ONE


The Starfucker



Still in bed, I realized it was my fifty-third birthday. My next thought was about the adventure I was going to have in a month. As a kind of birthday present to myself I had decided, as suggested by my friend Perry Moore, to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. The Camino is a spiritual pilgrimage of over five hundred miles across northern Spain that pilgrims have walked for over two thousand years. Maybe that was why I was having so much trouble getting out of bed that birthday morning-not that I was another year older, but that my body had already begun to rebel at having to walk those five hundred miles of a trek my depleted spirit was demanding of it.

I cracked open an eye: another hotel room. Down the hill outside my window, Los Angeles, like me, lolled and continued to wake. I have awakened in many such overly conceptualized hotel rooms in Los Angeles since becoming known as a writer uninhibited by fame. I cracked open my other eye in that one six years ago and focused on it all. The low-slung sofa a sloe-eyed decorator, no doubt, deemed, "Divine!" before demanding an assistant buy it in bulk at the Pacific Design Center out there down that same hill outside my window so he, the sloe-eyed one, could then speed off to Melrose to make a tattoo appointment, his bicep finally big enough to have Emily Dickinson's entire two lines "'Hope' is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul" inked across it. Next to the sofa was a rather tatty red repro Saarinen chair. But the thing I recall the most from that immobile morning I turned fifty-three is my featherless solitude. They were-the sofa, the Saarinen, the solitude-the same somehow: each carefully chosen, precisely placed, all elements of an acquired aesthetic.

Many of my assignments over the years have taken me to LA to interview the phalanx of movie stars over whom I have mostly fawned. "The Impertinent Fawner" could have been printed on my business cards if I had ever thought myself in need of any. I had-I have-chosen a life free of business cards. That alone, I tell myself still, is accomplishment enough.

Or has it been? Is it?

Is it enough for a man to interview Madonna?

Is it man enough?

She was the first person about whom I wrote a cover story for Vanity Fair during my fourteen years there as a contributor after my stint as executive editor at Andy Warhol's Interview. This was, however, the once-upon-a-time Madonna, the one during Dick Tracy and Warren Beatty, before Malawi and Lourdes and alleged face-lifts, the one who has found a way, unlike me so far, to inhabit her fifties. Back when I first met her she had, through her first surge of real wealth, an aesthetic that could also be described as an acquired one. Her pride at her good taste outweighed her need for privacy at that point and she invited me to her home.

It was January 1990. Time Inc. and Warner Brothers were about to merge. The Leaning Tower of Pisa needed repair and was suddenly closed to visitors. A few days before, the Dow Jones reached a record 2,800 points. Jim Palmer and Joe Morgan were to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame that month and Panama's Manuel Noriega was to surrender to American forces. Moscow was getting its first McDonald's. The Simpsons was ready to premiere on the fledgling Fox Network. And I was sitting in the back of a black sedan being driven high into the hills overlooking all of Los Angeles, a kind of city-state replete with valet parking, huevos rancheros, and replication. I stared out my window. On one side, down below, was the gnarl of Sunset. On the other, looming even larger, was the Valley in a city that states: This is what a valley is.

The sedan pulled into Madonna's drive. I waited a bit before getting out, because I was early for the interview. It is a trait of mine-arriving early-ingrained in me by my grandfather, who made sure, back in my Mississippi childhood, that ours was the first car each Sunday morning in the parking lot of Trinity Methodist Church. He would then make all of us, my grandmother and brother and sister and me, wait until the second family drove up for the worship service before we could get out. Then on his cue-an exaggerated groan as he opened his door and unfolded his body-we all climbed from the car.

Madonna's house up in those hills that day was as far from Trinity Methodist's parking lot as I had ever traveled. With an exaggerated groan I unfolded my own body and, climbing from the car, climbed from the life that had brought me to such a place.

* * *

I rang Madonna's bell and readied myself for one of her assistants to answer it. Wrong. "Ready or not, here I come!" could, since her own childhood, have been her mantra, the mantra of a woman who has never hidden from but always sought herself. Why had it surprised me-she could not disguise her satisfied grin when I gasped a little at the sudden sight of her-when it was she who swung open the door to greet me?

She wore no makeup at all that day except for lipstick that had been applied to the now-reddest lips allowed in town. On her tiny, exquisitely toned legs she was wearing black fishnet stockings beneath black cutoff jeans. She had not buttoned the top three buttons on a studded black denim shirt. A black leather cap was cocked atop her head. Black pumps were on her feet. Even the straggly strands of dirty hair streaming from under that cap were surprisingly dark, for she had planned, slyly so, to end our time together that day in her kitchen as I watched her eat a big bag of barbecue potato chips and feign bemusement at the trashy tabloids she purposefully had waiting for her perusal, all the while getting her hair washed in the kitchen sink, then dyed yet again back to the blond color that was her showbiz shade.

