Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver. Eugene Salomon
4 Celebrities
Certainly one thing that has not changed is a scene such as this: two teenage girls and their mothers, Agogers (people who are ‘agog’) from Georgia on their first trip to New York, piled into my cab at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on a Saturday evening at 7.30 p.m., en route to the Broadway show Beauty and the Beast.
‘Hey,’ the teenager sitting beside me said as we hit traffic heading into Times Square, ‘have you ever had a celebrity in your taxi?’
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘I’ve had lots of them.’
‘Really?!’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I once had the man who co-wrote the songs of the show you’re going to see.’
‘Wow, what’s his name?’
‘Howard Ashman.’
No response. She’d never heard of the late, great lyricist.
‘Have you ever had a movie star?’
‘Sure.’
‘Wow! Really? You have? Who? Who?’
‘Well, I’ve had Lauren Bacall.’
No response. Obviously this girl was not a fan of classic cinema.
‘How about Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I replied, hoping to hit a home run.
‘Holy Jesus! Leonardo DiCaprio! In this cab?’ At which point all four of them began fondling the upholstery, hoping some of Leo’s charisma would rub off on them.
What is it about celebrities, anyway? Are they really any different than you and me? Well, in a sense, no. Their food goes in one end and comes out the other, just like everyone else’s (although it may start out as sushi from Nobu’s for them and a tuna melt from Frank’s deli for you and me). But the nature of the lives they are living is really quite different than any other type of person. For example…
Starlight
I was cruising down Columbus Avenue one evening in 1987 when I was hailed at 77th Street by a middle-aged man wearing a tuxedo. He opened the rear door, but instead of getting in, he leaned forward and inspected the condition of the compartment and picked up a couple of errant pieces of paper from the floorboard. Deciding that my taxi now met his high standards, he then asked me to wait a minute while he retrieved his friends from a restaurant on the avenue. One of his friends, he said, was a ‘major VIP’.
Well, my curiosity was certainly aroused. Who could this Very Important Person be? In a few moments the man in the tuxedo reappeared from the restaurant with another man, also wearing a tux, and two women in fashionable evening dresses. The cause of all the fuss, it turned out, was this other man. He was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
It was a name you would recognize if you were past a certain age. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, had been a movie star, a leading man, in the 1930s and was the son of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, himself a big star from the silent movie era. I was familiar with Jr mostly because he was a pitch man for the wool industry and would appear in that capacity in television commercials.
We drove down Columbus Avenue a mere eleven blocks, to Lincoln Center. As Mr Fairbanks opened the door of my cab and stepped out into the plaza there, he was immediately surrounded by photographers snapping away, their strobe lights creating an explosion of brightness in the cool night air. He posed for the paparazzi, flashing a winning smile and looking altogether dapper. Apparently a special event of some kind was being held that night at Lincoln Center and the media were waiting for the stars to arrive.
After I drove away in anonymity, I had some thoughts about this phenomenon of celebrity. Consider this: although the glow of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr’s movie career had faded away nearly fifty years prior to that night, he was still being treated by the mortals around him with the care and adulation that you and I never receive for even a single day in our lives.
No, they are not the same as the rest of us. There is truly a phenomenon at work here. It’s like a force of nature, a type of energy. The physics of mass communications, if you will.
It can be interesting to observe how different celebrities deal with it. Some, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, are quite comfortable with it. Others, like John Lennon the two times I saw him on the street, resist it by trying to remain unrecognized behind dark glasses, scarves and various disguises. And then there are those who, like rodeo cowboys riding on the back of a bull, can’t seem to get enough of it and will go out of their way to let you know who they are.
Leonardo Di who?
One pleasant Tuesday night in the summer of 1996 I found myself waiting once again in the taxi queue in front of the Bowery Bar in the East Village. The popular Tuesday night party Beige was in full swing there and it was a good place to get a fare during an otherwise slow night shift.
I finally got to the front of the line when a group of rowdy kids, probably too young to have been in there in the first place, emerged from the bar, playfully pushing and shoving each other as they approached my cab. Other than the fact that they were loud and goofing around, I noticed three things: 1) one of them was smoking a cigar that was bigger than his face, 2) one of them was a model-gorgeous female and the others were all guys, and 3) there were five of them.
Now there were two problems here. Cigars, of course, are a no-no in a taxicab. And New York City taxis by law are only allowed to carry four passengers. But this group was probably drunk, definitely raucous and they had jumped into my cab so quickly that I decided that playing taxicab cop was too much of an effort and decided to just drive them where they wanted to go without a protest. Three of the guys and the girl crammed themselves onto the back seat and a fellow who must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds joined me in the front. And off we went.
Our destination was a club called Spy on Greene Street in Soho, a short ride. I opened the windows to allow for some ventilation of the cigar smoke and was being pretty much oblivious to the laughter and clamor surrounding me when a male voice from the back seat suddenly grabbed my attention.
‘Hey, driver,’ the voice said.
‘Yeah?’ I called back.
‘Hey, you know, this is Leonardo DiCaprio you’ve got back here!’
‘It is?’
‘Yeah!’
‘Leonardo Di who?’
‘Leonardo DiCaprio!’
‘So – who is Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I asked. This was before Titanic and I’d never heard of him.
A second voice belonging to the blond-haired kid smoking the cigar now joined in the conversation.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he cried out.
‘Uhhh… nooo…’
‘I’m an actor, man!’
‘Oh.’
‘Did you see This Boy’s Life?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I’ve heard of that movie,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t seen it. You were in that?’
‘I played with De Niro, man!’
‘Wow! Really!’
‘How about What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Did you see that?’
‘No, sorry, I didn’t see that one, either. You were in that?’
‘Yeah!’
I was certainly out of the loop. I would have liked to have discussed some of his work with him, but I hadn’t seen any of the kid’s movies.
‘Are