photo by Cliff Watts
Halle Berry's Date
with a Perfect Stranger
A writer sat across the table from an actress. She told him most writers screw up the story. He told her writing isn't easy. She asked to give it a shot. This is what happened.
By Halle Berry & Tom Chiarella
[NOTE: Halle Berry wrote the story. Tom Chiarella added his thoughts in the form of footnotes. Click the footnote to read his annotations.]
As I sat in my car, (1) driving to what I had sworn would be my last print interview ever, (2) I couldn't help but think of all the reasons why I was glad that this would in fact be my last sit-down dinner with a perfect stranger on a mission. No more rhetorical questions about my failed marriages, no more smiling through the mundane inquiries about my beauty regime, no more defending my graphic love scene in Monster's Ball, no more pressure to come up with an excuse as to why I don't have a baby at forty, and finally, no more giving a magazine the power to paint a portrait of me that was just not true. (3)
I entered the restaurant (4) looking for the perfect stranger who would write this last and forgettable piece, and I was shocked to find that he looked nothing like I had suspected. (5) Instead of being a freakish monster (6) out to get me, he was a soft teddy-bear type (7) with shaggy hair (8) and an easy smile and the very normal name of Tom. Due to my extreme paranoia, I immediately thought it sneaky of the magazine to send a totally harmless-looking (9) perfect stranger to do its dirty work.
We sat down (10) and started with the normal blah, blah, blah that most perfect strangers start conversations with, and then suddenly, after about ten minutes, I realized that the interview had begun but Tom, the perfect stranger, had not taken one note or pulled out a tape recorder. At that moment, I smiled on the inside: Either Tom was as dumb as paint, (11) or Tom was going to be my best interview ever. Since this was my last interview, I decided to seek revenge preemptively on this perfect stranger and ask him all the annoying kinds of questions that I had suffered through for so many years. (12)
HB: You're a college professor as well as a journalist. I really admire that. What made you want to be a teacher?
TC: I really wanted to be around twenty-two-year-old women. (13)
HB: So what's it like working for Esquire, especially when you live in Indiana?
TC: It's a dream come true. I like ass-kissing, and I get to do a lot of it working for Esquire. (14)
HB: Any regrets?
TC: Yes, a failed marriage. I wish I had more kids. I also regret that I just told you that. (15)
HB: Can you tell me what happened with your first marriage? Can you shed any light on why you split with your ex-wife? Did her career as a nurse contribute to it?
TC: I'm no longer talking about that.... It's very private. But I will say this: Nurses have better stories. Please don't ask me to explain. (16)
HB: What about your current relationship with Christine White, the playwright? Is that different in any way?
TC: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I never get sick of Chris, and she surprisingly never gets sick of me. She's the joy and the wonder of my life. Through her, I get to get close to hot chicks like Rae Dawn Chong. (17)
HB: Speaking of Rae Dawn Chong and movies, have you seen any of my movies? If so, what has been your favorite and your least favorite?
TC: Well, I didn't like the Bond flick that much. I mean the bikini was okkkkkaaaayyyy. (18) However, I really loved B.A.P.S. For a white boy raised in New York living in Indiana, I thought that shit was funny! (19)
Like most good journalists on a mission, I am not really sure if those were the actual answers Tom gave or if that was just my selective memory in search of a juicy story with an interesting twist that would sell magazines. (20)
The next day, Tom and I were to spend the day together shopping for a dinner party that I was giving for a few of my closest friends. Whoo-hoo...sounds like fun... not! However, Tom took the shopping spree in stride, all in an attempt to "see what a day in the life of a perfect stranger''(21) like me was like.... Right! (22)
As we parked and headed toward the door, one of the perfect strangers that had been following us all morning taking our picture asked Tom his name. (23) Tom replied, "Tom Chiarella." The perfect stranger replied, "You look like Kevin Smith." Then, to my surprise, I heard Tom, aka Cuddly Bear, (24) shout, "Fuck you." Then the perfect stranger said, "Like Kevin Smith before he lost the weight." To which Cuddly Bear said, "Then my name is Fuck You Twice." And as a result, rumor has it Cuddly Bear is now known on the Net as Fuck You Twice. (25)
After laughing our asses off, we headed into the market and fell right into the whole couple-going-shopping thing. He grabbed the cart from the back and I pulled it from the front. Although we were perfect strangers, we appeared to be the perfect couple. I led him around like women do to men in supermarkets, grabbing everything I needed for dinner with skillful precision. He was careful not to run the cart up on my heels, just like his mother taught him. One perfect stranger after another offered us all kinds of delectable treats as we shopped. While I passed them all up like a woman on a crazed mission to get out of the store ASAP, Tom delighted in tasting every free treat he could get his hands on. (26) I didn't dare tell him, but he did kinda look like Kevin Smith. (27)
As we checked out, Tom was a true gentleman and offered to carry all the groceries. As he struggled to manage the bags, he also struggled to find his sunglasses. He said that now that he knew perfect strangers were photographing us, he felt "the need to look cool." And I must say, Tom was starting to look kinda hot. (28) Not because the glasses were anything special, but because I was having fun with a perfect stranger. A perfect stranger who I thought for sure was out to get me the day before.
