Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (10 page)

Due to the skill of her publicists, Dr. Laser’s reputation was that of a modern-day Renoir. If anyone could get rid of it, smooth it out, or freshen it up, she could. Her specialty was the Laser, a recent technology in its most refined stage. Dr. Laser’s trick was to blast the Laser on a tomato to demonstrate how proficient and skilled she was. Of course, that tomato always remained pristine and blemish-free.

I was different than most of Dr. Laser’s patients. The majority of them came to her because they wanted to look like this year’s version of beauty. They were there to eliminate hooked, big or wide noses, hooded eyes, receding chins or any genetic feature which was not currently popular. Unfortunately, most of the plastic surgeons, including Dr. Laser, were beginning to be a little too successful at their work. I knew that because the women on the Westside—especially the young actresses—had all begun to look very similar to each other.

At my first appointment, the waiting room was crammed full of patients, the phone was ringing off the hook, and six nurses worked like traffic cops to direct the flow of patients.

But the day I appeared for my procedure, there was nothing but silence in her office.

“Hello?”

I walked past the in-take desk.

I walked down the dark hallways of her medical suite.

I walked past the empty, dark, exam rooms.

I found a woman lifting weights in one of the supply rooms.

“Go into any room and sit down. Don’t worry, the doctor will find you.”

I turned the lights on in an exam room and read a book.

Forty-five minutes later Dr. Laser walked in wearing a T-shirt and stained sweat pants.

I thought it was strange.

Dr. Laser did a decent job on me. Her follow-up, a 15-second exam done by her assistant at a parking lot under the Century City Mall, was a bit dicey.

Then the article “Doctors and Demerol: The tragedy of Dr. Laser” came out. As I read the article, many of her other patients had not been as fortunate as I had: They were seared to a pulp and scarred.

Apparently, seven days before my appointment, she had purchased the equivalent of 822 individual doses of Demerol. Three days after my appointment, she purchased at least 950 more individual doses. During this same month, she had filed for bankruptcy. Investigators had gone to her office and found a soup pot of syringes and empty drug ampules covered with mold. In her home they found “insect infestation,” numerous syringes and needle caps under cushions, on the floor, in a shopping bag, and behind a couch.

After I read the article, I called my friend Gabe. “I think we have a clear winner for this year’s Zen of Fraud.”

“No—someone who has so exceeded our extremely low standards that you would dare to select a winner in the second quarter of the year?”

“This is special.”

The Zen of Fraud.

I think this category came about because Gabe and I worked in the same industry and were so amazed by the range of amoral scum we encountered.

Just when we thought that we had found the worst monster possible, someone more disgusting would appear. Thus the Zen of Fraud became a competition to see who had met the most arrogant wind-bag of hypocrisy, like the “genius” hedge fund manager who criticized your business practices and then stole the life savings of his retired clients, or the “hot” agent who blamed you for not doing more for a client and then destroyed the client’s career because he couldn’t control his own prescription drug addiction.

And I thought that Dr. Laser was my winner for the year.

That is until I saw Jon Gene Jenny, the former dean of the theater school where I did my undergraduate work, stride across the stage to accept his award at the Emmys.

In some bizarre turn of events, one of my clients had managed to get himself nominated for an Emmy. Even more unusual was the fact that my client felt some gratitude toward me for the three years of unpaid legal work. He asked me to accompany him to the awards ceremony. The ceremony was fatally boring.

However, when Jon Gene Jenny’s name was called, I was suddenly thrown into an alternate universe where people I knew were accepting awards in nationally-televised ceremonies for things other than a stint in Celebrity Rehab.

Jon Gene Jenny, or “Genie,” was more of a guru than a teacher. At age 49, he had taken over the theater school in a time of disarray and thus was given free rein to do whatever he wanted with it, as long as he fixed it. His theater school was the mirror image of his psyche: one-third cult, one-third Midwest theater philosophy, and one-third unresolved anger over every insult that he had ever suffered in high school and not yet worked out with his therapist.

