Seven Men: Memories of an Unconventional Love Life

By Elizabeth Kaye

In Seven Men: Memories of an Unconventional Love Life, bestselling author and award-winning journalist Elizabeth Kaye provides an elegant, rueful and astonishingly frank account of her search for comfort and love, and finally for meaning and peace. In the tradition of such classic memoirists as Marguerite Duras and Colette, Kaye recounts her tempestuous romantic past and the singular (and famous) men with whom she shared it.

Seven Men tells the story of one woman’s journey through a world peopled by society’s brightest and most beautiful. As an esteemed profile writer for Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times, Kaye inhabited a world of celebrity. And though she often felt as if she was "traveling on a visa that was about to expire," the talented and attractive Kaye found herself involved with a series of handsome and powerful men.

There was The Anchorman, who sent her secret messages during his newscasts and showed up in her apartment an hour later. There was The Astronaut: he’d walked on the moon; they met at a conference for recovering alcoholics. There was the Actor, known for his brilliant performances, whose greatest role may have been acting the part of a faithful husband while pursuing serial affairs. There was the Dancer, the Writer, the Movie Star, the Critic, the Musician. . .

As she writes: “Falling in love is transformative, at least for a time; its early, adrenalized stages provide another of those occasions through which you can become more generous and joyous and lustrous than you would otherwise be. This is a bubble certain to burst, and until it does there is no way to accurately assess whether the object of your passion is someone you actually like, or whether you’ve simply fallen into yet another instance of delusion at first sight. I knew this when I met the Writer. Nonetheless, ten days after we first traded smiles, we decided to get married.”

In Seven Men: Memories of an Unconventional Love Life, Elizabeth Kaye conveys the hard-won lessons of one woman’s journey in the fast lane. She reveals the pains and pleasures of a life spent pursuing love and calculates the costs with shivering precision. While she did not always love wisely, she concludes, her life has been rich with daring and passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Jan 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780999633892

Elizabeth Kaye

Elizabeth Kaye is an award-winning journalist who has written five books on subjects ranging from the Los Angeles Lakers to American Ballet Theatre. Her most recent ebook, Lifeboat No. 8: An Untold Tale of Love, Loss, and Surviving the Titanic, rose to #1 on the Amazon and New York Times ebook bestseller lists.

Book preview

PRELUDE

From the time I became a writer, I felt compelled to write about men. I would like to tell you it was a choice, but in fact it was an obsession, and while I assumed there must be a reason for it, I had no idea what it was.

I could have discovered that reason quite easily had I looked to the black and white photograph pinned to a corkboard above my desk. It pictures me at the age of four standing beside my first boyfriend, a curly-haired, freckle-faced five year old with a precociously knowing expression. I’m wearing corduroy overalls. I have a Buster Brown haircut and I’m holding what appears to be an Oreo cookie in one hand. My boyfriend is a lot taller than me. His arm is slung around my shoulder and I’m looking up at him with an adoring expression and a smile so broad it looks as if my face is about to burst.

Initially the appeal of this picture was its cuteness factor, and I failed to deduce the obvious: before I believed in much of anything, I believed that being with a boy equates to being happy. And so, from my early teens, there were many boys and many of them made me happy, at first, if not at last. There was the boy who taught me to smoke Camel cigarettes, the one who gave me a wristlet corsage of scarlet cymbidium orchids, the one who gave me my first kiss, my first heartache, my first sip of Jack Daniels. I picture them—14, 15, 16 years old—boys whose images remain oddly indelible even now, having long since been spliced into the cumbersome reel that runs, every so often, on a loop in my mind, presenting a cavalcade of teenaged hopes gone sour.

Those early misalliances ravaged my youthful faith that people always mean what they say and promises are always kept and being loyal to someone assures they’ll be loyal back. The resultant anxiety is memorialized in a note I wrote to myself in my early 20s, scrawled on pink paper, in purple ink. It reads, Don’t forget to pack silver stockings. In the uneasy realm I had come to inhabit, talismans were necessary and betrayal or heartache could be kept at bay only if I remembered to pack the silver stockings.

So it seems to me now that writing about men was a way to venture into what had come to seem desirable yet infinitely hostile territory while safely fortified with a ballpoint pen, a Panasonic mini-tape recorder and an assignment from Esquire.

