CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1981
Warrington sat in a movie theater in midtown Manhattan, waiting for the show to begin. All his friends from school were there, waiting with him. Actually they weren’t there to see a movie. They were there to see Warrington—in a movie.
Warrington hadn’t really made it at Villanova. He’d tried his best to pretend he actually liked economics, but they didn’t call it the dry science for nothing. It was brutal. It was like learning a second language and math at the same time. He loathed every minute of it. He also had loathed the bucolic campus in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. It was what his mother wanted, but not what he wanted. He had so much more to offer. He was a creative guy. In the summer after sophomore year, he’d made a decision—he was going to quit and move to New York to become what he was always meant to be—an actor.
It all made more sense than the Laffer curve and John Maynard Keynes. He had an outgoing personality, could ingratiate himself with people in power (teachers, coaches, bouncers), and was growing into his father’s good looks. Hollywood beckoned, but first he had to actually learn how to act. New York City and the Strasberg Institute was the place for that.
His father—now remarried and selling real estate in Palm Beach—had helped him out. Though Warrington was now twenty-one and could certainly have gone out and gotten a real job to pay the bills, he was an artist and his father was a patron. Dad paid the rent on Warrington’s Sutton Place apartment and the tuition at Strasberg. Whether his father believed any of this would amount to anything, Warrington did not know. He was just happy that his dad was contributing. He wouldn’t have asked his stepfather for the money. He never liked asking him for anything. He’d come to resent spending any time at Tally Ho, feeling as though he was back at Gilman, living in a stranger’s house. His father’s financial help—limited though it was—was the only assistance he could bear to accept.
He really needed it to work out. It was important that he succeed, to validate his father’s investment.
It wasn’t easy. For two years he’d won major roles only in TV commercials. When he tried out for a part in the sequel to the hugely popular Friday the 13th, he’d believed it would take him to the next step. He studied for weeks, watching the first movie again and again. When it came time to read, he was stiff and awkward. He didn’t understand the nuances of character. A speaking role was not to be.
But his enthusiasm showed through. He was clearly committed to working hard, and the casting director came up with an idea: why not give Warrington—who was now using the razor family name Warrington Gillette—a nonspeaking role? Why not make him Jason himself?
Perhaps Jason could be his breakthrough role. Sure there wasn’t a single line of dialogue, and it was difficult to recognize Warrington under all that makeup. He looked like somebody had lit a fire on his face and put it out with a rake. His hair was matted to his head and torn out in spots, the left side drooped, and his mouth hung open wide enough for a bird to fly in.
During shooting, the makeup was always driving him insane. Gobs of rubber and plastic had been glued to the left side of his face. His left eye was completely covered up, replaced by a twisted festering rubber mess that left him blind on one side. He had dentures that forced his mouth to remain open for hours at a time. He wore a skull-cap that caused him to sweat like Richard Nixon. He wore a stained plaid cotton shirt common to people who know how to gut deer and kill small animals. He looked like a lunatic, which was what he was supposed to look like. And who cared? He was in the movies.
Actually it was Friday the 13th: Part 2, and it was as good as he could manage in this particular moment in his acting career. It wasn’t exactly Marlon Brando in A Street-car Named Desire, but it would do. Warrington, after all, was a professional actor now, and he understood that you have to pay your dues.
Boy was he paying. His favorite story—one he told every model he could rope into conversation in his many nights out on the town—was the day he was supposed to crash through a window in a deserted cabin in the woods. There were always deserted cabins in these movies, and the best way for the lunatic to enter them was always to crash through the window. The day of the big scene he’d been standing all morning waiting for his big moment. He would crash through the window to slash and chop his way into the hearts and minds of teenagers and the rest of the gore-obsessed world. He hadn’t eaten all morning because the idiotic makeup prevented him from taking food into his mouth. His depth perception was gone because his left eye was hidden behind the foam rubber, and he was enveloped in a fine sheen of sweat. All he needed to do was crash through the window and flail madly for a few moments. Maybe this was method acting. You got so furious at being cooped up inside this makeup that your fury became part of your role. They hadn’t really mentioned that at the Strasberg Institute.
