Starlet.

I’ve heard tell that words like chime, melody, and lullaby are the most beautiful words in the English language. Lovely, to be sure, but I find starlet — the word and the act of being — to be a rare state of grace. When a star falls and strikes ground with one last, plaintive twinkle, the sound it makes? Starlet…

There was a time before there were Fame Whores and Celebutantes who have shows on E! and lay claim to fame just for being themselves when the ambitious race of Starlet People populated Hollywood. They were the studio contract players plucked out of beauty pageants and drama schools — hometown beauties made good who went off to Tinseltown and found the gates to the Emerald City thrown open for them. If stars are the established, volatile, and demanding talent, then starlets are the hungry, needy would-bes out to prove their worth and be chosen.

Yes, it’s starlets who are the magnetic, vacant Tabula Rasas on which we can project all our personal obsessions, but the male variety has always been in comparatively short supply. Every so often you’ll get a Christopher George, Joe Dallesandro, or Jon-Erik Hexum, but it’s harder for men to approximate the doe-eyed sex kittenry and goofy naivete (“Won’t that be the day!”) that women exude as they’re chased around desks or pose in publicity stills. Male starletry has sadly fallen into the hands of celebrity broods and Reality TV douches as of late, and it sickens me.

But one man still embodies everything a starlet should be: the inestimable Marcus Patrick.

The key to starletry is not only taking risks — it’s being able to adapt your repertoire when opportunity arises. You have to be able to do it all. Marcus’s roles include: a stripper, a surfer, a priest, a bigamist, a stripper, a DJ who helps a date rape victim rebuild her life by raping her rapist, a mercenary, and a fag hag-befriending stripper. If he were Ann-Margret or Mamie Van Doren, he’d have his own section on my revolving DVD shelf. On Days Of Our Lives alone — from which he was canned in 2006 for doing a full-frontal layout in Playgirl — he starred as Jett Carver: pilot, ISA agent, prostitution ring infiltrator, amnesiac, and the hottest security guard ever at Salem University.

It’s one thing to be a MAW (that’s Model/Actor/Whatever), but it’s a whole other bag to actually live the life of a starlet. Marcus has been a Euro boy band member, the British Tae Kwon Do Junior and Men’s Heavyweight champion, a gymnast, a go-go boy, an actor, a stripper, a mainstream model, a nude model, a personal trainer, developed his own fitness regimen, had his own calendar, and been engaged to a porn star. Moving into the phase wherein a starlet becomes reflective and inspirational, he’s a become a humanitarian and raw food advocate. Now he’s taken on the role of a lifetime:

Jesus.

It sounds like I mock because I was basically born basted in irony, but I sincerely love this man. I’d like to Svengali his ass in a Love and Death on Long Island sort of way. In the same way that Raquel Welch‘s One Million Years B.C. pin-up hangs on my wall and Jaclyn Smith‘s Kelly Garrett from Charlie’s Angels seems to hold all the mysteries of the universe behind her perfect, blank visage (Air created a deserved electro starlet paean for her) and Breck hair, so too does Marcus command my worship. When I listen to his mid-’90s Eurodisco anthem “Love Me” (“The power of one — and I’ve got much more!”) while on the elliptical, I believe he’s just being candid. His come-and-go American accent isn’t wonky — it’s international. And now that he’s joined a — I won’t call it a cult — collective of Christian macrobiotic vegans (didn’t this same thing happen to Sydney Andrews on Melrose Place, or was it Jerri Blank on Strangers With Candy?), I know he’s gonna be OK because he can kill with his bare hands if he has to. The group has produced a film based on the vegetarian leanings of Jesus, and who better than smokesmodel Marcus to essay him?

Religious sex scandals have become more frequent and hilarious since around 2005 when Bush America began to buckle under its own sanctimony, and porn has creeped into so many of them that the idea of Jesus being personified by a stud who gets cash stuffed into his g-string nightly in West Hollywood and moonlights in muscle porn makes a weird sense at this stage.

Even Jeff Palmer has a personal relationship with God, and Jesus is like James Bond or Tarzan; he’s been played by X-number of actors, and his fans/worshippers simply transfer their own needs onto him with a new face. I’m convinced that if he ever did truly reveal himself and looked not like a man, but a winged serpent or an eagle-headed humanoid, his cred with the masses would plummet because he would cease to be an extension of the believer’s self. Biracial, spin-kicking, seaweed-eating Marcus-as-Jesus is akin Black Barbie or Blacula — the face is determined by the needs of the beholder.

Recent years have given us the Greed Is Good Prosperity Gospel, The Family’s Merciless Power Gospel, and even a Green Power Gospel, so the latest spin-off is the Raw Food Gospel, which posits Jesus was a herbivore for whom consuming flesh was anathema and colon flushing was sacred. It’s pretty harmless as these interpretations go, and Marcus’s elucidations amount to the only religious pitch I’ve ever been able to listen to without wondering whether I could puncture a missionary’s heart with my two fingers. Maybe all sermons should be delivered by the mocha-skinned and genetically-blessed instead of wizened televangelists and men in dresses. As Marcus blithely asserts that “I’m kind of the rebel that is willing to do what Jesus did,” you know you’re venturing into irony-free waters and bound for the Lost Continent where dwells the fabled City of The Starlets.

Have a seat as Marcus — with guileless, clear-eyed sincerity that makes me want to rest my head on his knee — introduces us to the Essene Gospels in a fireside chat. Less manic than Tom Cruise, less wingnutty than Kirk Cameron, and less full of shit (in every sense) than Kevin Trudeau, Marcus looks like a yoga instructor or denizen of Shangri-La, and may be the first proselytizer to doff his shirt and flex during an exhortation on faith-based nutrition and still stay on topic. Meet his friend Angelic who is aging backward. Side-eye as he assures us that models and actors treat their bodies like temples by eating only fruits and leafy greens. Watch him race a 60-year-old man through the mountains, but do not snicker at the repeated use of the phrase “going raw.” Then commit his deadpanned contrasting of a “raw lasagna” with a “Satanic pizza” to memory, because The Raw and The Cooked-style anthropology never before had this much naked star quality on its side.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com