THE V I R G I NITY of F A M OUS MEN Stories
CHRISTINE S N E E D
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N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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THE FIRST WIFE
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he famous do resemble the unfamous, but they are not the same species, not quite. The famous have mutated, amassed characteristics—refinements or corporeal variations— that allow their projected images, if not their bodies themselves, to dominate the rest of us. If you are married to a man whom thousands, possibly millions, of women believe themselves to be in love with, some of them, inevitably, more beautiful and charming than you are, it is not a question of if but of when. When will he be unfaithful, if he hasn’t been already? It isn’t easy, nor is it as romantic as the magazine photographers make it look, to be the wife of a very famous, memorably handsome man. There are very few nights, even when you are together, when you don’t wonder what secrets he is keeping from you, or how long he will be at home before he leaves for another shoot or another meeting in a glamorous city across one ocean or the other with some director or producer who rarely remembers your name. Marriage is a liability in the movie business,
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despite the public’s stubborn, contradictory desire to believe that this particular marriage is different, in that it will endure, even prosper, with children and house-beautiful photo essays in Vogue. There were always so many others lurking about, hoping to take my place, if only for a few days or hours. It was like being married to the president of an enormous country where nearly everyone was offering him sexual favors, ones he really wasn’t scorned by anyone but me for accepting.
2.
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He married me in part because I wasn’t famous, not as famous as he was, in any case. He was the beauty in our household, and I was not the beast but the brains. I wasn’t ugly or plain, and I remain neither ugly nor plain, but in college, when for a while I fantasized strenuously about becoming an actress, it soon became clear to me that I liked making up the characters more than playing them. I also realized early on that men age much better in Hollywood than women do. My husband will never be old in the same way that I will be. Even if my fame were as great as his, I would be called an old woman much sooner than he an old man. But I will never be as famous as he is, and although he can be blamed for many things, this isn’t one of them. How did it end? Before I say what it was like to be courted by him, to fall in love, however briefly or genuinely, I prefer to talk about the end because it is rarely ever given its due. It is the filmmaker’s and the writer’s most reliable trick to seduce us with the details of a marvelous and improbable coupling while hinting darkly that things did not end well, that some tragedy or tragic character flaw in one or both of the 22
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T HE F IR ST W IF E
principals brought on a heartbreaking collapse. And when the collapse comes, it is seldom given more than a few pages, a few sodden minutes at the end of the film. My husband was Antony Grégoire; this is the name he was born with, not a stage name chosen for him by an agent. It is regal-sounding, I suppose, a name that demands our attention or at least a moment’s pause. His father was French, his mother Swedish, he their only son, the one masculine bloom raised in a garden of sisters. He and his sisters got along well enough most of the time, but he was the favorite—a fact their parents did little to disguise, despite the three daughters’ spectacular scholastic and athletic achievements. Antony was bookish, quiet, and sheltered during early adolescence, but then he became handsome and, eventually, the best-looking man in the room. He attracted the heated attention of his sisters’ friends, and in time, one of their fathers who was a film producer. “If I’d met Anna’s father even a couple of years earlier than I did, I bet I wouldn’t have become an actor,” Antony told me not long after we met. “If I’d been seventeen instead of nineteen, I probably would have rolled my eyes and been a sarcastic jerk to him. I was the kind of dork who smoked alone in his room with his Doors albums and Kerouac novels. I used to spend a lot of time wondering if Jim Morrison and I would have been friends.” I laughed. “You did not.” “Of course I did. Every punk I knew was like that where I grew up.” “You would have found your way to L.A. eventually. Especially since you were only an hour and a half away.” He shook his head. “No, I’m telling you, it wouldn’t have happened. Bakersfield is like another planet. It was luck, nothing else.”
