Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Las Vegas, Nevada. February 23.

  The city is a coronation of brightnesses, like so much shattered glass thrown by the fistful over a sandy floor, a high-desert Hong Kong of possibility. “Sunday midnight is our busiest time of the week,” says the woman who checks us in to the Excalibur Hotel/Casino. “There’s no freaking explaining it.” We’ve driven to Las Vegas in a dopamine infusion of orange light, nerved on Coca-Cola, gorged on pizza, the Skylark smelling vaguely stale. The brain sloshing in the padded cranium of the trunk. On I-40 in Arizona, we passed a Navajo woman in a Ford pickup listening to the same radio station we were, pounding out a drumbeat on her steering wheel. Later, an embalmed moon, Hale-Bopp like a pale teardrop. When Einstein once visited the Hopi Indians near the Grand Canyon, they honored him with an Indian name, the Great Relative.

  And now, in the casino at midnight, we stand amid bally-hooing hordes of pale-skinned easterners and leather-skinned westerners, bikers and accountants, cowboy-hatted and big-haired and bald as cue balls, imperial on free drinks, soaring on the oxygen-enriched air pumping into the casino to keep people awake, everyone taking a stab at Instamatic riches. Harvey seems overwhelmed, his sensibilities so jangled that he schlepps straight up to one of our cheesy eighteenth-floor rooms—rooms that are tricked out like a cardboard-castle set for a high school production of Camelot. He refuses help with his luggage, has the brain slung over his shoulder in the duffel, tosses it in the closet.

  Wide awake, I go back downstairs and roam all night, remembering that Einstein put little faith in games of chance. About quantum mechanics, a theory that allowed for unpredictable outcomes, he once said that God does not play dice with the universe. Yet Las Vegas is all about dice. And all about a perverse kind of hope, too. One man at a five-dollar blackjack table, a short, tightly bundled guy who smells of lime aftershave, is abstractly addressing the male dealer in gambler clichés and porn-movie dialogue. “Oh yeah, baby!… Yeah, baby!… Give it to me!… Hit me!… Oh yeah!… Hold right there!… Feels good!”

  Soon he’s sitting alone. As are others like him. These are men so sunk down inside themselves that they don’t give a prostitute working the place a second look when she cozies up to them. Personally, I’m feeling pretty good, lose some quick money at the roulette table, and then, feeling a little less good, regroup in the Minstrel’s Lounge. Maybe I’ve been alone with Harvey too long, probably I need friends, but I find myself asking an older couple about Einstein. The man tooks at me suspiciously. “I don’t know anything about him, really, and I don’t care one way or the other. I’m just trying to have fun,” he says in a Yankee accent.

  “I don’t know anything either,” chimes his wife cheerfully. “Just that he was a genius or something.”

  After the hot-tub revelation, I no longer feel compelled to keep our secret. I am traveling with the man who owns Einstein’s brain, I say, and we are going to California to show it to Einstein’s granddaughter. The man folds his arms and looks at me straight on. “Whatever makes you happy,” he says.

  At an empty blackjack table, I ask a dealer, a Korean guy with a mustache, about Einstein. “I don’t know anything about him,” he says, “but that man over there should be able to help you.” He points to his manager, a white guy with a mustache. He barely lets me finish before responding. “Haven’t seen him in here tonight. Sorry, pal.”

  I try again, with the friendliest-looking man I can find. He’s middle-aged and round-bellied, like his group of friends, all wearing Bucky Badger sweatshirts. I smile at them, ask their pardon, phrase my question more carefully this time.

  Mr. Badger furrows his brow. “Why do you want to know?” he demands. “Has anyone ever told you about E = mc2? Has anyone in this casino bothered to tell you that?”

  I explain that in fact no one has, that I myself am traveling with Einstein’s brain. At the mention of the brain, he doesn’t miss a beat, becomes impatient. “Let’s bury the damn brain and be done with it,” he says, as if he’s been in on the debate since day one.

