by Andy Behrman
Smash
Summer in Manhattan. It feels like I am waiting for the next semester at Wesleyan to start again. I explore Columbus Avenue, Amsterdam Avenue, and Broadway and make it my business to get to know my bank manager and all of the tellers, the dry cleaner, the owner of the liquor store, the owner of the hardware store (he actually knows me well from my spree—all of the loot still unused), the owner of the stationery store, and the guy at the newsstand. I want to be the mayor of my little five-block neighborhood as I had been at the campus of Wesleyan. But this is going to be a tough feat, just from a numbers point of view. I waste hours wandering the streets, talking to neighbors, and walking in the park. I often forget that I have come to New York with the intention of starting an independent film company, which I have decided to call Smash, suggesting not only a huge hit but also a sense of being “out of control.” It also has a kind of hip British sound to it, which I like. The type for the stationery and announcements, which I work on for weeks with a graphic designer at his studio in Chelsea, is bold—copperplate—and printed in bright red ink—it really leaps off the page. I’m obsessed with packaging this project and haven’t given much thought to exactly what it is I’m about to plunge into. My plan is to raise $250,000 for my first project, a zany comedy in which a family moves to a New Jersey suburb and meets a bunch of wild neighbors. With Jill, a good friend from college who is a film fanatic and an editor at a cable-television magazine, I sit down and start working on a full-length script. We put it together in less than four months. I intend to raise the money from family members, friends, and colleagues of my parents, mostly a group of dentists, doctors, and businessmen. With the help of an attorney who is an alumnus of Wesleyan, I set up a corporation and a limited partnership by the middle of the summer. Then I start lining up people who will talk to me and read the script and listen to my fifteen-minute pitch, stressing the huge teenage audience for the film and the fact that we can shoot it for less than $250,000 and probably make back a few million dollars.
I arrive at the Park Avenue apartment at exactly 7:30 P.M., dressed in pleated khakis and a navy blue polo shirt, carrying a handsome black Porsche briefcase my parents bought me in Italy. I am here to meet the parents of a college friend to discuss the possibility of their investing in my film project. The doorman announces that I have arrived, and the elevator man brings me up to their apartment. I am greeted warmly with hugs and kisses by Mr. and Mrs. Lehman, whom I haven’t seen since graduation day at Wesleyan. “You both look healthy and tan,” I tell them. They’ve just returned from Spain. Their son, my friend Todd, is off in Europe on vacation. Their apartment is exquisitely decorated with lots of floral patterns: floral everything. In fact, since I walked in, the Lehmans are becoming floral themselves. I take a seat on the floral couch and pull out a video of my thesis film, an investor’s packet, and a press kit, with the name Smash Films emblazoned on it. Mr. and Mrs. Lehman are sitting opposite me on the other couch. “So, what exactly are you up to, Andy?” Mr. Lehman asks me. “I’m making a low-budget film for $250,000, which I expect to return several million dollars,” I tell him. “Damn, you’ve gone out on your own,” he says. He seems impressed. “I looked over the limited-partnership agreement you sent me, and everything in it seems fine. I’m just not sure if I’m sold on the idea.” “Comedies targeted at teenagers are the newest trend, and teenagers represent the greatest part of the filmgoing audience,” I tell him. “Why not?” says Mrs. Lehman. I explain to Mr. Lehman that the producer is a Wesleyan alum and that once he assembles our crew and we’ve cast the film, we can probably start shooting in three months. “Will there be any well-known actors in the film?” he asks. “No, but there will after it’s released,” I respond. They both laugh. There’s a pause. “Maybe you need more time to think about it,” I tell them. “No, no,” Mr. Lehman says. “I’ve always had a good feeling about you. I’m good for $5,000.” Mrs. Lehman walks into another room and returns with a checkbook. She hands it to her husband, who writes the check and signs the forms. “Don’t let us down,” Mr. Lehman says. “We want an Oscar.” I am selling the deal based solely on the success of my college film project—but that simply isn’t enough. In time I realize that my expectations are slightly delusional. My investors are only willing to part with small amounts of money, and it seems highly improbable that I’ll be able to come up with all of the budget in time. After four months my inheritance is gone and I’m dipping into the investors’ money to finance my lifestyle. I’m spending it faster than I can raise it. As time passes, I am losing control and feeling more and more paralyzed.