The house, like her, was surprisingly small, startlingly white, all modern angles and hard edges. Everywhere there was an exquisite incongruity. Outside, a black Mercedes 560SL was parked next to a coral-colored '57 Thunderbird; inside, twentieth-century art hung above eighteenth-century furniture. Candles, embossed with Catholic saints, dotted the house's sophisticated rooms. On a kitchen counter, audiotapes of Joseph Campbell'sThe Power of Myth lay stacked beside tapes by Public Enemy.

Atop her work desk was a beautiful portrait of her mother, who died of cancer when Madonna was six. "My memories of her drift in and out," she admitted to me. "When I turned thirty, which was the age my mother was when she died, I just flipped because I kept thinking I'm now outliving my mother."

I didn't gasp this time, but I did noticeably blanch. My mother had died at the age of thirty-three from cancer when I was eight and I, having already outlived her by several months, was about to turn thirty-four in a matter of weeks. The fact that I had also by then outlived my father, who had just turned thirty-two when he was killed in a car crash before my mother's illness, didn't lessen the odd panic I had been experiencing. It only served as the panic's foundation. Fed it. It was a heady feeling. Addictive? Perhaps. I only knew I was ironically growing to depend on such panic to feel alive.

I told Madonna of this shared panic of ours when she asked if I was all right. I had planned to match her brashness that day but had not anticipated just how brash we would instantly be with each other. It threw me. Where do I take the conversation from here? I was thinking, but there was no need to worry. She remained firmly in control.

"I thought something horrible was going to happen to me when I turned thirty," she said, reaching down and straightening the frame that contained her mother's image. Had the woman in that picture known already that she had cancer? Had she sensed something awful was about to happen? I stared into the eyes of Madonna's mother, eyes that a long-ago camera lens had caught in an unguarded moment. I saw the anger that had embedded itself there, the sorrow, peering back at me from beneath my own reflection.

"I kept thinking, like, this is it, my time is up," said Madonna, cutting her eyes defiantly my way after they had caught mine there in the glass atop her mother's face. Madonna's defiance somehow gladdened me. It was, in essence, her allure. She continued to straighten her desk. "It was a tough year last year. I was going through so many things ... and my divorce...," she said, mentioning Sean Penn without mentioning his name.

An ornately gold-framed Langlois, originally painted for Versailles, was as large as the entire ceiling in the house's main room, and that is exactly where Madonna had hung it, Hermes's exposed loins dangling over our heads as we headed that way. Boxer Joe Louis, photographed by Irving Penn, pouted in a corner across from May Ray's nude of Kiki de Montparnasse. Above the fireplace was a 1932 Léger painting, Composition. Across from it was a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo.

Earlier, in the entrance foyer, I had walked by another Kahlo. I stopped following Madonna about the house long enough to walk back toward it all by myself. She now followed me. I asked her the painting's name. "My Birth," she told me, coming to stand close beside me and gaze also at the image. It depicted Kahlo's mother in bed with the sheets folded back over her head. All that could be seen of the mother were her opened bloody legs, the head of the adult Kahlo emerging from between them.

Madonna touched my arm.

"If somebody doesn't like this painting," she said, "then I know they can't be my friend."

* * *

I did like the painting-it haunts me still-but I did not become her friend. We became, as one does so often where I reside just outside the frame of fame, heightened acquaintances. It's the kind of public relationship that can so easily flow from the intimacy that a good interview engenders when it veers into a conversation performed as a private one. Madonna and I, veering, talked a lot that day about abandonment because of the deaths of our mothers from cancer when we were children. "I don't know if going to a shrink cures the loneliness caused by such abandonment," she'd confided, "but it sure helps you understand it."

Would I ever truly understand it? I wondered the morning of my fifty-third birthday as I continued to lie in bed, feeling as if I had even abandoned myself in a way I had yet fully to comprehend. Noon arrived. I had to be at lunch in a matter of an hour over at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills to interview Hugh Jackman for the cover of Parade. A siren outside my window was the day's first wail as I considered the arc of my career. Andy Warhol's Interview. Vanity Fair. Parade. Yep: fifty-three.

