I was used to seeing celebrities up close, of course, but not casually relaxing together in such huge numbers. It reminded me of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Elmer Fudd works as a waiter at the Macrumbo Room. He serves dinner to animated Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (“Baby wants rabbit …”) while cartoon versions of Frank Sinatra and Ray Milland drink at the bar. Everywhere I turned, there were cartoony-looking movie stars. In one of Moses’s living rooms, I saw Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman amuse onlookers by pretending to arm wrestle. On line at the seafood buffet, I spotted Reese Witherspoon filling a plate with lobster tails and cocktail sauce. I saw George Clooney chatting up Charlize Theron and Terrence Howard chatting up Michelle Williams. When Nicole Kidman broke her heel on a stone path in the garden, I was there to act as history’s witness. When Sean Penn couldn’t find an ashtray, I was there to watch him stub out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe.
After circling the scene a couple of times, I noticed a commotion at the screening room building. It was jammed with people, so I peeked through an open window. I saw our host, Jay Moses—one of the few men who could pull off an ascot in the twenty-first century—addressing a crowd of revelers. Then I noticed who the head of Monarch Pictures had his arm around. It was Chuck Fuse, the numbskull I interviewed in Prague back in the spring. It looked like he was going to get Johnny’s old job after all. I headed to the bar inside the tent and waited for the bartender to look my way. Standing next to me, waiting as well, was a very thin man wearing a Nehru jacket. He looked familiar.
“I know you, don’t I?” the man asked after studying me for a few seconds. “You interviewed me, didn’t you? At my home?”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him. It was Alistair Lyon. This guy was full of surprises. The star must have lost a hundred pounds since doing that Winston Churchill movie—all part of preparation for his next role, as Mahatma Gandhi in a hunger strike drama called Fast. Even more shocking, though, was the fact that he remembered me. Movie stars never remembered reporters. Unless, of course, they’re angry at them. When it comes to negative press, celebrities have photographic memories. I tried to recall if there’d been anything in my story about Lyon that the great actor could have objected to.
“Yes, that was me,” I said, bracing for the worst.
“I remember you asked me a lot of questions about being famous,” Lyon said. “Did you ever figure it out? Fame, that is?”
He wasn’t angry. He simply had a good memory. I tried to answer his question. I told him about the four quadrant theory and fuckability quotients and how celebrities were America’s number two export. Lyon nodded politely until I was finished, but I could tell he wasn’t buying it. Frankly, neither was I. I had seen the inside of the factory where celebrities were manufactured, watched them roll off the assembly lines and get packaged for the public. The mystery wasn’t totally gone, but fame was definitely losing its luster. I was starting to realize that the sparkle and glitter that had so mesmerized me—that so mesmerized the whole world—turned out to be mostly marketing.
“Maybe,” Lyon said, with the understated delivery only an Oscar winner could pull off, “you are not looking for answers in the right places.”
Sammy didn’t stop calling after I moved to Los Angeles. But thanks to the three-hour time difference, I wasn’t being startled out of bed in the middle of the night anymore. Now the phone would ring at around eleven p.m.—two in the morning in New York, Samantha’s bewitching hour. I got the sense that calling me was sort of like a mini vacation for her—a break from the depressing routine of caring for her husband and dealing with crazy Korean doctors and even crazier Alaskan family members. Sammy could relax and be herself and chat about nothing at all. As for me, I was more than glad to be Sam’s holiday destination, her personal Ibiza. But I was also glad I was on the other side of the continent. After that near-kiss in my office, it felt a lot safer.
Johnny was continuing to decline, in sometimes startling ways. Along with weight loss, muscle atrophy, and spreading paralysis—he was finally forced to take his doctor’s advice and was confined to a wheelchair—he also seemed to be aging rapidly. His hair and facial stubble had gone completely white, his skin was becoming wrinkled, and liver spots had started appearing on his hands. Inexplicably, the only part of his body that didn’t seem affected by the brain cancer was Johnny’s left arm, which remained nearly as beefy and powerful as ever. Johnny’s Western doctors were at a loss to explain it, but his Eastern healers pointed to the healthy appendage as a sign that their medicines were working. “I don’t think Johnny listens to them anymore,” Sammy told me during one call. “He still takes their weird medicine and does their exercises, but it’s more out of habit now. Whenever they tell him how well he’s doing, he just looks at me and rolls his eyes.”
