Is there friggin’ anything Matt Damon can’t do? As the action hero/leading man/activist/Oscar-winning screenwriter/sitcom revelation/Internet meme finally makes the transition to Serious Director, we’re about to find out

by Amy Wallace

Originally published in GQ, January 2012

I’m ducking Matt Damon. We’re supposed to meet at the Central Park Zoo ticket booth precisely at noon, but I’m not there. I’m thirty feet away, standing behind a huge oak tree, keeping watch.

Cameron Crowe, the director, has urged me to try to get a glimpse of the 41-year-old actor when he doesn’t know I’m there. “Matt’s fans relate to him as an older brother or a member of the family. And that’s how he relates to them,” Crowe says, recalling how during the shoot of their new movie, We Bought a Zoo, he liked to do reconnaissance on Damon as he signed autographs and interacted with his public.

The Boston native, who now calls New York home, can be reticent in interviews, reluctant to reveal too much or get too personal. I want to observe him in his natural habitat, and I imagine that my stealth will be rewarded with the kind of unguarded moment that can only be viewed in the wild. As minutes pass, however, and I don’t spot him anywhere, a thought looms: This is Jason Bourne I’m hunting—the master of evasion. What if Matt Damon is ducking me?

Stepping into the open, I sort of wave my notebook like a journalistic homing beacon, and suddenly there he is, all smiles. “Hi, I’m Matt,” he says, extending a hand. He’s in jeans, a gray waffle-y long-sleeve T-shirt, and what look to be brand-new black Puma sneakers. He has a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows, which makes it easy to notice that his hat and his eyes are exactly the same blue. He’s taller than I thought he’d be and exactly a quarter inch taller than the man standing next to him: a gray-haired, bespectacled guy in pleated chinos and a baseball cap.

“This,” Damon proclaims, “is my dad.”

When Damon the younger pulls out a credit card to gain us entry to what we will all agree must be the smallest zoo on earth, Damon the elder (his name is Kent) observes wryly, “This is the first time the son buys the father a ticket to the zoo. When has that happened before?” Whereupon the son grins big and says, “There’s, like, a disturbance in the Force!”

“Come on,” Kent says. “Let’s go see the polar bears.”

As we set off, I’m immediately struck by the constant cross-generational ball-busting between father and son. For example, the story of when 12-year-old Matt announced his intent to play point guard for the Boston Celtics.

Kent: I said, “Matt, I have to tell you a little bit about the real world.”

Matt: My favorite player was Tiny Archibald, and he goes, “You know they call him Tiny because he’s six foot one.” He told me that he was the tallest Damon to ever evolve at five foot ten.

Kent: Five ten and a half, by the way.

Matt: Used to be, man.

Kent: Not that we’re sensitive about it.

I mention something Crowe has told me about Damon’s performance in the new film, in which he plays a widowed father of two who buys a ramshackle zoo. Crowe singles out a scene in which Damon talks to an ailing Siberian tiger through a chain-link fence. In the script, the tiger was supposed to be supine, but the minute Damon delivered his first line, the cat got up, snarling, and came toward him with menace. “Most people would have said, ‘This isn’t funny—put a chain on that thing!’ But Matt stays in,” Crowe told me, explaining why that first, unexpected take is the one he used in the final film. “You see him flinch but stay in.”

Hearing this, Kent gets a mischievous look: “So you were brave?”

Matt shakes his head and rolls his eyes. “Cameron was telling stories about how I was brave in the face of a caged tiger,” he says. “He was working it.”

“Bunch of b.s.,” agrees Kent. Which is when I realize that we may still be talking about who’s the bigger man. Standing in front of a 90,000-gallon tank containing Gus, the zoo’s half-ton polar bear, Matt describes borrowing a bike from his elder brother, Kyle, and discovering (when he couldn’t reach the pedals) that Kyle has much longer legs. “We realized if you took his lower body and my upper body, we’d be, like, six foot three,” Matt tells his dad, who readily concedes that Matt is long of torso. “You have a neck,” he tells his son. “I don’t even have a neck.” At which point, Matt nods and says simply, “It’s true.” If you measured the smirks on their faces, I swear they’d be precisely the same size.

