Leading Man

by Benjamin Svetkey

  And then I came home from work one day and Robin announced that she had found true love on the set of DINKs. With an actress named Purity Love. “Wait a sec—she’s gay?” I asked, stunned. “Gayer than Peppermint Patty at an Indigo Girls concert,” Robin chirped, dancing around my kitchen as she smelted a pot of angel hair pasta into sludge. “We’re going on a date on Saturday. She asked me out. Can you believe it? I’m really starting to like LA.”

  I congratulated her on her new romance. If anyone deserved a little Love, it was Robin. Her dating life was almost as calamitous as my own, although her trouble was of a different sort. She fell in love too easily, then would inevitably get her heart smashed to bits. I’d nursed her through at least a dozen traumatic breakups. I was beginning to worry that Robin was losing hope. I was also worrying that Purity Love could do some serious damage if things didn’t work out. I didn’t say anything out loud, but I had some niggling suspicions.

  Purity was not hugely famous. DINKs, in fact, was her first break, or at least her first since she was seventeen. Her only other credit on IMDb was in 1997, when she starred with three other teenagers in a Nickelodeon kiddie program called Boogie Girls. The reasons for Love’s abrupt departure from that show were cloudy—she either walked away in a huff or was fired—but one day thousands of toddlers turned on their TVs and saw a different redhead singing and dancing about sharing toys and making friends. Children’s television could be such a jungle. Now that she had bounced back with DINKs, though, I’d been seeing Love’s picture in the party pages of LA’s local glossy magazines, always in a slinky, low-cut dress, and with her arm around some up-and-coming actor or hot young director. Exclusively of the male variety.

  At least Robin’s love affair kept her out of my hair for the next couple of weeks. I could finally go to the bathroom in the morning again. She was out all night almost every night. Every couple of days Robin would come whirling back into the loft to collect some personal items, then rush off again. Sometimes she’d even have a minute for a quick conversation.

  “How are things going with your new girlfriend?” I asked, watching Robin dig into my clothes dryer looking for clean underwear.

  “It’s terrifying,” she said, laughing. “I really think she’s the one, Max, I really do. I’m so in love with this girl it’s disgusting. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever been with …” She found a pair of freshly washed panties and looked up from the dryer. “But that’s what’s terrifying. What if it doesn’t work out? I don’t know if I could take that.”

  “But what if it does?” I said. I’d been a little jealous of Robin, and I still had my suspicions about Purity, but I had to root for their love affair. I’d never seen Robin so happy. It was like a light had been switched on behind her eyes. I hadn’t yet met Purr, as Robin called her, but I was grateful to Love for what she was doing to my friend. I only wished I had somebody to do the same to me.

  The phone rang at a quarter past eleven. I had a pretty good hunch who was calling. Where she was, it was a quarter past two.

  “We’re at Mount Sinai,” Samantha said between sobs. “Johnny’s in the emergency room. All of a sudden he started having convulsions and couldn’t breathe. The doctors don’t know what’s going on. It’s terrible, Max. I think he’s dying.”

  I caught the next plane to New York. It was an impulsive thing to do—if Robin had been on my sofa that night, she would have talked me out of it—but after Samantha hung up the phone to get back to her convulsing husband, all I could hear were her sobs. It cost seventy-five thousand frequent flyer miles—the only seat available on the last flight out of LA was in first class—but I didn’t care. When it came to rushing to Sammy’s side in her hour of need, I would pay any price.

  No, I most certainly was not hoping for Johnny’s death. That would have made me a monster. Truthfully, as I flew to New York, I was crossing every finger that Mars would be okay. Not just for his sake, but for Sammy’s. I hated the idea of her suffering any sort of pain. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that in the lizard part of my brain, where evil thoughts slither and hiss, I did wonder what would happen if Mars happened to die. I know, it’s terrible, but I couldn’t help myself. I imagined soothing Samantha through her grief. Growing close with her again. And then, after an appropriate mourning period had passed, taking her back into my arms as the One once again. God, I hated myself.

