through over those five months, I doubted a drug had been invented that could soothe her pain.

  The good news was that Johnny was alive. A few hours after the fall, he woke up in his hospital suite in South Dakota, looked at the room full of doctors and nurses, and said, “Oops.” The fall obviously hadn’t affected his love of a good one-liner. In fact, incredibly, miraculously, the fall had barely mussed his hair. Aside from a couple of broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, he was otherwise undented. The doctors were astonished. But then they ran a battery of tests and scans to discover what had caused Johnny to black out while rappelling in the first place. They found a tiny cancerous nodule attached to his pineal gland. That was bad news, very, very bad.

  As I learned from the parade of experts making the rounds on the cable news networks, the pineal gland is the mysterious pinecone-shaped part of the brain that regulates sleep, aging, sexuality, some motor control, and, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, much of an individual’s personality. Depending on how aggressive the cancer growing inside Johnny’s head was, the prognosis ranged from grim to devastating. Tremors, seizures, temporary or permanent blindness, amnesia, hearing loss, personality changes, premature aging, muscle atrophy, and partial or total paralysis—this was what Johnny had to look forward to in the three, or five, or, if he was really lucky, seven years he had left to live.

  According to the experts on TV, Johnny’s was an incredibly rare form of brain cancer affecting fewer than one in a million people. Roughly the same statistical chances, I reckoned, for the son of an Alaskan lumberjack to come to Hollywood and end up one of the world’s most famous action stars. To be chosen by fate for fame and fortune only to have all your success reduced to rubble by a tumor the size of a poppy seed—this was tragedy on a scale that would impress even ancient Greek playwrights. That the disease had been discovered thanks to a freak accident on Mount Rushmore just made the whole thing all the more appallingly bizarre and ironic.

  Understandably, Mars’s first impulse—or the first impulse of his management team—was to get out of the spotlight. Production on Don’t Tread on Me was “suspended indefinitely,” as the press release from the studio delicately put it. Johnny, with Sammy at his side, retreated to his Upper West Side penthouse, seldom venturing out for anything but trips to the hospital for more futile medical tests. The media, at the beginning, respected Johnny’s personal space. They treated the star with kid gloves, turning his accident on Mount Rushmore into a public crusade for greater safety on movie sets. Johnny’s beautiful young wife, meanwhile, was given the sobriquet “Saint Samantha,” a reward for her stoicism and resolve in the face of her husband’s tragic circumstances.

  “Oh, shut up,” Sammy said when I jokingly used the nickname during another late-night call. She started making a lot of them around that time. Sammy had always been a night owl, but since the accident she’d been having even more trouble sleeping. They were about the saddest conversations I’d ever had with another human being. “Johnny is in denial,” she told me in one of them. “He really thinks he can beat this thing. But he’s deteriorating every day. He sometimes gets so weak he can barely walk on his own. Just getting out of bed and into the bathroom in the morning can be a huge ordeal. One of the doctors suggested he get a wheelchair. I thought Johnny was going to slug him.”

  “He’s got you,” I told her. “He’s always been lucky to have you.”

  “Well, he needs me now,” she said. “I guess I could be grateful for that.”

  She was breaking my heart all over again.

  You can’t starve the media forever. Sooner or later the beast grows hungry. Without fresh pictures, the paparazzi eventually got more aggressive and began following Sammy whenever she left the penthouse. Without new facts, the tabloids started mixing truth with gossip. Sometimes even I had trouble telling the difference. There was a particularly nasty rumor going around, for instance, that the only reason Mars had married Samantha was that he got her pregnant, and that Sammy had miscarried a few months after their wedding. Preposterous, I thought, until I realized that the timing sort
of made sense. Sammy could have been pregnant that night she turned up distraught at my door at two in the morning.

  There were also rumors that Johnny was consulting with quack doctors promising to cure his cancer with “breakthrough” treatments being developed in South Korean clinics. This turned out to be true. Johnny was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on untested experimental therapies that no Western scientist (or insurance company) would touch. Facing such a grim prognosis from his traditional-medicine doctors in New York, what did Johnny have to lose? At least the Eastern quacks offered him hope. But the press had a field day, printing made-up stories about Johnny consulting with a shaman and taking mescaline extract mixed with steroids.

