Free Leading Man by Benjamin Svetkey

interview or a set visit. Theoretically, that was also just long enough for a brief romantic encounter. Sadly, though, my plan to make LA my sexual playground didn’t pan out. California-style dating was too alien to me. I never did get the hang of it. In New York, if you met a girl at a party, you might ask her where she went to school or what she had majored in. In Los Angeles, you asked where she was repped and who did her head shots. In New York, when you invited a girl on a date, it was assumed you’d meet at the restaurant. In LA, transport to and from dinner was a complex minuet. Did you pick her up? Or was that presumptuous? Either way, what you drove was critical. In Hollywood, there is no more importantstatus marker than the make and model of your car. I once picked up an LA woman for a date in a brand-new high-performance BMW M3—the rental place had upgraded me from my usual Mustang—and I knew right away I’d be getting lucky. “Wow!” my date said, slowly running a finger along a door panel. “I’ve never gone out with a car this nice before.”
    My real personal life may have been a wasteland, but my relationships with the stars were improving. I began to see myself less as a celebrity whisperer and more as an anthropologist, the Jane Goodall of fame, hacking my way through the Hollywood jungle in order to study the mysterious primates who lived in this strange Serengeti with valet parking. I once flew to LA just to spend an afternoon hovering in a helicopter over the Academy Awards for an aerial photo spread that would give
KNOW
readers a bald-spot-view of the stars. At eight hundred feet, with a photographer dangling out the window in a safety harness, it felt exactly like we were filming a Discovery Channel nature documentary. As a species,
Homo sapiens
are drawn toward fame like leopards to gazelles—and I wanted to know how come. When you think about it, the concept of celebrity is relatively new to human society. Yet clearly it triggers primal impulses in us all. What itch in our monkey brains are we scratching when we turn and stare at Val Kilmer in an airport? What ancient Darwinian impulse are we satisfying when we ask Reese Witherspoon for her autograph?
    At the start of the twenty-first century, the whole worldseemed to be going celebrity crazy. New celeb-focused magazines were popping up on newsstands every week, while otherwise serious newspapers, like
The New York Times
, began publishing box office tallies as if they were sports scores. When Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman announced their divorce, the networks interrupted regular TV programming to broadcast the news as though it were the moon landing.
KNOW
magazine had been bitten by the celebrity bug, as well, and was putting more movie stars on its covers than ever. That was great for me—I got to write a lot of those celebrity stories. I still felt driven to understand the shimmering world that had stolen Sammy from me. I still saw fame as a mystery that needed solving.
    So I expanded my research. I talked to a real anthropologist—a woman who spent years in an actual jungle studying monkeys—about celebrity and why it mattered to us humans. Her theory was that fame was a throwback to the primate need for an alpha male. “In the ape world, the alpha male eats whatever he wants to and sleeps with whoever he wants to,” she explained while I tried not to envision Johnny Mars as a giant monkey swinging in to take my Sammy away from me. “The only difference is that the ape doesn’t get a limousine.” I talked to a psychologist about the phenomenon, and his take was that fame was a sort of mental illness—acquired situational narcissism, he called the affliction. Another expert in media sociology saw fame as a “drug” that had hooked the whole planet. “We’ve all become addicts,” he said, sounding strung out. “There have been studies. People experience withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their dose of Brad and Jen or