I decided to get out of the house for some fresh air before the sun set. Without really thinking about it, I found myself taking a stroll down memory lane—literally. I walked the six blocks to Sammy’s old house, where her parents still lived. I knew the route so well I could have made the trip with my eyes closed and walking backward.
I hesitated before ringing the bell. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Sammy’s parents. I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about a blast from their daughter’s past turning up on their doorstep, but I needn’t have worried. “Oh, come in, come in!” Sam’s mom said, as if she’d been expecting me. The house was still a study in chaos. A cat zoomed out the door, pursued by a dog. Another cat was playing a free-form jazz tune by walking on the piano keys in the living room. Sammy’s dad was sitting on a La-Z-Boy in the den, watching an old I Spy rerun on TV. We had always bonded over our mutual love of crappy espionage shows (and of his daughter). Nothing had changed here, either. Until I looked a bit closer. There were framed pictures of Sammy and Johnny all over the place. I also noticed that the bookshelves in the den, which used to be cluttered with unread Book-of-the-Month Club editions, now held a tidy row of neatly labeled DVD cases. “Sammy Age 12,” one of them was marked. “Sammy skiing in Vermont,” said another. They looked brand-new.
“20/20 is doing an interview with Samantha next month and they went through all our home movies looking for footage of her as a kid,” Sam’s dad explained when he saw me checking out the DVDs. “We gave them boxes and boxes of old videotape I found in our attic, and they brought us back these. They practically indexed every frame. Want to see one?” I had a private coronary while I tried to remember what Sammy did with a particular home video we’d made together in college, but was quickly distracted by the scene that sparkled to life on the TV screen. It was an image of ten-year-old Sammy at a beach, trying to coax her younger sister into the waves. “Cape Cod,” her dad said. “Summer of 1980.”
“Show him the prom,” Sammy’s mom said, laughing. “That one is priceless.”
Sammy’s dad switched discs and there we were—Sammy and me at eighteen, standing in her parents’ driveway in front of a hired limo. I was going through a punk stage and had on a midnight blue tuxedo, a black ruffled shirt, and a red skinny tie. Sammy had squirted enough petroleum jelly in my hair to fill the Exxon Valdez and had given me a spiky ’do that she thought was trendy. I looked like Sid Vicious on the way to a black-tie circus. But Sammy was beautiful in the cream-colored silk gown she had borrowed from her older sister. Fifteen years later, sitting in her parents’ den, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “This isn’t going to turn up on 20/20, is it?” I asked her dad.
“No, I’m saving this one in case we ever need to blackmail you.”
“Dad, you’re not dying.”
“How do you know?” my father asked, adjusting the angle of his hospital bed with the remote control for the fiftieth time that morning. The tubes were gone from his nose and arm and the color had returned to his face. But he was sure he was a goner.
“Because the doctors say you’ll be fine,” I told him. “You need rest and a proper diet. And a nurse. We have to find you a nurse.”
“I don’t need a nurse,” he said. “I need a funeral director. I’m not making it out of this room alive …”
“Dad, if you don’t knock it off with the adjustable bed, I’ll make sure you need a funeral director. Give me that thing.”
I loved the guy—he was my dad—but he drove me nuts. Not to be disloyal to my mom, but I think even she would have wished that he’d fallen in love and remarried after her death. Twenty-five years of solitary widowerhood had made him as sad and hard as a gravestone. He still hadn’t gotten over her. He brought her up every time we spoke. Granted, Mom was pretty much the only thing we had in common, especially after I left the house to make my way in the world, but the truth was I barely remembered her. All I had were fleeting sensory ghosts. The sound of her laughing. The softness of her hair. The warmth of her touch. I was only eight when she died. I hardly knew her.
“You look more and more like her every year,” my dad said.
“Dad, please,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“That’s a compliment, kid. Your mother was a beautiful woman. You know she was in Life magazine—”
“In a toothpaste advertisement, I know,” I interrupted him. “Dad, look, I went down into the basement yesterday, and I saw the letters.”