I thought back to an earlier birthday. It was the night of the Vanity Fair Oscar party at Morton's-March 27, 1995. Courtney Love was at my table, since she had also requested that I be her escort that night. We had already been spending a lot of time with each other leading up to a cover story for Vanity Fair that was scheduled to run in its upcoming May issue and were by then heightened acquaintances of our own.

A couple of months before the Vanity Fair party I had flown out to Seattle, where she lived on the shores of Lake Washington. It was to be our first meeting and she had kept me waiting for well over an hour down in the living room of the house she had shared with her late husband, Kurt Cobain. I became bored going over my interview notes by the fourth or fifth time and began to inspect what appeared to be a kind of Buddhist altar set up on a side table. I opened a tiny box positioned there. What exactly could it contain? I picked up a bit of its contents with my fingers and felt the coarseness of the crinkled thread-like stuff I was holding. As I more closely inspected it-even giving it a whiff-Love entered the living room behind me and I heard, for the first time, a voice. Low. Hoarse. Hers. "What are you doing with Kurt's pubic hair?" she asked.

I ended up conducting most of the interview with her that day as she lay naked in her tub and scrubbed her own pubic hair while I sat on the toilet with the seat down. I also spent many more hours with her on the road as she toured with her band Hole. I swigged vodka from the bottles she offered me both backstage in Salt Lake City and at New York's Roseland. And I accompanied her to New Orleans to look at real estate. She wanted to own a haunted house, as if the one back in Seattle weren't haunted enough.

Like Madonna all those years earlier, Love had graciously given me a tour of her home. She'd even unlocked a kind of inner sanctum where Cobain had committed suicide in the studio above the garage, which she'd had converted to a hothouse filled with row upon row of orchids. It was the last thing we did together at the end of a very long day there on the shores of Lake Washington. She walked me into it. Not the studio exactly. Not the hothouse. But the silence Cobain had left there. The light refracted from Lake Washington gilded it all with a silvery grayness. She too touched my arm. We talked about the orchids.

* * *

Love had asked me to pick her up at her room at the Chateau Marmont the night of the Oscar party. When I arrived she was not alone but had paired up with a kind of dollish doppelgänger, Amanda de Cadenet, who was then the wife of Duran Duran's bassist John Taylor. The women were wearing matching dime-store tiaras and were dressed in what appeared to be long, lacy satin slips, as if they had tried on their gowns but then decided to discard such a bourgeois concept as clothing.

"These are the cheapest wedding dresses we could find," Courtney had insisted when I asked if she and de Cadenet were indeed wearing undergarments to the party. "We are gorgeous lesbians in twenty-dollar dresses," she grandly stated, then stated it again later, less grandly, with more of a put-upon rock 'n' roll moll in the mix, when we got to the party and she was interviewed outside by a cadre of roped-off reporters.

The flashbulbs went into a frenzy at the rope line outside Morton's. The satin from the slips or wedding dresses or whatever it was she and de Cadenet were wearing shimmered in the shock that even those cameras seemed to be registering at such attire, the tacky gimcrackery of their tiaras exposed by the chum of paparazzi. Forget her faux-lesbian pal de Cadenet; this was the real chum for which Love was ravenous. All their posing-chins just so, those chintzy tiaras becoming precariously unpinned-churned the chum even more. Me? I happened to be the bald gay guy who remained completely still between them in the midst of it all, which is an apt description of a certain swath of that town, perennial, patient, that has always been there, dead center.

* * *

One of the Vanity Fair cover stories that had run before that imminent one on Love was one on Jessica Lange, who was nominated for Best Actress that night for her performance in Blue Sky. Madonna, Lange, and Love-they were the three blond muses I thought about the morning of my fifty-third birthday as I lay in bed unable to move. Unbeknownst to Lange-the truest of these muses-she had even been the person who inspired me to embark on the adventure I was about to attempt in a matter of weeks.

There have been times in my job as a chronicler of celebrity that I thought I owed it to an actor or actress to write more than an impertinent puff piece. In those incidences I have tried to mine the ore of stardom, if not art, and find its seam and, in so doing, perhaps discover the very essence of that person. Yet even mining metaphors seemed lacking when dealing with Lange. Her allure-her own gravity, if you will-went deeper than any ore, any seam in it. She had recently returned at that point to live much of the year back on her family farm in Minnesota and by rediscovering her roots she had also rediscovered the gravity one attains from the land itself, the ever-onward trudge atop it, its hold on us all as we walk. There was, she had insisted to me, a mystical grounding one encountered when one was alone with one's own undergrowth.

