Bob de Niro, Meryl, and I

After tiring of the rock star's life in my early 30s, I did the sensible thing, and decided to become a movie star instead. I enrolled in an acting class, and found that I was awful at acting, but do you suppose I allowed that to slow me down any more than my inability to sing or play a musical instrument had kept me from aspiring to rock stardom? Then, a few months later, I figured out The Trick. If you go on stage as yourself pretending to be someone else (that is, the person you’re portraying), you’ll be stiff and inhibited, an embarrassment to yourself and a disappointment to your audience. What you have to learn to do is leave yourself in the dressing room, and go on stage as your character. Learning to do this turned out to be easier than to play sixteenth-notes with my bass drum foot. 

It wasn’t long before I was one of the most in-demand young actors in town, even though I didn’t have what is known in the trade as a head shot — a glossy 8 by 10 photograph in which I was unrecognisably more handsome than in real life. One afternoon at a busy photocopy place in West Hollywood I found myself behind a frumpy woman of maybe 50 in the slow-moving queue. Noticing the photograph of a gorgeous young woman she had in hand, Imagining it might flatter her (one gets half her genes from Mama), I asked if the GYW were her daughter. If looks could kill! “No,” she replied icily, “it’s me.” 

Through my friend Edy Williams, the faded starlet and exhibitionist known for making a spectacle of herself every year outside the Oscars, I got an agent, who in about a week had my phone ringing off the hook. The first role I was offered was in nothing less than Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. The casting director wanted me to play Chub, the autistic, morbidly obese love child of President Lincoln and Sally Hemmings, earlier the secret girlfriend of Thomas Jefferson. But the role would require me to gain a great deal of weight. Being vain, and having endured the agony of pudginess at age eight, when my parents had to buy me special “husky” jeans, I demurred. Ultimately, Bob de Niro, still puffy from Raging Bull, got the part, and in fact was nominated for Best Weight Gain at the following year’s Oscars, outside which Edy, by now in her waning 50s, and not recognisable as the leering, Raquel Welch-maned brunette temptress in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, wore a dog and a form-fitting transparent gown made of hardened Vaseline.

I was also asked to co-star with Meryl Streep in Snip, the 2006 musical biopic about Lorena Bobbitt. I had been an avid fan of Meryl’s work since her performance in A Hard Day's Night decades before, but was iffy doing naked sex scenes with her, or, even worse, with her body double, who wasn’t exactly Edy Williams. Eventually, they were able to persuade Tom Cruise to take the part. Though I am far from comfortable with his, or anyone else’s, being a Scientologist, I had to agree that Tommy was wonderful in the role. 

Only three years ago, I had another chance to act with Meryl, in the little-seen Ricki and The Flash, about a middle-aged woman who refuses to relinquish her own dreams of rock stardom even though they embarrass her grown children and accountant. I was going to play the gorgeous, much younger fan with whom Meryl-as-Ricki cheated on her boyfriend, played by Rick Springfield. Once again, though, I was iffy about the love scenes, especially after learning they would be three-ways, with Rick included. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’d felt a kinship with Rick since learning that he was a fellow depression sufferer, and had pleasant memories of an elevator ride in the famous and iconic Capitol [Records] Tower in around 1973, when I shared the elevator with two sniffling under-assistant West Coast promotion man types. Rick Springfield was newly signed to Capitol. The shorter of my fellow passengers marvelled, “You know, I think Rick’s prettier than any woman at Capitol.” To which the larger, to my great delight, responded, “Not prettier than [Name Withheld],” my girlfriend, who was a Capitol publicist at the time. 

They didn’t know who I was. But of course sometimes I don’t know who I am.

Eventually, after playing Agememnon, son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope of Mycenae, brother of Menelaus, and husband of Clytemnestra, in Pixar's animated 1998 version of The Iliad, I became one of Hollywood's most in-demand voice actors. I preferred voice work because I was never asked either to gain or lose weight, and could turn up at the studio in the tracksuits I'd taken to wearing after noting how good many of Tony's minions looked in them in The Sopranos.

A Little Tale of Ordinary American Life

When Jaylin and his dad moved to Timberline, Dad couldn’t get work, and spent most of his waking hours drunk. If Jaylin said anything critical, Dad would threaten to punch his face in. He’d say something like, “I’ve gotten over losing your mama, so losing you wouldn’t be a biggie.” Jaylin was big and strong, but Dad was a monster. He’d won the Strongest Man ni Town competition at the big annual Fourth of July party in the park back in Sistoquoc three of the last four years. The year he’d lost, it was because he got so drunk that he showed up for the final heat 45 minutes after the judges had declared that Rick dude the winner. 

