The Art of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente) (31 page)

I would be remiss if I did not include the hot, endlessly talented, and ridiculously hysterical men from my TV series
Veronica’s Closet
—Dan, Chill, and Wally. They were the bad boys who shared my stage for three years. They were the “good” bad boys in my life.

My best memory of their antics was the time that we were all called in for a “sexual harassment” briefing by the attorneys at Warner Bros. A lot of lawsuits were flying around the studios in 1998 and as part of our indoctrination into the rules and regs of sexual harassment violations, we were ordered by our producers to show up and be on our best behavior.

Kathy Najimy had her boobs out. They were still in her bra but her bra was hanging out of her sweater. The boys had their pants unzipped and their asses hanging out and vile things written all over their bodies. I had “fuck you whores” written across my rack in red lipstick.

The Warner Bros. attorneys were not amused. I’m not saying we were almost fired but there were flames coming from the attorneys’ eyes. But we were in tears, trying to behave respectfully, which we all flunked with flying colors.

If we had been sued for sexual harassment on our own set, all of us would have been in the poor farm or the pokey. Every comment out of my boys’ mouths was of a nasty, perverted, hysterical nature.

But it was all in fun and no charges were filed. Phew!

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist, a master, and this is what Auguste Rodin was, can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensibility of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than 18 in her heart . . . no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.

—ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The Art of
Young Lovers

I
F THERE’S one detail I must share about dancing, it is this; at one time or another you will think it’s a swell idea to shag your dance partner.

From various conversations with dancers, I’ve learned that they invariably swap DNA on a regular basis. Oh true, they call it love and at that moment. I understand the love. Hot-bodied folks pressing their hot selves together simulating the reach and withdrawal of lovers.

Whether it be the tango, the dance of sweat and flirtation, or the aggressive paso doble, the dance of anger and greed, the sexual tension is mighty. A dancer gets a sexual respite while doing the jive. Jives are throwbacks to the 1950s where hops and soda pops were the order of the day. Then there’s the salsa, aka dirty Latin dancing. And the waltz, the acceptable dance of repressed puritans. Onward with the rumba, which is a heartbeat from fucking each other right there on the highly polished dance floor. The quick step is the fastest way to the bedroom, since you cover more ground.

There’s a reason certain religions outlaw dancing. Dancing is the surest route to copulation since Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the foreplay of kings and sinners and whirling dervishes.

At first I thought it was just Maks. Certainly Maks was the sex god of the ballroom. I’d never experienced the power, the passion of the dance with anyone else, or had I?

Wasn’t I two-stepping the night away with John Travolta three hours after I landed in Vancouver to shoot
Look Who’s Talking
? Weren’t we shooting tequila and wasn’t I already beckoning him to not be John but instead stay in character all night as Texas Bud from
Urban Cowboy
? Wasn’t I immediately, during the sexiest two-step any two people ever stepped, dreaming of marrying him? Or Bud? Or whoever the guy was gliding me around the floor?

Had I forgotten about dancing with Patrick Swayze nightly on location in
North and South
? Had I blocked out the fact that we made
Dirty Dancing
look like a sock hop?

Yes, I’d forgotten it all because when you are dancing with your partner, he is the only man in your life.

At the end of
Dancing with the Stars
, I wanted to keep dancing. I had contracted a delicious penchant for it. I was addicted to it. Maks was zooming off to the Ukraine to work and bang Ukrainian chicks. He had already promised me early on that I could dance in his studios free for the rest of my life, which he probably thought, at best, would be a couple of months, what with the way I was belting down the hooch. We were at his pretty house in Jersey—I would love to tell you the town so you could all rush over there and get signed photos, but Jeffrey had driven me there and I wasn’t paying attention.

He and his family had thrown a swell dinner for me. Lora, Maks’s mother, had cooked up a Russian feast. I’m afraid of foreign food, so I was leery. It proved to be excellent, free of wacko stuff like the goat’s brains and eyeballs I’d been served at a family’s home in Rome.

