The Book of Formation, page 1
Copyright © 2017 by Ross Simonini
First Melville House Printing: November 2017
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
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Ebook ISBN 9781612196695
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simonini, Ross, author.
Title: The book of formation / Ross Simonini.
Description: First edition. | Brooklyn : Melville House, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039346 (print) | LCCN 2017048438 (ebook) | ISBN 9781612196695 (reflowable) | ISBN 9781612196688 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology)--Fiction. | Self-realization--Fiction. | Fame--Fiction. | Cults--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Satire. | GSAFD: Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3619.I562863 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.I562863 B66 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039346
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
I. December 1994
II. December 1994
III. January 1996
IV. May 1999
V. March 2002
VI. January 2004
VII. April 2006
VIII. May 2014
Afterword
The highest bliss on earth shall be
The joys of personality!
—GOETHE
Preface
For two decades I interviewed the man who helped us to stop being ourselves and become who we want to be. I was fortunate enough to know him well and in many forms: as a celebrity, hermit, mentor, target of media slander, miracle worker, director of a multimillion-dollar media empire, and uncultured teenage fledgling, which is how I first met him on a winter morning in Los Angeles.
Most people never knew Masha Isle. They didn’t meet the boy who uttered every word with perfect ignorance. They met someone else: the fully formed adult, master of the personality arts—worldly, seasoned, glowing from televisions and presiding over his audiences like a natural-born leader.
This book is my attempt to reintroduce the world to Isle. For those who know him through gossip and tabloids, here is a chance to meet him directly, without the pesky buzz of opinion. For devotees of his show, these talks reveal the icon as he was offstage, out of his host position. For those who haven’t known Isle at all—the next generations—I hope this book serves as an authentic introduction.
—
Of course, to be properly introduced to the boy, you must first meet the mother. Anyone who lived through those premillennial years knew the name Mayah long before the arrival of her boy successor, and this, too, is how I met the Isles, in the final days of 1994.
Ah, the ‘90s—the moment I discovered I could work on myself. Actualize, as the saying then went. A decade of looking through the mirror. Self-transformation certainly wasn’t a new concept, but to experience it then, when it was finally accepted into pop culture—that felt historic. Here was a new way to believe—no more years of studying the dreary history of religion. By then, all you needed was pure human potential.
When these talks began, Mayah! was in its eighth nationally syndicated season, the clear frontrunner among a wave of talk shows. These were collectively known as “PM” or “personality movement.” Likewise, Mayah’s growing mass of admirers referred to themselves as “personality movers” (or simply “movers”) and included a cast of celebrities whose endorsements lifted her to the most rarified peak of the American media landscape.
I admit, at this time in my life, I only knew the vague contours of PM. I had the same basic knowledge as any half-aware U.S. citizen. I could recite a bit of the movement’s jargon, but I didn’t really understand it, and I’d seen a few episodes of the show, mostly to study Mayah’s dynamic interviews with guests. I’d heard people making claims of radical transformations, shedding bad habits, eradicating unwanted opinions, but to me it all sounded like overwrought psychoanalysis.
There were a slew of other hosts—Dr. Mark Todd, Tello Jeffers, Vicki Shore, Donel—and they all carved out their individual niches and interpretations of “p,” which, as best as I could understand, was some kind of energy substance at the root of our identities. But mostly, like everyone else, my attention was fixed on Mayah, who seemed to draw her energy out of an endless well of charm from which we all wanted to drink.
She was pervasive—on every red carpet, her arm around every head in show business. Within a few years, I watched as the media’s fascination with Mayah’s celebrity blossomed into a certainty that this woman would progress our culture toward enlightenment. The majority had crossed a threshold, from skepticism to belief. Every food she ate, ensemble she wore, suggestion she made—the press received it all as wisdom.
Unlike most celebrities, Mayah asked for a kind of attention that felt productive. We could all see how she was developing an important new role for society. And yet, as much as we loved her, it was obvious that the system of thought behind her words wasn’t going to catch on. Her vigilance was endearing, and her sermons on the show were uplifting, but ultimately, all the talk about “p” seemed just too opaque for popular consciousness. The expanse of PM wasn’t suited for six-hundred-word articles, so journalists usually glossed over it in a clause or two. You’d hear people throw the terms back and forth—“Inhale P. Exhale Personality.”—to show off their knowledge of pop trivia, but rarely did anyone dive beneath the movement’s reputation as the newest way to make yourself over. PM was everywhere, yes, but no one was really paying attention, which is how one of the great ideas of the late twentieth century developed, hidden in plain sight.
—
For me, the whole thing floated by like a ship off the coast—impressive, but of no personal concern. I wasn’t the target audience and I had no stake in the game, which was exactly how I liked to observe the drift of fads. For a journalist, this was the preferred position: cool neutrality. The idea was to purge yourself of opinion and become a blank slate on which to deliver the truth. Culture trusted you, and the way to honor that trust was to escape your own bias.
