by Scott Brown
In the Guard, during the school year, I became a legal clerk, keeping the minutes of any courts-martial or any other legal proceedings, and I was picked to be a deputy probation officer for young offenders in Somerville. I knew I wanted to go to law school, and I was training myself as best I could. But most of all, I knew that but for my coaches and Judge Zoll, I could have easily been one of those young offenders. There was nothing preordained about my path at all.
By my senior year, my mother and Leeann had moved out of Larry’s house. It had been a battle of courts and lawyers, with Larry leaving and then being allowed to return, and then my mother leaving. In those days, there were few laws to protect abused wives and single mothers. Now my mom and Leeann were living in an apartment in neighboring Melrose, and Leeann was enrolled at Melrose High. Larry stayed in Wakefield for years. He had his properties, and I would see him sometimes around town, where I gave him a stare and told him to get the hell away from me. He was, I know now, a marital terrorist, as bent on destruction as the guys who build IEDs or wire the detonator on a suicide vest. He used everything at his disposal: violence, money, and physical and mental coercion. He nearly killed my mom, he wrecked Leeann’s life for years, and the worst that happened to him was having to pay a divorce settlement. Otherwise, he kept everything he owned. His bonds were safe and he continued to walk the streets with his terrifying partly amputated hands.
I met Ruth Greenfield on a bitterly cold late-fall night at Houlihan’s, a bar in Faneuil Hall in Boston. I had arrived with a bunch of my basketball teammates, and I was wearing a scarf—a really long wool scarf, the kind that could be wrapped repeatedly around my neck—because it was freezing. In a 1980 way, I thought it looked really cool. Ruth was already in the bar with a group of her friends from Boston University. I don’t remember anything about her friends, just that she had beautiful, long, wavy strawberry blond hair. I said something to her, she laughed, and we spent a lot of the evening talking. She gave me her number, probably on a matchbook, and I called.
Ruth was from Long Island, New York, and she was studying to be a psychologist. Her father had died when she was younger; her mom had remarried, and Ruth and her entire family made me feel special, made me feel wanted. Even her interest in psychology was perfect because I came with my own set of baggage. Ruth was funny, and she wasn’t scared off by the fallout from Larry or the other refuse of my parents’ periodically chaotic lives. We dated for the rest of my senior year; she came to my games and cheered in the stands. My parents came too. My mother came to most of my home games, my father to a scattered few by the end. But the court was bigger, and they weren’t on pullout wooden risers at the side of the gym. I couldn’t scan for them in my peripheral vision; all I could do was concentrate on the ball. I wanted to be the guy taking the last shot of the game, putting the ball in flight just before the buzzer.
My parents were both there for my graduation. I was one of thirteen seniors to win a “Senior Award” from the Tufts Alumni Association at graduation, and I also earned a one-year, $2,000 NCAA scholarship, which helped to pay for my first semester’s tuition at Boston College Law School and got me a spot in something called “Tufts University’s Cavalcade of Champions.” In my scrapbook, I pasted a Xerox of a photo of me at graduation, in my white suit jacket with the spreading lapels, the round collar and wide tie, a boutonniere pinned to my buttonhole. I’m holding my diploma, and next to me on one side is my father, beaming, the perfect touch of silver at his temples. My mother’s eyes are rotated as far away from my father as possible; her face is forward, but she is looking off to one side. On her face there is a hint of a smile. In the middle, I have that frozen expression of someone waiting for the shutter to snap and the moment to be over, and for us to separate and move on.
I had joined ROTC and spent part of my summer training and catching up on my classes, as well as painting houses and doing whatever I could to make some extra money. Boston College Law School started in the fall. I took my first-year courses at BC and first thing in the mornings headed over to Northeastern University for ROTC courses. My fellow cadets were nearly all undergrads, and I was about four years older, gramps to most of them. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and went to Northeastern, several miles away, to train from 6 to 9 a.m., then headed back to law school, and studied at night. And I was dating Ruth. For the first time, my life was balanced. Every piece of the puzzle fit. It was like that perfect stillness, that calm, bright blue sky that surfaces after a raging thunderstorm. And then there came a magazine.