  I try one last time, a cocktail waitress with a tornado of blond hair. She stands in a short black-and-gold dress, looking like someone’s risqué aunt in age denial at a Jersey Shore wedding. When I ask her if she happens to know what Albert Einstein is famous for, her jaw drops. “You’re kidding?” she asks. “You must be kidding me. Is there a hidden camera around here? You’re the fifth guy to ask me that tonight, and frankly I’m offended.” Her voice is pinched with anger. “You know what? I do know who he is …” She and I have known each other less than twenty seconds, and yet it feels like our first married fight. “He invented the atom bomb, and I happen to think he’s terrible.”

  In the morning, Harvey and I go for breakfast. There are huge lines trailing out of the Roundtable Buffet and Sherwood Forest Cafe, and so we watch a juggler dressed in green tights work the crowd—“Oh boy, whatta juggler!” says Harvey. Later, we gather our bags and head through the casino for the castle door. As usual, Harvey refuses help with his luggage, has the brain slung over his shoulder. We pause at a bank of slot machines. A group of grandmothers give Harvey a quick once-over, then go back to their spinning lemons and limes and sevens. I pull a couple of coins from my pocket. “For good luck,” I tell him. Until now, Harvey hasn’t been keen on gambling, but for my sake he slides a quarter into the slot machine and reluctantly pulls the lever. In a way, however, Harvey has been a high-stakes gambler all along, having risked everything on one bet many, many years ago. And even though his slot windows display only unmatched fruit, he leaves the casino with his own jackpot safely stashed in the gray duffel, his step oddly light as he slips over the Excalibur’s rich purple carpet and out into the blinding sunlight and sand-papery air.

  Los Angeles, California. February 24.

  Down through the brown, low-slung, burned-out flats of the Mojave, passing the Soda and Cady mountains, along Ivanpah and Silver lakes, powdered white and dinosaur-bone dry, through the broken-winged, blue-shadowed towns of Baker and Yermo and Barstow, by the world’s largest thermometer (electronically measuring temperatures to 140 degrees), then up over Cajon Summit—all of it like a grim, parched-mouth, sun-bleached day-after-Las-Vegas hangover until suddenly Los Angeles explodes in lush green palm trees and red taillights at rush hour, the California sky tilting ultraviolet over the Pacific. Harvey reads from the map the whole way, literally reads to me like it’s the story of Job. We pass a gold-earringed woman driving a red BMW with a vanity plate that reads 2SUCCESS. It seems every car here gleams with its own declaration of erotic or financial prowess: 8MILL; ORGAZ; MONEY. On the radio, we get an action-news update about a disgruntled circus clown who’s stolen a car, busting for freedom on I-110. And, packed in, moving five abreast, having apparently passed our desirable exit some miles ago, we’re completely lost for the first time all trip.

  When we finally escape the highway, we’re somewhere in West Hollywood, though we’re looking for Santa Monica and the ocean. At a gas station, I approach a stocky, balding guy in short sleeves and a tie. He works for Kodak as a field engineer. He gives me directions and then asks where I’m from. Once he’s registered our vitals, the expression on his face looks like a billboard for the country of the dumbfounded. “No fuck, you got Einstein’s brain right over there?” he says. “No fucking way. Right in that trunk? The car with the little old man? Are you making a fucking movie of this? Holy fuck.” He pulls out a business card with a picture of himself on it, sporting a full head of half-synthetic hair. “That was in my Hair Club days,” he says, without hesitation. “You gotta put me in this fucking article. I’m the guy who gave you directions to the ocean. Einstein’s fucking brain! What the fuck next? Aliens, right?”

  About five blocks down, we realize that Hair Club has given us bum directions. We drift to the curb and ask help from the first person who appears on the other side of our rolled-down window: a cross-dresser in body-hugging black leather with thin, shaven legs that seem six feet high and a tiara of some
sort in her hair. She bends into the window seductively and gives precise directions, then says, “Hurry now, y’all don’t want to miss that romantic sunset over the Pacific.” After a half block, Harvey glances once over his shoulder. “Well, we sure asked the right person,” he says. We drive the brain down Sunset and Wilshire, Rodeo and Hollywood, and finally hole up in Santa Monica.

