Double Double (15 page)

So I tore up the schedule and planted an item in the
New York Post
's influential “Page Six” column about the book and the commotion it was making in Los Angeles. I immediately received six phone calls from major television programs including an offer from
Donahue
to have Julia on for the whole hour, an honor usually bestowed only upon Hollywood actors.

This meant I had to cancel the guaranteed commitment with Joan Rivers, whom I personally had promised would get Julia first, before the book became a cause célèbre. The public relations business is a strange one: Rarely is anything put on paper. It's all handshake agreements built on trust, with a publicist knowing that if he pisses off a producer at a national TV show or a prominent magazine or newspaper, then not only will he be persona non grata, his whole company would take a black eye for all of the authors.

All of this was running through my head when I decided that, instead of having a driver and a limo pick up Julia, I would go along for the ride and be at JFK airport to greet her at midnight. I thought she would appreciate some groveling, Hollywood-style, to impress upon her how important her book was to the company.

It worked. She came down the runway, a thin, tiny woman with a sly smile and her trademark shock of gray hair standing on end like a porcupine. Behind her was her assistant, Susan, tall, Los Angeles–pretty in revealing clothes, with a big mop of unruly brown hair. After we retrieved multiple steamer trunks of luggage and stepped into the limo, Julia complained bitterly about not being allowed to smoke on the six-hour flight and immediately lit a cigarette.

Her nonstop kibitzing continued until she ground out the cigarette, reached into her coat, lit up what was left of a joint, and pronounced, “Tomorrow I start A.A.!”

We all laughed, particularly since I had told Susan I was in recovery, and we had one of those friendly, falsely intimate moments found only in the Los Angeles entertainment community. Susan was knowledgeable about the twelve steps, and we both couldn't help loving Julia. The sickly-sweet smell permeated the limo with Julia's every puff—the car windows up, of course—making my eyes water and my mouth dry.

To get in Julia's good graces, I fired off the unintentionally funny line (as only the young and ambitious can): “Julia, in my three and a half years of book publicity, I've never worked on a book this big!” Julia was thrilled. When we arrived at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park, she and Susan went inside, and I got the bonus of a ride to my apartment in downtown Manhattan, filled with hope and foreboding.

Much to my surprise,
Donahue
went very well. Julia sold the book, was funny and honest, and handled all of Phil's questions with aplomb. She was on best behavior, and orders for the book soared.

After an action-packed day at work on Julia's and other books, I went to pick up “Jules” at ten
P.M.
for her eleven-to-midnight interview on
The Larry King Show.
This was before his show on CNN, when his radio show was a mainstay for big-name touring authors. I called up to the suite, and Susan warned me, “Be careful. She's really tired and in a bad mood.”

I took the elevator up and entered the room, where Julia was sitting at a table with her best friend, the editor in chief of Random House. “Jules” was visibly pissed.

“Ken, you've made me do too much today. I'm tired, I haven't gotten enough sleep—don't you understand? I'm a forty-seven-year-old woman, and I can't take it.” And on. And on. I stood there stone-faced, quickly factoring in the projected length of this tongue-lashing, the amount of time it would take to drive to Larry King's studio, the traffic in midtown this time of night, knowing that if I fucked up on getting her to the most important national live radio show in the country, it would be my head.

I finally got her out of the hotel and into the limo and she turned to me and apologized. “Ken, I'm sorry. I wouldn't normally do that in front of other people, but you have to understand, I'm really tired.”

We arrived at the studio with eight minutes to spare before the show went live. Julia turned on the charm with Larry and killed the whole hour. I took her back to the hotel and dropped her off, desperately needing a twelve-step meeting.

As I attempted to go to sleep, I ran Julia's life through my head. I loved all that Julia had done because I was a movie buff. I couldn't possibly compare my talents to hers, but I did relate to how my choices had been dictated by alcohol and drugs.

