I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (2 page)

Would I ever truly understand it? I wondered the morning of my fifty-third birthday as I continued to lie in bed, feeling as if I had even abandoned myself in a way I had yet fully to comprehend. Noon arrived. I had to be at lunch in a matter of an hour over at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills to interview Hugh Jackman for the cover of
Parade.
A siren outside my window was the day’s first wail as I considered the arc of my career. Andy Warhol’s
Interview. Vanity Fair. Parade.
Yep: fifty-three.

I thought back to an earlier birthday. It was the night of the
Vanity Fair
Oscar party at Morton’s—March 27, 1995. Courtney Love was at my table, since she had also requested that I be her escort that night. We had already been spending a lot of time with each other leading up to a cover story for
Vanity Fair
that was scheduled to run in its upcoming May issue and were by then heightened acquaintances of our own.

A couple of months before the
Vanity Fair
party I had flown out to Seattle, where she lived on the shores of Lake Washington. It was to be our first meeting and she had kept me waiting for well over an hour down in the living room of the house she had shared with her late husband, Kurt Cobain. I became bored going over my interview notes by the fourth or fifth time and began to inspect what appeared to be a kind of Buddhist altar set up on a side table. I opened a tiny box positioned there. What exactly could it contain? I picked up a bit of its contents with my fingers and felt the coarseness of the crinkled thread-like stuff I was holding. As I more closely inspected it—even giving it a whiff—Love entered the living room behind me and I heard, for the first time, a voice. Low. Hoarse. Hers. “What are you doing with Kurt’s pubic hair?” she asked.

I ended up conducting most of the interview with her that day as she lay naked in her tub and scrubbed her own pubic hair while I sat on the toilet with the seat down. I also spent many more hours with her on the road as she toured with her band Hole. I swigged vodka from the bottles she offered me both backstage in Salt Lake City and at New York’s Roseland. And I accompanied her to New Orleans to look at real estate. She wanted to own a haunted house, as if the one back in Seattle weren’t haunted enough.

Like Madonna all those years earlier, Love had graciously given me a tour of her home. She’d even unlocked a kind of inner sanctum where Cobain had committed suicide in the studio above the garage, which she’d had converted to a hothouse filled with row upon row of orchids. It was the last thing we did together at the end of a very long day there on the shores of Lake Washington. She walked me into it. Not the studio exactly. Not the hothouse. But the silence Cobain had left there. The light refracted from Lake Washington gilded it all with a silvery grayness. She too touched my arm. We talked about the orchids.

*   *   *

Love had asked me to pick her up at her room at the Chateau Marmont the night of the Oscar party. When I arrived she was not alone but had paired up with a kind of dollish doppelgänger, Amanda de Cadenet, who was then the wife of Duran Duran’s bassist John Taylor. The women were wearing matching dime-store tiaras and were dressed in what appeared to be long, lacy satin slips, as if they had tried on their gowns but then decided to discard such a bourgeois concept as clothing.

“These are the cheapest wedding dresses we could find,” Courtney had insisted when I asked if she and de Cadenet were indeed wearing undergarments to the party. “We are gorgeous lesbians in twenty-dollar dresses,” she grandly stated, then stated it again later, less grandly, with more of a put-upon rock ’n’ roll moll in the mix, when we got to the party and she was interviewed outside by a cadre of roped-off reporters.

The flashbulbs went into a frenzy at the rope line outside Morton’s. The satin from the slips or wedding dresses or whatever it was she and de Cadenet were wearing shimmered in the shock that even those cameras seemed to be registering at such attire, the tacky gimcrackery of their tiaras exposed by the chum of paparazzi. Forget her faux-lesbian pal de Cadenet; this was the real chum for which Love was ravenous. All their posing—chins just so, those chintzy tiaras becoming precariously unpinned—churned the chum even more. Me? I happened to be the bald gay guy who remained completely still between them in the midst of it all, which is an apt description of a certain swath of that town, perennial, patient, that has always been there, dead center.

