Excerpts
For the celebrity profiler, every job's a blind date, and the sweaty fat girl is always you. When the chemistry's right, it's magical for the story. And when the chemistry sucks, it's misery, and also very good for the story.
It's the story I crave -- and the story is about real human connection. It's not my job to plug the star's latest project. My job is to dig as deep as I can, share some laughs -- and write the hell out of it.
After a long time staring into the mirror, he turns away and sits back down in the seat across from mine. His eyes are red and wet. His hands shake.
"It's 'Anatomy of a Frame-Up,'" he says. "There is no case. They have no case. I didn't do anything wrong -- I didn't do anything. They have no case. If they had a case, I'd be sitting in jail right now.
"She kissed the gun. I have no idea why -- I never knew her, never even saw her before that night. I have no idea who she was or what her agenda was. They have the gun -- I have no idea where or how she got the gun. She asked me for a ride home. Then she wanted to see the castle. She was loud -- she was loud and drunk even before we left the House of Blues. She grabbed a bottle of tequila from the bar to take with her. I was not drunk. I wasn't drunk at all. There is no case. She killed herself.
Even as he mounted the summit of the sitcom world, Larry David remained Larry David. Each season, he prayed that NBC or Jerry Seinfeld would pull the show's plug. Each year, he frayed a little more under the pressure to keep topping himself.
"It was so big. It was like, 'Yeah, cancel the show. Take me out of my misery -- because I don't think I can do this.'"
Then, in 1996, he quit the highest-rated sitcom on television -- quit writing, quit producing, and quit watching it. And -- being Larry David -- not with any sense of triumph or success.
"People would say, 'You deserve it.' I'd go, 'What do you even mean -- I deserve it? What do I deserve? I don't deserve anything.'"
As for his Seinfeld money, it's a running joke on Curb Your Enthusiasm. When David confronts a network exec about swiping shrimp from his take-out order, the guy hollers, "You know what, Larry? Take your $475 million and buy yourself some fucking shrimp."
If Larry David isn't happy, it's not his money's fault.
"I like having it; I'm not gonna deny that. I never made more than $7000 a year until I was thirty-two. I had my share of character-building years. It's great to have it. But I wasn't happy when some of those numbers were published. People look at me and go, 'Oh, you must be so happy.' Nobody knows what goes on inside another person's head. You don't know anything, no matter who they are."
In his VIP section, Mickey Rourke swigs from a bottle of red wine while Tupac rolls and smokes joint after joint. As if the scuzz-celebrity quotient here tonight isn't quite high enough, Shannon Dougherty appears on the cushions. She and Tupac talk; Mickey is busy scanning the floor below, where someone has hoisted Carre Otis atop a huge speaker on the floor. She is dancing stiffly, alone, above the crowd. I notice two girls who have been allowed
beyond the rope; they're standing at my side, whispering and giggling. The one with the raven pig-tails, her midriff bare, approaches Mickey. The other, blonde and bubbly-cute, begins to laugh.
"Look," she says, pointing to her friend, whose hand is now down the back of Mickey's jeans. "He's so gross. I can't believe it."
She wants to know what Tupac is like. I tell her that all I know is that he's smoked a lot of weed tonight.
"He'll probably want to do that anal thing," she says, laughing, and moves to him. In a little while, it's time to go home. The blond leaves with Tupac, and Mickey and her friend take the next cab.
Before he gets in, Mickey comes over to give me a hug. His lips brush my cheek.
"Take care of yourself," he says.
I can't smell a thing, not even the wine.
"I am Iron Man," Robert Downey Jr. says. "Now, what kind of Iron Man do I wanna be? The Daniel Craig, someone-just-packed-clay-on-my-shoulders-and-chest thing is played out. So I'd rather go a little more Enter the Dragon style."
"Here's how insane life gets -- I'm doing a fucking biopic. Same pressure as Chaplin, except there's no reference -- you're creating the reference. The hustle is, how do I write a line between doing something that wasn't expected and how do I trust my brother, Jon Favreau -- and how do we have this fuckin' thing happen where we both are the guy -- because to me, that's a movie, when the director and the lead guy create this third thing that is the character."
"Should we have one of our business-therapy sessions so Scott can see how fuckin' sick we all are? I just wanna break the ice here."
And he farts once, short and sharp.
"That's fuckin' nothing," he says. "I can clear out this whole floor." Not bad for an overture, I say, rolling out a bassoon note of my own.
"Dude," he says. "That was literally like an orchestral blip. That wasn't even the warm-up -- that was like the fuckin' oboist's double-reed hit the floor."
But the truth is elsewhere: Downey's colon is ready to conduct.
"For reference," he shouts as he bolts from the kitchen, "you may photograph whatever you like, except this three-coil steamer I'm about to fuckin' drop in Christine's office."
The eggs are history. Gone, all gone: the eggs, the beans, the home fries, even the toast. Kid Rock's gone, too -- vanished, say the gossips, into the fetid jungle of Pam Anderson.
"It's totally never my policy to ever talk about anybody in an interview," Sheryl vows when Kid Rock's name is raised, but she was the one who brought it up when I asked why she wasn't doing any new material during her club shows. It was none other than the Kid who warned Sheryl that any new stuff she did might wind up scarfed by Napster -- but hey, as long as we're on the subject, just how dumb is he in real life?
"He's not dumb. He has an overview of what entertainment is that just blows my mind, a great scope of what people want, and what's considered kind of challenging to the audience. The other thing is, he's wildly talented. As he gets out and plays with other people, people are shocked by how talented he is."
Would this be the same Kid Rock who wrote "Fuck U Blind" and "Blow Me" -- that Kid Rock?
"It's like Lenny Bruce to me," Sheryl says. "Lenny Bruce challenging the audience, saying things that are really taboo, that scare people, but everybody inside is kind of laughing about it."
Lenny Bruce? Kid Rock has precisely two things in common with Lenny Bruce: He likes showgirls and getting blown.