But I go through the motions of working on the project every day—doing related chores and errands, making telephone calls, following up with prospective investors. Somehow I think the money will magically materialize, so I pretend that I’m working twelve- to fourteen-hour days circulating dupes of my college video and the synopsis and prospectus, working with my lawyer and a prospective producer, and hoping to find my angel. Though I’m on the verge of financial disaster, with almost no money in my bank account, I keep courting prospective investors, going to the movies—Repo Man and Star 80—and out to dinner with friends at the Odeon and Ruelles. In the morning I work out at the Vertical Club, trying to forget about my fear and focusing on creating the perfect body—I become addicted to a neurotic routine of cardiovascular training and lifting that is purely narcissistic. My weekends are taken up with brunches at Barney Greengrass or Ernie’s, or hanging out at places like the Dublin House on 79th Street and Broadway, a scruffy, dimly lit Irish pub with a long dark wooden bar, paneling, and a jukebox. But I’m starting to panic. My mother had always told me that I took all the shortcuts. Maybe I should have gone straight to film school. Or business school. Or law school. Like most of my Wesleyan friends.
Slave to Fashion
My lucky way out comes in September 1984, when I think about going back to work at Giorgio Armani, where I had a temporary job recently over school break. They are rushing to open their first United States boutique and they desperately need help. They hire me to start the day after I call them. Good timing. I need the money, and I can work on my film project at the same time. In the back of my mind I’m just putting the film on the back burner, confident that eventually I will make it and pay back my investors. But I’m curious as to where my next experience might take me. The next day I begin working in the public relations and marketing department, on a staff of only six or seven. My experience at Armani proves to be a crash course in ridding myself of any leftover naïveté.
The film American Gigolo has provided Armani with tremendous exposure in the United States, since Richard Gere wore exclusively Armani in his starring role. Suddenly, Armani is synonymous with “minimalist chic,” and everybody wants to wear him. The large specialty and department stores are buying up his clothing, plans for freestanding boutiques are in the works, and the Armani image is being carefully groomed and disseminated through magazines and billboards.
With the flagship store on Madison Avenue still under construction, the opening has been delayed several months, so there is plenty of pressure to speed things up and open in time for Christmas. There is a tremendous amount of tension between the boss and her underlings. The Armani empire is run out of Milan, but the United States fiefdom is directed by a dynamic woman named Martina Bartolini, who comes just about up to my waist and barks orders in Italian (to those who speak it and those who don’t) or in her bastardized English. Intent on creating a huge splash for Armani in the United States, she supervises an army of construction workers, lighting experts, display and visual artists, and floral designers working around the clock to ensure that her austere boutique at 815 Madison will be the jewel in the crown. She runs Armani like a mini-Mussolini, and many around her find her laughable.
I serve as her gofer, secretary, assistant, and jester, trying to lighten the mood of an extremely tense group of people who take fashion a bit too seriously, as if it is a science and we a
re an emergency medical unit, rescuing the world from bad taste. I work ridiculously long hours, sometimes up to sixteen a day. Whatever Martina demands, I do, from writing press releases about the next season’s line, working with media people consigning clothing for fashion shoots, and assisting in publicity to picking up meals from hot spots like Mezzaluna or espresso from Gardenia. For the first time, I get an up-close look at a slick world I had only seen in the movies and magazines. I remember one shoot we do for Amica, an Italian magazine, featuring Matt Dillon in a bathtub surrounded by beautiful underage female models.
From my first day at Armani, I start consigning clothing to myself—suits, jackets, sweaters, leather jackets, anything lying around the office that I consider to be a sample and that looks great on me. I’m thrilled each time I leave the office at the end of the night with new clothes, and I become addicted to acquiring more. I’m always wondering if anybody else is doing the same thing.
October 3, 1984.