Genie looked like a cross between a bantam rooster and Bette Davis in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
. He was five foot two of muscle with a 52-inch chest and a head cascading with graying blond ringlets that covered his electric-blue eyes. Given his looks and girth, he never wore conventional clothing. His typical outfit consisted of food-stained sweatpants coordinated with psychedelically colored suspenders covering a lavender or black T-shirt.

Clearly, Genie had been a dork in high school, someone who had suffered for his looks and devotion to theater. Now he had a virtual playground on which to torment whatever unsuspecting female student fell into his web.

It was frightening to watch Genie put those 18-year-olds through his sieve. He purposely kept the theater students isolated from the other students at the school. He told them that if they mixed with the other students, their work would be “diluted” and they would never have a life in the theater. Naturally, this had the effect of making them all sleep with each other and turning the atmosphere into a hotbed of gossip and intrigue.

Genie also kept his students ridiculously exhausted: No matter what the weather, they were outside doing Tai Chi at six a.m. At night, if they weren’t rehearsing a production, those students, who were paying $38,000 per year in tuition alone, were ordered to do menial tasks like scrape gum off the floor of a 2000-seat theater until 10 p.m., Monday through Friday.

In Genie’s program, women who were good-looking in a conventional sense were slightly tainted, or “bad,” or automatically branded as “artificial.” It was impossible to play a female lead in any of his productions unless you were extremely plain with six inches of cellulite hanging off your butt. He punished the good-looking ones by making them wear ridiculous costumes in minor roles that did nothing more than humiliate them. This, obviously, was nothing more than revenge for him.

I remember seeing a poor blonde girl who had the genetic misfortune, in Genie’s world, to be strikingly beautiful. In typical Genie fashion, he cast her as a spear carrier in his original interpretation of
Antigone
. Her costume consisted of a silver Harpo Marx wig, a tiny butt-slicing thong, and a tube top, which was purposely cut too small so that if she moved her right arm, her right boob would pop out.

Of course, he slept with all of the pretty ones. His line was that he was “going to show them what it was to be alive.” And not just the ones in the theater school. He once tried to hook-up with me at a party with this “going to be alive” line. When I told him that I knew what it meant to “be alive” and that meant that I had to go do my laundry, he called me a “Fake,” a plastic fake person who only wanted to be with non-real pretty boys. He called me that every time he saw me for the remaining three-plus years until I graduated, often yelling “Hey Fake!” across the cafeteria, or “Hi Fakie,” if he found me in the library, “There’s the Fake, hi Fakie!” if he saw me off campus.

But something about me must have resonated with him. Maybe it was my refusal to buy his lines. Maybe it was the fact that clearly I wasn’t interested. Maybe it was that I was sixteen years old and I was challenging him, or simply, a challenge.

Genie managed to get one of his theater students with a work-study job in the registrar’s office to give him my schedule and personal data, information which included my dorm room, car license-plate number, and phone number.

He appeared twice, sometimes three times a day outside my classes to tell me, “Tonight, you and me, Fakie.” He knocked on my dorm room door at night whispering to my closed door, “C’mon Fakie—let’s do it.” He left notes for me on the windshield of my car which said, “Get Real Fakie—I’m Waiting for You.”

Although obsessive, Genie’s behavior was not unusual for some of the faculty members at the art school. Sleeping your way through the student body—or should I say, student bodies—was a rite of passage for some of the faculty, a passage which occasionally included dumping your current wife and marrying one of your students, who, on average, was 30 years younger than the faculty member.

Everyone knew about the music teacher who would sneak up on his students and fondle their breasts as they played. My own violin teacher had dumped three wives, one of them a previous student, during his ten-year teaching career. And the member of the administration who always managed to have the best-looking male students as his chauffeurs, a work/‌study job, was well known for his pretty-boy taste.

