USA

Esquire | April, 1986

Esquire Goes on One Last Date

What did Michelle Pfeiffer do to deserve this?

Steadfast readers of this magazine probably remember that there was once an unidentified royal “we” who had the enviable and daunting “job” of dating the most beautiful and desirable women in the world. We are they, and we dated monthly for two solid years, surviving each night so that we might live to tell about it in these pages.

We were, back then, a sailor on the sea of love. We weathered early-evening nerves and late-night storms. We heard the roar of our own heartbeat as we made twenty-four first-time phone calls; picked out twenty-four ties; pressed twenty-four door buzzers; and bid twenty-four striking women goodnight. And whatever the hour, the season, the actual weather, each of those goodnights was shrouded in mist.

Three years later, we are stunned that it happened at all—especially when we remember the very first date. She was, and remains, a sensual and intelligent actress whose career began to blossom shortly after she went out with us. A nasty coincidence —as is the fact that her initials are identical to those of the most feared and elite Nazi corps.

To be generous: a great date it wasn’t. We spent the first part of it with her and with much of her family in the stands of Yankee Stadium, getting through it, we thought, with sufficient courtesy and charro. We extended insights into the glorious sport that was being played out below, then the two of us went off to a harborside restaurant in Brooklyn, where we made each other so tense that it was all we could do to swallow our swordfish. Tense, not wrathful, is how we remember it. Nevertheless, a year later she attacked us in the pages of another magazine, saying that if she’d had some loose change in her pocket she would have ditched us at the restaurant and taken a cab home—alone.

A bad start, but we stayed our course. With our second date we began to get the hang of it. She was the stunning and articulate British actress J.S. , who had learned—that very day—that she’d been chosen for the female lead in the Broadway production of Amadeus. Celebrating, we danced the night away at the Rainbow Room. Masterfully, we led.

Then there was the former member of the Mamas and the Papas, M. P. , whose knee touched ours at a downtown jazz joint. And there was the olive-skinned, doe-eyed beauty, B. C. , who, when we asked where she was from, said South America, Central America, the Far East, and Hungary. She made us so confused. There was the major Hollywood star, D.C., once married to the dashing Cary Grant, who steamed some broccoli for us in her Malibu beach house, and laughed and talked about the universe as a leaf dropped off her ficus tree. She made us feel guilty about smoking. When she walked us to our car to say goodnight, she brought along our cigarette butts wrapped in a paper towel. She waved farewell with one hand, while with the other she dropped our butts in the trash. Oh, those were the nights!

Every so often, and more often than not, we fell in love. We spent an innocent (though edgy) weekend in Chicago with D.M., the steamy star of a prime-time soap. And it pleases us that we occasionally see her still; sometimes she’ll call when she’s in New York and we’ll have dinner. (Talk about the power of TV: one night in a blasé Manhattan restaurant a man stuck his face between ours and our mutton and rasped, “You are a very lucky man.”)

We also became close and enduring friends with B.B., she who has womanhood’s most melodic voice and who played Jackie O. on television. We’ll never forget the way that first evening ended: how when she turned to say good-night on Fourteenth Street her silver shoe kicked an empty beer can and sent it skittering into the gutter—and along with it, our heart.

During these last three years we’ve thought back on each of them: on A.I., who went on from our date to bear a son to Steven Spielberg; on D. R., Motown megastar, who is no doubt a warm person but who was out of lipstick the day we met her; and on P. K. , the Indian actress so naturally breathtaking that she is as comely with a shaved head as she is with hair.

Then it ended. It ended after a particularly fine evening with C.R., the British actress with cheekbones befitting a Gothic cathedral, who has appeared in movies with Dirk Bogarde and Woody Allen.

But after that we just pulled up our oars. We bronzed our credit cards. Readers reacted to the news. A woman from Atlanta wrote in: “How nice it is to know that one true gentleman still exists—a man who doesn’t even expect to get kissed on the first date. If you’re ever in town, give a call.” Other readers rejoiced. A man from Dallas wrote: “Good! Now maybe the magazine will find a real man to write that thing. Maybe he’ll even score once in a while.” (Stuff it, pal, we did score once.)

Nevertheless, we were weary and dated out. The fact was that after all the high life and theater tickets and expensive wine and jitterbugging and jetting about, we decided we had better things to do with our evenings. Watch ball games on TV. Take up with good books. Or just sit there with our clock ticking. We were growing into this older guy.

