But Enough About Me (3 page)

When he was on duty at the store, he would talk to every customer, to our everlasting horror. My dad had a handy repertoire of four or five all-purpose comments that he used on shoppers. A husband glumly trailing his wife? “I see she dragged you out here!” Or “I'll bet you'd rather be home watching the ball game!” A lady leaving the store laden with bags? “I see you bought us out!” “If the customer has kids, I'll say something about them, because people always like to talk about their kids,” he said. “A little bit of humor is good.” He waved to a store clerk. “With Penney's,” he finished proudly, as though he were making a presentation, “it's about the first and last impression—someone in the store saying hello and good-bye.”

Who doesn't love a good old-fashioned department store? Back in the day, Penney's boasted even more departments, because it strove to be your complete one-stop-shopping destination. The building in Wayne housed an automotive department, a garden shop, a candy pavilion, and a pet store. (“The snake got loose again,” said my father one night, wearily pouring a Scotch. “And it ate some of the hamsters.”)

The highlight of our spring was Penney's annual Sweet Sale. At the door, shoppers would receive a chocolate bar—the good, thick kind with almonds in them that high school kids sell—and tucked inside would be a coupon for either 25, 30, or 35 percent off of an item that day. “Another employee just slipped me a candy bar,” Heather would gleefully report. After a few hours of shopping, we'd stop for cheeseburgers and cheesecake squares in the Penney's coffee shop, which, with its squeaky vinyl booths and soothing brown, tan, and mauve color palette, was one of our favorite places on earth to eat.

Penney's was the tamest of all of our family jaunts. Most of them were much wackier. One prized ritual was paying a carefree visit to the family cemetery plot, which my sensible father had purchased for all of us many years back. “We've got some property,” he announced when the deal came through, as we gathered around him for details. “It's a double plot,” he told my mother excitedly. “You could put four caskets in there, or we have enough for, oh, I'd say eight or ten cremations.”

The plot came in handy when Heather and I were going through our Goth Lite phase (black clothing, major Maybelline eyeliner, silver jewelry). She and I would make late-night drives to the graveyard—blasting Siouxsie and the Banshees—so that we could drape ourselves moodily around our final resting place.

“You know what our friends are probably doing right now?” Heather said scornfully as she settled her back against a gravestone. “Watching TV.”

I shook my head. “They just don't get it,” I said. I looked up at the moon and sighed in a mournful way. Call me morbid, call me pale. “And you know what? They will never understand me in a million years. This is the real me. I'm not afraid of darkness, and I'm certainly not afraid of death.” Actually I was, but I had to put up a good front because Heather was younger.

Heather absently pulled up some grave grass. “I wish that everyone in high school could see me right now. It's like they can't look beyond my Benetton outfits.”

When the rest of the family got wind of our visits, they decided they wanted in on the action. Soon, we had a ritual. Someone would bring up our cemetery plot, and Heather would cry, “Let's make a night of it! Festively, we would pile into the car. First, we'd go to Fabio's Mexican Cantina in New Providence for gloppy, cheese-filmed Mexican food. (“Smile, and smile some more,” the menu urged. “Laugh, and laugh some more.”) Then we'd merrily drive off to our little patch of land.

“On a clear day,” said my father, stepping out of the car, “you can see New York City from here. You can't beat the location.”

“I dare you to lie down and cross your arms!” Dinah said to Heather. Soon, we were lying together on the plot, our arms folded like Nosferatu.

“Jay, where did you put the camera?” my mother cried. “Wait, I know, it's in the car! Dinah, stay there, with your arms folded just like that, and no smiling!” Each family member leaped up to take a photo of the others, while urging them to stay motionless. As my father was fiddling around with the flash, Heather whispered to me, “You know what? I don't think this is creepy, because when one of us does die, at least I'll have this memory and it won't be a sad thing.” This was far too sunny a thought to be Goth Lite, but I liked it, anyway.

New York was only an hour-long drive away from our small town in Central Jersey, but my family visited the city exactly once a year, which was all the culture I required. We would have some moo shoo pork and egg rolls in Chinatown, then take the obligatory spin through Little Italy. For us kids, what was even better than eating a cannoli at Ferrara's was the ultimate in excitement: going to look at the bums on the Lower East Side, which we did faithfully once a year. It was kind of like visiting relatives.

“Let's go see the bums! Time for the bums!” we would chorus. Then my father would pilot our light blue Buick LeSabre downtown to the Bowery, which in the eighties was an open-air asylum, not the hipster carnival it is now. There we would park, and silently, reflectively watch the homeless men swill their Mad Dog 20/20. This was supposed to be a character-building, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I exercise, but for us kids, it was better than a matinee of
Cats.