*   *   *

One of the
Vanity Fair
cover stories that had run before that imminent one on Love was one on Jessica Lange, who was nominated for Best Actress that night for her performance in
Blue Sky.
Madonna, Lange, and Love—they were the three blond muses I thought about the morning of my fifty-third birthday as I lay in bed unable to move. Unbeknownst to Lange—the truest of these muses—she had even been the person who inspired me to embark on the adventure I was about to attempt in a matter of weeks.

There have been times in my job as a chronicler of celebrity that I thought I owed it to an actor or actress to write more than an impertinent puff piece. In those incidences I have tried to mine the ore of stardom, if not art, and find its seam and, in so doing, perhaps discover the very essence of that person. Yet even mining metaphors seemed lacking when dealing with Lange. Her allure—her own gravity, if you will—went deeper than any ore, any seam in it. She had recently returned at that point to live much of the year back on her family farm in Minnesota and by rediscovering her roots she had also rediscovered the gravity one attains from the land itself, the ever-onward trudge atop it, its hold on us all as we walk. There was, she had insisted to me, a mystical grounding one encountered when one was alone with one’s own undergrowth.

“That’s all I do anywhere is walk. Walking for the sake of walking,” she told me when surprising me with a phone call one morning after I thought our interviews had been completed. “But none of that silly walking,” she warned. “That power walking.”

She was piddling around in her kitchen with the phone to her ear, so I asked what she had taped to her refrigerator. The piddling stopped and she read aloud the two quotes I assumed she read silently to herself every time she reached for a carton of milk or some leftovers.

The first was from T. S. Eliot:

“‘We shall not cease from exploration,’” she read, “‘and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’”

She paused, seeming to gather herself before she could go on. “Then there’s this,” she said. “It’s from Kierkegaard. ‘Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But if sitting still—and the more one sits still—the closer one comes to feeling ill. If one just keeps on walking everything will be all right.’”

*   *   *

Lange was allowing herself some silly walking on the red carpet when I watched her arrival at Morton’s after the Oscar ceremony. She clutched her Academy Award in one hand, then the other, its familiar heft—this was her second one after winning for
Tootsie
—something she could handle with a deftness that did not feel foreign to her. Falling leaves, appliquéd onto her sheer bodice, continued in an autumnal tumble down the rest of her gown. I had not noticed that leafy tumble on the TV screen when, in her acceptance speech, she thanked her children for their love and understanding, as well as those who had rescued the film.
Blue Sky
had been completed in 1991 but not released until 1994 because of the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion. She especially thanked Tony Richardson, the film’s director, but seemed careful not to mention his death in 1991 soon after the film was completed. She had spoken of him in the past tense, but that could have been construed as a reference again to how long it had taken the film to be released. If one weren’t an insider in Hollywood one would have never known that this most dashing of men had actually died. Richardson had been the husband of Vanessa Redgrave and the father of Natasha and Joely before he left Redgrave to be able to continue openly his love affair with Jeanne Moreau. He did not become open about his bisexual nature and his other, longer love affair with men until he contracted HIV. He died of AIDS.

Tom Hanks, who had won his Oscar the year before for not only dying of the disease but also humanizing it, had just won his second in a row a few hours earlier. The one he now held was for
Forrest Gump
and a scrum of admirers over there in the middle of Morton’s was trying to make eye contact with him. Over by the bar, Anthony Hopkins was shouting a whisper into Nigel Hawthorne’s cocked ear as if they were on some stage planning the murder of Caesar instead of standing in a din of after-dinner guests. Sharon Stone glided through the throng toward a twenty-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. Over against the wall Tony Curtis was checking me out yet again after telling me earlier that he’d once had a crush on Yul Brynner. “I think that’s why you’re making me feel so odd. You kinda look like him. I haven’t slept with a man in decades, but the night is young,” he’d flirted.

