As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  I didn’t care. This wasn’t about the article for me. This was much bigger. This was bucket-list stuff. I was finally going to meet my childhood hero. And not just some quickie handshake and awkward photo backstage, the kind Copperfield did after performances for VIP ticket holders. This, at least in my eyes, was going to be a conversation—my chance to sit across from the man who, along with Adam and my brother, Jeff, had been a north star to me during my childhood.

  David Copperfield had always been there for me when I needed to escape. I was nine when I saw his first CBS special. Every year after, fall couldn’t come soon enough for me as I waited for his annual television broadcast—my Super Bowl. He gave me an alternative to the celebrated male archetype of suburban Baltimore. He didn’t carry a lacrosse stick or wear corduroys with tiny whales on them. He was a quirky Jewish guy who did magic. What more could I ask for? He also always seemed to get the girl—definitive proof that magic wasn’t nearly as much of a virginity protector as that other eighties basement pursuit, Dungeons & Dragons. Copperfield had the most beautiful assistants in his shows, who were constantly under his spell and dancing around with him, and he was always laughing and flirting with celebrity guests like Cindy Williams and Bernadette Peters. He gave me hope.

  And of course he gave me magic.

  I sat in my basement and watched in awe as he walked through the Great Wall of China and vanished a seventy-ton Orient Express railway car and levitated over the Grand Canyon. His television specials became the highlight reel of my youth. They were always recorded in front of a live audience, and when he spoke to the crowd—when he spoke directly to the camera—I felt like he was speaking directly to me. Few people spoke directly to me.

  Now, on a rainy night in Hartford, Connecticut, David Copperfield actually was going to speak directly to me. I’d been taking a few Vicodin a week since my surgeries, mainly to help me zone out at night, but didn’t bother bringing any with me on this evening as I wanted to be as clearheaded as possible for our conversation. I knew it was going to be memorable and that the cassette recording of our interview would no doubt become a cherished possession. I figured I’d keep it alongside the copy of The World’s Greatest Magic that I bought at the Yogi Magic Mart when I was twelve years old and had been signed by Copperfield.

  It was like I was twelve all over again when he appeared onstage at the Hartford Civic Center. The theater went dark and a series of small spotlights danced around an antique elevator that was slowly being lowered toward the stage, stopping a few feet from the ground. The doors opened and the thin material on the other three sides retracted to expose a wrought-iron frame that allowed the audience to see right through to the back of the stage. It was completely empty. The doors closed and the material on the sides slid back into place. Suddenly the doors were open again and there he was. I had goose bumps.

  Copperfield was taller in real life than I thought he would be. He wore a neatly pressed white button-down shirt and a pair of high-waisted black jeans, and his hair was big on top and long in the back—the Jewish mullet. Jerry Seinfeld and Ben Stiller had similar hairdos around that time, which led me to believe that all male Jewish celebrities in the mid-nineties were seeing the same hairdresser.

  My seat, which had been arranged through Copperfield’s press team, was dead center, ten rows back. The best—and to me, the only—seat in the house. There was nowhere else in the world I would have wanted to be. I watched in mouth-agape wonderment as he elegantly passed through a giant fan and vanished random audience members only to make them reappear moments later on the other side of the stage. My eyes filled with tears at the end of the show when he talked about how much he always dreamed about seeing it snow when he was a young boy and then made it snow throughout the entire arena.

  The interview was held backstage after the show in a small room that was empty except for two large leather club chairs facing each other—about three feet apart—and a narrow table off to the side with a few bottles of water. I was more excited than nervous. Because of my job as the Eye editor of WWD and W, I was interacting with celebrities all the time and never seemed to get nervous. In fact, I was very much at ease around famous people. I felt a level of comfort with celebrities that I never managed to feel as a boy around my childhood friends. Movie stars and fashion designers didn’t know that I went to college a virgin or that I got so homesick at camp that I had to go to the nurse. They had no clue that I was the last picked for a pickup game of basketball or that I refused to take my shirt off when it was decided that my team would be “skins.” My team was always “skins.”