Personally, I was mostly annoyed, and occasionally terrified, by Genie’s behavior. But I think even he knew his behavior had crossed the line on that Saturday night during March of my first year when he started banging on my door at 3:40 a.m. and began screaming, “Fakie—Open the Door.” This went on for 23 minutes, and then he started throwing the furniture in the lounge near my room—a television, an ash-tray, a chair—against my door. When the off campus police responded to my call at 4:15 a.m. and took him away, it seemed to slow him down.

“Why did you call the police?” said the dean of the music school after I was summoned to his office. “You know, that’s Genie. Boys will be boys.”

“He’s just having a little fun,” said Roberta after I told her that Genie frightened me. “Don’t be so judgmental.”

Not long after that, he attached himself to some 19-year-old female directing student, a tiny girl with a head full of bright red ringlets who always wore jeans, white baker’s smocks, and knee-high black leather boots with four-inch heels. She was a transfer from NYU who had crossed the country to work with Genie because she thought he was a genius.

The directing student kept him busy for a while. Between juvenile victims, Genie made hounding me a sport. Fortunately, there were enough innocents around to regularly supply him with fresh meat.

It was a lot of activity for a guy who was allegedly the Dean of the theater school, for whom 50 aspiring actors in their late teens and early twenties had entrusted their parents’ life savings and their training in the dramatic arts. I remember wondering how any of them were going to make a living at this on a day when I watched Genie’s students learn how to emote expression in an exercise in which they all played clams at the bottom of the ocean. And the answer, of course, was that none of them would. As I learned later, Genie’s theater school philosophy was “we give you the desire, and you find the technique.” And unfortunately, none of them found it.

In addition to the fact that few of them learned any technique, Genie actively discouraged his students from getting work in the entertainment industry by letting people know that they were “sellouts” for working in that materialistic world. The few students who did get work because they were too pretty not to be noticed by agents were punished by being thrown out of the program. In retrospect, these were the only students who ended up with careers in the industry. The rest became the word processors, waiters, and retail clerks of the world.

The irony of the situation was that while Genie actively discouraged his students from seeking work in the “plastic of tinsel town,” he, and the rest of the faculty, were all over it. I remember watching TV and seeing a strange guy in a non-verbal role as a bailiff on some network Lawyer/‌Police show and thinking, “Hmmm, there must have been something to that clam training, because that was Genie.” Or, while sitting in a bar, you’d catch a few seconds of some TV show and realize that the tubby waitress on the screen who just served coffee and maybe uttered the line “Non-fat latte, extra foam,” was the world renowned expert on “Emotion through African Masks” who had been teaching at your school for 15 years. It was funny: the prestigious theater faculty of the school who had their books, theories, and New York or Chicago theater experience were the day players of the entertainment industry. And if you looked quickly and didn’t turn your head, you could find them choking out lines like “Here’s your drink,” or “Your order’s up.”

Sometime after Genie’s theater book,
I Experience It Therefore I Am It,
was published and the theater school went to some festival in New York where it proceeded to lose its accreditation, I heard that Genie had decided to “create productions” with the most Hollywood of all creatures. As it turned out, one of his former students from the ice age of his teaching days in the Midwest had become an enormous television star, creating such a hit that he would forever be remembered for this one particular character. After a lifetime of staging
Waiting for Godot
with 18-year-olds fresh off the bus from Wisconsin and at best, making a mid-five-figure income, it must have done something to him to see his former student with no possibility of an economic problem for the next three generations. That’s when Genie decided that Hollywood, after everything was said and done, was not looking too bad after all. And so he hung up his suspenders and sweatpants.

It was around this time that our paths began to cross a little bit. I think that I began to catch glimmers of him running around in the trendy restaurants where I was forced to go to satisfy my clients after their first big deal came through. Later, I would see him at all of the premieres. Not long after that, I discovered that he and his production company were being represented by the most aggressive agency in town, an agency that had been thought to control the entertainment industry in the early ’90s.

The most startling moment came when I started getting phone calls from the Stepford D- (D for Development) Girls at his production company. They wanted to go to lunch with me to find out more about my clients and how we could do business together.