The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (29 page)

Jonny wants babies, and that’s where our like minds part ways. He’ll make a brilliant father. I’m done raising kids.

Jon’s manners are impeccable, and manners are very important to me. He’ll never let you pay for a thing, even if
you
invited
him
!! Every door is opened. Every kind gesture is thanked. His mama raised him right. He always returns calls immediately or texts or tweets. He puts his coat around you if you’re cold. He insists you order first.

One thing you could never guess about Jonny-Boy, among his multitudes of talents, is that he’s an awesome cock blocker! It began when Jon and I went to a club in LA called Colony. I’d go there after every
DWTS
show night and dance with black men. Oh, how I love black men! Shockingly, I’ve never shagged one but the thought of it is exhilarating and I see that in my future! I know all people are supposed to be looked upon as equal, but black men are superior! Exotic! White men are, well, white. Like the difference between a glass of milk and a hot fudge sundae. You can tell the difference between THOSE, can’t you?

Getting back on point with the cock blocking. Jonny-Boy is THE best at it. He does it without even pissing the dude off! There I was dancing my brains out with every guy who asked me. This one! That one! I was having a ball! Then a nasty boy wedged himself between me and the guy I was dancing with. You could tell he was a nasty boy because he had “Nasty Boy” written on his hat. The nasty boy was getting carried away with his gyrations. I went there to dance, not fornicate on the dance floor, but apparently Nasty Boy didn’t get the memo. I was getting pretty uncomfortable. I had my nervous giggle going on, and my eyes were darting around the room.

In flew Jonny to the rescue! He slipped his arms around my waist and said, “Babe, we gotta get home. I have to work early.” Then he flashed that big friendly smile at Nasty Boy. Nasty said, “Oh, sorry ma’am, I didn’t know you were married,” and backed his nasty ass up. AHH, my hero, Jonny Boy!

Jonny will be in my life until it ends. We’ve promised each other that we WILL be married in our next lifetime but I’m an optimist—I’m thinkin’ next June. :)

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

—LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH

The Art of
Clubbing Men

T
HE LAST time I was a clubber was . . . well . . . never.

I’ve spent very little time in clubs. They are pretty ridiculous to me, especially now when all you do is stand in booths and wait for slutty girls with sparklers instead of slutty girls with cocktail trays to zip by and plop $600 bottles of vodka on the table. Club dancing is near extinction, and clubs are more crowded than municipal swimming pools in the sixties. The secondhand weed smoke is nauseating. The reason for no dancing is that there’s no room, or well, just enough room to grind on one another in drunken stupors. All the clubbers are chronically texting or tweeting cool things like “We’re going in!” or “This place is sick!” which makes me wonder why, if it’s
so
sick, they’re sitting there tweeting.

I’ve often wondered how “epic” it would be to “go in” without drugs or alcohol. Is it really the DJ? Does he really mix the sound so differently than the DJ spinning next door? I know; I’m old, I don’t get it, ’cause it just seems like the exact same songs played endlessly with different amounts of time before the next one is bled into the last one. And call me old-fashioned, but when I see some exec in a suit or some rapper smoking a blunt, pony up 50 to 100,000 Gs for a tab, it just makes me wonder,
Wouldn’t that be better spent on Habitat for Humanity?
And don’t the chicks with the glorified Roman candles look identical to one another? And how about those X’d-out go-go girls gyrating on the back of VIP booths? Couldn’t they use a hot bath and dancing lessons?

Oh jeez, here I go again sounding old school. It’s apparently the clientele that make the clubgoers keep on clubbing. But aren’t the only new people you see there the out-of-towners or the not-so-pretty people who couldn’t get in the door? The ones you tripped over who were freezing their asses off the night before? The ones who got smarter tonight and paid the doorman $200 to make them seem more beautiful?

Oh sure, the girls are pretty, you know the ones, the underage “models” paid by the club owners to pretend like they aren’t hookers. I’m not saying there is
no
value to standing around in a club getting shit-faced. I’m just saying let’s not pretend it’s because we’re hot.

We can’t possibly take “hooking up” seriously as proof that we’re hot. Maybe at 10:00 p.m., but certainly not at 2:00 a.m. when anyone short of the Elephant Man could get laid. Even then, Elephant Woman would probably be right around the corner putting salve on her sparkler burns, willing to throw down. I’m pretty sure even a corpse could get fucked if it was propped up, wearing a G-string.