  So I generally didn’t get weird in front of celebrities. Most of the time, anyway.

  Wow! David Copperfield has freakishly long fingers.

  That was my first thought the moment I met my hero. He walked into the room and introduced himself. I was finally face-to-face with him, shaking hands with the man I’d idolized for most of my life, and all I could think was that he had unbelievably long fingers—like E.T. long. I’m pretty sure I held on to his hand a few beats longer than is customary for the average handshake. I’ve heard that some professional athletes are born with larger lungs, which gives them superhuman ability. Like a form of genetic superiority. Maybe the same sort of thing was true with David Copperfield’s hands. This was his superpower. He was born to be a magician.

  I suddenly became deeply insecure about the size of my hands.

  We took our seats and I placed the tape recorder on the concrete floor between us. Aside from the awkward long handshake, I managed to keep my cool.

  My entire approach to dealing with celebrities had come from the pep talk about girls Adam had given me when I was fifteen years old. “You want to be respectful and show interest,” he told me, “but not too much interest. Don’t gush. Keep your cool and act like you belong there.”

  It may not have gotten me laid, but this advice had served me well.

  In the end, though, I was able to be myself with Copperfield. I didn’t have to pretend to be cooler than I was or more confident or less interested. He saw to that the moment the interview started.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  I’d done dozens of celebrity interviews by this point, and not once had anyone ever had any questions for me.

  “Did you always want to be a writer?” he asked.

  He seemed genuinely curious. He listened as I answered and shared his own experiences and anecdotes.

  “When did you first fall in love with magic?” he asked.

  I had wasted little time in letting him know that not only was I a fan, but that practicing magic, reading about magic, watching magic—as I had just done earlier that evening—made me feel like me. Feeling like me—truly being myself—wasn’t a regular occurrence when I was a kid, I explained. Magic somehow managed to remove any external pressures and all insecurities, I told him.

  “I was the same way,” Copperfield said. “I get it. Magic was my escape, too. It allowed me to be a dreamer. It’s important to dream.”

  This conversation was like a dream. I felt accepted by him. Patrick, meanwhile, was going to kill me. I had promised to steer clear of magic, and I spent over an hour talking about it. Screw it, I figured. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I made sure to ask about Schiffer and their engagement toward the end of our interview, and Copperfield gave me more than enough for the story that I needed to write. A story that wouldn’t include any of our real conversation, but none of that mattered. The conversation had happened. It was magical.

  As we got up to say goodbye, I thanked him for his time and asked if he would mind signing a copy of his new book for me.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I’d be happy to.”

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out a copy of the book and a pen.

  “To Dan Peres,” he wrote. “There’s no limit to what you can do if you just believe. David Copperfield.”

  We shook hands—I was sure to let go this time bef
ore things got weird—and then he was gone.

  The Sheraton was attached to the Hartford Civic Center and it took me only a few minutes to get back to the relative humidity of the fifth floor. I was still buzzing when I walked into my room. The last few bites of my dinner—a cheeseburger and fries—were still on a tray on the room’s desk when I walked in. I took a fry, cold and limp, dunked it in ketchup, and popped it in my mouth. It was after 11:30 p.m., but I was far too wired to go to sleep. I sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the Walkman out of my black JanSport backpack and hit the rewind button—I wanted to listen to our conversation. Relive it.

  When I pushed play, though, all I heard was a deep and steady vibration, like the constant hum of an engine. My heart sank. I fast-forwarded the tape a bit and pressed play again. Vibration. I flipped the tape over and tried to listen to the other side. Vibration. My heart was racing. All color drained from my face. I checked the volume. Vibration.

  My legs felt weak.

  This can’t be happening.

  I paced around the length of the room. For the second time that night, tears filled my eyes.