He’s the original lord of lowbrow, the king of the pratfall, the last surviving link to the bedrock of American comedy—vaudeville, burlesque, slapstick. Sure, he’s ancient, but he’s juggling half a dozen new projects and still found time to sit down with Amy Wallace for an eleven-hour interview. Call it the Jerry Lewis Marathon that covered, well, just about everything that’s ever been funny

Originally appeared in GQ, August 2011

Jerry Lewis sits behind his huge desk, neatening the items that stand like sentries between us: a can of Diet Sunkist; a container of silver pens, tips up; a container of red pens, same position; a handful of green plastic surgical scalpels he uses to open mail, a dish of lemon drops. When you’ve been on the planet for almost nine decades, like Lewis has, and when you can’t throw anything out (“I’ve kept everything!”), and when you’re slightly nuts (“Did you ever see a man who can look at one eye with the other?”), you require order. At 85, Lewis employs three full-time people to help him stay organized. He loves them fiercely—and drives them bonkers.

“Have you done anything today? Why not?” Lewis likes to bellow, his voice—three parts affection, one part curmudgeon—thundering through Jerry Lewis Films, a sprawling suite in an office park about four miles from the Las Vegas strip. He looks good—a little stooped, sure, but still sharp-eyed and quick-tongued and up-tempo, his red silk shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal the scar from his double-bypass surgery twenty-nine years ago. On his feet are red velvet slippers embroidered with those iconic faces of Comedy and Tragedy. “Can I get another orange soda?” he asks, and when it arrives twenty seconds later: “What took you so long?”

Suddenly, Lewis’s face goes blank and his hazel eyes get big as quarters. Slamming his chair back—boom!—he reaches for a trash can under his desk and expels a mouthful of soda in its general direction: a classic spit take. Except, he says, that it’s not.

“Went down the wrong pipe,” he announces, daintily dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “I’m fine. It happens all the time, and when it does, you just have to let it.” Getting older is crammed, he says, with such losses of control. “I’m taking Lasix, which makes me pee sometimes seven, eight, eleven, twelve times,” he says. “I’ve decided to keep my fly open all day.”

For hours now, we’ve been sitting around talking about funny—what it is, how it works, how to kill a joke, how to let it breathe. Lewis has thought a lot about these things since he got his first onstage laugh, accidentally kicking out a stage light at the age of 5. That was in 1931. In the intervening years, he became and remains the reigning master of the sight gag, the clown with the rubber face whose links to the foundations of American comedy are unmatched by anyone alive. This is a man, after all, who was tight with Charlie freakin’ Chaplin, not to mention Stan Laurel and Al Jolson. This is a man who’s met nine presidents and performed for four. As we talk, photos of many of those he holds dearest, may they rest in peace, look down from his crowded walls: John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and the handsome crooner Lewis still calls “my partner” even though they broke up their act fifty-five years ago: Dean Martin.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Martin and Lewis were—along with Sinatra and Elvis—the most famous people on earth. Later, though American critics were slow to recognize it, Lewis also became one of the few comic auteurs: a filmmaker who wrote, directed, produced, choreographed, edited, and starred in many of his own films, the best of which (The Nutty Professor, The Bellboy) have become bona fide classics. Tarantino and Spielberg are avowed Lewis fans. So is Scorsese. “He makes many people uncomfortable,” the director says. “He doesn’t censor himself as a performer, a filmmaker, or a public figure—which is difficult to accept for many people. I know there have been some books about him and some recognition in the past few years, but I think Americans are still coming to terms with Jerry and his astonishing artistry. It’s as if they had to invent a new place for it, a new category.

Charlie Sheen talks to Amy Wallace about his latest bender, his true feelings about sobriety and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ and the cyclical insanity of his crazy-ass life

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ April 2011

Five days ago, we closed a profile built around an interview with Charlie Sheen that will appear in the April issue of GQ. Since then, Sheen has continued doing what the article describes—texting and emailing the media (on Friday, he sent images of his new “Death from Above” tattoo to Entertainment Tonight) and calling in live to radio shows.

But Sheen also did something new: lobbed insults at his employers, specifically Chuck Lorre, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men, the top-rated sitcom on which Sheen stars. In a choice of words many saw as anti-Semitic, the actor referred to Lorre, who was born Charles Levine, as “Chaim Levine”—a name that Lorre himself has sometimes used. Sheen also called his hit show a “puke fest that everybody worships” and called the bosses who’d urged him to clean up his act “AA Nazis” and “blatant hypocrites.” Sheen’s spewing of vitriol appears to have pushed CBS and Warner Bros. Television to act. In a joint statement, the two companies suspended production of Two and a Half Men for the season, leaving at least 200 people out of work and canceling four planned episodes.

