Homeland Elegies(72)
He said this to me over a poached-egg-and-smashed-avocado toast at the Standard hotel in downtown Los Angeles. I was in Hollywood for “meetings” a few months after winning the Pulitzer, in 2013; I’d been inundated with offers from studios to write some version of the same story, each pitched to me as the next necessary pop-culture corrective in which a “good” Muslim works with (or in) law enforcement to uncover and eradicate a “bad” Muslim. Some of these projects already had scripts and were looking for a writer to come in for what they called an “authentic polish”—others needed a writer to give first flesh to these plastic bones. I’d known Mike from the time when he’d been my neighbor in New York, a young tax lawyer at a firm that also practiced entertainment law. It hadn’t taken him long back then to figure out he wanted to be an agent, and it was not much longer still before he became one. We’d stayed in touch over the years, so I’d come to ask his advice: I didn’t want to write any of these silly stories I was being offered; but was there some way to reroute the new attention along more fruitful lines?
Mike showed up at the restaurant a few minutes late in a gleaming maroon Maserati, his just-shaved head catching the sun as he emerged from the driver’s seat. I was seated at a window booth above the parking lot and had a clear view of him as he pressed a tip into the young black valet’s palm. As Mike walked off, I noted the valet’s surprise at what I assumed was the generous tip.
Mike entered the dining room with a boisterous greeting to the women at the hostess station; the bright clip-clop of his leather-soled oxfords announced his lively gambol. We hugged, and he sat, pulling out his gum and pressing it into a square napkin. He warned me he didn’t have long. One of his most important clients—an erstwhile child star who’d finally broken through into adult stardom—learned that his costar (a woman) had been given a larger gun in a pivotal scene, and he walked off the film. Said client had been AWOL for three days, and Mike just learned that morning of his whereabouts: a palatial Airbnb in the Hollywood Hills, replete with a crew of hookers, coke, and more Viagra than he could ever use. Mike would be picking him up in a couple of hours to take him back to the set.
I won’t indulge in a protracted summary of our meeting that morning, for it’s not the story I want to tell here—which is neither Mike’s story nor my own but the tale of a certain rarely remarked-upon shift in our nation’s economic politics that I was unaware of until Mike explained it to me some three years after that breakfast in Los Angeles, during the spring of 2016, as Donald Trump was crisscrossing the nation and sowing chaos in the Republican primary ranks and when Mike correctly predicted that Trump would be our next president. Before I get to that, though, there’s a little work left to do here first:
That morning in 2013, he told me something about Hollywood that would help me make sense of the place and its products: the movie industry was founded by families from New York’s garment district and still bore every essential mark of the fashion business—the fixation on surface over substance; the terror of missing out on the latest fad; the fawning and listlessness and social desperation; and, above all, the endless turnover. Careers were like the latest fabrics, bought in bulk or by the yard, on which preformed narrative templates could be traced, cut, and quickly discarded when the public tired of them. Novelty, ephemerality, single use, mass production—these were the town’s innate, enduring values, and Mike’s advice to me that morning was to see the studio’s new interest in me through this lens: all anyone in Hollywood would care about was my Islam, no matter what any of them might say. I was the latest print of a rough fabric everyone seemed to think would sell like hotcakes if only someone could figure out how to shape it into something folks might at least want to try on. “If you give them what they want,” Mike advised, “you can be that guy out here. They’re all looking for him. But if you don’t want to play along—and I’m guessing you don’t—then you’re probably just wasting your time.”
There was one other thing he said to me that morning: the town was Jewish. Even those who weren’t had formed themselves to the habits of a business that had been started by Jews and where Jews were still smarter and more experienced than the rest. It was something he actually liked about Hollywood, he said. “It’s not like with WASPs. Here, you know where you stand with people. They tell you.” But he cautioned me to be mindful that, as a Muslim, I might be seen as an enemy. “Get out in front of it,” he suggested. “Find ways to let them know up front that you’re not coming for them.”
“Coming for them?”
“You know—that you’re not against what they stand for.”
“Meaning…”
“Israel, the rest of it.”
“Mike—”
“Don’t get defensive, bro. I’m just looking out for you.”
“I’m not against what they stand for. My favorite writers are all Jewish. I’ve been going to school on Philip Roth and Arthur Miller since I was in my teens.”
“All good,” he said, only partly smiling. “Make sure they know it. You’ll be fine.”
It was all typical Mike Jacobs, the caustic, well-intentioned directness, the charged racial views offered without judgment or apology. He owed what he sometimes called his “cheery pessimism” to his father, Jerry, also a lawyer, whose shadow loomed large in Mike’s life. Jerry Jacobs gave up a career in Washington, DC, to move the family back to Opelika, Alabama, where generations of Jacobses had lived for over a century. It was a remarkable choice considering the start he’d made: right out of law school, Jerry landed a clerkship under Spottswood Robinson at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the highest appeals court in the land. Stately, mild-mannered “Spotts” Robinson was a legend at that point, the first lawyer to argue Brown v. Board of Education, later the first black judge to be appointed to the DC Circuit. Clerking for Robinson back then—this was during the 1980s—was a stepping-stone without equal for a young black lawyer like Mike’s father. But the professional prospects, however bright, didn’t ultimately blind Jerry to what was taking shape in DC, the rise of the ideological framework he foresaw would hurt American blacks more than anyone realized. So Jerry decamped from the nation’s capital for Opelika, where he joined a local law practice, served on the city council, and eventually got elected to the Alabama House of Representatives. I met Jerry once, when he and Mike’s mother were visiting New York in the late ’90s, a sinewy, balding man with a high-pitched voice and a spectacular mustache. It was immediately obvious just how much Mike owed to the man—the preemptive exuberance, the jaunty physical rhythms. Even the faint traces of deeper, world-weary fatigue I’d divined in Mike’s distracted pauses and half smiles. Years later, Mike mentioned in passing that his father’s favorite movie star was Jimmy Stewart—and that his favorite film was It’s a Wonderful Life—and I would imagine I’d stumbled onto the source of that high-strung, high-octane charm innate in father and son, the peculiar, willfully boyish strain that only partly masked a deeper battle against disillusionment. It was an emotional alloy familiar to anyone who knew Stewart’s heroes, all characters whose infelicitous confrontations with America’s darker truths left them, in one way or another, spiritually crippled.