Insatiable (15 page)

19

U
NDER
C
OVERS

I
T WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN HELEN GURLEY BROWN’S COSMOPOLITAN WITHOUT
the usual wondrous cleavage on the cover. April’s exotic vixen in 1973, captured by Francesco Scavullo, was framed in the twin pillars of brilliant teasing headlines that Helen Gurley Brown invented (and the more sedate sister magazines ultimately copied). I swear these are not made up. They are that April’s actual come-ons.

The (Tricky, Sticky)

Male
-Menopause—How
His

Can Affect
You
.

How You Can

(and Will)

Live Through

an Anxiety Attack

Stephen Birmingham

Probes the Lives of

Very Rich Girls

and Their

Bizarre Hangups

Are

Younger Men

the Answer?

What It Takes

to Be a

TV News Girl

Could a girl (or even a woman) possibly resist putting down a dollar at the newsstand for all that hand-holding and psycho-burping? Inside, Nancy Friday told how to buy a man’s suit. Thomas Meehan exposed “The Brain Manipulators.” Walter Reade revealed “Love Affairs Are Good for You.” But the pièce de résistance (in every sense) that month was my profile of a Hollywood hunk. The cover line promised:

The Burt Reynolds

We Didn’t Uncover.

The aftermath of the Watergate break-in consumed Americans. Gordon Liddy had been given a twenty-year sentence for refusing to answer the Watergate grand jury’s questions. The Vietnam War was officially ended even as White House warriors were insisting that it was right to bomb Cambodia. But, as always, frivolities distracted and consumed us. In New York, Halston’s pantsuits aroused longing in those who couldn’t afford them. Voyeurs devoured peeks into the glamorous life of Diane and Egon von Furstenberg.

Long before
New York,
I’d written for Helen Gurley Brown at
Cosmopolitan
. It was income, I told myself, money to finance our eating out, overseas travel, furs. I had a weakness for fur. I found a talented furrier who made me an American broadtail coat that fit like a dress, a V-necked brown broadtail blouse that zipped down the back, and a cheetah suit that Don loathed. It was hard to break the freelance habit, even though Don had urged me to devote all my free time to the novel. With his salary, he could easily handle the bills for all his addresses—ours, hers, and Woodstock, where the two of them would spend summer weekends while I bunked with friends in East Hampton. I knew he was right. But I liked having that extra money. Before I could exit cold turkey, I agreed to one last request from Helen: a profile of Burt Reynolds. Well, I was curious.

Burt Reynolds was filming
White Lightning
in the stifling heat of Little Rock in August 1972, when Helen sent me off to pin him wiggling to the canvas. I went through the press clippings. One year earlier, the buzz about Reynolds’s powerful performance in
Deliverance
was so feverish, it had made him nervous. If the picture lived up to the hype, it would be a breakthrough for the actor, who’d been fired from Universal and had slogged through television action series—
Riverboat, Gunsmoke, Hawk
—only to find an audience being himself, sardonic and self-mockingly funny, on the late-night talk shows. Just before I met him, he’d been offered one million dollars to play James Bond for three films and had turned it down as a dead-end career move. “I know what I want because I’ve waited fifteen years to get it,” he said. He was several years away from sharing the cover of
Time
magazine with Eastwood.

Then came the
Cosmopolitan
centerfold. Burt had astonished himself, Helen Gurley Brown, and the world by posing nude on a fur rug for
Cosmo
’s first centerfold. Now sexual propositions came at three o’clock in the morning. Incredible mail poured in—Polaroid photos of naked supplicants taken in the mirror, a lock of pubic hair in wax paper.

His affair with Dinah Shore, nineteen years his senior, was certainly intriguing. Younger man, older woman. I liked that. And I thought the centerfold was a wonderful spoof. From the clips and quotes, he struck me as a man who didn’t give a damn what anyone might think. I could see the years in his eyes, a little puffy . . . and the lines in his forehead. I found them appealingly decadent.

