L.A. Man Read online

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  Darkness wraps around the rented Ford Explorer like a blanket as we drive into the plains of eastern New Mexico. We made it from the kiln-baked landscape of the low desert to the higher elevations of pine trees and snow on the ground and moonlight reflecting off mountain silhouettes. And back down again. The driver was right, Arizona and New Mexico are big, but at last Amarillo seems within reach. It’s not that far from Tucumcari, and Tucumcari is not that far from here. The driver is ready for the home stretch. Ever since he stopped flying two years ago, he’s used to putting these miles on a day.

  “Wes won’t characterize it as a fear of flying, but more as a love of the open road,” explains Owen Wilson, calling from Los Angeles. “Once my mom asked why he won’t fly, and Wes replied, ‘Nobody knows.’ That’s become the standard answer.”

  It’s the third or fourth time in a matter of minutes that Wilson has called. He and Anderson are involved in a minor squabble regarding some advice Anderson is giving Wilson that Wilson probably agrees with but doesn’t necessarily want to hear.

  “That was the smooth-things-out conversation,” Anderson says of Wilson’s latest and most conciliatory call, “which then becomes the general criticisms, the ‘Okay, I agree, but here’s your big problem.’”

  Anderson is chuckling. “We’re like an old married couple. Never go to bed angry.”

  Outside the Explorer, the Rushmore hoopla is steamrolling. In fact, the car phone has been ringing off the hook all afternoon and into the evening with reports from the openings in Los Angeles and New York. The larger journey seems to be catching up with us.

  “We had two guys who were either on hallucinogens or laughing gas,” buzzes Randy Poster, the film’s music supervisor, from New York.

  Übermanager Geyer Kosinski had a stool pigeon at the LA opener who phoned in a report. Kosinski phoned Owen with a report of that report, and then Owen called Wes with a report of the report of the report. The report? Only front-row seats for latecomers. Spontaneous applause when the credits rolled. And this from a typically blasé LA matinee crowd. Word on the reviews is overwhelmingly positive, too. The New York Daily News says it’s “the best and most beautiful movie of 1998.” The New Yorker can’t keep the smile off its face. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin says…well, who the hell ever knows what Janet Maslin is saying, but it seems really good.

  The passenger wants to know how this makes the driver feel.

  “You’re the next big thing. Does that rattle you?”

  “Do you think that’s right? I don’t know if that’s right.”

  “Film critics are building altars to you in their offices.”

  “Yeah, but did you read Kenneth Turan’s? Turan’s wasn’t that great.”

  “How do you know? I want to talk to someone who knows this.”

  “Barry Mendel [Rushmore’s producer]. He can read it to you. Okay, I mean Turan’s review is not the greatest review ever. It’s not terrible, but he says, like, he says something like…he didn’t like Max.”

  “He didn’t like Max?”

  “He didn’t like the character. Not the performance, but the character.”

  “All right, but you’re being hailed. You’re being praised. You’re being compared to Buster Keaton. Are you skeptical?”

  “No, I’m not skeptical. I mean, I like it. It doesn’t feel that great, but it feels good.”

  “Why doesn’t it feel that great?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Are you like Max in that you think, ‘Hey, I should be making what’s being called the best American movie of the year’?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. I’m actually in good spirits. But the reviews, bad reviews, I think, make you feel horrible. And, like, Turan’s review does not make me feel very good.”

  “It doesn’t sound that bad.”

  “It’s not that bad, but it just has a tendency to, like, draw everything into that. You sort of look for the worst and sink to that level.”

  “Well, I could be sitting in the car with the Woody Allen of the next generation. How do you think I’m supposed to feel?”

  “Well, you gotta know that it’s hundreds of miles to go tonight, so I don’t care who you’re sitting in the car with, you’re not going to feel that good.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel, either.”

  “I actually feel pretty good. I wish we had some more daylight, but aside from that, I think we’re doing pretty well.”

