Adulation (20 page)

—had suggested that he write dialogue as a way of channeling the anger that was starting to show up in fights Danny instigated on school grounds and in classrooms, or in the form of burns from cigarette butts he put out on his forearms just to get someone’s attention. He’d never told his creative writing teacher in high school, the one who’d first noticed his flair for dialogue, that that was why he was so good at it. That he’d been scripting every confrontation he’d dreamed of for years.

Artie didn’t hit Danny or his mother. He wasn’t abusive in that sense. But he was a bully. He belittled Danny for the sole purpose of raising himself up. Political dramas came easily to Danny because they were chock-full of rhetoric, opportunities for speech-making and proselytizing by polar opposites wanting to take each other down rather than come to a mutual understanding or respect. He had read
 
Tyranny of the Majority
 
in college and decided that he’d take tyranny down by the stroke of a pen. Danny would verbally beat the shit out of a bully in three acts.  The underdog would always win. Justice would be done. The silenced would always be spoken for. And when writing couldn’t give him that voice, the bottle did.

When he’d graduated college and his senior thesis had been produced Off Broadway, attractingattention from the critics and his soon-to-be agent, Danny’s weekend drinking benders had spilled overinto weekdays. Yet they weren’t so much benders as the kind of drinking his father would do, the kind thathad a schedule or routine and didn’t end in icy stoicism or passing out as much as a lonely stupor. When

his next play,
 
Madness
, was produced on Broadway and optioned as a movie, Danny Masters was catapulted into stardom, leaving behind Daniel Gold, phenom playwright. Reporters wanted to talk to him. Photographers wanted to take his picture. Image consultants wanted to take him shopping. Women wanted to take him to bed without him needing to get drunk first. The attention both exhilarated and terrified him, for he wondered when they were going to find out that he was just a stupid, white, halfJewish kid from Long Island who wasn’t supposed to amount to anything. His star was going to burn out any day now, that’s what his father said the night Danny won the Tony award for
 
Madness
. When the film adaptation (starring a then-teenage Robbie Marsh) topped the box office the summer he turned twenty-six, Danny paid off his school loans as well as his parents’ house. When his father found out, he pushed Danny against the living room wall—the only time he’d ever used physical force. Danny then moved out to Los Angeles and set up permanent residence there.

With every accomplishment, Danny could hear Artie Gold’s menacing, slurred voice (even in sobriety):
 
Your  star’s gonna burn out, you punk, and you’ll wind up the same nobody you were before.
 
Every positive review, every award, every meeting with Mike Nichols or Steven Spielberg or Harvey Weinstein delayed that burnout for one more day and scared the crap out of him. Only applause and adulation appeased him, blocked out the impending doom. And when there was no applause, when there was no one to adore him, there was the bottle. Danny drank for the liquid confidence. He drank to keep up the applause. He drank to keep up the façade of being Danny Masters.

He’d been to therapy in an attempt to understand why his father hated him so much, why he stayed with his mother if she and Danny were the burdens he claimed them to be. He even once confronted Artie about it, screamed at the top of his lungs:
 
What did I ever do to you, you miserable fuck?

“You were born,” Artie said, matter-of-factly. “I didn’t want a wife. I didn’t want a kid. I wanted my life to be my own.”

“Why didn’t you tell me I was an accident?” he later cried to his mother.

She looked at him with such sorrow in her eyes. “Because you weren’t an accident. Not to me.”

“Then why didn’t you leave him?”

“Because I thought one day he’d realize that he needed me, and you too, and that we were worth the sacrifices he believed he made.”

Danny first met Frannie Reichman at a spa in LA—she was an aesthetician. By the time she’dfinished applying his mud mask, he had asked her out for dinner and a movie. They both detested theridiculousness of their rhyming  names, but detested the formality of Daniel and Francine even more. Whenthey married a year after
 
Madness
 
was nominated for a Golden Globe award, he thought his drinking dayswere over. After all, he had someone who loved him now, just as he was (or so he thought—“just as hewas” at the time was “not drinking”). And for the first year, he was fine. He drank socially and in excessonly at a wedding or two. But when his first TV series was picked up by one of the major networks, Artie Gold’s voice came back to haunt him again, and this time from the grave—he’d died on July fifth the yearbefore, his liver no longer able to function. Moreover, the stakes had gone up—instead of weekend boxoffice numbers, Danny had to maintain household share points and battle against
 
Friends
 
and
 
ER
 
and theever-growing number of cable channels and choices. He became hostile toward Frannie when she didn’tvalidate him enough (and of course she could never validate him enough). He lashed out at his writingstaff when they didn’t fact-check their research closely enough and viewers voiced their complaintsfollowing that week’s episode. And he got into a public war of words with a critic who accused Danny ofbeing a one-trick pony.
 
Your star’s gonna burn out, you punk...

He never even saw her.

Danny was in New York days after the 1995 Emmys, his thirtieth birthday creeping up. His showhad been nominated for two awards, including Best Drama. Just days before, Frannie had announced thatshe was pregnant  with their first child, and he was equal parts thrilled and terrified (when was he not?).

He lost.

For the first and only time, he’d not won an award. He had not expected to win (he never expectedto), but the loss signaled the first dimming of the light. The sun was setting on Danny Masters and hisdumb luck. The world was cluing in that he was nothing special.

He’d gone to a party and lost count of the number of flutes of champagne he’d downed whileyukking it up with television’s best and brightest. It was daybreak when he cajoled his New York agentinto loaning him his car for a drive out to the Hamptons (or so he said), promising to return it later thatevening, and in no time at all he was serpentining through the back streets of his old Bethpageneighborhood on Long Island. He knew them by heart. Hell, he could find his old house blindfolded, theone his mother sold shortly after his father died, before she moved to Florida (she passed away when Danny was thirty-five). And yet he couldn’t remember the houses all looking so similar.

