Between Me and You Page 2
17 BEN JUNE 2008 It’s raining in Los Angeles, and no one knows what to do about it. People are scattering around, hovering in Whole Foods, tweeting with panicked abandon: It’s raining! It might be the apocalypse! I’m set to meet Spencer for lunch to discuss my next steps in my career: One Day in Dallas hadn’t blown up like we’d all thought, and for the first time I have to consider strategy; I have to “take a meeting” with my agent to ensure that I don’t, as my dad would say, slide into a wasteland of mediocrity. It’s happened to plenty of other golden boys. It can’t happen to me. Tatum is in majestic Hawaii while I am here on daddy duty for the next ten days. It’s longer than she wanted to be away from the baby, but she’d been back at work since he was four weeks old, the necessary requirements of capitalizing on Oscar-nomination heat, and thus when production on Shipwreck called for nearly two weeks in Hawaii, she packed her breast pump and was flown first class to the Big Island. Sh
18 TATUM MAY 2007 I can put it off no longer: I have to go home to Ohio for Piper’s wedding. David Frears has given me loads of advice on “going home again.” All through the media push for Pride and Prejudice leading up to the June release, he’s assured me that you just put on a face like you’re putting on a role. “Darling, if a gay can survive a weekend visit to bumblefuck Nebraska, where, when I was in high school, a city councilman tried to tell my parents that I could get electroshock therapy to deal with my homo-ness, you can endure your little sister’s wedding.” David’s taken me under his wing, told me I’m the best Elizabeth Bennet in the history of Elizabeth Bennets, of which there have been many. He’s protected me through the slow but ever-present bleat of tabloid coverage (rumors of sleeping with Colin Farrell on the set), the mounting tide of whispers of an Academy Award, the connection with a stylist so I’m not caught looking like a general garbage dump when I’m out in publi
19 BEN DECEMBER 2007 I am being polite to Ron; I can feel myself being polite, trying too hard. He is perfectly nice, perfectly innocuous. I realize that I’m thirty-three years old, and stewing over my mother’s new relationship puts me at the emotional maturity of about, say, a nine-year-old. Also, it has been six years since my dad died. She’s had her time to mourn. So have I. “He’s so nice,” Tatum said in the car last night after we met for dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where they were staying for the visit. “And your mom seems really smitten.” I cornered too sharply around a turn on Sunset. “Hey, Jesus, Ben!” Tatum’s hand flew to her belly, the way that a mother’s arm would fly toward the back seat if the car stopped too abruptly. “Sorry, sorry.” I slowed and put my own palm atop her stomach, which has the perfect curvature of a beach ball. The baby wasn’t exactly planned, and its inception wasn’t exactly the stuff of true romance, maybe a romantic comedy if I were to write
20 TATUM FEBRUARY 2008 The baby has been kicking me all night, and when I do manage to sleep, my heartburn roars up my esophagus and shakes me awake. “I’m sorry, I’m a mess,” I say to Hailey, the makeup artist the studio sends. “I’m sorry, I’m a whale,” I say to the seamstress who lets out my gown (more of a tent) another half inch. “Don’t be silly,” they both say, because I’m now an Oscar-nominated actress who is due any day now, and they are effectively on my payroll and are told to say reassuring things like this to a hormonal tank several hours before she may lumber onstage to accept the award. It’s a relief to be done with it all tonight. To be done with the air kisses on the red carpet, with the cocktail hours and dinners and Q and As and interviews, even though some of those interviews have granted me covers like Variety. But my ankles are swollen, and my fatigue is drowning me, and I can’t possibly imagine how I could take one more week of the pomp and circumstance, of faking n
21 BEN SEPTEMBER 2006 The sky is robin’s-egg blue, just as it was five years ago. I stare upward for a beat too long and am blinded for a moment, hazy yellow orbs obscuring my vision, despite my sunglasses. Leo stands ramrod straight next to me, his shoulders pinned as if literally stapled back, but his toes jigger up and down, his fingers twitch in nonstop motion. My mom is weeping silently to my other side, staring out at the vast wasteland of a construction pit at Ground Zero, staring farther to the two reflection pools she says will bring her a bit of solace, but I can’t see how. Tatum had planned to come, but then the roof to the new house in Holmby Hills cratered in, and I told her she should stay behind to deal with it. She assured me that her dad could manage on his own—he was living in the guesthouse and taking classes at UCLA for accounting—but I didn’t mind. Really. I wasn’t interested in delving too deeply back into my grief, and if Tatum had been along, she’d have poked an