Jaylin got a job washing dishes at the Timberline Diner on Route 3. It hadn’t really been a diner for years. It served good local wines, had a young chef who’d been to one of those culinary colleges, and was written up in the little magazines that came with the Sunday newspaper. Jaylin found that he lost himself in the steamy clamour of the kitchen, and was able to forget about his mom dying at 41 and Dad being an asshole. 

The place’s owner saw that Jaylin was a hard worker and promoted him. He became what the owner called a junior waiter, which turned out to mean busboy. Jaylin wasn’t able to lose himself lugging plastic tubfuls of dirty dishes back to the little pockmarked Salvadorean who’d replaced him as dishwasher, and  was pretty sure the waitresses (none was a dude) were cheating him. Jaylin wasn’t good at math, but was pretty sure that $3 wasn’t 15 percent of $45, and that you didn’t figure out 15 percent by dividing by 15. The only waitress who didn’t snarl at him when he asked if she was sure she was doing the math right was Lucy, the youngest and hottest, not that any of them was exactly Pam Anderson.

She was hot enough for Dad, though. He finally got his drinking under control a little bit, and got a job as mechanic. When he came in to see Jaylin at work, Lucy was his server. He asked her out, and it must have gone pretty well because she started giving Jaylin a bigger portion of her tipe — at least until he made the mistake of pointing out how much less than Lucy the other waitresses  were paying him. They started treating her like she had a disease they might catch if they were nice, and Lucy, whom Dad had dumped in the meantime, started giving him a hard time in front of them, probably trying to get back in their good graces. 

Jaylin dropped out of school, went through a tweaking period of his own, and pulled himself out of it in large part by moving to the city, 12 miles away, and beginning his own career as a mechanic. When Dad found out he was working on “Jap” cars, though Jay worked mostly on Hyundais, he gave Jay a hard time. In Dad’s view, Asian-manufactured products in general and cars in particular were responsible for America’s economy having been in the crapper before President Trump got elected and started fixing everything. When Jay pointed out that most of the cars he worked on were actually made in the USA, Dad accused him of having a smart mouth. Jay began dating a girl, Laniqu’a, who worked at the Subway around the corner from his garage. 

On their third date, they went to see the new Tom Cruise movie at the big cineplex on Elm, and then to a pizza place one of the other mechanics had told Jay wasn’t bad. There was a really awkward moment when their server turned out to be Lucy, looking a little worn-out, but still pretty for somebody in her thirties. It was awkward for a minute, but then Lucy seemed to decide to treat Jay and his date just like any other diners. It occurred to Jay to give her a hard time, and to get her to take his calzone back to the kitchen, but at the Timber the servers had all made a point of spitting into the food of diners who annoyed them, so Jay too pretended they’d never been waitress and busboy. Laniqu’a, not yet 17, and one who’d been taken to a restaurant exactly once before in her lifetime after her older brother's confirmation, was very impressed by the two of them knowing each other. Her new boyfriend had been places, and seen things!

Their bill, which Lucy presented on a little silver tray with two stale chocolate mints, came to $21. Jay had a phone with a calculator app, but didn’t use it. He left Lucy a wrinkled dollar bill, a quarter, two dimes, and three pennies. 

Trophy Boyfriend for Rent: Enquire Within

Graphic design is what I do best, and for a while, around the turn of the century, the world seemed to agree. In 2000, I got five design jobs. Every time I’d get bored at one of them — and I get bored very easily — I’d extend my hand and someone would put a better-paying job in it. In 2009, I worked in Manhattan, at a rate that would’ve enriched me by over $100K for the year if I hadn’t become bored and careless and sent away. But I didn’t get the lo-paying production artist job in Kingston-on-Thames for which I interviewed last week. I suspect the woman doing the hiring thought it might be more prudent to hire someone not yet with one foot in the grave. Since I first began bemoaning my accelerating decrepitude here maybe five years ago, you see, I've become neither lovelier nor fresher-faced.

I have realised that I’m highly unlikely to get any more 9-to-5 jobs in this lifetime, and that the way forward might be not as a writer or graphic designer, but as a trophy boyfriend for women of a certain age, though I will confess to believing that not a single one of us isn’t of a certain age, be it 14, 39, 54, or what have you. 

