Seeing stars in New York

Ferris Bueller’s hair has gone almost completely gray.

Actor Matthew Broderick, who played the perpetual adolescent, looks more like a college professor now than the too-cool-for-school teen.

You learn a lot about stars when you see them up close and in the flesh. I’m no celebrity stalker – it’ s just hard not to spot a familiar face when you’re out in New York, doing one of the million things New Yorkers love to do in the restless, intractable city of my birth.

You could be walking down 42nd Street and see Matthew Modine posing for a fashion spread, like my sisters did one summer. You could be babysitting in Central Park and bump into Kevin Bacon, like my cousin did, and still does. At the doctor’s office you might see Nicole Kidman leaving the building, still glowing from an appointment with dermatologist-to-the-stars Patricia Wexler, MD.

New York is more Hollywood than Hollywood… in my experience, anyway. I’ve been to Los Angeles three times and never spotted even a Z-list actor. It’s like going to a zoo where all the animals are hidden in their cages. You’re more likely to get involved in a car accident with Lindsay Lohan than actually spot her walking down the street, and there’s the rub in that sprawling, public-transportation-less, car-crazy city.

Celebrities love to live in New York, on the other hand, because they can go about their business without being hassled. Even if they’ve been spotted, everyone in the immediate vicinity tries their best to act cool and unfazed, as if seeing Mena Suvari daintily eating sushi were an everyday occurrence. And who knows, maybe it is at Nobu, where my brother actually had a close encounter with the American Beauty starlet.

My brother Gary is a chef, so while vacationing in the Big Apple, he went to Nobu to check out the food. Anyway, all thoughts of food flew out the window when he spotted a gorgeous blonde sitting at the sushi bar. It was Suvari, dining out – alone – on a Friday night. After she had exited the restaurant, my brother got up the courage to approach her with another out-of-towner he had been chatting with. The Nobu bouncer rushed to intervene, but Mena held up a hand and said, "No, it’s okay." After a few minutes of small talk, Suvari sweetly allowed Gary and his buddy to take pictures with her, before getting into her limo. It would have been a complete Cloud-9 experience for my bro, had he not called after her, "Nice to meet you… Miss Sorvino!"

In Manhattan, you never know where you’re going to have a brush with fame. It could be on a street corner, where my brother also spotted Hilary Swank standing and letting out an indelicate, open-mouthed yawn while he passed by on a city bus. He took a second look to be sure it was her, and – sure enough – husband Chad Lowe was standing right next to her.

You could see someone famous in as mundane a place as a Tower Records, where I spotted fashion designer Marc Jacobs shopping for CDs, or at a Loews movie theater, where my husband and I saw Greg Kinnear. Apparently we had been in the same Chelsea cinema watching James Toback’s Two Girls and a Guy, and when the film let out, Kinnear was in the lobby with his girlfriend, discussing the movie with a group of friends. Though my husband and I gathered that he’d liked the film, all we could talk about was how Kinnear looked exactly like he does in his movies, except a lot shorter.

Hot restaurants are usually great places to spot celebs. At Balthazar I saw Marc Jacobs (again – doesn’t he ever stay at home?) power lunching with his pal, Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon. At Lucky Strike I had brunch alongside Willem Dafoe who, unlike Kinnear, looks a lot better in person than in his films. He’s strikingly fair, for one thing, and handsome in a white, Nosferatu sort of way. Dafoe is also a devoted family man: he was sharing breakfast with his small, equally fair son while trying to read the paper.

Over drinks at The Whiskey, the bar at the Philippe Starck-designed Paramount Hotel, my husband and I observed actor Josh Charles walk in, accompanied only by his agent. For a New York hotspot, The Whiskey was remarkably deserted at that time of night, and we could easily have sauntered over to Charles’s table and asked for an autograph. Unfortunately I am as bad with names and faces as the rest of my family, and though I could remember Charles’s face from the movie Threesome, the only name I could dig up from my faulty memory vaults was Chris O’Donnell. So I guess it was for the best that – although the actor kept looking over at us, probably hoping for a "Hey, aren’t you Josh Charles from Threesome?" – the most my husband and I could manage were weak smiles from our banquette.

Film and acting schools are also choice watering holes for Hollywood talent. My sister Jenny, who studied for a summer at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, took a master class with her idol, Ralph Fiennes, who’s not Nazi commandant-intimidating at all, but soft-spoken, humorous, with killer eye contact.

Meanwhile my youngest sister Marie, who studied directing at New York’s Columbia University, met stars like Adam Sandler, Matt Dillon, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Inside the Actors’ Studio-type settings. According to her, Sandler doesn’t clown around at all in real life. He just sat there, in his white pants and sneakers, quietly observing every single person in the room.

Dillon was there to promote his directorial debut, City of Ghosts, which was so incomprehensible the projectionist wasn’t sure if he had switched Reel One with Reel Two. The verdict? "Oh, Matt was totally hot. The movie was horrible."

Off campus, Marie sat next to Keri Russell at a Lower East Side café, where the Felicity star was partaking of vegetarian hummus and pita bread while reading a thick book. Perhaps remembering her old waitressing days, Russell left a hugely generous tip, "like $40 or something."

But best of all, this year’s Best Actor Oscar nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman taught my sister "Directing the Actor" at Columbia. "P. Ho," as he was fondly called by his class, would come to class dressed like a six-year-old, in shorts and oversize T-shirt, carrying the most supersized McDonald’s soft drinks available. His instruction was anything but juvenile, though. Novice actors became brilliant in his sure, theater-bred hands – so much so that ex-smokers in the class took up the habit again just to glean a few gems from the Capote star during his cigarette breaks.

If, unlike us, you disdain waiting for fate to hand you an A-lister, go see stars in their natural habitat, treading the floorboards onstage. Many actors head to Broadway to hone their chops – to prove that they are real thespians, like Alec Baldwin in A Streetcar Named Desire or Natalie Portman in The Diary of Anne Frank. Of course, some are born to the stage, like Matthew Broderick. But while most remember him best from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Producers, he was already my crush as Neil Simon’s alter-ego in plays like Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. Maybe that’s why seeing Biloxi Blues onstage was a double treat for me: not only did I get to see Broderick before he made the film, but Superman himself, Christopher Reeve, was in the audience that gave him a standing ovation. (This was before the fall from the horse, before the paralysis and the baldness.) After Broderick took his last curtain call, Reeve waited for the theater to empty, hunched in his seat so nobody would recognize his 6’3" frame topped by a lush sweep of black hair. It was hard to miss those blazing blue eyes, though, and once my siblings and I shyly approached, he amiably signed our Playbills.

I must have some weird spiritual connection with Matthew Broderick, though, because during my last trip to New York I ran into him again, this time at the Barnes & Noble book store on Fifth Avenue. I wouldn’t have recognized the gray-haired figure clad in tweed if he hadn’t walked right in front of me. Broderick was on a quest for the brand-new Bob Dylan memoir, and started chatting up an attractive blonde woman who was most definitely not his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker. Not-Sarah stayed by his side until he had located what he wanted: a coffee-table book so new it wasn’t even on the shelves yet, but in a stack on the floor. Of course, Matthew had to have the most pristine volume in the pile, which was conveniently located at the very bottom. So while he struggled not to send books flying everywhere, I debated whether to go over, pretend to be one of the staff and offer my assistance. But before I could give in to my inner stalker, a little voice told me no, that wouldn’t be cool. This was New York, after all, where everyone – even celebrities – deserves to be treated like an ordinary upstanding citizen, and you never know whose famous face you might see around the next corner.