“You’re snooping around in my house?” He grabbed the remote out of my hand and raised the back of the bed in order to confront me. The adjustment took several seconds, somewhat undercutting the effect. “I don’t snoop around in your house! Why are you snooping in mine?”
“I was turning off the dryer—it kept beeping at me. And I saw the letters. I’m concerned about you, Dad. It’s not healthy. Mom’s been gone a long time. You really need to let her go. Maybe even meet someone else. It’s not too late.”
“Ha!” he snorted. “That’s funny. I’m seventy years old. I’m not about to start picking up chicks at discotheques. No, Max, I made my choice. I chose your mother. It was the best choice I ever made, no matter what happened. But look who’s talking! What about you? When are you going to make a choice? You’re thirty-one years old—”
“Thirty-four,” I corrected him.
“That’s what I’m saying. You’re in your mid-thirties and you still haven’t found the right girl.”
“How do you know I haven’t found her?” I said. “Maybe I have found her but just can’t have her. Maybe I had her but she was taken from me.”
“That girl who married the movie star? The one who lived down the street? Samantha?”
I nodded.
“She made her choice, Max, and it wasn’t you. That means she wasn’t the right girl.” He motioned me to come closer. “Find the right girl, son. She’s out there somewhere. Just open your eyes.” He reached up and affectionately ruffled my hair, just like he did when I was a boy. Then he started playing with the bed’s remote control again.
A few days later, I got a late-night call from Samantha. Her parents must have told her about my father being sick. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hope he’s doing better. Remember when we were fifteen and he drove us to that Duran Duran concert and spent the whole night sitting in the car in the parking lot? The poor guy. I always felt bad for him. He never got over your mom.”
“Well, you know, we Lerner men—we mate for life,” I said.
We talked for an hour, our longest conversation in months, and would have talked longer except Sammy had to catch a flight in the morning to Wyoming. They were selling the ranch—the bills from Korean doctors were piling up—and she needed to be there to close the deal. But we arranged to have dinner when she got back to New York, just like old times. It would be our first meeting since before Johnny got diagnosed with brain cancer.
11
“Nine, four, four, double-B, D, C,” Samantha said.
“Pardon?” I replied.
“Nine, four, four, double-B, D, C,” she repeated, flustered and irritated. “That’s the license plate of the black SUV that’s circling the block right now. It followed me to the restaurant. It’s a photographer. He goes wherever I go, day and night. He’s made Johnny his specialty. Except Johnny hardly ever leaves the apartment, so he ends up taking three hundred pictures of me every day.”
We had just settled into a booth at a restaurant on Eighth Avenue in the Theater District, not far from KNOW’s offices. Holiday decorations were up all over the city. The tree at Rockefeller Center was sparkling with shiny balls. The Cartier Building was wrapped in a giant red ribbon. The mannequins in Barneys’ windows were strangling each other with Christmas lights. And the Italian bistro where Sammy and I were meeting had hung sprigs of mistletoe above all the tables. I pointed ours out to Sammy as she slipped out of her coat. She smiled and planted a kiss on my cheek. Then she continued on about the photographer in the SUV.
>
“The weird thing is,” she said, “I never see the guy’s face. All I ever see is his camera lens sticking out from the car window. Just once, I’d like to look him in the eye.”
She was as lovely as ever. She had the same warm smile, the same soft laugh, the same irresistibly kissable lips. But I couldn’t help noticing something about her eyes—remoteness, perhaps, or loneliness—that hadn’t been there before. After all the stress and horror she’d endured over the last year and a half, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had shown up for our dinner with white hair and a facial tic. One minute Sammy was the carefree bride of a matinee idol, jetting from topless beaches in the Mediterranean to mountaintop ski resorts in the Alps. The next, she found herself trapped in a world of bedpans and bedsores, the stoical wife of the most famous terminal case on the planet. It couldn’t have been more tragically ironic if Rod Serling had written it.
“How’s Johnny doing?” I asked after the waiter finished filling our wineglasses with merlot.
