Chapter 4
The next morning, I wake up with a slight hangover and go downstairs to meet Jill from The New Yorker. I recognize her from when I met her just before seeing the movie, but don’t know whether to shake her hand or hug her. She comes in firmly with a handshake and says, “How’s your junket been?”
“I’ve had worse jobs,” I tell her. “In fact, all my jobs were worse jobs.”
“I find them rather dehumanizing,” she says. “Honestly, never been a fan of the celebrity profile, but my editor says I’m good at them, and as you say, I’ve had worse jobs. Shall we start with some breakfast?”
We get in a cab. She doesn’t have a recorder out, and she isn’t taking notes.
I ask her what she doesn’t like about celebrity profiles, and she says, “You’re trying to get people to buy movie tickets and I’m trying to get people to buy magazines, and those goals are sometimes in tension.
But mostly, and don’t take this the wrong way, but I think part of the reason I’m assigned these is because I don’t find celebrities particularly interesting. What did you do before this?”
“I waited tables at a restaurant in the East Village.”
“See, if I’d interviewed you then, before all the media training, we could’ve had a great conversation. What’d you learn from serving?”
“A lot. It was an Italian place. Mostly couples. The great thing about serving is that a lot of people don’t think of you as a person, so you get up close to other people’s lives.
People falling in love, breaking up, trying to figure out whether to put their kid in a new school.
You see it all, and it’s out in public, and they never notice you noticing. ”
“If you like not being thought of as a person, you’ll love being famous.” Jill laughs. I can tell that she is trying to make me comfortable so I’ll slip up, but I still like her.
At breakfast, she pulls out the recorder and asks me about the movie, about how I prepared for it.
She asks me about Juniper, how we were different in our processes.
She asks me if Juniper wears perfume, and I say no, and for a moment I can smell her.
Jill says that she writes a lot about perfume because writing about smell is the most interesting challenge she’s come across, and then she asks me how Juniper smells, and I say, “I can’t describe it.
Like when you’re inside on a rainy day, maybe. ”
“You say I love you a lot. That’s come up in several of the conversations I’ve had. Do you love Juniper?”
“Very much.”
“Do you care to comment on the rumors?”
“I do not.”
“See, the media training kills the conversation.” She takes a sip of coffee. “Did the studio tell you to appear to be in love with Juniper?”
Ellen has taught me to answer the question I want to answer, not the question I am asked. “Nobody has to tell me to love Juniper. She’s just so kind, thoughtful, and funny.”
“A few weeks ago, a fan got into Juniper’s car, and you threw him out. Do you remember that?”
“Vividly.”
“That man’s name was Allen Marksville.”
“Okay.”
“Allen Marksville is a fifty-two-year-old white male from Los Angeles. I interviewed him. When I asked him to name his favorite episode of the show Juniper was on, he couldn’t. Couldn’t describe a single plotline. Didn’t know the name of Juniper’s character.”
“Okay,” I say again. I am starting to sweat.
“That surprised me. It made me wonder if Allen Marksville was actually a fan of Juniper’s at all.”
“How did you even find the guy?”
“I’m a good reporter. Why would a fifty-two-year-old guy who isn’t a fan of Juniper’s pretend to be a fan of Juniper’s?”
I remember Ellen telling me it had to be a setup, that it was simply too good as press. “I don’t know. That’s above my pay grade.”
“I want to write about you, Kai. But I also want to write about the machine that is making you a star. And I’m curious if you knew that Allen Marksville was a plant, placed there to make you look heroic when you threw him out of that car.”
I wish Ellen could be here, but The New Yorker doesn’t let publicists tag along on interviews. “You’re saying I did it? I promise you I’m not nearly smart enough to do all that shit.”
“You’re plenty smart, but I’m not sure you’re experienced enough. But the studio has people, don’t they?”
“The studio wouldn’t do that. They’re not like that.”
She just smiles. “Fair enough. Why’d you decide to do Gods of Andromeda?”
I talk about Brian and the journey from love to power and so on, and how I was excited to work with Juniper again.
But I’m still thinking about the studio, and whether they are, in fact, like that.
