[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Date: 14-FEB-2003 13:06:59
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Kevin and Julie party
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr Gold.
Source: Esquire, June 2002 v137 i6 p102(5).
Title: The tao of Kato: he was born of tragedy, but behold the life force
that is Kato Kaelin.
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Subjects: Celebrities - Conduct of life
People: Kaelin, Brian - Conduct of life
Locations: United States
Electronic Collection: A86128206
RN: A86128206
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2002 � Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Over the years, I've called Kato Kaelin many times. Here's a sampling of what
I've heard on his answering machine: "This is Kato. I'm not here right now. If
you want to leave a message, do so after the beep. If you want to send a fax,
wait a couple months. I'm buying a machine." "This is Kato. If this message
seems long, that's because it's the director's cut." "This is Kato. My beep is
bigger than your beep." "This is Kato. If you want to rob me, now is a good
time." If you do get Kato on the phone, he'll answer it cheerily: "Parts and
services!" And when he's ready to hang up, he'll sometimes say, "First one to
hang up is the greatest!" Then click off.
That's Kato right there. Maybe at first you'll be skeptical, as I was. Maybe
you're wary of people who engage in phone hijinks, just as you're wary of men
who wear T-shirts offering free mustache rides to women. But Kato will wear
you down, as he did me, as he does everybody he meets. You will give in to
Kato because Kato is determined to have fun and, perhaps more important, to
make you have fun, too. This is a man who's been mocked and loather ever since
Mark Fuhrman knocked on the door of his guesthouse. This is a man who
still--eight years later--gets glares whenever he walks into a restaurant,
who's been the butt of roughly seven hundred thousand jokes, who's been
tarred, mostly unfairly, I think, as a moron, a liar, a ditz, a hair-dyer.
(Well, that last one's true.) A man who--as he'll tell you himself--can earn a
living only by making self-parodying appearances on sitcoms and fast-food
commercials. And yet he's a man who refuses to be sad. At all. He's
aggressively chipper. He once pretended to slip on a banana peel to brighten
my mood. A banana peel! That's Kato, a shaft of peroxided light in this dark
world. And over the years, I've come to realize that I'd be better off if I
were more like Kato. We all would be. Every self-pitying, black-hearted one of
us.
A Hug and a High Five
I just flew in from New York, and, boy, is Kato tired. He picks me up at the
airport in his aging black BMW and apologizes for being so exhausted; he was
up all night with his pal Charlie Sheen. But he's the most energetic exhausted
man I've ever met. He gives me both a hug and a high five. He interrogates me
about my life. He updates me on his Hollywood career, which he admits could be
going better: "My agent is State Farm." He wants me to speak to his
girlfriend, so he dials her on his cell. "I couldn't remember what A. J.
looked like," he tells her before handing me the phone, "so I picked up a
small, Chinese black man."
I've known Kato since 1996, when he asked me for advice on selling his
autobiography. It was called The Sixteenth Minute, and my most vivid memory of
it is that it contains a scene of Kato making out with Tori Spelling in a
bathroom. I was no help to him at all. Still, we kept in touch. And now I've
come out to L. A. for a weekend of pure, unadulterated Kato, something to
boost my mood in this increasingly horrific world.
He looks about the same as he did when I first met him, not counting the
creeping crow's-feet and the once famous hair, which is a little shorter and
darker but still qualifies as blond. He's wearing last night's
clothes--tightish black jeans and a brown checkered jacket. As we drive, his
left leg bounces and he runs his fingers through his hair. I'm happy to see
his essential Kato-ness--a little self-deprecation, a bit of surfer guy, some
septuagenarian borscht-belt comic--is intact. We eat lunch at a diner. I pay.
Kato forgot his wallet. "I get a lot of crap for being spacey and ... what was
I saying?"