  “That’s what I mean, you’re keeping your eye on the project at hand, but I’m trying to talk about, not your place on this road to Amarillo, but your place on this road of life.”

  “Right. The road to, uh, the road to Mulholland. The road to Fifth Avenue. Well, in terms of that, I can’t say that I feel ecstatically happy about it. The thing is, we really don’t have any sense of what level of attention the movie is going to have when it really comes out, you know?”

  Anderson should be forgiven if he’s a little wary of the warm embrace being extended to him and Rushmore. He heard it from the movie people before with Bottle Rocket, although not on this scale. Then, when Bottle Rocket, which refers to low-impact fireworks, lived up to its name at the box office, the experience left him thinking there were “lots of people hating that movie that we don’t know about.”

  Rushmore, however, is different in important ways. Even though it clearly shares the same tender heart and skewed sensibility, the film is the product of an examined life—mostly Anderson’s—whereas Bottle Rocket was a snapshot of a particular moment. It’s a short distance between Max Fischer, the hurting adolescent who is trying to find the right balance of insecurity and bravado, and Wes Anderson as a boy.

  “It definitely couldn’t be more personal. Bottle Rocket was about our behavior at the time. This is about our lives and backgrounds and all that family stuff,” Anderson admits. “When I talk about the story, I talk about it as something we did together, but there’s a tremendous amount of personal connection with me.”

  Indeed, when Anderson speaks of the paradoxes of Max Fischer’s tenure at Rushmore Academy, it sounds as if he’s talking about himself in Hollywood.

  “Max wants to lead everybody, but he wants to do it in a way that uses this whole establishment, kind of,” he says, obviously getting a charge out of divining his and Max’s character. “But he has his own ideas about things. He’s just not a conformist, but he hasn’t, like, reconciled himself with the image he wants to have, you know?”

  Of course. For men and for artists, that’s something that happens a ways down the road, on the larger journey. And that’s if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, even as his much-hoped-for film opens on both coasts, the driver is moving farther into the anonymous middle of America, where for a few days, anyway, he won’t have to reconcile anything. The passenger suggests it’s kind of symbolic.

  “Now that you mention it,” says the driver, “it sounds a little psychological. Like something’s happening, and I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

  Morning Becomes Electra

  Originally published as “Please Don’t Squeeze the Carmen,”

  Bikini, April 1997

  Author’s note: In the mid-nineties, I worked for RayGun Publishing, the iconic and irreverent indie-publishing concern started by Marvin and Jaclyn Jarrett. For a few years, RayGun was a West Coast arbiter of cool. Bikini magazine, which I’d eventually edit, was its tongue-in-cheek pop-culture title.

  In its day, RayGun was a thriving den of underpaid creativity. The famed designer David Carson made his first impressions there. Johnny Knoxville cut his teeth at Bikini and journalist Alex Wagner got hired straight out of college. Many excellent journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and top-notch photographers gained their footing at RayGun during what seems now like a looser, more creative time for magazines.

/>   For a while, I was kind of the starlet-interviewing stunt guy. The conceit being that I’d stand in for the reader on something approximating a “date” with the likes of Shannen Doherty, Jenny McCarthy, Carmen Electra, and others I’m forgetting. They were all good sports and none were easily dismissed. I managed to dig this one up and it seemed as fitting an ode to that era in my life as anything.

  My dear reader, by the time you have reached these words, I trust that the cover teaser, the table of contents, and the headlines will have sufficiently clued you in on the general premise of this article—my “date” with Carmen Electra.

  But, of course, this wasn’t just my date, reader; it was our date. I was merely chosen to represent you, to go in your place, as Carmen would’ve been understandably overwhelmed, perhaps even frightened, had several thousand of us descended upon the appointed romantic rendezvous spot, flowers and candy nervously clutched in our sweaty palms. I had to be the guy. I had to be you. And even now, long after the fact, I can feel the weight of your hopes and dreams as you suffer paper cuts turning the pages to arrive at this point and find out how our date went.