“You could even see the blurred scar where doctors removed his spleen and put him back together after the accident that killed his dreams of a professional football career,” I would later write. I found the scar on that beautiful body “moving . . . a symbol of vulnerability, unbelievably sexy.” Was I born to write for
Cosmo
? Helen thought so. Clearly, women were lined up to jump into his bed. I was not attracted by that. It was too obvious. I promised myself that I would not be one of them. All’s fair, I thought, but I didn’t want to be the kind of woman who would fool around with Dinah Shore’s guy. I needed to find him attractive to write the profile Helen wanted, but I didn’t need to uncross my legs.

I found Reynolds in the Sam Peck Hotel bar with a string of locals warming the bar stools and the imported movie talent cooling down after a day on the set. He was dark, heavy-browed, his sulky lips involved with a vodka and tonic. He smiled and tossed off a few one-liners, flip, nervous maybe, sizing me up while playing Burt Reynolds the self-mocking wag. He was big as life, which is never as big as celluloid or fantasy, thinner than he seemed in photographs, looking fresh-scrubbed and Saturday Night Feverish in a skintight striped body shirt open at the neck and lean black stretch pants.

This was work for both of us. He’d been slammed around on the set since 7:00
AM.
But the rules of this movie-star interview game say you both pretend it’s fun. He needed to win me if he hoped to like his image months from now in
Cosmopolitan
. In those first few minutes, his leg was already pressed against mine. I imagined the leg was saying, I am a man and you are a woman and we’re stuck with this artificial intimacy, so let’s go with it.

Okay, leg, I thought, not moving away. I don’t mind being treated like a sex object by a sex object. Let’s talk. We started with
Deliverance
. Supposedly, Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando had wanted the part, but the director, John Boorman, had asked for Reynolds after seeing him on the talk-show circuit. Burt suggested we move to a table. He ordered a club sandwich, annointing it with catsup, and tolerated a dozen interruptions from passing fans rather sweetly.

“Don’t you just want them to go away?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I sat there for fifteen years while people reached across me to get someone else’s autograph, asking me, ‘Are you somebody too?’”

I had developed a style for writing magazine profiles. I liked to hang around for a while, watching my subject, or my victim, as it might turn out, at work and play, eavesdropping, lobbing a question or two from time to time, saving the actual interrogation for later, when I knew the person better. So that’s what I did. The heat was oppressive the next morning, the mosquitoes bigger than chickens, twenty minutes outside of Little Rock. Burt, as moonshine-runner Gator McKlusky, would tangle with a gang of toughs, the cops, and the sheriff in the dusty rubble. The crew was boldly bared in the heat, women in shorts and halters, the grips bare-chested. Burt would be shoved, pummeled, fly through the air, and wind up hanging in the crook of a tree. No stuntman here.

“Everybody thinks I’m an ass for doing my own stunts,” he told me. “Number one is that I like doing it. And in the long run, I’ll be a better McKlusky.” The movements had to be precisely choreographed, rehearsed, rehearsed again. Between each take, someone handed Burt a glass of vodka spiked with Gatorade.

Just as the camera was lugged into place again, the sun disappeared. Burt lounged during the break, admiring his costar’s legs. “Cyd Charisse’s are even better,” he volunteered. “And for the best keester in Hollywood, it’s Vera-Ellen and Mitzi Gaynor. As for boobs . . .” He pondered, watching me take notes. “There’s a problem. Big boobs are wonderful, but after six hours you get tired of them. Small little boobs, they just sit there and stare at you. They’re wonderful, too.” I couldn’t decide if he thought he was amusing me or just playing Burt Reynolds, and who cared what I thought? It was his Johnny Carson persona.