I spent years cultivating this attitude. I’d molded my voice to the shape of highbrow journals. I interviewed intellectuals on theory, politicians on policy, and moguls on ethics. Pop culture, on the other hand, was an alien landscape to me.
All this changed in 1994, when I accepted an uncharacteristically light assignment to profile Mayah. An editor at a now-defunct glossy magazine called me and mentioned the idea. She thought it might be provocative to put a heady writer such as myself on a sugary story like this. In fact, she’d already pitched my name to Mayah’s publicist and received an encouraging response.
I accepted because it seemed like the right kind of challenge, and because the minor accolades of small academic publications were starting to feel meager. I wanted to know what it would feel like to write something for the general reader. I also knew enough about Mayah to know that she granted interviews only rarely. She relished making grand ideological proclamations about her privacy, and irately rebuffing the paparazzi. My hope was to be the first interviewer to debate her deeply, to get her on the defensive and coax something unexpected from her. Why she agreed to speak with me, I could not say, but I recognized the opportunity and I took it.
The plan was to fly to Los Angeles and chronicle the rising queen of television in six thousand zeitgeisty words. I shadowed Mayah for five days and I attended two live tapings of the show. Each week, Mayah! focused on a single “guest” making a “turn” from one personality to a new one. Shows featured ongoing interviews with the guest’s family and friends, lectures that related the guest’s progress, plus film clips of offstage treatments. Every so often, Mayah would bring one of her favorite transformational writers on the show to help tease out the nuances of the guest’s situation.
That particular week’s guest, Julie B., came from the state of Idaho, was addicted to aerosol, and had a penchant for verbally abusive partners, all of whom had their own idiosyncratic addictions. She blamed her personality.
My first show was on a Thursday, a day known for being boisterous and unpredictable due to the onstage “p-form lessons.” I’d been keeping up with the show to prepare for the article, but I was still a little shocked by the kinds of primal-looking fits that took place that afternoon. Julie B. flailed around the stage for twenty minutes while the house band clapped and stomped. Finally, she exhausted herself, collapsed onto the bed, and became docile enough to allow Mayah to wag her limbs and “rub out that stale p.”
For the second taping, Julie B. was in treatment backstage, and we watched a short surveillance video of her as she lay unconscious, getting massaged with white oil. Then Mayah held a forty-minute “intensive cry.” Photographs from Julie’s childhood projected above us, alternately cute and heartbreaking, accompanied by cooing gospel music. Mayah commented on each image, telling little anecdotes to illuminate Julie’s tendencies toward self-destructive behaviors, until, one by one, the audience joined in for the sob. This, Mayah explained, was a “cleansing ritual,” both for the audience and Julie, and though I didn’t personally ex
—
Over the next few days, I interviewed the show’s staff and visited the homes of a few of the show’s vocal supporters, including the actress Billie Gaines, who told me that Mayah had “rearranged” her life with just a few meetings. However, when I asked for a deeper description of the meetings, Gaines declined, saying that she had only “a few nooks of discretion in her life,” and her personality work was one of them.
Most importantly, I got some face time with Mayah. However, while her show depicts an earnest and forthcoming extrovert, her dealings with the press are consistently reserved, reluctant, and occasionally spiteful. In my few brief interviews with her, Mayah proved to be an expert in the evasive remark. Though she was never directly rude to me, I couldn’t seem to get past the series of verbal games she’d placed between us. She managed to avoid making any clear, direct statements or revealing any factual information about herself. She’d respond to a question with an unrelated answer and would laugh in moments that seemed entirely inappropriate. Each reply felt like a small provocation to my dialogic skills, and so I pushed on competitively, trying to speak to her on her own elusive terms.
For the longest of these talks, Mayah and I met in an intimate, conical room walled almost entirely in mirrors. She called it the “rec room,” which I later learned was an abbreviation of “recovery room,” a place where guests come after they’ve taken a turn. For me, the room was a nightmare. My reflection kept peering at me from over both of Mayah’s shoulders, bobbing in my peripheral vision like a persistent sprite. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on her. She, of course, rolled along comfortably, unaffected by the reflections, her face sculpted into an impermeable Mona Lisa smile.
Again, I asked my questions, but each one was casually volleyed back as a new question, and pretty soon, I started to answer them. She had me rambling about my life, my career, and my recent personal failures. If I’m honest, I was too flattered by her interest not to give thoughtful responses. Even when I tried to turn the table, to segue into the topics I’d prepared in my notes, she’d take me down another conversational alley and watch as I struggled to find my way out of it.
I managed to disclose the place and time of my birth, the story of how I began professionally interviewing, the contempt I had for a certain sweaty-necked contingent of Mayah’s fans, and, finally, my candid reasons for accepting the assignment. My interviews were exercises in compassion, I told her, and this piece was a way for me to try and understand a person who was utterly alien to me. I went on to freely describe my pre-interview protocol, where I close my eyes, imagine the interviewee sitting across from me, and anticipate the first few minutes of the exchange. Mayah seemed to love all of this, hooting and clapping, encouraging me to tell her everything.