Many of the men I wrote about were film stars, which means I spent an inordinate amount of time with men in circumstances that were, effectively, mutually purposeful encounters designed to resemble real life. These contrivances took many diverting forms: hiking through the sun parched hills of the Ojai Valley, strolling through white cedars and lilac trees on Mackinaw Island, dining in the otherwise empty dining room of the one elegant hotel in El Paso, Texas, sharing a barbecue pizza in a recording studio in Memphis, riding on the rear seat of a motorcycle through the narrow thoroughfares of Nottinghill Gate.

It made for an interesting, if rather odd life, a play of many acts in which the leading man was always attractive and always changing. If I were making a film of it, the opening sequence would have me walking into a London restaurant with Anthony Hopkins and exiting the same establishment three years later with Jeremy Irons.

These were years when magazine articles ran at great lengths and in sufficient detail that we felt free to flatter ourselves by describing them as definitive. Reporting took many weeks—often months—and for this considerable duration, I had a Zelig-like connection to the actors’ pampered, rarified world where beauty begets money and money begets power and where principals are lavished with an unequivocal adoration the less illustrious can expect to garner only as newborns.

It was not a world I belonged in, though I could get by. I could wear the right clothes and eat with the right fork and ask reasonably thoughtful questions and know to whom the actors were referring when they mentioned Ismail or Marty. These were useful faculties and I relied on them, yet I always felt I was traveling on a visa that was about to expire.

Still, there was something compelling and elevated about these encounters and they prompted me to seek out well-known men in what is known as real life. For fame changes things; it alters whatever is around it as surely as adding a great splash of turquoise or magenta to a painting changes the appearance of every other color on the canvas. Fame is an intoxicant, a form of energy; it is power in its most distilled, immediate form. It animates everyone who comes into contact with it and being with someone who brings this enchantment about makes you feel bigger and bolder and, sometimes, transformed. In that sense, the person I became when spending time with these men existed only in their presence.

I liked being that person for the same reasons I was partial to double espressos, the seventh game of the World Series and the grand finale of fireworks shows. And that is why I stubbornly refused to relinquish her, for better and for worse.

THE ANCHORMAN

In my early 20s, I danced in discotheques every night with a prematurely decadent crowd who popped amphetamines and downed stingers until last call and whose collective notion of a serious intellectual was a person who read the headlines above the fold on the front page of the New York Times. But a few years down the line, some of those people were reading The Stranger by Camus, preferably in French, and marching with Dr. King and Dr. Spock and declaring that capitalistic diversions like discothèques were irrelevant, a word employed a lot back then.

I was marching and reading The Stranger too, and teaching dance to kids in Harlem and working in a tiny, windowless office on West 57th Street for an organization called Writers and Artists Against the War. I kept up relentlessly with the news, especially TV news, a frustrating avocation since there wasn’t much news on television and what there was aired simultaneously and—in the absence of videotapes, DVDs, and DVRs—had to be viewed live.

As a consequence, Lyndon Johnson had three TV sets in the White House so he could watch all three nightly broadcasts of the network news. With the same purpose in mind, I had three sets too—big, thick, ugly boxes with rabbit ears—lined up side by side on a cinderblock and plywood contraption in my living room, which was also my bedroom, dining room and office.

I had a recurring dream back then that the world was about to explode. My waking hours were tainted by the same metaphysical dread, a nagging condition reinforced as I stared at black and white images on my three screens and saw the endless, unthinkable, sickening collage of napalmed peasants and funeral trains and young men returned home in pine boxes.

This was an agonized world, though you’d never know it from the TV anchormen, whose affectless demeanor and soothing caramel voices lent them the aspect of permanent residents of an alternate, indifferent universe.

The sole exception was an anchorman whose show aired for an hour each morning, during which time he evinced a distinct edge and enough skepticism about official actions and rationales to challenge his interview subjects with questions I would have asked.

In the ordinary course of things, he was as remote from me as Mars and would have remained so if Spiro Agnew, the unlikely vice president of the United States, had refrained from excoriating anti-war protestors in a diatribe delivered to a Republican crowd that interrupted him with applause 23 times in 26 minutes. We can afford to separate [the protestors] from our society, he said, with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.

Objectively speaking, this was an astonishingly disgusting thing to say, even