Keryn has rounded up Edge and other Irish refugees—Ned, Maurice, Suzanne—and organized a car to take us to the Japanese restaurant. When we get there an Asian woman is standing in the doorway waving

[357]

At us to hurry, hurry or we'll lose our table. But stop. Who's this sitting alone at a table outside the place? It's Morleigh. Edge is surprised and delighted. Morleigh had to come home to Los Angeles after Bono's party to have a heart-to-heart with her boyfriend about the fact that she and Edge were falling for each other. I had the impression that Edge wasn't sure which way it was going to go, but I guess it's gone his way. Edge and Morleigh mumble to each other and study their shoes like schoolkids.

Well, this could be good news for the other three. If Edge gets a girlfriend maybe they can stop working for a while!

The next day, though, Edge has to do the work for all of them. Some smooth talker in the U2 camp convinced everyone else that the best way for U2 to perform at the MTV awards show would be for Edge to go there and sing "Numb" in person with the other three on videotape on big TV sets. (No doubt Tom Sawyer could have convinced Edge to whitewash his fence too.) The scene backstage at Universal Studios, where the show is being done, is chaos. It's ninety-five degrees and everyone's a star. There's Sharon Stone, Whoopi Goldberg, Keanu Reeves, Christian Slater, Sting, Sinead, Gabriel, R.E.M., Arrested Devel­opment, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith, and on and on and on and on. Everybody knows everybody, but it's hard for people to keep straight if they know each other 'cause they've actually met before or because they've seen each other on talk shows.

Edge is given a trailer just outside the theater's back gate, in a long row of celebrity mobile homes. His next door neighbor is Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder and his girlfriend Beth Liebling come out and wave like the folks down the block sayin' howdy. Actually the whole setup is a sort of Superstar Trailer Park. The longest limousine in the world pulls up in front of us—one of those comically extended Cadillacs you'd see in a movie parodying Texas—and Eddie says, "Who could that be? Who would come to this in a car like that?" We wait anxiously for the door to open and out hobbles Milton Berle, the ancient comedian who was America's first TV superstar forty years ago.

As soon as Uncle Miltie is ushered inside, along comes the Universal Studio tour, a train of oversize golf carts loaded with families in short pants who have just seen the shark from Jaws and the Jurassic Park display and are now being shown the freaks of rock & roll. Edge waves at the tourists, who stare blankly at him as they pass.

[358]

"They get to see you right after the dinosaurs," I observe.

"You mean Steven Tyier?" Eddie asks. Then he smiles and waves to the vacant tourists. When they are almost out of sight Eddie hurls the orange he's been eating at the trailer. Hits it too.

Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers comes running up in a baseball cap and an agitated state. "You gotta be honest with me," he says. "I just got a haircut and you gotta tell me how it looks." Flea pulls off his cap to reveal a new crew cut and a high forehead. "Nah, it looks fine," Eddie assures him. Flea seems relieved—he's about to go on TV. Then Eddie, smiling, adds, "Makes you look like Sting." Flea rushes off to get a mohawk—but not before Eddie's reminded him to wave to the next tour bus.

Pearl Jam goes in to rehearse just after R.E.M. finishes. Peter Buck watches from the empty auditorium and says, "If their new album is good, they're going to be the biggest band in the world."

Wading into the backstage celebrity throng is like going swimming through tides of ego, anxiety, power, and tension. There's the Spin Doctors, there's Soul Asylum, there's Janet Jackson, there's Nirvana, there's Madonna, there's the guy who plays Kramer on Seinfeld. I'm standing out back talking to Sinead O'Connor when Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love breeze past looking health, happy, and wholesome. He is wearing a striped, long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans, she is wearing a white Marilyn Monroe dress and they are bouncing their baby daughter be­tween them while every photographer in California snaps roll after roll of the happy couple. No doubt this will become the official Cobain family portrait. Sinead, herself a young parent and herself the object of intense media condemnation, zips over to Courtney and starts asking about the baby. Pretty soon they're chatting about child rearing like two suburban moms in the A&P.

There is some adventure going on amid all this bonding too. Rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg is zigging and zagging through the backstage passes trying to stay one step ahead of Los Angeles cops, who want to arrest him for allegedly driving a Jeep from which his bodyguard shot and killed a probationer who had threatened Snoop. The police want to charge the rapper with being an accessory to murder. Snoop apparently hopes to fulfill his obligations to MTV before considering his debt to society.

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