Leading Man (6 page)

“Oh, God, you’re with somebody,” Samantha said, quickly turning back toward the elevator. “I’m so sorry—I shouldn’t have come.” I grabbed her sleeve and insisted she stay. Even in distress, she looked terrific. There was no denying Sammy had acquired a polished new sheen since she started dating a movie star. She dressed better, or at least more expensively. Her nails were perfectly manicured, something she never bothered with when we were living together. And on this particular night, I couldn’t help notice, there was something almost incandescent about her skin. It was going to be tougher than usual to pretend I wasn’t still in love with her.

We sat out in the hallway and talked in whispers for an hour. Sam and Johnny had had a fight earlier in the
evening. It was about the usual dumb stuff couples argue over, as well as the unusual stuff that couples fight about only if one of them happens to be an internationally famous superstar. “We check into a hotel and the mayor of the city and dozens of other people are there to greet him,” Samantha explained. “And he just leaves me sitting in the car. It’s like he forgets I’m there. It’d be funny,” she went on, “but I have to admit it hurts.” Samantha had other complaints, as well—about how women were constantly throwing themselves at Mars, even when she was standing right next to him—but as upsetting as all this was to her, I kept thinking that it didn’t add up to her turning up at my door at two in the morning. I had the sense that there was something more going on with Sammy, something she wasn’t saying.

I did my best to appear understanding and sympathetic, but in my head wheels were spinning within wheels. When Samantha found herself in trouble—whatever sort of trouble it was—whom had she turned to? She turned to me! That must mean something. I started wondering if this was the point in the script when Sammy realized that she didn’t want to be with a movie star—she wanted to be with the boy next door. Finally, she was coming to her senses. She was understanding that what we had—a connection forged in the primordial ooze of our childhoods, a bond locking us together on a molecular level—was far more powerful than any fly-by-night romance with a Hollywood slickster. “So,” I said, after we talked for a while, “are you really in love with this guy? I mean, truly, deeply in love? Are you sure?” What I was actually asking, of course, was whether she loved me instead.

Before Samantha could answer, the door to my apartment flew open and Cecilia-Cybille-Cintra, fully dressed and obviously annoyed, stormed into the hallway. “Asshole,” she muttered under her breath as she stepped into the elevator. Sammy looked mortified, but after seeing that I didn’t care, couldn’t help cracking up. “I’m so sorry,” she said after the elevator doors slid closed. “I spoiled your evening. And she looked so pretty.” We talked a little while longer, then she said she had to go. She slipped into her coat and gave me a long hug. “Thanks for cheering me up,” she said, kissing me softly on my nose. “You’re a good friend.” A month later, I read in the tabloids that Samantha and Johnny were married.

They’d been wed in a private ceremony—“exclusive,” was the word the
Post
used—held at the star’s 150-acre vacation ranch in Wyoming. Above the story was the single wedding photograph the newlyweds had released to the press, a shot of the happy couple beaming for the camera, in tuxedo and white gown, atop one of Mars’s horses. I stared at the picture until my eyes bled.

I tried to fall in love again. Really, I did. I sure dated a lot. Although maybe “dates” isn’t quite the right word for what I went on. They were more like drive-by fondlings. Or random acts of groping. Few of these “romances” had a life span longer than, say, a Jenny McCarthy sitcom.

It’s not that I was such an amazing pickup artist. I was never the kind of smoothie who could reel a girl in from five barstools away with a slick line and a wink. On the contrary—I’d had the same girlfriend since I was twelve; I didn’t have a clue how to pick up chicks. But I had a cool job with a regular paycheck, was not hideously disfigured, and was straight. In New York during the Great Man Shortage of the 1990s, that made me a catch.

Still, no matter who I went out with, I would always panic. I would wake up in the middle of the night next to a woman I barely knew and suddenly the walls would begin closing in. I’d stagger to the window, gasping for air. It was like claustrophobia, or gamophobia, or coul-rophobia (or is that fear of clowns?). Whatever phobia I
was suffering from, it made me feel as if the girl in my bed, whoever she was, had been the worst decision I’d ever made. It made me feel as if I’d stepped into a bear trap, and that I would need to chew off a limb to get free. To make matters worse, I was terrible at breaking up, no matter how much practice I got. To do it properly takes spadework. You have to seed the ground with subtle hints of dissatisfaction—calling off dinners at the last minute, sulking for no good reason—so that it’s not too much of a shock when you drop the ax. There were times, I confess, when I took the easy way out and simply stopped answering my phone. “You’re an asshole,” one of my dates succinctly scrawled on a postcard she mailed from across town. She had a point.

