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  In this phase of his career Gere represented a gritty 1970s male sensuality and seemed perfectly cast in the downbeat, nihilistic world of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, whose story was yet another one of that decade’s archetypical narratives. Schoolteacher Theresa Dunn’s murder at the hands of a random sex partner in the mid-’70s urban wasteland of Manhattan was sexually arousing and had a tabloid excitement for me at fourteen, but it also alternately horrified and bored and depressed me. Diane Keaton experiences her ultimate orgasm as she’s being stabbed to death on another one-night stand (by Tom Berenger, another fixation of mine from that moment) beneath the flickering dead end of a strobe light, gasping and covered with blood—punishment achieved and morality play completed. And yet I watched the film over and over again during the weeks it played on the Z Channel, for glimpses of Gere.

  In 1979, the only movie he appeared in was Yanks, John Schlesinger’s World War II ensemble about GIs stationed in northern England in 1943. It was the first time Gere had starred in a movie made by a gay director, and the difference between this and his two previous movies (one directed by Terrence Malick, the other by Robert Mulligan) was noticeable to me even at fifteen. Everything changed because the camera now approached Gere as a star, accentuating the sad almond eyes, the sensuous full-lipped mouth, the glamorous hollowed-out cheeks, the smooth ex-gymnast’s body that we glimpse naked in a barracks shower in one of the very first scenes—the blocking somewhat obscures explicit nudity, but we get the idea—and his prominent nose seemed less schnozzy: someone in lust was photographing him. Watching Yanks for the first time that fall when I was fifteen, I hadn’t before seen a more beautiful man in any movie, but he also seemed blank and lost, which probably added to his beauty. Gere’s flaw in period films like Days of Heaven and Yanks was that he seemed too contemporary, too modern, to truly fit into these worlds, and because of this he was mannered. He comes off in Yanks as amateurish, with a flat and uninflected voice, and he doesn’t look or sound or move the way we’d imagine a wisecracking short-order cook from Arizona would—he seems instead as if he should be preening on the catwalk in late-’70s Milan, twitchy from drugs and open to anything sexually, or else lounging around Studio 54 and the Fiorucci boutique in Beverly Hills. Gere emanates a sense of entitlement that seems faintly bizarre, yet he holds the screen even as it is almost always apparent that he’s acting, and overly self-aware, never really disappearing into the role. There remains a genuine tension in this.

  Yanks is a glazed and somewhat embalmed piece of traditional studio moviemaking, and all the Americans are miscast: Chick Vennera as Gere’s best friend is encouraged to overdo everything, and who in their right mind considered William Devane a romantic leading man, paired with the luminous Vanessa Redgrave no less? It was a major bomb, but Gere had already shot American Gigolo by the time Yanks flopped. This was the second movie in which he’d replaced Travolta (the first was Days of Heaven), and though Paramount wanted Christopher Reeve for Julian Kay after Travolta split, Paul Schrader held out for Gere, finally convincing the head of the studio, Barry Diller, to cast him. (Julie Christie dropped out after Travolta left, and Meryl Streep later turned down the role of Michelle because she found the script distasteful.) In the opening half of American Gigolo, it’s obvious that Julian Kay will be anyone you want, depending on how much you pay him. One of the first times we see him he’s hanging upside down in his apartment, wearing gravity boots while rehearsing lines in Swedish for an upcoming eight-thousand-dollar trick, and later he runs the same lines with that senator’s wife, Michelle. Sometimes he’s a chauffeur for a wealthy widow from Charlottesville, and then he turns into a swishy German decorator in order to protect a client when they’re visiting Sotheby’s—arguably one of Gere’s more embarrassing moments on screen. In the movie’s most iconic scene Julian gets dressed for a night out, wiping cocaine off a small mirror, laying out beautiful Armani suits on his bed, choosing a costume, inspecting the drawers of luxurious shirts and shimmering ties while Smokey Robinson sings “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” Near the end of the movie, Julian desperately tells the pimp who set him up for the Rheiman murder in Palm Springs that he’ll play other roles (gay, kink) in order to escape this frame-up, and you realize that American Gigolo could be considered a horror movie about an actor losing his audience. Julian thinks he’s free but he’s constantly told what to do—everything’s really just an audition to get paid.