22 TATUM AUGUST 2009 The lobby of Commitments is hushed, with a waterfall fountain nearly the only noise, the receptionist and intake nurse working soundlessly behind the desk. Sunlight from the skylight on the ceiling illuminates the eggshell walls, photographs of the ocean and landscapes adorning them. Fresh flowers spill atop the side tables next to the cozy couches where only a solitary family sits, looking both gray and grave, clutching the arm of a young man who is obviously on his way in. Dr. Wallis greets us with a firm handshake that evolves into a bear hug. “One of my best success stories,” he says, grabbing my dad’s hand, wrapping him in his arms as well. “You guys saved my life,” my dad says, his eyes tearing as they always do now. Some people drink and get emotional. My dad got sober and now has never been more in touch with his softer side. “How’s he doing?” I ask. “Good, good.” Dr. Wallis nods, ushering us through the glass door, out of the lobby into the facility. “We a
23 BEN JULY 2005 Our car sputters to a stop in the middle of nowhere Arizona. I’m right, of course, we should have stopped for gas, but Tatum insisted, No, no, that’s BS, they just say the tank is almost empty, but it’s not. The tank is empty. Tatum squeezes the wheel and grits her teeth and looks toward me, batting her lashes. “Don’t be mad.” “Tatum!” “OK, so I should have listened to you. But . . . you know . . .” “No, I don’t.” “Well, you’re just usually a little melodramatic about the tank running low, so I figured—” “That I couldn’t possibly be right when the orange light is flashing frantically to alert you that we’re about to run out of gas?” From the back seat, Monster yawns loudly, then rises—he’s tall enough to hit the ceiling on the SUV—and pokes his head between us. “Monster doesn’t like it when Mommy and Daddy fight,” Tatum says. “Tatum!” I pull out my cell phone and stick my hand out the window, desperate for a signal, which we haven’t gotten for miles since we dipped int
24 TATUM OCTOBER 2010 I’m in New York only for the weekend and a day. A quick in and out to do a junket for As You Like It, which is on all the awards lists, though no one has actually seen anything other than rough-cut footage, some scenes here and there. But the industry is abuzz with a David Frears–Tatum Connelly reunion, after all the awards heat with Pride and Prejudice, and buzz in Hollywood is just about all you need to convince people that something is real. Daisy convinces me to meet her for a drink downtown at Harbor, the hottest, newest nightclub with a rotation of celebrity guest DJs. She’s back in the city for the month—New York Cops is shooting on location to attempt to capture the grit that they have lost over the years by filming on a soundstage in Burbank, and she texts me relentlessly until I agree to venture south of Bowery to meet her. I call Ben before I pull myself from the bedding at the Four Seasons. It sounds like I’ve woken him, though he’s three hours earlier
25 BEN AUGUST 2004 I wake to Tatum on top of me. She leans close to my neck, then to my ear: “Happy birthday, baby.” “Holy shit,” I groan. “I’m fucking old.” “Shhh,” she whispers. “I’m about to make you feel very, very young.” “But Leo . . .” Leo is in the next room, crashing on the pullout in my office. “Leo didn’t come home until three a.m.; he’s not going to hear a thing.” “OK,” I say. “OK,” she says, easing her way lower. After a few minutes, I forget that I’m now thirty and that my brother is fifteen feet away, and that I have a deadline for a sc
ript that’s a mess but that I will somehow wrangle into greatness. I forget everything except my wife on top of me and her ability to make me feel like I could live forever. Leo is here for the week. It’s a terrible week with my schedule: One Day in Dallas is due to the studio on September 1, so we can shoot just at the start of the new year, but Leo insisted, and Tatum thought we should make a big to-do, have a party for my birthday, so o
26 TATUM MARCH 2011 Leo dies four days after I win the Academy Award. We linger by his hospital bed, where he is unable to be revived, and then finally Helen agrees to remove the ventilator, and his chest rises almost undetectably until it rises no more. I’m supposed to be in Panama; I was scheduled to start principal photography on Army Women: 2.0 just after the awards season ended, but they rejigger the schedule and give me an extra week to allow me another handful of days off for the funeral. A handful of days feels unbearably unjust, though I understand the overtime and the budget and the payroll and the crew; this movie isn’t just about me, though I’m its star. A handful of days to grieve with my husband feels like a bomb that could explode between us—among everything else, I’d forgotten to thank him in my acceptance speech. It was a humiliating oversight. I literally blanked out; I was so stunned to be onstage that I forgot my speech nearly entirely. But it shouldn’t have been ha
