The Rock Is An Onion

By Mark Leyner

As if struck by the adamantine sword of the Scorpion King, THE ROCK of ages is cleft for me. On one side, he's the indefatigably charismatic World Wrestling Federation superstar, a cocky, trash-talking fictional construct who punctuates baroque WWF story lines with the most famous physiognomic gesture in the history of sports entertainment--a vaulting eyebrow hoisted high above a gimlet stare. The Rock is the People's Champion, who employs something called the People's Elbow as his coup de grace.

On the other side, he's Dwayne Johnson, an amiable and quietly articulate young man with a chiseled physique. A mensch with muscles. His expression is warm, his intelligence keen. He shakes hands and signs autographs and poses for snapshots with wide-eyed kids, smiling and exuding the most perfectly innate grace and noblesse oblige you could ever want in a chair-wielding wrestler turned sword-swinging movie star.

Over lunch (The Rock/Johnson has a double order of pancakes), he seems almost coy about hyping his just-released action blockbuster The Scorpion King, in which he plays Mathayus, reprising the role he briefly assumed in The Mummy Returns. He spends the entire film in brown leather battle gear, impaling and slashing his enemies, except when he stops to have sex with a sorceress, after which, natch, her psychic powers are diminished.

Johnson, who turns 30 on May 2, is a third-generation wrestler and the son of an African-American father and a Samoan mother. His life has not always been so peachy, and in talking about it, he seems to let down his guard. He admits that only six years ago he'd sunk to a low point. His attempt to make it in the NFL had fizzled and he was living on a "p___-stained mattress" in Alberta, Canada. He says that even now he has few real friends on the WWF circuit. "I like doing things by myself," he tells me. He speaks sincerely of his commitment to learning the acting craft. He reminisces tenderly about the birth of his daughter, whom he describes as being "wrapped up like a burrito." He confesses to me that he suffers from a chronic Dunkin' Donuts addiction.

And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, this Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, whoever he is--he's a really decent guy, introspective, with a true sense of proportion about what's meaningful in life. Plus, he makes you feel as if he's really, really confiding in you.

Then, a week after the lunch, I'm trawling magazines for stories about The Scorpion King, and I discover verbatim recapitulations of almost every spontaneous aside and admission that I had thought Johnson made to me and me only. This guy is good. From the "p___-stained mattress" to his favorite doughnuts--glazed, chocolate-chocolate frosted, blueberry--it's all there.

I'm crushed. But then I realize something. Maybe Dwayne Johnson is as meticulously written and choreographed a character as The Rock. And that for the duration of my lunch with him, I'd been written into the Dwayne Johnson story line. It was all "a work"--wrestling jargon for a scripted bout.

Parsing the iconography of The Rock/Dwayne Johnson--a guy who's as comfortable at Make-a-Wish Foundation fund raisers as he is on the Howard Stern Show--is a task worthy of a French semiotician. He represents the postmillennial celebrity--a simulated character overlaying other simulated characters. This is The Rock's secret and perhaps ultimate persona: the Onion. Let others peel away the skin to find another skin beneath. Just ensure that every layer is as tasty as the one before and America will cry for more.