“Great,” Sam said, taking a long sip. “In fact, the doctors say …” Her eyes met mine and she couldn’t finish the sentence. She sighed. “The truth is,” she said, “he’s terrible. He takes all these weird medicines from these strange doctors, and he does all these exercises, physical therapy that’s supposed to help stop the muscles from atrophying. But none of it works.” Sammy took another big sip. “To make things even worse, his family from Alaska has moved in. They said they wanted to help, but all they do is ask how much things are worth. It’s like they’re taking inventory for when he dies. I’ve caught them going through our drawers and cabinets. They’re so …” Sammy stopped again and took a deep, Zen breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “Let’s start over. I’m being a drag. I don’t want to be a drag. I just want to have a good time tonight. Let’s just have fun, okay?”
And so we did. We drained the whole bottle of merlot, then ordered another, while I did everything short of sticking straws up my nose to make Sammy laugh. I regaled her with tales of my dating misadventures. I had her rolling on the floor with stories about my experiences in Hollywood. We reminisced over shared childhood memories, about our secret sleepovers during high school, and our over-the-top melodramatic separations during college. We had so much fun, we didn’t notice that hours had passed. When I looked up to pay the bill, I saw that we were the only ones left in the restaurant. Our waiter was standing at the bar, looking resentful. Sammy took out her little silver RAZR cell phone and started tapping at its keypad. “I’m sending a message to my driver,” she said. “I’m asking him if the photographer in the SUV is still there.” A few seconds later, she got the response. “Damn,” Sam said. “Still there.” She looked around the restaurant until her eyes stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand. “Let’s make a break for it.”
We got some startled glances from the busboys cleaning up the prep tables and mopping the floor, but as luck would have it there was a back door in the kitchen that led to an alleyway outside. “I don’t want to go home yet,” Sammy said, stepping over some garbage bags. We were both a little tipsy, but I don’t think it was the wine that was making Samantha drunk. I think it was the freedom. “Your office is around here somewhere, isn’t it?” she asked. “Let’s go to your office. I want to see where you work!”
It had started to snow—flakes as big as cotton balls floated all around us as we wobbled up Broadway. It made the city look like one of Carla’s globes. I swiped my ID card at the entrance of the KNOW building and we stumbled into the empty lobby, making our way to the elevators. Like naughty children, we skulked through the magazine’s darkened halls, the judgmental eyes of politicians and celebrities gazing down at us from the blown-up covers framed along the walls. I fumbled with my keys, opened my office door, and switched on just the desk lamp to give the room a warm, cozy glow. My eyes followed Samantha around the room as she examined the pop culture treasures I’d picked up over the years. She yanked the string on my talking Ed Grimley doll (“I must say!”). She stroked my Tribble. She accidentally set off the ejector roof on the tiny James Bond car sitting on my bookshelf, sending the little plastic guy in the passenger seat flying under my desk. Sam and I bumped heads when we both bent down to retrieve him. When we stood up, our faces were so close I could feel her breath on my lips.
For a heartbeat, it seemed as if no time had passed since her dad had videotaped us as teenagers in our prom outfits, since we lived together in that tiny apartment in the West Village, since before Johnny Mars came into her life and ruined mine.
Just when I decided to lean in even closer, Sammy spotted something on a shelf that made her jaw drop. She shot me an astonished look, then reached for the familiar-looking green ceramic turtle-shaped penny bank she made in fourth grade. I’d never been able to throw the thing away. She turned it over in her hands and ran a finger along the initials she had carved into the turtle’s foot as a little girl. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I can’t believe you’ve kept this thing,” she said.
“Well,” I responded, trying to make light of it, “it’s still got money in it.”
Samantha put the turtle back on the shelf and leaned into me for a long, warm hug. When she looked up, I could tell from her expression what was coming next. “I better get going,” she whispered softly. “I don’t want to, but I really should. I’ve probably stayed too long already.” She ran her fingers through my hair. Finally, she peeled herself from my arms and straightened her dress, and we walked back to the elevators. I pushed the button labeled “L,” for “Loser.”
