I don't get a lot of letters - I mean who does these days - but it came as a special surprise when in recent months I received a large padded envelope, return address a PO box in Hollywood. It was stuffed with letters, all of them from the 80s, and each stamped with an apparent rating: G, PG, PG-13, R, and finally X (which for those of you too young to remember = NC-17 today). They had been opened and read, I could tell, then returned to their envelopes. I immediately knew what they were: fan letters.
During my brief encounter with fame, these parcels came twice-monthly. Initially, they were unmediated - sent directly from my agent's office to my home address. Most were from tween girls, regular readers of teen magazines, and members of various fan clubs. I was advised to write back only rarely, when it was a child with cancer, or whose parents had just divorced, or something - you weren't supposed to be too accessible. All the others would get a canned reply, and head shot, if requested.
I promptly ignored this advice, writing back to as many of them as I could find the time. Almost always, they wanted to know: did I have a girlfriend? My agent told me to always say yes, whether or not it was true, because boys were supposed to have girlfriends. Umm, where's yours, I thought. He had only a "personal assistant" (the first time I had heard the term), this eighteen year old boy who he claimed to have rescued from a troubled home several years earlier. The first time I met him I thought he was my age, or no more than a year or two older. I thought it was his son. Nope, more like his "son."
(Funnily: my on-again, off-again beard since grade school - the first girl I had ever kissed - had with her twin sister been "discovered" by an associate of my agent, shortly before it happened to me. They had a small role at the opening of a lodging-themed cult horror flick, running and screaming, and were offered others afterward. But their mother, who became fast aware of how the business worked at the turn of the decade, pulled the plug on it all.)
My own experience with fandom soon took a dark turn too.
One of my correspondents was a boy my age in Nebraska - just about the only boy who wrote to me. He seemed nice enough, and (since I had a small/secret crush on him) it didn't even matter that our shared interests were mostly the fabrications of a bitter Hollywood screenwriter turned copywriter for the agency. (It was all, you understand, designed to appeal to tween girls, without ever being overtly gay - certain things were in, and others out. Unless you were being groomed for "bad boy" parts, for instance, a taste for heavy metal was verboten, as was an interest in horror movies. According to the press releases, my favorite band was "Wham!," and my favorite movie was "the Goonies" [which, at least, I actually did like]. I preferred Benihana [this was the 80s remember, when Japan was the future] to Mexican, but I'd never try sushi. The scar above my right eye was caused by a dog attack [a standard period sit com trope - I had actually collided with my teammate's front teeth playing soccer]. I liked the beach, playing cards, light blue...)
A month or two into our correspondence, I got a letter which I knew to have a picture inside. I hurriedly tore open the envelope, only to find the nude photo of a middle aged man lying naked on a lakeside beach. The accompanying letter, which described "traditional coming of age rites," from Sparta to New Guinea, laid bare (you'll forgive the pun) his interest in me. He would kidnap me, he said - like Zeus did Ganymede - and "show me the path to manhood so lacking in the modern world." You may not remember a single line from Shakespeare, but somehow the words of creeps stick with you for decades.
I left it on the counter for my parents to find, and that was the end of that. One of the office ladies - a nice woman who called me Bunny for some reason (I think I had shown up there in a Peter Rabbit costume once) - was assigned the task of screening my mail, and giving each letter a rating.
In those months, I managed to leverage my fleeting celebrity for one thing: a real pen pal. Maybe I was just mad at having been burned (as in deceived and taken advantage of) by Middle Aged Man, or maybe it was that I wanted to connect with someone who got what I was going through. (For all but the most well-adjusted - which I was most certainly not - a certain amount of withdrawal is common. People you've known think you're being aloof, but it isn't that at all. Prior to this moment, you've only ever had a private life, with all its expectations, and deficits - the stuff of normal life. Now you have a public self, which has taken over your body, and image, and increasingly your life. Strangers, and even some friends, begin to see you as that. As a kid, and even as an adult, a part of you just wants to hide.
As a counterpoint example, one of my friends in high school was this actress who played opposite probably the biggest kid star of the decade [all because of this one movie] in the flick that followed. I didn't understand it to be film noir, or kid noir - these were terms I wouldn't hear until college - but it was one of my favorite movies back then. It was also a big inspiration for this feature I'm writing, "the Little Drummer Boy." If kindness were a child actor, she was it: despite a regular tv gig she got straight As in AP classes, was always generous with her time, and did charity work not because she had to, but because she wanted to. I'd been hoping she might come out of actor retirement for the role of the dancing boy's mother, and I'm pleased to find she's willing to act again. In fact, I'm hoping her former screen mate might consider playing the dad. But I digress...)
My pen pal and I had met at this charity dinner, which fittingly enough for the movie he was about to appear in, was devoted to funding Russian exchange students, and promoting "peace through friendship." (I don't know why I was there. It had been decided that my Special Interest would be world peace - which annoyed me because it sounded like a beauty pageant contestant - so I guess it had something to do with that. The Soviet-era swag on display though was pretty cool: old spy cameras [one a wrist watch, another a pen], folk art by Cossacks, an Afghanistan invasion force play set. My favorite was the spy stuff. It was like that game "Top Secret," but for real.)
You could tell even then that he was already over it, just wanted to get back to his friends, and baseball (which was his original talent, and part of the reason he got the role in the first place). I figured it was why I stopped hearing from him after a few months, and why he never worked again. What I only realized, after getting this parcel, was that there might be more to the story. Astonishingly, there was one final letter from him - which began with his usual good will, and goings on (he'd mark each day he had left in Hollywood, as if it was jail), but ended with a warning.
The week prior, he'd been invited to a certain private club well known to CDAN readers. He was only there a short time before things got palpably strange, and uncomfortable, with one of the adults present. After demanding use of a phone for close to ten minutes, he was finally able to call his father in the midwest, who in turned called him a cab back to his hotel. (He was in town to do publicity.) The letter was marked with an X, presumably by my agent, to indicate it was not for my eyes: people protecting their kind, and all.
So, why did I get it now, after all these years? I'm thinking it's because of what's happened, beginning last October. You wonder who else is getting what. You wonder what they're turning over to the appropriate authorities. (As in: the letter is no longer in my possession.)
There was this other letter too, the envelope marked conspicuously with the stuff of 80s fan girls: hearts, clouds, rainbows, unicorns. That was all tongue in cheek, or at least meant in the best possible way. As it turns out, I knew, or at least had met my correspondent.
"Dear *****," it read. "Not sure if you remember me, but I was that studio intern who made sure you didn't end up on a milk carton. I just wanted to write and maybe cheer you up. I know you didn't get the part, but I thought you did good. And for what it's worth the production is a mess."
Oddly enough, even after all this time, this did make me feel better. In this business it isn't even always success that matters, but the perception of it. As I had said, more or less, I was or would start to become famous for something that didn't yet exist. I'm thinking that this is the proverbial way the world works. The only difference between a con and a hustle is that with the latter, you have the goods. You either break through the noise, or you don't. Almost never does anyone get an "e" for effort.
But I was just happy to hear from her too, however belatedly. She was that rare flower of kindness in the asphalt of Hollywood. And these being internet times, she wasn't hard to find. She's married now, with two nice and nearly grown kids.
Stay tuned for Part 2!
