The SEAN PENN EXPERIENCE

Stars are not like us

When I was in my mid-twenties and living for a year in Los Angeles, I got a call from my then-still-alive William Morris agent. “Sean Penn is interested in doing a project about the Mitchell Brothers,” said the agent. “His business manager loves your play.” 

I had written a play about the Mitchell Brothers, and Sean’s business developer had apparently gotten hold of it, and liked it.  The Mitchell brothers were legendary in the Bay Area for having started what somebody called “The Carnegie Hall of Sex” — a vast sexual romping palace in the Tenderloin, with all kinds of strange provenance:  Hunter S. Thompson used to hang out there, leering and medicated, calling himself the “Night Manager.”  The Mitchell brothers saga ended when the older brother shot his younger brother with a rifle and killed him, for reasons nobody knew.  I was commissioned to write a play about it for San Francisco’s Magic Theater.  I hated the theater’s Artistic Director at the time,  so I called the show “XXX LOVE ACT,”  just to make the noble Magic marquee look like a show in the flesh district.  

Anyway, I couldn’t believe I was going to meet THE MAN WHO MARRIED MADONNA.  At peak Madonna, Madonna married Sean Penn, who before this existential vanishing point was celebrated for being the most fearless actor of his generation. Paparazzi helicopters swarmed their Malibu hillside ceremony.  

This whiplash celebrity marriage, which the world was forced to absorb without warning, was short-lived.  There was something in the tabloids about Sean trussing Madge up like a turkey and sticking her head in the oven.  It was unclear what went on, amid Madonna’s allegations of abuse.  They were just both too volatile, man, they were dynamite together!  Boom!  All that star power just ended up combusting into insecurities and unsafe S&M. 

 ( But imagine what their first good dates were like!) 

So, I was thinking of that when I was shaking Sean Penn’s hand, and it was the first time I ever noticed a thing that certain men do where they size you up sexually in a micro-instant.  I could feel inside my skin that Sean had just rated me a generous B-.  (This was LA, after all, where models come to strip.)

I instantaneously knew that I had already failed.  I wasn’t simmering with a barely-contained hormonal yowling and skin-peeling need to rip his shirt off and mount him behind the nearest potted plant.  This was unforgivable, because I am the age group he performed for at his peak. (It happens with many male stars:  if you’re not juiced up for them with pheromones and misguided love and dilated pupils, they can tell, and it sort of hurts their feelings. It’s awkward.) 

Sean had been holed up in a vast catacomb of editing studios.   I believe he was cutting “The Crossing Guard” at the time — one of his moody, pathos-ridden films.   He said he’d been in the studio all night.  His squinty eyed machismo was immediately palpable as he stood there exuding Sean Penness in his rumpled jacket and greasy hair;  achingly famous without trying. 

He had read nothing of mine, and basically had no idea who I was, and seemed to have no interest in my play, which is what I assumed I was there for.  Instead, he walked me around the editing studio, talking about editing.  He might have been sussing out my vibe on a primal hippy level, but he asked me no questions at all, preferring to speak about himself.  

It was then that we ran into Michelle Pfeiffer, who was walking with a person as inconsequential as I was.   Michelle and Sean had apparently not met before, but they were already snugly seated in the Big Jacuzzi of Stardom together, so there was already a readymade closeness.  The person with Michelle and I stood miserably back a few feet from the star collision, looking at our shoes, being invisible.  It was clear by our non-famousness that we were not worthy of introduction.  

Sean and Michelle said a few generous things to each other, then Michelle walked away with her worthless half-man, and Sean returned to me.

“Don’t you ever wish we were dogs sometimes?  So when there’s a meeting like that, we could just hump right out in the open?” asked Sean.  I wasn’t offended, just a little surprised.  I reminded myself that he’d been up all night. 

“Hey, do you like cars?” He asked. 

“I love cars.” 

“I’ll show you one.”  We walked outside and got inside his absolutely wicked, raked, fully customized, flawless El Camino.  A muscle car to devour all others.  Gorgeous blue flake paint job, massively thick wheels, big chrome rims.  

“Lemme play something for you,” Sean said, inserting a cassette tape into the console.   “This is the tape from my answering machine.  I got a message on it from Marlon Brando, after he saw a cut of my movie.  Check this out.” 

So Sean and I sat in the bench front seat of his car, which seemed to have been airlifted in perfect cleanliness from 1975 Detroit, and he played the message, which was something like, 

BOOP 

“Sean? It’s Marlon.” 

That VOICE.  That was Marlon fucking Brando on that tape.  Guys and Dolls.  Stanley Kowalski.  Colonel Kurtz.  

 “I want to tell you about the beauty and the power of your movie…I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything like it in my life.  I was absolutely floored.  It’s a stunning achievement….”  

Marlon went on to praise Sean’s movie for a good four minutes of solid gold ass-licking, and Sean just sat there in his hot rod and beamed.  It was interesting to notice that I was far less of a presence in the car with Sean than Marlon Brando was, even when Brando was on a cassette.  Sean was swooning in Brando’s praise, absorbing great scoops of it into himself.   There was a whole inter-celebrity currency going on that I would never understand.  Sean was floating on thick, girthy rainbows of nonstop glittering awesomeness and validation and total life satisfaction.

And he married peak Madonna.  How does a guy get so lucky? 

Nothing happened with Sean and my play, obviously.  The Estevez brothers:  Emilio and Charlie Sheen, eventually made some abomination based on the Mitchells that had nothing to do with me.  I believe it was called “X-Rated?”  I believe it went straight to video. 

It was shite.

Artwork: “Mommie Dearest,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020