by Scott Brown
Right around the start of 1983, I went on a go-see for Jordache jeans. Jordache had vaulted to superstardom in the designer jeans market in 1979 by producing a commercial with an apparently topless woman galloping on a horse amid breaking waves. It was too hot for network television, but in the era of Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, that only made it more attractive to potential customers. By the early 1980s, the three names stitched across most fashionable rear ends were Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Jordache. Now Jordache was looking for a new face for its ads, on TV and in print. The contract was for $20,000 and I made the cut. Within weeks, I had a billboard looming in Times Square, in full view of the discount Broadway tickets booth, the glinting neon lights, and the parting sea of taxicabs. And I had filmed a commercial. I was rich, or as rich as I had ever been. I left the cockroaches of lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village behind and started living in a hotel suite at Fifty-eighth and Park with a bunch of actors and models. Each day, unseen maids came in and tidied up our beds and picked up our towels off the floor.
I took acting lessons—because all models really wanted to get out of modeling and into Broadway or film roles—went to my law classes, and ran around so that I could be seen at the same clubs as Christie Brinkley and Linda Evangelista. The 1990 ad campaign for Canon cameras, “Image is everything,” was about eight years too late for the New York modeling scene. When I was sent on a go-see for a golf company, I B.S.-ed my way into convincing them that I could actually play golf and spent a weekend in Bermuda, wearing golf clothes and shanking the ball out of the sand traps.
One of my New York friends had thrown a birthday party for me at the Underground, another dance club, where he hired strippers dressed as cowgirls, which the other guests enjoyed far more than me. When my high school buddies visited, we were waved through the rope lines into whatever nightspot we wanted. But they also shook their heads and rolled their eyes at the life I had joined. They openly mocked the pretense of it all, where inside the clubs, neon strobe lights bathed the smoky rooms in a strange, pulsing light and everyone had to shout just to be heard. While the crowd around us ordered imports, like Heineken or Corona, or shots of tequila where each drinker claimed to have gotten the worm, my buddies stuck to bottles of Bud and said, “This is not real life, Scott.”
I knew that too. For me, modeling was a business, a way to get some financial security and to hedge my bets. I had already done the series of calculations in my head—if the modeling didn’t work out, I had law school; if law school didn’t work out, I had the Army. I had two or three backup plans going at once, so I would never be dependent on any one thing.
And I had already discovered the seamy side, like the squeegee guys who lurked in the shadows after midnight, waiting to jump out and spray the windshields of the cars that cruised Manhattan whenever they were idling at a red light. Right after I arrived in New York, I had joined the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) so I could get appearance fees when I went on TV as the Cosmo guy. Everybody seemed to want a piece of me, and I in turn trusted almost no one. I had months where I was rich and months where I had nothing except the wardrobe that the fashion houses gave to me in trade. I took jobs in other places, including a couple of shows in Philadelphia. After one, I met a local television personality named Bonnie. She invited me to the symphony. I said sure and after a few more visits I was splitting my time between Philly and New York, with trips each month up to Boston to train with the Guard.
It was a treadmill of always looking good, always going to the right places, and going on the go-sees. I was becoming hard and cautious. At the start of the summer, I got a call from my professor of military science. I had been given a training deferment the previous year—the Army had even used me to model for one of its recruitment ads. But now, I had to go to advanced training in North Carolina or be bounced from the program. I also got word that I had to return to Boston College Law School, drop out, or transfer to make space for someone else. I believed wholeheartedly in the maxim “If you start something, you finish it.” You never ignore your obligations. I asked for a couple of days to think about it.