Though less fresh-faced than when I was was full of the joy of life and collagen, I still make a very nice appearance in dimly illuminated bistros, where I will meet clients for the first time. Away from harsh lighting, I believe the multiple creases in my punim suggest great worldliness or even gravitas. And my physique is a thing of wonder for a man my age, thanks to the fact that I spend six hours per days at the gym, and then do my farm chores. Though I lack men’s-“health”-magazine abs, few women have failed to describe my biceps, triceps, pecs, lats, quads, and what have you as “to die for”, though in many cases I’d have preferred that they’d have lived for them. I am able to see my feet when I look down. 

As you have just seen, my sparkling sense of humour is very much intact. Back when I customarily squired Playboy and Penthouse models to rock galas in Hollywood, several told me it wasn’t my irresistible Semitic good looks that had made them scrawl their phone numbers on matchbook covers and slip them to me as I swaggered back to my table from the men’s room of chic eateries, but my palpable puckishness. I see the humour in almost everything — sometimes, admittedly, to the horror of those around me — and regularly come up with such delightful coinages as God never closes a door without first locking the windows from the outside or To each his onus, both of which are trademarked, so don't try to pass them off as your own. When the woman with whom I am dining gets up to use the lavatory or to flirt with the sommelier, who in most cases turns out to be as gay as charming, I reflexively stand. I know which fork to use, and chew with my mouth closed. I abhor textspeak and cigarette smoke.

I am able to converse engagingly on a broad variety of topics, ranging from Premier League football to architecture to foreign travel to current affairs. The many, many hours I have spent watching Chopped! in the USA and Master Chef in the UK have not been in vain. My cooking has been known to bring tears of joy to women’s eyes. I wear my clothes. They don't not wear me. This is an important distinction. I have a way of making anything I put on appear very stylish. It's just something I've always had, a je ne sais quoi. I am also able to drop foreign phrases into my speech without apparent effort. The trick — to make it appear easy — is one I mastered early in adolescence. I have always felt great ease around women. 

Families adore me. I can't count the numbers of times the parents, and more recently, children of the women in my life have taken me aside a week or two after my and their daughter's or mum's relationship began to confide, commonly with tears in their eyes, "I can't tell you how happy I am that [Mom, or Name of Daughter] found you!" The father of my first wife regarded me as the son he'd never had. We went on fishing and hunting trips together, and repaired small appliances in his little man-cave.

I am an enormously gifted musician and singer. One of my former lovers believed that, as Mel Tormé was called The Velvet Fog, I, with a comparably creamy baritone, might be thought of as The Velvet Mist. I have learned not to perform The Walker Bros.’ "The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore" at karaoke anymore, as it invariably makes the women present wish they weren’t married, and their husbands or boyfriends want to poke me in the eye. Few appreciate how high a high price one must pay for having a voice as gorgeous as mine. 

And now, at last, the money shot. Erotically, I have ample reason to believe that I am pretty nearly incomparable — intuitive, creative, and inexhaustible. If I had a dollar, or in my new country, a pound, for every time a Playboy or Penthouse model post-coitally informed me that they’d never imagined how wonderful lovemaking could be until they’d met me, I wouldn’t have had to interview for the demeaning, ill-paying production artist, uh, position in Kingston-on-Thames. One of my over-2000 lovers told me that I made her one huge G-spot. It's just something I've always been able to do.

Like some of the many, many psychotherapists by whom I have been treated over the years, I use a sliding scale, and never say no to one in need, though I will confess that it’s rather easier to say yes when she in need (I recognise bisexuality as natural, but haven't tried it yet) looks like the late Chrissy Amphett. My rate as of Valentines Day 2018 is £65/hour for outcall, plus the cost of an Uber both going and coming home, and £45/hour in my spacious riverside home, bring your own towels. I look forward to hearing from  you, and to relieving as much of your loneliness and erotic frustration as your budget and my busy schedule will permit. 

Splitsville: The Ageing Rock Star and His Trophy Girlfriend

It’s time, Violette, to admit that it’s not working any more. At 78, I’m too old to pretend I don’t notice your revulsion when you look at me. As though I can help my decrepitude! As though I have it in my power to make my neck loos less like a turkey’s. As though I don’t try to cover up the blotches on my face. As though I didn’t spend £1325 pounds last spring having my teeth whitened in Harley Street. And you didn’t even seem to notice, maybe because the more urgent need is to have them straightened, but the dentist told me straightening my toofies would be a long, expensive process, and at 78, I’m not very much in the mood for Long Processes.

