From blackmail to fake marriages, Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson led strange double lives as '50s heartthrobs who were secretly gay.
Even as a kid, watching “Pillow Talk” on Dialing for Dollars during the long, rainy afternoons of the pre-cable era, I knew there was something odd about Rock Hudson. Apparently, a sex comedy can be so devoid of sexual energy that even a child in the latency stage will notice its absence. Later, when I went off to college in the San Francisco Bay Area, I learned what “everyone” knew: Rock Hudson was not only gay, he was the basis for the closeted movie star who romanced one of the male characters in Armistead Maupin’s serialized novel “Tales of the City.” That, I figured, explained Hudson’s implausible performances. Unlike other gay performers, he wasn’t a good enough actor to convincingly simulate the lust for Doris Day that he never personally felt.
On the other hand, the bizarre, glossy comedies Hudson made with Day were huge hits. Plenty of Americans bought Hudson as a heterosexual leading man, enough to make him the No. 1 box office attraction for several years in the ’50s and ’60s. Enough to prompt shrieks of shock and disbelief throughout the land when Hudson died of AIDS in 1985.
Now, having read Robert Hofler’s “The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson,” I have a better understanding of what made Hudson so stilted on-screen. His desire for his leading ladies was patently artificial, yes, but so were his teeth, his walk, his voice, even his smile. Rock Hudson was a male Eliza Doolittle, the masterpiece of Henry Willson, who fabricated a matinee idol out of the raw material of one Roy Fitzgerald, a gauche former sailor and truck driver who could barely cross a room without tripping over his own feet when the two men first met in 1947.
Willson, who started out writing puffery about a set of young film actors for fan magazines in the early 1930s, was a star-maker of genius. Although for a while he worked with the legendary producer David O. Selznick during Selznick’s less than glorious post-”Gone With the Wind” years, mostly Willson was an agent. For a time he was one of the most powerful in Hollywood, and eventually he was — to use a term Hofler is particularly fond of — the most notorious.
Willson represented some big female stars in addition to Hudson: Natalie Wood, Joan Fontaine and Lana Turner, whom he discovered. (He also saw the potential in Montgomery Clift and Alain Delon, though he failed to sign them on.) But Willson’s specialty was handsome, strapping young men, each of whom he rechristened with some preposterously butch moniker: Guy Madison (who inspired a journalist to coin the term “beefcake”), Troy Donahue, John Saxon, Rad Fulton, Race Gentry, Cal Bolder, Clint Connors, etc., even a pair of twins he renamed Dirk and Dack Rambo. Acting ability wasn’t required, conventional good looks were a must and willingness to have sex with the ferret-faced Willson was — while not absolutely necessary — very, very strongly encouraged.
This Article
“The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson”
By Robert Hofler
Carroll & Graf
470 pages
Nonfiction
“Tab Hunter Confidential”
By Tab Hunter
Algonquin Books
358 pages
Nonfiction
“The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson” is a gritty, often coarse but well-researched biography of a tough Hollywood power broker famous for his “Adonis factory.” Its counterpart, also just published, is “Tab Hunter Confidential,” the autobiography of an Adonis and former Willson client. Hunter tells the story of prefab ’50s stardom from the other side of the contract. His career was fairly brief; he was a teen idol, swamped with fan letters and photo requests from pubescent girls for a few years (he received 62,000 valentines in 1956), but he never succeeded in landing any really memorable film roles. Even in Hunter’s heyday, people joked about his synthetic persona the way they joke today about teenybopper acts like Jesse McCartney and Ashlee Simpson. When Hunter’s fame began to dim, he resorted to cheesy B-movies with titles like “Operation Bikini” and an endless grind of dinner-theater engagements that helped him pay the rent and support his ailing mother.
For all that, Hunter seems astonishingly free of bitterness. Most of his indignation is reserved for scandal sheets and two-faced directors and performers who buttered him up in person then, years later, mocked his work. Today, he lives with his younger partner, a producer, and still keeps a hand in the business; he’s a living testimonial to the idea that a sweet disposition is its own reward. The smart, cynical, ruthless Willson wound up a paranoid wreck of a charity case, living in the Motion Picture Country Home, a sort of rest home for indigent show business people, until he died in 1978. As Hofler points out with relish, the master name inventor died without enough funds to put his own name on his grave.
Willson was never able to adjust to the transformation of Hollywood in the post-studio era, or to reconcile himself to the fact that he couldn’t keep spending money the way he did at the peak of Rock Hudson’s fame. (To be fair, much of that money he spent freely and generously on his young clients.) Hunter, by contrast, was flexible enough (and hip enough) to recognize a good thing when cult director John Waters called up to ask him to star in “Polyester” in the early ’80s. His agent at the time was horrified by the idea of Hunter starring alongside the transvestite icon Divine, but the role rejuvenated Hunter’s career.
The most fascinating parts of both these books describe what it was like to be a prominent gay man in 1950s Hollywood. According to Hunter, there was an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement with the industry and press: “the rule was, act discreetly, and people would respect your right to privacy. I’d mastered it.” Hunter’s longest affairs during this time, with the figure skater Ronnie Robertson and fellow actor Anthony Perkins, took place beneath the radar of even the most avidly dirt-sniffing tabloids.
Willson made a point of never living with another man and was draconian in enforcing the same rule with his clients. He was known to drive past a young actor’s house in the dead of night to make sure another man’s car wasn’t injudiciously parked out front. Those who disobeyed soon saw the roles dry up; Willson didn’t want to invest too much effort in a wannabe star who wouldn’t play by the rules. Although he regularly took specimens from his stable of pretty boys to clubs and restaurants, he was never seen with less than two at a time. As he saw it “three men always translated as a night out with the boys, two men read as a date.”
Willson, like his clients, made a practice of escorting an assortment of actresses and other well-known women to premieres and parties. Willson planted items about his “engagements” to several such notables, including the president’s daughter, Margaret Truman, in the press (an engagement that goes unmentioned in her memoirs, written only a few years later). Hunter had an entire alternate-universe love life in fan magazines, where articles elaborated on the ups and downs of his romances with Natalie Wood and Debbie Reynolds. At the peak of “Sigh Guy” mania, whole magazines were devoted to Hunter, featuring fake interviews with Wood about what sorts of presents Hunter gave her and stories elucidating “What Every Girl Should Know About Tab Hunter.” The man himself (real name, Art Gelien), was baffled: “Why did so many people want to see me in these absurdly fake situations?” he writes. “Tab Hunter tries on a sport coat! Tab Hunter goes on a picnic! Tab Hunter water-skis!”