  When the plane landed at JFK at 10:30 a.m., I grabbed my overhead bag and headed for the taxi stand. I hadn’t called ahead for car service, or a hotel room, for that matter. I hadn’t even told Sammy I was coming. I didn’t want her to try to dissuade me. As I waited for a cab to take me to Mount Sinai Hospital, I took out my cell phone to call KNOW’s travel department. They’d be able to arrange a room for me somewhere. I noticed I had a voice mail. “Hey Max, it’s Sammy. Everything is okay. Whew. Johnny is breathing normally and the convulsions have stopped. They’re going to release him later today. They think it was a reaction to one of the drugs the Koreans gave him. Jesus, was that scary! Anyway, thanks for taking my panic-stricken call last night and for being so sweet about it. You’re a great friend …”

  Of course, I was glad that Johnny was okay—but I felt like an idiot. I really was pathetic. I had flown across the country in the middle of the night just because a girl I once lived with was worried about her husband’s health. Clearly I had made no progress whatsoever. No matter how many miles I put between us, no matter the hours I spent up in the air, no matter how many other perfectly wonderful women I met—I thought of the one who left me hanging on the Charles Bridge in Prague—I always ended up boomeranging back to Samantha. What we had was not a normal, healthy relationship between a grown-up man and a grown-up woman. It was more like the relationship between a grown-up dog and his grown-up mistress. When she whistled, I came running. Why? It was like I was stuck in my own private sitcom hell, forever doomed to make the same jackass mistake over and over again. Now I knew how Gilligan felt. I wasn’t ever going to get off this stupid island.

  I did an about-face and walked back into JFK airport to catch the next flight to LA. Six hours later, when I stepped through the front door of my loft, I was so exhausted and relieved to be home I almost didn’t notice Robin weeping on my sofa. I tossed my bag into a corner—there really wasn’t any need to tell her about Sammy’s call and how it sent me scurrying to New York—and sat down beside her. “What’s going on?” I asked in a whisper. “What happened?”

  “Purity is a bitch!” Robin howled. “She’s a deceitful, conniving, cold-blooded bitch.”

  “Oh c’mon, it can’t be that bad. What happened?” I was praying it was just a lovers’ spat, something easily repairable.

  “She told me that if I didn’t write more lines for her character, she was going to break up with me,” Robin explained between sobs. “She said if I really cared about her, I should prove it by making her a star. That’s the only reason she went out with me in the first place—to get more lines! I found out from one of the producers that she does this all the time. Whenever they hire new writers, she throws herself at them. Male, female, whatever, she doesn’t care, so long as she thinks they can help her career …”

  “Wait a second,” I interrupted. “I want to make sure I understand this correctly. She’s sleeping with the writers to get ahead? How stupid is this girl?”

  “Yeah, right?” Robin agreed, laughing through her tears.

  An idea popped into my head as I brewed my friend a cup of tea. My own love life was still a disaster-in-progress, but that didn’t mean Robin’s had to be. Maybe there was a way I could help give her some closure, help heal her wounded heart. “Robin,” I said over the kettle whistle, “how would you feel about revenge?”

  Part one of my plan was to get my editor, Carla, to agree to a story on DINKs. I gave her a spiel about how the show pointed to the changing definition of the American family in pop culture. How it spoke to a long-overlooked but growing demographic—married people who
don’t reproduce.

  “I already assigned a DINKs story to Cartwright,” Carla said. “But if he’s willing to give it up, it’s all yours.”

  Justin Cartwright was one of the other writers in the Los Angeles bureau. Normally his beat was sports, but he’d occasionally dive into a TV piece. “Oh, yeah, dude, that would be great!” Cartwright said when I offered to pick up his DINKs story. “I’m scheduled to go on the set next week, but there’s a Segway race in Long Beach that I’m dying to sign up for …”

  DINKs was shot on a pair of soundstages in Culver City. Four different living rooms, assorted bedrooms, kitchens, and dining rooms were in one building; all the other sets, including the bank where one character worked as a teller and the emergency room where another was a nurse, were in the other. The producers and writers, Robin included, had their offices in bungalows on the other side of the lot. The economy and efficiency of TV production always impressed me, especially after spending so much time on feature films, where sets were so often built to be blown up.

