by David Rakoff
The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot
Scientist Stephen Jay Gould posited the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which contends that the earth’s biota, rather than existing on a constant and linear march toward development and proliferation, can sometimes experience long stretches of evolutionary stasis, followed by irregular bursts of rapid and radical change.
There you are, for example, rooting for grubs in the dirt, pushing aside spongy logs with your ineffectual proboscis, as you and your ancestors have been doing for ten millennia, and suddenly everything changes and surges ahead with a charged developmental fury. The same time the next year, you’re picking up fat and nutritious larvae between your highly dexterous forefinger and opposable thumb, all the while thinking, Once I’ve developed agriculture, I’ll dredge these in a little cornmeal and cook them over that fire I just invented.
For most of us, life is a fairly steady trek, and such high-flown dreams of thumbs and cornmeal and fire are adaptive boosts we neither deserve nor could possibly hope to attain in our lifetime. The myth of the overnight success is just that. Only once did I find myself at the center of an evolutionary fluke of such gargantuan proportion as to confound even a genius like Stephen Jay Gould. One day a grunt in publishing, and the next ushered past the velvet rope into a whole new life. (Allow us to help you down from that tree, Mr. Rakoff … We hope you enjoy your new upright posture, Mr. Rakoff … How about a bigger brain case, Mr. Rakoff…) In such an exclusive world, it was a testament to the top-drawer quality of both that the jumbo shrimp and baby lamb chops should be the same size. The strawberries were as big as a newborn’s head and the muffins appeared to have been baked in thimbles. Whole carrots were as slender as golf pencils and the water came in tiny glass bottles more traditionally used to hold ampoules of morphine. It was a Lewis Carroll buffet, the scale of everything either amplified or diminished to signify privilege, nothing more so than the fact that no one was eating, not even me. Not because I was blasé. I am never blasé about food, especially free food. I was not eating because I was nervous, standing in that small chandeliered room, about to sit down for a read-through of the screenplay for a movie that was to begin shooting. A movie in which I had been cast.
It was 1995, and I was still working full-time as a propagandist and in-house writer in the book trade. I wrote press releases and the occasional remarks for the publisher. I amused myself by peppering his speeches with ever-nellier references from my own life. It began subtly, but if my stealth campaign proved successful, by the end of the year, this married father of children would be welcoming the sales reps with breathless references to watching La Strada while smoking and crying in the balcony of the Paris cinema. It was an easy job and no one bothered me. It afforded me a paycheck, health insurance, an office and its attendant supplies (O glorious Post-its), and as long as I turned my work around quickly, a good deal of free time in which to do freelance writing assignments. I also very occasionally got to act in the odd downtown production with friends. The casting director of the film saw me in one of them, called me in for an audition, and I got the part. It was a big movie. A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores. It was based on a novel by an author published by my employer, coincidentally, about whom more later, except to say that we were friendly at one time but she might just be the only person in my entire life about whom I’ve said something purposely, gratuitously injurious and deeply unkind.
I was one of the few people in the room who was not known. There were three iconic female stars, a supporting cast of respected actors, and a fearsome producer with a talent for hits and a reputation as the devil incarnate. Not a room in which to be seen eating. My presence there would have been the classic Cinderella story if instead of being delivered from her grimy scullery to the carefree life of the palace, our dainty-footed heroine was a thirty-something guy who had left his evil stepsisters to go off and play a mincing fairy interior decorator. The Stepin Fetchit aspects of my part extended beyond the sexual to the ethnic. My part was that of an ersatz food-court Latin of indeterminate national origin. Even his name, Duarto, does not exist in Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, a testament to the deep research for which our author was known. Snippy ectomorphs like Duarto have been a staple of the movies since the early talkies. You have seen us, I am sure. Generally, we are slim, our hair is often brilliantined and pasted down like a phonograph record molded directly to the skull. We have been known to sport the occasional eyebrow-pencil mustache. Our jobs tend toward the mildly creative and powerless—tango instructor, wedding consultant, Hays Office–approved neutered gigolo. Also, traditionally we exhibit two modes of behavior, both of them manifestations of displeasure. There is our comically outraged ethnic or sexual pride, the former eliciting from us a fiery Chiquita Banana “You een-solt my cohn-tree?” (which, as we have established, with a name like Duarto, does not actually exist and is therefore not really insultable), and the latter a dubiously macho defense of the molested honor of our woman, our own interest in whom would have to increase tenfold to reach the level of repelled. The far more common state of a Duarto, however, is one of peevish boredom and affronted aesthetics (“Dios mío, where did you get that agonizing side table?”). This makes us speak in a kind of enervated drawl that broadcasts to all the world that we would much rather be anywhere else than here, preferably somewhere holding a teacup poodle while being the willing recipient of vigorous anal sex.
And all of it with an accent. I based mine on that of a fellow with whom I went to college. It was 1982, and as best as I can remember, he majored in Peppermint Lounge, with a minor in Pyramid Club. If you asked him where he was from, he responded with, “I am from Europe. Okay, fuck you, Venezuela,” which wasn’t even true. He was Israeli.