In fact, Hunter’s stardom happened in the press more than on the screen. “Despite being the subject of a publicity barrage,” he writes of the first year or so, “I couldn’t get work.” He had to either go back to his pre-acting jobs of scooping ice cream and mucking out stables or, as Willson preferred, collect unemployment. “Heading to that ugly redbrick government building,” Hunter writes, “I’d pass a newsstand where the latest issues of Photoplay and Movie Life detailed my whirlwind life as a new screen sensation.”
Celebrity journalism was at least as potent in Hunter’s day as it is now; back then it could manufacture its own world. “Those magazines created Tab Hunter, virtually out of whole cloth,” Hunter writes, and he credits them over Willson in making his name. This seems a bit unfair, as Willson was a master at using the press — particularly party photographs. Once Lana Turner became a star, Willson privately set her up with sex dates (according to Hofler, they both appreciated well-endowed young men). In return she agreed to attend a premiere with Willson protigi Rory Calhoun (in reality an ex-con named Francis Durgin). Willson cannily suggested that Turner wear white fur, to play up the contrast between the actress’ blondness and Calhoun’s wolfish, black-Irish good looks and dark suit. The photos of the pair are still striking, shot through with all sorts of vaguely taboo sexual innuendo, and they caused a sensation. Up to that point, Calhoun had uttered precisely one line on film.
Another Willson publicity coup helped launch Rock Hudson, initially a marginally competent actor who needed 36 takes to correctly cough out the line “You’ve got to get a bigger blackboard” in Raoul Walsh’s “Fighter Squadron” (1949). Willson had Hudson and well-known dancer-actress Vera-Ellen attend the fancy dress Press Photographers Ball as twin Oscar statues, covered in gold body paint. (À la “Goldfinger,” the paint nearly asphyxiated Hudson.) Again, the photographs were plastered everywhere.
With Hudson, however, Willson had found both the supreme creation of his star-making career and a source of perpetual worry. Unlike Hunter, Hudson was anything but discreet. One of Hofler’s sources remembers meeting the star at L.A.’s Farmer’s Market at 2 a.m., openly cruising for men. “Henry had his standards,” said Willson’s assistant, “but Rock would sleep with anyone.” Hudson seems to have tried to accomplish just that, demanding sexual favors (“the Rock trap”) from Willson clients who had landed minor roles in his films, and turning up in search of fresh “talent” for threesomes at Willson’s infamously frisky pool parties during the late ’50s and early ’60s. “Rock’s sex drive was enormous,” Van Williams, another Willson client, told Hofler.
As a result, Willson had his hands full fending off blackmailers and spurned lovers once Hudson became a big name. The “dirty deals” of Hofler’s title for the most part all trace back to Rock’s high jinks. There are the off-duty Los Angeles Police Department officers whom Willson and his on-retainer private detectives hired to rough up the guy with the photos of Hudson in flagrante delicto and the boyfriend who threatened to go public unless he was allowed to sit next to Hudson at events. Yet another client insists that he heard Willson call in a bunch of favors from the Mob (he’d provided stars for the opening nights of Las Vegas clubs) to get two of Hudson’s blackmailers “rubbed out.”
The great nemesis of gay Hollywood during the ’50s was Confidential magazine, a scurrilous scandal sheet that reported on peccadilloes the mainstream press and fan magazines wouldn’t touch. Confidential had a standing offer for dirt on Hudson, and two of the star’s ex-lovers had turned down $10,000 offers to tell their stories. It was only a matter of time until Confidential got something juicy on Hudson.
Hence one of the dirtiest deals in Willson’s résumé: In 1955, he fed Confidential information on the criminal past of Rory Calhoun, his own client, and Tab Hunter, whom Willson had never forgiven for firing him and signing on with his archrival, agent Dick Clayton. Hofler maintains that it’s common knowledge that Willson made this trade — dirt on Calhoun and Hunter (who was picked up in a raid on a gay party in 1950) in exchange for protection for Rock Hudson. Hunter doesn’t seem to be aware of it, to judge from his book. In later years, Willson took to claiming that J. Edgar Hoover would “take care” of any blackmailers for him, and Hofler comes up with some mighty suggestive, if inconclusive remarks about an “informant” in the FBI file on Hudson.
Surprisingly, the Confidential exposés did little to hurt Calhoun, whose bad boy image was only burnished by the revelations of his “hardcore criminal past.” Even Hunter emerged relatively unscathed. The circulation of Confidential was too small to affect his public image and even when, two years later, Hunter was dragged into a libel trial against the magazine, it didn’t affect him much. “In 1957 the mainstream media couldn’t even come up with adequate euphemisms for homosexuality — that’s how taboo it still was,” he writes. So the press stuck to tales of alleged heterosexual misbehavior and left the more unspeakable rumors alone.
The media did wind up killing Hunter’s career, just as he was trying to establish himself as a TV star, but not as a result of his sexuality. He was raked over the coals because his neighbors in Glendale took offense when he rejected their dinner invitations and refused to linger with the local girls who “accidentally” bumped into him outside his front gate. In revenge, they accused him of savagely beating his dog, Fritz, a particularly egregious charge considering Hunter is a great animal lover. He was eventually cleared in a media circus trial, but the damage was done. Ironically, as Hofler points out, “Tab’s demise had little to do with a gay arrest, which was completely substantiated, and more to do with the dog-beating charge, which was completely unfounded.”
As for Willson’s prudence, in the end it didn’t really pay off. After narrowly averting a Rock-related crisis, the agent insisted that his top star marry quickly to squelch any further rumors. Willson’s own secretary, Phyllis Gates, was the sacrificial beard. To the bitter end, Gates made the improbable claim that she went into it not realizing that Hudson was gay, but for the rest of Hollywood the wedding had the opposite of the intended effect. “When Rock got married — that’s when the industry just laughed itself silly,” Debbie Reynolds told a reporter for Buzz magazine. “Then people started talking about [Rock's homosexuality].”