“I want you girls to think about how lucky you have it,” my father would say as two muttering, shabby men broke out in a drunken fistfight.

“Jesus, Jay, lock the doors,” my mother said, frowning anxiously.

Both of the men weakly put up their dukes, landing a few tepid body blows but basically just making a wobbly circle around each other. Nearby, a guy with a World's Greatest Grandma T-shirt was settling into a refrigerator box next to a jar half-filled with urine. As he gathered some newspaper
around him, he squinted wearily up at us, a suburban family of five, staring wide-eyed at him from the car.

“It's easy to take things for granted,” continued my father as Dinah nudged me.
Prostitute,
she mouthed. I craned my neck.

“—Simple things like a roof over your head. Electricity. A decent education—”

I raised my eyebrows at my sisters and jerked my head to the left. Two rats were in a fight to the death over what looked from the car to be part of a pastrami sandwich. Ugh, look at their long, pink tails. The bigger one started to gain ground. Whoops, now the little one is on top. Scrappy, that one.

“—valuable lesson for you about gratitude,” he concluded.

We nodded meekly. Then my dad threw the Buick in reverse, and we headed to the Holland Tunnel, and back to New Jersey. The day was always exciting, but we all felt a little relieved when we pulled onto the Turnpike.

If it is at all possible, avoid setting up your interview in New York or Los Angeles, because your famous person will invariably be overscheduled and distracted. In a different era, celebrities would occasionally grant a “personality profile” when they didn't have a movie or a TV show or an album to plug, but these days, they are told by their handlers that to give an interview without something to sell just looks needy and sad. So when it is time to push a product, the public relations team usually loads up their star with multiple interviews per day over the course of a week or two.

The deadliest occur in an airless conference room of the movie company at their Los Angeles or New York headquarters. If this happens, all you can hope is that the chat takes place in the morning, when the star is freshest, rather than at the end of the day, when the star is deranged from answering the same five questions about gaining weight for a role or “what it was like” to work with various costars. It can be especially awkward when a movie was made years ago and was shelved or delayed (this happens a lot). The star will have trouble unearthing the obligatory anecdotes from the set because he or she will have made three films in the meantime, and will end up repeating the same two stories for each visitor, and you are left with nothing.

With musicians, it's always wise to pick a tour stop where there are no media for miles. Often publicists will try to combine a photo shoot and an interview to get it over with, but the subject is always being pulled in different directions, so you must grab five frantic minutes as they get changed, or have their makeup done, or you shout questions over the noise of the hair dryer. If a star is uncomfortable or too distracted to come up with a clever answer to your question, she'll get her entourage to participate and turn the question on a member of her glam squad (“I don't know. Chrissie, did I ever want to quit the business?”) so that the answer is unusable.

Thus, it is always a good idea during the negotiations process to fish around and see if your subject is going to leave town for any reason. If he or she is a musician and they are on tour, pick a place like Kansas City for your interview. If he or she is a movie star and on location in a nonglamorous spot, try to wrangle your way in. Why? Because the star might actually be glad to see you. You will be a fresh new face, and if they are neurotic about being away from the public eye in a remote outpost, you will bolster their ego by conveying that the world still cares about what they are doing. Yes, a gang of screaming fans gathered by their hotel entrance can buoy them up, but a journalist who dramatically flies into a distant location is just that little bit more legitimate. The welcome will be warmer, the focus sharper, and if your celebrity is bored by seeing the same faces on tour or on set, you may get some extra time, rather than just the promised hour and a half.

The only roadblock becomes actually getting to the location. With Brad Pitt, in the Rockies for his mountain-climbing movie
Seven Years in Tibet,
I flew from New York to Vancouver, then on to the mountains in a twelve-seat Beechcraft terrifyingly named Wilderness Air, whose pilot spent the entire shaky barf bag of a flight with her head swiveled around, chatting animatedly with the passenger behind her. Her copilot, meanwhile, had his head buried in a book. So who, exactly, was flying the plane? The Lord? A computer? I knew that DC-10s had them, but Wilderness Air? I looked around for dibs on the meatiest-looking passenger to eat if the plane crashed.

Against the odds, we landed in a remote field and I wandered over to a diner, awaiting a van that was to pick me up for a three-hour journey up the muddy mountains. I supposed I should eat. I was constantly afraid of long stretches without food. As the waitress slapped a burger on my table, she gave me a hard look and said, “Been a lot of moose attacks around here lately. Mothers protecting their babies. They just come barreling out of the woods at ya.” Then she shuffled away. Moose attacks? The only wildlife I had to worry about in my neck of the woods were squirrels, and rats. Which I hated. Yet I missed them.

