James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning

They see producers, agents, managers, writers, other actors and actresses, studio executives, moguls. Despite the fact that many of these people absolutely despise each other, they look like they are all in love, deeply, truly and wildly in love. Kiss on the cheek, pat on the back, give me a hug, buddy, let's take a picture. And then, please please please go straight to the restroom and fuck yourself.

James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning

It's become a commonplace observation that a public scourging is as often as not, a great career move. And with his above-cited novel lingering among the country's top 150 sellers (it's been as high as #43 on the USA Today list, shortly after its May 22 publication date) it's hard to say that James Frey, 39, hasn't benefited in some way from his notoriety.

But oh, what notoriety. The New York Times' David Carr (of whom more below) observed after a cataclysmic mea culpa appearance on Oprah that the talk show host, once Frey's greatest admirer, had "snapped [Frey and publisher Nan Talese] in two like dry winter twigs."

Oprah ended an extended denunciation of Frey's not-entirely-true memoir A Million Little Pieces by declaring, "I believe the truth matters," to what Carr described as thunderous, though he may as well have said vindictive, applause.

Frey gives a pained chuckle when asked about the "just spell the name right" theory: "I would never want to go through that again. People go, `Hey, any press is good press' and I just laugh and go, `God, you don't know'."

One wonders how Frey managed to sit up, dust himself off, and craft a 501-page novel in reasonably short order after his time being publicly pelted with rocks.

"Whatever happened, happened," he said, "and often you don't choose what happens to you in life--you just deal with whatever it is. I wouldn't want to go through that again, and I don't take pride in some of the mistakes that I made. But I live with it and move on I write the best books I can."

There was no guarantee when he sat down to write the Times' Janet Maslin would write a section-fronting review, using his peculiar novelistic diction, and summarizing what he'd done this way:

The Million Little Pieces guy was called James Frey. He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

She applauded his rather random samplings of factoids about a banana museum and gang populations --"even the stray facts had their artistry" and forgave a streak of earnestness-- "So what if the book always made poor people humble decent better than rich spoiled profligate ones?", going on to conclude:

And it worked.

That's how James Frey saved himself.

The Los Angles Times' David Ulin was pretty much in the opposing camp, calling the new work "execrable" and "a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining," but Frey got a friendly and observant feature in the same paper, as he strolled about his former stomping grounds near the beach.

He also had the ongoing consolation of the more than decent sales figures A Million Little Pieces (and a similarly truthy follow-up, My Friend Leonard) enjoyed, whether for their intrinsic storytelling merits or via the market stimulus that came via all the controversy. For Frey, the money isn't key, but the audience is all-important:

Yeah, I've done all right. When people ask me about money, I always say if I could get paid ten bucks and have a million people read my book or get paid a million bucks and have ten people read my book I'd take the ten bucks and the million people every time. I don't do what I do for money if I was doing something purely for cash I'd be a banker. I write books because I love books.

As a look at his wardrobe as seen on book jackets will attest, Frey estimates he spends $300 a year on clothes, and he's still driving the Toyota 4 Runner he's had since he was 22. Born and raised in Ohio, he lives in Soho with his family, and admits to a second home in the culturati playground Amagansett on Long Island. But as he attests in his novel, "Artists have always had an uncomfortable relationship with money ... the lifestyle is far harder, lonelier and more boring than can be imagined."

Frey's reviled memoir was very much present in the mind of the Times' Carr when he set out to write his own memoir, The Night of the Gun, a hair-raising (and often hilarious, sometimes touching) skein of scarifying anecdotes that should cause something of a sensation when it's published in August.

Carr got a reported $300,000 for the book, which he richly earns not just with its entertaining, cockeyed charms but for the complete exposure he subjects his bad, former self to. Crackhead, batterer, bad dad, and all around loadee, he's unsparing in his self-laceration but moving in his determination.

Although both Carr and Fey fit the modern profile of bi-coastal beings, there's still a certain geographical divide Frey outlines in his book: The process by which literary and theatrical names form the East coast are snapped up by a Hollywood that's hungry for respectability.

"There is a phenomenon," he writes, of "many a promising playwright turned into a TV hack, novelist into mumbling screenwriter stage actor intro preening sitcom star, and theater director into director of soap commercials."

As Frey's notoriety turned him from memoirist to fabulist, he was detached from his agent and publisher, but neither Hollywood nor the editors at his current publishing house, Harper Collins, had a problem with that. He's got a screenplay handed in to director Tony Scott, (for whom he has nothing but praise) based on the autobiography of Hell's Angel leader Sonny Barger, and more book ideas. (When pressed, he won't disavow the notion of a novel of manners set in his posh Long Island enclave.)

As much optimism and civic spirit as Frey shows in his novel, which lays out four plot lines that he pointedly doesn't interweave in the fashion of Short Cuts or Crash, there's a dark underbelly to Frey's Los Angles. For some of the characters there is violence in the offing, but the sternest portrait is of "public heterosexual ... private homosexual" movie star Amberton Parker, a mélange of corrupt movie star tendencies who moves from starring in a row of action vehicles ("If they're evil, and are threatening America, he kills them. Kills them dead") to becoming a cinematic "Symbol of truth, and justice, honesty, and integrity."

It's Amberton and his (also privately gay) wife Casey who observe the premiere described at the top of this column, and when his love object--a college sports star turned agent--threatens to cut him loose, Casey direly warns, "Your job is to service us. Your past as some sort of college football superhero, while interesting and sort of cue, is meanings to people how are as famous as we are...If we want you fired, it can be done with a phone call... because people all over the world pay money to see us."

It's more description than invective, insists Frey: "I look at the film industry in what I believe is a very realistic way. It can be a very brutal, ugly unforgiving place, and it's all about money. If you go into it thinking it's about anything else, you're gonna get roughed up. So when I go to L.A. to do a job or I take a job in he industry, I go in knowing what I'm getting myself into. The film industry is a place where here's massive money and massive fame and I think of that of being indicting of those things more than it is the industry itself."

None of this is to say Frey's not enjoying his trips to the West Coast. He staged a rock and roll book reading in cooperation with a young metal group called Black Tide, that resulted in eight arrests at the Whiskey on Sunset, and recently he stopped by the Chateau Marmont and accidentally ran into photographer Terry Richardson (his collaborator on a photo-and-text limited edition based on the novel), and began partying with him, Pamela Anderson, and some Hells Angels of their mutual acquaintance.

"That could only happen in LA, he approvingly notes. Unlike a thuggy foreign-born hit man who more than anything wants a SAG card and tries to help Amberton out of a jam, Frey doesn't close his interview by saying, `Go away little man with voice machine and pencil. You disappear now.'" Instead, he summarizes how he stayed on his feet despite that very pubic beating that came in the wake of A Million Little Pieces:

"I'm a writer. That's what I do, and the only thing I know how to do. You try to focus word by word, and sentence by sentence. I just needed to get back to work. I always say, and people laugh but it's true, that everybody has bad times at work and everybody has bad days. And bad years. I had a really bad year. But that doesn't mean you quit or you walk away. You do your best to get through it and go back to work."

(James  Frey, July 2006; photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage)

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