I’m on the crosstown bus headed to work, frantic that I’ll be late. The day begins at 8:00 A.M., and I make it with just enough time to pick up some coffee and settle at my desk, which is stacked high with fashion magazines and covered with yellow lined legal paper on which Martina has illegibly scrawled memos and letters to be typed, unalphabetized files, and pink message slips from yesterday, which was technically only seven hours ago. My coworkers arrive in the office, dressed magnificently but looking tired and drained from working into the early hours. Martina is in her office with the door closed, but you can hear muffled Italian seeping out through the walls. Ellen, the receptionist, who is the only employee dressed in a wrinkled navy blue skirt with an unpressed white blouse sticking out, sits out in front of the elevators typing, organizing files, and shuffling papers. The understated waiting room, in which the only decoration is a white orchid on a single black table, fits the Armani mantra: minimal, minimal, minimal. Inside the office, Rafael, a public relations assistant, argues on the phone in Italian; his hair is perfectly in place, and he is dressed impeccably in his navy blue blazer and gray flannel pants. Olivia, the accountant, is busy with her calculator, her head buried in a pile of checkbooks and ledgers. Tina, the office manager, is running around from floor to floor, trying to keep everything under control, nervous that we’re not going to meet our deadline. And Clare, the office public relations consultant/stylist/gossip, walks in at around 10:30 A.M., because she’s been out at a party until 4:00 A.M. She entertains us with the names and details of the celebrities she was with. “Quasi celebrities,” I say. I start typing Martina’s memos when Tina asks me to help her organize the back storage area because I’m tall enough to reach the top shelves. Martina comes out of her office with a snarl on her face and asks if I can type two letters and have them messengered as quickly as possible. I crank them out right away, she signs them, and I call a messenger and bring them downstairs. Samples are delivered to our floor, and we need to check that everything on the inventory list has come in. I’m addicted to the frenetic pace of this place, and it fuels my mania. Martina could spit out ten more chores, and I could handle them all. In the meantime, I still haven’t gotten to her memos, and she needs them right away. But she sends me out to pick up her lunch, and when I come back she tells me that she wants me to go downtown and meet a photographer and to bring a duffel bag of clothing to a shoot. I get into a cab, find the studio on Greene Street in Soho, and deliver the clothes. When I return, Rafael is half laughing at me because it’s almost 4:00 P.M. and I’ve been running around and haven’t sat down all day or had lunch. He orders a sandwich for me. Clare has taken a break, so I end up answering the phone for the next hour and start working on a press release for the opening. She comes back two hours later. “Where were you? You’re late, I’m pissed,” I tell her. “Sorry,” she says. Martina comes over to me and squeezes my cheeks and says something sweet in Italian. I guess I’m doing something right. It’s already dark outside, but we’re just getting ready to put together new press kits. I’m sitting on the floor in stocking feet, collating hundreds of photocopies and stuffing them into folders. Then I’m attaching labels to photographs and inserting them into the folders; this goes on into the night. Everybody else is slaving away, at their desks, while Martina is out to dinner entertaining clients. Soon people start leaving. At midnight I finally decide to call it quits. I’ve done my sixteen hours. At home I stay up for a few more hours watching television until I can fall asleep and start the cycle again in the morning.
The Pill
I’m visiting Allison at Yale, the fall after my graduation, and we come back to her dorm room slightly drunk after dinner one evening. There’s a message from her mother on the answering machine about some unpaid bill. Slight intrusion. I take off my pants and T-shirt and lie down in bed and watch as she strips in front of me. She’s laughing like this is a game. It’s kind of charming. We haven’t seen each other all week, and I’m pretty aroused. I light a joint. She asks me about places I’d like to travel to, and I tell her Iceland, China, Africa, and Australia. She thinks those places are so far away—maybe too far away, I think. The pot is making me crazy and a little paranoid. Her hair smells like smoke now, and I feel like a voyeur, like I’m watching this couple kissing, about to make love. Afterward, we go out for scrambled eggs and bacon and ice cream sundaes and start laughing hysterically when we see a napkin stuck to the waiter’s shoe as he’s passing by. It’s not really very funny at all. We finally get so tired that we go back to her room and sleep until noon.
My relationship with Allison becomes more serious, and we start spending more time together. She is finishing her final year at Yale and she spends the weekends with me in Manhattan. There are so many notations in my datebook about our incredible sex (“great night of sex,” “up all night,” “hot sex”). It seems like the perfect relationship, but it clearly isn’t. I don’t know how to communicate with her. I take on a very controlling role in the relationship, minding her day-to-day activities and taking care of her errands and appointments. I try to make her life as simple as possible, and she becomes accustomed to my omnipresence. When we first started sleeping together, she used a diaphragm, and I would do the prep work. I thought it was fun, real teamwork. But she tired of this nightly ritual, and her doctor recommended that she go on the pill. Now each night I remind her to take her pill, and if she’s too lazy, I pop one of the little peach tablets out of the case and give it to her with water. I also keep track of her menstrual cycle in my date book, so we know when to expect her next period. When it’s late, we are thrown into a panic. We’re not talking to each other; she’s crying and telling me that this time she’s sure she’s pregnant. Each time I assure her that she isn’t and show her the calculations. I suggest that we go out to dinner. It’ll happen by tomorrow morning. She’s only two days late. We go out to Nishi for sushi. She comes home and gets her period. It’s the wasabi. I make a red star in my date book and I’ll know when she had her period so I can remind her for next time.
