Six Degrees of Brad Pitt
This is a story about fame.
If the average American were to blurt out the name of the most famous actor in the planet, the chances are pretty good that the answer would be Brad Pitt.
Pitt stars in the new movie "The Mexican" with his female equivalent, Julia Roberts. Although this violent comedy about a hapless henchman who must retrieve an antique pistol for his mobster boss is mere entertainment, the concentrated star power provides a natural springboard for examining the nature of celebrity.
You probably know that Pitt grew up in Springfield, Mo., and that he attended the University of Missouri before emigrating to Hollywood in 1986. Therefore there are many Missourians with first- or second-hand stories about him. Surely there's no one in the Midwest who's more than six people removed from the blue-eyed heartthrob whom People magazine has twice crowned "The Sexiest Man Alive."
I went to college at Mizzou during the same period when Pitt was there, but I can't honestly say I remember him. A Post-Dispatch colleague and Mizzou alumnus (I'll call him Jeff D.) recalls Pitt as a rough-hewn frat boy who loitered at Shakespeare's Pizza to learn the whereabouts of parties. It's not unlikely that Pitt and I stood around the same keg at some off-campus beer bash or jockeyed for the attention of the same bartender at the Blue Note. In those days, my surly subculture was pretty hostile to visitors from Fraternity Row, and this smiling playboy from Sigma Chi would have been viewed as an adversary. He had been featured in the "Men of Mizzou" calendar, a sampling of Greek beefcake, and that would have been reason enough to resent him. But Pitt was also an advertising major at the Mizzou journalism school, which I attended, so he couldn't have been entirely lacking in substance.
I finally met him, briefly and unremarkably, in Los Angeles in 1988. We were part of a great westward migration of Missourians in the mid to late '80s. Like Dust Bowl refugees, dreamers from the Show Me State were racing down Route 66 to new lives beneath the California sun. Two credits shy of graduation, Pitt had taken his life savings of $325, loaded his belongings into an old Nissan he called Runaround Sue and hit the road. Although he fibbed to his parents that he would be finishing college out west, his real hope was to parlay his good looks and country-boy charm into an acting career.
"I never thought very far ahead," Pitt admitted during an interview last month in Los Angeles. "I wasn't thinking about fame or success. There's no way you can prepare for that. All I could think about was how much I loved movies."
My friend Greg N., a Mizzou alumnus who shared an apartment with Pitt in North Hollywood, introduced me to the aspiring actor at a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. The truth is that I can't remember a single thing about that meeting; yet having shaken his hand, I memorized Pitt's name and rooted for his eventual stardom, both for his own sake and for the bragging rights it would confer upon me for having crossed his path.
One of Pitt's first jobs in Los Angeles was to wear a chicken suit outside an El Pollo Loco restaurant. He also had a gig as the limo driver for a strip-o-gram service. (I picture the yowling customers who never realized that the handsome kid wielding the boombox was potentially more interesting than the naked dancer. Like, say, Tina Turner's milkman or Kevin Kline's lab partner, those civilians who met Pitt in his pre-fame years can now earn a little status by retroactively inflating the significance of casual encounters.)
Pitt learned pretty quickly that he needed more than a dazzling smile to succeed in the cutthroat movie business. "I don't think it's any secret that we come out here wanting some kind of outside worship to gain a sense of self worth. You learn to deal with rejection pretty quickly, or else you don't survive."
Pitt earned $38 as an extra in the movie "Less Than Zero" then landed recurring roles in the TV series "Dallas" and "Glory Days" before his breakthrough as the larcenous hitchhiker in "Thelma and Louise." Buoyed by glowing reviews, he starred in the low-budget cult film "Johnny Suede" and the partially animated "Cool World." When Robert Redford cast the easy-going young actor in "A River Runs Through It," he was anointing Pitt as a possible successor to his own legacy.
Once Hollywood learned how to spotlight his washboard abs, Pitt's stardom was assured. He stole "Interview with the Vampire" from star Tom Cruise, and scored an international hit with "Seven." Although "Seven Years in Tibet," "Meet Joe Black," "Fight Club" and "Snatch" represent a succession of box-office disappointments, Pitt is now a celebrity of larger-than-life magnitude, a totem of male sexuality (and an implicit threat to a nation of men who thought that if they were sufficiently sensitive to women's feelings, they wouldn't be judged on their looks). Even while filming his new movie in the Mexican desert, Pitt was besieged by fans, and the set had to be fenced off.
Like an unsuspecting fisherman who is suddenly teleported to the mother ship, Pitt occupies a rarifed realm from whence he can only send signals to the rest of us through publicists and reporters.