  We’ve come to L.A. so that Harvey can meet one of the doctors to whom he once sent slices of Einstein’s brain for research. Yet Harvey can’t seem to reach him—can’t even recall his name when I ask. Meanwhile, I’ve made plans to meet Roger Richman, the president of his own celebrity-licensing agency and the man who represents the beneficiaries of the estate of Albert Einstein, which itself is presided over by Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Richman polices trademark infringements, hawks trade shows for Einstein contraband, and decides just how the image of the physicist will be used in advertisements and on merchandise around the world. When I first called Richman from Kansas and told him that I was heading his way with Harvey and the brain, he was curt. “The brain is at the Smithsonian,” he said. “And I’d rather not have you bring that man along.”

  And although the brain has never been near the Smithsonian, and is authentically still in our trunk, I’m forced to make up some polite excuse when I leave Harvey—something about seeing a friend. I drop him at the beach, where he finds a senior center and spends the day writing postcards, making pals, playing cards. Then I guiltily head over to Richman’s Beverly Hills office.

  Richman, fifty-three, is a big, powerful man with big, powerful ideas and a full head of thickly parted, natural hair. He wears a green short-sleeve shirt. He greets me by saying, “You got the brain with you?” And then he starts laughing.

  He ushers me into his office, a spacious, cluttered room strewn with unlicensed celebrity products, and before we begin our interview he puts a tape recorder next to mine, turns it on, and, in this most self-referential of cities, announces that he is taping for the autobiography he intends to write someday. “I would like to say that I’m a marketing genius,” he announces.

  Richman proceeds to tell me the illustrious history of Richman. How, eighteen years ago, the son of Bela Lugosi sued Universal Studios for a percentage of profits made from the image of his father as Dracula. And although he lost the lawsuit, the judgment contained one paragraph stating that whereas the studio owned the rights to Dracula and the family did not have a right to control Lugosi’s image, no one else had the right to appropriate it either. With that one paragraph, Richman set off for swap meets, stalking the stalls, picking up all kinds of items that illegally appropriated the images of dead stars. Then he went after the infringers on behalf of the families.

  In 1983, he drove to Sacramento with the sons of John Wayne and Harpo Marx and the grandson of W. C. Fields, and together they argued before the legislature for a celebrity-rights act, which legally assured that no one may use the name, voice, or picture of a deceased personality without permission from the family. Then the group made the same argument in New York State, where they were called “a group of tribal headhunters” by a lawyer representing Time Inc. “It was the proudest moment of my life,” Richman says.

  What he’s become in these past two decades is the Upholder of Dead Celebrity, the Protector of the After-Image. Among the estates he has serviced are those of Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, Sigmund Freud, Mae West, and the Wright brothers, as well as a personal favorite of mine, Basil Rathbone. It’s easier to have dead clients, Richman confides, because they don’t cancel a million-dollar dress deal when they get a better offer for a clothing line of their own at Kmart.

  Of all his clients, Einstein is the biggest. Richman employs five law firms domestically and as many abroad to police him, paying up to $40,000 a month for their services. He shows me a stack of papers, dictionary thick. “All of these are Albert Einstein infringements,” he declares proudly. He shows me a famous photograph of Einstein sticking his tongue out. “We never allow this picture to be used,” he says fussily. “You know people come back to me and say, ‘Who are you to say that we can’t use this when he stuck his tongue out and he knew photographers were there?’ and I say, ‘Hey, I’m running a public trust; it’s incumbent upon me to protect these people.’ ”

  Richman won’t reveal how much money he and Hebrew University make from Einstein, but he admits it’s more than from any other client. When I ask if the figure is in the millions, he simply says, “I wouldn’t say millions.” I remind him that Einstein never allowed his name or image to serve as a product endorsement during his life. “Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse,” the physicist said. “Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?” So wouldn’t he object to himself selling Nikon cameras now? Richman dismisses this idea out of hand and assures me that all the profits go to scholarships at Hebrew University.