The next night, I had an invite to a party for Christie Brinkley at Studio 54. I walked in and I was once again the Cosmo guy, the guy on the posters and the beefcake wall calendar, the guy whose face zipped across the screen for Jordache denim. The last thing I remember is talking to a New York socialite who was a fixture at the club, with her permanent tan and iridescent eye shadow, oversize earrings, and expensive, low-cut dress. She had gotten me a beer. I had only three beers all evening. The next morning, I woke up in a bedroom and didn’t know where I was. Slowly, it dawned on me that I was in the socialite’s apartment. There were pictures of presidents on the walls and her assistant was flitting around the rooms. But I had no memory of how I got there, no memory of anything. The whole night was erased, as if someone had slipped something into my drink, which is probably what happened. I dressed and left, walking down Madison Avenue, staring back at my reflection in the window glass, saying, “Who the hell am I?” I looked at myself and did not like the person I was becoming.
That morning, I called my military science professor and asked him if the opportunity to go to advanced camp was still open. He said yes. I went back to Boston, I completed all of my tests, and two weeks later, I was standing on the parade grounds of Fort Bragg, being yelled at by drill sergeants. It was the best decision I ever made.
At the start, my reputation at Fort Bragg preceded me. I was the Cosmo guy, which is what my fellow cadets and the instructors called me, when they weren’t calling me “pretty boy” and “sissy boy” and “twinkle toes” or whatever else came to mind. But I was determined. I would win the races, do the best in the physical training test, and come out on top in land navigation, or “land nav.” And there was a kind of grudging, mutual respect that we developed in those first few days and weeks. No matter how much they ribbed me, we were all here doing the same stuff, and I wasn’t trying to coast on any reputation. No other Cosmo guy had signed up for advanced U.S. military training. At Fort Bragg. In Fayetteville, North Carolina. In July.
Nothing drove home where we were and what we were doing like land nav, which was also the most nerve-racking of all our assignments. I could always do the athletic stuff unless I got hurt. The classroom requirements were never a problem. But land nav was pass/fail or, more appropriately, do-or-die. Fail land nav and you’re done, out of the program. For each navigation exercise, every cadet would be given a map, coordinates, and a compass, and told to go find this spot. And it was timed.
The start was the most critical thing, orienting the compass and the map to make sure that I was going in the right direction. The courses were miles long and I would literally be running to make sure that I reached the end in time. Head southeast rather than southwest, and I would destroy my chances from step one. And in land nav, I was alone. There was no one running the obstacle course beside me, no next group of people doing sit-ups or push-ups, no one scribbling with a pencil at the desk to my left or my right. I was dripping sweat in the bushes by myself.
I came out of one cluster of bushes covered in ticks, so I had to stop for a few minutes to pull them off before they burrowed under my clothes and into my skin. Every brown, hard-shelled tick added to the stress because another second was being lost to the clock. The outdoor courses were covered in ticks and chiggers, just waiting to overrun my bare neck or hands or arms; no-see-ums, with their quick bites that left red welts; and long, slithery snakes. The weather was hot and humid; the air was so saturated with water that it felt almost liquid. Even the rain didn’t help. Afterward, it was only wetter, hotter, and stickier.
I remember one land nav round right at the end of advanced training. We had done PT and our firing exercises. I set off and I couldn’t find the first coordinate, so I ran back to the starting point, reoriented myself, and set off again.
I ran to the first spot, then the second, then the third. I finally found my groove, spot and go, spot and go. I knew that one running step equaled about three walking steps. Usually I’d try to pace myself, walking and running, but this time, because I had started late, I kept running, weaving into and out of trees, crunching over the twigs and dry sticks scattered on the ground. And I finished before anyone else. I was on the bus with the lieutenant being checked for ticks when the rest of the cadets came in. The ticks were so numerous that everyone had to take off his or her uniform. The ones who were covered from head to toe had to also drop their drawers, bend over, and be checked. It built a strange camaraderie too, each man or woman depending on his or her buddies or officers so as not to get scavenged by tiny bloodsuckers.
Right before advanced camp ended, I earned one of the coveted airborne training slots and was invited to stay on for a chance to earn my wings. The airborne training was being held not at Fort Benning, the traditional training site for airborne school, but at Fort Bragg, and the usual three weeks of training were condensed into two. Everything was accelerated. I was eager to do it. Back in Philly, Bonnie thought that I had lost my mind.