Yet Pitt hasn't completely lost touch with his Midwestern roots. Robb M., a record-label employee from St. Louis, met Pitt at a friend's house in the Hollywood Hills around the time that the actor earned an Oscar nomination for "Twelve Monkeys." When Pitt learned that Robb was a Mizzou grad, they enjoyed a long chat. Pitt sat on the floor, chain-smoking Marlboros and drinking a Mountain Dew while they connected the dots of their mutual acquaintances.
Pitt says he returns to Springfield about once a year to visit his family. Last March, a rakish fellow who may or may not have been Pitt made local headlines when he and his entourage went bar hopping in downtown Springfield. In the next day's newspaper, Pitt's mother insisted that her son was in Hollywood, rehearsing for "The Mexican," and therefore the hard-partying fellow was an impostor; but some of Pitt's old classmates from Kickapoo High School weren't so sure.
That's what happens when you're Brad Pitt. All the things you do--and some of the things you don't--are fair game for public discussion.
In 1997, the former Baptist choirboy successfully sued Playgirl magazine for publishing nude paparazzi photos of him. Last year, to discourage leaks about his August wedding to "Friends" star Jennifer Aniston, Pitt required all the hired help to sign non-disclosure agreements and risk hefty fines. Earlier this year, the National Enquirer quoted unnamed pals as saying Pitt and Aniston were addicted to drugs. (The drug turned out to be marijuana.)
Greg N. no longer lives in Los Angeles and hasn't spoken to Pitt in several years. While he says it is "surreal to see the same mannerisms you watched in your apartment suddenly magnified 100 feet tall on a movie screen," he says his personal acquaintance with Pitt has sensitized him to the ways the press can distort an celebrity's image and invade his privacy. (Greg's protective impulses extend to another Mizzou alumnus who was part of his circle in L.A., an aspiring singer named Sheryl Crow.)
Greg's wife, Sarah, who dated Pitt in high school, was once featured on a television show called "First Loves of the Stars." After the program aired, numerous other TV shows offered her money for additional dirt about the young Brad. But Sarah, a happily married mother of two, declined to be further pigeonholed as "Brad Pitt's first girlfriend."
Issues of privacy and exploitation were weighing heavily on my mind before I interviewed Pitt in Los Angeles last month.
If you spend enough time in California, you end up crossing paths with a lot of people who occupy that strange realm on the other side of the velvet rope. I once rode in a limousine with O.J. Simpson and Nicole. I procured a fake ID to get a teenage Christina Applegate into a nightclub. I stayed up late doing speed with Christopher Lloyd of "Taxi" while he tried to seduce my girlfriend. (I finally gave up, and I believe before the sun came up she gave him a blowjob.).
But no matter how often I'm near the phenomenon of celebrity, it doesn't lose its weirdness. That moment when the famous personage enters the interview room, when the flesh-and-blood reality overlaps the celluloid image, feels like a key to decoding the mystery of contemporary life. (Let's ignore for the moment the possibility that our irrational worship of imagery might be the very cause of our problems.) And because of my vague personal connections to Pitt, I figured that this was a rare opportunity to get close to the truth.
Cleverly attired in Mizzou colors of black and gold, I waited in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire with a dozen other reporters who were clearly more cynical about fame than I was.
Although's he's 37, the slender Pitt entered the room wearing bleached hair and two layers of ratty t-shirts, looking like someone who belongs on a skateboard instead of a pedestal.
After invoking the name of a mutual friend, I asked Pitt the question I'd been rehearsing for hours, the question that was supposed to pry loose the poet from his soul and earn me an invitation to his hillside mansion (where he'd introduce me to Jen and we'd play pinball all afternoon while listening to the new Radiohead album): "When you reflect on how far you've come from Springfield to here, does it still amaze you, or do you have a philosophical handle on it"
He flashed his perfect teeth but answered thoughtfully. "Sometimes I forget to step back and have a little respect for where I've come from and what it took to get out here and to keep going in this business. That's important."
I was too bashful to ask a pointed follow-up about the existential unreality of fame, and the rest of the interview was monopolized by the reporters who wanted juicy quotes about Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston. But even within the context of this p.r. puffery, Pitt hinted at a source of his spiritual sustenance.
"After Jen and I were married, there was a feeling like we were embarking on this thing together. We have this team." He gestured toward the wide world beyond the celebrity cloister. "Whatever goes wrong out there, we've got this thing in here that's pretty fantastic."
After 20 minutes, an assistant intervened and the the interview adjourned. "Do you have any message for the folks back home?" I asked him as he moved toward the door.
"You mean Missourah?" he asked. "Just tell them I said hello." In this case, it was a nicer way of saying goodbye.
(Originally published in the St. Louis Pot-Dispatch, Dec. 2000)