Leading Man (2 page)

In magazine profiles, DeeDee was frequently described as “an old soul,” which is Hollywood-speak for someone who’s packed a lot of fast living into a very few years. Like a lot of kids born into the business—her dad was Leon Devry, the 1970s B-movie producer who gave David Lynch and Tim Burton their first crew jobs, and her mom was Yvette Vickers, the Playboy centerfold–turned–horror movie actress—she had a bumpy upbringing. Alcoholism, cocaine abuse, Vicodin addiction. And that was just middle school. As talented and committed an actress as she was—her portrayal of Tricia Nixon in the HBO drama
First Daughter
won her a much-deserved Golden Globe—she couldn’t seem to step out of her own way. Married and divorced twice—both times to the same rock musician—she hit bottom at twenty-six, with a public mischief arrest when police found her at five in the morning wading naked in the fountain in front of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, she was finally clean and sober, and making a comeback with a movie about a time-traveling M1A1 Abrams battle tank.

As I had my getting-to-know-you meeting with the actress inside the scorpion-infested tent, I kept flinching, imagining the tickle of arachnid feet on my skin. I wondered if DeeDee was testing me with this scorpion mind game, or if she really could be that blasé about deadly arthropods. I decided it was probably the latter. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of “Hot” and “Crazy,” Devry would occupy the intersecting space smack in the middle. “You know,” she said, staring at my face, “you look a little like Paul Newman. Has anybody ever told you that?” Sadly, no, nobody had. Probably because I looked nothing like Paul Newman. With my shock of reddish brown hair and cornflower blue eyes, I was more like Alfred E. Neuman. But this was an old trick movie stars played on journalists. It was intended to flatter and ingratiate, the way politicians sometimes repeat a person’s name after being introduced. Kirsten Dunst once told me I looked like Paul Bettany. Ashley Judd, weirdly, said I reminded her of her cat. But DeeDee took the game a step further. She leaned forward, pinched my chin between her thumb and forefinger, and moved my head around as if examining a farm animal. “Your eyes,” she finally decided, “are definitely
Newman’s. But you have Leo DiCaprio’s chin.” Then she flashed her famous DeeDee Devry grin.

The meeting lasted only a few minutes, until a production assistant peeked into the tent to announce that they were finally ready to start shooting the jump. For the next couple of hours, I watched the actress perform acrobatics in hundred-degree jungle heat. She dove off the temple wall (with body cables supporting her) over and over again, executing a perfect rolling landing every time. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. And I wasn’t the only one. Off in the distance, a line of orange figures stood atop another of the temple walls. Even the monks had come out to watch the blond goddess in action.

That night, the knocking started earlier, at about midnight. Again, there was nobody at the door. I threw on some clothes and headed to the hotel lobby.

“A knocking sound, you say?” asked the attendant at the front desk. He was a Cambodian man in his sixties with a French accent, and silver, slicked-back hair. A little gold nameplate on his jacket said “Nhean.”

“Yeah, like somebody’s at the door, but then nobody is,” I explained.

“A knocking but with nobody there,” Nhean repeated, as if he was having trouble understanding.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to change rooms, please.”

Nhean consulted his computer for a few moments, then frowned. “I’m so sorry, monsieur,” he said. “We are completely filled. With all the movie people from Hollywood, we have no rooms left.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, has anybody else complained about knocking?” I asked. I was thinking that a mad late-night knocker might be running amok in the hotel, and that I was just one of his victims.

“Not that I am aware of,” Nhean said. Then, after a pause, “Would you like me to accompany you to your room so that I can hear this knocking for myself?”

I shook my head no, yawned, and turned around to head back to my room. That’s when I heard the jazzy tinkle of piano keys coming from the hotel lounge—the Elephant Bar, it was called, presumably because of all the polished tusks adorning the walls—and decided to pop in for a nightcap. Even at midnight, the place was hopping, with a dozen members of the
Time Tank
crew drinking and laughing as they lazed in oversize wicker armchairs and sofas. I spotted Katherine Fust drinking by herself in a corner of the bar. As a rule, I don’t fraternize with unit publicists—they’re usually too worried about saying something that could end up in print to be any fun as drinking buddies—but that didn’t turn out to be a problem with Katherine.