  Then, to show me just how bleak a world without Roger Richman can be, he leads me to a large cardboard box across the room. It’s full of black-market desecrations—“horrible, horrible stuff,” Richman says. A greeting card with Mae West urinating through an hourglass, one of Marilyn Monroe snorting cocaine. There’s John Wayne toilet paper (“It’s rough! It’s tough! And it doesn’t take crap off anyone!”) and a vial of Elvis’s sweat (“Now you can let his perspiration be an inspiration”) and a box of cotton balls emblazoned with the words BRANDO’S BALLS. But the pièce de résistance, the succès de scandale, is wrapped in paper with rubber bands around it. “I always keep him in his house,” says Richman. “I never take him out.”

  Richman places it in my hands, and I unwrap it slowly to find eight inches of hard rubber topped by the smiley-faced head of President Ronald Reagan. It was this very dildo that Richman waved on the floor of the California statehouse to make his point—“I HAVE HERE IN MY HANDS A SEXUAL DEVICE,” he bellowed to the shocked assemblage—and that pleases him.

  Once the Gipper has been wrapped and replaced in the box, we tour the rest of the office. And Richman gallops on: “We’re planning a major celebration of the millennium. We’re doing mailings to advertising agencies reminding them that it’s coming, that we represent all these people, that they should be celebrating this past century.”

  In order to put his own client list in perspective, Richman recently called the Screen Actors Guild and found that about eighteen thousand actors have died in this century. “How many are marketable today?” asks Richman, throwing his arms open in apparent disbelief. “Twenty! These are the most talented people that ever lived … but most people are here and gone forever. You know, you have your fifteen minutes of fame and that’s it.”

  Finally I ask Richman why our country is overly obsessed with celebrity today, why celebrity, as much as a Vegas jackpot, has become the Jell-O mold of the American Dream. He begins by quoting Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

  “They’ll never be an Elizabeth Taylor,” he says. “Their hopes are their dreams and their dreams are on TV and their dreams are watching these beautiful chests walking into the Academy Awards in gorgeous gowns and they live for that. That’s why Communism failed. [It] never gave people any hope. That’s why democracy has been so successful. The American Dream, it’s based on hope … as long as you have money, you go right to the top.”

  He continues. “When I travel into the heartland of America—I go backpacking a lot—and talk about what I’m doing, oh, these people, they won’t let me shut up. They just ask question after question after question. I’m like a hero to them. Around here, no one cares. Dead stars, oh, forget it. You’re an agent for the dead, you’re a joke, c’mon.”

  But Richman is convinced that he’s having the last laugh, in no small part thanks to Einstein, who’s gone global. In Japan, Einstein’s image is used in a commercial for a video game called 3DO; in Hungary, his mug is plastered on billboards for a local telephone company; in South Africa, he advertises insuranc
e. “He’s the most widely recognized human being that ever lived,” declares Richman. “In China”—where Richman has recently brokered a deal for Einstein T-shirts—“they’re limited to one child per family, and every single parent calls their one child ‘my little Einstein.’ ” He smiles at the thought.

  “China is a cultural wasteland,” he says emphatically. “They’ve never heard of John Wayne. They’ve never heard of Steve McQueen. They’ve never seen any of their movies. But Einstein, they know.”

  San Jose, California. February 26.

  Harvey is to give a talk on Einstein’s brain in San Jose. Before we left Princeton, he rooted through the letters he keeps in a shoe box—letters from an oddball collection of fans and groupies, critics and psychos, everywhere from Denmark to New Zealand, everyone from angry rabbis demanding the brain for burial to elegiacal schoolkids cutely waxing juvenile about trying to figure out relativity—and called a woman named Sarah Gonzalez, someone he doesn’t know but who had written to him a few years ago randomly asking for a piece of the brain. When she heard from Harvey, she felt that the Lord God had intervened on her behalf. Ever since his call, she has been busy informing San Jose of our arrival, contacting the mayor and the local media, trying to set up a dinner party for leading lights in the community, and arranging for Harvey and Einstein’s brain to visit with students at Independence High School, one of the biggest in the country.