Samantha wasn’t the only one calling me in LA. Much to my surprise, my dad started phoning every so often. This was a first—when I lived in New York, he always stubbornly waited for me to call. Months, if that’s what it took. An even bigger surprise: he’d met a new lady friend. “We’re not dating,” he made sure I understood when he told me about her. “We just go to the movies sometimes, or have something to eat together.” He’d met her at the gym his doctor had forced him to join after his heart attack. Her name was Madge, she was sixty-eight, and she was recuperating from a heart attack as well. They bonded over their mutual hatred of beta-blockers. It just goes to show, anything is possible.
Robin also phoned—sometimes three or four times a day. She had not been happy about my moving to LA, to put it mildly. “Why would you want to live in Los Angeles?” she had asked with a shocked stare when I broke the news to her. “It’s a giant strip mall. It’s got the personality of a paper napkin. You’ll hate it there.” Robin was no longer answering phones at KNOW. Her latest play, Hamret?, an update of Hamlet in which all the roles had been rewritten for Scooby-Doo characters, had been a huge success. The Times had given it a half-page rave. For Robin, New York was still a city full of hope and promise. But she was wrong about LA. I didn’t hate it.
For one thing, the work environment was a lot more relaxing in Los Angeles than in Manhattan. The magazine rented a slick suite of offices in a tower in Brentwood for the six LA-based writers, although nobody actually spent time at “the bureau” except to pick up mail and steal office supplies. Unlike KNOW’s New York writers, who were always stabbing one another in the back competing for bylines and column inches, the scribes in LA strove to do as little as possible. There was supposed to be an LA bureau chief—D. B. Martin was the name on the door of his huge corner office—but nobody could remember ever seeing him behind his desk. The only time he surfaced was in public, accompanying a celebrity. One writer spotted him at Christian Bale’s table during the Governors Ball. Another caught him courtside at a Lakers game with Dustin Hoffman. Like Colonel Kurtz, Martin had gone native. The local savages, mistaking his title for power, had adopted him almost as one of their own. He’d become a professional hanger-on. The horror. The horror.
Sure, there was a lot to dislike about LA. The traffic was maddening, the air quality sometimes bordered on sulfuric, and I was dealing on a daily basis with some of the most vicious and scurrilous liars and cheats you could find in any city on any continent—agents and publicists. On the other hand, Los Angeles was the only municipality I knew of with an economy based entirely on creativity. Like Washington, D.C., it was a one-industry town, except the industry here was dreams. That made LA a magnet for all sorts of lunatics, not just the sort trying to become movie stars. If you wanted to invent a new religion, or build cars that ran on french fry grease, or, like Abbot Kinney, build a European waterway on the beach, this city was ready to welcome you with open arms. I loved that about LA.
It was also, in its own spectacularly tacky way, a sexy city. Or at least jiggly. Strolling past the downtown-chic clothing shops on Melrose Avenue was like a trip to Hef World. The sidewalks were jammed with
could-be Playmates in hot pants and halter tops, strutting like strippers on a runway. Driving my Speedster at night along bustling, neon-lit Sunset Strip—“the clitoris of LA,” as Robert Evans once described it, or should have—I’d find myself looking at everything but the road. At every stoplight, there’d be another billboard with a twenty-foot-tall bikini-clad supermodel peddling the latest musk fragrance or underwire bra. It’s a wonder I didn’t hit more lampposts. As far as I could tell, the streets of LA truly were paved with carefree sex. For some reason, though, my GPS navigator kept taking me to Crazy Street.
“How do you feel about composting?” an incredibly hot blonde asked me one night when I tried to chat her up at Bar Marmont on Sunset. She was wearing puffy hippie pants and a tight-fitting T-shirt with a vintage Mr. Bubble ad on it, but she was sucking her cocktail through a straw in a way that would make a porn star blush. “Because, you know, I could never go to bed with a man who didn’t compost.”