Off we went to our final destination: Greenblatt's. My favorite deli. Greenblatt's is more than a deli; it's a place that houses the finest wine in the city. I ordered a case for my little dinner party, and we decided to sit and end our outing with a bite to eat. I was starving by now and ordered the pastrami on rye with spicy mustard, while Tom ordered the cheese-and-paté plate. I was like, Is that all you're going to eat? He replied, "After that Kevin Smith comment, I've been on a diet for the last thirty minutes." I thought to myself, Poor guy, he wouldn't last a minute in my shoes with that thin skin. Sure enough, a perfect stranger brought my sandwich and Tom instantly became moist at the mouth. (29) As I ripped into the meat like a wild boar eating its kill, I could see the desire on Tom's face. He immediately canceled his cheese plate and ordered what I had. And of course, like most people who have been on a diet for only thirty minutes, he was relieved to see the real food arrive. The funny part was that he said he wasn't going to eat the bread, as if the fatty pastrami was void of 80 percent of the calories of the meal. (30)
As the conversation wrapped up, I pulled out my credit card to pay. Tom stopped me from paying by noting that the meal was on the magazine. I thought, Oh, shit, right...we are doing an interview. However, the last two hours had felt like I was hanging with an old friend from back home. Then he reached his cupped left hand over the table toward my chest area and said, "Can I touch it?" In my mind, I was like, Whoa, playboy, slow it on down. I gave him one of my what-the-fuck looks, and he laughed and said, "I'm talking about your titanium Amex card." (31) Now that I felt knee-high to a bullfrog, I graciously passed him the card and did my best to play it off.
I watched the perfect stranger finish his sandwich. On another day, he'd just be a guy in a shop, lifting the pastrami off his perfectly good rye bread like a fool. But now I knew him. Him and his girlfriend and his screwups and his pain here and there in life. He knew mine, too. But everybody thinks they do. He looked past me, out the window. "The coast is probably clear," he said. "No one seems to know we're here." I smiled. The perfect stranger was my hero. He never asked me one dumb question, not one rhetorical question, not one question I had heard before, never invaded my personal boundaries, didn't really seem to care about my love life, and never asked me what it was like to kiss Bruce Willis. I looked at him again.
I never get to see a perfect stranger like that, looking out the window, caught in his own thoughts, worried about other perfect strangers with cameras. It was kinda sweet. "You think they know we're here?" he said, with mustard in his beard. I handed him a napkin. "They always do," I said. (32)
Then I told him he just didn't have a clue. (33)
Annotations, by Tom Chiarella
(1) Halle Berry wrote this. Every word. Like all writers, she got a lot of things wrong, and she should be held responsible for the content. Return to story.
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(2) Oh, please, who believes that? Return to story.
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(3) Here's a portrait for you: At this point, I was inside at the bar, having been there in advance, having spent some nugget of time talking to a young woman who claimed to be a professional shopper for the wives of athletes, me working to make small talk. She was having none of it. She drank champagne with a drop of Chambord. I asked her what that tasted like. Reasonable question. She looked at me icily, but for a moment it seemed as if she could see me. "What it tastes like," she said. For a moment, I thought this was the first part of her answer and that more was coming. But she kept quiet, and silence hung between us. I felt like I was made of clay. That was her answer. It was the old Redd Foxx bit. Q: What is it? A: What it is. It felt like an omen. Me, talking to a woman sick to death of talking to men she didn't know. Christ. Here we go, I thought. I sucked on my drink. I didn't have any more questions. I tried like hell not to order a second. I searched my heart to find some shred of interest in the Laker game on the television. I bided my time. Return to story.
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(4) The hostess came and got me. The professional shopper didn't look to see who was meeting the old fat guy. I flipped her off, without anyone seeing, before I left. The hell with it, I thought. Return to story.
