“Caught it from you, sucker. What’s goin’ on?”
“The mayor’s holding his press conference at eleven to put the rumors to rest about his affair, so now we’re more convinced than ever that he’s getting it on the side…. There’s a school board meeting tonight that we have to cover because it’s rumored that the chancellor’s going to be ousted. The police commissioner is holding a press conference this afternoon about the police brutality investigation in the Bronx. The Lion King is opening in yet another theater, a murder in Brooklyn and your mother called to tell you her ‘dawg’s’ vomiting.”
Tex closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Get somebody down to hammer the mayor. Payback time. And send someone to get a quote from his wife. See how she’s reacting to the mess. Let’s do a man in the street, too. We’ll give it a full page.”
“Boy, you really are in a pissy mood,” Larry says, heading back to his desk. “Sharon dump you for a fatter guy?” Sharon was Tex’s latest flame.
Tex pulls the hat down lower. That’s my cue to get to work.
Instead of research, I do something that shows my true colors. I log on to Google, opening one after another of the Mike Taylor entries. I want to see the pictures, read interviews, hear his words. I can’t help looking over my shoulder. Not a smart move to be caught by the publisher while gawking at movie-star pictures when all of America is waiting for my next column. I open up one of “Melanie’s pages,” a picture gallery of “gorgeous Mike.” There’s a shot of him in a black T-shirt and a black leather jacket at a movie premiere; hair gelled back, dark eyes sparkling, dressed in a tux at the Emmy Awards; shirtless in a tight bathing suit playing basketball at the beach. I enlarge it.
In another, his arm is locked around the waist of his current flame, French model Jolie Bonjour. Clearly, she is having many bon jours these days, thanks in large part to the fact that she’s probably the one broad who fits into those stupid size 0 clothes, or worse still, 00, that always piss me off because they’re made to fit only anorexics or eleven-year-old adolescents, in which case they belong in the children’s department. To boot, Miss Bonjour is barely drinking age, and has luminescent blue eyes, and poreless skin. Was there even a word in French for zit? And that platinum hair. No wonder hair color manufacturers offered five hundred shades of blond that were used by more than a third of the women in the world. Now, brown hair, on the other hand, came in something like three shades. Light brown, medium brown and dark. End of story. Dullsville, really.
The plastic-Barbie image of perfection never died. No matter that if Barbie’s body were translated into human scale, her measurements would be 38-18-34. So what if no one on the planet had those proportions, women still wanted them.
At least, to their credit, Barbie’s manufacturers were now giving the dolls wider waists, smaller busts and closed mouths, a far cry from “Lilli,” the prototype for Barbie—dating back forty years—who was a German doll based on a lusty actress who was in between gigs.
This poupée smiles widely in every shot. No wonder. Mike Taylor’s arm was hooked around her waist.
I open up interview after interview with Taylor. Thank God for the Internet. Actually, his life was an open magazine—just this past month the six-page cover story in Architectural Digest with the headline: “Perfection in Pacific Palisades.” It began with a double-page spread showing the cobalt blue of the Pacific as a backdrop to the bright Southern California sun glinting off the polished steel of the Nautilus machines in his sprawling home gym. Fifteen behemoths in all, each with a precise function, either to tone and strengthen a specific muscle group, or offer an aerobic challenge. A trainer visited as often as the postman, the story said, to take him through the routine.
Sotto voce, Taylor admitted that he loathed exercise, but his romantic roles made it mandatory that he stay in shape. Legions of fans just waited for the moment when they would glimpse his contoured physique as he pulled off a snug T-shirt and fell into an embrace with a lush-lipped nymphet.
“Part of the job,” he said.
According to the cover story, Taylor had been in Los Angeles for twelve years, but had quickly gained fame and fortune after a TV pilot based on the lives of a group of elite NASA astronauts was picked up for a regular series on CBS.
In The High Life, he played womanizing Scott Bronson, a rocket scientist who joined the space program and rose to become one of its top advisors, a job which had come to define who he was. His exalted standing didn’t hurt his appeal to the nubile NASA recruits—whom he had a reputation for quickly bedding—or the thirty-million fans who watched—captivated by Mike’s work—his long-term relationship with a curvaceous fellow astronaut, his secretive one-night stands, and all the bizarre twists and turns that his life took on this earth and beyond. In addition to the show, he told the writer that he spent weekends and vacations making films.
“Exhausting? Sure, but my career’s on a roll, and that’s not something you take lightly in Hollywood. I started out doing some awful TV work, and now, finally, at age thirty-eight, I feel that I’ve hit my stride.”
“Where would you like to see yourself in the next five years?”
He shrugged. “No clue, man. I just take it from day to day, and I’ve no idea where this frantic roller-coaster ride is headed. All I know is that I’m holding on tight, and enjoying the ride.”
His day started at sunrise, and his bedroom, the story showed, was a marvel of simplicity—a gray granite floor and a king-size bed covered in gray linens. He worked out in the gym, showered in a glass-walled bathroom with a panoramic ocean vista and had coffee in a cavernous granite, concrete and stainless-steel kitchen. The story followed him through the gardens outside the house, where he chatted with the writer about his future projects. One of them, he said, was a movie called Dangerous Lies.
My stomach is growling. It’s almost one o’clock. I bookmark the site.
“How about some lunch?” I call out to Tamara.
“What’s your pleasure?”
“Greens,” I whisper pathetically.
“Can’t hear ya.”
Would she hear beef goulash? Fettucini Alfredo? It reminds me of the painful day that I went to buy my first bra. The hearing-impaired saleswoman walked to the back of the store toward the stockroom and yelled out for every New Yorker to hear, “What size bra did you want again, honey?”
And my pained whisper. The trainer, 34 triple A. Was that how it felt for a guy who bought his first box of condoms?
“Hey, big guy, you want the ribbed for extra stimulation? And what size? Small, medium? Behemoth?”
I get up and go over to Tamara’s desk.
“A double order of gale-force greens,” I mouth, “with balsamic vinegar and a large mineral water.” Then I can’t stop myself and shout, “Ahh, screw it, put an order of potato salad on top.”
Wilhelm’s sandwich shop. I adore it. Never a wait. Never a tie-up. It’s run with military precision by a highly trained staff of beefy Bavarians who stand elbow-to-elbow behind a thick wooden cutting board where they prepare football-size sandwiches. German heroes, as it were. Despite the long line snaking around the glass-covered counter, there’s never more than just a moment’s wait, the piercing cry, “WHO’S NEXT?” serving as a cracking bullwhip that keeps patrons rhythmically goose-stepping up to the counter.
Wilhelm’s has become an institution in the East 40s, and I am one of their cherished patrons. Who else but yours truly is intimately familiar with every one of their thirty-three sandwiches? Who else calls on them to cater parties? An autographed picture of me with my chunky arm around owner and sandwich meister Wilhelm Obermayer is mounted on the wall as if I’m a visiting dignitary. It says, “To Wilhelm, my hero.”
There is a reason for my devotion. A sandwich from Wilhelm’s isn’t a sandwich, it’s an indulgence. Who doesn’t