Such were our circumstances last summer, when a woman, for reasons we honestly can’t remember, caught our attention. We found ourself walking out of our way to see two of her movies: a forgettable romantic thriller, Into the Night; and a rather uninspired Hollywood folktale, Ladyhawke. When did we first notice Michelle Pfeiffer? We cannot honestly remember—but when we watched her on the screen, we felt an old wind rising. Perhaps we’d been dry-docked too long. Perhaps old sailors never die, they just go to Elaine’s.

We decided to polish our shirt studs. We decided to dust off the present tense and go out on another date. As luck would have it, Michelle Pfeiffer is in the East. Luck? No, this is fate! For it turns out that she is not only in the East—filming Sweet Liberty with Alan Alda—she is free tomorrow night, and not only free, she has an extra theater ticket because, to make a long story short, her sister was supposed to go to the theater with Michelle and Michelle’s fellow cast member Lois Chiles, but the sister went back to L.A., and so on, etcetera.

In any event, the next evening comes and it’s the hottest night of the hottest week of the summer. The old question has us in its spell: What to wear?

In weather like this, nothing will do but old-fashioned, schleppy seersucker—but real seersucker, the 100-percent-cotton kind, which gets puffy when washed and hung out to dry. So we put on our seersucker suit with a white shirt and a crisp, brown tie, and lock the door behind us, as we’ve done so many times before, but not lately.

Curiously, this time feels different. We check our pulse. We’re not too skittish. As we hit the street we think back on what we used to be like at this stage of the evening. We smile at how stupid we were. How we nagged ourself: Will she like us? Will she love us? Will she laugh at our jokes? Will she be too tall? And tonight, sure, we want Michelle Pfeiffer to stand short and to fall in love, but if not, so what? Dwight Gooden is going for the Mets tomorrow night, and we have good seats.

We settle into our chartered limousine and give the driver the address where Michelle is staying. The seersucker’s doing its thing, keeping us nice and cool. The only concern we have is that we’re not concerned about what lies ahead. But when we reach the address—right on schedule—we find ourself staring up at a New York institution of higher (to be generous) learning. Wrong address! Things are screwed up! Some of that old nerdy fire comes coursing through our veins. Frantically, we run to a pay phone and call a hundred numbers in California to track down the right address.

By the time we reach the town house we’re all of ten minutes late. But our seersucker is soaked. We race up four flights of stairs and ring the buzzer. The door opens—we used to make a big deal of this moment in many of our old pieces—and there she stands. Michelle Pfeiffer, average height, without a trace of makeup. She’s wearing a plain white T-shirt, black-and-white toreador pants, and pink sneakers. Evidently she hasn’t dressed yet for the theater.

We enter the apartment, which is not air-conditioned. There is one window, which is propped open with a can of Comet. Michelle, who is guarded and appears not very sure of who we are, why we’re here, or what possible thing she could say to us, gamely offer s us a drink. “Would you like a beer—or a glass of water?” she asks. We go for the water.

She sets our refreshments down on the coffee table, then sits on the opposite chair. She is cool, distant. We’re sweating, distant.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly, “but I’ve always had a hard time knowing what to say to strangers.”

So the two of us try to make small talk about the futility of small talk. This inadequacy, the inability to schmooze, is the only thing we have in common. Michelle says that “whenever I go to a party I usually retreat to a comer of the room.” We reply that when introduced to people for the first time our mind goes blank, as if a great white curtain drops across our consciousness. The two of us look at the floor. Then at the walls. We think to ourself: this is going to be a long night. It’s as if somebody told Michelle that a stranger would ring her bell, and that she should let him in, and that she should do or say nothing more until she receives further instructions.

Finally, she cracks. “Maybe we should pick up Lois,” she says with a weak smile.

“You’re not changing for the theater?” we wonder, surprised that the words have actually dropped from our mouth

Michelle gives us a zap with her ice-blue eyes. She responds evenly, “I never really worry about how I look.”

Right. Why should she?

Lois is staying a short distance away, at the apartment of her hairdresser, who’s a close friend of hers. She’s down-stairs in an instant, and as she climbs into the backseat we give thanks that she’s coming along.

Right away she flashes us a lovely, shy grin. “I guess this makes me the duenna,” she says.