One of the reasons I wasn’t doing better with dating in LA, I figured, was that I didn’t know how to dress like a local. In New York, I wore a suit and a button-down shirt, no tie. It was the uniform of the Manhattan media drone, and I loved its Garanimals-like simplicity. Find matching pants and jacket, and you were done. But in LA, I discovered, only suits wore suits. And suits weren’t considered sexy. So I drove to Fred Segal in West Hollywood and bought two pairs of trendy Italian blue jeans and some simple black Tom Cruise-style T-shirts. That would be my new LA uniform. I was pretty pleased with myself until the salesgirl rang up my purchases. My new jeans and tees cost me $1,100. It made me reconsider composting.
As a sign of commitment to my decision to move to LA, I resolved to donate all my old New York clothing to the Salvation Army. I made a big production out of it, chucking items out of my closet onto the floor in the middle of my loft, turning all the pockets inside out in case I happened to have left $1,100 in one of them. I found only about six bucks in change, but I did dig up theater ticket stubs and nightclub matchbooks and cocktail napkins—the flotsam of my old dating life in Manhattan. I also found—surprise!—a fat joint that one of the Harold brothers had given me back in the spring, when I’d visited the Brooklyn set of Kush Street, their latest stoner comedy. The sibling filmmakers were famous for shooting movies while totally high, and when I met them they didn’t disappoint. When they opened the door to their trailer, plumes of marijuana smoke wafted into the parking lot. Inside, the fumes were so thick I needed fog lights to find the sofa. I declined the joint they were passing around—I hardly needed it; just breathing the air made me hear sitar music—but after the interview Joey Harold insisted on slipping a souvenir cigarette into my jacket pocket. “To remember us by,” he said with a phlegmy laugh. Somehow, I’d forgotten all about it.
I lit up the joint and continued sorting through my clothing. The pot certainly made the chore more interesting. I studied a piece of lint as if it contained the secrets of the universe. I examined an old penny as if it were Michelangelo’s lost masterpiece, noticing for the first time how Lincoln’s beard curled up at the end, like a gnome’s. Then, in the pocket of a tweed jacket, I found a scrap of paper with strange handwriting on it. The words weren’t English—“Misenka” and “Saska”—and there was a line of numbers underneath that didn’t make any sense. What the hell was this? I took another toke of pot and scratched my head. Somewhere in the slush of my gray matter, a synapse fired. This was the paper the Czech girl—Eliska, I remembered her name—had slipped me the night I had kissed her in Prague, now over a year ago. It was the address near the Charles Bridge where she had stood me up. And the long series of seemingly random digits—could that be a Czech phone number? Eliska’s number? I took another drag and realized what I had to do.
If it was eight p.m. in LA, what time was it in the Czech Republic? I remembered that it was a six-hour time difference. That would make it two in the afternoon in Prague. I took another hit and grabbed the phone. Why did Sammy get to be my one and only phone buddy? Maybe Eliska and I could have a telephonic relationship, too. The night we spent together drinking that Sternobased Czech aperitif and watching Death dance on the clock tower in Old Town Square—that had been the best date I’d had in years. True, the kiss hadn’t been received as warmly as I’d hoped, but Eliska didn’t slap me or call the cops. I was sure she’d be delighted to hear from me again. After carefully punching in the numbers, I waited as my call bounced off who knows how many communication satellites, and then heard the high-pitched purring of a European phone. I took one last hit and prepared to give Eliska the surprise of her life.
“Prosim … kdo je tam?” Eliska’s voice sounded scratchy and sleepy. Something was wrong. I stubbed the joint out on the bottom of my shoe, Sean Penn–style, and did some quick recalculating. To my horror, I instantly realized my mistake. It was a six-hour difference between New York and Prague; between LA and Prague, it was nine. And it wasn’t earlier in the Czech Republic, it was later. I’d surprised Eliska, all right, but by calling her at five in the morning her time. “Kdo je to?” she repeated into her phone, growing impatient. “Je pet rano!” I didn’t know what to say. So I hung up, slid the phone under my Crate & Barrel limited edition sofa pillow, and prayed they didn’t have caller ID in Central Europe.