Maks likes to control the world since he has a hard time controlling his mind, his temper (except while dancing), and the lunatics around him. One of the lunatics at the dinner was a cute Russian boy who looked like one of those Russian dolls from a stacking set.

After a most delicious meal, Maks and his dad, Sasha, needed to go into Maks’s well-appointed library, with its vast elephant “trunks up only” collection. Maks had somewhere in time decided to control who my dance partner would be while he was away mending the broken hearts of his kicked-off bachelorettes.

Russians don’t ask you to do things. They command you to do things. “Kirstie, dance with Sergey. He was trained by me and he knows my technique. He was raised by me. He was born because of me. He would not exist without me.” You get the idea. Jeez, the lengths Maks will go to take credit for his creations—called people.

“Um, excuse me, I’m going to be traveling all over the world in the next several months.”

Svengali smiled. “And Sergey will be with you.”

The thing about Maks is that you thought YOU were going to ask Sergey to travel and dance with you 10 minutes earlier but somehow it ends up that it was
his
idea.

While Maks and Sasha got down to mob business, Sergey and I danced. He had a hard grip on me and flung me around where he wanted me to go. Teddy Voleynets, another student of Maks’s and a member of the Voleynets family, the family partners of Maks’s dance studios, had a very light touch, a gentle hold. Sergey, on the other hand, is forceful and constantly takes control of your body, just like his mentor, Maks. Put it this way: if you thought you were turning left and they wanted you to turn right, even bloodied you would end up on the right side of the room. They would actually make good traffic cops.

Sergey is a beautiful dancer. All of Maks’s students are beautiful dancers. Perhaps he had to beat the beauty into them, but his product is beautiful dancers.

Sergey seemed like a cocky little snot. He wasn’t friendly and warm. When I tell my friends someone is cold or aloof, they always say the same thing, “You’re an actress, Kirstie, you’re intimidating, they’re just shy and nervous around you.”

Although there is some truth to the logic, my friends have used it to cover all bases. I’ll be freaked out saying, “Oh my god, the caretaker is a freak! I swear to God he’s psychotic. I’m truly afraid at this point. He could be a killer!” their reply will be, “Oh Kirstie, you’re an actress, you intimidate him, he’s just nervous around you.” Although there is a grain of truth in their observation, the majority of freaks or assholes I’ve tagged as such are exactly that.

Sergey was aloof and a little cold, and I assumed he was gay. He holds his body in a very elegant manner. He has a faint, tight smile at times, and let’s face it, he wouldn’t be the first gay dancer.

I instantly danced fairly well with him. He felt familiar. During my six-week “rage,” I danced with Sergey a few times in the studio. Also I danced with Teddy and some other guy. Oh yes, and on a few professional occasions I danced with Maks. But mostly I just went to meetings and clubbed.

The first time Sergey danced with me outside of NYC was when I flew him to Maine. That’s when I got to know him. I found him to be hysterically funny and a man of deep thoughts, a complex man with a dark history. It’s hard to find a Russian with a light history, I’ve come to find out. We were not dancing for a competition so his demeanor was more that of a student to client, instead of pro to pro. He was professional and forgiving.

Back I went to NYC, to continue my six-week life as a party girl. On occasion I would see Sergey at a club or at dinner, but there was no dancing. When I departed NYC in July, Sergey went along. Don’t ask how or why, but a very odd woman I’d met in NYC went with us. She was about my age but luckily looked 20 years older so that I felt no competition. It’s always a good idea to surround yourself with women less attractive than yourself when you’re single. I’d learned that trick at age 12.

As odd as she was, she had a riveting story of world travel and seductive love stories. Our first night in Maine, the third of July, we sat on my porch, watched fireworks, and drank red wine—Barbaresco, my favorite. The fireworks were on the evening of the third because it’s cheaper to get a crew to set them off the day before the Fourth, or even the day after, which I’ve witnessed in Islesboro, Maine. Sorta like opening Christmas gifts on New Year’s Eve.

