Just to give you another example — I remember a couple of years ago, Mark was in Paris to have some sort of surgery, and, in the middle of the operation, the guy gets up off the operating table, walks out of the hospital, and strolls into the Yves Saint Laurent spring couture show, onto the runway, viscera bulging out of an eight-inch abdominal incision, clamps and hemostats and catheters dangling from his body. And the girls — the Christy Turlingtons, the Linda Evangelistas, the Naomi Campbells — they were all over him! And sure enough, that spring, you’d go to a dinner party or a gala and you’d actually see women wearing priceless couture ensembles that had been artistically stained with iodine germicidal scrub and adorned with a variety of silver surgical instruments — that’s how charismatic a presence he was, and that’s how pervasive his influence was among people who wanted to be irreproachably au courant.
HAROLD PINTER: I admire Leyner tremendously. First of all, his work — stunning, magnificent! His play Varicose Moon is achingly beautiful. I think it will be unnecessary for playwrights to write any new plays for some time now—Varicose Moon should suffice. In fact, I think it would be vulgar for playwrights to burden the public with their offerings given the creation of this coruscating masterwork.
He has also been a wise and magnanimous friend. It was Leyner who first introduced me to Beckett’s Hawaiian writing — and for that alone, I remain eternally indebted to him. [Between the completion of his novel The Unnameable and his debut as a dramatist with En attendant Godot, Samuel Beckett, desperate for money to support the child he’d fathered with American singer Kate Smith, moved to Hawaii and secured a job in public relations, writing brochure copy for the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Maui. Long suppressed by the Beckett estate, which publicly denied their existence, Beckett’s Maui brochures constitute a fascinating lens through which readers can further explore the mind of the angst-ridden Nobel Laureate. Today, many Beckett scholars consider these brochures (which hype the hotel’s 750,000-gallon pool with its romantic grotto, 130-foot water slide, and swim-up cocktail bar, championship golf course, lei-making and ukelele classes, and authentic luau) Beckett’s most important work.]
Here’s a wonderful instance of Leyner’s intellectual generosity. I was working on a play, a play that contained all of my characteristic motifs — the fallibility of memory, the ultimate unknowability of women to men and men to women, the notion that all human contact is battle — in oblique, elliptical dialogue delivered by an estranged elderly couple who remain immobile for most of the play. And I just was not happy with it at all. So I gave the script to Leyner. He took it with him to his hotel that evening, and later that same night, he rang me up and suggested that instead of the action taking place in a house in London’s Hampstead Heath, as I’d intended, it take place in Reno, Nevada, at the Eldorado Hotel. It’s been discovered that some six metric tons of an experimental, highly mutagenic fungus developed by the Defense Department’s Advanced Fungal Weapons Research Center, located in nearby Sparks, have seeped into the city’s underlying aquifer. As the play opens, scientists suspect the lethal fungus of having rapidly evolved into a sophisticated ratiocinative being capable of defeating all but the top two or three chess grandmasters in the world. Well, it was an astonishingly brilliant suggestion — it would never have occurred to me in a million years! It totally transformed the play, which critics would laud as the most powerful and innovative of my career.
KATARINA WITT: It’s been over two years since I spent that final afternoon alone with him as he furiously endeavored to complete his memoirs, and yet I still find him as maddeningly seductive and utterly unfathomable a man as ever. I don’t think a half-hour goes by in the course of a day when I don’t catch myself fantasizing about him.
I recently competed in the World Figure Skating Championships in Stuttgart. It was the climax of my program, I was doing a triple Salchow and, right in the middle, in midair, I just left my body and there I was with Mark again — this was during the most important international competition of the year! Well, it turns out that, in my disembodied state, I didn’t do a triple Salchow, I did a septuagesimal Salchow — that’s seventy rotations in the air! — obviously a feat that had never been accomplished before and has not been since. My coach, who’d always been a bit superstitious, saw the devil’s work in the freak Salchow, and she quit and entered a monastic order in Baden-Baden.
DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS: Substance abuse problem? In my medical opinion, no. He’d been putting a tremendous amount of pressure on himself to finish this particular book before, what he called, “an imminent siege by the spineless degenerates arrayed against me.”
If I prescribed Percodan, Demerol, Valium, Quaaludes, Placidyl, pentobarbital, Anadrol, Primobolan, erythropoeitin, amineptine, and clenbuterol for him, it was simply to ease his mind and give him some enhanced stamina. Like I said, there was the pressure of this book and the pressure of just being who he was.
RON HOWARD: Gosh … what can one say about “Le Leyner”? I just hope that the Team Leyner sign in Times Square isn’t taken down. To me, that sign is synonymous with New York City. It is New York City — it’s brash, it’s ballsy, it’s like “Yo!” [The huge neon Team Leyner sign at 2 Times Square simulates positron emission tomography images of Leyner’s brain function as he writes, laid over a magnetic resonance image of his brain anatomy — so pedestrians below can actually observe glucose metabolism at various sites within Leyner’s cerebral cortex as he’s producing one of his critically acclaimed best-sellers. The 85-ton, 105-foot-high, 6l-foot-wide sign, built at a cost exceeding $5 million, features nearly 70 miles of fiber-optic tubing, more than eight miles of neon tubing, and more than 34,000 light bulbs.]
Actually, you know what I’d do with the Team Leyner sign? I’d put it into orbit, so it could be like the earth’s Statue of Liberty — so it would be the first logo of humanity that the extraterrestrial aliens see when they immigrate here.
Come to think of it, there is one personal experience that stands out in my mind when I think about him. I was with a group of Hollywood directors and actors on a sightseeing bus tour of Team Leyner Headquarters. Leyner happened to be on the grounds that afternoon — he was doing some kind of martial arts sparring with one of his elderly bodyguards — and he recognized me and invited me in for iced tea. While I was there, a UPS truck pulled up to the front entrance and the driver unloaded a calutron. [A calutron is a device that produces highly enriched weapons-grade uranium through a process called electromagnetic isotope separation.] Leyner signed for the merchandise and sat back down with me, making no mention of the delivery. I recognized the Chinese ideogram for “This Side Up” so I’m fairly certain that it was either from Taiwan or the People’s Republic. About a half-hour later, another UPS truck pulls up, and the driver unloads a shipment of zirconium from an export company in Frankfurt. [Zirconium can be used to make uranium fuel rods.] Again, Leyner signed for the delivery, returned to finish his drink, and then vanished. I was allowed a last swallow of tea and then escorted back to the bus by one of his minions. Weird, huh? Weird guy, though. But fun weird. I don’t know if other men had this experience, but Leyner made me feel really small physically, really stupid, and really sexually inadequate. But it was still so cool being with him! [Though accurate intelligence is sketchy, Defense Department experts say they believe Leyner was probably two to five years away from producing a crude nuclear weapon.]