“It was the biggest blow to Henry’s career,” Van Williams told Hofler. “It put a seal of finality on it, that it was true: Henry was gay, Rock was gay, a number of his clients were gay. He had a lot of straight clients, but they got the reputation: if you’re with Henry Willson, you got to be a fag.” As Hofler discovered in doing some digging of his own, several former Willson clients — most notably Robert Wagner — began to deny that they’d ever worked with him. The man who’d made his name as — and based his identity on being — a creator of stars had ended up repelling them.
There are two noteworthy low points described in these books. In “Tab Hunter Confidential,” Hunter, caught on the dinner theater treadmill, looks up at the marquee of an establishment where he’s set to perform that night and sees that the sign reads not “Tab Hunter in Bye Bye Birdie” but “Special Tonite: Lobster $9.95.” In “The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson,” Willson, by 1972, is reduced to bartering his antiques and silverware with his housekeeper in exchange for her continued services: “I’ll give you this lamp if you stay another week.”
Both incidents are mortifying, but instructively so. Hunter, blessed with the virtue of humility, has lived to offer up his own setbacks for laughs. He might have played Hollywood’s game, but he didn’t invest in it or believe in it too deeply, and when it was time to let go, he did. Cheap lobster outranked him on the marquee, but he was working. Willson, by contrast, was pathetically trying to shore up a lifestyle he could no longer afford by selling it off piece by piece. Willson was a brilliant identifier of talent, a consummate showbiz professional, a double-crosser, a cutthroat competitor, a shark. Hunter was a modest talent, an innocent, starry-eyed and inconveniently idealistic. It’s funny which one turned out to be the real survivor.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
My tryst with Spencer Tracy
In this excerpt from a controversial new book, a Hollywood bartender recalls his nights of passion with the star
By the mid-fifties, Los Angeles was changing. Its population had reached two million, making it the fourth largest city in the nation after New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Mike Romanoff had opened his fancy new Romanoff ’s restaurant on Rodeo Drive. Robinsons had launched its flagship department store at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. The gigantic new CBS Television City was under construction in Hollywood, intended primarily for the development and production of color television programming. After being temporarily closed down for financial reasons, the Hollywood Bowl reopened and celebrated its thirty-third season of music and entertainment under the stars.
My daughter Donna had grown into a beautiful little girl with sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair. She was a good student, attending a grammar school on the corner of Beachwood Drive and Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood, not too far from our small apartment. Even though I did not see much of her due to my vagabond lifestyle, I adored her.
As for my good friend George Cukor, he had made extensive alterations to his property on Cordell Drive in West Los Angeles. On the western side of his large home he had built two smaller houses. The interior of his own dwelling had been redecorated by Bill Haines, the art director and designer who had taken me up as his guest to San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s spectacular residence on the Pacific coast back when I was a kid on a weekend pass during my boot camp days in the Marines. The orange grove around George’s house had been replaced by landscaped gardens. One of the two new houses George built was rented out to Martin Pollard, a very successful and high-profile local Chevrolet dealer. The other one, where George’s property fronted onto St. Ives Drive, was rented out to famed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer megastar Spencer Tracy. George and Tracy were the best of friends. They respected one another’s talents enormously. The two of them had first worked together at MGM in 1942 on the very successful romantic drama “Keeper of the Flame,” in which Tracy costarred with Katharine Hepburn.
Tracy was still a Hollywood phenomenon. During the forties there was a saying in the film industry that MGM had more stars in its firmament than there were in heaven. Tracy was one of the biggest and brightest. In a career spanning more than four decades he would be nominated for nine Academy Awards. He won two, for Best Actor in “Captains Courageous” in 1937 and for Best Actor in “Boys Town” in 1938.
When George heard that I was no longer working as a bartender at the 881 Club he invited me over for brunch one Sunday. And that was the first time I met Spencer Tracy. By then I was used to being in the company of big names, but Tracy was different. He was an actor of almost mythical proportions. People felt humbled in his presence. When I arrived at George’s place and saw Tracy lounging at the pool my heart skipped a beat. How was I going to react? What could I possibly talk to him about? Would I be intimidated by him? All doubts and fears were cast asunder as soon as George introduced me to him. Tracy was the easiest guy in the world to get along with. Because George didn’t drink, and typically didn’t have any wine or booze at home, Tracy had brought a large flask of scotch with him. The three of us sat around the pool as these two great talents of the cinema talked shop. George was never one for long, drawn out social gatherings, so by three o’clock Tracy excused himself and trotted up the driveway to the gate and then down the block to the house that he was renting on the west side of George’s property. It was the maid’s day off, so I decided to linger for a while and help George clear up. As we busied ourselves in the kitchen George told me that Tracy had married his wife, actress Louise Treadwell, back in 1923, the very year I was born. They had a palatial place somewhere in Beverly Hills. But Tracy desperately needed his space and his privacy. He therefore often lived alone in the house he rented from George. His marriage to Louise would last until his death in 1967. They had two children, a son John, born in 1924, and a daughter Susie, born in 1932. Sadly, John was born deaf and there was little doctors could do to help him. News of this unfortunate state of affairs never got into the press. Few people knew about it or about how much Tracy anguished over his son’s debilitation. Louise devoted the rest of her life to helping deaf children through the John Tracy Clinic, which she established in Los Angeles in the early forties. Tracy was very supportive of her charitable efforts and funded much of the operating costs of the clinic himself. He was a generous, good-hearted man.
As we stashed away dishes and glassware, George and I also discussed the phony romance between Tracy and Katharine Hepburn that the studio and the publicists had concocted for public consumption. The invented story had been so well managed that the press and public alike accepted it without question. People across the United States and around the world gave it so much credence that both Tracy and Hepburn had little choice but to pretend that it was true. Whenever they worked on a movie together flashbulbs popped. They were hounded by the paparazzi if they were known to be dining out at a restaurant or seen with other members of a film’s cast, dancing at the Coconut Grove. On movie productions they were always given trailers, dressing rooms, hotel suites, or bungalows alongside one another to keep the myth alive. And they both played the part. It was as though they were performing in a movie within a movie whenever they did a picture together. Such was the power of the studio publicity machine. It was like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor story all over again. Except in this case none of it was true. Hired Hollywood spin doctors even went so far as to say that the reason Tracy never divorced his wife Louise to marry Kate was because of his Catholic upbringing which, according to church decree, forbade divorce. It was all so farcical.