While there has been no word yet about whether the show will be canceled for good, Sheen himself has been voluble—if contradictory—on the topic. One minute, the 45- year-old actor has said he plans to show up to work even though the show’s sets are shut down (“I’m going back to work,” he texted Good Morning America from an island in the Bahamas, where he was vacationing with three women—a model, one of his ex-wives, and a porn star—on Thursday). The next minute, he has said that he can’t imagine working with the “turds” who run the show ever again. “Can you imagine going back… with those knuckleheads?” he told Pat O’Brien later that same day. “It would go bad quickly… We’re pretty much done.” Whatever his plan, Sheen seems determined to engage his corporate overlords in full-scale combat. On Friday, in a Fox Sports Radio interview with Pat O’Brien, he suggested CBS and Warners were in “absolute breach” and appeared to be gearing up for a legal battle. “We are at war,” he said. “It’s about to get really gnarly.”

So wacky and self-destructive have Sheen’s comments been that it’s hard to imagine he’s telling the truth when he repeatedly says that he has cured his addiction “with my mind,” leaving him “100 percent clean” of drugs and alcohol (though on Saturday, RadarOnline.com posted results–and photos—of a preliminary urine test the site said it had conducted in his home; Sheen passed). On Alex Jones’ show, for example, he interspersed his zingers about Lorre with references to trolls, F-18 fighter pilots and Vatican assassins. He reportedly texted RadarOnline.com that he was in talks with HBO about a new show—Sheen’s Corner—that would pay him $5 million an episode (an assertion promptly denied by HBO, which like Warner Bros. Television, is owned by Time Warner). On Saturday came another grandiose claim: Sheen reportedly told TMZ.com that he’s writing a tell-all book to be titled When the Laughter Stopped. He wants the bidding for the publication rights to start at $10 million.

So what’s driving Sheen? One answer is Apocalypse Now, the 1979 war epic that starred his father, Martin Sheen. As he told GQ, the movie—whose set he visited as a child—is nearly always in his thoughts (an assertion he only amplified with that new tattoo, which quotes the death card that Robert Duvall’s character, Kilgore, throws on his victims in the film). “I’m not just my dad,” Sheen said this week in one radio rant. “I’m putting up the river to kill another part of me, which is Kurtz. I’m every character in between, save for that little weirdo with his guts strapped in, begging for water. That’s not me. But there are parts of me that are Dennis Hopper.”

Sean Penn, the actor who grew up making Super 8 movies with Sheen, told GQ that he’s always seen his friend as something of a performance artist, raising the odd possibility that Sheen’s behavior is his own weird form of agitprop. Is the man who started life as Carlos Irwin Estevez mocking the Hollywood celebrity meltdown by staging the Mother of All Meltdowns? Is he bi-polar? Or is he just an addict who’s circling the drain? What follows is the full story on how Sheen became Sheen.

*****************************************************************************

People are always asking Charlie Sheen, “What are you thinking?” The drugs, the drink, the porn stars, the alleged violence, the trashed hotel rooms… why?

“Here’s a peek into my insanity,” he tells me one afternoon in February. ”People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from Apocalypse Now or Jaws.”

It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the west side of Los Angeles. Batting practice is like therapy for the former star athlete, people who know him say, and he’s spent the past few hours hitting balls with his friend Tony Todd, whom he met in Little League when they were 8 years old. This has been “the best day ever,” says Sheen, 45. His voice is relaxed and fluid. He sounds like he’s on the mend. But when I say as much, he’s quick to correct me.

“We’re past ‘on the mend,’ ” he says. “We’re not dealing with normal DNA here, you know what I’m saying? All those other sissies and amateurs, they can take their fucking time.” But not Charlie Sheen, the star of CBS’s Two and a Half Men, the top-rated comedy on television. He needs to get back to the set. “I heal as fast as I unravel. It’s a blessing and a curse. I feel I have to. There’s families out of jobs. There’s work to do.”