Yes, yes, I know. I could go to the gym, to try to tighten myself back up, but I wonder if you understand that it’s no longer an if-there’s-a-will-there’s-a-way situation for me. At some point every body effectively says, “Too bad, brighteyes, but everybody gets only so much collagen in a lifetime, and your supply is now used up.” I could spend all day pumping iron (and aggravating the arthritis in my shoulders!) and still be droopy, Vi. And the looks of pity and amusement and scorn the testosterone supplement boys give me! Do I really want to continue subjecting myself to that? I mean, I do of course see the humour in their imagining they’re not going to run out of collagen themselves some day, and their not understanding that their being all hard and cut and gorgeous isn’t a function of their greater nobility or even perseverance, but of the chronological accident of their youth. But that gets me only so far.

By the way, I do take some consolation from the fact that if I were an ex-footballer your own age I probably wouldn’t be much less prone to complaining about my arthritis. Whatever I may have put my body through in the course of whipping audiences into frenzies all these decades pales in comparison to what they put theirs through.

At that last awards show we went to together, do you suppose I didn’t see the longing in your eyes when lads far nearer your own age swaggered up in their taut bodies and thick glossy hair and, in many cases, straightened white teeth, to collect their various awards? The only ones I get anymore are for Lifetime Achievement. And what a good laugh everybody had at the Razor’s Edge do when, instead of another fucking loving cup, they gave me a gold-plated Kozee Komforts Height Adjustable Aluminium Four Feet Quad Cane Walking Stick. We both managed to pretend to be terribly amused, but I suspect  you were probably terribly embarrassed, and I hardly blame you.

You’ve got to accept your share of the responsibility, though, Vi. You knew when you came backstage at the O2 Arena all those years ago — what is it now, 27? — that there was a 34-year gap between our ages. Did you think I was going to remain as gorgeous as I was that night at only 51 (my tongue’s in cheek here, Vi) forever? Did you not study physiology at the good schools your parents (12 and 15 years my junior, respectively!) sent you to? Was there no mention at your good schools of collagen depletion, or of the fact that the joints start hurting?

So as I said, Vi, it’s time to admit that it just isn’t working anymore. In the words of Bob Dylan, to whom I was introduced back in the early 70s, and whom I found to be a smug little cunt, I believe it’s time for us to quit. You may look at me with revulsion, but how do you suppose I see you. at almost 45 years old? This just in, VI: I’m still selling out stadiums, while you’re barely recognisable as the 17-year-old who stole my heart all those years ago — and not a suitable rock star’s trophy girlfriend anymore. 

I’ve met someone new, Vi. Chantelle. She’s 28, and we’re expecting. 

Lennon in Sequins and Boas: Questions That Demand To Be Asked!

There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask The Beatles, or at least the surviving ones. When Beatlemania started, and fans all over the world were crazed with delight at the mere sound ot their name, did they find it pleasurable, or terrifying? I know in many cases they thought they might be crushed to death, or pulled to pieces, but I’m speaking more of psychological terror. Can you imagine how disorienting it must be to go over the course of around 18 months from being a hometown favourite in a little urine-reeking subterranean club in the north of England, not exactly rock and roll Ground Zero to that point, to inspiring mass nearly global hysteria? Did they think it was something they were doing, or that it was just the universe being all zany and capricious?

I’d also like to ask The Who, or at least the surviving ones, something. By all accounts, Roger Daltrey was the group thug, even in the days when he teased his hair and wore ladies’ shoes and shawls. What could emboldened him to allow Mr. Townshend to try to steal his lead singer's spotlight with his implacable exhibitionism? And how did Mr. Townshend summon the gall for such exhibitionism when there was hardly a guitar player in the UK whose chops didn’t surpass his own by miles and miles and miles and miles and miles? In this, he might have been the exact opposite of Rod Stewart, who four years later would have to be coaxed out from behind the amplifiers when he toured with Jeff Beck. (I am of course well aware that, as of around 1975, many began wishing that Rod would go back behind the amplifers.)

I would like to ask the countless millions who derogate Kenny G, Nickelback, and Phil Collins, to name the three who spring most inexorably to mind, if they imagine that doing so makes them appear with-it-, arty, and cultured. I believe it has the opposite effect, especially when the disdain involves the use of the word suck, as in Phil Collins sucks. I recently became aware that Nickelback, of whom I’d heretofore managed to steer clear, are indeed really obnoxious, but since when is obnoxiousness something unusual in popular entertainment? I don’t perceive the gap between Kenny G and Branford Marsalis, say, as any wider than that between the late Tom Petty and a genuinely talented songwriter. And Phil Collins is a little bland, but is he any blander than Petty was? While I’m here, in this paragraph, I would like to ask the hundreds of millions who regard Bob Marley as the iconic reggae artist if they’ve ever heard of Jimmy Cliff, who’s far superior in my own view.   