Tracy looked and behaved as masculine as they come. Think Sylvester Stallone, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Anthony Quinn. They don’t come manlier than that. To the world — on-screen and off — Spencer Tracy was like them. Once I had started bartending more or less full time I saw Tracy a couple of times at small dinner parties, especially at George’s place, and progressively began to know him better. As our acquaintanceship developed I began calling him Spence, which he preferred over Spencer. Kate Hepburn called him Spence, too.
One day — I don’t remember exactly why — I got a call from Spence. He knew that in addition to working at parties and private dinners I was also available for general handyman chores and, if memory serves me correctly, I think he wanted me to take a look at his hot water cylinder or something like that. When I arrived at about two o’clock in the afternoon he was sitting in his living room listening to classical music, thumbing through a screenplay, and drinking scotch. The rented house was perfect for his needs, especially when he was working. He could spend time alone there relaxing, learning his lines, and developing his characters. And boozing. Lots of boozing. Other than Errol Flynn I seldom saw anyone put away as much alcohol as Spence did. On that particular afternoon he seemed pretty low. Apparently he had been over to his house that morning to see his wife and something had obviously upset him. He didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps it was something to do with his son John’s hearing affliction. Who knows? Anyway, I believe that I messed around with his hot water heater while he kept throwing back scotch after scotch. By sundown he must have finished an entire bottle. I offered to put together a light meal for him, which he agreed to. The next thing I knew another bottle of scotch came out and he was downing the stuff like orange juice.
As evening settled around us I laid out the meal I’d prepared and joined him in the living room. To distract him from his melancholic mood I asked him to talk about the script he had been paging through earlier that day. Flinging it across the table at me, with his words now slurring noticeably, he told me that it was for a picture called “Pat and Mike” that he was going to star in with Kate Hepburn later that year. And that’s what pierced a hole in the hornet’s nest. The minute he started talking about Kate something deep inside him was unleashed. He launched into a tirade about her. This was not the cool, calm, collected Spencer Tracy we were all familiar with through the characters he played on-screen. This was an angry, bitter, bruised man. He had been hurt by her. Slurring and stumbling over his words he told me that she was always rude to him, that she treated him like dirt, that she was contemptuous of him. Nothing about their great tabloid romance matched up with what Spence was telling me that evening as night fell.
Before I knew it, it was past midnight. Finally, after another empty bottle of scotch stood on the coffee table he began to undress and begged me not to leave him. I did not have the heart to say no. It was clear to me that Spence desperately needed someone to be with him. He was hurting badly. I could only assume that his pseudo-romance with Kate Hepburn was causing him this distress. I turned off the lights, undressed him, then got undressed myself, climbed into bed with him, and held him tightly like a baby. He continued to slobber and curse and complain. By then he had had so much to drink that I hardly understood a word he was saying. I tried to pacify him by saying that by morning all would be well and that we should try to get some sleep, but he wasn’t ready for that. Instead, he lay his head down at my groin, took hold of my penis and began nibbling on my foreskin. This was the last guy on earth that I expected an overture like that from, but I was more than happy to oblige him and despite his inebriated state we had an hour or so of pretty good sex.
At about four in the morning I woke up with a start. Spence had got out of bed and was stumbling around the bedroom trying to find the door to the bathroom to take an urgently needed pee. He fumbled for the light switch but couldn’t find it, so he just let loose. One moment he was urinating up against the drapes, the next into an open closet, then all over the carpet. Finally he fell back into bed and immediately lapsed into a deep sleep, snoring like an express train.
The next morning there wasn’t even the slightest hint of how drunk he’d been, that he’d pissed in the corner of the bedroom, or that we’d had sex together. He didn’t say a word about it. It was as though none of it ever happened.
That was the first of many sexual encounters I had with Spence. Sometimes I would go to his place at five in the afternoon and sit around the kitchen table with him until two in the morning as he drank himself into a stupor. Then he would be ready for a little sex. Despite everything, he was a damn good lover. The great Spencer Tracy was another bisexual man, a fact totally concealed by the studio publicity department. That is, if they ever knew about it at all.
A voice that touched us all
Like Michael Jackson, another icon lost to addiction and fame, Whitney was an awe-inspiring, genre-crossing pioneer
Whitney Houston performs during the Billboard Awards at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Dec. 7, 1998. (Credit: AP)
On Thursday night, Whitney Houston appeared at the Kelly Price & Friends Unplugged: For The Love of R&B pre-Grammys event. Amateur YouTube footage of the singer’s performance hinted at hysteria: Audience members screamed her name and flashbulbs exploded as she crooned the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me” in a sultry lower register as a duet with Price. The version of the song was gentle and tempered, although Houston’s beatific looks and animated gestures imbued it with quiet jubilance.
The performance feels sickeningly eerie on the heels of Houston’s death Saturday at 48. Both the song and her duet partner were links to the singer’s decorated past: Price featured on her Grammy-nominated 1999 single “Heartbreak Hotel” and a studio version of “Jesus Loves Me” appeared on the soundtrack of “The Bodyguard,” the 1992 album which made Houston a megastar. What’s more, she looked healthy and sounded strong; there were no warning signs that the brief appearance would be her last. (Though the photos of her returning to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Friday night tell a different story.) Houston, whose reputation was marred by a turbulent marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown (and a disastrous reality show about their lives together) and well-publicized struggles with addiction, finally seemed well enough to reboot her singing career.
