Leading Man

Thank you to my agent, Betsy Lerner, who, on more than one occasion, powered up the defibrillators and zapped this book back from the dead. Thank you to Claudia Herr, my editor at Vintage, and her colleague Peter Gethers, without whom this novel literally would not exist. Thank you to my friend Sean Smith, who spent part of his time in the Peace Corps last year e-mailing me literary guidance from a tin hut in Africa. Thank you to so many others, famous and unfamous, living and deceased, who helped me tell this story.

The knocking began at two in the morning. Three sharp raps, a few seconds of silence, then three more. I crawled out of bed, grabbed a fluffy robe from the bathroom—“Grand Hotel d’Angkor” it said in gold lettering on the breast pocket—and opened the door.

Nobody was there.

I didn’t know a soul in Cambodia, certainly not anyone who’d pay a visit at this late hour, so I figured some other hotel guest must have mixed up a room number. I slid back into the comfy king-size bed with the eight-hundred-thread-count sheets, slipped on the eye mask from the minibar, switched off the light, and drifted back to sleep. A few minutes later, though, the knocking started again. Three raps, silence, three more. I headed to the door again. The hallway was still empty.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but if any place seemed likely to be haunted, it was this hotel in Siem Reap. The village itself was straight out of a Children’s Fund late-night TV spot. It was made up mostly of crumbling clay shacks and
muddy streets, and the surrounding jungle was littered with unexploded land mines left over from Cambodia’s on-again-off-again civil war. Beggars were everywhere, many of them small children. Buddhist monks in flowing orange robes flocked to the area too, drawn by the Zen magnetism of the nearby Temple of Angkor Wat, the super-sacred eight-hundred-year-old Buddhist shrine located a few miles down a dirt road. But smack in the middle of this twelfth-century landscape, sticking out like Lady Gaga at an ashram, was the five-star Grand Hotel d’Angkor, a colonial palace that had been catering to rich European tourists since Cambodia had been a French outpost back in the 1930s. This was about as far from Western civilization as you could get—in Siem Reap, elephants were still considered a form of mass transit—yet the doormen at the Grand Hotel all wore dainty white gloves.

I had ventured into Cambodia feeling like Captain Willard on the Nung River, in search of DeeDee Devry, the blond movie starlet famous for her in-your-face acting style, stunning violet eyes, and tumultuous private life. DeeDee—or Double-D, as she was nicknamed by the Hollywood press—was in Siem Reap shooting a high-concept action picture called
Time Tank
. She was starring as a U.S. Army tank commander in Afghanistan who takes a wrong turn into a temporal vortex that sends her and her vehicle hopscotching through portals in time and space. Think
Band of Brothers
meets
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
. At one point in the script, there’s a stop in medieval Indochina, where DeeDee’s character is worshipped
by the Khmer natives, the old blond-goddess-in-the-jungle routine.

Technically, I was a member of the Hollywood press, although I didn’t spend a lot of time in Hollywood. My job was to fly around the world, interview movie stars and other celebrities, and write about them in the pages of
KNOW
magazine, the much-venerated, widely read news weekly headquartered in New York. It was a preposterously glamorous gig, the sort of jet-setting occupation a shallow Matthew McConaughey character might have in a cheesy romantic comedy—until McConaughey’s character falls in love in the second act and learns the greater bliss of settling down with a regular girl like Kate Hudson. Only I was stuck in my second act. I was in my thirties and was unable to fall in love. The way things were going, I’d end up as Matthew McConaughey for the rest of my life, and nobody wants that.

It didn’t matter what sort of girl I dated when I was back home in the United States—the punky music publicist with prematurely blue hair, the sexy sculptress who made spooky artwork out of glass eyeballs, the struggling actress who was so superstitious she dealt herself tarot cards before every audition—I always ended up running away. My intentions were honorable. I would go into each new romance with an open mind, hoping this would be the one that would stick, but it never did. Sooner or later, I would find deal-breaking flaws. A cackling laugh. Thick ankles. Loud chewing. And that was it, I would bolt. I knew, of course, I had plenty of
flaws of my own, much worse than unshapely ankles. But I couldn’t help myself.