Cosmopolitan magazine, or Cosmo, was searching for “America’s Sexiest Man.” There had only been four previous winners, and they included Burt Reynolds, James Brown, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I didn’t read Cosmo, but Ruth did and so did Leeann. The winner would get $1,000, which would partially replace my NCAA scholarship for the upcoming year to help pay for law school. Ruth and I talked about the contest, but Leeann took it further and thought that I should enter. She sent in two photos of me—one in a shirt and a tie and another in a bathing suit. She enclosed a nice letter, telling the judges how I was a law student and in the military.
Months later, it was reading period before finals at BC Law School. I was studying, and my phone rang. The woman on the other end said that she was Helen Gurley Brown. I had no clue who Helen Gurley Brown was. I was sure it was a prank. So sure that I said, “Yeah, right.” And hung up. A minute later, my phone rang again. I was still incredulous. I said, “If this is for real, send me the ticket to New York.” The next day, a FedEx truck pulled up. Inside was an envelope with a ticket. I was headed to New York.
What hit me first was the size and the overwhelming noise. Boston in 1982 was a small place with relatively few towering buildings. The wharf area had yet to be redeveloped. The city was old and small. New York was neither of those things. It was a cacophony of high-rise construction cranes flocking up the East Side and tall buildings that blocked nearly any patch of the sky. I walked down Madison Avenue looking up, feeling like a mountaineer in a canyon with giant stone formations rising on either side. There was the deep-throated rumble of buses belching thick, acrid smoke and yellow taxis snaking in and out of lanes, their drivers leaning on their horns. The sidewalks were crowded with people jostling by. I met with Helen Gurley Brown and a bunch of other people at the magazine. She looked at me and said, “You’re our winner.” I said, “You haven’t even seen me without a shirt or clothes,” and she replied, “It doesn’t matter. I can tell you are not going to embarrass us. You’re in law school, in the military, and you’re a nice young man.”
Soon afterward, they set up a photo shoot for me. I was just coming off exams. I was in pizza, beer, and popcorn shape—not fat, but not cut either. I wasn’t playing competitive basketball every day. Suddenly, I was on location with stylists and makeup people touching me and arranging me, spraying my skin and my hair, and a photographer telling me to drop my chin and then lift my chin as he clicked away. Previously, the most formal of all the pictures I’d ever posed for involved me balancing a basketball on my index finger while I wore my basketball uniform. Here, I was completely nude, although my privates were hidden, in a roomful of strangers, men and women. I was totally unprepared. I was embarrassed and very, very uncomfortable, discreetly trying to cover myself, and feeling completely freaked-out. It showed. The photos were not what they had wanted. On top of that, I looked pale and I wasn’t physically toned; I probably needed to lose ten pounds. The Cosmo staff saw the photos and told me to come back in two weeks. They wanted me to be, as they put it, “more cut.” They’d be doing a reshoot, at a house in the Hamptons.
I’d never had to get in shape like this before, and I reverted to what I’d done to prepare for the military. I ran every day with a backpack, and I stopped eating. My food was tuna in a can, three times a day. I went to a tanning salon as well and lay under the UV lights. When I returned to New York, I was bronzed and toned. Cosmo had its photo shoot at the beac
h and planned a red-carpet rollout. I was to start in New York and then go on a thirty-two-state tour. Cosmo put me up at a fancy hotel and I was scheduled to appear on wall-to-wall media, including the Today show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley, The Phil Donahue Show, the network evening and nighttime magazine shows, and even something with Barbara Walters. It was the first time in Cosmo’s history that a regular guy had won their contest, and in part it was because, as Helen Gurley Brown had said, they thought that as a law student and someone in the military, I wouldn’t do anything to humiliate them, which was true. In the write-up that went with the photo, they quoted me as saying that I’m patriotic, even though it isn’t considered cool. And they also asked me about my dad, and I told the truth, that “he wasn’t around much.” The article also said that I liked “slinky women.” It was my first experience in learning not to believe everything you read. Not only didn’t I say that; I didn’t even know what a slinky woman was.