"That's all I do anywhere is walk. Walking for the sake of walking," she told me when surprising me with a phone call one morning after I thought our interviews had been completed. "But none of that silly walking," she warned. "That power walking."

She was piddling around in her kitchen with the phone to her ear, so I asked what she had taped to her refrigerator. The piddling stopped and she read aloud the two quotes I assumed she read silently to herself every time she reached for a carton of milk or some leftovers.

The first was from T. S. Eliot:

"'We shall not cease from exploration,'" she read, "'and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'"

She paused, seeming to gather herself before she could go on. "Then there's this," she said. "It's from Kierkegaard. 'Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But if sitting still-and the more one sits still-the closer one comes to feeling ill. If one just keeps on walking everything will be all right.'"

* * *

Lange was allowing herself some silly walking on the red carpet when I watched her arrival at Morton's after the Oscar ceremony. She clutched her Academy Award in one hand, then the other, its familiar heft-this was her second one after winning for Tootsie-something she could handle with a deftness that did not feel foreign to her. Falling leaves, appliquéd onto her sheer bodice, continued in an autumnal tumble down the rest of her gown. I had not noticed that leafy tumble on the TV screen when, in her acceptance speech, she thanked her children for their love and understanding, as well as those who had rescued the film. Blue Sky had been completed in 1991 but not released until 1994 because of the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion. She especially thanked Tony Richardson, the film's director, but seemed careful not to mention his death in 1991 soon after the film was completed. She had spoken of him in the past tense, but that could have been construed as a reference again to how long it had taken the film to be released. If one weren't an insider in Hollywood one would have never known that this most dashing of men had actually died. Richardson had been the husband of Vanessa Redgrave and the father of Natasha and Joely before he left Redgrave to be able to continue openly his love affair with Jeanne Moreau. He did not become open about his bisexual nature and his other, longer love affair with men until he contracted HIV. He died of AIDS.

Tom Hanks, who had won his Oscar the year before for not only dying of the disease but also humanizing it, had just won his second in a row a few hours earlier. The one he now held was for Forrest Gump and a scrum of admirers over there in the middle of Morton's was trying to make eye contact with him. Over by the bar, Anthony Hopkins was shouting a whisper into Nigel Hawthorne's cocked ear as if they were on some stage planning the murder of Caesar instead of standing in a din of after-dinner guests. Sharon Stone glided through the throng toward a twenty-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. Over against the wall Tony Curtis was checking me out yet again after telling me earlier that he'd once had a crush on Yul Brynner. "I think that's why you're making me feel so odd. You kinda look like him. I haven't slept with a man in decades, but the night is young," he'd flirted.

I had wanted to greet Lange at the door, but Pat Kingsley, her PR rep, was insisting she linger a bit longer on the red carpet. Kingsley was the toughest of a tough lot and had at one time or another represented Natalie Wood, Frank Sinatra, Al Pacino, Candice Bergen, Jodie Foster, Richard Gere, Sally Field, Will Smith, and Tom Cruise. I had a grudging respect for Pat and even liked her in spite of our adversarial roles in Hollywood. She was a liberal from the South like me, and though she had the gangly grace of a woman who once perhaps could have been a basketball star with the meanest of hook shots, she was a rabid baseball fan who liked to attend Dodgers games with another of her clients, Doris Day. I marveled at how Kingsley maneuvered Lange with the guileful patience of a major-league manager, a patience so guileful, in fact, that what she was feeling-what Pat seemed to be feeling at that very moment-was not patience at all but a perturbed restraint while taking the measure of the other team on the field.

I had already downed more than my requisite two vodkas and decided Lange and not my bladder would have to wait. When I returned from the bathroom, she had finally been allowed by Kingsley to enter the party and she and Hanks were having a private little laugh, which seemed to gather strength as it rippled through the room until the roar that surged around them-the preening of the privileged herd-had as its source the sound the two of them were making at that very moment when the party itself knew to crest. I huddled at the bar with a fewVanity Fair colleagues and reached for another vodka. "... very..." was all I heard Lynn Wyatt say to Betsy Bloomingdale as they passed by me before pausing long enough with George Hamilton to bask, along with him, in his handsomeness.

Was it Hamilton's overly debonair demeanor that began to depress me so in that instant? Or was it the smell of vomit on the well-upholstered Anna Nicole Smith who had just thrown up in the ladies' room yet sashayed right past me back into the party, one of her hips hitting me with such unacknowledged force I spilled a bit of my vodka? Whatever the reason, the frivolity of the night began to detach itself from me-fall away-just as that foliage on Lange's dress was falling away from some unseen tree that began to cast its shadow on the night. I looked at Lange across the room, who seemed to have been feeling the same way. Our eyes met and we smiled wanly at each other. She waved her Oscar-less hand at me and then her Oscar itself, trying to cheer us both up.