I’m not trying to be all “bah, humbug” here, really I’m not. In fact, I gave it all a whirl, a six-week whirl.

Before iPhones and sparkler girls, there were selections of alcohol and dancing was an integral part of the evening. Even then I had little interest. But in the six weeks following
Dancing with the Stars
, it became my life.

My copilot was my assistant Kelly, and our captain was limo driver extraordinaire, Jeffrey. He veered us in and out of more clubs and restaurants in that six weeks than I’d frequented collectively throughout my life.

The night we got runner-up on
DWTS
, we flew on a private G-6 to NYC to appear on
Good Morning America
. I ended up staying in NYC for six weeks.

I felt like a
That Girl
Holly Golightly banshee on the loose.

It was crazy fun. The only bad part, which didn’t seem bad at the time, was that I drank too much, which for me means “anything.” I almost never drink, maybe a couple of glasses of wine every year. Not because I’m an alchy or a puritan, it’s just that I never think about it. But boy, was I drinking in NYC. Every night, I’d say, between one and three drinks with the occasional five-drink night. For me that’s like a fifth of vodka every hour.

This was my New York City DAY schedule: up at 7:00 a.m., eat breakfast, dance, and then go to meetings. I was the NYC “It” girl. Broadway, commercials, TV series, book publishing, brands—you name it, I was meeting on it. Appearing on
Letterman
,
Fallon
,
The View
, and everything in between. Selling our QVC Organic Liaison line, walking the catwalk for Zang Toi, and shopping . . . lots of shopping for shoes. I collected an estimated 40 pairs of heels, split among Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, YSL, and Prada.

And clothes. I never buy clothes. I hate clothes shopping. I’ll drop five Gs on a sofa but never on a dress. I went wild shopping for my new fitter figure. So meeting and shopping by day, but mostly meeting. Then back to my way-too-expensive hotel by seven, shower, doll up, dress up, and go out to dinner by nine.

By the looks of the press and the gossip, Maks and I were inseparable. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. Maks was mostly in the Ukraine doing the show
The Cube
, making appearances, or judging dance contests somewhere. Honestly, I can’t remember where he was, but he wasn’t in NYC. He popped in and out during that six-week period, mostly out, and when he was there we saw each other.

Anyway, nightly, I was “on the town” and amid “the scene.” I’m rarely on the town and never on the scene. I’ve had a bazillion opportunities to be on the scene in my 30 years as an actress, and I’m not good on the scene. The scene is usually druggie and almost always boozy, and it’s exhausting and usually boring. If you are on the scene very much, you will see the exact same people you saw the night before, and before and before—you know, the “scene” people.

Before my six-week post-
DWTS
romp, I would come in and out of NYC for a meeting, premiere, publicity appearance, or to be on
Saturday Night Live
. This six weeks was my longest stint by far, except when I was filming movies. But that was work, this was playtime, so the scene was fresh and spectacular.

My hangs were SL, Abe & Arthurs, 1 Oak, the Greenwich Hotel, the Boom Boom Room, Soho House, Cipriani, Christian Louboutin, and Mr. Chow.

I spent all my time with Kelly, my free-spirited assistant of many years, and my friends Mona, Nicole, and Teddy. But the best part of my six-week romp was my limo driver, Jeffrey. Or “Jeffy,” as all us girls like to call him.

Jeffy has long, curly silver hair and always says the word “man.” Jeffrey was witness to every backseat make-out session, every onslaught of paparazzi, and, well, everything. Jeffrey was basically my driver from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. We were only apart for seven-hour sleep interludes.

Jeffrey owns a limo company called EZ Ryder. He employs many drivers and owns lots of cars, but Jeffrey is the reason that big-name movie and television stars swear by EZ Ryder. Jeffrey is this laid-back ex-stoner guy who looks like he lived fairly hard between the 1960s and the ’90s. He is 100 percent trustworthy. He never gossips about any of his famous clientele, even though he must be filled with book-worthy tales.

I had a movie premiere to attend one night. I’d gotten sort of bored with my “every night out on the town” behavior, so I needed to take it up a notch. “I need an Aston Martin,” I squealed. “Fuck yeah man! I’ll get you one!” he squealed. Jeffrey showed up at eight with this white Aston Martin convertible. I was staying at one of my two favorite NYC hotels, the Greenwich. It’s owned by Robert De Niro and is decked to the nines with his father’s artwork.