“I hate my job,” she said the minute I sat in the wicker chair next to her. “I hate my life.” I took a long sip of my Airavata cocktail (a specialty of the Elephant Bar, made with rum, coconut juice, pineapple, and lots more rum) but I knew I’d need several more to catch up to Katherine. The publicist was smashed. “I’m sick of movie sets,” she went on, not caring, or even much noticing, that she was talking to a journalist. “I’m sick of movie stars! Do you know what I had to do today? I had to find chocolate-covered Peeps in Cambodia. You know, those marshmallow
candy things? One of the producers read somewhere that our leading lady is a freak for them. The fat fuck producer comes up to me and tells me that it’s absolutely essential—those were his words,
absolutely essential
—that we have chocolate-covered Peeps in DeeDee’s trailer by tomorrow. But guess what? There are no fucking Peeps in fucking Cambodia! As far as I can tell, there’s no marshmallow-type candy of any kind in this whole fucking country. I had to call Los Angeles and have them put a box on a plane to Siem Reap. It’s going to cost the production three thousand dollars. And you know what? I bet DeeDee doesn’t even like them. I bet she’s never even eaten one. But I’m going to get fired over fucking Peeps.”

“I hate Peeps” was the most sympathetic thing I could think to say when Katherine finished talking. I had mostly stopped listening, anyway, and was concentrating instead on a pretty brunette at the bar, noticing how one strap of her camisole top was slipping down her slender shoulder. It’s not that I didn’t feel for Katherine. I knew she had one of those jobs that sounded great on paper—travel to exotic places with movie stars!—but in reality led to a slow corrosion of the soul. I had one of those jobs, too. But I was still jet-lagged and groggy, thanks to the knocking that was keeping me awake, and I didn’t have the energy to cheer up a drunken publicist I barely knew. I was about to make up an excuse to get up from my chair when Katherine let out an enormous hiccup. “Fuck,” the publicist said. Then she slumped down in her chair and passed out cold.

I thought about striking up a conversation with the brunette I’d been eyeing but a curly-haired guy in his
twenties sat down next to her and they promptly began making out. I decided to return to my room. As soon as I got back I crawled into bed and was just about to switch off the light when a revelation hit me: the knocking occurred only in the dark. Whoever or whatever it was that had been banging on my door—a ghost, a prankster, a drunken hotel guest—it never happened when the lights were on. I tested my theory by switching off the bedside lamp. Sure enough, within minutes, the rapping resumed. When I turned the light back on, it stopped. I began to formulate a plan.

I put the bathrobe on again and headed back to the lobby. I borrowed a flashlight from Nhean—he didn’t seem surprised to see me—and returned to my room. I turned off the light and waited in the dark. When the rapping started, I turned on the flashlight. Just as I’d hoped, it wasn’t bright enough to chase away whatever was making the noise. I listened for a while, noticing how the rapping got louder and louder. I tried to follow the sound to its source. It was definitely coming from near the door, but, weirdly, from my side of it. And from above. I slowly raised the beam of light up the wall to the ceiling, until I saw … a small spotted lizard poking out from behind a light fixture. I stared at it for a few seconds. It stared back at me. Then it opened its mouth. Out came three sharp gecko barks that sounded exactly like someone knocking on a door.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

“Knock, knock, knock,” the gecko repeated.

I rushed back to the hotel lobby one more time, excited to tell Nhean about my discovery. Also, I needed someone
to come to my room to remove the lizard. “It is considered good luck!” Nhean explained after he heard the story. “It is a good sign to find one in your room!”

“Good luck?” I asked.

“Also, they eat the mosquitoes,” Nhean said.

“What about the luck?” I asked.

“We call them Chhin Chhos,” Nhean explained. “If you listen to what it is saying, you will have good luck. It is trying to tell you something, monsieur. But you must listen.”

“Oh really,” I said, a little sarcastically. I was starting to suspect that Nhean was pulling my leg. “And what would a lizard be telling me by making knocking noises at one a.m.?” It was a rhetorical question, but Nhean answered it anyway.

“I don’t know, monsieur. Maybe it is saying, ‘Wake up!’ ”

The next morning, DeeDee was shooting a scene in which she’d row a small canoe around a moat protecting the temple. In point of fact, there actually were ancient trenches surrounding the shrine, but most had been bone-dry for centuries. Thanks to Hollywood magic—a fleet of water-pumping trucks—it took only a couple of days to get them filled up again.

