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Authors: Benjamin Svetkey
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face, read my name again, then looked at my face. “You’re the guy who wrote about
Dark Matter
in
KNOW
magazine!” he informed the whole store. “You’re the guy who got to be an alien!” I smiled grimly and nudged the video closer to the kid, hoping he’d put it in a bag already. “This is so cool!” he said, picking up the box and waving it around. “I can’t believe you’re renting a video in my store!”
Finally, I experienced the final stage of the celebrity life cycle, fame’s death throes. I turned on a new episode of
Dark Matter
and saw that my hamster was being played by another actor. In fact, he’d been given lines to speak! To think, I developed that character, I brought it to life, and now some upstart in rodent ears was taking over just as the part was getting interesting. I knew exactly how Bette Davis felt at the end of
All About Eve
.
I may not have been a real celebrity, but I got to live like one, especially when traveling on assignment. At the end of the 1990s, before terrorism and stock market crashes erased the last vestiges of glamour from jet travel, there was a luxury service between New York and Los Angeles called Imperial Airways. It operated the most pimped-out commercial fleet in the sky. The front end of its lavishlyconfigured DC-8s and 727s had private berths, like on a train, so that first-class passengers could slide shut a frosted-glass door and cross the country in privacy. Even Imperial’s “coach” section, where I usually sat, had cushy oversize red-leather swivel-loungers, provided linen and crystal dinner service, and was always packed with celebs. It was like the Golden Globes at thirty thousand feet. I loved it.
I became a frequent flyer on Imperial, shuttling between the coasts once or twice a month for interviews. When I landed in LA, I would always rent a zippy convertible and stay at the posh Four Seasons Hotel, the pale pink palace on the east edge of Beverly Hills that was the red-hot center of Hollywood’s mediaverse. This was where the studios put up talent from out of town, where many of the film industry’s junkets were held, and where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity in a swimsuit at the pool. The Four Seasons had a frequent-stayer bonus: After forty visits, they gave you a terrycloth bathrobe, the fluffiest on Earth, with your initials monogrammed on it. I had two of them. During a brief hipster stage, I grew a goatee and switched to the grittier Chateau Marmont on Sunset, where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity overdosing at the pool. But eventually I shaved and returned to my fortress on Doheny. The Four Seasons felt more like home to me than home. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t see any problem with that.
When I first started spending time in LA, I made the mistake of comparing the city’s geo-demographics to Manhattan’s. Beverly Hills was the Upper East Side with palm trees. Venice was the East Village with sand. WestHollywood was Chelsea with actual, atmospherically created rainbows. After a while, though, I began to see that the true comparison wasn’t with New York City, but with Westchester. Being in Los Angeles, I realized, was a lot like being sixteen years old in the suburbs when my dad went away on a business trip and left me home alone with the keys to his Cadillac and a cookie jar filled with “emergency” cash. LA is a city filled with grown-up children spending money they shouldn’t be spending and driving cars they shouldn’t be driving. It’s a town without any adult supervision.
It is also a city filled with beautiful women who dress like porn stars even when picking up a carton of organic orange juice at the grocery store (the men, meanwhile, dress like little boys, in short pants and T-shirts). I thought LA might be a solution to my commitment phobia problem. I was traveling there twice a month but seldom staying longer than two or three days, the time it took to turn around an
Dark Matter
in
KNOW
magazine!” he informed the whole store. “You’re the guy who got to be an alien!” I smiled grimly and nudged the video closer to the kid, hoping he’d put it in a bag already. “This is so cool!” he said, picking up the box and waving it around. “I can’t believe you’re renting a video in my store!”
Finally, I experienced the final stage of the celebrity life cycle, fame’s death throes. I turned on a new episode of
Dark Matter
and saw that my hamster was being played by another actor. In fact, he’d been given lines to speak! To think, I developed that character, I brought it to life, and now some upstart in rodent ears was taking over just as the part was getting interesting. I knew exactly how Bette Davis felt at the end of
All About Eve
.
I may not have been a real celebrity, but I got to live like one, especially when traveling on assignment. At the end of the 1990s, before terrorism and stock market crashes erased the last vestiges of glamour from jet travel, there was a luxury service between New York and Los Angeles called Imperial Airways. It operated the most pimped-out commercial fleet in the sky. The front end of its lavishlyconfigured DC-8s and 727s had private berths, like on a train, so that first-class passengers could slide shut a frosted-glass door and cross the country in privacy. Even Imperial’s “coach” section, where I usually sat, had cushy oversize red-leather swivel-loungers, provided linen and crystal dinner service, and was always packed with celebs. It was like the Golden Globes at thirty thousand feet. I loved it.
I became a frequent flyer on Imperial, shuttling between the coasts once or twice a month for interviews. When I landed in LA, I would always rent a zippy convertible and stay at the posh Four Seasons Hotel, the pale pink palace on the east edge of Beverly Hills that was the red-hot center of Hollywood’s mediaverse. This was where the studios put up talent from out of town, where many of the film industry’s junkets were held, and where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity in a swimsuit at the pool. The Four Seasons had a frequent-stayer bonus: After forty visits, they gave you a terrycloth bathrobe, the fluffiest on Earth, with your initials monogrammed on it. I had two of them. During a brief hipster stage, I grew a goatee and switched to the grittier Chateau Marmont on Sunset, where you could always catch a glimpse of a celebrity overdosing at the pool. But eventually I shaved and returned to my fortress on Doheny. The Four Seasons felt more like home to me than home. I don’t know how it was that I didn’t see any problem with that.
When I first started spending time in LA, I made the mistake of comparing the city’s geo-demographics to Manhattan’s. Beverly Hills was the Upper East Side with palm trees. Venice was the East Village with sand. WestHollywood was Chelsea with actual, atmospherically created rainbows. After a while, though, I began to see that the true comparison wasn’t with New York City, but with Westchester. Being in Los Angeles, I realized, was a lot like being sixteen years old in the suburbs when my dad went away on a business trip and left me home alone with the keys to his Cadillac and a cookie jar filled with “emergency” cash. LA is a city filled with grown-up children spending money they shouldn’t be spending and driving cars they shouldn’t be driving. It’s a town without any adult supervision.
It is also a city filled with beautiful women who dress like porn stars even when picking up a carton of organic orange juice at the grocery store (the men, meanwhile, dress like little boys, in short pants and T-shirts). I thought LA might be a solution to my commitment phobia problem. I was traveling there twice a month but seldom staying longer than two or three days, the time it took to turn around an
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