Leading Man

by Benjamin Svetkey

  Watching it all unfold on TV was beyond surreal. Sammy’s death completely took over the news channels. A paparazzo had been involved in a celebrity spouse’s death. That was enough to make it a major story. Except this was no ordinary celebrity spouse. This was Saint Samantha, the poster girl of matrimonial loyalty and sacrifice. The media went nuts. Comparisons to Lady Di’s crash in Paris ten years earlier were all over the airwaves. One cable anchor went so far as to awkwardly proclaim Sammy “America’s people’s princess.” There was footage of fans laying flowers near the site on the West Side Highway where the collision occurred. There were long shots of Johnny’s apartment building, where the star was said to be mourning his loss. There were interviews with angry politicians promising crackdowns on “the paparazzi menace.” And, of course, there was endless video of Sammy, going to movie openings with Johnny, attending black-tie medical research fund-raisers, that ubiquitous home movie clip of ten-year-old Sammy playing on a beach in Cape Cod.

  Robin hovered, phoning multiple times. “I bet you couldn’t have guessed in a million years that this would be the way the story ended,” she said, having a philosophical moment while I watched a computer-generated animated re-creation of the accident on CNN for the hundredth time. I hadn’t had a chance to tell Robin what happened with Sammy the week before at the Shui. Even though I’d been having a meltdown over it, a tiny part of me had been looking forward to bragging. After all, I’d been talking to Robin about getting Sammy back throughout our whole friendship. Now, though, I wanted to keep my night with Sam to myself. It seemed too precious a memory to share.

  My dad phoned. You’d think that after his experience losing my mother in a car crash, he would have had something soothing and wise to say. But it was precisely because of his experience that he knew there were no words for a time like this. “Son, I’m so sorry for your loss” was the best he could come up with. Then he put his new lady friend, Madge, on the phone to offer her condolences. “So, how did you know her?” she asked. Still, I appreciated the call.

  Carla telephoned, too, although it turned out she had an ulterior motive. “Max, how horrible for you,” she said. “I know you were friends with Samantha. You were close, weren’t you? You know what might help? Maybe if you wrote something for the magazine about her. It might be cathartic, don’t you think?”

  “Carla,” I said, “I don’t think I’m going to do much writing for a while. Especially about celebrities.”

  “You want to take a break from writing?” she asked. “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea, Max. How long a break were you thinking?”

  “Forever,” I said. “Forever sounds about right.”

  After three days, I decided it was time to switch off the TV. It took Herculean strength, but I pushed myself into the shower and scrounged up some fresh clothing. I hadn’t eaten much since throwing up at Celebrity. Robin had brought over a pizza the night before, but it sat untouched on the butcher-block counter in my kitchen. I took out a cold piece and sniffed, then put it back in its box. I looked in the refrigerator, but there was nothing I wanted. Then I opened my laptop and checked my e-mail. There was an ad for discount Viagra, a sale announcement at Fred Segal, a couple of work-related items, and a message from Eliska wondering where I’d been and why I hadn’t answered her last e-mail. It would have been so easy to write her a short note explaining that a close friend had passed away and that I’d get back in touch with her when I could. But I just didn’t have the energy.

  Then I saw an e-mail from Sammy. My heart jumped. But, of course, it wasn’t from Sammy. It was from one of her sisters. She was using Sam’s computer, she explained, to let people in Samantha’s contacts list know that there was going to be a memorial service in New York in one week. Did I want to be put on the guest list? I’d never heard of a funeral with a “guest list” before, but I responded that, yes, by all means, I’d be there. I wondered how many other of Sammy’s contacts were getting posthumous e-mails. I was a little surprised Sam even had a contact list, given that she did so little e-mailing. And then, like a light flipping on in my brain, it occurred to me: I hadn’t been to the mailbox in three days.

  Sure enough, mixed in with the cable bill and the supermarket flyers, there was a small envelope with Sammy’s round, feminine writing on it. I turned it over in my hands and examined it for a long moment before tearing it open. I was keenly aware that inside were Samantha’s last words to me. It was postmarked the day before her death.