  And then it hit me. We must have done the interview in a room directly above the industrial machinery that powers the Hartford Civic Center. The tape recorder was on the floor in between me and Copperfield and the rumble that must have been coming from beneath drowned out our voices.

  I froze. Then I freaked out.

  “No way!” I screamed.

  I ripped the bedspread from the bed, sending it and the pillows underneath flying across the room. I swatted the stack of plastic cups into the large windows overlooking the Civic Center and kicked the red upholstered armchair over on its back. My hands shaking, I stopped to try the Walkman again. Vibration. I pounded my fist on the desk and then on the edge of my dinner plate, sending its contents—pickles, fries, a small container of ketchup, and more—into the air and raining down on the bed.

  I suddenly regretted not bringing any pills with me to Hartford. I needed to disconnect. To zone out. I even checked my backpack for some, knowing, of course, that they weren’t there.

  I ultimately took the tape to a sound mixing engineer I found in Manhattan and he was able to separate the vibrations from the voices, allowing me to hear—albeit faintly—my interview with Copperfield.

  But that night at the Sheraton, my hotel room in shambles, I listened to both sides of the tape—ninety minutes of low, deep rumbling. It was oddly soothing, in the end. Like a giant purring cat.

  I eventually fell asleep next to a small pile of coleslaw.

  The Kavorka

  Barbara Walters is the best wingman I’ve ever had.

  I met her only once, in Paris in the spring of 1998, but there’s no question that she’s responsible for my dating one of the most beautiful women in France.

  It was one of those perfect late May evenings, the type that makes anyone who’s ever lived in Paris forget about the nine months of the year when the skies match the ubiquitous gray sandstone of the city’s architecture. The sort of night captured on postcards—dark blue sky with the Seine twinkling in the light of a full moon and the Eiffel Tower glittering in the background. Hollywood’s version of Paris.

  And there I was, at a party in the kind of apartment off the Avenue Foch that you see only in design magazines, standing in the host’s all-white kitchen trying not to get caught staring at Gabrielle, the quintessential Parisian beauty right out of central casting. She was elegant yet pouty. Casual but chic. Both lean and full-figured. She was a cross between Jessica Rabbit and Catherine Deneuve. I was smart enough to know that women like that were best admired from the other side of the room by guys like me. She was, as Adam and Tanner would have readily pointed out, way out of my league.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d seen Gabrielle. At twenty-four, she was one of the young darlings of Parisian society. Her parents were well-known art collectors and ran a small but important gallery not far from the Bristol Hotel on the tony rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Her unfailingly elegant mother was one of the grande dames of the posh 16th arrondissement and the last of the great chain smokers. Her father always wore a tie, even on weekends, and was dear friends with Fernando Botero, whose bloated bronze sculptures could be found throughout the family’s sprawling apartment a short walk from the Place de l’Étoile.

  Gabrielle was out nearly every night, one of the “It girls” photographed and featured in the pages of Paris Match and France’s many glossy fashion magazines. I knew her face well from my tenure as the Eye page editor. We had run her photo in WWD and W many times. I stood quietly in the kitchen trying to remember something I’d read about her once. She’d had an affair with either a high-ranking French politician or an older American actor she’d met while at the Cannes Film Festival. I couldn’t remember which. Either way, I was camped out in the kitchen because I was feeling exceptionally underdressed and most guests had congregated in the apartment’s more spacious entertaining rooms.

  When I was given the job as the Paris bureau chief for W magazine, Patrick McCarthy told me to accept every invitation for the first six months so I could meet as many of the players as possible. And they came pouring in—some by mail, others by fax. That evening’s invite came rather casually with a phone call from Sabine, who was the head of couture client relations at a major French fashion house. These jobs were often held by independently wealthy society figures with impressive Rolodexes.

  Sabine knew everyone. And if she didn’t know someone, then Anna did. And if for some inexplicable reason, neither Sabine nor Anna knew someone, then Benedetta definitely did.

