Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

I like Leyner personally — he’s a hell of a lot of fun to party with — but I don’t think he’s ever considered how many people are hurt by his irresponsible behavior. And I don’t think it’s going to be a very “Team Leyner” Christmas for all the folks we’re going to have to lay off.…

[The announcement of Leyner’s disappearance sent Mattel stock plunging on the New York Stock Exchange to $35,625 a share, down $8,075. The news also sent shock waves through the Tokyo Stock Exchange. At the midday recess, the Nikkei index of 225 issues was down 6,574.75 points, or about 15 percent, to 24,115.79.]

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:On a number of occasions, on the way home from the Supreme Court, I stopped in at Team Leyner Headquarters for a Coke or a Bud Light — but it was no matter of great import …

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS:Justice Thomas, approximately how many times did you stop in at Team Leyner on the way home from the Supreme Court?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:Senator, I’d say approximately 1,100 times I stopped in at Team Leyner — and in order to continue a debate I’d been having with Mark about, say, the relationship between quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence or St. Augustine’s conception of a neo-Platonic God or Lacanian psychoanalysis — I’d stop in at Team Leyner Headquarters and have a Diet Dr. Pepper or an Amstel Light.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS:Justice Thomas, did you ever — on any of these approximately 1,100 occasions when you say you stopped in at Team Leyner Headquarters to continue a discussion — take anabolic steroids, Thorazine, Percodan, or LSD with Mark Leyner?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:Senator, I categorically deny that. I did, on several occasions, stop in at Team Leyner Headquarters on the way home from the Supreme Court to continue a discussion I might be having with Mark about the sonnets of Gerard de Nerval or the impact of movable type and gunpowder on the decline of the feudal nobility, and I did on a number of those occasions have several tablespoons of Maalox Extra-strength Antacid/Antiflatulent and several Extra-strength Tylenol Gelcaps.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS:Justice Thomas, did Mark Leyner ever discuss with you his desire to develop a clandestine nuclear weapons plant at the Team Leyner facility?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:No, Senator.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS:More specifically, Justice Thomas, did he ever discuss with you using funds from a secret family trust in Liechtenstein to acquire the technology to produce weapons-grade plutonium?

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:Senator, that is absolutely, categorically untrue. Nothing even remotely resembling such a conversation ever took place between Mark Leyner and myself.

SENATOR CECIL VALGUS:Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions for Justice Thomas.

JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS:Mr. Chairman, with all due respect to the members of this committee, I must express to you my belief that conducting these investigations into the activities of Team Leyner at a time when Mr. Leyner is unable to participate and unable to refute the scurrilous attacks on his name — at a time when his whereabouts are unknown and his well-being, his very existence, is in doubt — is profoundly unfair, and it’s tearing the very fabric of our society asunder.

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG:I was the last person to be alone with him before he vanished that afternoon. He was dressed in a green uniform with gold epaulets, crotchless blue pantaloons, and red top boots, unshaven, bleary-eyed, working relentlessly — mauling his computer keyboard like some kind of rabid animal — pausing intermittently to gobble a handful of electric-eel roe from a nearby terrine, wiping his mouth on a piece of fan mail, and then renewing his assault. I don’t know how graphic you want me to get — but it was obvious that he was extremely aroused by whatever he was writing. And there was just something so incredibly sexy about him as he worked. He was so … he just had this … this “thing” about him.

Just to give you another example — I remember a couple of years ago, Mark was in Paris to have some sort of surgery, and, in the middle of the operation, the guy gets up off the operating table, walks out of the hospital, and strolls into the Yves Saint Laurent spring couture show, onto the runway, viscera bulging out of an eight-inch abdominal incision, clamps and hemostats and catheters dangling from his body. And the girls — the Christy Turlingtons, the Linda Evangelistas, the Naomi Campbells — they were all over him! And sure enough, that spring, you’d go to a dinner party or a gala and you’d actually see women wearing priceless couture ensembles that had been artistically stained with iodine germicidal scrub and adorned with a variety of silver surgical instruments — that’s how charismatic a presence he was, and that’s how pervasive his influence was among people who wanted to be irreproachably au courant.

HAROLD PINTER:I admire Leyner tremendously. First of all, his work — stunning, magnificent! His play Varicose Moon is achingly beautiful. I think it will be unnecessary for playwrights to write any new plays for some time now— Varicose Moon should suffice. In fact, I think it would be vulgar for playwrights to burden the public with their offerings given the creation of this coruscating masterwork.

He has also been a wise and magnanimous friend. It was Leyner who first introduced me to Beckett’s Hawaiian writing — and for that alone, I remain eternally indebted to him. [Between the completion of his novel The Unnameable and his debut as a dramatist with En attendant Godot , Samuel Beckett, desperate for money to support the child he’d fathered with American singer Kate Smith, moved to Hawaii and secured a job in public relations, writing brochure copy for the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Maui. Long suppressed by the Beckett estate, which publicly denied their existence, Beckett’s Maui brochures constitute a fascinating lens through which readers can further explore the mind of the angst-ridden Nobel Laureate. Today, many Beckett scholars consider these brochures (which hype the hotel’s 750,000-gallon pool with its romantic grotto, 130-foot water slide, and swim-up cocktail bar, championship golf course, lei-making and ukelele classes, and authentic luau) Beckett’s most important work.]

Here’s a wonderful instance of Leyner’s intellectual generosity. I was working on a play, a play that contained all of my characteristic motifs — the fallibility of memory, the ultimate unknowability of women to men and men to women, the notion that all human contact is battle — in oblique, elliptical dialogue delivered by an estranged elderly couple who remain immobile for most of the play. And I just was not happy with it at all. So I gave the script to Leyner. He took it with him to his hotel that evening, and later that same night, he rang me up and suggested that instead of the action taking place in a house in London’s Hampstead Heath, as I’d intended, it take place in Reno, Nevada, at the Eldorado Hotel. It’s been discovered that some six metric tons of an experimental, highly mutagenic fungus developed by the Defense Department’s Advanced Fungal Weapons Research Center, located in nearby Sparks, have seeped into the city’s underlying aquifer. As the play opens, scientists suspect the lethal fungus of having rapidly evolved into a sophisticated ratiocinative being capable of defeating all but the top two or three chess grandmasters in the world. Well, it was an astonishingly brilliant suggestion — it would never have occurred to me in a million years! It totally transformed the play, which critics would laud as the most powerful and innovative of my career.