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  I’ve been involved with actors since I was a child, in close proximity from elementary school and high school into adulthood, both professionally and a few times romantically. Even with the crazy passive-aggressive positivity actors need simply to maintain their balance and to feed their hunger to seduce and control you, I’ve always found them endearing and likable. This neurosis is ultimately forgivable since this is what actors are supposed to do—to make you like them. Their job simply demands: I want to make you want me. And because of this, at least for the majority of actors whom I’ve hung out with, acting is a hard life, filled with a low-level fear and emotional peril due to what might happen if you don’t like them. What if you don’t respond to what they’re selling? It’s pretty basic: what happens if the actor just isn’t liked? This is not a job that’s forced on anyone; it’s simply chosen by people who want to express themselves (regardless of where their neuroses come from) and also hope to make a living from doing so. But most actors never succeed, and the struggle and rejection inherent in their trade makes just about any other profession seem sane and straightforward. The reasons an actor is wanted and hired are so random—often luck based, having nothing to do with merit and capability—that watching this game from the sidelines, as a nonactor, can be upsetting enough to make your mind reel. (This is why I find casting sessions almost unbearable—even before hearing someone read from the script, from the moment they walk into the room I can tell instantly whether he or she is right for the role, or not.) Imagine, then, what this feels like for them. Actors are so integral to film and theater and TV that the best of them unearth truths that are stunningly revealing, and they can also be a joy to watch because of their physicality as well as their talent. Who has a problem looking at amazingly pretty people for the duration of even a mediocre movie? Actors depend on their likability, and their attractiveness, because they want people to watch them, to be drawn to them, to desire them. Because of this, actors are, by their very nature, liars.

  For this reason, they end up playing a part for us in their lives, too. And they can’t help it: they spend their days disappearing into personas. They want to please, they want to do a good job, they have a need—and because of this actors can be as simple and amiable and guileless as the friendliest golden retriever. Or they can be paranoid and emotionally needy narcissists, always worrying about what anyone and everyone wants from them. Is it just a job? Is it only a performance? Do they want sexual gratification? What role should I play to get this part? How high do I turn the sexual wattage up for the casting director, this producer, that executive? God, I hope they like me. Actors dread criticism and are more wounded by it because, unlike most of us, they live in front of an audience, and criticism means the public might not like them anymore. Criticism means the next job, that next flirtation, maybe the big career-changing payday might not happen. For the actor, criticism is tied far more intimately to survival than it is for any of the rest of us. Or at least it hasn’t been, until lately.

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  A long time ago in the faraway era of Empire, actors could protect their carefully designed and enigmatic selves more easily and completely than is possible now, when we all live in the digital land of social media where our phones candidly capture moments that used to be private and our unbidden thoughts can be typed up in a line or two on Twitter. Some actors have become more hidden, less likely to go public with their opinions, likes and dislikes—because who knows where that next job�
��s coming from? Others have become more vocal, stridently voicing their righteousness, but signaling one’s social-justice virtue isn’t necessarily the same as being honest—it can also be a pose. Who might these actors offend if they behaved like regular people, angry and riddled with contradictions? But being an actor involves turning into a blank, hollowing yourself out so you can replace whatever was there with the character you’re playing next. What does it mean to be real as an actor? What does transparency mean if you’re essentially a vessel waiting to be filled again and again and again? Part of the actor’s immediate charm stems from an upbeat attitude they keep selling, one that masks their true selves. If you get to know an actor intimately you might or might not have access to that true self in private, but rarely will you see it in public, where the actor always continues to play a part. But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we’ve all become actors. We’ve had to rethink the means with which to express our feelings and thoughts and ideas and opinions in the void created by a corporate culture that is forever trying to silence us by sucking up everything human and contradictory and real with its assigned rule book on how to behave. We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor’s dream.