  “Okay, I know you’re Jewish, but this is your holy trinity,” Patrick told me over dinner in Paris the night he introduced me to Sabine, Anna, and Benedetta, whom everyone called Benny.

  Sabine oozed elegance. She had been widowed several years earlier when her older investment banker husband had had a stroke on a friend’s yacht during the Monaco Grand Prix.

  Anna reminded me of Susan Sarandon. She was folksy and carefree and purred, “Ciao, darling,” when she kissed you hello in a way that made you think you were the only one she’d ever said that to. She was a countess and divided her time between Paris and Florence, where she managed her family’s foundation and was instrumental in convincing billionaires to pay for the restoration of poorly maintained European landmarks.

  Benny, meanwhile, had spent fifteen years at Christie’s, but just weeks before I moved to Paris, left for Sotheby’s in a defection so shocking that it was still being discussed by the Concorde Class well after I arrived. She had a deep, throaty laugh that could be heard across a room and, as I would come to learn, always wore gray.

  In their mid-forties, all three were strikingly beautiful and seemed incredibly loyal to Patrick, who must have asked them to look out for me, because I heard from at least one of them every day my first few months in Paris.

  “I’m having a little housewarming party,” Sabine told me when she called earlier in the week. “It’ll be a fun group. Please come.”

  I was expecting an informal get-together, the kind where people drop in with a bottle of wine in hand, take a look around the new place, eat some cheese, and then take off. I figured jeans and my favorite broken-in navy blue Chuck Taylors would be fine.

  A position in the Paris office of Fairchild Publications was considered a plum assignment. John Fairchild himself had run the bureau there in the 1950s, and Patrick was there in the early eighties. A few months before offering me the job, Patrick asked if I would be interested in flying over for the couture shows and to interview Valentino for W.

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person to be sitting down with Valentino to discuss design inspiration and fabric choice,” I told him.

  “Who wants to read a story about that?” asked Patrick. “Not me. Valentino will love you precisely because you’re not going to talk to him about fashion.”

  I had brought a suit with me on that trip, which I
wore to a handful of fashion shows, but when I showed up to meet Valentino in his Paris show space on the Place Vendome, I had on a pair of well-worn chinos, a button-down and sweater, and my Chucks. A canvas messenger bag holding a tape recorder and some notes was slung across my chest. As I walked up to the venue, workers were busy unloading lighting trusses and audio equipment from a few small trucks parked diagonally on the sidewalk near the entrance.

  “I’m here to see Valentino,” I told an official-looking woman with short bangs who was standing by the front door holding a clipboard.

  She looked me up and down with obvious disdain, as only the French can, and said something in her native tongue, which I didn’t understand.

  “Valentino,” I repeated. “I’m here to see Valentino.”

  “Are you the lighting guy?” she asked in heavily accented English. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt and a crisp white shirt. “Your things are being brought in now. Please use the other entrance.”

  “No. I have a rendezvous with Monsieur Valentino,” I explained, pretty much exhausting the extent of my French.

  “Comme ça?” she muttered before reluctantly ushering me in.

  A few minutes later, I was standing in front of Valentino. He was wearing a grayish-blue double-breasted suit and perfectly polished brown shoes. He was by far the tannest man I’d ever seen, darker even than my grandfather’s friend from Miami Beach, Mort Sugarman, whom I had watched slather baby oil all over himself by the pool at the Carriage House on Collins Avenue when I was a little boy.

  “Forgive me if I’m underdressed,” I said.

  “Not at all,” Valentino told me. “You are fresh-faced and very chic.”

  A few minutes later, while I was sitting on a small sofa next to Valentino as a fitting model twirled in front of us, the woman with the clipboard walked past and we made eye contact. I smiled. She leered.

  Comme ça, yourself. He thinks I’m chic, I thought to myself as Valentino talked about the collection he was about to present.