As we talk, he addresses his latest binge only obliquely at first. “In regards to this whole recent odyssey, I’ll just say this: It was epic,” he says. “There are two rules at my house right now: You park your judgment at the door, and you enjoy every moment. People can interpret that however they want. Enjoy every sober moment. Enjoy every loaded moment. Just enjoy every moment. It’s not a rehearsal, you know?”

He’ll expand on that later. But first, why Jaws and Apocalypse Now? There are a couple of scenes that play in his head, he says. One is the town-hall meeting in Jaws, in which Robert Shaw (as shark hunter Sam Quint) tells the assembled throng, “This shark—swallow you whole. Little shakin’, little tenderizin’, down you go.” “That’s the greatest speech ever,” Sheen says.

Then there’s Apocalypse Now, which holds a near sacred place in his consciousness. Charlie was 10 when his father, Martin Sheen, went to the Philippines to star in the movie and almost died during filming, suffering from a severe heart attack. Charlie and the rest of the family rushed to his bedside. His father’s brush with mortality haunts Charlie to this day. So does the movie.

” ‘I am beyond their timid, lying morality. Therefore I’m beyond caring,’ ” Sheen recites, quoting a letter written by the madman Kurtz (Marlon Brando) that Sheen’s father, playing Captain Benjamin L. Willard, reads aloud in the film. But “the best line in the movie” comes later, Sheen says, his voice surging with pride. “Dad says, ‘Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s who he really took his orders from, anyway.’ Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s who he really took his orders from, anyway. How deep is that? I mean, wow.”

***

Late on the night of January 25, Kacey Jordan received a Twitter message saying Charlie Sheen wanted her to come to a party. Jordan, who is 22 and best known for portraying Cindy Brady in the adult film Not the Bradys XXX, was excited. She’d never met the actor, though they’d talked once about a year earlier. That was when another “client” of Jordan’s put her on the phone with Sheen. Charlie told her he loved her work—which was saying something, since he was a collector of adult films (and thus was surely aware of Jordan’s distinctive genitalia, know in the porn world as K-Puff). He wanted to meet then, she says, but he wasn’t in a good place. “He’s like, ‘I’ve been in trouble,’” Jordan says. “A couple of days later, he went into rehab. I was like, ‘Damn it!’”

Now Jordan saw her chance. When promised a $5,000 payment, she headed to Sheen’s five-bedroom, $7.2 million home in Beverly Hills. What she found, she says, wasn’t what she expected. Sheen was disheveled, with wine stains on his shirt. There wasn’t much meat on his five-foot-ten-inch frame. He looked depleted. Then there was his mouth: “His teeth were all gold. I see him as that guy on that show—you know, a celebrity. But he told me he has to put on fake teeth for his show.”

That’s Daniel Hernandez talking, the 21-year-old intern who helped save Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s life. Here, Hernandez and two other heroes of the Arizona massacre—one of the men who tackled the gunman and the woman who prevented him from reloading—tell Amy Wallace their gripping stories of that dark and sunny Saturday

by Amy Wallace

Originally ran in GQ, March 2011

Daniel Hernandez Jr. (21, junior at the University of Arizona, intern for Representative Giffords): I had thought I wanted to be a physician. Then I volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. I’ve always been drawn to strong women. They face a double standard, and it’s always been a lot harder for them to get half as far, even though they’re working twice as hard. The day after Hillary lost the primary, I met Gabby. She had been the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona state senate. I had an interaction with her at an event, and she just left the biggest impression. After that, my plans changed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like medicine. I just thought I would be able to serve more people if I went into public service.

My internship was supposed to start on January 12, when school begins, but I’d volunteered to start early, because between semesters the office is short-staffed. I’ve known Gabby for years—I’d worked on her campaigns since I met her in June 2008. She’s the kindest, warmest individual you will ever meet. “I don’t do handshakes, honey. I do hugs,” she always says.

Patricia Maisch (61, co-owner with her husband, John, of Oro Valley Heating & Cooling): I was there to thank Gabrielle for her work over the last several years. So much is reported about how the stimulus package didn’t work, but for our small business, it was incredible. There was a $1,500 federal tax credit if you upgraded your heating-and-cooling system, and we had our best year ever in 2009. I went there to tell her I hoped she would run again in 2012.