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  In May 1985 Less Than Zero was published, and even though it didn’t become a national best seller until the fall, it was talked about in certain publishing circles and it wasn’t long before magazines started asking me—a junior at Bennington College—to write articles for them. One of the first was Vanity Fair, whose editor in chief summoned me to New York that July when I was attending the Bennington writers summer workshop in Vermont. I took the train down to Manhattan and arrived, somewhat nervously, at the bar at the Algonquin to meet the woman who had revived Vanity Fair into what was becoming once again the buzziest magazine around. I sat across from her and was immediately uncomfortable: Tina Brown was soft-spoken, petite, with a no-nonsense air of British formality, and she could stare you down with a laser-light intensity. I found her stillness intimidating, so as a hungover, shaggy twenty-one-year-old I ordered a midday vodka and grapefruit juice to settle my nerves. She wanted to know what I might like to write about, and I shrugged because I really didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write a piece for the magazine, and I finally told her so. But she persisted, sometimes silently. Tina’s silences were always weighted with meanings I couldn’t decipher, and she didn’t seem to care how long they lasted. I remember an especially lengthy one that went on for minutes when we had lunch in the late ’90s at the Royalton, when she wanted me to write a profile of the then-recluse Axl Rose for The New Yorker, where she had become editor in chief. (I demurred.) I was used to all this by then, but at the Algonquin, a decade earlier, I kept shifting uncomfortably. And then she brought up the Brat Pack, who had been newly branded in a recent New York magazine piece.

  “Is there an actor in the Brat Pack that you might like to profile?” Tina asked. I shrugged. “What about Judd Nelson?” she suggested quietly. St. Elmo’s Fire had opened a few weeks earlier and I’d seen The Breakfast Club that spring. “Yeah, maybe…” Now it was my turn to go silent. She looked at something on the table, then back at me. “He’s quite annoying, isn’t he?” I made a meaningless gesture with my hands. “Yeah, I guess…” “I think he’s quite annoying,” she said again, then asked, “Don’t you?” I’d never met Judd Nelson and told her so. “He seems a bit obnoxious,” she insisted. “That might be a very interesting match—you profiling Judd.” Something seemed to be swirling around the bar in the Algonquin that summer afternoon: she was beginning to get to me and I was seeing things her way, and soon I began to nod. “Yeah, yeah, he does seem pretty annoying,” I said. “You’re right.” Tina then asked when I’d next be in LA and said she was hoping to get the piece ready for Vanity Fair’s Los Angeles issue, which would be out in October. I told her I’d get back to LA in August when the workshop was over, and she said she’d handle all the necessary arrangements. I left the hotel in a kind of daze, worried that I’d mindlessly accepted an assignment that in the end would somehow displease her. She seemed so exacting and the magazine itself so impossibly glamorous to my college-kid sensibility, and did I really want to do a hit piece on an actor? But I found out from my agent later that afternoon what I would get paid and it staggered me—“A fuck of a lot of money,” as she put it—and by comparison to the digital age when everyone basically writes for free, it seems even more staggering in retrospect. And so the plan was set in motion: I would meet the actor Judd Nelson, find him appalling, and write about how awful hanging out with him had been.