Despite erratic public behavior and increasingly unsteady live performances, Houston always had fans who rooted for her recovery, who wanted her to recapture her powerhouse voice and magnetic personality. Born into music royalty — her mom was the gospel icon Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick and her godmother soul great Aretha Franklin — the New Jersey native cut her teeth singing gospel in church, modeling and acting. By the time she earned a record deal, Whitney (like Madonna, Prince and Michael, one name was enough to identify her) was an enviable combination of glamorous and casual. On 1985’s “Whitney Houston” and 1987’s “Whitney,” her spin on contemporaneous soft rock, R&B, soul and gospel was mature but not stuffy or beholden to formality; on early hit singles, she struck a balance between playful longing (“How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “So Emotional”) and serious balladry (“Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “Saving All My Love For You”). To little girls growing up in the ‘80s, Whitney Houston and Madonna were the artists you emulated and sang along to (loudly); they were the powerful, confident women you heard on the radio all the time, the pair you strove to be like.
However, Houston was also more than likely the artist your mom (if not grandmother) liked, which helped her ease gracefully into an adult career. That period arguably started with her dual starring acting role/soundtrack appearances on 1992’s “The Bodyguard,” a movie in which Kevin Costner played her protector. If her ‘80s tunes made her a household name, her interpretation of the Dolly Parton-penned “I Will Always Love You” sent her into the stratosphere. To this day, Houston’s soft-rock re-do of the country hit endures as an awe-inspiring performance: octave-dancing vocal prowess, nuanced emotional longing and the kind of subtlety hard to find in today’s mainstream music, in the form of her dramatic pause near the end of the song before she launches into the climactic, “And I…will always love youuuuu… .”
Houston would never top “The Bodyguard” and its monstrous success. (Besides “I Will Always Love You,” the soundtrack spawned the torchy hit “I Have Nothing” and a disco-soul remake of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman.”) And although she continued to evolve into a graceful R&B singer and rack up winning singles — throughout the 1990s, hits came from the soundtracks of “Waiting To Exhale,” “The Preacher’s Wife” and “The Prince Of Egypt” and her 1998 solo album, “My Love Is Your Love” — her problems with drugs and a chaotic marriage soon took a toll on her public persona. Rumors of substance abuse swirled around her — something not helped when marijuana was found in her and Brown’s luggage in 2000 — and in a 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, a defensive Houston uttered these infamous sentences: “Crack is cheap; I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let’s get that straight, okay? We don’t do crack, we don’t do that. Crack is wack.” The latter catchphrase caused an uproar and did irreparable damage to her reputation.
But Houston persevered — and eventually came clean about her private turmoil. In a 2009 Oprah Winfrey interview, a calmer Houston — her voice noticeably raspier and lower — was open about abusing cocaine and marijuana, and admitted the post-”Bodyguard” era was tough: “By ’The Preacher’s Wife,’ [doing drugs] was an everyday thing. … I would do my work, but after I did my work, for a whole year or two, it was everyday.” Her marriage to Brown was troubled, she told Oprah, including a time when he spit in her face in front of their daughter, Bobbi. The couple divorced in 2007.
In recent years, Houston’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. 2009’s “I Look to You” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and the song “Million Dollar Bill” also hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play charts, but lukewarm-to-critical reception marred her 2010 world tour and she entered outpatient rehab as recently as May 2011. Still, in her recent public appearances she seemed upbeat and healthy; it seemed plausible she could follow in the footsteps of Tina Turner, who rejuvenated her career after extricating herself from an abusive domestic situation.
But with her premature death, it’s hard not to compare Houston to Michael Jackson, another ‘80s megastar who died young, crippled by addiction and the burdens of fame. Like the King Of Pop, Houston was a pioneer, one who broke open racial barriers so that other soul/R&B artists could have a shot at mainstream success. “The Bodyguard” was Houston’s “Thriller,” the career albatross from which she could never escape. And just as MJ reinvented the concept of the male pop star, Houston did the same for women. She was vulnerable and girlish, but never let those qualities undermine her talent, something fellow huge-voiced diva Mariah Carey took to heart. And Houston exuded confidence in every aspect of her career — of course because of her voice, but also because of her expressive interpretations. She could have bludgeoned listeners over the head with just the sheer power of her voice — but instead, Houston approached her songs like an actress inhabiting a character, squeezing emotion from every lyric with sincerity, grace and elegance.
Why shouldn’t Demi Moore be “stressed”?
A 911 call sends her to the hospital -- and brings out class resentment
Demi Moore (Credit: AP/Victoria Will)
At 10:49 Monday night, a 911 call summoned an ambulance to the home of actress and producer Demi Moore. Within half an hour, a team was on the scene, had assessed her condition, and taken her to a local hospital. That’s about double the amount of time it took for Internet critics to take aim at her.
In a cryptic statement Tuesday, a spokesman for Moore announced, “Because of the stresses in her life right now, Demi has chosen to seek professional assistance to treat her exhaustion and improve her overall health. She looks forward to getting well and is grateful for the support of her family and friends.” She has since dropped out of the biopic “Lovelace,” where she was set to play Gloria Steinem.
You don’t have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to suspect there’s more to the story than “exhaustion.” Exhaustion doesn’t usually merit a 911 call. And an anonymous source who claims to have seen the incident report told E! Tuesday that Moore was “shaking” and otherwise “acting like she was suffering from a seizure,” which certainly sounds like something serious went down – and may have been part of a larger problem.
But from the moment the news broke, there was skepticism that a beautiful, wealthy woman — even one whose recent divorce proceedings render her Twitter handle painfully obsolete — could have it all that bad. The very first response on E! was a weary “Stress? What stress? I swear, these Hollywood socialites wouldn’t last a minute in the real world!” TMZ, where the story originally broke, had similar sentiments. “Stress? WTF! Obviously she hasn’t been out in real America lately,” wrote one disgusted commenter. On People, a commenter complained, “I am exhausted too. Where is my article in People?” while another said, “For rich people it’s called exhaustion. For the rest of America it’s called working a full time job, plus overtime, running a household, raising kids and paying your bills. Now I know why I am exhausted.” A commenter named Lucy added, “Try working 2 jobs, 60 hours a week, looking after your own household with no hired help and tell me about exhaustion! ” And at ABC News, a woman named Ann wrote, “I look frail and tired EVERY DAY. I am fed up with rich has-beens being a piece of ‘news.’” Wow, all that real-world stress and exhaustion sure makes people angry.
