Leading Man (3 page)

I wasn’t born an intimacy-phobic, fame-obsessed a-hole. Nobody ever is. It requires a powerful transformative event to do that sort of damage to a man’s psyche. In this case, the story begins with a lifelong love affair with a superhero.

I adored Johnny Mars from the moment I laid eyes on him. Of all the eighties action stars of my youth, he was the one I idolized most. I would have given anything to be him, or just a little bit more like him. Sardonic and suave. Dashingly ruthless. A smooth maneuver around every danger, a clever comeback for every situation. Who could forget his classic line in
Give Me Death
, delivered in his trademark growl, just before his famous FBI agent character, Jack Montana, blows away the bad guy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (“Glory, glory, hallelujah, douchebag!”). Or that scene in
Live Free or Kill
, when Montana pushes an assassin out of the landing-gear hatch of Air Force One (“Have a nice flight, dickweed!”).
I couldn’t forget them, but then I was still a twelve-year-old boy long after I grew up.

And then Johnny Mars stole my girlfriend.

If this book were a movie, right about now everything would get all wavy as we dissolved to a flashback of New York City circa 1994. Dennis Franz is baring buttocks on
NYPD Blue
. Kurt Cobain is making flannel a fashion statement. Rudy Giuliani is cracking down on jaywalking during his first term as mayor. And I, a rookie reporter in my twenties, am heading for a newsstand near the subway entrance on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, just as I did every morning on the way to work. We are approaching the precise moment in time when my world shatters. The moment I learn that my girlfriend—my true love, the woman I planned to marry, the one who was supposedly spending the summer redefining the role of Anya in a production of
The Cherry Orchard
at the prestigious Concord Theater Festival up in Massachusetts—has left me for the movie star I worshipped throughout my childhood. And adulthood too.

My first clue came from the
New York Post
. As you can imagine, it was subtle.
MARS OVER THE MOON!
announced a headline on Page Six, above a picture of the hulking actor with his arm around a woman who looked amazingly like my own beloved Samantha. According to the article, the forty-two-year-old superstar had fallen for my twenty-four-year-old girlfriend during rehearsals for
The Cherry Orchard
. Mars was always trying to prove that he was a real actor, capable of playing parts that didn’t involve battling parasailing terrorists over the Grand Canyon, so he had muscled his way into the part of Lopakhin in
Concord’s production of the Chekhov classic. According to the
Post
, Samantha and Mars had been a “hot item” for several weeks, which would explain the recent lack of phone calls from Sammy. Still, I figured this must be a mistake. I bought a copy of the more reliable
Daily News
. There was an item in that paper too. Mars, it said, was “swooning” over his new “gal pal,” and was planning on moving her into his Upper West Side penthouse when the festival ended and the couple returned to New York the following week. Getting desperate, I purchased
The New York Times
. Even the Old Gray Lady was spreading the news. A profile of Mars in the Arts section included a reference to the fact that “Mr. Mars” had become “romantically involved” with one of the actresses at the festival, “a Ms. Samantha Kotter, originally from Westchester.”

Suddenly, it seemed like the asphalt on Sixth Avenue had turned to rubber. My legs went wobbly and my heart started pounding, and there was something wrong with my stomach, too. I felt like I’d been whacked in the gut with a large carnival mallet.

Samantha and I had been childhood sweethearts. We met in seventh grade when Sammy spotted me on the playground and introduced herself by whipping a snowball at my head. “Hey,” twelve-year-old Samantha said as she watched me brush the stinging ice from my eyes. “You’re standing on my snow.”

“Your snow?” I replied, confused, mostly by the fact that a girl was talking to me.

“I was going to build a snowman where you’re standing,
but you’ve ruined the snow. You got your footprints all over.”

“It’s not ruined,” I argued, stepping gingerly from the spot. “You can still make a snowman.”

“Well then,” Samantha said, “you’d better help.”

And so it began, our decades-long love affair. From then on, Samantha would have an above-the-title role in my life. She would become the first girl I took to the movies. The first to hold my hand. The first to let me kiss her. Every first there was to have, I had with her. Every second, third, and fourth, too.