The thing that gets you the first few times in the plane is not the pitch and roll when the pilots fly “map of the earth”; it is the smell of the engine fumes, the burning oil and gas that enter the cabin through the open door in one onward rush. The smell is not just a smell; it is a collection of thick exhaust particles that coat the inside of your nose and the back of your mouth. So there will be a bunch of guys, lined up in rows along the inside of the plane, in full gear with their helmets, their clips, and their chutes, bouncing up and down, smelling this noxious smell, in the full-on summer heat, ears ringing from the noise. And at some point, one of them will throw up. The trainers prepared all of us for this. We were all handed paper airsick bags. Once they were used, they were to be deposited inside our shirts. This meant only one thing: they would explode upon impact.
I was determined that this would not happen to me. I was at the back of the line, one of the last jumpers. The first guy who puked was up toward the front, closer to the door, nearer to the wings and the whir of the engine. But the puking moved toward the back of the line like a reflex. One guy vomited, then another, then another after that. The smell was the trigger. I was five minutes from my jump when I puked into the paper bag. And then I did exactly as I had been told. I put it in my shirt, next to my chest. And when I landed, upon the force of impact, the bag burst, covering me in vomit.
We did day jumps and night jumps. We learned how to hit the ground. The best way to do it is to land on your feet with your knees bent and then roll to your side. When you do it right, it feels almost perfect, not much different from getting out of bed. The worst jumps are when you land with your feet first, then your head, and then your butt. Anyone with that landing is basically smacking his or her head against the ground upon impact. Even with a helmet, the force of the hit leaves you dazed. And the first thing you are supposed to do when you hit the ground is unhook your parachute. But if it’s windy and you’re dazed, you can’t unhook the chute. The wind will lift up the silks and basically reinflate the parachute, and you’ll be dragged until something forces it all to come to a stop. Until that moment, a stunned jumper is trapped by the massive, billowing ball of material. I had a feet-head-butt landing once, and I learned my lesson; I hoped never to have it again.
Of all our maneuvers, the night jumps were by far the scariest. When you jump out of a plane at night, you don’t know when you are going to hit. You are falling through the black sky with very little idea of how far you are from the ground. The only way to gauge your distance is to yell, and then the echo from the yell bounces off the earth. The faster the echo bounces back, the closer you are to the ground. Then you start looking for the tree line, the darker shadows against the very dark sky. When you see trees ahead, you know you are going to hit. It’s one, two, three, here it comes, here it comes, boom: smack against the ground or snagged on a pointy rush of branches, if you are particularly unlucky that night.
When my group of cadets passed Airborne School, we earned our blood wings—our senior officers and trainers took our pins and jammed them straight through our shirts, into our flesh.
I kept in constant contact with Bonnie during my training, and she even came down to visit me one weekend. I met her in my uniform; she showed up looking like a fashion model; and we drove around trying to get a place to stay for the weekend. Because we were an unmarried couple, it took us about eleven tries before we found a place in North Carolina that would rent to us. It was a shock to me, being from Boston. There, hotels would take your money without a second glance. But not here. The futile search for a place was a bit like a metaphor for our relationship. That was over too. She had wanted a model, not a guy in the military who was going back to law school. Our lives were moving in two different directions. I left Fort Bragg and headed back to Boston to finish law school. One local newspaper actually ran a piece reporting that the Cosmo guy had returned. I kept up my classes and also continued to model on the side. I had enough money now for a down payment on a condo and a car. I kept doing my National Guard training and finished ROTC to become a commissioned officer. I still had all my options to keep open.
A few months after the Cosmo spread appeared, I did an interview with Marion Christy for the Boston Globe. The Cosmo experience had left me emboldened, and I was honest with her, more honest than I probably had ever been. During the interview, I talked about my father’s absence from my life, and how he wasn’t around while I was growing up. She put all of it in her piece.