  I realized later—I didn’t make the connection in the bar—that Tina had of course read New York’s Brat Pack article. It was the most talked-about piece of celebrity journalism in years. The magazine had sent David Blum to Los Angeles to profile Emilio Estevez, arguably the most famous of the actors in Joel Schumacher’s recently released St. Elmo’s Fire, and what had been pitched as a typical puff piece quickly warped into a scathing portrayal that soon became scandalous. Estevez’s mistake was inviting the journalist to trail him around LA, allowing him to observe what young stars do with their nights off. It’s all quite harmless: nobody’s snorting blow or banging hookers, it’s just Emilio using his new status to get into nightclubs and comped at movie theaters, but the authorial tone makes everyone in the piece, no matter what they’re doing or saying, seem entitled and annoying. Its chief weakness—and the reason I’m mystified why it has carried such pop-cultural weight for more than three decades—is that the only people in it besides Estevez are the barely present Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson, for whom Blum reserves the bulk of his ire. Timothy Hutton makes a brief appearance, but he was never part of the Brat Pack; he’d become a star five years earlier and had already won an Oscar. But Blum lumps everyone from that period together, including Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Matthew Broderick, Matthew Modine and Nic Cage. And so begins a curious study in journalistic pathology: a youngish male reporter (Blum was probably thirty at the time) seems to seethe over the beauty and good fortune of these up-and-coming young actors, so he twists their youthful nights out—drinking Coronas at the Hard Rock, reveling in the attention from starstruck girls—into something almost sinister.

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  Because of the roles Nelson had played in The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, as well as in a little-seen movie I’d caught earlier that year called Fandango, and because by now I’d read the New York Brat Pack piece, I wasn’t sure whom I was going to meet, and because I had been influenced and flattered by Tina Brown, I expected to dislike him. But Judd was nothing like the snarling John Bender in The Breakfast Club or the entitled yuppie Alec from St. Elmo’s Fire, or anything I had inferred from another magazine’s previous snarky profile—he was smart, funny, direct, likable. And because we were getting along so well I decided, while we were sitting in Carney’s on Sunset Boulevard on the afternoon we met in August of 1985, to confide what my editor had in mind for the piece, and what she was probably expecting me to turn in. Judd contemplated this, and we went back and forth on how to approach this problem, and the unfairness of it all, whether real or imagined, and then came up with an alternative. Instead of a Judd Nelson profile we offered Vanity Fair a piece about where young Hollywood really hangs out—not Spago and the Roxy, but the secret places where the hip and connected actually go. We envisioned “Looking for Cool in LA.” When I pitched the piece to the magazine they loved it, even bringing handsome young Bradford Branson on board to shoot the places Judd and I had decided to extol as LA’s coolest. What I didn’t let anyone at Vanity Fair know was that the places Judd and I would sanctify were actually some of the most r
etrograde, least fashionable venues in greater Los Angeles—places that real young Hollywood sophisticates not only would shun, but probably hadn’t even heard of.

  Where did LA’s youngest and hippest prefer to eat? At Philippe: the original home of the French-dip sandwich, a simple cafeteria on Alameda and Ord. For a cultural excursion: the Museum of Neon Art. The coolest place for a drink would be the bar at the downtown Hilton on a seedy stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. And then there was the fictional Bud Club—a legendary floating emporium that could magically pop up anywhere from Glendale to dark and deserted Venice, so elusive that it allegedly drove the young and hip insane. Everywhere from the retro coffee shop Ben Frank’s to a Chinese fortune-teller hidden in the outskirts of Pasadena became the fake go-to for LA’s juvenile elite—and Judd and I sold them all, posing at each in black suits and skinny ties and Ray-Bans for photographs Brandon shot in beautiful shimmering black and white. To make sure nobody at the magazine would get suspicious we threw in a few legitimately trendy places: Power Tools, the Ritz Café, Chianti Cucina, Dirt Box. Ultimately, the two of us felt that we had both dodged a bullet—me having something stranger and less orthodox than a hack profile could offer, and Judd going unscathed by an encounter with a potentially dubious journalist. The piece ran in the November 1985 issue, our names heralded on the cover and superimposed over Sylvester Stallone posing with Brigitte Nielsen. As a senior at Bennington College I remember opening that issue on a bus heading from campus into town and feeling both delighted and frightened by what Judd and I had pulled off, and it wasn’t long before I heard that Vanity Fair had found out what we’d perpetrated, and understandably I was never asked to write anything else during Tina Brown’s reign. Ironically, a few of the places we prematurely proclaimed cool ultimately became so for a little while, because of the piece, and it seems a reminder now of the power of Vanity Fair, of youth, and of the 1980s.