We moved into the star’s dressing room—not the giant luxury trailer I would have expected, but, rather, a cramped tin can on wheels, left over from a low-budget shoot. Nothing long enough to stretch out on, just a few feet of seating, skimpily padded in plastic. Rotting squares of cheap carpet. Wheezing air conditioner. Burt propped his feet on a rusty metal locker after blending an alchemy from its contents—frosty vodka, limes, near-frozen tonic nestled in a bank of ice. I excused myself to check out the medicine chest in the john: Blistex, Snow Tan bronzer, piles of knee and elbow pads, acid-balanced hair spray, styling set, Solarcaine (which could also be used to prolong erotic ecstasy, Burt annotated later).

I picked up a paper fan and unfurled it. There was a letter written on it: “Dear Burt, you really should work for the space center. Your letter sent me into orbit without a rocket. Hope this fan keeps you cool. I’m available to operate it.”

“Isn’t that cute?” said Burt. “I love things like that.”

Now he was confiding why he would resist an affair with his leading lady. “You get too protective.” He reminisced about the loves of his life, about the importance of ending a relationship with honesty. Of not pulling “every bullshit trick every man tries to pull.” I was not sure what to make of this uninhibited outpouring. Eventually, I noticed that a lot of it sounded familiar. I’d read it already—his canned confessions—in the movie-magazine clips supplied by the studio publicist.

The sun broke out again. The crew scattered peat moss over brush and scraggle to soften the falls. Burt unzipped his dungarees and started stuffing padding around his flanks. I couldn’t help but notice—I guessed I was expected to notice—that the
Cosmo
centerfold did not do him full justice, hiding that perfect derriere. Oh dear. I had to pull myself back to reality, remembering that I was not going to be just another pushover.

So why did I suggest that we have dinner in his apartment atop the Sam Peck Hotel that evening? To escape the dining room’s constant intrusions, of course. I was wearing a white satin jumpsuit covered in a wild floral print—evening pajamas almost, but not quite—with a zipper down the front,
Cosmo
cleavage, but, most important to me, impossible to get out of gracefully. A fashion statement as chastity belt. Know thyself.

Burt looked fresh and relaxed, taut in his body shirt and stretch pants. We stood on the terrace, watching lightning cut fissures into an elephant gray sky, when the buzzer sounded. Oh. Yes . . . a female wanting photo and autograph. Then another.

“Do you think we could pretend there’s no one out there?” I asked.

He agreed we could ignore the buzzer.

“Want to see the horse I bought today?” He handed me a photo of a spindly freckled colt. “I bought him by telephone.” Burt picked up the phone and asked for room service. Two vodkas and tonic for Burt. Two glasses of white wine for me. “That’s what money is for,” he confided. “Room service. Horses. Flying your friends in to visit the set.” Money had bought the 180 acres of Florida ranch, the house built by Al Capone, where his parents lived, the land in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the California house and its gate with the giant fretwork
R.

This time, the knock announced room service. We sat there in the darkening room of the dimly lighted apartment, impersonal except for the handsome abstract paintings he had rented for the duration of filming. The waiter wheeled in a table covered with a long white cloth. Burt lighted candles.

“I called Clint Eastwood to check you out,” he told me, leaning back on the sofa, sipping his vodka.

“I guess he said I was okay.” I wondered what Eastwood had told him.

All the time I was listening, taping, sipping my wine, and analyzing the man, I was trying to remember why it had seemed so important to stay vertical. Suddenly, instead of a smart-ass cocksman, I was imagining some element of insecurity in this hypersexuality. Oh no. Vulnerability. My weakness. His leg was touching mine. His conversation was sexier than the actual seduction moves of most men. And I let him talk, let him alternate between superstud and sensitive Mr. Wonderful. I was quiet, sipping my wine but not drunk at all, thinking about the line between the compulsive Don Juan and a man who clearly loves women.

“I’m getting talked out,” he warned. “I told my agent I can’t do any more of these interviews. I don’t want to talk about anything for three months. I’ve just been so f—— honest.”

I was talked out, too. To hell with denial, I thought. If my life depended on it, I couldn’t remember why it was I was not going to make love to this adorable man. I moved toward him and offered my mouth. His lips were soft. He let me kiss him. Oh, what a wonderful surprise. He really knew how to kiss. And everything else.