  I interviewed each of the main actors in their trailers, which were parked next to the soundstages. First, Monica Sellers, the fifty-eight-year-old ex–soap star who played the ER nurse, then Elmo Barker, the thirty-two-year-old African American stand-up comic who played the bank teller, followed by Jessica Mildred, the twenty-eight-year-old Australian actress who played the childless wife of a rising young politician. All this, though, was merely foreplay. The real screwing was coming up.

  Purity Love didn’t have a big enough part to warrant a trailer of her own—as a second-tier character, she was in a scene only every couple of episodes—so we conducted our interview in one of the bedroom sets. We’d never met, so she didn’t know my face, but I was concerned she might recognize my name. Robin had undoubtedly mentioned me once or twice. I needn’t have worried. When she saw me getting a cup of coffee at the catering tables, she headed right over. “You’re Justin Cartwright, the writer from KNOW, aren’t you?” she said, shaking my hand like we were already best friends. Publicists usually send out memos to cast and crew when a journalist is visiting the set. Purity had obviously read an outdated one and had been studying to butter up the wrong journalist. “I really loved your piece last week on professional volleyball …”

  This was working out even better than I could have planned. For the next hour, I let Love think I was Justin Cartwright. And Justin, that shameless suck-up, lit a bonfire under Purity’s ego. I told her she was the best part of DINKs, that her nimble comic timing and soaring dramatic abilities were being woefully underutilized by the show’s writers and producers—an injustice I promised to point out in my article. Purity was so thrilled she was literally bouncing on the bed. “You know, Justin,” she said, putting a hand on my knee, “we should really hang out together sometime. When neither of us is working.”

  “Oh, I’d like that very much, Purity,” I said.

  “Call me Purr,” she said, with a flirty smile.

  The following week, when my piece on DINKs was published, I got revenge not only for Robin but for all the other writers Love had screwed over in her lust for more screen time. I did the absolute worst thing a journalist could do to an actress. I left her out of the article. Completely. I didn’t mention her name once. According to Robin, Love flew into a rage when she read it, ripping the magazine into pieces and storming off the set. She created such a commotion, kicking one of the key grips in the shin as she exited, that the producers were considering getting rid of her. Another redheaded actress could easily replace her.

  Now I knew what it felt like to use my journalistic powers for good rather than evil. Seeing the laughter in Robin’s eyes as she told me the whole story, I felt better than I had in months. For once in my life, I was the superhero.

  15

  “Pack your Bermuda shorts, Max. You’re going to the Bahamas!”

  Carla, my editor, was on the other end of the line. She’d dialed my number at the office in Brentwood, but I had that line pretty much on permanent call forwarding. I hadn’t stepped foot in the bureau in weeks. When Carla called to tell me she was sending me to the set of the next Jack Montana movie—the first not to star Johnny Mars—I was at home in Venice, lounging on my sofa, watching La Dolce Vita on cable with a big bag of cheese puffs propped on my stomach. Max in his resting state.

  “You want me to write about the new Jack Montana movie?” I whined into the phone. “Carla, are you sure that’s such a great idea?”

  “Max, you’re the world’s leading expert on Montana movies,” she said. “You can recite the titles in reverse-chronological order. Plus, you’ve already interviewed Chuck Fuse. He knows you. It’ll make for a better interview.”

  “I don’t know, Carla. It’s not like he’s going to remember me …”

  “Max,” she said, growing impatient, “I’m sending you to the Bahamas. Bring me a snow globe.”

  I had nothing against the Bahamas. I was sure it was a very nice place. But I was starting to find visiting movie sets, even the ones in LA, more and more of a drag. I’d been to so many that they started to blend together. I had recently interviewed Jennifer Aniston, but whether it was on the set of Rumor Has It … or The Break-Up I couldn’t for the life of me remember. What’s more, I didn’t care. I found myself not only losing interest in my job, but, for the first time in my life, in the whole of pop culture. I guess you could say I was suffering from post-dramatic set-visit syndrome.

  Even if I wasn’t in the midst of a career crisis, though, visiting a Jack Montana production was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do. Just thinking about it made my stomach queasy. Johnny had made several more trips to the ER for convulsions and, on one terrible night, a bout of temporary blindness—Sammy kept me up to date with real-time reports on every emergency. It wasn’t logical—I doubted I could explain it to Carla—but traveling to a Jack Montana set to interview the guy who was replacing Johnny felt somehow wrong, like a betrayal. The poor man wasn’t even dead yet.

