Fairy Tale Interrupted (5 page)

I knew it. I fucking knew it. Michael was jumping ship.

“Can’t you take me with you?”

“It’s not a PR thing, Rose. And everything is still up in the air. But don’t worry. I’ve found you a new job.”

“I don’t want a new job. I want to stay here.”

Michael had made me feel as though I was indispensable. He even said in one of my reviews, “You are the prize of my pen.” I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to take me with him.

“There is no ‘here’ anymore,” he said. “I sold the business to another PR firm; all the accounts and you are part of the deal. You’re going to work for them.”

“What if I don’t like it there?”

“Give the new firm a chance. Just go meet them.” He handed me a slip of paper with a midtown address, and I arranged to be interviewed that afternoon. But as I made my way uptown to my potential new employer’s office, I was furious at Michael for springing this on me at the last minute and still not telling me the whole truth. What was his business with John, and why couldn’t he take me with him? In the elevator on my way up to the impromptu interview, I tried to tell myself that perhaps this was for the best. My new job might be even cooler than PR/NY. I had to keep an open mind.

But as soon as the doors opened, I knew there was nothing cool about the place. The reception area was set up like a tiki bar, with wood paneling and colored Christmas lights, in a sad attempt at being “fun” and “hip.” I was going from a chic minimalist office to a Las Vegas lounge.

The receptionist sent me in to meet one of the executives, who had a typically drab office with slivers of window that looked out on the misery of midtown workers scrambling to grab lunch and get back to the office with enough time to actually eat it. When the woman stood up and extended her hand, a pungent, stale aroma wafted my way—she smelled like booze.

“Michael told me you’re great with clients and really good at booking media.”

Yeah,
I thought,
a prize he was looking to give away
.

“I need you to write a press release so I can see your work,” she said, slurring her words.

“Right now?” I asked. I was pretty nervous. I already knew I didn’t want to work for this lady, but I needed a job. Without saying another word, she got up from her desk and wobbled away to make room for me to use her computer. I sat down in her chair and waited in silence for a few awkward moments. Had she passed out behind me?

“Well, what’s it about?” I asked.

“What?” she said.

“The press release you want me to write.”

“Oh, right . . . God is announcing the end of the world, and you have to write a press release.”

She had to be kidding.

“Who is your client?” I asked.

“God.”

I stared at the screen with my wrists resting on the keyboard, fingers poised to type, having no idea what to write.
There is no way I’m doing this,
I thought as I stared at the blinking cursor. I got up and looked right at her. “Well, if God is your client, then
you don’t need me, or a press release,” I said, grabbing my purse and running out of her office.

I ran through the tiki-lounge waiting area to the elevators and repeatedly pressed the down button, hoping she wouldn’t follow me. Nobody was in the elevator, and when the doors closed, I leaned against the wall and began sobbing. I was hysterical. Everything good about my life was slipping away. The job I had been lucky to get and worked so hard to keep was over. I wouldn’t be hanging with people like Michael and John, or even Liz and Tricia, anymore. I would probably lose my apartment and have to move back in with Frank and his mom or, even worse, back home.

I cried all the way from midtown to 26th Street. Somewhere along the way, one of my contacts fell out of my eye, so by the time I got back to PR/NY, I was puffy, crying, and half-blind. I went straight into my office and slammed the door shut.

Moments later, Michael banged on the door and said, “Rose, come on, open up.” But I wouldn’t. I yelled through the door, “Forget it. I can’t believe you’re ditching me like this.”

From the other side of the door, I heard John ask, “What’s going on?” Then there was a low murmur as John and Michael talked about me. I heard one pair of footsteps retreating and gathered that John had returned to his office—which I still thought to be
my
office.

“Rosie, calm down.”

It was John.

“I think we might be able to figure something out,” he said. I worried he was going to give me a pity talk, but I opened the door anyway. Instead, he sat on the edge of my desk and looked me straight in the eyes. “Why don’t you work for me?”