  The worst rumors, however, were the ones about Johnny’s tumor supposedly altering his personality. From the media vantage, personality changes were one of the more sensational symptoms of having a cancer growing in your skull. So there were dozens of items in the tabloids about how Mars had become a monster at home, raging at his wife, firing household staff, making impossible demands of his doctors and nurses. The funny thing was, I knew from my phone calls with Samantha that the exact opposite was true. There had indeed been a personality change, but for the better. Sure, Johnny suffered from bouts of depression and was understandably having a hard time accepting his situation. But now that he needed Sam, he was kinder to her, softer, more loving. She certainly wasn’t getting left behind with the luggage anymore.

  Eventually, Mars decided to come out of hiding to “take control of his press,” as publicists say. A crisis management expert was summoned and a media plan was hatched. First thing they did was hire a ghostwriter and commission a quickie memoir. It was written, printed, and in bookstores in under four months, a new publishing industry record. Then, to help plug the book, Johnny and Sammy went on a chat show charm offensive.

  “Welcome back to Larry King Live. Joining us now from New York, Johnny Mars, actor, health activist, and author of the new memoir Fight of My Life: How I Lived Before I Died. With Johnny is his lovely wife, a terrific gal, Samantha Mars. Johnny will be fifty-two years old tomorrow. Happy birthday, Johnny!”

  Less than a year had passed since the accident, but already Mars was a sliver of his former self. His once ruggedly handsome face was gaunt and pasty, and his thick mane of hair was beginning to thin. Even Larry King looked healthier. Sammy sat by his side, her arm hooked under his, and gazed up at her husband with Nancy Reagan eyes. She looked skinny. And tired. And not all that thrilled to be on TV.

  “So, Johnny, how are you feeling these days?” King began the interview. “You look terrific!”

  “I feel terrific, Larry,” Johnny answered, his rumbling voice still capable of setting off seismographs. “Honestly, Larry, I feel like I’m growing stronger every day. I’ve changed my diet. I’ve been living healthier. No more cigars, isn’t that right, Sammy?”

  Samantha nodded and continued smiling.

  “And I’ve been working with doctors and scientists around the world to find a cure for brain cancers of all sorts,” Johnny went on. “Not just Western scientists, but also doctors of Eastern medicine. They’ve been making amazing advancements in brain cancer treatment in places like South Korea. We’re still a long way from a cure, Larry, but there’s growing hope for people like me.”

  “That’s great, Johnny. Sammy, let me get personal with you for a minute,” the talk show host said, turning his attention to my ex-girlfriend. “I’m going to ask what everyone is wondering. What about intimacy? How has all this changed your physical relationship with Johnny?” Samantha looked dumbfounded by the question, and embarrassed, but quickly recovered. “Oh, you know, Larry,” she said, laughing, “Johnny has never really needed any help in that department. He’s always been very healthy that way.”

  I wanted to strangle King with his own suspenders. But I knew that Samantha was lying. She had let slip the truth during one of our late-night talks. It might have been a symptom of the cancer, or a side effect of the unorthodox treatments he was taking, but Johnny was all but dead below the waist. At first, I have to admit, that news had me cheering inside. For years the thought of that big oaf defiling my darling Samantha had been fueling my nightmares—at least that part of my torture was finally over. But then, as I thought about it more, I started to feel something odd. Something I never would have guessed I was capable of feeling. I felt sorry for the guy. The fact that Johnny Mars would never again be able to make love to my ex-girlfriend made me sad. How weird is that?

  10

  That fall, my dad had a heart attack. He’d been raking the backyard when a shooting pain in his chest knocked him to his knees. I got the news from the neighbor who found him in a pile of leaves, unconscious. My father was at White Plains Hospital, the neighbor told me over the phone. Alive, as far as he knew.

  I hailed a yellow cab outside the KNOW building and had the driver take me all the way to White Plains. It was faster than the commuter train. It took a while to find his room—turned out there were two Robert Lerners listed as patients, but Dad wasn’t the one having a vasectomy. He was sleeping when I tiptoed in. He looked pale as a ghost. There were tubes coming out of his nose and others going into his arm. An EKG machine beeped softly at his bedside. A doctor in green hospital scrubs gently tapped my shoulder and led me into the corridor. “He’s going to be okay,” he said. “It was a posterior myocardial infarction, which is bad, but not the worst kind of heart attack. We’ll monitor him here for a couple of days, but he’ll need help when he goes home. He’ll need a nurse.”