Bill Badger (74, retired army colonel): I’d never met her, but the congresswoman and I had communicated back and forth on e-mail. Her husband is a captain in the navy, which is equivalent to a colonel in the army. So she’s a military spouse, and my wife is a military spouse. Obamacare was one of the issues I e-mailed her about, especially military medical benefits for life. She was exceptionally good at responding. If I had a question, she’d get me an answer. I’m a Republican and she’s a Democrat, but she works all the way from the right to the left. I truly admire her.

Hernandez: I had gotten up at seven forty-five that day, like I usually do. Gabe Zimmerman, Gabby’s community-outreach director, had organized the 10 a.m. “Congress on Your Corner” event, and he asked me to be at the Safeway at the corner of Ina and North Oracle by 9 a.m. to help with setup. When people started arriving, I went to the back of the line with my clipboard, taking down people’s information so if we ran out of time, we could send them a letter acknowledging them for coming. That generally didn’t happen, because if there was a crowd, Gabby would rarely leave, even if she was late to the next event. But just to be on the safe side, I was registering people.

Maisch: I got there early, and I signed in with Daniel—I know that’s his name now. I was fourth or fifth in line. I asked him, “Are we going to go in order?” and he said yes. I told him I’d be right back and went into the grocery store and bought a banana and a bottle of water and came back out. Now there are twenty to twenty-five people there. I could have pushed back up to the front, but I thought, you know, “I’m not going to be pushy. I’m just going to go to the end of the line. It’s a beautiful day. I can stand in the sun.”

Badger: When I got there, Giffords had a big banner up with her name on it. I just walked right up and got about ten feet from her, and an aide stepped up and said I had to get in line. So I walked down to the end and registered. It was less than five minutes from the time I parked my car to when I heard the shooting: bang, bang, bang, bang.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in GQ, November 2010

“How much T&A do you want in your pay TV?” Chris Albrecht asks. We’re sitting in the back of a Dublin taxi on our way to dinner, which is good, he says, because he’s famished. “I need food,” he proclaims. “And some Irish wine.” He also needs an answer to his question. Since taking over as CEO of Starz, the premium cable channel, the 58-year-old executive has been wrestling with how explicit it needs to be to compete. Arriving in Ireland today from Los Angeles, he’s spent the past few hours reviewing marketing hooks for a new Starz show. “There Are No Rules in This House” is one slogan under consideration to hype Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, an upcoming prequel to Starz’s gory, sexy hit Spartacus: Blood and Sand. “How Far Will They Go?” is another. Now Albrecht is wondering: How far should Starz go?

Dressed in jeans, a sky blue dress shirt, and a beloved Dolce & Gabbana leather jacket his two daughters gave him a decade ago, Albrecht says he liked the simplicity of the campaign for Blood and Sand that aired in January, right after he took the helm: a well-muscled stud, sword in hand, ready for action. “Whether or not you want to see that, you get it,” Albrecht says. But right now, after flying all day and working all afternoon, he’s beat. Smiling broadly, he announces, “I want a drink.”

He’s already had one. Three taster bottles of Irish whiskey were waiting for him in his Four Seasons suite when he checked in, and he says he sampled them all. Powers was his favorite, he says, leaning forward to ask if the cabbie agrees. The driver demurs—he’s a Jameson’s man. “Jameson’s was my second choice,” Albrecht replies. As for Bushmills, he adds, it didn’t measure up.

It’s been three and a half years since Albrecht—then HBO’s chairman and CEO—was arrested near a Las Vegas valet stand for choking his then girlfriend. Police said he smelled of alcohol, was unsteady on his feet, and slurred his speech. Albrecht soon sent an e-mail to HBO employees apologizing for his actions and saying he was taking a leave of absence to seek help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Then the Los Angeles Times reported that sixteen years earlier, he’d had an affair with one of his HBO employees that ended in a closed-door altercation; HBO paid the woman a hefty settlement. Within hours, Albrecht was fired.

Today, except for his close-cropped mostly bald pate, Albrecht barely resembles the mug shot that was seemingly everywhere in May 2007. That image, which is still the first one that pops up when you Google him, was sinister—thuggish, even. Now he is tan, fit, and bright-eyed. Ten months after taking the helm at Starz, he seems committed to building the service into one that’s every bit as buzzworthy as HBO and Showtime.

