Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,65

what he did when he found out that she was eating steak again. In case it’s not clear, he likes to tease people, but he’s not a big fan of being teased himself.

3. “I’m an ass man and a tits man. Why should I have to choose between the two?” Indeed. The usual laws of supply and demand do not apply to movie stars.

4. “The reason I’m hired for the best roles is because I am the best. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying this, because it’s true.”

He said these modest words after Parachute Point debuted (his crappiest movie, worse than The Writing on the Wall, if you ask me. Parachute is totally cheesy, and the boy who played his son was smarmy with a capital S) when being interviewed by a movie critic for the L.A. Times. I’m not sure why Renn thought he could get away with saying something as self-aggrandizing as this and not be made fun of or lose some of his fans and industry allies, not to mention his friends. His publicist had to perform God knows how many unholy acts to convince the journalist not to publish this quote.

5. “I love Monet. I don’t care what those assholes think. If they could paint like he could, they wouldn’t be such stuck-up pricks about his water lilies or cathedrals or dying wife.”

At a fund-raiser for the Getty where he donated a big wad of cash to their endowment, he was almost apoplectic when he saw a couple of museum officials rolling their eyes after he said that his favorite artist was Monet. “Isn’t it possible that they were rolling their eyes over something else?” I asked him, trying to make him feel better. His reply: “I know you can be pretty fucking dense sometimes, but I think this one wins the grand prize.”

6. “I’m not a bully. Bullies beat people up and can’t control their tempers. I’ve never been like that in my life.”

He knew that he was being pretty selective in his definition of bully. I told him that he was forgetting about the people who are emotionally and verbally abusive, which, needless to say, I thought described him pretty well. He said that all married people argue sometimes, and it wasn’t my job to rate everything he said by some asinine bully scale that I’d gotten from watching Oprah or listening to Loveline or whatever sorry-ass bullshit I squandered my time on when he wasn’t home. (Oprah, by the way, adores him, and by then he had been on her show at least four or five times.)

7. “If one more person stops me and says how my movies got them to quit drinking or gambling or fucking their brother’s wife, I’m seriously going to kill them.”

We were at the Grove when he said this, late for a birthday party for Martin Landau, I think it was, and were trying to find a suitable gift. Renn liked shopping, but if he wasn’t in the mood to talk to fans, he knew better than to go to the mall thirty minutes before we were supposed to be at a surprise party ten miles away.

*Most of the above was excised from the published version.

The books on his nightstand:

1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. What California guy or wannabe hippie of a certain age and social class doesn’t pretend to like this book?

2. Women by Charles Bukowski. I didn’t read this novel until a few years after we were divorced. It helped me to see why Renn treated me the way that he sometimes did. With this being one of his favorite books . . . well, read it for yourself and see if you too aren’t worried about a guy who thinks this is the best thing since clean water.

3. The Stranger (both a French and an English version). He knew passages of this book by heart, and for some reason, he identified with Meursault, Camus’s strange murderer/anti-hero, who hoped at the novel’s end that he would be greeted by cries of hatred from the people who had come to witness his execution. I didn’t get this, and Renn thought that I was ignorant for not understanding what Camus was doing.

“He’s finally starting to feel something at the end,” he said. “After being indifferent to everything before now.”

“But why cries of hatred? That’s terrible,” I said. “You actually identify with him?”

“Yes, I do. It doesn’t matter if they’re cries of love or