I had a shrink for two years. Every week I’d go in and talk about my parents, Stacey, our children, my troubles getting acting work, and—when I did get work—my continuing problems getting out of my own way.
Then one day my shrink asked me to look at a script he’d written.
And so I spent a number of years shrink-less.
In spite of my raised hopes a couple of years earlier, the early 2010s were an especially tough time. On the one hand, the Hank Zipzer books Lin and I were writing were selling, and I was regularly being asked to give my talks about dyslexia. And I finally seemed to have made it in the world of voice acting, especially in Clifford’s Puppy Days (where I won a Daytime Emmy), Monsters at Work, and Rugrats.
People wanted to hear my voice on-screen. It just seemed nobody wanted to see my face on-screen.
It was great to be the heart of the piece in Adam’s movies—but Adam could only make so many movies. It was lovely to be treated so warmly by so many people, but if you don’t feel the warmth toward yourself that people are showing you (They can’t possibly be talking about me, I’d think), then your happiness is fleeting: you need to keep feeding this beast with outward approval. And though it was fun to play the kind of unauthoritative authority figures I played on Arrested Development and Royal Pains and Childrens Hospital, good writing like that (or in the case of Childrens Hospital, very interesting writing) came only once in a while.
Meanwhile, my phone wasn’t ringing.
I’ve never thought a lot about age—or maybe a better way to put it is that I’ve tried not to think a lot about it. I’d felt for a while … okay, I’d known for a while that my age was working against me in the business. It’s a young person’s game: that’s a given. I definitely didn’t look young anymore—my hair had gone from black to gray to mostly white. (I still liked my hair.) But I had also developed a kind of mound of fat on my throat: at one point one of my agents brought it up. “You should get rid of that,” he said. “It might be stopping you from getting work.” And I took umbrage. I thought that was rude. At first I wasn’t even thinking about the possibility that what he said might be true.
But eventually it dawned on me: he might not have phrased it very diplomatically, but he was right. I went to a plastic surgeon and had the thing removed. And it not only made me look better, but made me feel better.
And I still wasn’t getting any work. (But what a neck!)
My agency, a big agency, kept passing me down to whoever was brand-new. That wasn’t so good. Every pilot season I’d call and ask what was out there, and this new young person, whomever he or she happened to be, would say, “Sorry, I’ve read everything; there’s nothing for you.” I’d say, “Come on, there’s got to be something. At least a meeting. Get me a meeting, and I’ll go in and maybe they’ll change the fifty-year-old to a sixty-five-year-old.”
“Sorry.”
When I tried going over my agent’s head to see if I might do better with someone else, I’d hear: “You know, I gotta ask if anybody wants to take you on.”
Not so encouraging.
But instead of standing up for myself, I’d just say, “Oh.”
Now, my wonderful son Max is a go-getter. Max doesn’t let moss grow beneath his feet. And he kept saying, “What are you doing? You’ve got to get a new agent—these people are doing nothing for you.”
I dismissed it each time. “Nah, I’m okay.”
Then Stacey and Zoe would say it: “Why don’t you get a new agent?” And I’d think, in my typical way, At least I have somebody. I don’t know who else would want to take me. I don’t want to try to see if someone will take me and they won’t.
At some point, when I got passed along to the latest new person at the agency, she turned out to be Leigh Brillstein, the daughter of the legendary manager Bernie Brillstein. I liked Leigh a lot: she was funny. And made great brownies.
I still wasn’t getting any work, though—just getting chubby.
Then Leigh left to go to Resolution, a brand-new agency founded by Jeff Berg, one of the founders of ICM. And, thinking that maybe a new company might work better for me, I decided to go with her.
Then, in very short order, Resolution closed. And for a while I had no agent at all.
As Max traveled more and more for directing work, his German shepherd, Hamlet—now fully grown—began staying with us. And when Hamlet stayed with us, he became territorial and aggressive. This despite the fact that Linus, who was still with us, was bigger than anybody.