Michael J. Fox made his jaunty way through the crowd-nothing wan about him-and stood beside me there at the bar. I had interviewed Fox for a cover story at Interview during my Factory days. We remarked on the party and reminisced about my visit to his house years earlier. "But after that interview you left behind a piece of paper with some words on it. My dog Barnaby found it a few days later between the sofa cushions and I took it from him before he could chew it up. I've been wanting to tell you this for a long time," said Michael. "It was a litany for a word association game."

I downed the rest of my vodka.

"Yeah," Fox said, laughing. "Every word was sexual. 'Pussy.' 'Dick'. 'Cock.' 'Fuck.'..."

I moaned, hearing the litany itself lend even more noise to the party, muddying the laughter of a neighboring starlet. With each word Michael had fun flinging back at me I heard how I not only sexualized my own life but tried to do the same thing to others. Sam Shepard had found it so alarming during the conversation I had with him down in a horse stable in Charlottesville for his own Interview story that he would have bucked himself if he had not said something. "Everything is sexual to you," he had stated quietly with a stare so steely it had stopped our conversation for a moment. Where was Shepard? I wondered. Where was that steely stare of his I now so suddenly longed for in this crowd of anxious glances? His absence next to Jessica's side that night went unmentioned but not unnoticed.

* * *

After Michael J. Fox had cornered me with my own coarseness, I looked around for a lifeline. Even Courtney Love would have served the purpose if she and her doppelgänger hadn't dumped me after dinner to disappear into the party's swarm. Jessica Lange finally-even sweetly-headed toward me just in the nick of time. As she walked up to Michael and me, I gave her a big hug, more in relief than congratulations, and as I did I caught a glimpse of my wristwatch. "It's after midnight," I said in Lange's ear. "That means it's March twenty-eighth. My birthday. Shit. I totally forgot. Guess it's not about you anymore, Jessica. It's all about me now."

"Seriously?" she asked. "It's really your birthday? Okay. Here," she said, handing me her Oscar as if it were some last-minute gift she'd gotten for me. "Happy birthday. Hold this. It's getting much too heavy anyway."

She asked Michael and me if we wanted to be her dates to the Pulp Fiction party over at Chasen's, since a certain segment of the crowd had already begun to make a mass exodus over there from Morton's. She grabbed my wrist and looked at my watch herself. "Pat is commandeering the limo and I'm supposed to meet her out front in just a couple of minutes now. Come on, boys. Be my dates."

Michael and I shrugged and followed her out to the limo. We climbed in the back with her. Michael took a jump seat. I sat next to Jessica and put her Oscar between my legs. Pat Kingsley sat on the other side of her and looked over at me with an expression of confusion and disgust. How had she been so lax as to allow someone like me in the limo with her client? The limo swerved abruptly for some reason-it was hard to know why through all the tinted glass-and we all fell silent for the ride over to Chasen's, as if in a show of respect for its impending demise. The Pulp Fiction party we were headed toward was more than Chasen's last hurrah. It was its wake. The restaurant, by closing its doors forever in just a few days, was proving that a certain sort of Hollywood was not just dying out but finally dead.

Only the year before at Vanity Fair's first Oscar party Dominick Dunne had used Chasen's as a kind of parable to illustrate our place in its world. I had been standing at that same spot at the bar at Morton's feeling the same odd despondency and smiling wanly or glancing anxiously at anyone who'd smile or glance back when Nick, as he was known to his friends, noticed me hanging out all alone. He came over and gave me a nudge. "What's wrong, kid?" he had asked.

I shrugged and shook my head at it all. I tried to pretend I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. But the pretense was too much-not the party's but my own. "I was just thinking of something John Keats once wrote in a letter," I told Nick, sounding even more pretentious than I was feeling. Yet Keats has always been a comfort to me. "'Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous,' he wrote, 'who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?' This is kind of a commonplace crowd of the overly famous, but it still holds true, huh. They are each individually lost in a throng of themselves. I know I'm lost in it. I feel like I'm just visiting my own life."

