We had agreed to meet for dinner. I was a few minutes early, so I waited at the bar of the restaurant. There was another person at the bar. She was a very attractive blond woman who gave off an aura of cool distance. Every indication was that she was there to be by herself, and did not wish to be bothered.
My companion arrived. He walked over to greet me. The blond woman saw him out of the corner of her eye. She turned around to face him, and she said, ”You are gorgeous.”
My companion did not know exactly what to say. He paused for a second, and then said, ”I`m gorgeous? Thank you.”
We started to walk toward the hostess` station so that we could go to our table, but the blond woman rose from her seat. ”I have to shake your hand,” she said to my companion. He shook her hand. ”I just wanted to feel your energy,” she said.
Here`s what was happening: My companion, back in the early `70s, was the star of the most popular show on television. He played a detective. So great was his fame that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
He is now in his late 50s. ”Gorgeous” is not a word that would objectively be used to describe him; he has a weather-beaten face that shows the marks of a lifetime of experiences. He is pleasing to look at, but if he had walked into the restaurant and been anyone but himself, it is a good bet that the blond at the bar would not have glanced twice at him.
But such had been the impact of the character he had once played on television that the woman, seemingly involuntarily, was moved to react as she had. What made it more amazing is that when the man walked into the restaurant, he was wearing a jacket with the collar pulled up, and a hat pulled down hard on his forehead. You would have thought it would have been difficult to recognize him.
We went to our table, and when the waiter approached he handed my companion a menu and addressed him by name. You have to remember: It has been a decade or so since my companion`s television show was airing in first run. It is still seen in syndication–but it`s not as if Americans are still watching him in prime time.
I asked him about it. What had gone through his mind when the blond woman at the bar had spoken to him?
”I don`t know,” he said. ”What do you say? A woman you have never met calls you gorgeous. It makes me a little uncomfortable. How do you respond to something like that?”
And the waiter, I said; the waiter had addressed him as if they were old friends.
My companion began to nod his head. ”I don`t think God ever intended for a person to be recognized by 2 billion people,” he said. ”But that`s what happened after that series went on the air. It`s still in syndication in every part of the world, and there`s no place I can go that this doesn`t happen. I was in the movies before the television series happened, but the movies were nothing like this. There`s never been anything that has the impact of television.”
I asked him if things had been even more intense during the time when the series was in first run.
”I suppose they might have been,” he said. ”But I wasn`t in a position to find out. I was in Hollywood shooting the series 15 hours a day, seven days a week. So I didn`t really see anybody. I remember, though, my children didn`t like it. I couldn`t take them to the park, and they didn`t like the whole thing.”
I told him that I had recently spent some time on the set of ”Miami Vice” with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, who star in that series. I had been surprised by something. Johnson and Thomas were constantly talking not about the success of ”Miami Vice,” but about other projects they wanted to pursue. Both of them, for example, wanted to be recording stars, and have their songs played on the radio. And Johnson said that he wanted to be able to direct television movies. I had wondered: Why did they want anything more? ”Probably because they`re afraid that what they have now is going to go away,” my companion said. The tone of his voice conveyed his message:
Johnson and Thomas were wrong. When you reach a certain level, it never goes away. Even the passing of time doesn`t make it go away.
We finished our dinner and took a short walk. We passed by another bar, this one with people sitting inside against big plate glass windows. My companion had his collar pulled up and his hat pulled down again, and we were walking swiftly. But instantaneously the people in the bar were banging their fists against the windows. I could see them mouthing a name; it wasn`t my companion`s name, but the name of the character he used to play on television. On the street a couple saw him, and the woman literally screamed out the name of his old television character. This did not seem to affect him one way or the other. He had to go his way, and I had to go mine. We hailed a cab for him. As he climbed into the back seat, I could see that he was ready for what was about to occur. The cab driver was going to turn around and be amazed at who was back there. It must happen every time.
Life is constantly strange, but some lives are so much stranger than others . . . .