  “Dear Max,” she wrote in a short note. “Dinner was lovely. After dinner was even lovelier. Amazingly, I’m still not freaking out—not yet, anyway. I hope you aren’t, either. There are so many things I want to say to you, but I can’t think straight right now. Life is so much more complicated than when we were kids. But whatever ends up happening, Max, please know that I love you. I always have and always will.”

  Sammy’s memorial service was held at the Magistrate Theater, the very spot where, ten years earlier, I attended the premiere of Canterbury’s Pilgrim and came as close as I ever had to meeting Johnny Mars in the flesh. There weren’t any roving klieg lights or red carpets or even very many popping flashbulbs—the paparazzi wisely kept their distance—but in every other way it looked just like a movie opening. Celebrities were everywhere.

  I knew that I would finally meet Johnny Mars at Sammy’s memorial, and I spent most of the flight to New York wondering what I would say to him. There had been so many different things I’d wanted to tell him over so many years. As a kid, thrilling to his exploits on the screen, I wanted to cheer him on with all my teenage heart. In my twenties, after he stole Sammy, I wanted to rage at him with all my broken heart. In my thirties, after Johnny got sick, I wanted to tell him how sorry I was, how much I pitied him. But now, with Sammy gone, I had no idea what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. I wasn’t sure how I felt about anything.

  I’d been to a lot of celeb-packed events in my time, but never a funeral. Under the shadow of death, the rituals of fame and exclusivity seemed even emptier and more ridiculous than ever. After being ushered in by clipboard-toting gatekeepers, mourners picked up their tickets at the box office window, along with a program printed on luxurious linen paper. On the cover was a picture of Samantha. Inside was a list of the people who would be stepping to the podium to share their memories of her. Christina Ricci, John Travolta, Sandra Bullock, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Tommy Lee Jones—there were more stars appearing onstage at Sammy’s memorial than at the Oscars. It made me want to gag.

  People were milling around, filling the hall with the murmur of hundreds of whispered conversations. So I milled too. I spotted DeeDee Devry chatting with Rupert Everett and Leonard Cox talking with Ben Affleck. Even Chuck Fuse, Johnny’s replacement, was there, with his arm around Jay Moses. I didn’t see Johnny anywhere, but I knew he had to be close. Eventually I spotted Sammy’s family, her mom and dad and her two sisters, huddled together on the other side of the orchestra section. They were the only ones not working the room, just sitting quietly, waiting for the ceremony to begin. I was about to go over to give them all hugs when the lights in the theater dimmed and people began taking their seats.

  “You again!” the man in the seat next to mine said when I settled in. It took me a second to find the face underneath the overgrown beard and mustache, but it was the actor Alistair Lyon. I remembered reading that he’d been cast as the lead in Ulysses S., a biopic about General Grant, which perhaps explained the forest of facial hair. “We must be karmically connected,” he said. “We keep bumping into each other in the oddest places. How did you know Samantha Mars? Did you interview her?”

  “No,” I answered. “I never interviewed her. She was my girlfriend. Until Johnny came along.”

  “I don’t understand,” Alistair said. “Your girlfriend was Samantha Mars?”

  “She wasn’t Samantha Mars at the time, but yes. One minute I was living with her, the next she was married to Johnny Mars.�
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  “That’s extraordinary,” Lyon said. “An action star stole your love. That must have been rough to get over.”

  I left that unanswered—I wasn’t about to open up to a movie star on this of all occasions. “What about you—how did you know Samantha?”

  “Oh, I never met her,” Lyon answered.

  “So you’re friends with Johnny?”

  “Not exactly friends,” he said. “We’ve met a few times. I’m just here to pay my respects. What these poor people have been through. It’s so tragic it’s almost biblical. She was literally killed by fame.”