The idea that a lady with an army of handlers to clean her mansion, iron her designer clothes, and mix up her cleanse shakes is stressed out may justifiably stick in the craw of anyone trying to wring one more winter out of that crappy pair of Payless boots. The story, for Moore’s detractors, is black and white: Entitled woman with a jet-set lifestyle hits a bumpy patch when her marriage to her handsome TV star husband flatlines, can’t handle the “real” world, and has the luxury of retreating to some zillion-dollar-a-week oasis where she is no doubt right now getting a caviar and gold leaf facial – all while the rest of us are picking off-brand Cheerios out of the carpet.
Divorce, sickness, job insecurity and family obligations happen to the rich and poor, the famous and the obscure. And very, very few among us have the resources of a “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” star. There are no medals or cash prizes handed out for enduring hardship without a personal trainer or Kabbalah retreat. But it’s certainly not as if a celebrity’s choice to “seek professional assistance” creates a shortage of it for everybody else. Some movie star’s in treatment? Oh well, dammit, now where are the rest of us supposed to go? She’s doing something for her health? Gosh, what a bitch.
If, for whatever reason at all – the end of your marriage, the disappointment of a professional flop, the plain old chemistry in your brain – you were at the end of your rope, wouldn’t the absolute best and smartest thing in the world be to get whatever assistance you possibly could? Or does having a big bank account somehow render an individual impervious to heartbreak or depression? Because I’ve got to say, based on what we know of celebrity, it does not.
There’s still far too much stigma attached to the issues of mental and emotional health and illness. And the idea that anyone, regardless of fame or income, isn’t supposed to be affected by profoundly life-changing events is absurd. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that getting help is for the weak. Just because you can afford “exhaustion,” there’s still no shame in having it — and there’s no shame in getting treated for it. Sure, most of us have to get through storms on the strength of our own, decidedly low-budget, counsel and support. But we still find it in our own ways, because we need to in order to survive. And those who don’t aren’t stronger or more “real” – they just tend to become angry commenters on the Internet.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams
The death of the celebrity memoir
We can thank Snooki for something: Finally, this annoying publishing trend looks like it is fizzling out
(Credit: sgame via Shutterstock)
In a recent essay for the Daily Beast, Michael Korda, the storied former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, warned the public to stay away from celebrity memoirs, decrying the majority of these books as “dull, homogenized, bland and sanitized.” He ought to know, for as he goes on to explain, he spent much of his professional life trying to persuade movie stars to write their autobiographies. (One of the ironies here is that Korda, while a celebrity only in the book world — which means not much of a celebrity at all — is famous for writing divertingly about almost any topic, including himself. This piece is no exception.)
A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore.” Could the public finally be wising up?
Of course, the cause might just be the low caliber of the celebrities in question. I didn’t recognize any of the names the Guardian held up as fizzling memoirists — except for Alan Partridge, who isn’t even a real person. “I, Partridge” was in fact written by the actor-writer-director Steve Coogan, who created the character of Partridge for a television series parodying B-list chat-show hosts and other effluvia of the media world. His book is a parody of celebrity memoirs, and reportedly the only “significant” title in a genre whose sales have dropped 60 percent in the past year.
However, I suspect it’s mostly just wishful thinking that has some observers pegging the celebrity memoir as a fading trend. It’s hard for me to say for sure, though, because I seem to have a much lower than average interest in the people who write them. To be honest, apart from a couple of episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” back when it first came out, I’ve never watched a reality TV show. (My feeling is that if I’m going to be entertained, I’ll go to professionals.) So I still don’t really know who Snooki is, and when I asked friends and acquaintances to fill me in around the time her book came out, they all said. “You’re lucky. You’re much better off not knowing.”
Most celebrities are actors of some kind, and my (somewhat limited) experience writing movie and television journalism has led me to conclude that actors are some of the least interesting people in the arts. That doesn’t mean I’m not regularly awestruck by the work they create; I just really don’t want to listen to them talk about it. Or about their personal lives. And I certainly don’t want to read about either one. The more famous and rich an actor is, the more controlled, frictionless and therefore insipid his or her life is likely to be. As Korda writes, “Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.”
I’m not talking about creative visionaries like Patti Smith or innovators like Tina Fey, real writers whose ability to reflect thoughtfully on their own work and lives is unquestioned. Their books don’t exist for the sole reason that the people who wrote them are famous and know some other famous people; often, they aren’t even thought of as celebrity memoirs in the first place. The true celebrity memoir is “written” (that is, ghostwritten for) what used to be called “entertainment personalities,” namely, movie and television stars.
A movie star, like a politician, has usually spent much time, effort and money to construct a public persona, and, as Korda explains, such people are “seldom likely to want to deface their images, or to puncture the balloon of their egos merely to sell books.” (The money to be made on even a successful book is dwarfed by the fees for starring in Hollywood movies.) For this reason, most famous actors’ memoirs are bland and cautious, but even if they were willing to “tell the truth” — the thing, according to Korda, that every book publisher hopes for — that truth is unlikely to be worth the price of a hardcover book.
The example he uses is the film actor Glenn Ford, whose memoir the agent, Swifty Lazar (a more entertaining character than any actor Korda mentions), once tried to peddle. Ford had co-starred and been infatuated with Rita Hayworth (the Angelina Jolie of her time). But they’d never slept together, which put him in a fairly similar position to every other guy in America except Orson Welles. Who cares? And if Ford had slept with Hayworth? Is that really enough to justify the other 250 pages of a no-doubt tedious book chronicling Ford’s childhood in Canada and early theater work in Santa Monica? Sort of a moot point, that, since Ford clammed up at the very mention of the Hayworth non-affair.
Perhaps reality-TV stars have arisen to fill the candidness deficit created by people who are famous for some good reason. That movie star or top athlete is never going to ‘fess up about his or her private quarrels and most humiliating intimate or professional moments; they don’t have to. But reality-TV stars exist for the sole purpose of having embarrassing experiences in the public eye. They aren’t just willing to talk about this stuff: it’s their job. They’ve got nothing else to talk about.