Rusty as we are at all this, we now entertain one of those insights (or presumptions) we used to have all the time on our dates. It is this: Here we are in a fancy car, seated between two glorious extremes of womanhood. They are Elemental, we think, our instincts whirring. In Lois we have the Earth: a woman who has found meaning and wisdom through relentless self-searching. In Michelle we have the Air: a woman who is finding her truth through the acute observation of those around her. And thus armed with the Earth and the Air, and having just had our Water, we set off for the theater. (The Fire, as we said, had flickered and waned three years earlier. )

The play is As Is, a highly praised drama about an AIDS victim and the staunch support he receives from his former lover, who is superbly played by Jonathan Hadary. For Broadway, As Is is powerful stuff. It achieves what first-rate theater is all about: it untes an audience of disparatesouls through strong, shared experience. When it’s over the three of us drive away along darkened streets, closer than we were before. The emotions of the play, the dreadful reality of its theme, the craft of the actors, these are the things that have brought us together.

Needless to say, this mood changes as we enter the uptown hubbub of Elaine’s, where Elaine herself gives us a big hug, a good table, and a somewhat sidelong glance. We order an enormous Scotch, and the Elements order red wine. The three of us check out the room. Over there is Dabney Coleman. And over there is, Guess who? whispers Lois. We shrug. “Dennis Stein,” she confides. “He’s the man who was engaged to Liz Taylor alter she left Victor Luna.” (Lois knows a lot of stuff like this, though she really doesn’t traffic in it. Honest.)

In no time at all, the three of us find ourselves talking as friends. Peas in a pod, eating veal piccata. This is not the way it used to be, and it’s not how we really want it to be tonight—despite our stated nonchalance. Yet we find ourself refusing to ask all the old questions, refusing to pry into the kind of intimacies we dined on in our salad days.

Indeed, we try only one such foray. It has been our experience that certain kinds of women don’t easily mix. And throughout this evening—though we don’t come out and say so—we have had occasional, fleeting thoughts that Lois and Michelle may not be as true blue as they act. We have learned that they first met in an acting class in L.A. , and our hunch is that Lois might have had, perhaps, an immediate distrust of this too-perfect blonde with no prior experience. Our further reasoning held that Lois, who was then already well known as a successful model and an emerging film star in such movies as The Great Gatsby, and who had taken her knocks to get where she was, was perhaps short on patience when it came to upstarts like Michelle. So we gently suggest same to Lois.

But she waves off the assertion. What did we expect, confirmation? “The minute I laid eyes on Michelle,” she says evenly, “I realized that as beautiful as she was, she was not the stereotype you’re suggesting. I could tell by the way she looked at people that she wanted to grow by observing. It was clear that she had very little vanity, despite her incredible looks.”

Michelle jumps in, concurring. “Back then I was very, very green. But the first time I saw Lois I was struck by her very strong presence. I figured out that she was someone who had to overcome a lot of obstacles and she came out of it not bitter, the way some people do, but compassionate.”

The Elements then exchange big, warm smiles. Our foray is thus easily beaten down by these women—these two strong sisters, separated by some ten years. It’s an evident case of the younger having the good sense to emulate the will of the elder; of the self-taught elder to grant the natural strength of the younger.

The night skips on. Lois tells us why she long ago left Texas, why she never married, why a conventional marriage would never suit her.

Woman, we think, you are substantial-but this is neither the time nor place to put our cards on the table. Then we glance at Michelle and think to ourself, Girl, you choose your friends wisely, and you will do well by that.

Suddenly, it’s past 2:00 in the morning. We are three chums as we ride downtown, each prattling on about what a swell night this has been. When we reach Michelle’s she hops out and disappears inside. Now it is just Lois and us left in the car. As we cross town we say little or nothing. To say anything, we are thinking, would be to reassert sexuality, which is, somehow, inappropriate to the moment.

But Lois looks over and in a hushed voice says, “It’s so wonderful and unexpected to meet a man and get to talk the way we all did tonight. It doesn’t happen very often.”

No, we don’t try to score. We simply let Lois out in front of her hairdresser’s apartment, where she says goodnight. We send home the driver, then set off on foot in that same old mist, embracing not much more than simple satisfaction. Later on we get to thinking about Life on a Date. And we come to the conclusion that a date—any first date —is a hollow enterprise, necessary perhaps, but necessarily austere. We now realize that women know that better than men, always have, always will. We stop for a light. There is no more mist.

Scanned and transcript by PfeifferTheFace.com

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