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A week later, I was walking onto the set where The Movie Star was shooting another film. After all the weeks of ceaseless awareness of him, I had managed to wangle my way into a situation that would make him aware of me, if only temporarily.

I'd been so ensnared by impulse and fantasy that only when I spotted him in the near distance, ambling off the set, did it dawn on me that what I'd set into motion would lead necessarily to one of two outcomes: Either he would be interested in me or he wouldn't, and I had no idea which would hurt less.

He was tall, though not as tall as I'd imagined. And he was wonderfully male, in the way that Gary Cooper was male: craggy and sinewy and strong enough to betray a certain, unexpected fragility, the sort of man who comes across as tough and stubborn and gentle and more apt to break than to bend.

He opened the door to the trailer the movie studio had supplied for him and motioned for me to go inside. The interior was stupefyingly garish, with walls and seats upholstered in fake crimson velvet.

"It's like something a Louisiana whore picked out," he said, "and thought was real nice."

An interview can take on a hypnotic quality if both parties disregard the strictures imposed by conventional manners and the absence of familiarity. This requires a willingness and trust that cannot be coaxed into being. You either have these qualities or you don't, and at first, as we sat opposite each other on the fake velvet banquettes flanking the fake mahogany table, it was distressing to see that we didn't have them.

He glanced at me with a look that was intense and slightly suspicious, as if he was trying to discern something I might be hiding from him. He drummed his fingers on the table as we went back and forth in a mindless conversation that was more like fencing than talking, except for moments when he paused and said nothing at all for as much as a minute, while I tried to act as if that didn’t unnerve me. But then, for no reason that I could decipher, he leaned back in the banquette, uncrossed his arms, opened the can of soda on the table, and slid it over to me in what I took to be a peace offering.

Film stars are almost uniformly more attractive from a distance; up close the aura tends to tarnish fast. There are too many vanities, too much self-absorption, too much conversation about why they're angry with their agent.

He was far more appealing and winning than most, with a fierce, explosive laugh that signaled a capacity for delight as well as a refusal to bow to the gnawing sadness that had always plagued him.

I had never encountered a man who was such a burning composite of opposites: open and shielded, engaged and remote, laid-back and tightly wound. He was the only star I've ever met who loved to listen as much as he loved to talk, and when I spoke he would lean forward, murmuring mm-hmm, mm-hmm under his breath as if punctuating my words with his attention. I learned quickly to read his pauses, and to not be alarmed by them. They were his way of gathering himself; they were silences he needed.

As the assistant had implied, he was smart, and he was also given to charmingly eccentric perceptions. "I read this article about the universe," he said. "It says stars have two purposes: They provide energy with their light and supply heavy chemicals that make up our universe. That's like hogs saying, 'People have two purposes. One is to build us pens and the other is to bring us slop.'"

He had been many places and done many things and had had more than his share of women and praise. He could have been jaded, but he had retained a sense of wonder that was endearing, even childlike. "Have you been to Inner Space at Disneyland?" he asked. "You go into this magnified atom of a snowflake. It's beautiful seeing the symmetry of snowflakes. It's almost like God's clues. You look around and say, 'Listen, man, this can't be no accident.'"

He talked about writers and actors and musicians he admired, who were, for the most part, obscure. The often scant correspondence between talent and success infuriated him and left him suspecting that his own standing as the world's latest heartthrob had all the meaning and substance of a sand castle.

Though he had acquired the renown and riches that others dream of, he had dreamt of other things, had started out with loftier, more thoughtful goals than the ones he had achieved. Now, facing the dissonance between who he was and who he wanted to be, he felt like a sellout.

Maybe he felt that way, I said, because many of the people he respected most were not successful in the usual, commercial sense.

He stared at me. "You're paying attention, ain't cha?" he said.

It was a strange thing to say since—despite my roiling fantasies—we both knew that I was there to pay attention. In fact, he garnered a stunning degree of attention, arguably too much, but I could see that it was of no use to him, for it was the kind of attention that has to do with being admired, and he was seeking the sort of attention that results in being understood.

I had come to him as a reporter, with a shrouded need. It had not occurred to me until that moment that he needed something from me.

Buy Elizabeth Kaye's Sleeping with Famous Men for $1.99.