Nick put his arm around me. "Fuck John Keats," he said. "You know Chasen's?" he asked me. "It was the Morton's of its day. Not sure how long it can hang on. So glamorous yet so homey when Hollywood itself was both those things. There's a great waiter who's still working over at Chasen's. He's hanging in there. His name is Tommy. Tommy Gallagher. He's a real character. Doesn't take guff from anybody. Much wiser than John Keats. Some of the stars used to come in just so Tommy could take their measure. See Nancy Reagan over there," Nick said, nodding toward the former First Lady who had attended the party that year. "She and I were talking earlier about Chasen's. She and President Reagan loved to dine there. They go way back with the place. She told me that when she was in the hospital having both her children Tommy sent over food from Chasen's so she wouldn't have to eat that hospital grub. She also told me that 'Ronnie' had even proposed to her there in his favorite booth and that Tommy had overheard their plans to be married at the Little Brown Church in the Valley with Bill Holden as their best man. Nobody else was invited but Bill and his wife-I forget her name. Nancy told me that Tommy never breathed a word to anyone. Never told a soul. Never tipped off the press. And the day of the wedding he came and stood across the street from the church in order to pay his respects. That's who we are-you and I, Kevin-we're Tommy the waiter from Chasen's standing silently across the street all alone. You just have to find a way to feel lucky about that. I've got to get back to Nancy now. She's looking over here. Sometimes we get to cross the street."

He touched my arm.

"Happiness is a choice, kid," he said. "Choose to be happy."

* * *

If happiness is a choice, is sadness one also? I only know on my way to Chasen's that night in the back of that limo I could have pretended it was the greatest birthday I'd ever had-filled with famous guests, a date who had just won the Oscar for Best Actress-but I realized it was far from it. I don't mean for that to be interpreted in any way against Jessica Lange. She only showed me kindness that night, generosity. But I didn't really know her, nor she me, and yet there we were-the night of her Oscar win, the wee hours of my birthday-in the back of a limo together. The moment itself wasn't exactly the saddest moment of my life-there's been too much competition for that-but it was the exact moment that I became aware of how sad I really was, so sad I could not breathe and cracked a window to get some air. I tried to find the absurdity in the situation later and, in my diary, labeled Kingsley "The Peeved Publicist" and Fox "the town's latest iteration of Jimmy Cagney, who sat rather irritably at that point himself on the jump seat." And yet as I remember it now, the absurdity subsides and all that is left is how rational the sadness was.

"Roll that window up," Pat ordered me as we pulled into Chasen's parking lot and the paparazzi pushed toward us. She reached across Jessica and took the Oscar from between my legs and handed it back to her. Then on Pat's cue-a groan as exaggerated as my grandfather's as she made sure to be the first to unfold her own body before confronting a room full of people as worshipful as any in a small Methodist church sanctuary back in Mississippi-we all climbed from the car.

Pat put on her best game face and ran interference, confronting the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi with a combination of fearlessness and feigned indifference. Soon after our entrance, she cleared a space in one of the booths. Was it the one where Ronnie had proposed to Nancy? It really didn't matter. That night it was Lange's as she settled into it and received those who fell into her line of vision.

I resumed my spot next to her and, sitting there, allowed the night to befall mine as well. Sculpted profiles, perfected, formed taut bas-reliefs of flesh against the room's dark knotted paneling. Courtney Love, who'd already made her way over there, loomed largest, her loudness, her dishabille beauty, causing a bit of the crowd to puddle like standing water about her. She gave me a withering stare, then winked at me before throwing her head back and laughing with too much abandon.

In another cluster, Quentin Tarantino, his back to me, more than spoke. He was spinning a yarn of some sort, his spray of spittle in evidence there in the deep glow of one of Chasen's chunky heavily shaded lamps. I watched some of it settle on the head of his own Oscar he'd won for Best Original Screenplay, beading it with little blisters of moisture as if it were beginning to perspire like everybody else in the overcrowded room. Martin Landau, who had won the award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the movingly creepy Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, kept letting people rub his spittle-less Oscar's head for luck.

Landau's own head was topped off with a toupee. With all the congratulatory jostling throughout the evening, it had become a bit untethered and listed to the left as he too now listened to Tarantino, whose sour joy at having only won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar permeated the room until the whole venue took on the surly swank of Pulp Fiction itself. Samuel L. Jackson, who was so brilliant in Pulp Fiction but had lost the Oscar to Landau, stared sourly, joyfully, at the man's left-listing toupee. John Travolta's hairpiece held tight. Sharon Stone shook an old man's hand. Love got bored with throwing back her head at the horror of herself and came pushing through the party toward Lange's booth. She knelt and paid homage. Lange was visibly tiring but still had enough in her to give that gimcrack tiara now there in front of her a couple of gentle taps, the last gesture of amusement she would allow herself that evening. I looked away from Love. I thought of the orchids.