In the meantime, Zoe and Rob, who now had two little boys, Ace and Jules, got Scruffy, a goldendoodle. And when Zoe and Rob went on vacation, Scruffy stayed with us.
So at times, we had Hamlet, Scruffy, Linus, and Charlotte—now I’m no longer in show business; I’m a kennel. And it’s my responsibility to make sure all these dogs stay safe and fed.
With four dogs on the premises, we were a three-ring circus. Maybe a four-ring circus. Where Hamlet was concerned, if you were in the pack you were golden; if you weren’t, watch out. And Scruffy, as the latest arrival, was under immediate suspicion. Growling, lifting his lip, Hamlet chased poor sweet Scruffy all over the yard (and after his operation, he could really haul ass on three legs), until she jumped into my protective arms. Linus and Charlotte watched with interest.
But that only happened once. The second time Hamlet began to growl at Scruffy, Linus got up from his comfortable bask in the sun and placed his large bulk between the two of them, his eyes telling Hamlet, Don’t even think about it.
Hamlet thought about it for about one second. He backed off.
Jed had married his beautiful Amanda in 2008, and now they had two beautiful little girls, Indya and Lulu. And a French bulldog, Ringo. When Jed and his family went on vacation, Ringo stayed with Stacey and me, increasing the kennel population by one. All okay in theory—except that Ringo was one of the few dogs I’d ever met who would not warm up to me. Maybe he was just homesick, I thought at first; maybe he was distracted by the unfamiliar surroundings. Nope. When I leaned down to pet him, he edged away.
My solution to the problem was rather brilliant. I duct-taped slices of deli turkey to my shoes, and Ringo came up and snacked on my loafers. And we made friends.
In 2013 Max introduced me to his manager, Cliff Murray. Cliff was young, early thirties, went to Harvard. Smart, direct, ultrapractical. He worked with Eryn Brown, who was also very smart, and the equally smart Chris Huvane. And they took me on.
Now, they were taking me on for two reasons. One, I think, was as a favor to Max. The other was, “Yes, of course—it’s Henry Winkler.”
If I hadn’t been Henry Winkler, capital H, capital W, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near their roster. Because the rest of their roster was people more like Max’s age.
Working with these three managers, I was definitely in new territory. Soon after we began, Chris called me and said, “Be careful on Twitter. You said something anti-gun—watch yourself.” And he was absolutely right: after tweeting what I thought had been a very thoughtful gun-safety tweet, I got forty-eight hours of, “You should crawl back under the rock you came from”—and worse.
One day I asked Cliff if the silence of my telephone was due to my age. Somebody else might’ve tried to sugarcoat it; Cliff didn’t hesitate for a nanosecond. “Oh, absolutely,” he said.
So when I was asked to play the obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Lu Saperstein on one or two episodes of a new sitcom called Parks and Recreation, I jumped at the opportunity. Not only had the creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, done brilliant work on another mockumentary, The Office, but Parks and Rec’s cast was equally stupendous: Amy Poehler. Nick Offerman. Chris Pratt. Aubrey Plaza. Aziz Ansari. Adam Scott. Rashida Jones, who had been friends with our children and in our backyard for years. Rob Lowe. And on and on. Wow. But best of all was the fact that my character was the father of Jenny Slate’s and Ben Schwartz’s characters, and these two are just incredibly inventive and funny people in their own right. Jenny and her husband, Ben Shattuck, created the amazing Marcel the Shell—if you don’t know it, I won’t try to explain it; you just have to see it—and Ben Schwartz is part of an improv team with Thomas Middleditch and Zach Woods. And though I did improv in New York a hundred years ago, Middleditch and Schwartz are on another planet entirely.
They invited me to come and be part of an evening of improv at the Upstanding Citizens Brigade’s theater on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, and in the spirit of Try (Almost) Anything Once, I accepted. There was a little stage backed by a brick wall, some lights overhead, and the audience on three sides. I was onstage, standing against the brick wall as Thomas, Ben, and Zach started their act, and as I watched them being unbelievably brilliant, knowing I was going to somehow participate, I was thinking, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. I’m crazy. I have to leave now. I was not only out of my league, I was underwater. All I wanted to do was melt into the brick.