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(5) Funny, she looked exactly like I suspected. I mean exactly. She was small; all movie stars are small. Or I am big. (See footnotes 9, 20, 22, 26, 30, and paragraphs throughout the body of the text referring to my weight and/or my apparent resemblance to romanticized, overly friendly bears.) Her skin: flawless. Her hands: finespun, delicate, untroublesome to her as she talked. Eyes: clear as a glass of water, eyelashes ticked with mascara. Or maybe not. I could see she was exhausted with the thought of me even then, within a moment of meeting me. I knew that face. It was the face that says, I got forty-five minutes for you, no more. Return to story.
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(6) I never like meeting celebrities. Worst part of the job, really. Invading someone's life, if only for a moment -- lousy. Everything you do is built upon a trust that is illusory at best, an utter lie at worst. The subjects have something they're supposed to say, and they've said it many times in the weeks prior. They let you into their lives grudgingly and utter everything through an unseen megaphone, clear and safe, sometimes staring at the recorder so that everyone will hear. There's the recorder to fuss with and a transcript to produce. And me? I don't want to be noticed in a restaurant. My coats are jenky, my pants hang badly, and my hair, just fuck it. I never want my photo taken. Though I like movies, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to be an actor. I generally throw up all morning or sit around in my Yankees T-shirt like a depressed frat boy watching The Price Is Right in my hotel room. Esquire writer at large Scott Raab told me he feels sickest in those moments before the car picks him up to go to the dinner or whatever. That's when he has to remind himself that they asked him to do this. That's what I was telling myself then: They asked me. Me. It's somehow valuable to know that the term "freakish monster" comes to mind for H.B. But, hey, they asked me. Return to story.
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(7) I really object to this whole "teddy bear" thing. "Grizzly bear" would be fine. Return to story.
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(8) I just got a haircut. Return to story.
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(9) I was buzzed. It takes the danger out of me. Maybe the harmlessness I projected had to do with the fact that I was still turning over Redd Foxx's words in my head. What is it? I kept asking. What it is, I answered. It was the only question I could think of now. Worse, I knew that face and I could see she was exhausted by the thought of me, like I said. I wanted to ask H.B., What is it? But she looked me up and down and I felt like a fat goofball. What it is, I told myself. Return to story.
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(10) Every person in that restaurant, and there were maybe forty, said her name softly when she came in, to the person they were with, to themselves, to the air, I guess. And what it sounded like was a retarded chorus, something like hallabell, hallabell, hallabell. And even though everyone was whispering politely, pretending to be unfazed, you heard it like a giddy hiss of some dim frequency as we moved toward our table. She took no notice, didn't duck out of the attention, and walked straight through. I saw her do that again and again over the next two days. The woman could walk a steel wire through an ice storm. In heels. Always in heels. (She is small. They all are.) Return to story.
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(11) I love this phrase. The thing about H.B. was she had lots of these little homespun sayings, which she would say mostly under her breath, so I would either have to ask after what she just said or simply laugh and pretend I heard. Return to story.
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(12) It was like this: We were sitting together at one end of a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Night had fallen hard enough that the world outside wasn't recognizable. Neither of us was eating much. (See footnote number 5 on my weight issue.) We'd been there for two hours. I had a digital tape recorder in my pocket, and I kept thinking about taking it out. But things were going well. And I knew it would never work if we went on the record. She kept looking at the space on the table between us, that little strip of tablecloth where the recorder goes, the space that signifies "This is a working dinner" to everyone -- waiter, writer, celebrity herself, passerby -- so that no one worries this might just be two friends talking. And I just didn't take the recorder out. I just sat there, thinking I'd better memorize every detail of this event. What she ate (can't remember). What her hair looked like (can't remember). What sort of jewelry she wore (can't remember). What she was wearing (a knit dress, some cleavage, it looked expensive), if she made eye contact (she did, much more than I), how she used her fork (properly, I thought). And when I told her the list of things I didn't care about -- nakedness in Swordfish, sex in Monster's Ball, if she wanted to have a baby -- she laughed and said, "Then I will kiss your feet." So I left the recorder in my pocket, and we sat there talking about our own failures in marriage and how much we loved the people we were with now. But she misquotes me. Let's make that clear at the outset. And she really has no excuse, since I gave her the pen myself. I even gave her the paper to write on. Return to story.