At first Danny thought he’d hit something in the middle of the road, a downed tree limb, perhaps,for he had no idea that he’d strayed so far off to the side of the road. He never saw the nine-year-old girlwalking her golden retriever, almost as tall as she was, first thing in the morning before school. He neversaw her flinging in the air like a rag doll upon impact, according to witnesses. The impact had knockedhis wheel out of alignment, and the car careened over a mailbox and into a tree. He hit his head on thesteering wheel hard, causing a gash at  the very top of his forehead, the blood cascading down and makinghim woozy. Pressing the back of his tuxedo sleeve against the wound, he stumbled out and surveyed thedamage.

“F-ff-fuck,” he slurred.

He saw the dog first, a sight that not even the most realistic war film could make as gruesome. Thedog’s body was bloodied and contorted, and its eyes were open, each looking out the opposite direction.

“Oh f-f-fuck!” Danny moaned and covered his mouth before turning away and throwing up. It wasthen that he saw the girl out of the corner of his eye. Her body was also bloody and contorted, thoughperhaps not as grotesque.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” Danny repeated, the panic level rising inside him like floodwaters. Bythen about a half dozen neighbors had come out of their houses, including one from his old house, andwithin minutes the street was barricaded and lit up by police cars, an ambulance, and a tow truck. Foronly a split second, Danny had considered making a run for it, but the lucid part of him knew that even ifhe were not surrounded by law enforcement, if the accident had taken place on some abandoned road, hewould’ve called for help. He would’ve stayed. He had caused this, and he knew he needed to beaccountable. No, the impulse to run had nothing to do with escaping punishment—it was to escapehimself.

The cops restrained neighbors who wanted to beat the shit out of Danny (one of whom hademerged from his home with a shotgun), and they pulled him far off to the side and away from the EMTswho were working on the  girl like a pit crew worked on a racecar, at lightning speed and oblivious to thechaos around them. An officer gave him a breathalyzer test and interrogated him on who he was, wherehe’d been, where he was going, etcetera, while an EMT applied first aid to the gash on his forehead. Theofficer handcuffed Danny and took him to the hospital, where he threw up again and felt an almostunbearable pounding in his head. Everyone—neighbors, cops, EMTs, medical staff—looked at him withjudgment, disgust, fury, and he knew he deserved every look.

“Is she OK?” he’d kept asking, but no one would answer him.

When he’d been left alone in an emergency room cubicle, feeling woozy and nauseated and the

pounding in his head decreasing to a throb thanks to whatever meds they’d given him, he closed his eyes and leaned forward, his blood-spattered wrist handcuffed to the bed rail, and was ready to offer God the deal of a lifetime.

I will do anything—
anything
—you want if you let that little girl live. I will spend the rest of my life in jail, will voluntarily enter the gates of hell when my time comes
 
(he was going there anyway regardless, he knew).
 
Please, God, just let her live. Let her live let her live let her live...

The second offer to God, should the girl not live, would be an eye for an eye, of course. First chance he could get, he would kill himself.

He was sitting there, waiting for a doctor or the police officer to return, planning his suicide when he remembered Frannie and her news just days earlier.

Somehow, at that moment, he
 
knew
 
that Frannie was going to have a girl even though she hadn’t been far  enough along for the sex to be determined. The clarity of that moment, that knowing, was startling.

She’d be better off without me
 
was his first response, but the thought after that was the realization, again with stunning clarity, that he didn’t want to live without her, and vice versa. No, he wanted to be there to see his daughter take her first steps, grow up, go to college, get married. And in the blink of an eye, the bargain needed to be renegotiated. He prayed more fervently than he’d ever prayed in his life for the girl he’d hit to live, because there was no way he could live with himself if she didn’t (although he drank because he already couldn’t live with himself)—he’d have to kill himself, and he wanted to live for his daughter. He wanted to fix it, to fix
 
everything
. And he believed—no, he
 
knew
—he could. He’d take care of both girls. He’d see to it that if he lived and stayed out of jail, he’d spend the rest of his life making sure they’d never suffer ever again, especially not at his hands. Hell, maybe he’d even make them proud of him one day.

The police officer reentered the room and told him that although the girl was in critical condition, the doctors believed she’d pull through. Danny wept as he was released from the hospital and taken to jail, charged with driving while intoxicated, for starters. He hadn’t realized that he’d been saying
 
Thank you God, thank you God, thank you God
 
like a mantra until the officer driving the cruiser told him to shut the fuck up, that he didn’t deserve God’s benevolence. Danny nodded in agreement, his head throbbing too much to say anything else.

In addition to the DWI, Danny was charged with reckless endangerment of a minor and attempted manslaughter.  His agent had gotten him a lawyer notorious for defending delinquent celebrities who trashed hotel rooms, hit their spouses, unsuccessfully smuggled drugs or guns in their travel bags, or drove while under the influence. He had officially joined the ranks of “Celebrities Screwed by Success,” as one headline put it. (Years later, when he had done a Google search of himself and the accident, he saw other headlines: “‘Madness’ Writer Hits Child, Gets Arrested for DWI”; “Hollywood Phenom in Drunk Driving Incident”; “Drunk Screenwriter Plows Into Pedestrian, Kills Dog.”) The case was settled out of court; pleading to the DWI only (the other two charges had been dismissed), Danny agreed to do two months in jail, six months of community service, and enter an alcohol treatment facility (he’d already sworn to never consume another drop the moment he heard the girl was going to live, and hadn’t since). His driver’s license was revoked for a year.