Leading Man (12 page)

“The weird thing is,” she said, “I never see the guy’s face. All I ever see is his camera lens sticking out from the car window. Just once, I’d like to look him in the eye.”

She was as lovely as ever. She had the same warm smile, the same soft laugh, the same irresistibly kissable lips. But I couldn’t help noticing something about her eyes—remoteness, perhaps, or loneliness—that hadn’t been there before. After all the stress and horror she’d endured over the last year and a half, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had shown up for our dinner with white hair and a facial tic. One minute Sammy was the carefree bride of a matinee idol, jetting from topless beaches in the Mediterranean to mountaintop ski resorts in the Alps. The next, she found herself trapped in a world of bedpans and bedsores, the stoical wife of the most famous terminal case on the planet. It couldn’t have been more tragically ironic if Rod Serling had written it.

“How’s Johnny doing?” I asked after the waiter finished filling our wineglasses with merlot.

“Great,” Sam said, taking a long sip. “In fact, the doctors say …” Her eyes met mine and she couldn’t finish the sentence. She sighed. “The truth is,” she said, “he’s terrible. He takes all these weird medicines from these strange doctors, and he does all these exercises, physical therapy that’s supposed to help stop the muscles from atrophying. But none of it works.” Sammy took another big sip. “To make things even worse, his family from Alaska has moved in. They said they wanted to help, but all they do is ask how much things are worth. It’s like they’re taking
inventory for when he dies. I’ve caught them going through our drawers and cabinets. They’re so …” Sammy stopped again and took a deep, Zen breath. “I’m sorry,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “Let’s start over. I’m being a drag. I don’t want to be a drag. I just want to have a good time tonight. Let’s just have fun, okay?”

And so we did. We drained the whole bottle of merlot, then ordered another, while I did everything short of sticking straws up my nose to make Sammy laugh. I regaled her with tales of my dating misadventures. I had her rolling on the floor with stories about my experiences in Hollywood. We reminisced over shared childhood memories, about our secret sleepovers during high school, and our over-the-top melodramatic separations during college. We had so much fun, we didn’t notice that hours had passed. When I looked up to pay the bill, I saw that we were the only ones left in the restaurant. Our waiter was standing at the bar, looking resentful. Sammy took out her little silver RAZR cell phone and started tapping at its keypad. “I’m sending a message to my driver,” she said. “I’m asking him if the photographer in the SUV is still there.” A few seconds later, she got the response. “Damn,” Sam said. “Still there.” She looked around the restaurant until her eyes stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand. “Let’s make a break for it.”

We got some startled glances from the busboys cleaning up the prep tables and mopping the floor, but as luck would have it there was a back door in the kitchen that led to an alleyway outside. “I don’t want to go home yet,” Sammy said, stepping over some garbage bags. We were
both a little tipsy, but I don’t think it was the wine that was making Samantha drunk. I think it was the freedom. “Your office is around here somewhere, isn’t it?” she asked. “Let’s go to your office. I want to see where you work!”

It had started to snow—flakes as big as cotton balls floated all around us as we wobbled up Broadway. It made the city look like one of Carla’s globes. I swiped my ID card at the entrance of the
KNOW
building and we stumbled into the empty lobby, making our way to the elevators. Like naughty children, we skulked through the magazine’s darkened halls, the judgmental eyes of politicians and celebrities gazing down at us from the blown-up covers framed along the walls. I fumbled with my keys, opened my office door, and switched on just the desk lamp to give the room a warm, cozy glow. My eyes followed Samantha around the room as she examined the pop culture treasures I’d picked up over the years. She yanked the string on my talking Ed Grimley doll (“I must say!”). She stroked my Tribble. She accidentally set off the ejector roof on the tiny James Bond car sitting on my bookshelf, sending the little plastic guy in the passenger seat flying under my desk. Sam and I bumped heads when we both bent down to retrieve him. When we stood up, our faces were so close I could feel her breath on my lips.

For a heartbeat, it seemed as if no time had passed since her dad had videotaped us as teenagers in our prom outfits, since we lived together in that tiny apartment in the West Village, since before Johnny Mars came into her life and ruined mine.