Again, I’m the opposite of an expert in this department, but I do have a certain perspective to offer. Because I don’t watch reality TV, my impression of it is constructed entirely from conversations with people who do watch it. With the exception of a handful of contest shows like “Project Runway,” I’ve never heard anyone speak of the characters in reality TV shows without contempt. Often they will go on and on about how awful these people are. Whatever lofty anthropological reasons some of them may offer for watching the shows, from my perspective it seems that their chief appeal lies in giving viewers someone to look down on.
But while Americans may take great pleasure in collectively groaning over whatever risible antics Snooki gets up to for a half-hour every week, it’s no surprise that this would not translate into sales of her book. Surely people buy celebrity books not because they’re anticipating a satisfying literary experience, but rather to own a tangible piece of that individual’s stardom. (Also: Autograph tours are an obligatory element in the publication of any celebrity-authored title, so they get a chance to meet their idol face-to-face.) It’s another way of expressing one’s fandom. If the whole point of Snooki is hating on her, why would anyone want to purchase a bookful of that?
Celebrity memoirs make some commenters very, very angry. Although the genre has been around (in one version or another) for at least a century, the latest iteration is often held up as Exhibit A in arguments for the disgraceful state of book publishing. I can’t get too worked up about this. It makes as much sense as ranting about the abundance and popularity of books on any topics that don’t interest me personally (i.e., golf — lotta golf books out there).
Besides, the indignation seems misdirected. Publishers publish these titles because (until recently, at least), they do sell. For all the hopeful talk of declining enthusiasm for the genre, it’s worth noting that “Kardashian Konfidential” has sold well over 100,000 copies. Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress,” published in 2004, has sold over 1 million worldwide.
Doesn’t the problem here lie instead with the buyers of such books? (Seriously: Since I have such a hard time imagining why anyone would do so, if you have bought one of these celebrity memoirs, would you be so generous as to explain your motives in the comments thread?) Every time someone told me I was fortunate in not knowing who Snooki or Kim Kardashian are, I couldn’t help wondering why they chose to know so much about her themselves. Perhaps they secretly enjoy their own theatrical disgust with the state of American culture and society.
If we really wanted these annoying figures to go away, the solution is pretty simple: Stop paying attention to them. I’m here to testify that this is very easy to do. You, too, can know next to nothing about the Situation or Tila Tequila (whoever they are!), if they really bother you that much. A blank expression will pass over your face when their names are mentioned in conversation, and when you see placards announcing their forthcoming appearances at chain bookstores, you’ll frown vaguely, shrug and keep walking toward the shelves with the real books.
Further reading
Michael Korda on the dullness of Hollywood memoirs
The Guardian on flagging sales of celebrity memoirs
The Hollywood Reporter on the failure of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s “A Shore Thing.”
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller
How to sell furniture to celebrities
I worked at a luxury store in LA where people like Jennifer Lopez and Sharon Stone shopped. Here's what I learned
(Credit: minerva86 via Shutterstock)
I spent the first eight months of 2004 in Los Angeles selling expensive furniture to rich people. In the center of the store sat a colossal white sofa, extremely uncomfortable, which could be purchased for $8,000. No one bought it. A full set of silverware would set you back something like $15,000. No takers. A mink throw – $7,500 – also did not sell. Another mink throw, available for $5,000, actually did sell. In fact, I sold it. My single biggest commission. A frosty rich lady once bought an entire set of handcrafted Italian dishes: my second biggest commission. On the whole, though, I wasn’t a very good salesman. I sold lots of tablecloths. Glasses, too. I sold a lot of glasses.
One thing I learned: Rich people like a little pushback. They enter a store acutely aware of their wealth and what it means in this context, and this knowledge, by definition, is tied up with their sense of self-worth, for better or worse. They want you to be serious and professional with them, but they also want you to be able to slap their hand when they go astray. Mostly, they want you to care, even if they’re talking about decorative pillows. They want you, in short, to be like Jeeves, or Bruce Wayne’s Alfred. They’re the boss, sure, but if you’re not in control, they’ll eat you alive.
“Will this candlestick work with that table?” they’d ask, and I’d sigh wearily. Feigning nonchalance despite my terrifying ignorance, I would not look at them when I talked. With regard to the candlesticks, I’d talk to the table itself — explain that it depended on the context, depended on the room. I’d ask questions about the windows, the paint, the ceiling, and then, eventually, I’d pretend to grasp the situation. At that point I’d declare that, yes, the candlestick would work on that table. They’d buy the candlestick, not the table. Of course, if I were a great salesman, I wouldn’t have asked questions, would have just demonstrated how such a table only worked with four of those candlesticks, especially when accompanied by certain handmade placemats and napkins, etc. They’d see a fictitious version of their life, conducted at that particular table, and they’d attempt to acquire it by buying it all. And, as with a great dentist, it’d all happen without them realizing that someone was working on them.
Bridget Fonda, who had married film composer Danny Elfman and had stopped appearing in movies, shopped there compulsively. I have vivid memories of loading cumbersome decorative pots into the trunk of Elfman’s Maserati. Zach de La Rocha, the former frontman of Rage Against the Machine, apparently had a lot of time on his hands, too, because he drove his cool Mercedes over all the time and drank coffee at the cafe attached to the store by himself. He looked desperately bored and was always alone. Nicole Richie was not alone when she came to the cafe, nor was Kevin Costner. Victoria Beckham wore her sunglasses indoors, throughout lunch. David Schwimmer came a few times, alone, and was precisely as bitter and patronizing as you’d expect him to be. Gary Oldman was completely banal, just a middle-aged man shopping for furniture with his impossibly gorgeous 20-something lady friend.
Sharon Stone was bitchy and magnificent, a bombshell even without her makeup. I liked her sass. Unfortunately, when she came in I was wearing my apron. We were supposed to wear these short black aprons, but sometimes they were more humiliating than other times. She was there to buy a Missoni bathrobe for someone and she kept trying to tell me that this guy was a titanic, an ogre. He was like the yeti, but bigger. We had a XXXL robe, but she still wasn’t convinced it was big enough. I’m 6-foot-2, built like Zach Galifianakis, but when I put the robe on for her and stood on my tippy toes, she just winced, told me he was at least twice my size.
Eventually, she gave in and bought the robe, plus several $250 coral-encrusted pillows.