  Also, to be frank, the new Montana movie sounded terrible. I even hated its cutesy title—Less Talk, More Killing. Where was the traditional nod to American history that made Rocket’s Red Glare and Give Me Death such iconic movie names? For another thing, the director hired to reboot the franchise in the post-Mars era was Gary 7even, the pompous hack and shameless self-promoter (his real name, before he started adding numerals to it, was Gary Sevetini) who started his filmmaking career by turning the Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey into Bad Rabbit, a shocking splatter flick about a six-foot killer bunny. I’d read an interview in which 7even said that Special Agent Montana would no longer deliver witty one-liners after blowing away bad guys. In fact, in 7even’s film, Montana would barely speak at all. “My dream,” the director said, “would be to make a totally silent Jack Montana movie.”

  3at me, 7even.

  My biggest problem with the movie, though, was Chuck Fuse. I just couldn’t see him playing my childhood hero, or anybody’s childhood hero. I didn’t care how many street luge championships he’d won at the X Games, he wasn’t a movie star. He was too goofy looking, for one thing, with that huge, ludicrous pompador and teeny ears and beady eyes. And while his voice was deep enough, he had a pothead drawl that made everything he said sound 50 percent stupider. The film I’d watched him shoot in Prague, Boom!, had done okay when it was released in the summer of 2006, earning $150 million domestic, but Fuse couldn’t take all the credit for that. The pyrotechnics were the real star of that picture. Of course, I knew that Johnny Mars had once been a young, untested actor, before being cast as Jack Montana. But I was twelve years old at the time. It wasn’t as big an issue to me back then.

  Anyway, in the fall of 2007, I flew to Paradise Island, the sun-dappled Bahamian atoll where production was about to begin on the new Montana movie. Most of the film’s crew was staying at the Poseidon, a gigantic, crowded, Vegas-style family resort where vacationers splashed on waterslides and bodysurfed on artificial waves in gian
t pools. But the stars of the movie—as well as visiting journalists from important magazines—were housed down the road, at the ultra-exclusive, super-secluded Surfside Club. Once the grandest rubber plantation in the Bahamas, the property had been purchased and renovated by a Dutch travel conglomerate, and was now the Caribbean’s poshest playground for people with too much disposable income. The luxurious beachfront chalets, where Fuse and 7even were staying, rented for $20,000 a night. I ended up in Surfside’s slums, a $600-a-night room in “the Big House,” the giant colonial pile where the slaves slept back when the place was still a rubber tree farm. Of course, improvements had been made since then; I had a king-size featherbed, a Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, and French doors leading to a balcony overlooking a stunning tropical garden.

  On my first evening in the Bahamas, there was a pool party at the Surfside celebrating the film’s start of production. Fuse and 7even were the hosts. I opened my suitcase and dug around for the white Sonny Crockett–tyle linen suit I’d purchased just for the trip. It was wrinkled beyond recognition, so I tried that old traveler’s trick of hanging it in the bathroom while running steaming hot water in the shower. When I put the suit on, I looked like I’d been through a car wash without a car. I wore it to the party anyway.

  There was a calypso band playing Jack Montana theme music, a giant ice sculpture of the special agent’s famous .45 Magnum (after fifteen minutes in the tropical heat, it looked like a derringer), and a huge blown-up reproduction of the ad in Variety announcing Fuse’s casting. “CHUCK FUSE IS JACK MONTANA,” it said in block letters over a photo of the actor’s grinning face. I still wasn’t buying it, but I had to concede, grudgingly, that it was a nice party. The crew was just getting to know one another, so it was easy to mingle and be sociable. Even 7even was on his best behavior, chatting with assistants and introducing the grips to “Montana Girls,” the models-slash-extras who were always strewn about scenes in Montana movies like so much set dressing. In a matter of hours, virtually everyone at the party would hate 7even’s guts, and with good reason. His tyrannical, idiosyncratic directing style would make Lars von Trier burst into tears. But right now, the night before the first day of shooting, there was nothing but love in the air.