I woke up the next day, exhausted. The strain of getting Julia to Larry King's show had worn me out. I slept late, and when I got to work, I discovered that Julia was refusing to do Howard Stern's radio show because she was too tired. Groaning, I picked up the phone and called Stern's infamous producer and on-air foil, Gary Dell'Abate, and told him that Julia was very tired, overworked, and couldn't come to the studio to do the show.

Gary screamed at me, “Phillips is sucking every dick in town but blowing off Howard? You gotta be fucking kidding me!”

Gary threatened that Howard would ridicule Julia on-air and
make her look really bad, and “this ain't an idle threat” (the following day, Howard did complain bitterly about Julia on-air). I apologized for fifteen minutes and then dragged myself into the weekly marketing-cum-torture meeting for the big-shot editors who ran Random House, a meeting reviled by everyone in our department; one of my friends threw up out of anxiety before going into the meeting. Many of the editors were nice, but the most self-important would sit imperiously and grill the unlucky PR people who had to describe the publicity gained—or lost—for the lead titles that week. Those oh-so-often-dog-shit titles for which they had overpaid, for which publicity was supposed to spin into gold.

This week was different. The publisher and the editor of Julia's book were very pleasant to me. In the meeting, my sterling imitation of Julia's gravelly exclamations had brought down the house. After the meeting, I told the editor—who was very cute—that I appreciated her being nice, and she replied, “You know, Ken, it's not like it's a hard thing to do.” Yeah, right.

A few hours later, I was back outside our office building in midtown, waiting for a limo to take Julia and me to a popular live midday talk show on CNN. The limo was fifteen minutes late. I began to panic. Julia was waiting at the hotel. I saw a limo go by with a driver who looked like Julia's, and I ran two blocks, desperately trying to catch up. When I got to a red light where the limo had stopped and peered inside, it wasn't the same driver. I ran back to work—no cell phones in those days, so I had to go to my office to call the limo company. Apparently, the NYPD had chased the driver away, and he wound up in an auto accident. I told them to send a car to pick up Julia and decided it would be faster for me to run across town than take a car to the CNN studio.

Julia was fifteen minutes late and glowered at me as she stormed
into the greenroom. I asked how she felt about just landing at number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list. She replied, “I'm really not surprised, I knew it all along,” blah, blah, blah.

Julia went on the set, and was lit in to about some aspect of the book—Goldie Hawn's dirty hair?—while Susan and I caught up in the greenroom. Susan told me that Julia was always asking if she gossiped about how crazy her boss acted. I said Julia must be watching a movie of her own life: She could see her own awful behavior as if it were up on the screen, but she was unwilling, even powerless, to stop herself. Susan agreed. After the show, I dropped them both off at the hotel and went back to work, feeling so nauseated that I thought I was going to throw up.

The twelve-step slogan “Don't get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired” reminded me I'm always near-suicidal or -homicidal if I'm hungry. I polished off a sandwich and felt better.

Being with Julia that week strengthened my resolve not to pick up a drink or a drug. Her chain-smoking even helped me quit smoking cigarettes. I finally kicked the habit five months after Julia's book tour was over, only to discover the truth behind what I heard my first year of sobriety: “You're not really emotionally sober until you quit smoking.” Nothing can block feelings, enhance a lonely or sad moment, or kill an unwanted emotion better than a cigarette.

My last day with Julia was typical of our week together. I had to cancel yet another interview, this time with WABC Radio's
The Joy Behar Show.
The producer was completely pissed, if slightly mollified when I told him I had canceled Howard Stern and that Julia wasn't doing any local New York City radio. The producer went on to tell me that they'd advertised the interview twice in the papers and that, in canceling, “You're making us look like assholes.”

I apologized profusely for another fifteen minutes (all of my apologies seemed to last that long), and the producer calmed down before hanging up on me.

I walked over to the hotel and picked up Julia for a taped NPR interview with
Weekend All Things Considered,
a top author-interview show. Julia was in a great mood, relieved that I wasn't wearing a suit on this Friday afternoon but had come in my “play clothes.” She asked me, “Ken, tell me the truth, am I
the most
difficult author you've ever worked with?”