The screenplay reading went well. In addition to Duarto, I was pinch-hitting for three small parts. People were extremely nice to me. I made Diane Keaton giggle at one point; Bette Midler and I talked about her daughter’s school. Sarah Jessica Parker, Victor Garber, and J. Smith-Cameron took me for a post-traumatic drink at the Waldorf bar, and I walked home through the rain, tipsy and thrilled.
I had been granted admittance into a club I’d no right to be in. Somehow, despite my lack of formal training and my decidedly slim and exclusively off-off-off-Broadway résumé, the dues I’d paid in other realms—a bout of illness here, years logged in day jobs I didn’t enjoy there (can you imagine such suffering?)—could be converted somehow and cashed in for a flight to this new and coveted realm. This role would lead to others and I would never have to go back to the publishing house. Certainly the folks on the movie made me think so. The director took me out for a drink one evening and, like new lovers who endlessly narrate the thoroughly unremarkable details of their early meeting that happened just three weeks prior, he and I fondly recapitulated the out-of-nowhere story of my being cast. My part was at best a cameo and they made me feel like the lead. I was drunk on potential fame. For the next few weeks, I led a double life that was cinematic itself, spending my days at the office but dashing off during lunch hours and evenings after work for rehearsal, makeup and hair tests, and wardrobe appointments—where I was outfitted in a pair of trousers so tight that it would not be until years later when I had a hemorrhoidal ligation that I would experience such constriction again. When principal photography finally began, I cashed in all my vacation days, thinking as I left the office, I’ll be back … To clean out my desk, suckers!
My first day of shooting was out in Queens. I was given a trailer. Well, a slice of a trailer, the union-required minimum of space, called a honey wagon (which I would later find out is the term they use for those trucks that suck human waste out of septic tanks, which I wo
uld also find out isn’t that odd a coincidence). We were filming a scene between Bette Midler and myself, set in my decorator’s atelier. Duarto seemed to favor a maximalist aesthetic of paisley throws on overstuffed furniture, embroidered pillows, fat silk tassels, and garden urns. Bette Midler was bookish and friendly to the extent she felt comfortable being. We got along fine. That’s not meant to damn with faint praise. Quite the opposite. It’s very strange to be around the visually famous. It must be tremendously difficult for those whose very faces make up an integral part of the landscape. Everyone wants something from them, even those people who would deny it, or don’t know it themselves. Usually it’s nothing more than to be seen by the celebrity. You’re always conscious of where they are in the room. I once watched Jacqueline Onassis wait for an elevator, and the heightened performance of casualness of everyone around her paying her no notice had about as much in common with ignoring someone as a Father’s Day department-store window resembles an actual barbecue. I had no illusions that what was, for me, a peak experience was for Ms. Midler just another day, and likely one she would never remember, if I could manage to get through it without vomiting on myself in public which, it turns out, there is more than one way of doing.
Things began promisingly, but as the day progressed, something felt slightly off. I was not used to camera acting and was unprepared for just how different it felt from being onstage: the lack of sequence, the fragmentation, the waiting around, the crew standing so close, and the equipment hovering just overhead. In addition to the tight pants, they outfitted Duarto with a scarf made of yards of fabric that swooped and draped in a series of folds around my neck. I looked like the setup of that old Isadora Duncan joke (“Oh, wear the long one, dear. It’ll bring out your eyes …”). If we did a take, if I sat down, if I had a sip of water, the continuity person had to come over to adjust the drapery just so, to match the Polaroid they had taken earlier that morning. I became afraid to move and lost my coordination. At one point, as a bit of business during one take, I idly picked up a prop off my desk—a beautiful old artist’s model of a hand, carved from honey-colored boxwood—and gestured with it. The director liked it and instructed me to keep it in. But when I tried to do it again, I couldn’t even find the object on my desk, finally fumbling for it and all of it looking incredibly forced. It only got worse. It was like poorly following a pattern for a shirt or a set of plans for a building. I was making small errors that compounded themselves so that by midway through the process, I had created a misshapen garment with three sleeves, a house with no door.
Apparently, I was the only one who thought so. The director seemed pleased, going so far as to tell me at lunch, “I think you have a future in film.” I received similarly kind words from the horde of producers milling about—a cadre of young men on whom I had never clapped eyes before that day. We finished up, I returned to my trailer, unwound the scarf, and peeled off my tight pants. I almost passed out as half of my blood supply rushed precipitously away from my heart and brain and down to my legs. I changed back into my street clothes and stood on the curb outside the honey wagon and waited for the van back to Manhattan. Bette Midler’s car drove up and stopped about eight feet away. I could see her in the backseat, studying the next day’s script. The limo was long enough that her reading lamp did not disturb the driver. Her hair was wound up in a post-wig Nefertiti contraption, rising from her head like a soft bongo drum.