The fact that I really didn’t want to leave moved John. I would come to understand that he prized loyalty above all. Plus, he liked my sense of humor; I made him laugh, and he wanted me to stick around. . . . Doing what, I had no idea.

“What will you do?” I asked.

John laughed. “I’m starting a magazine.”

“Random Ventures, please hold. Random Ventures, please hold.”

Although I had pictured myself staying at PR/NY for much longer, promoting new brands and partying with Liz and Tricia, the company had been dissolved. Will jumped to another firm and brought his clients with him. Liz landed a job at a marketing company that did product tours in malls and would later come back to work with John, and Tricia went to work for Michael’s girlfriend, Victoria Hagan, an interior designer.

Only three of us—Michael, John, and I—were left in the old offices, but the new business, Random Ventures, was much livelier than PR/NY had been, starting with the phone lines. Before John’s arrival, the office was a quieter and slower-paced environment. Now it seemed frenetic, and the phones were ringing off the hook. My new job description included the
role of receptionist. I felt like a switchboard operator, juggling lines and jotting down messages—all of them “urgent,” at least according to the voices on the other end. The phones began ringing before I opened the door in the morning and kept on ringing long after I’d left.

Just answering the phones would have been fine. But I was more than overwhelmed spending all day answering questions—or, rather, avoiding them, since Michael and John’s new enterprise was still a secret. Random Ventures started out as an idea to sell custom-made kayaks. Once John and Michael realized they couldn’t mass-produce the handcrafted boats, they scrapped the plan and decided to start a magazine. When I joined Random Ventures, it was nothing more than the two of them looking for a publisher.

At that point, I didn’t know what John and Michael were telling people about the company or whom they were telling it to, but they told me they wanted to keep word of their affairs quiet while they looked for a backer. Until there was a definitive plan, they hoped to keep their venture out of the news.

I soon found out, however, that nothing about John’s life stayed quiet for long. As he gave his new office number out to friends and contacts, word of his whereabouts spread and the phones started going crazy. People weren’t calling for Random Ventures; they were calling for John—even if they didn’t know what he was doing.

Who knew it was possible to have that many friends? They wanted to meet for drinks, make dinner plans, or ask a small favor (“Please . . . just have him call me back. . . .”). Mountains of mail also poured into the chaotic new office, mostly letters
from charities begging John to lend his famous name to this or that cause, each worthier than the last.

My nerves were frayed because I now had a million opportunities every day to say something stupid to the wrong person or piss off someone important. The less I said, the better, so I quickly devised a script for myself that was essentially “I’ll see if he’s in.” And I stuck to it.

I didn’t want to do anything to screw up their plan to start a magazine that blended the opposing worlds of politics and pop culture. The timing was right for their concept: politics was moving in a younger and decidedly more mainstream direction. A couple of years earlier, in June 1992, a young and charismatic presidential candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton had played his sax on
The Arsenio Hall Show
during his campaign. President Clinton (who later appeared on MTV, where he was asked whether he wore boxers or briefs, to which he answered, “usually briefs”) was rewarded when election polls the year of his win showed a 20 percent increase in youth turnout over the prior presidential election, reversing a twenty-year decline of young voters.

Reaching out to young people through late-night shows was only part of the effort to change the long-standing conception of politics as uncool. Rock the Vote, a group that used music, celebrity, and pop culture to get young people interested in the political process and voting, was heating up with PSAs from artists like R.E.M., En Vogue, and Eddie Vedder, as well as TV specials featuring such A-listers as Madonna, Tom Cruise, and Chris Rock. I couldn’t imagine anyone more suited to merge the two worlds of pop culture and politics than John, since he exemplified both.