14
“Where the hell are all the people?” Robin wanted to know. “How come the streets are so empty? It looks like a national emergency.”
We were touring LA in my Speedster on a balmy February afternoon in 2007. I drove past the mansions of Beverly Hills, slowing down to show Robin the one on Sunset with the life-size bronze statues of joggers on the front lawn. I steered into the steep, winding streets of Hollywood Hills, took in the million-dollar views for a while, then looped back down into sleepy Santa Monica, and finally followed the coastline up to Malibu. We didn’t see a single pedestrian the whole time. “This city is so alien,” Robin said as we sat down for lunch at Neptune’s Net, a bikers’ hangout on the Pacific Coast Highway that served the best fried clams west of Nantucket. “I might as well be visiting the surface of the moon. Are you going to eat that coleslaw?”
Robin wasn’t in LA just to see me. Thanks to the success of her plays, she’d been approached for a job as a staff writer on DINKs, the hit cable-TV dramedy about four well-to-do childless couples—Dual Income No Kids—who lived in different parts of Los Angeles and came from different ethnic and generational groups, but somehow all managed to be friends. At first, Robin told her agent she wasn’t interested. She was a lifelong New Yorker. There was no way she would ever leave Manhattan to write for a crappy TV show, or even a pretty good one. Then her agent told her how much the gig paid, and she was on the next flight to LA.
I, of course, was delighted at the prospect of Robin moving to Los Angeles, and invited her to camp out on my sofa while she was in town interviewing with DINKs’s showrunners. If she took the job, I’d have my old wing-man back. With Robin’s help, in no time at all I’d be sleeping with scores of pretty young actresses again. In fact, there was one in particular on DINKs who I was hoping to meet, a sexy redhead improbably named Purity Love. She had a small but regular part as a new mom who was always rubbing her fertility in the other characters’ faces. But if Robin was to be the solution to my West Coast dating woes, I’d first have to convince her that Los Angeles wasn’t the lunar surface. “LA has a very vibrant lesbian community,” I told her, waving a clam for emphasis. “You’ve seen The L Word. There are cafés in this city that cater exclusively to beautiful gay girls …”
“Theater in LA is a joke,” Robin said, ignoring me. “How could I write plays in LA? It’d be like trying to toboggan in Tahiti.”
“How much do writers for DINKs get paid?” I asked. “What was that number again? It had so many zeros, I lost track …”
Robin, of course, accepted the job offer, and we agreed she would stay on my sofa in Venice until she could find an apartment of her own. It was the first time I had shared my home wi
th a woman for longer than a one-night stand since Samantha and I lived together in Greenwich Village. I have to say, it was sort of fun, for the first week. I’d come home from a hard day interviewing celebrities and would find Robin in my kitchen, cremating vegetables in a stir-fry pan, or exploding packets of instant rice in my microwave. (Are all lesbians lousy cooks or was it just her?) While we picked at the charred bits of food on our plates, I tutored Robin in the vernacular she’d need to survive in her new city. “You don’t leave voice mail,” I explained, “you ‘leave word.’ And you don’t play phone tag—here it’s called ‘trading calls.’ And when you make lots of calls in a row, that’s called ‘rolling calls.’ ” Robin nodded and took mental notes.
After a couple of weeks, though, I began to wonder if Robin was ever going to leave. She’d started her new job writing for DINKs, had leased a gigantic SUV that she practically needed a ladder to climb into, but seemed to have made no progress at all in finding a place to live. Every once in a while, she’d inquire about a neighborhood. “How about Marina del Rey?” she’d ask. “Flight attendants and swingers,” I’d answered. “Hollywood Hills?” “Agents and other douchebags.” But there was no serious apartment hunt going on. And I was beginning to want my space back. It was driving me nuts that Robin would take at least two hours in my bathroom every morning. It was somehow extra exasperating that she would always emerge looking exactly the way she did when she went in.
Leading Man Page 12