Then Ben grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the scene. I think I said something that made him laugh, and he was very kind. But basically I had no business being on the same stage with those guys. This was like the time I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company in London and understood why I could never do Shakespeare.
But Parks and Recreation was such fun. And after being asked to do one or two episodes, I stayed for three years. I delivered all the stars’ babies. I delivered Rashida Jones and Rob Lowe’s baby. I delivered Aubrey Plaza and Chris Pratt’s baby. I delivered Amy Poehler and Adam Scott’s baby. I mean, of course, that my character did. As clueless in general as Dr. Lu was, he kept answering the call.
When I was doing the ultrasound on Amy’s tummy, I congratulated them on triplets. The spots on the screen, however, turned out to be cream cheese from my lunch.
I never truly felt that I understood who my character was, but I guess something I did at the beginning was funny, because, to my surprise and delight, they kept bringing me back. I’m sure Amy Poehler was in on that decision. Because when I did scenes with her, I could see that she was completely in charge: it was really her show. She would direct, act, crack amazingly funny jokes. She truly was the commander in chief.
I should say here that I’ve always worked well with women in charge. My first insurance broker was a woman, Betty. (Who knew I even needed insurance? Tom Bosley knew.) My most recent lawyers, Wendy Heller and Jamie Cohen. Eryn Brown is one of my managers; Shauna Perlman is one of my major agents at CAA. (I signed with CAA after my long unagented period.) I’ve never felt in anything but good hands with each of these women.
The Hank Zipzer books were so successful so quickly that the idea of turning them into a TV series, live-action or animated, seemed irresistible. Lin Oliver and I had the books sent to Disney, and the first reaction there was, “Oh my gosh, these are so funny; he’s such a great character.”
That was nice to hear. We wrote him funny first. And resourceful, and tenacious.
But then they said, “Kids want aspirational heroes, and he’s got a problem.”
Well, first of all, call it a challenge, not a problem. And one-sixth of the children in the world have Hank’s kind of learning challenge—except that there is resistance, and ignorance, everywhere to simply acknowledging this fact. Once, when I was touring in Europe with the books, and speaking at a town hall meeting in Italy, a man stood up and told me that there’s no such thing as a learning challenge—these children are just lazy.
“Oh,” I said. “One of my parents has come back to life! Do you actually think the kids are lying about their struggle to learn?”
He sat down.
After Disney, we sent the books around to every children’s-television outlet in the country, but we met the same kind of resistance everywhere: the nitty-gritty of Hank in the trenches, dealing with his challenge in all kinds of humorous ways, just wasn’t aspirational enough. Not uplifting enough. But apparently the books’ fans felt differently. Lin and I wrote the twenty-eight Hank novels to be entertainment reading for the reluctant reader. And the greatest compliment I ever got came from the many, many fan letters we received. Children wrote the same thing, over and over, in seven languages: “How did you know me so well?”
Curiously, though, when we took the idea across the Atlantic to the UK, the BBC was very interested. Walker Books published the novels in England, with great success. And so it was that Hank Zipzer, the (live-action) TV series, debuted in January 2014 on CBBC, the children’s-programming branch of the BBC. The production was under the banner of Kindle Entertainment, a tasteful production company headed by Anne Brogan. Nick James, as Hank, headed an excellent all-British cast—the wonderful Nick Mohammed, also of Ted Lasso, played the principal, Mr. Love. (Actually, the cast was all British with one exception: a certain American television legend played Hank’s music teacher, Mr. Rock, who was of course based on Donald Rock, my music teacher back at McBurney, the only teacher who ever encouraged me.) Maddie Holliday was Hank’s annoying younger sister; she was ten at the time, and this was one of her very first acting jobs. During a scene in the pilot, I threw her an ad lib as I exited, and she threw an ad lib right back, as if she’d been doing it for years. The casting pièce de resistance was the sublime Felicity Montagu. She re-created my real fourth-grade teacher, Miss Adolf, as Lin and I had dreamed her: she was pure perfection. And bringing it all to life was the very talented young director Matt Bloom, who went on to do multiple episodes over three years, and a holiday movie.