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His rise was fast and without real difficulty, a fact he admits to most people because he thinks it adds to his appeal. There is no odor of desperation about him, no stories of violent hand-wringing or sobbing before the security gate of some powerful director or casting agent’s Bel-Air mansion. He embodies the most glittering American dream—the version that dictates success is one’s birthright and should come easily. Americans romanticize struggle and hard work but do not, in fact, like to work hard. It was January when our marriage split open, traditionally the coldest month of the year in North America, but in L.A., we hardly noticed, and it hadn’t taken me long to prefer winters in Southern California to those in my snow-choked hometown of Minneapolis. “You probably knew this was coming,” said Antony. He wasn’t lying next to me or sitting across from me at the dinner table, avoiding my gaze. He didn’t have to look at me at all because he said these words over the phone. I hadn’t seen him in three weeks. He was in Canada filming a movie about caribou hunters, and I’d heard that he was with another woman. She wasn’t in the movie and she despised cold weather, but I knew she was up there with him. We had friends in common, this woman and I. The film industry really is a small world, its tributaries and rivers and landmasses having all been mapped out by our mentors, our adversaries, our lovers past and future. “I didn’t think this would happen so soon,” I said. He hesitated. “You don’t sound upset.” “I am upset.” “You don’t sound like it.” “I’m not going to yell at you, not over the phone. I want you to come home and talk to me about this in person. Ask Jeff for a couple of days off. Tell him I’m sick, that I’m in the hospital. Tell him to shoot some of the scenes you’re not in.” 24
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“I’m not going to lie. He could easily check.” “Then tell him that your wife of five and a half years has asked that you come back and talk to her before you try to divorce her.” There was a tense pause. “Try to divorce you? What do you mean by try?” I hung up on him. When he called back, I didn’t answer. He called me fifteen more times that night, maybe even twenty-five—I can’t remember the precise number, but I didn’t answer any of those calls, each new sequence of rings sounding more and more desperate and enraged. I didn’t turn off the phone because it felt better to hear his distress than to sit in stunned silence. There was no prenuptial agreement; we had talked about it, but the idea had deeply embarrassed both of us. He had ignored the advice of his friends and his agent before our wedding because, again, he believed in success, not failure. He also thought that as a writer of character-driven screenplays, of political and romantic satires, I was not as interested in money as other people were. He was right, maybe, but I was interested in revenge. I wanted him to come home and tell me to my face that he was leaving me for another woman. As you can see, I wanted to make it difficult for him.
3. When you are thirteen, a recent initiate into the tragicomedy of adolescence, you imagine yourself marrying the boys whose dazed or beaming faces greet you from the dog-eared pages of teen magazines. You imagine yourself marrying your girlfriends’ older brothers, those with driver’s licenses
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and beginners’ mustaches and possibly an alarming tattoo or two they have tried to hide from their parents. You imagine yourself, after the prom or on the night they propose, being deflowered by these boys, both the famous and the unfamous ones. You peer at your face in the mirror for hours after school and worry about your nose and cheekbones and slightly crooked teeth. You know yourself to be pretty enough, but probably not beautiful. Your legs are bony, or else they are too fat—you unwillingly, helplessly, wear the evidence of a loving mother’s after-school cupcakes and cookies, her pancake breakfasts and Friday-night deep-dish pizzas. Antony Grégoire is only three and a half years older than I am. He was a senior in high school when I was a freshman, and from a young age, he did not carry with him the sense that he would be famous, as many other stars apparently do. The same night that he had talked about serendipity, he’d told me that he’d planned to become a structural engineer and design vast, intricate bridges; he had always liked science and math. He was not a spendthrift, not in the hysterical fashion that many famous people are. There was never any fear of bankruptcy, because he did not insist on having seventeen vintage Rolls-Royces in storage or a large staff of servants who all lived in his palatial home. We had a cook and a housekeeper who each worked four days a week. Someone came to do our landscaping; someone else came to take care of the pool. This is, of course, the manner in which many people live in the wealthier towns and cities of the world. I loved Antony and did not want to lose him. I thought that I might be able to forgive him if he appeared at the foot of our bed the morning after his call from Alberta and proclaimed that he had spoken too soon, that he had made a mistake. 26
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