The rollout was a whirlwind of being whisked from one spot to another, hopping into and out of town cars that raced around the city from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. I sat in the studio with Bryant Gumbel, and he rattled off his list of questions: What kind of reactions had I received from my friends, and was I embarrassed by all the attention that the photo shoot had generated? Offscreen, in the greenroom, I remember being asked one more question: “If you run for political office, do you think this is something that will be used against you?” I answered, “No. And I don’t have any interest in politics.”
Outside New York, the national tour was even crazier. Strange women would knock on my hotel door late at night. In Detroit, after one show, a married woman invited me to her home to hang out with her and her newly single friend. There were giant posters printed of me and in a certain sphere of the young, hip New York City world, circa 1982, I was something of a known name. But I wasn’t Scott Brown; I was “the Cosmo guy.” At Studio 54, the Underground, the Red Parrot, and Plato’s Retreat, no matter how long the line straining against the ropes—lines of bankers in their flashy suits and glinting shoes, ties off, shirts unbuttoned, or girls in their shiny satin tanks and skintight Calvins, so molded to their legs that they couldn’t sit down, teetering on sky-high Candies—I could walk right through and be ushered in. “Hey,” the bouncers would say, “it’s the Cosmo guy.” The first time I went into Studio 54, club owner Steve Rubell and Calvin Klein tried to rip my shirt off as kind of a prank to “see what you got,” as I went in the door. I was pissed; I didn’t know who they were or why they were doing it. And I didn’t own many shirts.
Another night, early on, I was ushered straight through the main club, with its pulsating music, vibrating lights, and people dancing or wandering with drinks permanently attached to their hands, to the back room, where the 1970s disco star Rick James and a couple of friends were sitting in a half circle. On the tables around them were piles of cocaine and draped over their chairs were leggy women with plunging necklines. Someone must have told them who I was, because they called out, pointing to the drugs and the women, “Hey, Cosmo guy. Want some of this? Want some of that?” I shook my head: “No, I’m good.” And I ordered an orange juice.
That was the benefit of growing up around men like Larry and Dan Sullivan, of my mother’s episodic binges, the times she was passed out, the way a night of drinking set off a downward spiral in her or in one of her husbands. I never drank hard liquor. I couldn’t stand the smell, and the taste to me was personally revolting. I stuck to beer and never more than two or three. I always wanted to know exactly where I was, to know exactly what was going on. The drugs too I had no interest in. And they were everywhere back then, not just in the back rooms of New York clubs. In a year or two, college sports teams up and down the East Coast would celebrate the end of the season with lines of cocaine. Len Bias, the second overall NBA draft pick, who signed with the Boston Celtics, died of a cocaine overdose before he ever set foot on a professional court. After that first summer in New York, a marketing agency set me up, as the Cosmo guy, with an all-American looking, famous hair-color model, who liked to snort heroin. That fix-up didn’t last even half the night.
I went to the clubs and the cool places because they were new and I could get in and everything was about being seen. I had been persuaded to give modeling a try.
From Cosmo, I had a portfolio of photographs, and offers to model quickly came, to walk the runways to techno pop music and strobe lights, or go on shoots with filtered lights, oiled skin, and giant wind machines. But the lure of the money called to me like a siren’s song. Top models made $200 an hour, $1,500 a day. A smile, some buffed biceps, and a ripped abdomen were worth in one day almost as much as four years in Tufts had been to the NCAA when it was giving out its postgraduate scholarship awards. If I modeled, and modeled well, I could pay for law school and put some aside. The National Guard was already willing to allow me a short reprieve. The exposure from the Cosmopolitan pick had turned out to be helpful to the Guard as well. All I had to do was keep up with my monthly training obligations. I worked out a deal with BC Law School: I took classes at Cardozo Law School in Greenwich Village and was granted a temporary leave of absence. I thought I had everything figured out. Even Ruth, who was still patiently waiting.