  “He’s going to hate that,” I said. “He doesn’t even like having a cleaning lady in the house.”

  “He’s going to have to make some changes,” the doctor went on. “He’s going to have to change his diet and start exercising.”

  “He’s pretty set in his ways,” I said. “He’s not great with change.”

  “How great is he with death?” the doctor asked.

  I went back into Dad’s room and sat in a chair for a while, watching him breathe. I realized I couldn’t remember ever seeing my father sleep before. Eventually, a nurse came in to tell me visiting hours were almost up. I opened the closet door and hunted through Dad’s clothes until I found his house keys. For the first time in fifteen years, I’d be spending the night in Shady Hill, in my attic room above the garage.

  The ancestral abode was exactly as I remembered it. In fact, all of Shady Hill seemed frozen in time. Nothing had changed. The same picket fences around the same houses, the same well-groomed yards, the same dogwood and oak trees. In Manhattan, neighborhoods rise and fall in the span of a decade, but the suburbs are eternal.

  I saw my father once or twice a year, but it was always in New York, at the Russian Tea Room or the ‘21’ Club or one of the other antediluvian establishments he’d dined in during his Madison Avenue days. It was more comfortable for both of us. He didn’t like visitors and I had zero emotional attachment to the house I grew up in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot in the place. Five years? Ten? Looking around now, I noticed that Dad hadn’t redecorated much. When something broke or wore out, he simply replaced it with as close a match as he could find. I don’t think he was being sentimental about my mother’s furniture. It was just easier to keep things the same. The only new additions to the decor were the flat-screen TV in the den that I’d sent him for Christmas two years ago and a golf putting set in the living room. I didn’t even know Dad played.

  Judging from the way the door stuck, my old room hadn’t seen much foot traffic since the day I left for college. When I finally pried it open, I felt like I was cracking the seals on an ancient tomb. Inside were the artifacts of my teenhood, perfectly preserved through the ages. The bookshelf by the window was still filled with dog-eared Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean paperbacks. On my desk was a first-generation Macintosh computer (I was always an early adopter), and on the wall above that was the faded blank space where I had once tacked up a Ja
ck Montana movie poster. Dad had apparently entered the room from time to time; he had turned one corner into a storage hold. There was a stack of cardboard boxes. When I looked inside, I saw they contained every copy of KNOW magazine that had my byline. Dad had been collecting my stories. I sat down on the small bed. The springs creaked so loudly it startled me to my feet. Maybe I’d sleep on the sofa downstairs.

  The refrigerator contained pretty much what you’d expect from the home of a widowed seventy-year-old retiree: A half-empty jar of martini olives and some old salami. Fortunately, there was also a six-pack of beer. I was about to open one when I heard a short burst of musical beeps—was that “Swanee River”?—coming from the basement. How weird. Like every idiot victim in every cheesy slasher film I’d ever seen, I opened the basement door and slowly stepped down the stairs. Except there wasn’t a serial killer in a hockey mask waiting for me. Dad had recently bought a new clothes dryer that played a little ditty to let you know its drying cycle was done, and then repeated it every thirty minutes until the dryer was shut off. Dad had obviously been doing a load of laundry while raking the backyard. I had to give the guy credit for keeping busy.

  I shut off the dryer, but before I climbed back up the stairs, I happened to glance over at Dad’s workshop table. There were bundles of old letters scattered on its surface. They were all in my mother’s soft, flowing hand. I picked one up and noted the date—January 16, 1967—three years before my birth. Some were dated earlier, others later. I sat down on a stool and started reading. What was in them wasn’t always very interesting. The letters written during their courtship were filled with minutiae about rendezvous arrangements at train stations and airports—the sort of details modern-day lovers send via text message. But there were also anniversary cards and birthday poems and other corny notes scribbled after they were well into their marriage, before my mother’s car accident. Next to the table, there was a dusty trunk filled with even more letters. It broke my heart. After all those years since her death, Dad still climbed down into the basement to spend time with Mom.