Lucky for me, though, there was one type of relationship I was really good at—the kind I had with megafamous strangers. Who cared that I couldn’t fall in love? Jack Nicholson knew my name! At least he did for the ninety minutes I spent with him in one of his mansions on Mulholland Drive. Who needed real intimacy with real people when fake intimacy with celebrities I would never see again was so much easier, so much fun? Unlike relationships with the unfamous—which often involved inconvenient emotions like longing or remorse—my relationships with stars were totally feeling-free. The rules of engagement were simple: I’d sit down with someone I’d never met and politely ask him or her invasive questions that would never come up in casual conversation—“What’s it like getting busted with a hooker in your car?” “Why do people think your husband is gay?”—while the stars tried to charm and disarm me, revealing as little about themselves as possible. It was both an intensely personal and completely counterfeit form of communication. It’s not how human beings are wired to interact. I loved it. To me, it was an entire romance, from seduction to betrayal, compressed into a single deadline.

And now I was in a hotel room in Southeast Asia, trying to get some sleep before meeting with yet another international superstar. Only some joker kept rapping on my door, then vanishing into thin air. I sat in bed and thumbed through some magazines. When I got bored with that, I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. There
were only two channels to watch in Cambodia, even at the Grand Hotel. One was broadcasting the
Asia Business Report
from Hong Kong. The other was airing a rerun of
Ally McBeal
. I killed a half hour watching Calista Flockhart dubbed in Taiwanese. When it was clear the knocker was not going to return, I switched off the light and curled back into a sleeping position.

A few minutes later, the knocking started again.

The Temple of Angkor Wat, where
Time Tank
was filming, is one of the most mystical places on Earth. It’s an immense pile of ornately sculpted sandstone edifices that have been baking and crumbling in the scorching Cambodian heat for eight centuries. Its smooth stone floors are worn and cracked, and entire sections of the monument are missing, snatched away by Western tomb raiders a century ago. But its five gigantic pinecone-like spires remain untouched by time. They tower over the jungle skyline like an ancient, unsolved mystery—beehive hairdos of the gods.

When I arrived on the set the following morning, it looked as if a real army had invaded. Truckloads of video equipment had been unloaded, huge camera cranes had been erected, and trailers and tents had popped up all around the shrine. The scene they were shooting involved DeeDee’s character being chased through the temple by outraged Khmer warriors, who had finally discovered that their new goddess was a mere mortal after all. To escape, she would have to jump from a twenty-foot wall into the
jungle below (landing on an air mattress just out of camera range). On the screen, the leap would make up maybe three or four seconds of footage. But it would take all day to film.

There are rules when a journalist visits a movie set. You don’t just waltz past the cameraman and start chatting with the stars. There are protocols to follow, pecking orders to observe. For starters, there’s always a chaper-one, or “unit publicist,” to escort the press around the set. On
Time Tank
, that was Katherine Fust, a slightly discombobulated English woman who was having a tough time adjusting to the sweltering Cambodian climate. “I should have stayed in London,” she complained, wilting in her Marks & Spencer safari outfit. “I could have been working on a Brendan Fraser movie!” Another rule: the star always sets the time and place for the interview. And the bigger the star, the longer the wait. In Cambodia, for instance, I figured it would be at least a couple of days before I’d get to sit down with Double-D. Meantime, I’d hang around the set, talk with the director and the lesser actors, and observe the actress at a discreet distance, until she summoned me to the interview. At least that’s how it usually worked.

I had been on the set for only a couple of hours, just long enough to find a shady spot inside the temple where I could sit on the cool stone floor and close my jet-lagged eyes, when Katherine came rushing up to me. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” she said, sweaty and out of breath. “DeeDee wants to meet you. She wants to get a look at you before your interview. Which, by the way, she wants to do tomorrow.” Katherine pointed to a lone canvas
tent pitched about fifty yards from the temple, near the edge of the jungle. “She’s in there,” she said. “She’s waiting for you. Now.”

She was wearing a skin-tight tank commander uniform—in the world of
Time Tank
, the U.S. Army issued camouflage hot pants—with pneumatic enhancements that kept her magnificent chest cantilevered in front of her torso like the guns of Navarone. Strapped to a holster around her slender waist was a pair of pistols that looked like they could take down a rhino. But the costume was the least dazzling thing about her. Those eyes! Those lips! Those … eyes again! She was so gorgeous, so stunning to behold, I almost didn’t hear what she was telling me. “There’s a scorpion in here, is that going to bother you?” DeeDee was saying, as if apologizing for not tidying up before guests arrived. “He was over there,” she said, nodding toward some sound equipment in the corner of the tent. “He must have moved. But he’ll turn up eventually.”