“No, I've worked with tougher.” I mentioned an author we both knew, and we burst out laughing.

The interview was not one of the host's best; he stumbled and was off his game. After it was over, Julia complained, then invited me to her hotel for a drink, apparently unaware that I was sober. Though it seemed to be an olive branch for all of her antics, I politely declined. It was the last time I saw her.

Julia died twelve years later, in 2002, of cancer. She was fifty-seven.

I was sad the day I heard she died. I even forgave her for calling me “Random House PR boy” in her follow-up book,
Driving Under the Affluence
. Her charm, wit, and sixth sense for the marketing of culture made her much more than another Hollywood
Day of the Locusts–
type story.

For me, the experience of working on a number one
New York Times
best seller, of handling the world's most difficult person for a month, was an education. I honed my PR chops and saw up close how an incredibly intelligent, warm, and charming person could self-destruct because she couldn't stop drinking. Julia's excuse was “twelve-steps meetings are about religion, and I'm an atheist.”

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
was a self-destructive
act that got Julia Phillips—whom everyone in the entertainment industry had written off and forgotten—back on the front page of entertainment news. She had lunch in Los Angeles again. She got her second act, if not sobriety. I was nearly fired from my job just a few months earlier for having a difficult personality and being intolerant of my coworkers, but largely because of my work on this book, I was able to save my job. I earned a second act and sobriety by attending lunchtime twelve-step meetings to keep my sanity.

For all of her bravado and slams of the film industry, Julia had loved her work, every last minute of it.

Maybe, like Julia, I wanted to eat lunch in my town again.

I
wonder sometimes why I bother. At times I feel almost as much a prisoner of sobriety as I did once of drunkenness. What's the point of this liquor-free life? Do I feel better? I don't know. Am I healthier? Probably. Do I look better? No. Am I easier to get along with? Yes, depending.

The clinic would call this kind of halfhearted attitude denial. Indeed, if the doctor read what I'm writing here, he'd want me back in the clinic tout de suite.

I think of the freedom of that woman my mother mentioned, the one who sat at her window every evening, reading and drinking two highballs. She had the freedom to do that. I don't.

I hear the friendly voices in the clinic telling me, Oh, but you
do
have that freedom! You're freer than she is. She has to have those drinks every evening. She's locked in to that particular prison. But you—you're out of it.

Why does that sound like a lie? If I'm out of that prison, I'm still on parole. “An alcoholic is never cured; he's always recovering.” That's bad news right there. How much effort would you want to expend on solving a problem that you're told in the end cannot be solved? Am I supposed to be placated by the knowledge that I'm my own parole officer?

Here's the thing: It would be almost as hard for me now to have a drink as it was back then to refuse one. I'm locked in to my own stiff psychology. I seem to have exchanged one prison for another. (Or perhaps that's sophistry. Or denial.)

I haven't had a drink in two decades. No, it's even longer than that. I haven't pinned down my nondrinking history, as Ken has. He knows day-month-year. Do I consider it less important than he does? I must, and that could be a bad thing. I remember that I stopped two days short of the New Year. But which New Year?

I do remember my faux lapse on a flight when the attendant served me a martini by mistake. I'm set to wondering again: Why bother? Why not jettison this whole sober life? This brings me back to square one, after I've handed out a lot of reasons for not drinking. Good reasons abound: Do I show more self-restraint? Yes. Does food taste better? Of course not. Have I laughed as hard not drinking as I used to laugh with the same person after belting down a few? Yes, I think I have. Do I have as much fun at social functions? Absolutely not. To have fun at a social function, you've got to be drunk or eight years old.

To commemorate a member being sober for a month, a year, ten years, they are always handing out coins in A.A., the way my kindergarten teacher handed out paper hearts to those who had shown some hint of extra-goodness. I wonder if it has to do with
our kindergarten selves, stripped of our adult allegiances to the trendy and the cool (like
Mad Men
without cigarettes), when drugs did not abound and escape meant not a substance but an open door.