  The ceremony opened with Sheryl Crow singing “Amazing Grace.” I tried to figure out how Crow knew Sammy, then remembered that she’d sung the title song for Yankee Doodle Deadly, one of the Montana films Johnny made in the late nineties. Then Willis came out and told a story about meeting Sammy on the set of Johnny’s last completed Montana movie, Independence Slay, in which Willis did a cameo as a Ukrainian uranium dealer. I began to realize that, except for Ricci, who had worked with Sammy on Losers Weepers, all the stars on the stage had met Sam through Johnny. They were his pals—and, in Alistair’s case, mere acquaintances—not hers. It made me wonder if Sammy had had any friends of her own since becoming Mrs. Mars. It didn’t seem so. For the first time, it began to dawn on me just how lonely and isolated Sammy may have been, even before Johnny’s illness. Her late-night calls—maybe those weren’t mini vacations. Maybe they were more like lifelines. How had I not seen that? I’d been so busy obsessing about my own problems, I never gave a thought to hers.

  If I hadn’t been consumed by my secret plot to win Sammy back, if I had just accepted that we were never going to be anything more (or less) than lifelong friends, I might have been more sensitive. But all along, I’d been making the same mistake I always made with Samantha. Sure, I figured out how to bring flowers and pick better gifts—I never again gave her a Man from U.N.C.L.E. boxed set, that’s for sure—but I still hadn’t learned to see beyond my own personal desires. All I wanted was to make Sammy love me again, whether that was what Sammy wanted or not. I never thought about her feelings. I was selfish and self-centered. And now it was too late to do anything about it.

  I peered over the hairdos in the theater, scanning for Johnny. He was usually easy to spot in a crowd, even in a wheelchair. But he didn’t seem to be there. From what I’d heard during dinner at the Shui, as well as what I’d been reading in the gossip columns, Mars’s health had been slipping even before Sammy had been killed. There were rumors that he’d been suffering from bouts of memory loss, forgetting even his own name. I guess I could understand why he might not show at his wife’s memorial service. Part of me was relieved; I could stop worrying about what to say to him. But another part was disappointed. I’d been shadowboxing with Johnny for a decade. He had been such a major force in my life, but he was still as two-dimensional to me as his character on the screen. I was finally going to get to experience the actual man.

  I looked over at Alistair. He was dabbing his eyes with a pocket square. In fact, all around the theater, famous people were sniffling and weeping. Even if they hadn’t known Sammy as well as I had, even if they hadn’t known her at all, Sammy’s death had clearly touched them. The strange thing was, I wasn’t crying. I was sad to the bone, to be sure. I was totally shattered. Next to her family, I knew Sam better than anyone in the theater. But no tears. Not yet.

  About thirty minutes into the ceremony, while Aimee Mann was onstage singing “The Last Mile of the Way,” I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and saw a young woman in a starched white nurse’s outfit. She knelt in the aisle next to me and whispered, “Are you Max Lerner?” I nodded yes. “Would you please come with me?” I looked over at Alistair Lyon, who’d been watching with curiosity. He just shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea what was going on, either. I stood and followed the nurse up the aisle toward the back of the theater, watching her walk in her big, ugly white shoes. She guided me into the lobby and through a door marked no entry, then down a long hallway toward the backstage dressing rooms. We passed a women’s restroom; the “W” had fallen off so that the sign on the door read omen. We finally came to another door, with a star painted on it. The nurse gave it a quick couple of raps, turned the knob, and led me inside.

  It was a small, run-down space with a makeup table and a lighted mirror against one wall and a beat-up old leatherette loveseat against another. In the middle of the room, slumped in an electric wheelchair, was a shriveled, ancient-looking mummy of a man. It took me a beat or two to realize who it was. “Is there anything you need?” the nurse gently asked her patient. He waved her away with the one functional part of his body—his still-muscular left arm—and the nurse went back out the door, leaving us alone together. For the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with Johnny Mars.

  Nothing I’d seen on TV or read in the papers had prepared me for just how desiccated Johnny looked in person. He had lost at least half his once-hulking body mass; at most, he weighed one hundred pounds. His legs were as thin as broomsticks. His face was so gaunt and gray and lifeless, it was startling to see it move. The only part of him that still looked vaguely alive, aside from his one good arm, were his eyes, which Mars now trained on me with terrifying intensity. I nervously adjusted my necktie while I waited for him to speak. “You are Max Lerner?” His lips barely moved but his voice still rumbled like a subway under a sidewalk. I nodded my head yes. Mars continued staring at my face for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, he spoke again.

  “Samantha cared a lot about you,” he said. “She was always talking about you. She said you were a great friend to her.”

