They laughed for this sudden relief from the burden of manners, and the laughter bound them across languages as they ate and drank on the marble terrace in the Roman night.
by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon
Chapter 1
A world before, he’d starred in a major summer spectacle, a movie that had effortlessly cruised to a $220 million global box office, with thirty-five percent of this fortune marked for Carrey personally, flooding into his financial reservoirs from distribution territories stretching, as was said, “from Tuscaloo to Timbuktu.” That the film was, even by his own estimation, firmly in his second tier only made its success sweeter: the greater the impunity, the closer to God.
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| Jim Carrey looks on as Dana Vachon types. (Courtesy) |
He’d filled with the love of the crowd as the blockbuster rolled out and on, opening in London, Moscow, Berlin. He entered Rome as a slapstick Caesar, walking a hundred-yard- long red carpet where he saw a publicist crouching right in his path and—gauging the moment like a cliff diver the rising tide—tripped right over the guy, going down spread eagle, head and shoulders walloping the carpet so hard that the crowd believed he’d died right in front of them. Lying there, Carrey thought of his uncle Des, shot and killed in a Bigfoot costume while on his way to prank a corn boil. Some lunged to help the star. Others just gasped. Carrey let their concern build before bouncing up like a coil and giving every subsequent interview with one eye crossed.
After, there was a dinner in his honor at the Quirinale Palace. A table for one hundred had been set by the president of the Italian republic. They’d all come for a brush with performative genius and watched, appreciatively, as at the head of the table, Carrey asked the veteran sommelier pouring wine into his glass if he could inspect the bottle. The man stopped and handed it to him. Jim sniffed the cork and examined the label, all of it just a setup for the moment where he plugged the bottle into his
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| "Memoirs and Misinformation" by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon. (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) |
mouth and took a long chug before, with the face of a true connoisseur, declaring, “Wonderful. They’ll love it.” They did. They roared, all of them: the Swiss art dealer and the Three Men from Merck and the waiters watching from the kitchen, where the cooks were laughing, too. And the Camorra enforcer who had, that week, put two bodies in the Tiber. And the Swedish ambassador’s husband. They laughed for this sudden relief from the burden of manners, and the laughter bound them across languages as they ate and drank on the marble terrace in the Roman night.
A twelve-piece orchestra played tangos, music that moved the owner of a dry-cleaning chain, a round woman, lonely in her late fifties, to decide, after three proseccos, that, having paid five thousand dollars to a corrupt senator’s even-more-corrupt secretary to be here, there was no reason not to approach Carrey for a dance. She moved toward him like a heat-seeking credenza, and something in the boldness of her spirit swayed Jim Carrey.
Excerpted from Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon. Copyright © 2020 by Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon. Republished with permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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