Leading Man

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Book: Read Leading Man for Free Online
Authors: Benjamin Svetkey
the corner, but I kept the most important power for myself.I had final say on the video we’d rent from the store on Hudson Street.
    When Sammy got accepted to the Concord Theater Festival, I took her out to an Italian restaurant on Perry Street and ordered an $8 bottle of champagne. We toasted her future and I joked about her not remembering me after she got famous. Later that night, we brought a quart of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream into the sofa bed with us and watched the video I’d chosen for the evening’s entertainment. It was
A Hard Day’s Night
. At one point, John Lennon picks up a guitar and starts casually strumming a tune. “If I fell in love with you,” he sings, “would you promise to be true …” Sammy put her head on my shoulder, licked a scoop of Häagen-Dazs, and passed the spoon back to me.
    I never saw Johnny Mars coming.

4
    Interviewing celebrities is not as easy as it looks. It’s a delicate process, not unlike coaxing a frightened kitten out from under a bed. To get them to purr into a tape recorder, you have to talk to them in soft, nonthreatening tones. Plenty of ego-stroking is a good idea, too. It establishes trust. Whatever you do, avoid asking questions that require any serious thinking. You don’t want to startle them.
    I learned all this the hard way, by trial and lots of error.
    It’s not like they gave me an instruction manual when I moved over to the entertainment beat at
KNOW
shortly after Samantha ran off, taking my will to live with her. It was presumed that I was already aware of how to do my job, otherwise why would such an esteemed magazine have hired me? Actually, I had no idea how to do my job. Fortunately, the editor of the Entertainment section didn’t seem to know what she was doing, either. As far as I could tell, Carla Dreysdale devoted virtually all hertime and energy to collecting and playing with the dozens and dozens of snow globes that filled every surface of her sleek corner office. We’re not simply talking about Welcome to Miami–style souvenir globes, although there were plenty of those. We’re talking about rare globes from obscure East European cities, a Spiro Agnew snow globe from the 1968 presidential race, even an antique prop snow globe that was used as a stand-in for the most famous snow globe in all of snow globe history—the one Orson Welles lets out of his hand at the end of
Citizen Kane
. That precious collector’s item got a special place of honor in Carla’s office, a spotlit bookshelf all its own, presumably protected by motion-detecting laser alarms when she shut the lights off and left for the day.
    The other writers at
KNOW
weren’t much help to me, either. They were always either flying off on some assignment or barricaded behind their office doors playing Beat the Clock with their deadlines. Some writers never turned up at the office at all; they’d file their stories from Berlin or Budapest, or wherever they happened to be. Then there were a couple who never seemed to leave. This one guy in the Religion section—the Stone Cutter was his nickname—had been locked in his office working on the same piece about fake first editions in the Vatican Library for nearly two years. I wasn’t about to ask him for career advice. About the only person I could turn to was Robin, the receptionist, who actually did offer me some pretty good guidance. “Speak to celebrities as if they were normal people and speak to normal people as if they were celebrities,” she suggested over lunch. “That’s what I dowhen I answer the phones. Seems to work pretty well. Are you going to eat those chips?” We became friends fast.
    Not surprisingly, I made plenty of rookie mistakes. Like when the magazine sent me on my first trip to Los Angeles for a story on
Star Flight
, the long-running TV space opera about an interstellar battleship marooned in a distant galaxy, and I almost got kicked off the set. It was the first time I’d ever stepped foot

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