It was one of the most enjoyable, relaxed nights of my life. We were all in harmony, but I was jealous of her stories of young lovers. She was Italian, you see, and she had had many lovers under the age of 25. Her youngest being 18—recently.

It felt as if I were living vicariously, amid this modern-day
La Dolce Vita
, and it made me question my own resistance to having younger men. As she spoke I felt puritanical in thought, old fashioned. I wanted to be more like her, to take lovers as a housewife selects chocolates from a Russell Stover box. Choose the one you want and if the taste isn’t to your liking, bite into the next. Sergey and I listened for hours to her tales of real “loves” and lovers. She was riveting.

The next morning she ended up in Sergey’s bed wearing a pale pink silk nightgown asking, “Does it make you nervous when I lie beside you?”

Oh lord, we were late to ride in the Fourth of July parade. I was scrambling to get dressed when I spotted the princess—no lie, she was an actual Italian royal. “Could you please run to the guest house and wake Sergey?” I frantically asked. “We’re late for the parade!” I didn’t ask, “Could you run over there in your pale pink silk gown with your breasts near your knees and seduce Sergey before the Fourth of July parade begins?”

This caused a little tension. When we met at the car to go to the parade, of course I didn’t know what had occurred. But we still rode in the parade, waving, smiling, and throwing candy like parade riders do. On that Fourth of July, Sergey and I decided to go to the barbecue on the island. We danced with all the firemen, lobstermen, army troops, and WASPs, we danced all throughout the day. Of course during our first dance, our alone time from our princess, he filled me in on her early morning visit. Even after all her stories the night before I was shocked and a little envious that she had the balls to hop into some 23-year-old’s bed and proposition him. I couldn’t fathom being that sexually free or aggressive. I sorta wanted to fathom it, was flirting with the idea of fathoming it, but I had too much fear to actually do it.

All this affair business sounds great on paper. Novels are filled with it. Movies are riddled with it. What woman over 40 hasn’t had a desire to be Mrs. Robinson, for crying out loud? But how did she get the guts to seduce Benjamin? It’s movie stuff, I thought. It’s Italian stuff, it’s European for Christ’s sake, but is it American? I’d heard the rumors that Susan Sarandon had a 27-year-old boyfriend and she’s three years older than I am, but was it true? Did she really? Or was it like the gossip about me where I lose and regain 60 pounds over a period of four weeks?

But it was enticing. It was titillating to think that an actress of her stature and intellect would have a boyfriend 30 years her junior. But I’m from Kansas! Lord Christ almighty, do women in Kansas take young lovers? None of my friends had. Even when they had boyfriends three years younger than themselves, we thought they were going through a midlife crisis. In Kansas you don’t date younger and you don’t date racially different. We are borderline rednecks. Okay, we’re rednecks and we don’t marry or date men much older either because it will look like we’re gold diggers. Our range is this: if you are 40, your boyfriend is allowed to be from 40 to 42. That’s the way we roll in Kansas.

But it really did get me thinking about the subject, for real.

Back Sergey and I went to NYC on John Travolta’s darling Jetson jet, the Eclipse. I clubbed around a few more weeks. Maks returned from Ukraine, and we flirted around at dinners and clubs. All of my meetings had been met, and it was time for me to leave NYC, to get on with my life. I had many charity events in front of me, and Sergey and I had a plan. We would fashion
DWTS
contests with all the high rollers who bank rolled the charities. He would teach them how to do a partner dance over a period of two to three days. He would choreograph them and then on show night, the night of the fundraiser, they would compete against each other. Sergey, I, and a local celeb from wherever we were would be the judges. Then as a treat for everyone, Sergey and I would perform an exhibition dance.

Our first stop was Italy, Firenze. All of my Italian friends who live in the United States and many who live in Italy congregated at a gorgeous villa in Tuscany called Villa Casteletti. I wasn’t into the drinking and smoking in Italy, I’d left them behind in Gotham.