I had a ball.
Zoe and her husband, Rob, and their little baby son, Ace, moved in with us for about a year and a half while their house was being made livable. It was the cutest thing in the world: the padding of Ace’s footsteps running down the hall, coming to our room, still echoes in my ears. So in 2014, Max, who is a writer-producer along with being a director, and Rob, the former actor who is now a successful builder, came together and developed a series called The Winklers. Aka The Winklers: The Son-in-Law, the Baby, My Daughter Living with Us, and the Sturm und Drang That Came Out of That. Then they went to Phil Rosenthal, the cocreator of Everybody Loves Raymond. Phil took over and wrote a script, directed a pilot—and ultimately disagreed wholeheartedly with ABC’s take on the show. So we almost got it on, but it never actually came to life. Judith Light played my wife; Domenick Lombardozzi was my son-in-law: who knew that this bald, heavyset, kind of menacing-looking guy from The Wire could be so funny? Susan Sarandon’s daughter, Eva Amurri, played my daughter. There were some great scenes in it. And we ate very well because Phil Rosenthal invests in and nurtures new restaurants and new chefs in LA. So lunch was always an adventure. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Lily Rosenthal, was Phil’s assistant and creator of good cheer on the set. The Winkler family’s relationship with Lily lasted, and during the pandemic, she helped tutor Ace, Jules, and Gus.
The show never saw the light of day. But if it had seen the light of day, it is very possible that I would not have been available for Barry. Maybe somebody up there had bigger plans for me.
One day during the first season of Happy Days, Ron Howard and I were walking down a street on the Paramount lot when I spotted Robert De Niro standing in a doorway, in 1920s clothes, taking a break from shooting The Godfather Part II. “We gotta go say hello,” I said to Ron. So we walked up and introduced ourselves. De Niro was very taciturn. “How you doin’,” was all he said.
“I just want to tell you before we leave you,” I said, “you use the word ‘fuck’ better than anybody on the planet in Mean Streets.”
He gave a tiny nod, never changing his expression. “Thank you.”
Cut to forty years later. Stacey and I are in New York, at a premiere party for The Intern, starring De Niro and Anne Hathaway, directed by Nancy Meyers. We’re at the party because our daughter is best friends with Nancy’s daughter Annie. And De Niro is at the party. I go up to him and say, “I have to ask you the same question people always ask me—can I take a selfie with you?”
“Yeah,” he says. Forty years later, he’s still taciturn. But really warm. A tiny smile comes to his face. “You said I use the word ‘fuck’ better than anybody on the planet.”
Oh, man. Had I caught up to the cool kids at last?
But deep down I knew that the part of me that was chasing after the cool kids (and never catching them)—that was the part of me that had to change. The ten-year-old in me. Who took up most of the space inside me.
Not so easy.
We still had our dog visitors from time to time, but our in-house contingent was fading away: first Linus passed on, then Charlotte. Linus was so brave, but cancer shattered his leg, and he couldn’t survive it. I felt every dog’s passing as a painful loss.
Then while I was at a Comic-Con in Virginia, Stacey and I picked up Sadie, a chocolate-brown labradoodle, and she flew home with us. But when Hamlet stayed over, as regularly happened while Max was working, he and Sadie had to stay in separate rooms. Sadie needed a friend she could be in the same room with.
Maisie, a goldendoodle (white with brown spots), came from Georgia to join us. And happily for everyone—except maybe Hamlet—she and Sadie bonded as sisters.