* * *

I still thought of those past orchids as I sat staring at a present one, tastefully potted, there on my hotel room's desk, a lone labellum clinging to its own life. I noticed the message light blinking on my phone and wondered if someone had called to wish me a happy fifty-third birthday. I punched in the code and heard instead the voice of Hugh Jackman's publicist telling me that his photo shoot for the cover of Parade was running late out in Malibu so our lunch had to be pushed back by an hour. I shrugged at the message and focused on the job at hand. The extra hour gave me just enough time to shower and peruse my notes concerning Jackman's juggernaut of a career as well as his disciplined adherence to a twice-a-day meditative practice that such a career conversely engendered in him.

I'd been up late the night before, in fact, reading about his devotion to the School of Practical Philosophy, upon which his meditative practice is based. Having already memorized most of the information, I only gave my notes a perfunctory fifteen minutes. I then folded them and stuffed them into my back pocket before having the hotel doorman hail a cab from the queue of five or six at the ready for East Coasters like me. To be seen in a cab is anathema to a Los Angelian. It's almost as bad as lowering one's price or losing to the Celtics. When I've pulled up in one out there I've seen some people roll their eyes. Others grow quiet. All recoil.

Once I got to the Peninsula hotel, I had to wait still longer after Jackman's publicist called yet again to tell me that they were stuck in freeway traffic. I read my notes once more, then sat and watched the swirl of tourists in the lobby-a bevy of bejeweled Arab women arguing about something in a language that lifted and fell in a kind of ancient flyting ritual, a couple of towheaded children telling each other secrets, a bride-to-be from Brentwood, I surmised, sweeping in with some garishly dressed girlfriends for the shower they were throwing for her over in the Verandah Room.

Jackman suddenly came bursting through the front doors looking around for someone who had been described to him, no doubt, as bald and short with a tape recorder at the ready. He spotted me and I laughed at his harried state, thankful for it. I had worried I was the one who would be slightly rattled that day. My dark mood that morning had scared me, making me think I really might be as mad as a March hare. Hugh, who hated being late, appeared rather mad and hare-like himself as he hurried toward me. We were, around 3:00 P.M., the only ones left in the Peninsula's Belvedere restaurant.

I relaxed into the resulting privacy and was prepared for another coy give-and-take with a carefully coached celebrity. I was also prepared to ask him any question I felt compelled to ask. What I was not prepared for was the one question he felt compelled to ask me.

* * *

"I turned forty last year and it didn't bother me at all," Jackman said when I told him it was my birthday. "Life has only gotten better."

"Yeah, well, forty didn't bother me either," I said. "But turning fifty sure did. When I moved to New York back in 1975 there were old coots like me now-well, gentlemen of a certain vintage, the art world's Henry Geldzahler and the poet Howard Moss-who told me, 'You should have been here in the 1940s and 1950s, kid, when New York was New York.' I'm at that age now when I hear myself talking to young guys about how great New York was in the seventies when Times Square, like sex back then, was dirty. But it's our youth we miss, not any earlier version of the city. What we miss is that earlier version of ourselves when we ourselves could be dirty and innocent at the same time."

"Have you seen American Swing?" Jackman asked. "It's that documentary about the sex club Plato's Retreat during the seventies. I really want to see that."

"I never wanted to see the real place that much when it was around," I told him. "The one or two times I went there I couldn't get the smell of it out of my nostrils for a day or so. Somebody gave me my first hit of poppers there."

"Yeah, I read about something called the Mattress Room they had there," he said. "Sounded kind of ... ah ... redolent."

"I don't like public sex," I heard myself confessing to him. "But I'll do anything behind a locked door. If I don't like it then I don't do it again."

"That's brilliant," Jackman said, laughing as if I were joking. "My favorite play I studied in drama school wasThe Bacchae. It's about King Pentheus, who gets eaten alive by all the women in a kind of orgy," he said, his eyes widening in anything but a steely stare, and I suddenly had an image of my three blond muses-Lange and Madonna and Love-devouring him in the role of the king. "I love that idea of animalistic chaos and following our desires," he continued. "I think the Wolverine character I've played a couple of times now kind of represents that. He's a man who battles between the animal and the human in him, between the chaos in him and the self-control he must have. We all deal with this to some extent every day. At what point do we let go and do what we want to do when we should submit to rules? This is a man who is terrified of the blind fury he gives in to. It's when he's at his most glorious and at his most devastating-and yet at his most destructive."

