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. . . INK: An actor-model-musician-promoter who also wants to be a muse by Mark Wallace The New Yorker, The Talk of the Town, February 15, 1997 Look closely at the hundred and sixty-six tiny celebrity head shots on the cover of Bret Easton Ellis's new novel, "Glamorama," and you will notice that pride of place has been given to Donovan Leitch, Manhattan's pennial "It" boy. This is not a coincidence, according to the model, singer, actor, and occasional night-club promoter, whose struggling glam-rock revival band, Nancy Boy, is in negotiations for a recording contract with Disney's Mammoth Records. "That novel is basically based on my life," Leitch said the other nightr at an apres-ski theme party he was hosting at B Bar. "I used to know Bret, sort of. I talked to him a couple of years ago, and he said, 'I'm writing a character for a novel and the picture I have in my head of him is you.'" And according to Kirsty Hume, Leitch's supermodel wife, "When Bret gave Donovan the book, he said it was kind of based on Donovan." "Glamorama" relates the unfortunate adventures of Victor Ward, a "quasi-famous" male mofel who dates a very famous supermodel. In Ward, Ellis has created a character who is as reliable a fixture on the Manhattan club scene as . . . well, as Donovan Leitch. Like Ward, Leitch plays in a struggling rock band, has appeared in Calvin Klein ads, and has dated supermodels. Like Leitch, who appeared in the 1988 remake of "The Blob," Ward finds himself up for a part in a cheesy horror movie. Also like Leitch, Ward has a father who is something of a celebrity himself, though he is a United States senator with designs on the presidency, rather than a peave-loving nineteen-sixties pop icon with a bowl haircut. Ellis, speaking by telephone between stops on his book tour for "Glamorama," was surprised and a bit amused to hear that Leitch had claimed such close kinship with his protagonist. "Victor Ward is a total figment, a total summation of all the things that I found very annoying about men of my generation, and he really wasn't based on anyone that I know," Ellis said. "I started writing this book before I even know who Donovan Leitch was." Still, Ellis conceded that "all the stuff going on in celebrity culture" fuelled the writing of "Glamorama." "I wouldn't be surprised in maybe unconcsciously I kept flashing on Donovan Leitch during the creation of this book," he said. Leitch and Hume do have cameo roles in the novel (along with hundreds of other celebrities and demi-celebrities, and "someone named Susan Sontag"), appearing as themselves in a Todd Oldham fashion show. When Leitch was told of Ellis's denials, he amiably went along with the author's subliminal-suggestion theory. "I think I was just fitted into the scheme somewhere," he said. "I don't know if there's another male model out there who has all the same character traits that I have." For Leitch, even the book's later chapters, in which Victor Ward falls in with a pack of models turned terrorists, resonated. "The similarities between being a terrorist and being a male model are not that dissimilar, you know. It's like a certain pose, and you're sort of distant from your career and you're just sort of apathetic in a way." Fortunately for Leitch, his life has yet to take the Grand Guignol turn that Victor Ward's takes in "Glamorama." He and Hume are planning to move out of Manhattan, to Woodstock, where he will concentrate on composing and recording his album. These days, Leitch admits, "life is not as glam as it used to be. But when we come out with the new record and everything, we'll get back into it." -30- |
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