Sometime around late 2015 or early 2016 I felt I had come to a crossroads. Despite all I had done—and there was some good work, with both my family and my profession—I knew, if I was being honest with myself, that I was still uncooked. A little boy inside. Who felt he didn’t know as much as other people. Who felt he wasn’t as educated as other people. I was this little kid, and everybody else knew more than I did.
My wanting to be perfect, with no room for mistakes, was standing toe to toe at the O.K. Corral with the knowledge that there had to be another way for me to be.
But what was it?
Though being a scared little kid inside made it easy for me to get along with children and animals, it did not help me to get along with my wife. It was very, very difficult for me to be vulnerable with Stacey. She had been dealing with the effects of my inner immaturity forever, but I couldn’t—it felt like I was physically unable to—share the causes with her. She and I bumped up against this again and again, and it was corrosive to our marriage. After almost forty years together, something in me still couldn’t let her in, and this was causing intense pain to both of us.
There was also this: after more than a dozen years working with Lin Oliver, she and I were also encountering bumps in the road. It happened whenever we disagreed about a plot point in one of our books, the kind of thing that’s bound to happen with collaborators—except that I was unable, again physically unable, to hold up my side of an argument: I would just cave, then keep quiet about it and build a thunderhead of resentment. I was bottling things up to an unhealthy degree. To this day, there is a word in chapter 3 of the second book that I so resent, I leave it out every time I read the book aloud.
Something had to change.
One night Frank Dines and I were going to the theater in LA, and I asked his advice about how I could change my working partnership with Lin. I knew deep down that whatever was going on with her and me was of a piece with what was happening with Stacey and me, but the professional relationship was easier to talk about than the personal.
Still, Frank was looking at me as if he knew I might be talking about more than I was talking about.
“Well, partnerships are tough,” he finally said. “You’ve got to give and take, give and take, all the time. And really getting into it can be scary.”
Oh boy, did I know what he was talking about. Across the board.
We went in and saw the play, and I didn’t say anything else to Frank, but on Monday he called me to say that if I was interested, he could refer me to an excellent therapist. If I was interested.
I was interested.
And I went in to see this woman, and that’s when my life began to change.
Very early in my treatment, I asked my new shrink in a casual way if she had children.
She looked me in the eye. “How would my telling you help what you and I are doing here?” she asked.
That was an interesting moment. I am famous, I am charming—famously charming. How could she resist answering this perfectly normal, perfectly innocent (I thought) question from me, the charming Henry Winkler?
She resisted. And by resisting, she was showing me that she wasn’t going to be impressed by my being famous and charming—nor was she going to hold it against me. She was simply showing me that she was there to work—to really help the human being in front of her—and that I had to be willing to work, too. Without deploying any of my usual crutches. I slowly realized there was still a lot of little boy in me, desperately trying to make everyone in the world love me, because my parents didn’t seem to. The little boy who knew less than everyone else.
I had to cut that idea off my bones with a bowie knife. I had to saw that little boy out of my being.
Oh, it was hard at the beginning. A lot of the time, I had absolutely no idea what my doctor was talking about. It didn’t compute. Where do I look? What do I do? Am I doing it right? Am I attacking the right problem? Am I saying the right thing?
Then, very, very slowly, I began to understand.
It was the fall of 2016, and Stacey and I had just come from a long meeting with our business managers Steve Bills and Jodie Munoz and our attorney Paul Hoffman about estate planning. I mean a long, long meeting—our advisors could literally have been speaking Turkish. Stacey and I understood a little bit here and there. We got that our three children would all share equally after we passed on … but there was a lot besides that. I mean, a lot.
So our heads were buzzing, and we were driving down Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, through a whole area that was kind of historic for us—where our first house was, the house that was home to our children when they were small. We were reminiscing a little … and my phone rang.
It was my latest agent calling. Iris. She had the happy-agent sound in her voice, so I began to get excited. After a quick couple of pleasantries, she started saying something about Bill Hader and a new show and HBO. “Well, you’re on a short list,” she said.
“Bill Hader?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“HBO?”