At the same time, I had also been trying to reconnect with my siblings, to see them and get to know them without some of the baggage and resentment that had polluted our growing up. One Saturday when I was in Boston, I decided to head up to Peabody to watch my half brother, Bruce, play baseball. My dad had also showed up to watch. At this point, it was rare for us to speak with any kind of routine. He had split from his third wife, and was now getting ready to marry for a fourth time, with Peggy, the ex-wife of one of his former business partners.
That day, he came moping up to me and said, “I read what you said in the newspaper.” Most of his friends had read it too. It was all true, but it stung him. He started to talk about the games he had come to and how it was really my mother who had kept him away from me at home. I didn’t want to hear it again. I practically had to sue him to get the equivalent of petty cash to feed myself when I was playing varsity basketball at one of the top academic schools in New England. I didn’t want to go back over the past. I told him point blank, “I’m sick and tired of the bullshit. Either you’re in my life or you’re not. Let me know what you want to do.” We stood there, looking at each other, and he said, “I’d like to try to get back into your life.”
It took years, but we both made an effort to reconcile. We started with simply trying to call each other more. Slowly, we started to get together, to meet for dinner. He quickly learned not to make me feel guilty about my mom, and when she complained to me about my father, I told her that I didn’t want to listen. Every few months, we made another tentative step. Eventually, my dad invited me out to Newburyport, where he would take me bar crawling up the stretch of road toward the New Hampshire shoreline. We’d wind our way from one windowless dive to the next, where we drank beer and listened to out-of-date music in smoky, wood-paneled rooms, at slightly sticky counters worn smooth from years of rubbing down, and inside each place, he proudly pointed me out to his friends. We would talk more and try to find some common ground.
As the first twenty-five years of my life drew to a close, I was finally getting to know my old man. And I really believe that it never would have happened without Cosmopolitan magazine. If he hadn’t read that later article in the Globe, hadn’t seen those words laid out on the page, we might be exactly where we had always been: quasi-strangers who happened to s
hare a last name.
I made one mistake in law school, a smart and very pretty girl, whom I was infatuated with but whom none of my close friends liked. We got engaged anyway, until I found her coming home from a weekend with a guy who was her old boss and happened to have been her boyfriend as well. After that discovery and with law school ending, I took off to Jamaica to lie on a beach and lick my wounds. There, I met a beautiful French-Canadian named José from Montreal. She spoke limited English, and about the only French I could decipher was what had come from my increasingly long-ago Latin, but after the drama with my ex-fiancée, the language barrier was perfect. After our time in Jamaica, we stayed in touch. I headed up to Montreal to see her; she came to Boston to see me.
In the early spring of 1985, I was off to Fort Benning, Georgia, for more weeks of infantry training. At Fort Benning we were up every day before 4 a.m. By 4, we would be on the course. Running, jumping, sprinting, push-ups, sit-ups—we were deep into all of them by 4:30 a.m. The sun was just coming up overhead as we finished. Then we had marksman training, classroom time, athletic competitions, and maneuvers in the field. One of our biggest field exercises was for eight days, with basically no sleep, maybe just a couple of hours a night. It’s a test, not simply a field test, but a test of who’s going to fail and who’s going to succeed, who’s going to crumble under the pressure or rise to the occasion.
The first day went great, and so did the second and the third. Each day, I waited to see which night in the field would be mine to lead. I was assigned to lead the last night, the night before the troops were set to go in, the night when all the men hit the wall. It’s cold at night, even in Georgia in the spring. In the woods, the temperature falls quickly. I was handed a scenario, with a location of the enemy. We had to move on the enemy and move in quietly by 6 a.m., or I would fail. We had night-vision goggles strapped to our heads to see in the darkness. I got everyone moving at dusk, but once there was no longer any trace of sun in the sky, everyone in the unit just kind of died. Men sat down on logs, leaned against trees, or lay down on the ground and just curled up. They might as well have gotten a book or a clicker and pretended the nearest tree trunk was the back of a couch. They wouldn’t move. The clock was ticking, and I had to go around smacking people, yelling at them to get up. We ultimately made it through, but only by the skin of our teeth. It was the low point of my entire military summer training period.