Amazingly, it was even hotter on day two of my set visit, and Katherine the publicist looked even more miserable. “I could be in Prague right now,” she complained, fanning herself with her safari hat. “I could be working on a Johnny Depp movie!” Remarkably, she didn’t seem
to have any memory of our conversation in the Elephant Bar the night before.

To help people deal with the heat, production assistants handed out bandannas that had been soaking in tubs of ice water, which the film crew tied around their foreheads like little air-conditioning units. It made the set resemble a Bruce Springsteen look-alike convention, but I joined in and put one on, too. Even DeeDee seemed to be melting in the heat. When she climbed out of the canoe after she finished filming her rowing scene, I spotted a few dewy drops of perspiration rolling down her neck toward her cleavage. The actress whispered some words to her director, then, surprisingly, headed straight for me. More celebrity interview convention: stars don’t directly approach reporters on a set. If they want to talk to one, they send a publicist or some other underling to beckon him. But this star took matters into her own hands. “I’m almost ready for our interview,” she said as she wrapped a chilled bandanna around her brow. “Why don’t you meet me in my trailer in about twenty minutes? It’s air-conditioned. It’ll be more comfortable.”

The air was cooler in the trailer, that much was true, but it was hardly more comfortable. On the contrary, I’d never perspired so much in my life. When I arrived at DeeDee’s Star Waggon twenty minutes later, as requested, the actress opened the door wearing nothing but a sheer, soaking-wet bedsheet. “Just stepped out of the shower,” she explained. “Hope you don’t mind.” She sat down on a sofa inside the trailer and crossed her legs, the soaked sheet falling open to reveal a stretch of upper thigh. Then
she smiled and offered to answer any question I cared to ask, once I regained the power of speech.

There were three possibilities for what was going on here. One, the star was trying to seduce me. I thought this highly unlikely. After all, I was a lowly reporter, one or two notches above grip in the social hierarchy of a movie set. Two, the actress was cynically attempting to manipulate a member of the press by using her body as a distraction and diversion. I thought this a distinct possibility. Or three, DeeDee was simply a free spirit who didn’t care that the air-conditioning in her trailer was making her nipples stand out under the translucent bedsheet like No. 2 pencil erasers. That was plausible, too.

I did the best interview I could under the circumstances. But it took all my concentration just to maintain eye contact, let alone remember my questions. I asked the star about her latest tattoo (“My body is my home—I like to decorate it,” she answered). I asked about her second split from her first husband (“It’s true what they say,” she said, “divorce is more wonderful the second time around”). At one point, I noticed a shark tooth pendant on a thin gold chain around her neck, so I asked about that. “This,” she said, “is my good luck charm. I never take it off. I feel
nude
without it.” She thrust out her chest to offer a closer look, all but smothering my face in her décolletage. “Don’t you think it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” she purred. I tried to answer, but all that came out of my mouth was a plaintive squeak.

Later in the interview, though, after my breathing returned to normal, something even more surprising happened.
I found myself fixated on parts of DeeDee’s body that weren’t erogenous zones. Oddly, I found myself staring at her arms. They were, I couldn’t help but notice, veiny. You sometimes see it with weight lifters and bodybuilders—low body fat and excessive working out make the veins expand to pump more oxygen to the extremities. DeeDee had obviously been overexercising. She had blood vessels as thick as Twizzlers bulging from her elbows to her wrists. Smaller capillaries made unsightly blue spiderwebs on her biceps. Frankly, it was a real turnoff. Also, what was up with that birthmark on her hip that I could almost see peeking through the wet bedsheet? Or was that another tattoo? Either way, I found it strangely repulsive. How come I hadn’t noticed any of these things before? Okay, I knew how come, but now that I had noticed I couldn’t stop looking.

Yes, that’s right, I was alone in a trailer with a beautiful, nearly naked movie star. I was being shown skin not meant for mortal eyes. I was living the fantasy of a million male moviegoers. And what did I focus on? The same thing I always focused on whenever I found myself attracted to a woman—her flaws. Her big, veiny, deal-breaking flaws. “What the hell is wrong with me?” I wondered as I stepped out of DeeDee’s trailer an hour later, gasping for air and soaked in sweat.