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inside a Hollywood soundstage, and I found myself so starstruck my jaw actually dropped. There it was, in the flesh, so to speak, the iconic bridge of the USS
Ultimatum
, the spaceship I’d been fantasizing about since I was ten. The cast and crew were on lunch break, the unit publicist had ducked out to take a phone call, and I was all alone. Naturally, I climbed into the captain’s chair. How could I resist? But before my butt hit the seat, production assistants came running from all over the stage, shouting and waving their arms. Sitting on the captain’s space lounger, it turned out, was strictly forbidden.
    “Oh my God!” the unit publicist shrieked when she returned from her phone call and found out what I’d almost done. “That’s the captain’s chair! Are you insane?”
    That day I learned Rule No. 1: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, touch anything on a soundstage, no matter how irresistible the temptation. A little later on, thanks to a slightly more awkward lesson, I learned Rule No. 2: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, no matter how irresistible the temptation, ask an aging starlet about her penis.
    It’d been eight months since I started at
KNOW
. Carla called me into her office with an assignment. “You’ll likethis story,” she said as she unpacked a box with her latest acquisition, a snow globe with a miniature Monrovian village inside. “It’s a one-page profile of Sissy Skye. Remember her?” Sure did. She was before my time, but I knew her work. In the late 1960s Skye had the most famous hairdo on planet Earth, a sort of shaggy Veronica Lake–like thing that fell fetchingly over half her face, covering one eye. It was smoldering and sexy. It was also, famously, responsible for one of the biggest hair-related crazes ever to sweep the nation, and probably countless mishaps in junior high school hallways as millions of fourteen-year-old girls stumbled to classes half-blinded by bangs. Even if I hadn’t known who Skye was, though, I would have jumped at the assignment. A one-page story in
KNOW
magazine was a huge opportunity. That was at least four hundred words!
    “You know about the rumor, right?” Carla went on, giving her new globe a little shake. “Of course you do—everybody knows about the rumor. I want you to try to get her to talk about it. She’s never said anything on the record about it before—maybe she’s finally ready. If you can get her to talk about it, there’s a chance we could bump the story up to a two-pager.”
    “Okay,” I said, pretending to know what Carla was talking about. “I’ll make sure to get into that with her. Ask about the rumor. You betcha.”
    “You know,” Carla added, putting down the globe and looking me straight in the eye, “if you can get Skye to open up about this, there’s even a chance of a cover line.”
    Later, when I asked Robin what the rumor was, I was astonished to learn that people had been gossiping foryears about Sissy Skye’s anatomical origins. It was an open secret—according to Robin—that Skye had been born with infantile hermaphroditism, and that surgery had been required to make her fully female. It explained, Robin said, why Skye had never had children, even though she’d been married three times. If I could get the actress to talk about all this, delve into her genital history, as it were, Carla had all but promised me a cover line. I had to try.
    And so I flew to Hollywood to ask Sissy Skye if she had been born with a penis. We met for lunch at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. It was a favorite hot spot for maturing movie stars—Forest Lawn, my fellow
KNOW
writers had nicknamed it—but compared to the other fossils eating in the Lounge that day, Skye was practically a teenager. She was officially forty-nine in Hollywood years, which meant she was closer to a girlish sixty. But she looked terrific. She still wore her hair in the same shaggy style, although now she kept her bangs from falling into her