Jeffrey pulled up. “Oh my god!” I yelled. “They leased me an Aston Martin?”

“Fuck no man—they’re just loaning it to you, man.”

They should give me one, I thought. I’ve been hyping Aston Martins on Twitter and to friends like I’m their spokesperson. Truth is, I have just always adored them. The first one I drove was in my TV series
Fat Actress
and it was love at first gear.

I looked ravishing, I must say, and Jeffrey was dressed to kill in a cool black suit. As we pulled up to the movie premiere, I said, “Jeffrey, what the hell am I doing? I see premieres all the time! Let’s drive!!!” We sailed past the theater with the red carpet, press, photographers, and celebs and he drove and drove and drove, blasting the radio, hair flying in the wind, laughing like teenagers. We just drove!!

Jeffrey’s the dude that can sit silent for hours or converse like a long-lost girlfriend. This night he just drove!! I had him pop me by the after-party for the premiere, but even
that
couldn’t compete with the drive. So back into the Aston I hopped, and off we went again, this time all over the city, with Jeffrey yelling, “This is freedom, man, this is freedom!!”

There are other things that made Jeffrey the best driver in NYC. He always has tons of violet candies in between the bucket seats in his grand candy basket, filled with every candy you could dream of. And gum, cigarettes, and phone chargers. It feels like Halloween in there!

Jeffrey has another phrase, my favorite phrase: “That’s fucked up, man.” All of my friends who know Jeffy know this phrase. If I’d leap in the car a little intoxicated and say, “God Jeff, I drank too much,” he’d say, “That’s fucked up, man.” If Mona told Jeffrey, “My ex is breaking my heart!” he’d reply, “That’s fucked up, man,” and he was always right! It
IS
fucked up to be stood up or drunk or anything else we complained about. In Jeffy’s car, whatever’s been done to you that you don’t like, he will agree, “That’s fucked up, man.” He doesn’t give you his opinions or tell you about what you should do or not do. He just empathizes with your grievance.

He’s also hysterically nutty and funny. Everybody loves Jeffrey. He is now so sought-after by Hollywood royalty that I have to call a week before I get to NYC. His other drivers are cool, but its Jeffrey we all want behind the wheel.

He’s also like this invisible guardian. One night while I was doing one of the dumber things I did in NYC, making out with a baseball player in the lobby of the Greenwich Hotel, I could peripherally see Jeffrey scouting for the paps. And probably checking to see if I took the guy up to my room and was in danger of ending up on
Snapped
or
48
Hours
. He just sort of invisibly strolled by, but it made me start laughing to see him out of the corner of my eye because I could hear him whisper, “That’s fucked up, man.”

Almost daily there were pictures of me on the cover of something or other with my latest boy toy. It was so far from reality that I sorta started to get off on it. Younger men have always been into me—ever since I was 16. My brother’s 12-year-old friends would fall for me.

But my preference has never been younger men, so when I’d see paparazzi hiding around the corner I began to ham it up a bit. I’d give ’em a look of shock that I’d been caught with my pants down. I’d stand a little closer to the guy or kiss him when I got in the car. I was having so much fun with my fake lovers that their parents were being called by the tabloids!!

Teddy was my “lover” for three weeks. The reporters would ask Teddy’s mother, “How do you feel about your son with an older woman?” She would decline to answer. His dad would yell from the background, “I think it’s great!”

When Jeffy picked me up in the a.m., he would present me with the latest articles and photos of me with my newest lover. The funniest was this rapper named Shancie whom Lil’ Romeo introduced to me in LA during
DWTS
. Shancie and I went dancing at the Colony on a few occasions with Romeo and the rest of the
DWTS
cast.

But this particular story said that Shancie had broken up with me because if he didn’t, his mother was kicking him out of living in her basement. Oh lord, I couldn’t stop laughing, and neither could Jeffy.

Although affairs with young men sound good in print and in movies or on
Sex and the City
, I can’t imagine having a life with a man 20 or 30 years my junior. Jeffrey will testify that I do have more in common with 30-year-old men than with my own age bracket, but I couldn’t marry them. I have a theory that men over 45 are mostly dead. They are either way too serious and significant about life or they bore me to death. Oh lord, they become serious about everything. Thirty-something-year-olds are in the prime of their lives creatively. They are planning their futures, and they are awake and vocal about what they want to do. They are usually game for anything, and they have endless energy. They are interesting.