Had she slipped me a pill? Something to loosen my tongue? I couldn’t believe myself, willfully saying these things to a subject. I had thought that after interviewing so many significant cultural figures I had developed some kind of an immunity to the inflated ego. But on that day, when Mayah showed her curiosity toward me, I found myself under her spell, weak-kneed, vulnerable. She showed me the glaring truth: I want attention. Maybe not worldwide fame, maybe not all the time, but I want to be noticed, just like everyone else does.
This embarrassment might have been the end of my relationship with the Isle family, but the next morning, after eating three croissants to make myself feel better, I got a call from Mayah’s assistant, Toni, asking if I’d be interested in speaking to “Mayah’s boy” the next day.
I was, of course, shocked. It was only a few hours before I was leaving to catch my flight home, and after my botched interview experience with Mayah, this unsolicited invitation to speak with her immediate family member seemed like the most unlikely offer I could imagine receiving.
So I spent a solid hour perched on the edge of my hotel bed, semiparalytic, wondering why Mayah would ask this, now, of me. What had gone right the day before? I did my typical yay-nay rumination, but eventually accepted, for the sake of the piece. The assistant gave me an address and asked me to arrive the following morning at 7:00 a.m., the moment when the following interviews begin.
—
I know the early conversations in this book will elicit mixed responses. Readers will interpret Masha’s stories of his youth as unfortunate—the disadvantaged, helpless child preyed upon by adults. Others will see him as a spoiled brat who was bequeathed the golden crown of fame. But to see him either way will only transform every phrase he utters into evidence of your own narrow perspective. You will simplify a man who was never simple, and who was never anyone’s prey.
You can be sure that whoever you are, Masha comes from a different culture than you. A culture of one, you could say. So give him the same courtesy you’d give a foreigner, someone raised in a place you’ve never been, with a lifestyle you will never understand. I have no interest in swaying your opinions. See Masha how you want—victim or prince—but also acknowledge that the person in these pages is free of your cultural toxins, and has been absolved from the social expectations into which all of us were involuntarily born.
I.
December 1994
LOS ANGELES, CA
Before Masha, I supported every interview I conducted with hours of careful research. I read as many conversations with my subjects as were available to the public. I familiarized myself with the tenor of their speech. I learned the topics they dodged and the ones that triggered negative reactions. I paid special attention to their underdiscussed passions, the avocations they’d only mentioned in passing, and would bring them up at the ideal moment in the conversation, usually to pleasant surprise: “So how long have you been collecting Flemish portraiture?” Most importantly, I’d get a sense of the questions that had been asked of the subject too many times before, the ones that elicited the kinds of rote responses nobody ever wants to hear. Even if I ignored all this research during the main performance (which is how I always thought of my interviews), the knowledge was always valuable.
For my interview with Masha, however, preparation was impossible. Not that I didn’t try. Even in the two hours I had to research, I made a few hurried attempts. I called my pop-savvy friends, but they’d never heard of him. I leafed through the folder of press I’d brought for the Mayah interview—no mention of any children. Finally, I explored the liquor store beneath my hotel and discovered three short articles about Mayah’s “immigrant” son, all of which I found in tabloid magazines. These gave me a small foothold, but were of no significant help. They all recycled the same anecdote, and each was basically a three-hundred-word elaboration of the headline “Mayah’s Adopted Teenage Boy!” All were accompanied by the same bleary photo of Mayah ducking into a black car on Santa Monica Boulevard. Beside her, you could just barely see a figure wearing sunglasses, a black cap, and what looked like a white hotel bathrobe. When I finished reading these, I had no more time left to research and in a funny way, I was relieved. The impossibility of planning felt like a small liberation. Nothing was expected of me.
—
As I approached the Isle compound from Beverly Glen Boulevard, only the turret on the main house’s gabled roof was visible. But then, once off the main road, I began to see a compound of buildings, surrounded by a thicket of laurels and oaks. A security guard greeted me at the gate and pointed me toward a road that snaked down a hill past the main house and ended at a small Spanish cottage.
I parked and saw a young person—maybe sixteen years old—leaning in the doorway, observing me with such a dispassionate expression that I wondered whether I had driven to the right house. The smooth face could be of either gender, and the person’s stance, the angle and weight of it, seemed equally anomalous. I smiled, a little hesitantly, and they waved me over. This was Masha.
As I approached, his physical beauty confused me, as if I were looking at a photo of a person, seeing him from a single fixed perspective. His skin looked airbrushed, undisturbed by the elements. His hair swayed in a hypnotic dance with the wind. From his neck hung a thin chain with a name tag, and I could see the beginnings of what looked like a tattoo emerging from the cuff of his sleeve. I reached for a handshake but he refused with a kind of nonchalance that diffused the insult of it.