I certainly understood battling the animalistic side of myself, which usually ended, however, in a destructive bacchanal of sex and drugs instead of blind fury. And yet for the first time I realized in that very moment that is exactly the way my blind fury unfurls itself: sex and drugs.

I cleared my throat and asked a prepared question. "Isn't your adherence to the practice of the School of Practical Philosophy all about acknowledging the duality in our natures and yet finding the unifying element in us all? There is a sentence in Sanskrit...," I said.

"... Tat Tvam Asi...," he said.

"Thou art that," we said together.

* * *

Jackman and I finished our meal as well as our interview, touching on all the topics that Parade readers wanted to know about-not Greek kings being devoured by three blond muses, but his adopted children, his own parents and childhood in Australia, his love for his wife, his hosting of the Oscar telecast, his stage and movie career. The waiter, surprising me, brought out a piece of mocha-frosted cake with a lone lit candle stuck atop it. Jackman must have told him to do it when he excused himself earlier, saying he had to make a quick phone call. The waiter made an elaborate ritual out of it all and then Jackman serenaded me with "Happy Birthday."

"Do you know about the Camino in northern Spain?" I asked him as the waiter handed us two forks. "It's a spiritual path that people have walked for two thousand years. I'm doing it in a month. I'm walking from France. Over the Pyrenees. And, if I make it, all the way across Spain to Santiago, where Saint James is said to be buried in the cathedral there."

"And what do you hope to find once you start walking?" asked Jackman.

"I don't know. I'm hoping it finds me," I said. "I feel somehow I'm already walking the Camino, having decided to do it. Coincidences are becoming even more heightened. Everything is beginning to connect. I just finished Shirley MacLaine's book The Camino about her own walk along the path. She talks about her inner spiritual journey in it as much as the trek itself. There are even astral projections in it. Things like that. But all these heightened coincidences did begin to happen to me while I was reading her book."

"Yeah? I'm listening. This kind of stuff fascinates me," said Jackman.

"I was in Starbucks reading Shirley's book when the door opened and I looked over and saw the most beautiful boy I think I've ever seen," I told Jackman. "He kind of looked like an astral projection himself. He was backlit by the sun and his blond wavy hair seemed to be encircled by a halo. I guess he looked more like an angel than an astral projection, but angels like that don't look at me anymore now that I'm past fifty, so instead of cruising him I turned back to Shirley's book. A few minutes later, the angel tapped me on the shoulder and said he couldn't help but notice what I was reading and asked if I was going to walk the Camino. He told me that he had walked it the year before but had to stop before he made it all the way because one of his knees blew out when he reached Burgos. We talked for a while about his experiences walking it and he gave me his name and number and e-mail in case I wanted to talk some more. His last name was Amore. He was an angel named Love. Can you believe that?"

"Yes. I can," said Jackman. "I do."

We sat in silence for a moment. "Have you seen Geoffrey Rush on Broadway in Ionesco's Exit the King?" I then asked him.

"Yeah. I did. It was amazing," he said.

"Yeah. It was," I agreed. "Did the play speak to your own fear of death like it spoke to mine?"

"Of course," said Jackman, taking a final bite of cake. "Not at the time, particularly, because I was so engrossed in Geoffrey's performance and the virtuosity of it. But I woke up the next morning to meditate and the first thing that came to my mind was that brilliant ... well ... not a description so much as a showing, a sharing of that oblivion, the casting off of everything in that last monologue when the queen is talking and he, as the king, physically, silently, did what he did. That's what meditation is. It's that natural shedding of all this stuff. It was a completely different meditation for me the next morning after seeing Exit the King and I've been meditating for fifteen years. But it somehow changed my view, my perspective, what they call in Sanskrit yourbhavana, which means what you bring to something, what you feel about something. I realized anew what a gift meditation is. It's dying twice a day. I'd never thought of it that way. It is a practice of dying-what it's like to get rid of the ideas, the desires, the body even. There is a part of meditation that is a feeling of bodilessness."

Jackman turned and now looked right at me. There was no steeliness in his stare, no accusatory cast, as there had been years earlier in Sam Shepard's, just utter stillness that, in turn, stilled me with its stern regard. He touched my arm. "I want to ask you a question, Kevin," he said. "I hope you don't mind. But I feel I must, in all seriousness, ask you this. Have you fucked the angel?"

And with that, I had the sensation of leaving my own body by burrowing down to its deepest desire, the seam in its ore. Jackman had just summed up my whole dilemma. It was the journey-the trudge-I had been on my whole life. How do I fully combine the spiritual with the carnal? Was this why the Camino beckoned me so? "Not yet," was all that I could answer.



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