Just when I decided to lean in even closer, Sammy
spotted something on a shelf that made her jaw drop. She shot me an astonished look, then reached for the familiar-looking green ceramic turtle-shaped penny bank she made in fourth grade. I’d never been able to throw the thing away. She turned it over in her hands and ran a finger along the initials she had carved into the turtle’s foot as a little girl. Her eyes filled with tears.

“I can’t believe you’ve kept this thing,” she said.

“Well,” I responded, trying to make light of it, “it’s still got money in it.”

Samantha put the turtle back on the shelf and leaned into me for a long, warm hug. When she looked up, I could tell from her expression what was coming next. “I better get going,” she whispered softly. “I don’t want to, but I really should. I’ve probably stayed too long already.” She ran her fingers through my hair. Finally, she peeled herself from my arms and straightened her dress, and we walked back to the elevators. I pushed the button labeled “L,” for “Loser.”

I always get lost at Heathrow Airport. I follow the signs and remember to walk on the left side of the corridors, but inevitably I take a wrong turn and end up emerging out of a drainage pipe in Slough.

I had arrived at Heathrow in early 2005 to begin my most ambitious journalistic endeavor to date—or at least my biggest boondoggle. My plan was to circumnavigate the globe on the trade winds of publicity, stopping to interview film stars and visit movie sets in London, Paris, Rome, Prague, and finally, heading much farther east, Cambodia, where DeeDee Devry would throw herself at me in a wet bedsheet before I returned to New York by way of LA. When I proposed the three-week jaunt to my editor, Carla, she barely batted an eye. “Bring me back some snow globes,” she said.

More and more, my comfort zone was shifting from life on Earth to life in the clouds. Air travel was like putting the world on pause. So long as I was in transit, nothing could touch me. Not even Samantha. Especially not
Samantha. Of course, there were drawbacks. It was sometimes crushingly lonely. One year, I had Thanksgiving dinner alone at thirty thousand feet over Greenland. Another year I celebrated my birthday at a duty-free airport shop in Australia. Most people measure the milestones of their lives with events like marriages and births. My landmarks were the trips I took and the stars I interviewed. Rowing a kayak in Sydney Harbor with Russell Crowe. Clinking glasses of aquavit in Oslo with Tom Cruise. Those were my Kodak moments. I’d be collecting a bunch more of them on this journey around the world.

I finally found my way to the Heathrow Express to London. As the train whooshed along the tracks, I watched English shrubbery fly past my window. Then I opened one of my bags and retrieved a fat manila file filled with clippings on Gwen Swallow, the forty-year-old BAFTA-winning actress who, until recently, had been married to the renowned Shakespearean actor and director Rufus Armitage. The divorce had been nasty, with the brunt of the bad publicity falling on the husband, who, according to Fleet Street stories in my folder, had fled the marriage after Gwen adopted her ninth child, a six-month-old Tibetan girl Gwen renamed Prunella.
DEAD-BEAT DAD
! booed a headline in
The Sun
over a story that asked readers the question, “Why would a man abandon his wife and nine children?” There was a full-page spread of paparazzi shots showing Armitage loading the trunk of his Jaguar outside the couple’s Kensington town house.

When I got to my hotel in Knightsbridge. there was a message waiting for me at the front desk. Swallow’s publicist wanted to change the location of the interview
tomorrow. Instead of tea at the Dorchester, Gwen wanted to meet in Kensington Gardens, at a spot called Round Pond. A curious choice—most stars tend to avoid publicly exposed settings. But then Gwen had a way of keeping people at bay. She could seem incredibly approachable on stage and screen—her portrayal of a deaf chambermaid in Mike Leigh’s
Sad, Sadder, Saddest
made millions of moviegoers want to hug her—but in person she was as accessible as an iceberg. The regal posture, the posh Sloaney accent, the thin dismissive smile—they all worked like a force field to keep the world at a distance.

With the help of a tourist map, I found Round Pond and arrived for the interview fifteen minutes early. Gwen couldn’t have picked a more idyllic London backdrop for my story. While I waited, I soaked in the scenery. Schoolboys in blue blazers and striped ties strolled the fiercely manicured lawns. In the distance, a red double-decker bus puttered past the ornate park gates. At the edge of the pond, an old woman fed bread crumbs to the most enormous swans I’d ever seen. Seriously, they looked big enough to saddle. It was all so serenely civilized, so
veddy
English, I half expected Mary Poppins to come floating down from the chim-chim-i-neys. Instead, on the horizon, I spotted Gwen and her entourage marching in my direction. She had brought the entire brood, all nine children, along with a caravan of nannies and nurses and other assistants lugging strollers and diaper bags and picnic baskets. Gwen was wearing so many scarves and shawls, she looked like a Bedouin. Her small army of children was running and shouting in circles around her. Even the swans stopped to stare.