Warrington could do this. He’d immersed himself in the story of Jason. He was a lonely, tormented kid, disfigured in a fire, back to kill off his tormentors in a remote area called Crystal Lake. There was an Oedipal aspect. The boy’s mother was killed in the first movie, so now Warrington’s Jason had grown up but kept her head in the refrigerator. His killing orgy had purpose other than to pique the prurient interest of popcorn-munching teens. Allegedly. How did you get inside that character? Why would you want to?
Standing around waiting to crash through the fake window in the fake cabin in the real woods deep in the heart of Connecticut, Warrington had tried to become the best Jason he could be. He had to make this work. Here he was, the scion of old money, the weight of legacy pressing down upon him, living off his father’s dime without a college degree to show for his troubles. It was acting or nothing.
The scene was ready. Jason was on another psycho rampage. Warrington was told to run hard and smash through the grimy window of the cabin in the woods with forearms extended and palms turned backward. The window was rigged so it wouldn’t hurt. At least that was what Warrington was told. Then he would attack the actress Amy Steel, who would scream and try in vain to escape his murderous mission. Pretty simple.
The director called, “Action!” and Warrington ran as fast as he could toward the window.
He hit the window like a brick wall and bounced back, landing flat on his butt.
It was ludicrous. There he sat, in all his foam-rubber splendor, mouth agape, stupefied and humiliated. The army of worker bees around him started yelling and casting blame as quickly as possible. Some idiot had forgotten to score the window. A linebacker couldn’t get through it, never mind a twenty-two-year-old Villanova dropout. They would have to shoot the scene again. The show must go on, etc.
“By the time we reached that scene,” Warrington was telling his friends, “I was so sick and uncomfortable with the whole process that I really could have killed that girl.”
The lights dimmed, the previews began. Finally it was time—Friday the 13th: Part 2. Warrington could barely contain himself when his name flashed on the screen during the opening credits.
Scene after scene unfolded. This was merely the first sequel, so the filmmakers felt compelled to offer up enough backstory that the movie actually contained plot elements. Warrington was Jason Voorhees, who supposedly drowned as a teenager at a camp for bored suburban youth called Crystal Lake. Jason’s mother flipped out and hid in the woods, killing anyone who tried to reopen the camp. In the first movie, she killed eight camp counselors but was decapitated by one survivor. She did this, naturally, on Friday the thirteenth. Her partially decomposed son, Jason, showed up to avenge her death, again on—when else?—Friday the thirteenth. The counselor who killed Mom decided it would be a good idea to return to the camp two months later to face her fears about Crystal Lake. This was convenient for Jason, who burst in and stabbed her in the neck with an ice pick. Her body was never found.
Friday the 13th: Part 2 didn’t end there, although the rest of the story was more or less a variation on that which had already been told. Five years later somebody else tried to reopen Camp Crystal Lake. Jason/Warrington returned and started killing people. As the movie rolled toward its inevitable bloody conclusion, yet another scantily clad counselor bimbo attacked Jason with a machete. Warrington/Jason somehow survived to escape into the woods, taking with him the promise of more sequels to come.
The credits rolled. Warrington and his friends stayed to watch his name roll by once again. They were all cheering and clapping him on the back, and in some ways it felt good. There he was, up there on the big screen, looking down on thousands of people who were willing to pay good money to watch Jason do his thing. And Warrington knew they’d all been there just to see Jason. Fame and fortune were within reach. He could taste it. He imagined himself exiting a black stretch limo at the premiere of his first star vehicle, the paparazzi braying at him as he strutted up the red carpet with a model on each arm.
Of course, his mother, father, sister, half brother and anyone else in his social circle could sit through the entire movie and not recognize Warrington up there, and in the entire film he’d uttered not a single word of English prose. The only acting involved running through woods and flailing about with a hatchet or a knife or an ice pick. An orangutan could do that. As he left the theater, he suddenly became depressed. Maybe acting wasn’t for him. Standing outside the theater, the theme song of Friday the 13th still ringing in his head, he began to think that maybe he wasn’t really cut out for the creative life. Maybe he needed to make a little cash.
Right away.