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(13) I did not say this. She did ask me about teaching, and my answer was long and nuanced. I tried to speak quickly enough so that she would have a hard time taking notes, hoping that she might ask for my recorder. Fast talkers are tough. That's where a writer panics a little. But she seemed to know some sort of shorthand. And I babbled. I enjoy reading, I told her. I believe in the power of stories. I dove in and told her about teaching Invisible Man the year before. I rambled. At one point, she followed up: "Do you like being around twenty-two-year-old women?" I believe I shrugged and said, Sure, who doesn't? Hence, that answer. It's true, but it isn't. I could sense that she was setting a trap with it, but I figured the context would keep me safe. When I see it now, I think, Very smart. Return to story.
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(14) I did not say this, either. Return to story.
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(15) This was not my answer. These were the answers to three follow-up questions over fifteen minutes. Return to story.
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(16) Let me explain. I told her my ex-wife used to come home from work and ask me how my day went. I would tell her I gave three B's, two C's, went to one committee meeting, and played a game of pickup basketball. Dull. Hey, I was a college professor living in Indiana. Then I'd ask her how her day went, and she would describe pulling a baby the size of her hand from the womb of a crack-addled thirty-year-old who spouted Scripture in lieu of an epidural. She would cry like hell, too. Nothing linked up for us, I told Halle. Nurses, I said, have better stories. I was perfectly willing to explain. I just didn't want to talk about my ex-wife. H.B. mixes and mingles the answers for effect. I admire her for it. The rest of that had nothing to do with her story. Return to story.
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(17) I said all this. Of course, it was after an eight-minute description of the play itself, after a fifteen-minute description of the depth of my love for this woman (Chris), after I told her that drama tended to bore me, and after she talked about how she (Halle) maintained a residence in New York mostly so she could go to plays. Did she quote any of that? Of course not. She left all that behind -- the way a good profiler does -- because what the subject wants you to know is not what you're after. It's what they guard that matters to the reader. She smiled when I brought up Rae Dawn Chong. She seemed to know her and was impressed that she was in the play. I said, "I know. It's pretty cool of her to come out to Indiana to do this." H.B. replied: "Pretty hot." I probably nodded my big head, my fat face, my shaggy mop, like a fool. I probably went on chewing without thinking I had said a goddamned thing. I'm certain I concurred in some way. So I brought it on myself; it's that way with reporters. But I did not say this. Halle Berry is the one who thinks Rae Dawn Chong is hot. (She is, too.) But I didn't say it. Return to story.
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(18) I have so many objections to this I could spit. I would never say "okkkkkaaaayyyy." I don't even know what that word sounds like. She was the one who asked, "You didn't like the orange bikini?" And I said, "Well, sure. Yes. I liked it. I mean, it was fine." Then I looked at her and said, "Great bikini," like a jackass. Return to story.
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(19) I do like B.A.P.S., for which she has always taken a bad rap. If you're Jim Carrey doing Dumb and Dumber, you're some sort of genius. If you're H.B., just as self-consciously messing with ghetto stereotypes, then you're a fool. It was her question, so I didn't ask, but there was no regret in her voice when she talked about it. She laughed when I brought it up, smiled while I held court on physical comedy. She agreed. The fat man is right: That shit was funny. Return to story.
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(20) Here she reveals that she knows how reporters misquote her or ignore the depth of her answers. She connects sentences that came minutes apart. She condenses. I get it. There's nothing else to do. A writer has only so many words. The clock dwindles on a dinner with every bite you take. You get a few lines to capture what the subject thinks about her next movie. (H.B.'s is called Perfect Stranger, which I just now realized -- only after reading her article twenty times in draft -- is why she keeps using the phrase over and over. Lord, I'm a dumbass.) So, Perfect Stranger: Bruce Willis. Murder. Online love. She kisses him, I think.
When she asked to write the piece herself, I told her all of that and more. I said, You have to look at the other person and ask, What gives him staying power? Why do people like him? Then you have to determine one thing that you learned through close physical proximity, one thing that no one would know from watching him on film. That's the hard part. "You have to risk humiliating the person," I said. "That's the key: risk."
She nodded and wrote that word down.
"What have you learned about me?" I said.
She looked at me again. Now she could see me. "You're pretty nice," she said.
I took a bite of my fish, eschewing my mashed yams. "So what? Some people think ferrets are nice. What did you learn that the reader might not know?"
"You're big," she said.
"So? You're small. Means nothing. I'm not even going to mention it. Who doesn't know that?"
"Well," she said, looking me up and down. "You're heavy?"
"Heavy? You aren't writing an article about gravity. Risk humiliating me."
She drank a little and said, "You're fat."
"Right!" I said, taking a forkful of grilled endive. I spun it around like I was working with a group of musicians, half conducting, half asking the performance to begin. "Play that up. Show them what you see." (What a horrible fucking mistake.)
"That's the only rule?" she said.