Could be the studio. Could be Bob. Could be Juniper’s agents, or Matthew’s, or even Ellen.
Could be anyone. You can’t trust anybody in Hollywood.
Too many people want success too badly. And yet I’ve kind of lucked into it.
“Are you familiar with Max Weber?” Jill asks.
“Definitely not,” I respond.
“Weber maintained that there are two kinds of charisma—charisma of personality and charisma of office. Every Pope has charisma of office; only some also have charisma of personality. What is it like to have exceptional charisma of personality? Are you aware of it?”
“I mean,” I say. “I don’t think of myself—”
“So the world just sort of bends to your will and you don’t notice it?”
“Believe me, Jill. The world does not bend to my will. I don’t even know my will.”
“So you’re saying you could have what you want if you only knew what you wanted.”
I smile. “Maybe.”
_____
She asks if I want to go to MoMA, and so we do.
We look at the Warhols, of course, and she asks me how I feel about them and I don’t know what to say.
The truth is, Warhol leaves me a little cold.
My favorite work of his is the stuff at the end he did with Basquiat, the paintings that feel less flat and superficial, but I don’t say that.
I talk about visiting the Carnegie with Juniper and the curator, and I tell her everything I read about Warhol’s dying year—how he partied too much and his gallbladder hurt all the time and he felt like the world had passed him by.
I say it’s hard work to stay in the spotlight, but work that Warhol felt compelled to do.
She asks me if I like being in the spotlight, and I say that I like acting and I’m not good at anything else.
We wind our way into this room of Agnes Martin paintings from her series called With My Back to the World.
They are just bands of pale color, but even though the room is pretty busy with people, it’s utterly silent.
Something about the paintings demands quiet.
I stare at one of them for a long time. The painting looks the way taking a deep breath feels.
I think about when we visited the museum back in Pittsburgh, how the curator said that artists like Martin and Joan Mitchell are trying to paint what interior experience is, not just what it’s like.
When we leave the room, Jill tells me, “Martin didn’t read a newspaper or a magazine for the last fifty years of her life.”
“My kind of artist,” I answer.
_____
Later, we’re back at the hotel, having a drink in the lobby.
I’m drinking an espresso martini because I know I’m going to be up late tonight; Matthew’s hosting a party.
Jill is drinking a glass of rosé. Jill looks like she could be one of your friends’ moms, the kind of person it’s easy to look past.
“It’s quite obvious,” she tells me, “that the studio wants you and Juniper to be plausibly-but-deniably in love.”
I give her a vague look in response. Ellen told me they can’t quote your vague looks.
“You seem an unlikely couple, I have to say. One highly analytical person, nakedly ambitious in a way that makes some uncomfortable. And then you, a doe-eyed Hollywood newbie uninterested in the Internet and seemingly ambivalent about fame.”
“I love Juniper,” I say. “She is thoughtful, funny, and wise.”
And then I break for a moment and tell the truth. “I admire her. She is incredibly bright and ambitious, and she wants to make great art. I’m kind of over the artist who’s super cool, who’s effortlessly brilliant. That’s not real. What’s real is that artists like Juniper work incredibly hard.”
“Fair enough. Are you in love with Juniper?”
“Sometimes,” I say. I’m tired, and the espresso martini has loosened my tongue. I snap back into myself.
“Do you find it hard to distinguish between your emotions and the emotions that the movie studio would like you to feel?”
I just smile for a moment, and then go back to my talking points. “Juniper is genuinely and truly one of my closest friends. When something great or terrible happens, she’s the first person I want to call.”
“Can we go off the record?” she asks. Ellen has told me about this.
If you say something stupid and then try to say “That was off the record,” the reporter can still publish it, because you can’t retroactively take something off the record.
But if you ask to go off the record, and the reporter agrees, whatever happens next in a conversation can’t be written about.
But I’ve never heard of a reporter asking to go off the record.
“Sure,” I say.
“I just want to talk to you like a normal human being, and I feel your brain churning every time I ask you a question. It’s got to be exhausting for you, and I know it’s exhausting for me. So, off the record, what’s it like?”