By our early twenties, we were living together in an L-shaped studio on the fourth floor of a rent-controlled apartment building on a cobblestone street in the West Village. It had a refrigerator that gave an electric shock whenever you touched its handle, and the walls would shake whenever a truck rumbled past the window, but I loved the place. In the morning we could hear birds chirping outside. At night, we could hear the
cloppity-clop
of police horses on the cobblestones—and also the screeches of transsexual hookers from the nearby Meatpacking District. A freshly minted journalism degree in hand, I had landed my first magazine job. Each day I would jump on the subway uptown to Fiftieth Street, and all but jog a couple of blocks to the glass tower where
KNOW
’s headquarters were located, on the top floor overlooking Times Square. As a new staff writer, the junior-most scribe, I had a small windowless office next to the men’s room. But it was my own office all the same, with my own name—Maxwell Lerner—stenciled on the door. When I first stepped inside and sat down behind my desk (my
own desk!), I knew exactly how Melanie Griffith felt at the end of
Working Girl
.

Samantha, meanwhile, was busy auditioning for acting roles. At twenty-four, she was a walking David Hamilton photograph, a fresh-faced poster child for natural beauty, with big brown doe eyes and a mane of silky brunette hair that dangled just above her waistline. She was also a gifted actress and singer. Still, at first the only work she could find was in a children’s theater in Murray Hill. Every night she would arrive back home with her face smeared in clown paint. I would huddle with her over the bathroom sink and gently remove her makeup. Sometimes I’d make jokes about the rubber clown nose.

“Maybe you could leave this on tonight,” I teased, arching an eyebrow.

“Acting is so glamorous.” Samantha ignored me, staring dejectedly at her reflection in the mirror. “My next part will probably be a dancing cupcake.”

“You’d make an incredibly sexy cupcake,” I said, nuzzling her neck, getting clown paint all over my chin.

“You don’t get famous by playing cupcakes.” Samantha sighed, examining her teeth in the mirror.

Then it happened: Samantha got her big break in
The Cherry Orchard
. And she headed up to Concord for the summer, where she finally got famous, although not exactly for her acting. I couldn’t believe how ironic it all was. When I first learned that Samantha would be sharing the stage with Johnny Mars at the festival, I couldn’t have been more thrilled, and made several unsubtle hints about wanting to meet the guy whose action figures I’d obsessively collected as a kid. Sammy was not as impressed. “I
might as well be doing Shakespeare with Arnold Schwarzenegger,” she complained. “Or Molière with Sylvester Stallone.” By the end of the summer, Samantha had apparently had a change of heart. She was now Johnny Mars’s number one fan. And I hated his guts.

I got a dollar’s change from the newsstand guy on Sixth Avenue and looked around for a pay phone. There was no answer when I called Sammy in Concord—just her normal, faithful-sounding voice on the answering machine—so I hung up and continued on to work. I spent the morning sitting at my desk staring at the wall, absorbing the hit I’d taken. During my lunch break, while poking at my uneaten sandwich in a deli, I told my coworker and soon-to-be best friend, Robin, what had happened. A lot of clever wags worked at
KNOW
, but Robin, the receptionist, was the wittiest of them all. She was a pretty Italian girl with soulful green eyes and long dark hair—sort of like Mona Lisa’s younger, lesbian sister—but she had all the sensitivity of an insult comic. “Wow, that’s rough,” she said. “How can you compete with Johnny Mars? He’s rich. He’s famous. He’s beloved by millions. He’s so handsome even
I’d
consider sleeping with him.” She paused for a second. “Are you going to eat that pickle?”

Of course, Robin was right. I couldn’t compete with Johnny Mars—as his number one fan for years, I knew that better than anyone. But that’s not what hurt the most. What stung worse was the fact that I learned the details of my cuckolding from the newspapers. Losing a girlfriend to a celebrity wasn’t just humiliating—it was
publicly
humiliating. Everybody knew about it. That evening, when I returned home after work, even my landlady
made a point of stopping me at the stairwell to giddily show me the item on Page Six linking my former soul mate—her ex-tenant—with a movie star. People can’t help but be excited when somebody they’ve known in their everyday lives suddenly becomes famous, even if it’s just for dating someone famous. It’s the fairy tale, and you can’t help but root for fairy tales. To my landlady, hell, even to me, it made Samantha loom larger than life, lifted her into a VIP world full of stretch limos and film premieres and paparazzi flashbulbs. And I, the unfamous, heartbroken ex-boyfriend, had been left behind, my nose pressed up against the window just like everyone else’s.