“Yeah.”
Oh my God. Bill Hader. HBO. I’ve never worked with HBO—I’ve never been asked.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m on a short list—wait. Is Dustin Hoffman on that list?”
“I’ll find out,” my agent said.
“Okay,” I said.
She put me on hold. I looked at Stacey. She looked at me.
Two, three, four … we came to a red light. Stayed there awhile. The light turned green. A couple of blocks later, another red light. I looked at Stacey again. She raised her eyebrows.
My agent finally came back on the line. “No, he is not.”
“Dustin Hoffman is not on the list?”
“Right. Not on the list.”
“All right, I’m in,” I said. Because if Dustin Hoffman is on that short list, they’re going to go with an Academy Award–winning movie star—I have no shot. I’m not even going in.
We get home. I get the script. It’s called Barry. Created by Hader and Alec Berg. The story of a professional hit man, to be played by Bill, who bumbles into an acting class and feels he’s discovered his true calling. I can tell immediately that the writing (by the two of them) could not be more perfect: so perfect that it’s almost shocking.
Now I’m sitting with my pages at the desk in my home office. This is the very first piece of furniture I ever bought—in 1975, for my first house, in Studio City. A big, tall doctor’s desk with a lot of drawers and wings of cubbies that open from the center. I’m sure that back in the day, each cubby was used for a different bottle of medicine. Me, I have tchotchkes from the first time I brought the desk home: Swiss Army knives; every patch that was given to me at appearances, even the patch I wore on my jacket at the McBurney School; a Best Dad Smurf award given to me by Jed. I’m sitting at my desk, and my son Max, the director, is directing me. My audition is tomorrow. I’m saying my lines, and Max is looking puzzled. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“I’m just doing the lines,” I say.
“What you’re saying isn’t in the script,” Max says.
“No, no, no, I’m improvising,” I say. “I’m making it my own.”
“Respect the writer, Dad,” Max says. He gives me a look. I give him a look. He knows what I know: reading, for me, is like pulling my own teeth. So I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done: it’s mostly worked pretty well for me.
“Max,” I say, “I’ve been doing it for forty years. It’s okay.”
He looks at me. “Not this time, Dad.”
All right, so now I memorize my lines, verbatim—which adds an extra layer of anxiety on top of the thick layer that’s already there. I drive to the audition. I get lost. It’s in some Sony building not connected to HBO or the studio, somewhere on the way to LAX, near the cemetery where my in-laws were laid to rest. I find the place but miss the driveway. I turn around. I turn around again. I finally get into the parking lot and park, and walk into the building. I go up the stairs, find the office, go in. I sit down in the metal chair that is known to every actor in every audition that has ever occurred. The folding chair at your school dance, or at the Passover table when you’ve run out of furniture and there are more guests. I’m sitting there in the chair, and all of a sudden, Bill Hader walks up. He’s carrying all kinds of things—a script, a coffee, his bag. He now has to juggle all of this and open the door to the casting office. He looks over and spots me. “Oh,” he says. “I’ll be right with you.”
“Have your coffee,” I say. “Relax. Enjoy. Sit down. Take a bath. I’ll be right here.”
He goes inside. Now I’m really waiting. Because the waiting I did before he arrived was nothing. Now the waiting is, he’s here, and I’ve got to go in front of him.
Finally, someone opens the door and invites me in. The casting people’s young assistant is sitting at a desk outside the inner sanctum. “Good morning,” I say. “Nice to see you.” I walk in. Sherry Thomas, the casting director, says hello. She’s standing behind the smallest videotape camera I have ever seen, mounted on a tripod. Bill Hader stands to the left of her.
“Okay, Henry,” Sherry says.
I do a scene. It’s a monologue. My character, the acting teacher Gene Cousineau, is making a presentation to his class, demonstrating how acting is done, performing a couple of lines from Hamlet, from A Streetcar Named Desire, from Serpico. He’s an incredibly bad actor—a failed actor who thinks he’s God’s gift to teaching—but of course he doesn’t know it. Bill is laughing. The more he laughs, the more I get into it. Stacey and I have watched this man for years on Saturday Night Live, and I just made him laugh.
