‘I was lucky to have the connections I have,” admits filmmaker Nicholas Loeb, sitting in his father’s five-story townhouse on East 61st Street.
At first glance, it’s easy to be skeptical of the handsome 24-year-old whose debut indie film, “The Smokers,” boasts a cast including Dominique Swain (of “Lolita” fame), Goldie Hawn’s son Oliver Hudson, Calvin Klein model Joel West – as well as Loeb.
One’s first thought is, Loeb’s father, John L. Loeb Jr., pulled some strings – his brother-in-law is Edgar Bronfman Sr., chairman of the Seagram Company, parent company of Universal Studios; John Loeb is a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark and a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families.
Heck, last weekend (the day after this interview) John Loeb even threw his son a party at Jet East in Southhampton to celebrate his 24th birthday and the completion of his new film. The guest list included luminaries like musician Duncan Sheik and actors Stephen Dorff and Lucas Haas.
But it soon becomes clear that pigeonholing the young Loeb as a spoiled Gen-Xer isn’t really fair. Sure, in his father’s sitting room on the Upper East Side, Loeb has all the trappings of a rich kid. But if ever there was a breathing embodiment of the old cliche that money can’t buy you happiness, he, as his traumatic, yet compelling story will show, is it.
For starters, in 1996 his mother, beautiful socialite Meta Harrsen, took a train from her home in Durham, N.C., to the office of her third husband, Jeff Bauer. There, she shot him with a .357-caliber Magnum before killing herself the same way.
“It was the last thing I’d expected her to do,” Loeb says simply. He has clear skin, is clean-shaven, preppy-looking in an olive polo shirt and blue jeans. He speaks hesitantly in a very low voice. “We were very close when that happened, closer than we’d been for a while. I thought things were getting better for her.”
Loeb’s parents divorced when he was a year old. His father, in light of his mother’s mental illness, retained custody of his son, raising him in his sprawling Upper East Side townhouse. (Loeb also has an older half-sister from his father’s first marriage and another younger half-sister from his mother’s second marriage to an Iranian oil tycoon.)
“Growing up in today’s world everyone is married a million times,” he says when asked if his father’s two marriages and mother’s three bothered him. “I don’t think the divorce affected me too much.” What did affect him was his mother’s absence. “From age two to nine I never saw her, I don’t know why. She’d call once a year, and I’d see her every couple years. She was always very loving and warm.”
Loeb’s surrogate mother was his nanny, Renee Doolan, who took care of him day-to-day. His father, who never remarried, dated a stream of women while Loeb was growing up-some of whom, Loeb says, “were really sweet and played with me, some of whom were absolutely horrible.”
But as Loeb got older, his relationship with his father deteriorated to the point where, at age 11 he voluntarily stayed at his New Hampshire boarding school over the summer rather than go home. “My dad would yell a lot growing up,” he explains. “I’d start screaming and crying back at him. It just got to the point where we could barely communicate.”
So when it came time for college, Loeb broke with generations of tradition; instead of going to Harvard he went to Tulane University in New Orleans.
“My grades weren’t good enough [for Harvard] – sure, maybe my family could have pushed to get me in, but I wanted to go to a school where I could get in myself,” he explains.
Although he remained distant with his father, it was during college that he built a relationship with his mother. “She called me out of the blue one day after having had no contact with me for five years,” he recalls. “I was very angry, but she kept saying that she’d been going through a lot and felt bad complicating my life.”
He began spending weekends with her family at their home in North Carolina until her death in March 1996. After her death, he broke off all contact with his father for two years. “I was so emotional. I think I directed it as anger towards him,” Loeb says.
Loeb’s father paid his tuition, but otherwise Loeb lived off of his trust funds. He is worth several million dollars. “A lot of my relatives would say, ‘He misses you, call him,’ but I just couldn’t,” he says.
He spent the summers interning at his uncle’s Universal Studios, once as a production assistant at “Primary Colors.” He says there, actress Emma Thompson was “like a mother” to him.
“[It was] as if she (Thompson) could sense the pain of [my mother’s suicide],” he says. “Always giving me hugs and saying, ‘If you ever want to talk, let me know.’ “
His father reinstated contact by attending his son’s graduation. Two weeks later they had dinner in New York. “I told him everything he’d done wrong-the criticism, the yelling, the coldness,” he recalls. “He apologized.”
But it wasn’t until months later when Loeb started filming aspiring writer Christina Peter’s screenplay “The Smokers,” a movie about three dysfunctional teenagers, with family friend and legendary music producer Quincy Jones as an executive producer, that his relationship with his father really took a positive turn.
“He came out to [where we filmed in] Kenosha, Wisconsin, and saw this 23-year-old boy managing a crew of 70 people,” he recalls. “He was shocked. It was a far cry from his image of me as this immature little boy who couldn’t do anything for himself.”
In fact, John Loeb Jr. even has a cameo in the film, playing the father of one of the misfit girls. “He was really excited, I think he wants to change his career now,” Loeb says.
Meanwhile, at Loeb’s Jet East party on Saturday night, it’s a picture of family harmony as John Loeb Jr., dressed almost identically to his son in a blue button-down shirt and white khakis, works the crowd. “I’m very, very proud of Nicholas,” he tells me, his imposing countenance softened by his smile.
Whether or not “The Smokers” will make it is anybody’s guess. But after debuting the movie’s trailer at the party, John Loeb Jr. is beaming from ear-to-ear, as if his son had already had won an Academy Award. Maybe there is a happy ending to this non-fairy tale, after all.