Ishmael

I tried to control Fame once. What a mistake. I was doing some press for Men Behaving Badly, this NBC TV series. 1996 or so. I had been through a lot of personal growth before getting that series, but no one knew that. That wasn’t for public consumption. It didn’t matter, for the interview. It should have been enough that I was just on this new TV show, right? “Here’s Justine Bateman’s triumphant return to series television”; something like that. So, there’s this reporter, interviewing me. On the soundstage for the show, during rehearsals, up in the empty audience bleacher seats. We’re sitting there, having our interview. It’s fine, it’s nice, talking about Rob and Ron, my character, normal stuff. Then he says this thing. I should have refused it, refused this fucking bait he dangled in front of my face. Near the end of the interview, the reporter puts his pad of paper and pen down in his lap and looks at me. He puts them down as if he’s not sure he even wants to write this piece on me now. That’s in my head only, maybe, but that’s there.

Looks at me and says, “I don’t want this to just be a puff piece.”

I’m thinking, imagining, that he may not even submit this interview now UNLESS I “give him something.” Yeah. Probably not even true. He probably would have submitted the interview fine without me handing him “something.” But me, wanting to “come back,” wanting to ramp that Fame back up to the impossible-to-get Family Ties level, imagining that that was possible, that I had any control over that at all, I decide to throw my recent personal growth, my private personal growth, into the fire, under the bus, sacrifice it, in order to “attain greater Fame.”

Yup, I fucking did it. Me. Surprised? I was. In the moment, I assured myself that it was worth it to “regain the Fame.” I justified it by imagining all the “people it would help” to hear my personal, private, sacrificed information. Fuck. It was the only time I have ever tried to “regain Fame.” It was an enormous mistake. The reporter was really happy. Maybe he’d tried that trick on 20 other famous people and I was the first one to fall for it. Me, the Fame veteran, the publicity expert. I fell for it. I was telling him all this stuff, really easy fodder for the public. Recovery, spiritual growth, all that. Fucking personal, not for public consumption, not for parsing in the public eye, not for picking apart like crows on a dead raccoon in the middle of Main Street, while everyone stands around and stares. No. That information was not for that, but I dropped it there. I just threw it right there on the road.

* * *

You know the Bible story about Isaac and Ishmael? God tells Sarah and Abraham that they’re going to have a kid. They wait, and no pregnancies for Sarah. Wait for years. Sarah gets old. Impossible for her to conceive now. Sarah then tells Abraham to go ahead and have sex with the slave girl, so they can have that kid God mentioned. So, Abraham does it. Has sex with the slave girl, and later out pops Ishmael. He’s not the kid God was talking about. So, now Abraham and Sarah have two problems. They used to have just one problem, but now they have two. They still don’t have the kid God was talking about AND now they have the Ishmael kid to deal with. Later, Sarah, at 90 years old (of course), gets pregnant with Isaac, the kid God was talking about. And Ishmael becomes a thorn in Isaac’s side.

You get it. When I gave the reporter “something,” I made “an Ishmael.” The one time I ever tried to control Fame, I made an Ishmael. I first had just the one “problem” of thinking I didn’t have enough Fame. After the interview, I had two problems: I still didn’t have that level of Fame I thought I needed AND I had spit information out there that gave people some additional boxes to dismiss me into. Used to be one problem, now I had two problems. I tried to control something uncontrollable. And it became a thorn in my side. For years after that, whenever some other famous person was going through what sounded similar to what I had spewed about myself, I’d get an urgent call from a talk show or a news show, to “comment.”

“So-an-so just did this-and-that. Can we get your comment? Can we have you in the studio to discuss this? Can we get your take on this? Can you come on Charlie Rose? Larry King?” No fucking way. I’d made an Ishmael; that didn’t mean I was going to feed it. I was going to leave it outside, by the river, in the elements, like the Vikings did with their deformed babies. I was going to leave it out there to die.