  I had to bite down hard to keep from breaking into sobs. I cleared my throat. “You know,” I told him, “there was a time when I hated your guts.”

  “I stole your girlfriend,” he said. “I don’t blame you.”

  “No,” I said, finally grasping something I should have figured out a decade ago. Standing in front of Mars, the man who’d gone from boyhood idol to nemesis to object of my confused pity, it all suddenly became clear. All the resentment and anger fell away, and I suddenly saw that I hadn’t been good enough for Sammy. Not because I wasn’t an action star, not because I couldn’t offer her penthouse apartments and ranches in Wyoming, not because of anything like that—but because I didn’t know what real love was. Maybe I couldn’t know when I was in my early twenties. But I knew it now. Watching Sammy as Mrs. Mars had taught it to me.

  “You didn’t steal her,” I said. “I lost her. You were just lucky enough to find her.”

  Mars’s facial muscles began twitching, his mouth contorting spastically. It took me a second or two to figure out what was happening. He was trying to smile.

  19

  I went through the motions. I got up every morning and started the day with a bike ride on the path along Venice Beach. I stopped by the bodega on Carroll Canal for an orange juice and Variety. I drove to the bureau in Brentwood to check my mailbox for press releases and swag. I interviewed Tom Cruise. Again. It was exactly the same life I’d been living before Sammy died. But it felt somehow different. It felt stupid.

  I no longer found fame fascinating. On the contrary, my decade-long pseudoscientific research into the mysteries of celebrity now seemed an idiotic waste of time. What did it matter if fame was a disease or a drug or a status symbol? Who cared? It was no great riddle why people turned their heads when Jack Nicholson entered the dining room of a restaurant. It’s because he’s Jack fucking Nicholson. Any moron could tell you that.

  I’d been in love with pop culture my whole life, but now I felt like I was at odds with the entire entertainment universe. Everything was changing. The star system was collapsing. The audience was splintering. The Internet loomed like the Eye of Mordor over the entire media landscape. Not that I could blame my malaise entirely on the ascendance of reality TV and Transformers movies, because even the classics had stopped giving me pleasure. One night
while I was surfing channels, I happened upon the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera playing on cable. It should have been a poignant Woody Allen moment, the epiphany when I realized how much joy pop culture had given the whole wide world, how many millions of tears it had dried. Instead, all I could think about was the fact that virtually every single person who appeared in that 1935 film was now dead. Probably even the little kids dancing on the ship deck during the big “Cosi Cosa” number.

  I guess you could say I was depressed.

  Robin did her best to cheer me up. She set me up with the actress who replaced Purity Love on DINKs. Yes, Purity got fired, but not because of her outburst after my article came out. A few months later she made the mistake of sleeping with another new writer on the show. Which would have been fine except he was also the boyfriend of one of the producers. The actress replacing Purity was just as pretty, and no doubt less psychotic, but our date went poorly anyway. My heart just wasn’t in it. By the end of the night, we were both in bad moods. “Would you stop that, please,” she said, nodding at my hand. I’d been absentmindedly drumming the table with my spoon through most of the meal. How not to pick up chicks.

  I tried calling Eliska again. This time I wasn’t high and I didn’t screw up the time zones. But all I got was her outgoing message. “Dobry den,” I heard her recorded voice say. “Donolali jste sk k Eliska.” Czech isn’t a particularly melodious tongue—it’s one hard consonant away from being Klingon—but Eliska made the language sound as soft as a purr. When her message ended, I hung up without saying anything. Then I called back to listen some more. I did this three times before Eliska herself picked up the phone. She’d obviously been screening her calls. “Prosim?” she said a little urgently. Flustered, I quickly hung up again.

  Even if we had talked, I’m not sure what I would have said. I knew I’d have to explain what had happened, why I had dropped the ball with our e-mail courtship. But that would have meant talking about Samantha, and the last person on Earth I wanted to do that with was Eliska. Sammy’s death was emotionally confusing enough; I didn’t need to mix those feelings up with the ones I had for my erstwhile would-be Czech mate. What was the point, anyway? Eliska lived a world away. She might as well have been from another galaxy. There was no way it could ever work between us.