  I would like to tell you that we fared well, that we got to something real, that we fully transcended the self-aware beauty and layers of image-making that separates us from America’s MTV-anointed object of adolescent adulation. And at times, I thought we did…but the thing about first dates is you can never quite tell what’s really going on inside your date’s head…the gleeful laughter could well have been nervous, the broad smiles may have been forced, the warm parting perhaps nothing more than sheer relief. During our “date,” reader, I did not think so. But when a concerned publicist greeted me on the phone “the morning after” with reports of a nervous Carmen thinking she’d perhaps “gone too far,” I had to wonder which way it was for Carmen…and for us.

  I’m sad to report, reader, that this was probably our last date with Carmen. But I’m not sure whom or what is to blame. Were we but gristle on her grill as she burns down the road to phenomenondom? Or, was she simply a doe-eyed innocent caught in the headlights of the image-making machine? Maybe we just weren’t such a hot date. I’m confused, reader, and all I can do is invite you to watch the accident unfold and then crawl with me through the debris in search of clues…

  So, like my editor said, it would be cool if we had, y’know, a date and we talked about dates and stuff. Do you like dates?

  Carmen Electra: Not blind dates, no.

  No? Actually, I was…

  …because, I wouldn’t want to go out with someone I don’t know and be stuck with the whole night. I think that would be miserable.

  I was talking about the fruit.

  I’m sorry?

  The fruit. I was talking about the fruit. Y’know…dates.

  Oh, the fruit. I don’t like those either.

  Can you hear the clunk as clearly as if you were there? You see, reader, God made a face to let you know he could be deadly serious about beauty and he put it on Carmen Electra. So, when confronted with this face as she strode into Geoffrey’s seaside restaurant in Malibu—carrying her lithe, compact, and curvaceous body like all the world was a runway—I thought a cornball joke like the one above might help break the ice. Bad move? Shall we go on? Or, have you had enough already?

  So, when was your first date? Can you remember your actual first, nervous-perspiration date?

  I can remember in kindergarten, having crushes on boys.

  Oh, definitely. I think I had my first orgasm when I was in first grade.

  I think I had mine on the school bus when I was twelve. By accident.

  Really, the bumps?

  Yeah, tight jeans. The Calvin Kleins. We wore them so tight, you’d have to use a hanger to get them off.

  I remember. I was alive then. Did you know what was going on?

  I had no idea. I just thought it was the most amazing feeling I’d felt in my life. Everyday, I sat on the bus, I’d try to repeat the same thing, but it wouldn’t happen again.

  You couldn’t find the right spot…

  Hey, now, you may be thinking, it’s a little early in the date for this kind of talk—and maybe that was our mistake. But why wait, reader? Any first bite could be poison and if we hesitate, there are things we could all go to the grave not knowing. Besides, the restaurant is empty but for Carmen, me, and the staff. We are sitting in the corner of the patio, overlooking the dark sea. A heat lamp the size of the Olympic torch lights our menus and warms our faces. Are you with me now? Carmen takes to the bread with extreme prejudice while I nervously eye the dinner napkin still resting under her cutlery. Cumulonimbus swells offshore, pregnant with an impending monster. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her to order for me…

  Carmen: Are you a vegetarian?

  Pretty much, but I do shrimp and fish and stuff like that.

  How about the fettuccini with shrimp, tomatoes, and spinach?

  Good choice.

  Waiter: Good choice.

  (Still no movement on the napkin.)

  We are all shaped by our experiences. Does anything have ore to do with who we are now than who we were when we were five? When Carmen Electra was five, Jimmy Carter was in his second year at the White House and the idea of taking a herd of American hostages was just hatching in the nether regions of Ayatollah Khomeni’s fundamentalist mind.

  Somewhere in Cincinnati, Ohio, Carmen was quantum leaps ahead of her kindergarten classmates in terms of self-realization. She knew she wanted to be a star, but she didn’t know how—whether it would be from dancing or singing or what? She might have known something else, though.