Now I have another scene, one where I’m talking to an acting student named Sally, telling her everything that she did wrong in the scene she just performed. I could perform it solo, but I sense it’s going to be better if I do it with somebody. And in my work I’ve always had the nerve that I’ve never had in life, so I turn to Sherry Thomas and say, “Excuse me, Sherry. Come on up here with me. The camera is pointed correctly—you don’t need to zoom in or out.”
So Sherry stands next to me, and Bill starts to direct me. “You’re a teacher and you’re full of shit, but you think you’re the greatest teacher in the universe,” he says. So I put my arm around Sherry and do the scene with her standing in for Sally. Gene bullies her, browbeats her until she bursts into tears. He’s monstrously full of himself, egomaniacal. Bill is laughing. I finish my speech and give Sherry a hug. “Thank you for playing with me,” I tell her. “And it was a pleasure to meet you, Bill.” I shake his hand and leave, and I drive home. I’m feeling pretty good. I made Bill Hader laugh. Twice.
And that good feeling dissipates slowly, then disappears completely, because I hear nothing back from my manager Cliff—nothing the next day, or the next. Or the next week, or the week after that. Or the week after that. The wait is excruciating. It’s as if I’m being cut by a scalpel. Finally I can’t take it anymore. But I can’t call my agent, because we don’t have that relationship. For all the weeks and months and years that I wasn’t working, they—they, because I get handed off from agent to agent at this big agency—have never called to see how I was. To say, “How are you doing? We’re looking. Don’t worry. We’re trying.” Nothing. I had to call them. They’d say, as if I’d just woken them from a nap: “Oh, hey! How are you?”
So I phoned Cliff again, who of course is in the loop.
“Henry, I know,” he says. “If there was any news, I would’ve called you.”
“I know, I know,” I say. “But please—is there any movement you can detect? The slightest tremor? I’ve fallen off their radar, haven’t I? Because this is way too long. This is, like, crazy long. They’ve gone in another direction, I’m sure of it. Could you please call and find out?”
Cliff calls Bill’s agent. Calls me back. “No, you’re still in the mix,” he says.
This gives me about three seconds of relief, then I’m sweating bullets again. I don’t want to be in the mix. I want to be the main ingredient.
A couple of more weeks creep by.
Once again I reach my absolute limit. I don’t want my manager to get exasperated with me, but I can no longer control myself. The anxiety has grown to such a point that it has shot out the top of my head, which forces my fingers to phone him. He phones Bill’s agent. Phones me back. “No, they’re meeting other people, but you’re still in there.”
Another week. Another week. It’s like I’m under the ocean and my air hose is being crimped—somebody has put a safety clip on my air hose. And I’m gasping and trying very hard to be cool. I’m trying to talk myself down. Stacey tries to talk me down. My puppies try to talk me down by dropping a ball at my feet. I’m trying so hard just to live my life and go about my business and forget about Bill Hader and HBO, and be like, “Hey, it’s okay—I’m throwing it up to the heavens, it’s up to God…” Yes, I talk to God, in the garden, like Emily Dickinson.
But oh my God, so long. I have sat in this chair at my desk for so many years, waiting for this phone, or one like it, to ring. My Scorsese phone is covered with cobwebs. The push buttons don’t work anymore.
Another week goes by. Then—bang, out of the blue—Bill himself calls.
“Hey, how you doing?” he says.
“How am I doing? So great, Bill. How are you?” I’m just sitting here and I’m so relaxed. Wow, I’m so surprised to hear from you. I wasn’t thinking about this at all.
“You want to come in and play?”
“Do I want to come in and play?”
In my mind: No! Are you kidding? If the first audition was good, I don’t want to fuck it up. No, I don’t want to come in and play.