While I didn’t have an actual title at Random Ventures, it was clear from day one that my job was strictly administrative, assisting both John and Michael. In the beginning, that meant typing and mailing letter after letter to media companies and private investors that John and Michael viewed as potential backers. Getting a response was never a problem, since everyone wanted a meeting with John. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that an eager reply didn’t necessarily indicate an intention to finance the political magazine. But John and Michael kept feeding me names from their Rolodexes, and I kept typing them into cover letters.

Had that been all it demanded, my new job would have been a cakewalk. But nothing with John was ever simple. His personal and public lives mixed in the most unique manner, and every detail was nuanced in a way that my upbringing hadn’t prepared me for. What did I know about serving on the benefit committee of the Whitney Museum or attending the celebration of the newly restored Grand Central Terminal? Growing up, my idea of culture was the
Daily News
.

At first, I was at a total loss to understand his circumstances, and like many people who didn’t know John well, I initially misinterpreted some of his behaviors as insensitive or spacey, when in fact they were coping mechanisms for his insane life. Take the fifteen-minute rule, for example. Whether attending a movie screening or meeting a friend for lunch, John was always right on time—which is to say, exactly fifteen minutes late. As his new assistant, I fielded more than a few panicked calls from people fearing they’d gotten the location wrong or, worse, were being stood up. But it didn’t take long to figure out that John’s tardiness was intentional—he was late because he couldn’t
risk standing on a street corner or at a restaurant bar if his appointment was running behind schedule. He’d be a sitting duck for anyone wanting an autograph or hoping to tell him a story about his mother or father. Hence the fifteen-minute rule. It even applied to one of his favorite pastimes, attending Knicks games, where he’d ease into his courtside seat long after the thousands of fans had already filed into Madison Square Garden.

Unfortunately, I had to figure that stuff out for myself. As foreign and enigmatic as John’s life was to me, it was normal to him. He didn’t deconstruct the details of his day; he acted on instinct, and I had to learn to do the same.

When I started working for him, I was unsure how to approach some of the minor details. For example, the first couple of times I booked his plane tickets, I wasn’t sure how to refer to Kennedy Airport. I mean, should I say “JFK” or “Kennedy” or “the airport named after your father”? It was awkward. He finally said to me, “I don’t mind going out of Kennedy,” and that’s the term I used from then on.

Reserving a hotel room for him for the first time was particularly confusing. I decided that using his name was out of the question, because it would cause havoc if people knew he was coming. Without asking him how he would like me to handle his travel arrangements—I hated to bother him with minutiae—I decided to reserve the room under my name. After I’d booked two or three trips like this, John approached me.

“Hey, Rosie, when you book my hotel room, it’s okay to put it under my name.”

“Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure you wanted that, but I will from now on. Was there a problem?”

“Well,” he said, his face breaking into a shit-eating grin, “I don’t get the fruit basket, the upgrade, or the champagne when it’s under your name. It sucks to travel as you, Rosie.”

It also sucked to deal with all the crazies who loved John. Every celebrity has a contingent of fanatical admirers. But the depth of feeling that John evoked in many, many people—celebrities included—was over the top. Yet while there were plenty of magazine stories about him, alongside the obligatory picture of him flinging a Frisbee or dashing into a cab, for the most part John kept his private life private. The gap between people’s intense interest and the little they actually knew about him allowed them to fill in details of their own choosing. They could easily superimpose their fantasies onto the blank slate of his public persona.

John was the perfect storm for those with obsessive tendencies: good-looking, famous, single, and part of a family with more conspiracy theories than cousins. What amazed me was that while many of his fans clearly didn’t have a firm grasp on reality, they were extremely resourceful, always finding a way to track down his address or phone or fax number. Once, I watched our fax machine spit out seventeen pages of a completely unintelligible rant in small, serial-killer-like handwriting. Some would call, often starting out perfectly normal before rapidly descending into something along the lines of “I am the child of Marilyn Monroe.” I became adept at feigning confusion and insisting the caller had the wrong number, confident that they wouldn’t call back.