Cohen doesn't like to talk about his childhood. He lived with father and mother and cat and dog and bed and bookshelf in a small house under a Montessori tap dancing academy, in the least fashionable corner of the most fashionable suburb of the deepest sinkhole in Lake County, an unhygienic armpit in the elbow of America's pelvis. His mother was a Formula One driver, his father ate lightbulbs for nickels. When he speaks of it, you can see the lush wetlands and oil-stained penguins that dot the landscape in America's heartland, so far from civilisation that even in Starbucks the manager is inbred. "I don't like to make a big deal of it," Cohen says, "because it only encourages stereotypes. People always want to know if I churned my own butter. I say 'Yes, but only in my spare time.' Or, 'Have you ever sewn up a stranger's chest wound.' Sure, I did that all the time, but not because I'm from Illinois." Margot Robbie. Credit:Getty Images Cohen started writing in high school, against doctor's orders. "When I was little, I thought I was going to be a genie. I was always climbing inside lamps, then leaping out and shouting at people that they had three wishes. I didn't decide 'I'm going to be a writer'. I didn't know that was a job. I thought that only happened to people who had been convicted of major sex crimes. But I wrote books at home, and I bound them in rich, soft leather, and I sold them for exorbitant prices. At school I wrote on the walls and ceilings just because I liked it." When Cohen was 16, he was asked to write the script for a commercial for a local aniseed wholesaler. That turned him all around. Just like that, he was headed to Chicago, the capital of books. He got a job writing the novels of Dan Brown. "Funnily enough, my editor was Liam Hemsworth before he was known and before I was known." For several decades, Cohen hung around Chicago, sleeping on roofs, working odd jobs in a succession of dilapidated ghost trains, eating only during the holidays. His big break came when he landed a job writing the pauses on 'Days of Our Lives'.

A few weeks after that, he was famous. In Holland. Nobody knew why. I asked if people back home were proud of his success. He thought a moment, then said, "Sorry, what was that? I wasn't listening." I knew exactly what he meant. At one time or another, just about every writer for 'Days of Our Lives' has gone to Hollywood. Some succeeded. Diablo Cody, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Ernest Lehman, Ben Affleck. Most failed. Cohen studied these people as you might study a book on how to train ferrets, paying special attention to Tori Spelling. When his 'Days of Our Lives' deal came up for renewal, he took off instead, being discovered months later at the bottom of a well in Alaska, screaming that he was Jesus.

Six weeks later, he created 'Vinyl', the hypnotically watchable show about a wealthy 1970s record executive who tries to reinvigorate the spirit of rock 'n' roll by becoming a murderer. Starring Ray Romano as David Bowie and Bobby Cannavale as his brother Robert, the show was co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger and was so successful that it was cancelled after one season for fear of raising audience expectations so high that they would be disappointed in all other shows. "I got the idea for 'Viny'l," he confides, "late one night when I was listening to music. I thought to myself, 'hey, music's good, isn't it?' Ten minutes later I'd written the first eight episodes." How does Rich Cohen feel about fame? Only last week he was nominated as one of Time Magazine's "400 Writers To Try To Identify of 2005", and sometimes it seems difficult to pin him down. Who is Rich Cohen, really? He is strangely evasive on this issue, saying only, "I have documents proving my identity". But then, he has never been comfortable with fame. Away from showbusiness, he slips back into his normal fake Swedish accent, putting on a long purple cape and walking the streets as an ordinary man. A homeless woman stops him to ask for an autograph: he graciously hands her a VHS copy of 'The Gods Must Be Crazy 2' and walks on. Even in his normalcy he is enigmatic: even in his erotically-charged, panther-like walk, he is still the same little boy from Lake Forest who once burned down the local church to win a breakfast radio contest. We talked about his new book, 'The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones', an astronomical treatise that advances the controversial theory that the Rolling Stones live in the sky. "They have built a house on a comet," Cohen explains, "and when it rains, that is the Rolling Stones emptying their sinks after doing the dishes." There is danger in suggesting that one of history's greatest rock bands is a family of powerful sky elves, but Cohen is no stranger to danger — he sleeps in a lobster tank, "to keep me humble". Conversation finally comes around to 'Tarzan'. Finding very little to say about it, we move on.

I remember hearing what legendary film producer Drew Barrymore once said about Rich Cohen. "When I look at Rich, I think of one word: Arnott's Pizza Shapes". I see what she meant now. The ripple of his abdominal muscles, the smooth curve of his spine, the comical plastic arrow protruding from his skull: there is grace and nobility in his bearing, but also a vulnerability that calls to mind Napoleon's defences in Portugal in the early 1800s. In Cohen, Barrymore saw America's lost innocence, the callow, naive honesty that once upon a time we called "happiness" but which we now dub "racism". Has Western civilisation, in its ceaseless quest for instant gratification and insistence upon self-service bowsers, abandoned something precious and valuable without even realising it? Is the military-industrial complex really worth the mass graves of 'America's Got Talent' contestants that it produces? Rich Cohen doesn't claim to have answers. In fact he doesn't even claim that I asked him the question. I ask Cohen about the sex scenes. "What sex scenes?" "The ones in 'Four Weddings and a Funeral'." We were silent for a moment. He was thinking of something; I was masturbating furiously. Then he stood, said goodbye, and hurled himself out the window with an ear-piercing scream. He looked just like Audrey Hepburn.

Ben Pobjie is the author of Error Australis.