Instead, I say, “Yes, of course I will, Bill. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
“Hey, I just wrote two scenes last night,” Bill says.
“You wrote two scenes last night?”
“Yes, I did. I’m going to email them to you.”
“Great, Bill. Thanks. Can’t wait.” Very casual. “Standing by, Bill.”
I run downstairs to my computer. Almost break my neck. Get the scenes (once again, by Bill and Alec, once again incredibly well written), email them to Max with a note: “Oh my God. I have another audition tomorrow.” He directs me over the phone this time.
I drive down to the same building again, managing this time not to get lost. Walk upstairs, where the first thing I see, in the hallway, is a girl—pardon me, a young woman—with script pages in her hand, pacing up and down, up and down, semi-audibly practicing her lines as (I know from my pages) Sally, Barry’s fellow acting student. This young lady is deep, deep into these pages: she’s practically eating the paper in order to become Sally.
“Hello,” I say. “Nice to see you.”
She gives me a quick surprised look, blinks a couple of times, then goes back to her lines. I sit down in a chair outside the office door, trying to sit quietly and be in my own space—which is impossible, because I have an entire opera going on here with this young woman—Rigoletto is going on in the hallway.
The door opens. “Hi, Henry,” the young assistant says. “Come on in.”
I go in. Same wonderful assistant. But this time, along with Bill, both casting directors, Sherry Thomas and Sharon Bialy, are there, as is Alec Berg, sitting on the couch. There are introductions all around. I’m particularly fascinated by Bill’s cocreator Alec, who seems so quiet, cool, and self-contained (self-contained is an understatement) that I immediately have the fantasy that he is Norwegian. I will later find out that he is not in any way Norwegian. (At one point I asked Alec if I could continue to refer to him as Norwegian. “Yes, you can,” he said.)
I will also discover that Alec has a rep. Not only is he considered the crème de la crème of comedy writing in Hollywood, but he’s so close to the vest, I think the vest is tattooed on.
I do the scene with Bill. Once again I am the acting teacher Gene Cousineau, and this time I’m instructing Barry, the hit man / acting student, in how to summon intense emotions. “If I want pure sorrow,” I say, passionately, as Gene, “I call up Princess Diana’s death. Or the day that my dad fell off the roof when I was a kid”—I mime the fall with my hand—“ka-plunk.”
Bill is laughing, breaking the scene. I have made Bill Hader laugh again. And—I can’t help glancing over at the couch—Alec (The Norwegian) Berg is actually smiling.
Oh my God. I just made Alec Berg smile. I nearly wet myself.
Bill, shifting from actor to director, is giving me his notes on the scene. Because Bill is so good, because Bill and Alec’s writing is so good, because this piece we’re doing is in such a different stratosphere from so much that I’ve read before, I absorb every syllable he’s saying, like a man in the Mojave Desert, dying of thirst, absorbing water.
Alec is still smiling. The casting people are smiling. Bill is smiling. I shake everyone’s hand and leave.
Out in the hallway, Rigoletto is still going on—it’s the third act. Now another young lady is sitting on the stairs, also holding script pages, saying the lines, gesticulating, feeling Sally’s words in the most intense way possible. I walk past her down the steps, excuse myself. Then something makes me stop and back up.
“Hi,” I say. “Are you going in to see Bill and Alec?”
“Yes, I am,” she says. “Yes, I am.”
“Wow,” I say. “Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn,” she says. “I’m living in Brooklyn.”
“Great pizza,” I say. “Well, I have a feeling you’re going to have a great time, and you’re going to do really well. I wish you the best. Break a leg.”
She thanked me. She looked surprised and delighted. And I went down the steps and out to the parking lot. Later I found that this young lady was the wonderful actress Sarah Goldberg—and Sarah told me she saw me, through a window in the door at the bottom of the stairs, walking back and forth, back and forth. I had lost my car in the parking lot. I was pushing the button on my key, but not hearing the beep-beep. That’s what Sarah saw.
Finally I found my car and went home.