Samantha must have known that I had learned about her and Mars. Paparazzi shots of the two of them had even made the local TV news that night. There were several messages from Sam on the answering machine when I entered my apartment. “Are you there, Max? I really need to talk to you.” I listened to Sammy’s voice on the tape as I stared at a pair of her crumpled pantyhose at the bottom of our closet. “I’ll be back in New York in a couple of days,” she said, “but I really need to talk to you now. I’m so sorry. Please call me back,
please
.”

I didn’t call her back. Instead, I unplugged the phone and turned off the answering machine. I had asked Robin not to tell anyone at the office, but the story was everywhere, and I was sure the other
KNOW
writers had already propped a cardboard Johnny Mars standup in my chair, and had plans for plenty more jokes designed to remind me that the woman I loved was now sleeping in a movie star’s bed.
KNOW
writers were clever that way. So for the next few days, I called in sick, stayed home, and
tried to cheer myself up. I destroyed old photographs with a Magic Marker, drawing villainous mustaches and devil horns on Samantha’s face. When that didn’t work, I tried throwing out her stuff, the acting books and bottles of moisturizer and whatever clothing she hadn’t taken with her to Concord. But some things I just couldn’t part with, let alone deface. There was a photograph of Samantha at sixteen, a big, sweet grin on her face as she stood in a snowy patch of woods wearing the too-large fisherman’s sweater I had given her for Christmas. I put the cap back on the Magic Marker when I came to that picture. And there was that green ceramic turtle Samantha had made in a fourth-grade pottery class that she kept on our kitchen table—I couldn’t bring myself to destroy that, either. It was just two pinch pots stuck together with a dollop of clay for a head and a slot for saving coins on top, but I really liked that turtle.

Samantha and I fell in love at such young, impressionable ages, it seemed to me as if we had molded each other out of clay. My values, my tastes, my fears, my dreams—Samantha was there, at ground zero, to help form them all. Sure, we had our spats. Samantha sometimes complained that I was self-centered and self-involved. She was right, of course. I was a guy in my twenties. “You don’t
listen
to me,” Samantha complained one night as I was reorganizing my CD collection. She’d come home upset about a bad audition—at least I think that’s what she was upset about—but I was too preoccupied trying to figure out where my new Deep Forest album belonged, in the World Music section or Ambient Dub, to pay much attention.
“Max, you’re always in your own universe,” Sammy complained. “Doesn’t it ever get lonely in there?”

My forgetfulness about birthdays and anniversaries became a running joke between us. But the longer it ran, the less funny it became. When I did remember, I put a lot of thought into the gifts I gave Sammy—just the wrong sort of thought. I never stopped to ask myself what she might want but instead got her presents I thought she should have. Or that I thought
I
should have. I’ll never forget the bewildered, disappointed look on her face when she tore open the wrapping on a Christmas gift to uncover the laser disc box set of the complete
Man from U.N.C.L.E
. TV series. What girl wouldn’t love thirty hours of a vintage spy show produced for twelve-year-old boys in the 1960s? “It’s
so
great,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “Really, you’ll thank me later.”

Even worse than buying her thoughtless presents, or forgetting her birthday altogether, or the time I decided to boycott Valentine’s Day (a sham holiday concocted by the greeting card industry) was the fact that it never crossed my mind for a second that any of this stuff mattered. I was so certain that Samantha would love me forever, that she was the girl I was destined to marry and grow old with, that I ended up taking her totally for granted. No wonder I didn’t notice the warning signs that were, during those final few months, flashing all over the place. When Samantha waved away my idea of taking the train up to Concord for a weekend visit, it didn’t occur to me to be suspicious (“Rehearsals are so boring,” she told me. “Besides, we wouldn’t have much time to spend together—we’re working
round the clock”). The fact that Samantha’s phone calls had dwindled from once a day when she first got to Concord to once a week, to none, didn’t register as a red flag with me, either. Even if I had noticed, the idea that I might lose her, that she might be falling for someone else, was utterly unthinkable. There was nothing on Earth I was more sure of.