Years earlier, the loss of Allison’s virginity to someone else left me crushed. She was dating a guy a year younger, and I was constantly jealous. One day she called me, sounding scared and on the verge of tears. “Andy, what am I going to do?” she asked. “I think I might be pregnant.” I assured her, for some reason, that she probably wasn’t pregnant but that I would make an appointment for her to see my mother’s gynecologist, Dr. Strauss, a man in his early seventies. It was to be our secret. “Please, don’t even tell your mother,” she pleaded. “Have you told Tim?” I asked. “Not yet,” she said. The appointed day came, and we drove in my red Kharmann Ghia to Dr. Strauss’s office, which was located in his house in a very nice neighborhood in Englewood, New Jersey. I waited in the car listening to the radio for about forty-five minutes wondering what was going on inside. She walked down the steps and toward the car, got in, and looked like she was about to cry. “So, what happened?” I asked. “He examined me and took some blood and urine and I’ll k
now in a day or so,” she said. She reached over and gave me a big hug. “Thanks. Thanks a lot for this,” she said. The next day she called and told me she wasn’t pregnant. I was relieved, but I really didn’t want to talk to her. I was still angry that she had lost her virginity.
The Pimp
Several weeks after I start working at Armani, some of the Milan-based executives come to New York to check on the progress of the U.S. empire. They are busy in daily meetings with Martina, in photo sessions, and with the press, and I am at their beck and call. I order cars and limousines for them, fetch their lunch, make reservations, and pick up tickets for Broadway shows. They are staying at the Carlyle Hotel, and some of them want videos of foreign films—Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, and Jean Cocteau—as well as gay porn. I am sent in search of the newest releases, with titles like Sizing Up and Like a Horse, or anything else of my choosing. I don’t question any of the requests, just take the cash and do the errands, never return the change, and always forget the receipts. I am sent on all kinds of what I call “homo missions”: picking up macho military clothing at Kaufman’s Army & Navy Store on 42nd Street, camouflage shorts and nylon vests and all kinds of undergear, jocks, bikinis, and thongs at stores on Christopher Street. This logically proceeds to being asked to track down and assemble “young men.” One of the executives is interested in meeting a model we had used on a recent shoot, and I’m asked to arrange it with his agency. I am naïve, but I know this isn’t a legitimate go-see. One of the executives asks me if I will find other “types” of models for them, and I take this to mean nonlegit types—escorts and hustlers. I find these guys in all different places, mostly through advertisements in the New York Native and in the theaters. I meet Scott, a tall, well-built, muscular guy with short black hair and green eyes, at the Gaiety Theater in Times Square, after his performance. He’s impressive. Handsome, with a great jawline and a hard body. They’ll like him. I tell him that there are a couple of business executives in town looking for escorts after his last show at 10:30 P.M. and that they’ll pay him $200 an hour. I also tell him they have tons of money and plenty of time. It sounds good to him. I give him one of the executives’ names and the address and phone number of his room at the hotel. He thanks me. I can barely imagine what’s going on at 76th and Madison, but it is very busy, and the reports are never too alarming. Nothing wilder than a lot of exhibitionism, posing, and jerking off. I make arrangements to pay these boys between $200 and $500 each; sometimes they head up there a few at a time (as many as nine or ten for orgies). Most of them want to be models or actors, some lawyers and doctors, but settle for being escorts, strippers, or the most coveted position—porn stars. These boys of the adult-film business, hard to find in New York, command higher fees. One of the best known is Brent Cummings, a huge blond bisexual with enormous shoulders and a powerful chest and arms, who is handsome in a dim-witted sort of way. Brent is twenty-five and brand-new to the big city. He performs at the Follies, a triple-X all-male theater on Seventh Avenue that features live shows and adult male films. He becomes a favorite of the Armani group.