In my defense, I did occasionally break the pattern. Every once in a while, I managed to keep a relationship going for whole weeks at a stretch. Sometimes even for a couple of months.

Darcy and I got into a fight on our very first date. We were at my apartment, in bed, and we started arguing about Cuba. I have no idea how the subject came up, but suddenly we were debating whether Castro had been good or bad for the Cuban people. I consider myself a card-carrying member of the liberal media conspiracy, but fiery, dark-eyed Darcy was an old-fashioned red-diaper baby from a famous family of wealthy American communists. Her great-grandfather had been one of the Hollywood Ten. Compared to her, I was a goose-stepping Nazi.

“Look at the literacy rate in Cuba!” she shouted, pulling the sheet up over her chest. “It’s ninety-eight percent!”

“Terrific!” I shouted back, covering my privates with a
pillow. “Too bad there’s nothing to read. There’s no free press!”

We kept this up for months. We would fight, break up over some stupid argument, and then get back together again for a couple of weeks. For me, the comforting knowledge that a split was always imminent was the key to making the arrangement work. For Darcy, it must have been maddening. After we broke up for the last time, I heard she joined the Peace Corps and moved to China. If I could have gotten that far away from myself, I would have.

After Darcy, I met a bubbly blond stage actress at a bar in SoHo. As we sipped dirty martinis, Mindy told me about her role in an off-Broadway play that required partial nudity. To demonstrate how comfortable she was with the part, she lifted up her shirt, right in the middle of the bar, and revealed her flawless breasts. We went out for about six weeks. I never used the word “girlfriend” and never permitted her to call me “boyfriend,” insisting on a rigid no-strings policy. It wasn’t that monogamy bothered me—I didn’t cheat on Mindy—it’s just that after Sammy, the only way I could sustain even a short-term relationship was by pretending I wasn’t in one. Mindy was a good enough actress to play the role for a while, but eventually she got bored and moved on to more interesting parts. She’s now married to a hugely successful hedge-fund manager.

Jen was a knockout fashion stylist who happened to be the girlfriend of a semifamous TV actor—Derek Meecham, the guy who played Joey’s dumber brother for a half season of
Friends
. I met her at a magazine photo shoot in TriBeCa and we instantly hit it off. Luckily for
me, she’d been feeling ignored by her semifamous boyfriend and was having doubts about their relationship. As far as I was concerned, the fact that she had a semifamous boyfriend only made her more attractive. Here was my chance to do to a celebrity what a celebrity had done to me. Even if he wasn’t really a celebrity. After about a month of secret dating, though, I discovered that I really liked Jen. She was sweet and vulnerable, but with a wicked sense of humor and a dead-sexy way of telling dirty jokes. Then, one night as we lay in bed, she made a deal-breaking mistake. She suggested she break it off with the semifamous boyfriend. “So we can be closer,” she explained, cuddling. “So we can be together, for real.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything. I was too busy studying Jen’s ankles. I hadn’t noticed it until just then, but they were starting to look thick.

One of the things making it especially hard for me to fall for another woman was the fact that Samantha seemed to be everywhere I turned. Within a few months of moving in with Johnny Mars, she was suddenly popping up all over TV. I’d be lounging at home in my boxer shorts, flipping channels, and—bang!—there she’d be in a laundry detergent commercial playing a pretty young mom in an apron. I’d try to watch
Melrose Place
and—boom!—there’d she be in the background, an extra at Shooters Bar. One night I spotted her on a slab in an episode of
Law & Order
. Even as a corpse, she made my heart go pitter-patter. I was glad her career was going so well, but this was getting ridiculous.

Samantha wasn’t turning up at my doorstep at two in the morning anymore. But after she got married she did develop a weird habit of calling me at odd hours, usually from distant lands in far-flung time zones. Once she woke me in the middle of the night with a call from Paris, where Mars was accepting an honorary degree from the Sorbonne.

“Jessica Rabbit or the Little Mermaid?” she began the conversation without bothering with a hello.

“What?”