“This? The junket?” She nods. “It’s like you’re a medieval soldier stabbing at me with a sword, and I’m deflecting the sword with my shield. As long as my shield holds, I’ll be okay. But it does take some concentration to keep the shield up.”
“But if the shield goes down, all you tell me is the truth.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“The truth belongs to me. That’s my life you’re talking about. My most personal, intimate feelings. My…whatever. My worst memories. My best memories.”
“Yes, but we’ve made a deal. You exchange pieces of yourself for celebrity. Celebrity keeps you working, keeps you paid. Keeps me paid, too.”
“Except once I’ve traded those little pieces of myself, I can’t get them back. They’re not mine anymore.”
“Right,” she says. “Okay, I get it. Back on the record?”
“Sure.”
_____
She never asks me about it, about the ever-present it.
We eat dinner, and she asks me about my childhood in Indiana, tells me she’ll be interviewing my brother and my parents.
She asks me if I liked high school. She asks me if I can remember the first time I knew I was good at acting.
I tell her the truth, that I’m still not sure I’m good at acting but I can remember the first time everything fell away and I felt fully absorbed into a character.
I was in high school, and we were doing You Can’t Take It with You.
It was the dress rehearsal, and I wasn’t thinking about my lines or my blocking; I wasn’t thinking about anything because I was too busy playing Paul.
Play. That’s what we call it. You’re playing a character; the thing you’re in is a play.
But if you’re really lucky, in moments it stops being play, stops being make-believe and becomes a kind of magic.
You aren’t Kai Laramie with his baggage and his worries.
You aren’t just playing; you are becoming.
That dress rehearsal was the first time I ever felt that I’d become someone, that for a flashing moment I was not playing Paul but was, in fact, Paul.
And if you’ve ever had that high, you’ll sacrifice a lot for the chance to have it again.
“That felt honest,” she says after I tell her.
I don’t answer. Not sure what to say. “I was never an actor,” she tells me, “but there’s something akin to that in writing.
The feeling of losing oneself, that it isn’t even you writing the words but you are instead a kind of aqueduct through which the words flow. ”
_____
Jill and I part ways, and Ellen is waiting for me in the lobby.
“Well?” she asks.
With Jill gone, I feel the anger well up in me. “Did you set up the sweaty guy in Juniper’s Uber?”
“No,” she says, but I’m watching her eyes, and I see both fear and guilt swirling in them.
“You put that guy in the Uber. He’s not even a fan. Jill interviewed him.”
“Fuuuuucccckkkk,” she says. “Fuck.” She takes a few steps away from me, then paces back toward me. “We need to get somewhere private.” I follow her to the second floor, to a little conference room festooned with posters of our movie. She closes the door behind us.
“I didn’t know,” she says. “Just for the record. They didn’t tell me until three days later.”
“They?”
“The studio. Todd, specifically. It’s always Todd. He plays dirty.”
I hear my voice rising. “And you didn’t tell me.”
“No, Kai, I didn’t tell you, because what good is it for you to hate Todd? You hate Todd, and you don’t do Andromeda, even though doing Andromeda is great for your career. I was trying to take care of you. I was trying to…Fuck.”
“He leaked my abuse too, didn’t he?” I’m almost screaming now. I can feel the heat behind my eyes. “And you knew about that, too.”
“No,” she says. “No no no. I never told Todd about that. I don’t trust him. No. God. I should’ve told you. I knew I should’ve told you. But I didn’t want you to hate the studio.”
“Because you don’t work for me. You work for the studio.”
“Yeah, not for much longer if Jill publishes the story. The studio will want someone to blame and I pitched the piece. What’d you say to her?”
“That it was above my pay grade.”
“Not a bad answer,” she says. “Fuck, the studio’s gonna look so bad.”
“Gonna look bad? The studio is bad.”
“Kai, it sucks, but they’re selling movie tickets. And it works, okay? It worked. You trended on Twitter. Probably got you Gavinth. Todd’s the reason you got Gavinth. Good for our movie, good for the next movie. And it’s not like Juniper got hurt.”
“I have to go to a party,” I say.