“So very nice to meet you,” she said as she presented me with her hand. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to kiss it, or maybe curtsey before it. I just gave it a shake. As we introduced ourselves, I felt a tug at my shoulder bag and looked down to see one of Gwen’s kids, a five-year-old Armenian adoptee, poking his nose into my satchel. Then he started digging out my notes and throwing them all over the lawn. A nanny attempted to distract him. “Now, Cedric, those don’t belong to you.” I spotted another nanny wrestling with a three-year-old Malawian boy who wanted to swim naked in the pond. “Now, Ridgewell, put your trousers on …” Gwen was oblivious to the mayhem. An assistant unfolded a cashmere Laura Ashley picnic blanket on the ground, and we sat down for our interview.

“I understand you are going to make another movie with Mike Leigh,” I began. “What’s it about?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” Gwen answered. “I’ll play a blind Croatian fishmonger whose husband is killed by a land mine.” A swan ran behind the actress, honking in terror, pursued by a six-year-old Mongolian girl named Felicity waving a bouquet of swan feathers in her fist. “It’s a heartbreaking story,” she went on, undistracted, “about man’s inhumanity to man …”

I knew the answer to
The Sun
’s rhetorical question. If I’d been married to this woman, I probably would have left her, too.

“Court-a-nee, she iz not ’ere. Ze show, eet aas been can-sealed.” This late-breaking news was delivered by a French doorman at the entrance of a Paris nightclub called Espace
Cadet, where nineteen-year-old pop sensation-turned-movie star Courtney Howell was scheduled to tape a French TV special in front of a crowd of adoring, gyrating Parisian partygoers. Afterward, she was scheduled to sit down for an interview with me. But Courtney hadn’t shown up. Outside the club, in the rain, clusters of dejected fans lingered under umbrellas, looking
très miserables
.

This sometimes happened with celebrities, especially young ones in the first dizzying flush of celebrity. When you’re not yet twenty years old, suddenly famous, and taking your first trip to an exotic city like Paris, remembering your press appointments isn’t exactly a high priority. Still, forgetting to show up for an expensively produced TV special, leaving hundreds of teenagers disappointed, along with a reporter from a major American magazine, that was pretty extreme. Court-a-nee’s pooblazeest, she had explaining to do.

“It was a combination of jet lag and exhaustion,” the New York flack apologized on the phone the following morning. “Courtney feels just terrible about it. Can we reschedule for later today? She’s supposed to be taping a French MTV segment on a boat on the Seine. Maybe you could do the interview then?”

A boat on the Seine sounded like a fine place to interview the Alabama-born pop tart who just a year earlier had taken the music world by storm with her hit video “Noxious,” in which she sang and danced in a toxic waste dump. Her recent appearance at the MTV video awards—where she trapezed over the audience onto the stage—had been a sensation, upstaging even Britney Spears, who that night had merely made out with Betty White. The
movie Courtney was about to begin shooting in France—her first feature film—was
Nap and Jo
, a poppy musical about the romance between Napoléon Bonaparte and his true love, Joséphine. The Seine seemed like a fitting venue for our chat. But when I turned up at the river, Courtney was nowhere in sight. I’d been blown off again.

“She feels just awful about it,” her publicist told me over the phone the next morning. “She had a terrible migraine and couldn’t get out of bed. But she really wants the interview to happen. Can you meet her this afternoon at the Eiffel Tower?”

Courtney didn’t show up at the Eiffel Tower. Or at the Louvre. Or the Arc de Triomphe. Or any of the other Parisian landmarks her publicist picked for our interview. Clearly, something was wrong. Perhaps the young starlet had a drug problem. Or was in the midst of a mental breakdown. Or else the sudden rush of fame had just been too much for her. Whatever was going on with Courtney Howell, alarm bells started ringing in the reporter part of my brain.