“Jessica Rabbit or the Little Mermaid?”
she repeated more emphatically.

It took my brain a second or two to spin up out of sleep mode and recognize what Sammy was doing. She was playing the game where we’d take turns choosing which pop culture character we’d rather make out with. “Jessica Rabbit,” I answered. “No, wait, what are the biological implications of having a tail?” We used to play all the time back when we were kids. Ginger or Mary Ann? Wilma or Betty? For her, Mike Seaver or Alex P. Keaton? Brandon or Dylan? It had been a while and I was out of practice. “Um,” I said, returning the volley, “Ren or Stimpy?”

There was no reason for the call. Every once in a while, Samantha just needed a reminder that I was there, still floating in high orbit around her life. I didn’t mind. Even in the middle of the night—
especially
in the middle of the night—I found the sound of her voice soothing.

I saw Samantha in the flesh once in a while, too. Every six months or so we would get together for dinner or drinks in what became, for me, an excruciating exercise in superhuman restraint. I would have to pretend not to
sniff her hair when she squeezed past me into her chair at the restaurant. I’d have to try to ignore how soft and inviting her lips looked when I watched her nibble on a piece of lettuce. There was a strict choreography to these dinners. We’d begin by talking about Johnny. How great he was. The amusing comments and brilliant observations and amazing career moves he’d made recently. Then we’d chat about Sammy for a bit, and how great she was, until we moved on to how great I was. But for all the cheery bravado, I wasn’t sure Sammy was doing so terrific. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t.

Being a movie star’s wife had obvious advantages. Money. Status. Even a certain degree of spousal-reflected fame. Sammy didn’t get asked for her autograph, but her new last name definitely elevated her status. She always arrived at our dinners in a chauffeur-driven town car, sometimes even a full-blown limo, and we never had to wait to be seated. Even at the most crowded restaurants, even when we didn’t have reservations, right away we’d be escorted to the best table in the house. But there was a downside, too. So long as she was married to Johnny, Sammy would always be a supporting player in her own life. She’d always get second billing to her husband. No matter what else she did, no matter what she accomplished, it could never compete with being a superstar’s wife.

What’s more, Sammy had to share her husband with the entire world. That wasn’t always a whole lot of fun. Once, at one of our dinners, Sammy told me about a trip she had taken with Johnny to Tokyo. They were met at the airport by hundreds of hysterical fans (apparently, Jack Montana was big in Japan). The mob was so excited by
his arrival that the Tokyo police had to swarm in and rescue Mars, but not before a Japanese schoolgirl got close enough to rip a sleeve from Johnny’s shirt. The police quickly hustled him through a security door and gave him a motorcade escort to his hotel. It was an hour before anybody realized that Sammy was still at the airport with the luggage. Samantha laughed when she told the story, but it still sounded pretty humiliating.

Mercifully, Samantha never suggested bringing her husband to one of our dinners. I no longer had the slightest desire to meet Johnny Mars. I’d rather have spent an evening trapped in an elevator with Sissy Skye and her gynecologist-urologist. The closest I’d come to him so far was when I returned one of Sammy’s calls and made the mistake of dialing her home number. Johnny picked up. “Oh, so you’re Max, eh?” he rumbled into the phone. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” I tried to speak but the words caught in my throat. “Um, I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I finally stuttered back. After that, I made it a point never to call Sammy at home.

But I did come perilously close to an in-person encounter with Special Agent Jack Montana in the spring of 2008, about two years into their marriage. The near miss occurred at the Magistrate Theater on Forty-second Street, at the New York premiere of the Kenneth Branagh–Julia Ormond fourteenth-century romance
Canterbury’s Pilgrim
.

As a writer for
KNOW
, I got invited to lots of movie premieres. I loved attending them. The roving klieg lights.
The shouting paparazzi. The thrill of strolling down a red carpet. It gave me tingles. Best of all, though, if you brought a date to a movie opening you were all but guaranteed to get lucky later. At that time, I was trying to get lucky with Lacy, a super-cute Pilates instructor with delusions of modeling. It was only our second date, but from the way Lacy held my hand during the cab ride to the theater, I was feeling optimistic. Especially since she had told me during our first date that she was a big Kenneth Branagh fan. When we got to the entrance and she saw Branagh himself, in the flesh, glad-handing fans and signing autographs, Lacy let out a delighted squeal.