She’ll see me standing here, I thought. She’ll tell her driver to open the door and I’ll get in and we’ll ride back to Manhattan, chuckling ruefully all the way about this crazy business. We will return to her rambling apartment. It will be the maid’s night off and we’ll eat leftovers from the icebox: cold chicken and pie. Milk from a glass bottle. Then I’ll say, thinking out loud more than anything else, I’ll say, “If only we could turn this into an all-singing, all-dancing musical picture.” “Why that’s a marvelous idea!” she’ll exclaim. Then we’ll stay up the whole night at the piano, working out a terrific bunch of socko numbers, catchy songs, and snappy dance routines! But the Divine Miss M never glanced my way as her car drove off.
You know that old principle that says that wishing will not make it so, but stating your worst fears just might? Okay, it’s not an old principle, I made it up myself, but only through direct and repeated observational proof. I have seen more times than I can discount where the verbalized worry that a spouse has had an affair was precisely both catalyst and fuel that resulted in the infidelity—the pile of rags, can of oil, match, and ready supply of pure oxygen, all in one. In my own life, I’ve scotched countless encounters by being far too vocal with my anxiety. I can’t help myself. When I spoke to anyone connected with the movie, from the director or the producer, to my agent, to anyone with an unobstructed ear canal, truth be told, I always joked, “Have I been fired yet?”
So when my agent called me the very next morning, before I was to leave to meet the van back out to Queens, and said without preamble, “I’m sorry, my friend, you’re off the movie,” I jovially riffed with him for fully five minutes before I realized he was not joking. I once almost let a friend board a transatlantic flight without telling her that she had unwittingly tucked her dress into the back of her panty hose. In the end I took pity on her, but for the brief period before I did, it was exquisite to watch her walk around that way. It turns out to be somewhat less so when it is your ass that’s poking out in the duty-free.
I might have seen the writing on the wall if I’d been anything other than a complete neophyte. Years later, I read a first-person account by an actor who claimed that it was common Hollywood knowledge that when someone tells you they think you “have a future” in the movies, as the director told me at lunch that day, the unspoken follow-up is understood to be “but not this movie.” He told me at lunch. That means they already knew by noon that I was a terrible mistake. That they even let me continue with the afternoon’s shooting seems, in retrospect, a courtesy. A few days later, the director sent me a kind note that read, “Dear David. I am very sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, you just had your reservations on the Titanic cancelled. You should look at it that way, too.”
They replaced me with Bronson Pinchot.
I went back to my publishing job, weeks earlier than planned, although something like $9,000 richer. They paid me my entire salary. It was, up to that moment, the single largest sum I had ever received. I bought a sofa and a week in Italy with the money. It only occurs to me now that this windfall was undeniably classy on their part, but such a payoff also speaks eloquently to how fervently they wanted me gone and effaced with the kind of permanence that scours away any evidence of my ever having been there.
I was embarrassed to be off the picture, but not hugely surprised. The movies are full of examples of people getting fired for reasons having little or nothing to do with their performance. My story was hardly unique. Except I really kind of stunk. While I can be fairly amusing on stage and radio, on camera I had—at least back then—what might best be described as screen absence.
Being fired was an entirely new experience, and not because I was so good at the jobs I had held up until then, although I was a crackerjack secretary, if I say so myself. It’s just that it was extraordinarily difficult to be fired in publishing. I don’t mean being laid off, which is extraordinarily easy—the book trade has been in peril since Gutenberg—I mean to be seen as so incompetent that the unmitigated pain-in-the-ass alternative of training someone new for your $18,000-a-year job is considered preferable to your continued presence on the hallway.
The only indication I have that I must have felt humiliated returning to work is that I have no clear memory of it. It can’t have been terribly pleasant to drag my vanquished self back to a job that was meant to supplement my creative urges, urges that had been shown to be delusional or, at best, validated in error and quickly corrected. There would be no punctuated equilibrium for me. I would not be advancing by undeserved leaps and bounds up the
food chain, as I had hoped. I was back to my life of employing my crude, thumbless limbs and avoiding those predators bent on my devourment.
Such as the author herself. Before any of this happened, we were friendly. It started when she had been given my name as a source for repartee and anecdotes for a book she was in the process of writing: a potboiler roman à clef about publishing, for which she received more than a million dollars. She never failed to receive at least a million dollars for any of the books she wrote, the vast majority of which didn’t come close to earning out their advances (this is not the unkind thing I said about her, that comes later …). We became friendly. She was a great deal of fun and unstinting in her generosity, standing me to a very fancy midtown lunch. She came to see me more than once in a play downtown, and when I was cast in the movie of her book, she took an almost maternal pride in my success. The commiserating phone call she made when I returned to work was entirely in keeping with the bond we had forged. But so was the subsequent turn of events, as relayed back to me later. According to her editor, I had, during our last call, bad-mouthed her and the movie, and told various lies about the director, the publisher, etc. I was made out to be a bitter, crazy loose cannon, and I was summarily dropped. This wasn’t surprising. I had been warned from the beginning that she was a hot stove of a girl. Her path was littered with casualties—people with whom she had had intimate relationships who then couldn’t get her on the phone, or found themselves on the wrong end of unkind gossip or scabrous misinformation with only one possible source. When things inevitably soured between her and her editor, for example, she reportedly sent him a bag of candy hearts, each one of which she had violently defaced with an alternate, vitriolic, and decidedly un-lovey-dovey message. I had gotten off easy.