  Carmen’s mom put her in dance classes and her teacher saw talent. She won her first dance contest, at five, prancing around to Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Did she choose her weapon at that moment?

  The following years were spent honing her dancing and singing skills at The School for Creative Arts until the ninth grade. Then, she decided she wanted to trade in a little of the practice that kept her busy until 9:30 p.m. every night for the possibility of making out with someone under the bleachers, of having people talk about her in the hallways, of riding shotgun in the Z28 IROC, of a normal adolescence. Did it get normal enough for us, reader, to have some common ground?

  I bet she got good grades.

  Did you date the captain of the football team?

  No, I dated a rapper in our high school.

  Oh, yeah? That’s even cooler, right?

  [Laughing.] Yes, exactly.

  Was it Vanilla Ice?

  No…did he live in Cincinnati?

  I don’t know. I think Texas, or something. So, tell me about high school. I want to know all about your history of high school dating. What were your best dates and worst dates? I’d be hard-pressed to remember three dates.

  Yeah, what’s a good date in Ohio?

  You’d meet at McDonald’s, right?

  Yeah, we’d meet at Pizza Hut and run out without paying. Eat and jump in the car. So, I can’t really say I had a good date. That was, like, exciting. It was fun. It was fun to go to King’s Island. That was the big amusement park.

  As she drains her third Coke, reader, I can see Carmen from further away than the tabletop that separates us. I see her off in the distance at a place few of us will ever reach, the place of earliest childhood fantasies realized by the age of twenty-four. The wild-fame welcome wagon at the door, wiretap hidden inside the bouquet of roses, an army of tabloid grubbers in the bushes. Cocked and loaded in the media’s pinball machine. It looks scary to me, and I think to myself that one could easily negotiate that brink of bigness with less grace than Carmen.

  Where does she go when it looks like a steep drop? Is it back to Ohio, to the amusement park where she performed in the magic shows and got sawed in half? Is she up there alone, or are we with her?

 
When we resume the date, Carmen tells me that she never sleeps with anyone on the first date. I’m not so convinced this is a good rule to live by and I bet her the man she marries will be the first one she does sleep with on the first date because he will be unlike the rest and she will know it immediately. But other fundamental differences are now rearing their ugly heads…

  So, you’re a spaghetti slicer, huh?

  Yeah, I don’t like to twist. It messes up my lipstick.

  So, uh…

  Who knows, maybe you’re the one for me and we’ll have sex tonight. (Laughs.) Just kidding.

  I don’t think so. I don’t think we are a good match.

  No?

  I mean, maybe, but…you haven’t put your napkin on your lap yet…and it’s making me nervous. (I try to cover up by saying I’m kidding.) I’m just kidding. (Unfortunately, I’m not.)

  I’ll do it for you.

  (She knew I wasn’t kidding.)

  Maybe the odds were just stacked against us, reader.

  Despite all the innuendo, despite the celebrity pictorial in Playboy, despite the fact that sex may be the most potent weapon in Carmen’s arsenal, she has been with only four men. It’s hard to compete with that level of selectivity. Another thing working against us, reader, is the whole name thing. Carmen seems to go for men with hooky marquee handles. There’s been a “Shan Sparks,” who took her to the junior prom; a “Craig Carrington,” who deflowered her admirably late in the game for a modern girl, and don’t forget the recently departed “B Real” of Cypress Hill. “Prince” is another name she’s been linked to professionally, if not romantically. Let’s admit it: “Joe Donnelly” or __________ (fill in your name here) might just fall a little flat.

  What do you look for in a guy? How do you feel about a sky-blue pickup truck? Is that something you look for in a guy?

  No.

  Oh, then, we’re definitely off.

  I like a person who is a good time, who can have fun under any circumstances, someone who is adventurous. Life is short, and I like to enjoy each day.