Fun with Porn Stars
We're off to a barbecue at Kato's friend's house in the Hollywood Hills. The
host, a tall guy in a tank top named Savage, directs episodes of Pamela
Anderson's show, V.I.P. It's the first house I've visited that has a
leopard-skin-covered staircase. And the guest list--well, it's what I've come
to expect when hanging with Kato: the oddest mix of quasi celebrities this
side of Game Show Network reruns. Judd Nelson's there, all in black, making a
point of wearing sunglasses indoors. There's also the guy who created the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one of Quincy Jones's daughters, and a
six-foot-tall softcoreporn actress named Julie Strain, who stars on the
Playboy channel's jurisprudence drama, Sex Court. "I get the Playboy channel,"
Kato says to her. "But I get it for the articles." I saw that coming right
down Lankershim Boulevard, but I still have to laugh. The porn star does, too.
Kato is the best partygoer I've ever met. Partly because he's the only guy I
know who actually does party tricks--makes dimes disappear, makes his wallet
magically jump out of his hands, puts two cocktail plates up to his ears and
says, "Hi, I'm Prince Charles." Let me say it again: You just have to laugh.
And the guests all do. Not because it's inherently funny--only about 38
percent of Kato's jokes actually qualify as funny--but because Kato says
everything with such unforced glee that it's infectious, an airborne virus of
happiness.
I ask Kato's girlfriend, Alana--a sweet party planner who looks as if she
could be the star of a WB show--if he's ever in a bad mood. "Only when the
Green Bay Packers lose." (Kato's a Wisconsin boy). And, frankly, there is one
other thing that bums him out, and it also involves a football player. At the
barbecue, after a couple Amstel Lights, one of his friends makes a hoary joke
about O. J.'s golf game. "He really slices that ball." Kato groans, and it's
not an amused groan. The fact that Kato--whose main goal in life is the
pursuit of his and others' happiness, who has an almost pathological obsession
with silliness--is forever linked to a pair of homicides, well, I think Alanis
Morissette once wrote a song about it. "I've moved past the trial," he'll
sometimes say, when it comes up. You can see his shoulders tighten. "I'm not
about the trial."
Kato thinks the O. J. scandal derailed his real acting career. He tells me how
right before Court TV made him a court jester, he was auditioning for what
would become the Jeff Daniels role in Dumb and Dumber. And yet Kato, because
he's Kato, can't wallow in the darkness long. He does what he has to do: He
jokes about O. J. Simpson. Like when people ask Kato, "Did he do it?" (for the
record: yes, Kato believes O. J. did it), Kato says, "You mean Ray Lewis? Rae
Carruth? Oh, that other NFL player? That was so long ago. Now we have so many
to choose from."
Stockdale: The Sitcom
We stop at Kato's new house--his own house, not a guesthouse, thank you very
much. He takes me on a tour, making sure to point out the abundance of hair
products in the bathroom.
He wants me to see his reel of TV and movie cameos, a collection including
appearances on Roseanne, The Norm Show, a forgotten UPN show, a Showtime
series. Kato's been struggling on the B-grade fringes of Hollywood since I've
known him, making a living of mocking Kato. Early on, he used to do spots on
local news stations: "I'm Kato Kaelin. Watch the eleven o'clock news or I'll
come sleep at your house." Not surprisingly, he's tried stand-up comedy.
(Sample joke: "At the DMV, they asked me for two forms of ID. I brought the
Enquirer and the Star.") He recently filmed a Jack in the Box commercial in
which he plays a pool boy, and he's got high hopes for it. Maybe too high.
"I'm hoping this will finally get things going. Because it shows a big
corporation endorsing me."
He wants this to help him go legit, to finally allow him to sell his TV
projects. He gives me the proposals. There's HouseGuest, a reality show in
which Kato knocks on a stranger's door and invades his or her house for a
weekend, making sure to drink out of milk containers in his underwear at 2:00
A.M. Or the big prize: the Larry Sanders--style sitcom in which Kato, a
talk-show host, interviews the fleetingly famous: Admiral Stockdale, Divine
Brown, et cetera. They're clever ideas. I want him to succeed, partly because
it means so much to him, partly because if Emeril got a fucking sitcom, why
shouldn't Kato? But I'm worried maybe he's missed his chance. What if fifteen
means fifteen? I keep this to myself.
The Wedding
Kato and Alana have a wedding to go to, and Kato invites me to crash. It's a
little odd, having Kato ask you to crash a party, sort of like Yo-Yo Ma asking
you to play a cello solo. But if my goal is to be more like Kato ...