I had wanted to greet Lange at the door, but Pat Kingsley, her PR rep, was insisting she linger a bit longer on the red carpet. Kingsley was the toughest of a tough lot and had at one time or another represented Natalie Wood, Frank Sinatra, Al Pacino, Candice Bergen, Jodie Foster, Richard Gere, Sally Field, Will Smith, and Tom Cruise. I had a grudging respect for Pat and even liked her in spite of our adversarial roles in Hollywood. She was a liberal from the South like me, and though she had the gangly grace of a woman who once perhaps could have been a basketball star with the meanest of hook shots, she was a rabid baseball fan who liked to attend Dodgers games with another of her clients, Doris Day. I marveled at how Kingsley maneuvered Lange with the guileful patience of a major-league manager, a patience so guileful, in fact, that what she was feeling—what Pat seemed to be feeling at that very moment—was not patience at all but a perturbed restraint while taking the measure of the other team on the field.

I had already downed more than my requisite two vodkas and decided Lange and not my bladder would have to wait. When I returned from the bathroom, she had finally been allowed by Kingsley to enter the party and she and Hanks were having a private little laugh, which seemed to gather strength as it rippled through the room until the roar that surged around them—the preening of the privileged herd—had as its source the sound the two of them were making at that very moment when the party itself knew to crest. I huddled at the bar with a few
Vanity Fair
colleagues and reached for another vodka. “… very…” was all I heard Lynn Wyatt say to Betsy Bloomingdale as they passed by me before pausing long enough with George Hamilton to bask, along with him, in his handsomeness.

Was it Hamilton’s overly debonair demeanor that began to depress me so in that instant? Or was it the smell of vomit on the well-upholstered Anna Nicole Smith who had just thrown up in the ladies’ room yet sashayed right past me back into the party, one of her hips hitting me with such unacknowledged force I spilled a bit of my vodka? Whatever the reason, the frivolity of the night began to detach itself from me—fall away—just as that foliage on Lange’s dress was falling away from some unseen tree that began to cast its shadow on the night. I looked at Lange across the room, who seemed to have been feeling the same way. Our eyes met and we smiled wanly at each other. She waved her Oscar-less hand at me and then her Oscar itself, trying to cheer us both up.

Michael J. Fox made his jaunty way through the crowd—nothing wan about him—and stood beside me there at the bar. I had interviewed Fox for a cover story at
Interview
during my Factory days. We remarked on the party and reminisced about my visit to his house years earlier. “But after that interview you left behind a piece of paper with some words on it. My dog Barnaby found it a few days later between the sofa cushions and I took it from him before he could chew it up. I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time,” said Michael. “It was a litany for a word association game.”

I downed the rest of my vodka.

“Yeah,” Fox said, laughing. “Every word was sexual. ‘Pussy.’ ‘Dick’. ‘Cock.’ ‘Fuck.’…”

I moaned, hearing the litany itself lend even more noise to the party, muddying the laughter of a neighboring starlet. With each word Michael had fun flinging back at me I heard how I not only sexualized my own life but tried to do the same thing to others. Sam Shepard had found it so alarming during the conversation I had with him down in a horse stable in Charlottesville for his own
Interview
story that he would have bucked himself if he had not said something. “Everything is sexual to you,” he had stated quietly with a stare so steely it had stopped our conversation for a moment. Where was Shepard? I wondered. Where was that steely stare of his I now so suddenly longed for in this crowd of anxious glances? His absence next to Jessica’s side that night went unmentioned but not unnoticed.

*   *   *

After Michael J. Fox had cornered me with my own coarseness, I looked around for a lifeline. Even Courtney Love would have served the purpose if she and her doppelgänger hadn’t dumped me after dinner to disappear into the party’s swarm. Jessica Lange finally—even sweetly—headed toward me just in the nick of time. As she walked up to Michael and me, I gave her a big hug, more in relief than congratulations, and as I did I caught a glimpse of my wristwatch. “It’s after midnight,” I said in Lange’s ear. “That means it’s March twenty-eighth. My birthday. Shit. I totally forgot. Guess it’s not about you anymore, Jessica. It’s all about me now.”

“Seriously?” she asked. “It’s really your birthday? Okay. Here,” she said, handing me her Oscar as if it were some last-minute gift she’d gotten for me. “Happy birthday. Hold this. It’s getting much too heavy anyway.”