The brittle-thin and very short character actress Linda Hunt — you’d recognize her if you saw her, she’s everywhere on TV, often with a prominent spot on unmemorable shows like “NCIS Los Angeles” — entered with her wife, who resembles Joan Didion. Hunt might have been the most appealing person I met that whole year in Los Angeles. She was grandmotherly, hilarious and familiar, even a little flirtatious as she chided me for trying to upsell her into buying a pair of $450 wicker chairs. Still, she wavered — she loved the chairs, really loved them, but she kept doubting herself, saying they were too big for someone her size. Then she’d acknowledge, with help from her wife, that the chairs would probably be used mainly by other normal-size people. In the end, I think she said something to the effect of, “I’m sorry, I know it’d be a good commission for you, but I just can’t do it,” and left empty-handed. She never learned my name, but she talked to me like I was a human being, like we were both human beings. When she left, I wanted to chase her out and buy her a beer.
Most people, learning that I was a writer, assumed I wrote screenplays and would give me their cards, begin talking about their film projects. I’d have to explain that I wrote for the page, for reading. At which point they would halt, midstream, and gaze at me with delight, like I was some charming curio in an antique shop, a lovely anachronism. Then they would walk away.
Jennifer Lopez didn’t ask me what I did outside of the furniture store, fortunately. She was pleasant enough, but her then-fiancée, Marc Anthony, stood to the side, glowering, and I was immediately possessed by a visceral hatred for him. She wore a white hat pulled down low on her head to prevent people from recognizing her, but when she leaned across the counter and locked eyes with me and I realized who she was and then briefly and involuntarily gawked at her, mouth ajar, she smiled sweetly, no doubt accustomed to stunned shopkeepers. You hope you’d remember that these people are just people, after all, people who have to floss and deal with bad traffic, who wear uncomfortable shoes and regret it, but then they’re in front of you all of a sudden asking you questions and it slips your mind. Like so much in Los Angeles, it’s humiliating. Lopez walked around the store and I followed, hypnotized by the pendulum swings of her hips. What I thought to myself was: “I am looking at Jennifer Lopez’s ass.” That was the depth of my insight.
She told me that she wanted many, many dainty English teacups. But our dainty English teacups weren’t quite dainty enough. Instead she bought 50 napkin rings. Or, she picked them out and Marc Anthony paid for them. He had a black American Express card, which signifies an ominous degree of wealth, and, looking at it, I noticed that his name was not “Marc Anthony” at all. He had a string of names and none of them were “Marc” or “Anthony.”
A week later, the two of them were married in a small ceremony with about 50 guests. Then the napkin rings made sense.
A week before her divorce from John Stamos became public information Rebecca Romijn-Stamos entered five minutes before closing with a tall gay man who wore comically long and pointy shoes. I didn’t recognize her. It’d been a long day, a long six months in Los Angeles, and I was deeply tired. The two of them were fondling the $5,000 mink throw, as so many people did, so I flatly asked if they wanted me to put it on hold for them. That was usually how I scared people away from the blanket. But she said yes, she wanted it to be put on hold. This struck me as nonsense, because no one wanted a $5,000 mink throw. So I handed her a yellow HOLD card and a pen and said that if she put her name and number on the card, I’d attach it to the blanket and I’d call if someone else made a move for it in the next couple days.
Then I went back to counting my till.
She started writing and then stopped, looked up at me, and said, “Wait, you’re going to leave this card out here? I’m not going to write my number on it.”
I put the money down, looked back at her. It took a couple more seconds before I realized who she was. I told her I’d hold the blanket for one day without the hold card. Then I gave her a business card with my name on it and said if she still wanted the blanket tomorrow, she could call me. As a teenager, I had scrutinized her airbrushed body in Victoria’s Secret catalogs, but when she’d stood right in front of me, I had no idea who she was.
The next day, I answered the phone and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos asked for me. By name. “I’ve decided to take it,” she said.
“OK,” I said and imagined her lying on the throw. Then I thought about all the many hands I had seen fondling the blanket before.
She picked it up the following day, without the aid of her clown-shoed decorator. I had wrapped it up and placed it in a huge bag, which I passed to her once I’d run her credit card and taken a duplicate. A couple of days later, her publicist announced that she and John Stamos were getting a divorce. Then the mink throw made sense.
Personally, I wanted everything in the store. I wanted the objects and I wanted the people. I wanted to eat them all up, gnaw on their bones. At first, I didn’t care about it all, thought it a lot of silliness, but soon enough I was fantasizing, actively, daily, about owning those gorgeous Italian wine glasses, they were $50 each, and about the house where I’d put my immense and uncomfortable sofa. I imagined the parties on my private beach, shaded by the French marquee that no one else in L.A. owned. Or, no one except Bridget Fonda.
While driving home to the apartment I shared with two roommates in Silverlake, I’d pick out the famous guests that would come to my beachfront house, pictured myself drinking a martini in the setting sun as the sea breeze rippled through my white suit. These things had never seemed relevant before. Now, I felt mortified by my sensible late ’90s Volvo, my cheap cellphone. Somewhere nearby, someone was sharing a platter of immaculate sushi with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who’s a year younger than me and prettier in person, while I was consuming starchy blocks of Trader Joe’s faux-sushi. What I needed, evidently, was a Maserati, a beachfront house in Malibu. What I needed was a better pair of sunglasses, and a life appropriate to those glasses. Until then, I was not alive, I was auditioning for life.
Updike wrote, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” but after living in L.A. for a while, the proper reply became obvious: With a mask like that, who needs a face?
In late August, I quit my job and packed my worldly possessions into my sedan and drove north for dreary and obsessively modest Seattle, where I still live. The AC was broken and it was at least 115 degrees in the plains of central California. The wind didn’t cool me down, just turned my car into a convection oven, but I dared not close the windows. Stereo all the way up, I locked in the cruise control at 25 miles an hour above the speed limit. And while I did, officially, ride off into the sunset in the end, there was — I’m glad to report — no epiphany, no heart-pounding climax. Like some great shimmering mirage, the entire fantasy merely evaporated from view. I wasn’t even out of California before it was gone.
Page 1 of 181 in Celebrity
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