I walk in confidently, as Kato instructed me, and find him at table 17, up in
the nosebleed balcony. It's a solemn, beautiful occasion, this uniting of two
souls, the kind of wedding where they give out skullcaps reading, "I went to
Jennifer and Michael's wedding and all I got was this lousy yarmulke." Kato
hugs me, and I sit down next to one of the members of Devo--I think the
drummer--who's wearing a red suit and a red tie and who doesn't talk much.
Across the table is a woman named Donna who's wearing too much lipstick. She's
loving Kato, but in a kitschy, ironic way that makes me uncomfortable. Kato
doesn't seem to mind. He writes his signature five times on a napkin so she
can sell it on eBay. "My aunt Esther is going to plotz!" she shouts, waving
her new autograph collection.
Kato and Alana go to the dance floor, and when they come back, Kato seems
down, a little droopy. "I think Mary Smart Masterson was giving me a dirty
look," he says. But then, a second later, he shakes it off. `You want some
wine, O. J.?" he asks me. Everyone laughs, and Kato realizes his mistake. A.
J., O. J.--they're damn close. He feigns being drunk. "I'll have another glash
of whishkey, bartender!" He's actually called me O. J. three times before, and
it doesn't bother me. As my wife, Julie, says, it's fine as long as I don't
slit her throat.
Sweating with Kate
We go to Kato's gym. Kato knows from sweating. Forty-five minutes on the
stationary bike, followed by a half hour of weights. I, on the other hand, am
finished in fifteen minutes. While waiting, I come up with a theory: People
whose names end in the vowel o are more fun. Ringo. Bozo. Kato. The exception:
Slobo.
The Haircut
Kato's worried we didn't pack enough fun into the weekend. He's got the
perfect ending: a visit to Supercuts.
So we go, me and Kato, to this Supercuts in a mall near his house. Kato is
assigned to Lida, a pretty young woman from Iran who's not overly strong with
the English. He sits in the chair.
"Should I take my clothes off?" asks Kato. She giggles, not quite sure how to
respond.
"I'm dating a girl from France. She's got so much hair under her arms, she
looks like Don King in a headlock. Thank you and goodnight!" Lida likes that
one. I sincerely doubt she understood it.
Then again, it doesn't matter. With Kato, the meaning of the syllables doesn't
matter. The key is to accept the joy of his rat-a-tat patter, and Lida has
accepted.
Lida runs her fingers through his hair. "How would you like haircut?"
"Over easy, side of hash," he says. Lida giggles.
The Epilogue
A couple months later, when I'm back in New York, I call Kato to wish him a
happy forty-third birthday. (It's March 9, in case you want to send a card
next year.) He's even more chipper than normal. He tells me he's close to
signing a deal with Trivial Pursuit for an ad campaign. (He'd be under the
slogan "Born to Be a Question.") And, even better, the company that makes
Family Feud has optioned HouseGuest, his TV show, and is trying to sell it to
networks. God, I hope it does. I hope the Tao of Kato finally shows itself to
be the way, that optimism and goofiness still have a place in a world in which
we have a color-coded homeland-security system. I congratulate him. "First one
to hang up is the greatest!" he says.
In putting together this month's Fun Issue, senior editor A. J. JACOBS (right)
and articles editor ANDY WARD spent weeks searching for the best gadgets,
plans for the best paper airplane, and the funny side to not-so-funny people
like Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton, and together conceived the supercolossal
"Quiz of Everything." "We were planning on doing the Fun Issue for February,
but then came September 11, and life didn't seem so fun anymore," says Jacobs,
who also wrote the very fun profile of Kato Kaelin ("The Tao of Kato," page
102). "But then we figured, we need fun now more than ever. Of course, the
most fun thing was working with Andy Ward. That guy is the Faulkner of fun,
whatever that means." Says Ward: "A. J. is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, an
aspiring writer of sonnets, a philosophy major, and could very well be the
single most fun human being ever put on God's green earth. Everything fun or
funny in this issue sprang directly from his mind. I want the world to know
that."
-- End --
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