12
I always get lost at Heathrow Airport. I follow the signs and remember to walk on the left side of the corridors, but inevitably I take a wrong turn and end up emerging out of a drainage pipe in Slough.
I had arrived at Heathrow in early 2005 to begin my most ambitious journalistic endeavor to date—or at least my biggest boondoggle. My plan was to circumnavigate the globe on the trade winds of publicity, stopping to interview film stars and visit movie sets in London, Paris, Rome, Prague, and finally, heading much farther east, Cambodia, where DeeDee Devry would throw herself at me in a wet bedsheet before I returned to New York by way of LA. When I proposed the three-week jaunt to my editor, Carla, she barely batted an eye. “Bring me back some snow globes,” she said.
More and more, my comfort zone was shifting from life on Earth to life in the clouds. Air travel was like putting the world on pause. So long as I was in transit, nothing could touch me. Not even Samantha. Especially not Samantha. Of course, there were drawbacks. It was sometimes crushingly lonely. One year, I had Thanksgiving dinner alone at thirty thousand feet over Greenland. Another year I celebrated my birthday at a duty-free airport shop in Australia. Most people measure the milestones of their lives with events like marriages and births. My landmarks were the trips I took and the stars I interviewed. Rowing a kayak in Sydney Harbor with Russell Crowe. Clinking glasses of aquavit in Oslo with Tom Cruise. Those were my Kodak moments. I’d be collecting a bunch more of them on this journey around the world.
I finally found my way to the Heathrow Express to London. As the train whooshed along the tracks, I watched English shrubbery fly past my window. Then I opened one of my bags and retrieved a fat manila file filled with clippings on Gwen Swallow, the forty-year-old BAFTA-winning actress who, until recently, had been married to the renowned Shakespearean actor and director Rufus Armitage. The divorce had been nasty, with the brunt of the bad publicity falling on the husband, who, according to Fleet Street stories in my folder, had fled the marriage after Gwen adopted her ninth child, a six-month-old Tibetan girl Gwen renamed Prunella. DEAD-BEAT DAD! booed a headline in The Sun over a story that asked readers the question, “Why would a man abandon his wife and nine children?” There was a full-page spread of paparazzi shots showing Armitage loading the trunk of his Jaguar outside the couple’s Kensington town house.
When I g
ot to my hotel in Knightsbridge. there was a message waiting for me at the front desk. Swallow’s publicist wanted to change the location of the interview tomorrow. Instead of tea at the Dorchester, Gwen wanted to meet in Kensington Gardens, at a spot called Round Pond. A curious choice—most stars tend to avoid publicly exposed settings. But then Gwen had a way of keeping people at bay. She could seem incredibly approachable on stage and screen—her portrayal of a deaf chambermaid in Mike Leigh’s Sad, Sadder, Saddest made millions of moviegoers want to hug her—but in person she was as accessible as an iceberg. The regal posture, the posh Sloaney accent, the thin dismissive smile—they all worked like a force field to keep the world at a distance.
With the help of a tourist map, I found Round Pond and arrived for the interview fifteen minutes early. Gwen couldn’t have picked a more idyllic London backdrop for my story. While I waited, I soaked in the scenery. Schoolboys in blue blazers and striped ties strolled the fiercely manicured lawns. In the distance, a red double-decker bus puttered past the ornate park gates. At the edge of the pond, an old woman fed bread crumbs to the most enormous swans I’d ever seen. Seriously, they looked big enough to saddle. It was all so serenely civilized, so veddy English, I half expected Mary Poppins to come floating down from the chim-chim-i-neys. Instead, on the horizon, I spotted Gwen and her entourage marching in my direction. She had brought the entire brood, all nine children, along with a caravan of nannies and nurses and other assistants lugging strollers and diaper bags and picnic baskets. Gwen was wearing so many scarves and shawls, she looked like a Bedouin. Her small army of children was running and shouting in circles around her. Even the swans stopped to stare.
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