But no comeback tale is complete without a proper owning up, and Albrecht, who understands storytelling better than perhaps any other Hollywood executive, knows that when a hero falters, he must take responsibility before he can be redeemed. Our conversations in Dublin—where he is visiting the set of Camelot, an ambitious reimagining of the King Arthur myth that will air next spring—mark his first public accounting of the events that cost him his HBO job. Over forty-eight hours, this up-from-nothing onetime comedian from Queens describes both his shame about what happened in Vegas and his deep regret about how much it cost him. He apologizes, again, for causing embarrassment and pain to his family and his colleagues. But there is one thing he does not do: deny that he still enjoys his liquor. He hasn’t fallen off the wagon, he insists. Instead, he says, he didn’t need to get on it. Contrary to the assertions he made in 2007—that alcohol made him do it—Albrecht tells me, “After years of reflection and working with specialists, I have recognized that alcohol is not an issue in my life. What I really needed to get at the heart of was my complicated and often very difficult love relationships with women.”

···

That first night, the cab deposits us at a restaurant called the Pig’s Ear, where Albrecht takes charge of a big table of colleagues and friends. Over a couple of bottles of Côtes du Rhône, which he orders for everyone and swirls before tasting, he launches into a story about what he calls “the HBO shrug”—the who-knows-if-this-is-gonna-fly-but-let’s-go-for-it bravado that was the norm while he was there. This particular shrug came about a decade ago, when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg requested a meeting with Albrecht and his boss, Jeff Bewkes, to discuss a miniseries they wanted to make about World War II. On the drive over, Albrecht says he and Bewkes made a pact: They would not commit a penny more than $90 million. But when Hanks and Spielberg asked for $115 million to make Band of Brothers, Bewkes immediately signed off. In the car afterward, Albrecht couldn’t resist: What about the pact? Bewkes shrugged—Albrecht acts it out—raising his shoulders toward his ears and making a what’re-you-gonna-do face.

“HBO has lost its shrug,” Albrecht says, sounding more sad than critical. It’s fashionable these days to say that TV shows are better than movies—”more daring, topical, and willing to risk giving offense,” as The New York Times recently put it. No person is more responsible for this turnabout than Albrecht, and sometimes it almost seems he creates entertainment in his own image. Bold is the word most people use to describe him. Risk-taking. While at HBO, which is owned by Time Warner, he famously urged writers to make their characters less cookie-cutter and their stories more complex. As Tom Fontana, whose prison series Oz was the first scripted drama Albrecht green-lighted at HBO, recalls: “He said, ‘I don’t care if the characters are likable as long as they’re interesting.’ In one sentence, he threw out all the rules in episodic television.” Alan Ball, who created Six Feet Under during Albrecht’s tenure (and now is the man behind HBO’s True Blood), says typical Hollywood executives are “all fear-based. It’s all about covering their ass, ‘so if this fails I won’t be blamed.’ That’s not where Chris is coming from.” Among the other mold-breaking shows Albrecht set in motion: The Wire, From the Earth to the Moon, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Da Ali G Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, In Treatment, and Deadwood.

It’s not yet clear whether Albrecht’s balls-out approach will work at Starz. For one thing, he can’t afford to shrug. He says his entire annual programming budget at Starz is less than the $115 million HBO spent on Band of Brothers. (When I mention this to Fontana, he responds: “I’ll bet on Chris’s wit over Time Warner’s money any day.”)

The Pig’s Ear—now crowded—has gotten lively. So has Albrecht. As he did when reviewing whiskeys in the taxi, he seems determined to raise the thorniest issues before I have the chance. Gesturing across the table, he introduces Anne Thomopoulos, an executive producer on Camelot whom he hired at HBO in 1992, as “Sasha’s replacement”—a reference to Sasha Emerson, the former HBO executive with whom he had the 1991 affair.

As the entrées arrive, a discussion of Oz turns similarly self-referential. Laughing, Albrecht observes that Fontana, his dear friend, had a penchant for killing off his most compelling characters—but not Tobias Beecher, the Harvard-educated attorney who ends up in prison after being convicted of vehicular manslaughter.

“He was a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God character,” Thomopoulos reminds the table, “the one who had too many glasses of wine and killed a kid with his car.”

“Beecher is the guy who did everything right and ended up in jail,” Albrecht says, turning to me before adding with exaggerated sarcasm, “How believable is that?”