27 BEN SEPTEMBER 2003 I am greeted like Moses at the Red Sea at Toronto, the figurative waters parting in front of me. We are here to screen All the Men, my follow-up to Romanticah, and the studio has sent early clips and bits and pieces to all the important press: Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, all the papers whose reviews can launch a career into the stratosphere. The early buzz is hot—Spencer, my agent, calls it “so fucking hot it’s like an all-ten stripper joint,” and I’m swept up in the wave of accolades, despite knowing better. Despite the fact that what matters most to me is Tatum and our life back home, well, fuck, who wouldn’t want the praise and the heralding and the calls that I might be the once-in-a-lifetime voice of my generation? I never thought this mattered, the fawning attention, the over-the-top praise, but it turns out that I was wrong about parts of myself, that it’s more than a little bit gratifying to be told that you’re “the fucking shit, man.” The studio flie
28 TATUM SEPTEMBER 2012 The road trip seemed like a good idea when I proposed it. Let’s drive to Texas like we did years ago! Bring Joey! It will be the perfect way to spend Labor Day weekend, the last gasp of vacation before I have to report to work. I was due in Austin the first week of September, not ideal timing because Joey was starting a new school for pre-K, and I’d have to fly to LA for the morning drop-off, then fly right back to Texas to make the day on set. But the Oscar win had given me all sorts of clout, and when the studio told me I could direct the little project I’d agreed to star in—nothing big, just a fifteen-million-dollar gimme about Roe v. Wade that won’t generate a huge box office but will generate some critical praise (if I direct it correctly, as I intend to, of course)—I wasn’t about to turn it down because I’d be jetting back and forth for day one of school. I’ve forgotten how hot it is, in these canyons through Arizona, how boring hours on end trapped in the
29 BEN JUNE 2002 Leo is his best self at his college graduation. Sober, shining, electric. After my dad, Leo’s had his good days, and his less good days, but he was a senior and allowed to get wasted and wake up with a wicked, gut-churning hangover, so I didn’t hover, and my mom was busy with her new charity, dedicated to raising funds for the families of 9/11 victims, so neither of us judged his bad days. Or, maybe more accurately, neither of us was present enough to judge them. You could see them in bruises under his eyes, in his half smile when recounting a memory of some stupid story or antic that he wasn’t sure he was getting quite right because he couldn’t remember it fully, or the way that he sometimes really needed a shower. But Leo was Leo, born with an impish streak, and he showed up at Sunday family dinners—a tradition Tatum had suggested in January when it was clear we all needed a bit of glue—cogent, present, hilarious. He could make my mom drop her head back and cackle, a
30 TATUM JULY 2013 From: Ben Livingston To: Amanda Paulson Re: things Date: April 10, 2013 A—listen, god, this is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever written. But, well, you know that I’ve been struggling lately, I just, ok, here goes: I think we should probably take a break. I’m typing that and it doesn’t seem right or maybe none of this seems real. I don’t know. I’m so fucked up now, and I want you. You know how much I want you. But there are all these stories in the press now, and if Tatum finds out . . . I don’t know what I want yet, and if this explodes before I’ve figured it out . . . Jesus, this is the most inarticulate thing I’ve ever written, and that’s saying a lot. I want you. I need you. I just don’t know what to do about it. What do you think? —B From: Amanda Paulson To: Ben Livingston Re: re: things Date: April 10, 2013 B—I understand. You know I do. But I do have to be honest and say that being with you again, well, it made me realize what an idiot I was back in New Yor