(I have rarely hated a colloquially popular word more than I hate suck, which I’ve always found particularly obnoxious, and commonly indicative of intellectual impairment. I would be willing to bet that a large majority of those who commonly describes things as sucking voted for Donald Trump, and in many cases even own Make America Great Again baseball caps. I don’t suppose that all mullet-wearers deploy the expression at the most negligible provocation, but have no doubt that an unusually large percentage of those who say, for instance, “It sucks donkey balls.” have mullets.)

I would like to know why people so rapaciously disdain Sting and Bono. Both seem pretty self-infatuated, and Bono’s self-branding as The Savour of Africa makes one’s flesh crawl a little bit. I’m further aware that he benefits from some tax-avoidance strategies more befitting someone like Donald Trump appointee Stephen (May I Have a Vowel, Please, Carol?) Mnuchin but would we really prefer that our richest rock stars not speak out on behalf of the Amazon rainforest and deprived Africans just because we find their self-regard rather…much? Would we really prefer that they be preoccupied with their collection of exotic sports cars? 

Another question for The Beatles. In the days after John Lennon declared that he was no longer wiling to be chained to a rhythm guitar, and took to appearing on stage in sequinned harlequin leotards, toe shoes, garish feather boas, and more makeup than Dusty Springfield, dancing like Tina Turner, pouting suggestively, and generally camping it up a treat, were Paul and Ringo embarrassed? 

The Worst Musicians In the World

Recently the celebrated arranger and producer Quincy Jones, best known for his work with the late Michael Jackson of The Jackson 5ive, has been shooting his mouth off about all sorts of things, ranging from Marlon Brando’s fervent promiscuity to his own ongoing erotic ravenousness to the musicianship of various famous musicians. Its his having pronounced The Beatles nothing less than The Worst Musicians in the World that caught my own eye. I can understand how someone who for decades had worked with the world’s best jazz players might have thought the boys from Liverpool something less than red-hot on their respective instruments, but wonder if he ever heard The Rolling Stones, or, for that matter, The Caterpillars of Democracy. 

The late Lesley Gore

Of all nine members of the Beatles and Stones, I would submit that Paul McCartney, on bass, was by far the best player, especially after he started getting adventurous around the time of "Rain". As for the Caterpillars of Democracy, a sort of psychedelic band for which I auditioned late in the Summer of Love, they weren’t just ghastly players, but also avidly pretentious. They advised me at my audition that they weren’t just musicians, but Artists, capitalisation mine, and that we wouldn’t play any of their actual repertoire together that morning, for fear of my being unable to resist the temptation to steal it, and claim it as my own. We played The Standells’ Dirty Water, I ineptly, they even more ineptly, and The Sunshine of Your Love. When they pronounced me Not What [They] Were Looking For, I was actually relieved. I wanted (as I still want, all these decades later) to be the least talented member of the band, and to feel that I must strive constantly to up my game. In any event, Quincy Jones couldn’t both have been aware of these guys, whose real group name I have long since forgotten, and able to call The Beatles the worst musicians in the world.

While we’re here, I will point out that Q, as his friends call him, had already begun producing glorious pop records 20 years before he’d even heard of the late Michael Jackson. To this day, Lesley Gore’s "You Don’t Own Me" sounds like pure genius, with "Maybe I Know" not far behind. As you’re probably aware, Les, in the glamorous “flip” hairstyle so many of the hottest hotties at nearby Santa Monica High School favoured at the time, to their own considerable detriment, performed at the famous TAMI show, filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in the fall of 1964. There is photographic evidence that The Rolling Stones, who headlined the show, chatted there with James Brown, who somehow managed not to die laughing (or crying) at their being billed above him, but none of them and Ms. Gore getting chummy, possibly because she was a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey who’d based her career on perky pop songs that reinforced gender stereotypes, while they had branded themselves as uncouth louts who played the blues, often in leather waistcoats. 

Les, who turned out later to be a lesbian — albeit not the Dusty Springfield kind, with immoderate eyeliner and mascara — may not even have been in the building at the same time as they. The TAMI show, of which I somehow managed to learn only months later, was taped over the course of a few days. Donald Trump’s own version of Josef Goebbels, Stephen Miller, is an alumnus of Santa Monica High School, as I am too, but he was no more present than I at the TAMI show taping. His, of course, is the superior excuse. He wouldn’t be born for another 21 years. I suspect that Lesley might be perceived as having inspired England’s Helen Shapiro, with whom The Worst Musicians in the World, toured before Beatlemania. Though herself Jewish, and from Clapton (!), east London, Helen had a rather more flattering coiffure than Lesley’s.