Chapter 1

BORN FOR IT: FIRST STIRRINGS OF STARDOM 

“…and ye shall find him wrapped in swaddling cloths and laying in a manger…” – Luke 2:14

Readers, note: I quote the above biblical text not to cast myself in any sort of Messianic glow but rather to pay homage to the even humbler beginnings of one of my favorite celebrities, Jesus Christ. If he rose to such heights from a dung-flecked pile of hay, think how much further I may yet climb from my upper middle class private school education in Baton Rouge! Fingers crossed.

(I also hope the New Testament scripture and my reverence for the Christ may serve as gentle reminders to readers and fans who too often forget that my surname is deceptive! Like my mother I am a baptized and confirmed member of First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge and am not – I repeat, not – a Jew. Perhaps I will season this book with periodic reminders of that fact in the form of favorite parables or the like. I won’t deny that in show business and in New York in general it can pay to “work a Jewish angle” and I’ll confess to having done so more than once – what celebrity has not at some point chosen the ends over the means? But there is a big difference between laughing at and pretending to understand an in-joke centered around some incomprehensible Yiddish jibber-jabber on the one hand and actually rejecting the son of God on the other!)

My first chance to truly parade my talent on the world stage came in the second grade, when I was cast in the role of Narrator in the class “French Play,” which was an annual foreign-language affair performed by the second graders whose title - the “French Play” - was oddly in English. The story concerned a merry band of roving French animals – a cat, dog, and mouse, among others! – who sang their way around the countryside and danced on the pont d’Avignon. I “narrated” – en francaise! – with a painted-on curled mustache that presaged my eventually legendary “porn star” or “child molester” mustache of the years 2001-07. (My “Lost Years” – see photo and the chapter Intimacies with Strangers – “the many men I’ve never loved”.) 

I was enrolled in private school run by Episcopalians. Which means that we had nice clothes and attended chapel but weren’t actually encouraged to cultivate a true faith in God. First from pre-kindergarten through fourth grade at St. James, downtown – that antebellum grande dame of Baton Rouge steeples. How even as a child I relished the urban experience – spending recess clinging to the ancient iron fence along the playground, gazing at the bustling downtown street, which was actually usually deserted. I was safer on the fence, far from the repetitive and brutish games of football played by the boys on the other side of the yard – games to which I was in any event not invited. On days when Father had his Kiwanis meeting nearby he would stop and greet me at my fence – how desperately I longed to be dragged over that fence and out of my cage, even if my skin were to be gouged in the process on its pointed iron tips and I were to trail a river of blood en route to anywhere freer. There was to be much scotch and therapy in my future!

…and there’s more to come, as the paparazzi gears up for a reading of excerpts from I Light Up My Life: the Mark Sam Celebrity Autobiography on Friday August 6 at 9:30 pm at Dixon Place, NYC.