31 BEN SEPTEMBER 2001 The only reason I’m awake is because Tatum had an early class and set off the fire alarm when she tried to fry bacon before leaving. “Shit, shit, sorry,” she said, scrambling around her tiny studio, flopping an oven mitt toward the smoke, batting down the alarm with a broom handle. The plastic cover popped off and crashed to the floor, where it promptly split in two. Tatum jumped like she hadn’t expected that, for gravity to work, and then her apartment was silent again, other than the sizzle of the torched bacon. “Shit,” she said again. “Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you.” I’d been up too late in the edit bay, splicing together the final cut of Romanticah before I sent it out into the festival world, praying someone will take notice and give me my shot. “It’s fine,” I said, rubbing my eyes, waving her closer. “I promised Tom I’d read two manuscripts today anyway.” “You’re seriously the best assistant agent he could hope for. Two books in a day?” She sho
32 TATUM NOVEMBER 2014 Ben wants to spend the day at the beach, Leo’s favorite spot, a little north of the lifeguard stand that’s just below the drop-off of the cliff near our very first place together. That one-bedroom bungalow on Ocean Avenue. It’s a Thursday, so Joey is at school, and I’m due in the edit bay in the afternoon, tweaking and honing the footage we shot in September and October for Love Runs Through, my second directorial feature. Directing means endless hours of prep, of hand holding, of decision making, of administration, of imagination. It distracts me from Ben and Joe, and I know it makes me less of a partner, but the studio offered, and I couldn’t say no. Didn’t want to say no; I accepted as soon as they called, on the call, in fact. Only later that night, when I shared it with Ben—uncorking a bottle of Bordeaux that the agency sent over—did I realize I’d said yes before asking him. He paused, and his jaw flexed in a way that signaled his displeasure, but he raised
33 BEN DECEMBER 2000 Amanda calls just before I slide on my coat to leave for New Year’s Eve. Caller ID alerts me to the 415 area code, and I check my watch because I don’t want to be late. I can spare three, maybe four minutes. Despite my better instincts, I press the Talk button. “Hey,” I say. “It’s me,” she replies. “I know.” The clock on the microwave in my parents’ kitchen tells me it’s 8:23. I told Tatum I’d pick her up by nine, so we could wedge our way into Times Square by midnight, which I still can’t believe I’ve agreed to. “This is practically highway robbery,” I’d said when she proposed it. I’d stopped at the bar to thank her for her work on Romanticah, and she’d said: “Well, as payback, you have to come to Times Square with me for New Year’s.” “Like a date?” I’d grinned. “I might let you kiss me if you’re lucky,” she said, then her eyes widened, and she laughed her machine-gun staccato and slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, sorry, I don’t even know where that cam
34 TATUM DECEMBER 2015 How do you divide a lifetime? Where do you begin? With the items that don’t matter to each of you or the ones that matter most? If we can agree
on the tangential things—the lamps in the bedroom, the treadmill in the gym, will we agree on the bigger stuff—the painting we bought from that artist in Austin on the road trip, the necklace you got me after Pride and Prejudice, the watch I bought you for your fortieth birthday, Joey’s schedule, our sanity? The moving trucks came on a dreary day in February. I was scheduled to be in the edit bay that day but canceled at the last minute. For Joey’s sake, though he was at school, and for the sake of not making us hate each other more than we already did, I stayed home, then shuffled around the house, trying to remain out of the way of the movers (and Ben), but there all the same. It felt like I had to show up for that, for Ben, for us. He was moving to an apartment only two miles away, but it might as well have been across
35 BEN OCTOBER 1999 Daisy put me up to it. I’d run into her at Ray’s Pizza earlier in the night, and she told me she was working a shift that night at a bar off Fourth—Dive Inn—and told me to swing by for a beer. Amanda was at the hospital until eleven o’clock, so I figured what the hell. I buzzed Amanda, who said she’d stop over when she got off, then we could go crash at her place, which wasn’t too far, just a couple blocks over on Astor. Easier than me shooting uptown to my parents’ on the subway, which was unreliable at night, and besides, it was my parents’. Not exactly living the dream. But that had been part of the deal with my dad: he’d wanted me to be a banker or a lawyer or head to business school after Williams. Like the writing was on the wall with my liberal arts education, my major in English: that I wasn’t going to amount to much, at least by my father’s definition. My mom convinced him: pay for grad school, at least most of it, but don’t subsidize my lifestyle. I took o