Even before the 2007 incident in Vegas, of course, Albrecht hadn’t done everything right. While he was married (he and the mother of his two daughters, Annie, divorced in 2002), he had a string of affairs in and out of the workplace. Known for his insatiable appetites, he bragged about bedding hundreds of women, multiple sources say. He acknowledges that he was a cocaine user (multiple sources say he used a lot of it). And according to three people he confided in after he got sober, he was a binge drinker during his early years at HBO.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in GQ August 2010

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.”

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O’Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. The timing was “synchronistic,” Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii “that Conan’s wife was jealous.”

“We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives,” Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry’s rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O’Brien’s future came up. “Conan’s completely free now,” Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you’d expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. “He doesn’t have to fit into someone else’s mold.”

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. “I’d eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces,” he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: “I asked the same question, and they said, ‘It’s an airplane cookie.’ And I didn’t want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened.” A beat. “I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, what are you going to do?’ They said, ‘We’re going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.’”

Originally appeared in GQ October, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”

In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier high jinks. Into this jolly tableau strides Smilin’ Bob—just your average middle manager with a bigger-than-average grin—in a Santa suit. “Not long ago, Santa decided he needed a little more room in his sled,” goes the smarmy voice-over, as a whistling theme song plays in the background. “So he made a call to Enzyte about natural male enhancement. And after a few short weeks, what did he get?” The camera cuts to a group of women who titter and leer in Bob’s general direction. “Why, not only a sleigh full of confidence and a sack full of pride, but it looks like Bob got the one thing that every lady likes: the joy of a gift that keeps on”—big pause—“giving.”

And that’s just one of eighteen Smilin’ Bob ads, all of which share the same objective: to sell a truckload of Enzyte, the once-a-day tablet that touts itself as “the effective, reliable way” to “the strongest, most powerful erections imaginable.” There’s the airport ad, in which Bob smiles his way through security (“Bob is not traveling as light as he used to!”), the one where Bob jumps off a diving board (“Bob has a big new spring of confidence, a generous swelling of pride”), and the one at the bowling alley (“Bob is throwing them hard and straight”). Smilin’ Bob never speaks, but the voice-over explains that he is “doing well. Very well indeed.”

Retro in style and slyly inexplicit, the ads let Bob’s smirk suggest what Enzyte can do, and millions of men have responded—even after the man who created Bob lost his business, his home, his fortune, and ultimately his freedom. Since then, that man—Steven E. Warshak, Federal Inmate #04431-061—has kept as quiet as the star of his commercials, refusing all interview requests. Here, for the first time, he attempts to explain himself.

*****

THE PROBLEM WAS GROWTH, Steve Warshak tells me. First it made him a threat, he says; then it made him a target.

We are alone, except for two distant prison administrators, in the huge sterile visiting room of a medium-security facility in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I have come to ask Warshak, 43, about what prosecutors call his “diabolical” nature, a nature exhibited—to quote the judge who sentenced him to twenty-five years behind bars—by the “massive fraudulent undertaking” for which he was convicted in August 2008.

Warshak was the founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a Cincinnati company that sold a wide range of supplements but made most of its money on one blockbuster product: Enzyte. Warshak sold countless men on the simple idea that happiness was just a little blue pill away. His pill had a six-letter name, just like the prescription drug it was designed to evoke. But unlike Viagra, Enzyte was “natural” and could be ordered without a prescription in the privacy of one’s home.

At last year’s trial, prosecutors alleged that Warshak had exploited that desire for privacy to bilk his customers out of more than $100 million. The scam was simple, they alleged: Get a customer’s credit card number by offering a free sample (pay only the postage!), then charge the card again for more product than the customer ever ordered. Enzyte was marketed to men who didn’t want to go to the doctor, the government argued, and thus were likely to be ashamed of their sexual inadequacy. Warshak figured he could steal from these customers with minimum risk, prosecutors said; embarrassment would keep them from complaining.

Like most convicts, Warshak maintains his innocence. But his argument is more creative than most. He says he is being unfairly punished for something that as a free man he claimed to know a lot about: getting too big too fast.

“We were a million times more successful than I ever dreamed of being,” he tells me, settling into one of 144 blue plastic chairs that are bolted to the linoleum floor in rows of twelve. His voice is soft, his manner overly polite. He looks athletic, even boyish, despite touches of gray at the temples of his dark hair. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes are alert and, at moments, warm—beseeching, even. But for the prison khakis with warshak printed on a white iron-on label over his heart, he could be your kindly neighborhood dentist.