One of the requirements of being the Cosmo guy was to declare that I was single and to deny having any kind of girlfriend. It was part of the unofficial agreement. Every day, in every interview, I had to deny Ruth. “Yeah, I’m single. Not seeing anyone serious.” But of course Ruth was there, and it was an unbelievably hurtful thing. Every time I said it, I knew that I hurt her, even though she almost never said anything. Still, I felt awful. It was a constant cycle of pretending and prevaricating. She couldn’t be there with me when I went out. I had to do everything alone. We barely made it through the summer and into the fall.
Ruth was the one who lent me her bicycle so that I could get around Manhattan and over to my law classes. I had started out in cabs, but they cost a fortune, and I hated the subway, hated walking down the trash-strewn stairs to the station, brushing past homeless men and women, their faces blackened from the sun and the wind, shuffling on swollen, gargantuan feet, wearing layers of coats even in the summertime, their things in ripped paper bags or in rusty shopping carts. Even more, I hated the smell as I waited for the train, the fetid heat of the platform, the stench of old urine, and the thunderous noise of the cars sailing past. I had to stay aboveground. Ruth suggested a bicycle, and that was how I moved through the city, weaving around cars, crossing through the park, finding the routes nearer to the two rivers for a bit of a fresh breeze, to combat the lingering smell of the black plastic bags of trash that piled up, massed on the sidewalk. The bike stayed with me, but Ruth and I drifted apart. I was being sucked into a glittering world that wanted only good-looking, unattached men. I didn’t know how to navigate that landscape and keep Ruth, or if it would have been possible to do both. Without Cosmo, we might have built a future together. Instead, she went overseas to travel with a friend, and things ended because it was easier and also in part because I let them.
It was a mistake that I had to make, to ensure that I never made it again.
I needed the bike, even when the weather got cold, because while the goal was money, at the start I wasn’t making anything. I did a bunch of high-end couture runway shows, for which I was paid in clothes, and most of it was completely over-the-top. In one, I walked up and down in a bathing suit wearing a giant mask over my face, while a flock of topless women paraded around me. I had a fabulous wardrobe, but barely $100 to my name. I became practiced in the art of free happy hours, of knowing the places I could duck into starting at about 5 p.m., where if I ordered a Coke, I had free rein at the steaming bins on the buffet table—mini quiches, pigs in blankets, spinach dip, whatever slightly stale, mass-produced food could be set out with little Sterno candles blazing underneath to keep it lukewarm. In that way, many nights, I ate dinner for $1.99.
/> I was living in a shared rental on Sullivan Street, where I dined on store-brand macaroni and cheese and spaghetti from cans. One morning, I woke up covered in cockroaches making the trek across the blanket and down my legs and up my arms. I might have given it all up, but I got an offer to become the face and also, inevitably, the backside of Jordache jeans.
Chapter Twelve
Jumping Out of Planes
Modeling in the early 1980s was all about the “go-see.” Go-sees were interviews where hopeful candidates crowded into waiting rooms, trying to look completely nonchalant, while clutching their glossy-photo portfolios and waiting to be called. Inside, casting directors looked through the images and said things like “Take off your shirt” or “Put this on.” It was the heyday of Interview and GQ magazines, where men strutted around with their jackets slung over their shoulders and the powerhouse agencies like Wilhelmina, Elite, and Ford ran the business, deciding who was the next big thing and the next new face. I started with the Sue Charney agency, and within a few months, I had signed with Wilhelmina. The modeling business back then was a funnel system; all the young, good-looking hopefuls were dropped into the same vast container and only a few were pushed through the narrow stem to come out on the other side. I usually ended up at go-sees with the same group of men. Most of us were regular guys, usually athletes, in shape, with decent looks. Sometimes the wheel rotated in our favor; sometimes it didn’t.