I shrugged and forked around in the remains of my mango chutney. "That, and never mention what the person is eating for dinner. That's pretty old hat for a magazine profile." Return to story.
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(21) Here she opens up the conceit. She's saying, "No one knows me." No big secret -- they all think that, movie stars. But this is the one assertion that H.B. both guards and asserts in everything she does, from the way she glides through the lightning storm of photographers that swings behind her on an invisible rope of attraction to the way she orders a liquor-soaked cake for a party (see note 22) with a distant, somehow quizzical look, the one she patented in Bulworth and Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, a look conveying both a level of hurt and the presence of real sinew. She glances away when she orders, counting her friends on an invisible hand. Then she thinks about it and shrugs. Return to story.
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(22) I admit that I took out a paragraph here, where H.B. took me to a bakery to buy a cake for her party the next night, because she wrote that she felt guilty bringing a fat man to a bakery. (She used the words pudgy and decadent.) But, Christ, enough already with the weight. I just lost sixteen pounds. I was feeling pretty good until this whole celebrity-profile thing. These people are obsessed. When I asked her who was coming to the party, she said friends. When I asked her who they were, she said, "Friends. You know. Teachers. Veterinarians. People from my neighborhood. Friends." Return to story.
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(23) But here she is blurring her use of the term "perfect strangers," which is the way she wants to describe the two of us (perfect strangers who hit it off) and the greasy shithead paparazzi who follow her all day and night taking pictures. They were everywhere we went. At this point, sixteen hours into an eighteen-hour relationship, I was sick of them, too. But H.B. is twenty years with this stuff now, and she was graciously indifferent, like a woman in the presence of a shitty ex-boyfriend. There's history. She could say something to them. But she won't. Return to story.
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(24) "Cuddly Bear?" WTF? What happened to "teddy bear"? Even that was better. Return to story.
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(25) When I shouted "Fuck you" to them, it seemed to make her immensely happy, and the "Fuck You Twice" thing was really just to get a laugh from her, because it's sweet when H.B. laughs. But check your notes, ace reporter: This happened when we were on the way out. Return to story.
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(26) I think I ate one sample of Stilton and a piece of Asian pear. Jesus. Return to story.
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(27) Fuck Kevin Smith, too. Return to story.
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(28) Now that you can print. Return to story.
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(29) Not sure what this means. But she's the writer. Return to story.
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(30) Hey, genius, ever heard of the Atkins diet? Return to story.
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(31) I heard they were made of metal. I wanted to check. It was. Very cool. Return to story.
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(32) I looked at her, too. It's what you do in moments like that. On the flight out to L.A., I'd read a fairly useless clip file on her. My preinterview read on the subject was dull. I thought, She gives the same answers every time. Then it turned out the problem wasn't her answers; it was the questions people asked. So I gave the questions over to her.
What I was thinking at that moment, with the pastrami in my fingertips, was: I might be in a lot of trouble. I'd just conducted an interview for a cover story without getting one quote on record, all on the faith that she would actually do what she said she wanted to: write the thing herself. I was thinking, That's never going to happen. Every movie star thinks writing is easy. I was thinking, Fuck me, I am in so much trouble.
She knew I was a little worried. What she doesn't narrate in her piece is that she looked at me there at the deli and asked me Redd Foxx's question: "What is it?"
"What it is," I said, "is that I don't have a single quote from you I can bank on. I might be in a lot of trouble if you don't write your part. Writing can be no fun. It's pretty hard actually."
She told me to take out the recorder then. "What do you see?" she asked, once I pushed the button. "What do you think people see in me?"
I'd been thinking about this. About how she was always alone in pictures. About how hard it is to be twice divorced, to have the world know your troubles. I figured I had it nailed: "I think people assume you have a sadness inside of you," I said. "They respond to some level of pain they pick up in your affect, your face, in you."
She smiled. "Directors always say that. They say, 'I want to work to show your sadness onscreen.' "
Just then, I felt pretty smart. I'd hit on something. She was telling me that I was insightful, like a director. A real pro. Then she went on: "Fans say it. Reviewers say it. I've been hearing it all my career. The truth is, it isn't so. My mother provided for me. I've made money. I've lived a charmed life. I've never been without. And whatever mistakes I made, well, shit, everybody has to learn from the past. You live it or you leave it. I'm not sad. I know what I am. But you don't. I'm monumentally happy, if you want to know the truth."
That was when she handed me the napkin. And she had mustard on her face, too. That was when I noticed the recorder wasn't running after all. Return to story.
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(33) Tell me about it. Return to story.