After a long, vertiginous van ride with one stop to let a herd of caribou cross, I arrived at the far-flung mountain camp, one of the few places on earth where Brad Pitt could walk around unmolested. He was dressed for the six inches of mud that surrounded the camp, in boots, sweatpants, and a black suede coat. He was so friendly and positive, so free of attitude, that my palms were barely moist when I shook his hand. I was relieved that I didn't have a crush on him; this would make the proceedings go a little more smoothly. I was drawn to scrawny, tubercular indoorsmen, while Pitt was more of a hot ski instructor/beach bum type. His favorite expressions were “Yeah, right?” when he agreed with you on something, followed by “Yeah, man” (when he agreed with you on something but perhaps less stridently), followed by “Excellent.” He referred to his costar, the British actor David Thewliss, as Thew-lie.

After I gamely followed him on a long hike, he invited me into his trailer. Yes! I quickly looked around, scribbling everything down on my pad:
Scientific American
magazine, a black Prada tote, a carton of Camels, a book on Frank Lloyd Wright, and a huge box of strawberry Twizzlers. Aha, a CD collection. The Dave Matthews Band, Shawn Colvin, and Soundgarden. As I got situated, Pitt decided to blast a few tunes from the Soundgarden album, and that is when it started to rain. In my palms. For as “Burden in My Hand” cranked up, Pitt began to rock out.

Chris Cornell's voice rang majestically over the mountains, exhorting us to follow him across the desert, as thirsty as you are.

Pitt thrashed around.

This has happened to me a couple of times, and I never know what to do. When someone is playing air guitar, do I play guitar as well? Whip my head around? Do I fill in on air drums? Pick up something and examine it? It's the same situation as being in the studio with a band and they play you some new tracks from their upcoming release. They all stare at you expectantly. Do you bob your head? Do you close your eyes, presumably lost in the music? You can't sing along, of course, because you never heard the words before. Maybe you give an OK sign and a big smile?

As Pitt leaped around the trailer and continued to rock, I stood there helplessly. Do I yell, “This album is so great”? I fast-forwarded ahead: He can't hear me, so he turns the stereo down, I idiotically repeat, “This album is so great,” he is annoyed because I have cut his moment of abandon short. I opt to go to the trailer door and take in the spectacular view of the peaks. I assume an awed, but slightly mellow, expression to match his low-key manner. After a few more songs, he joined me at the doorway to remark that he never got tired of the view. I, meanwhile, exhaled in relief. And because this wasn't in Los Angeles, I was able to spend the entire day with him—hiking, eating lunch in the commissary, even watching
Sling Blade
in his trailer with him, just the two of us. It wasn't necessarily that I was spectacular company, it's just that the deep mud around the set had suspended the shoot, and he didn't really have anything else to do.

Sadly, most interviews do not have the option of taking place in the wilderness, but with a little ingenuity, even the most common of settings can work. Hotel rooms, for instance, are a music-world cliché, and not all that interesting unless they're filled with used crack vials, but if your rendezvous takes place in a hotel, all is not necessarily lost.

The San Antonio hotel room of Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood offered a perfect peek into his everyday life. He and the band were in the midst of a U.S. tour and I joined him during a night off. He opened the door to the coziest scene imaginable. Ron's blond wife, Jo, was bustling around doing the laundry and throwing out the occasional wisecrack. Candles were
burning, scarves were draped over the lamps for a softer effect, and the TV was turned to an old interview with Katharine Hepburn (“Tough old broad!” Wood cackled appreciatively). My affable host, meanwhile, had set up a keg of Guinness beer in the bathtub of their suite and would periodically amble in there and fill 'er up. He urged me to join him, and he was so casual about it that after a while I unself-consciously headed to the bathroom to avail myself. As I filled my glass, I surveyed the surroundings. Draped over the shower curtain was a row of dripping black socks. Ron rinsed them out in the sink at night like an old British pensioner! This is a man who could have paid someone to lick them clean.

When I returned to the living room, Ron showed me a large sketchpad full of artwork that he had done, flourished here and there with an occasional guest doodle by Mick. We spent a delightful evening paging through the book and drinking Guinness while he reminisced about the Stones' early days, told stories about the band's visits to the homes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino (whose wife wouldn't allow him to stay in the house, he had to sleep in a shed in the garden), and talked proudly about his kids. He was one of the most unaffected people I've ever met. At the end of the night, he led me over to the balcony of his room and threw the doors open to a Texas sky that seemed impossibly huge. A few nights earlier, he told me, he and Jo had come out there and spent a long while watching a spectacular electrical storm. “It was beautiful,” he said quietly, gazing out at the stars.