It was bizarre! Even though my services were no longer needed for the series, finished scripts for each week’s episode would be delivered to the house every Thursday morning. They were saying, “You’re still on the team. But stay in the locker room.” A check for said services would arrive in the mailbox on Thursday afternoon. On Friday evening I went to the filming of the show and watched a company of consummate actors play out a farce—an echo of something I’d once had in mind.
I got used to it—the way you get used to a beloved pet dying. It gnaws at you, but it doesn’t take over your life. The job of a writer is to write. And so I kept writing. Other things. The house was leased until May, so while in L.A. I fashioned other series ideas (Hope springs eternal) and worked on the rewrite of a screenplay about a grandfather and his grandson on a road trip across the U.S. The old man has Alzheimer’s and his dying wish is that he meet the old Hollywood star, Alice Faye, whom he once invited to his college prom. She refused with a lovely note, and ever since he has been dying to meet her. His grandson fixes up grandpa’s old Indian motorcycle, and off they go to L.A.
Jack Lemmon had taken to the script and he was coming over for lunch to read through some scenes and discuss it… after Julia’s admonitions that the boys must wear shorts at the table. We’d had guests for meals before, and the boys’ nakedness at the table seemed more charming than off-putting, until one somewhat conservative couple, who not unsurprisingly had no children of their own, thought that nakedness had its place—but not at the dinner table.
“Yes, I explained, but we compensate by always going to bed fully dressed.”
We weren’t going to take any chances with offending Jack. After all, it wasn’t a social visit. It was business. And as Oscar Wilde once said, “Nudity and business should never mix.” The boys wore shorts. I explained to the boys who he was, and soon after his cream-colored Rolls Royce pulled into our driveway.
He was ebullient and charming. As energetic as Ensign Pulver in Mr. Roberts, as quirky as “Daphne” in Some Like it Hot, and as sweet as “Bud” Baxter in The Apartment. Julia made some croques monsieurs for lunch. Samuel piped up.
“They’re French. We ate them in Paris.”
“You were in Paris?”
“Yes! We also ate moule e frites”
“They call french fries, frites. Isn’t that silly?” added Gabe. Jack widened his eyes and screwed up his face and said, in his best “Daphne” voice,
“The silliest thing I ever heard.”
After lunch, Jack and I read some scenes and chatted, and when he left, I told the boys that we’d watch Some Like It Hot some day soon. It became the boys’ favorite movie. They saw it so often they almost memorized it. And there was nothing as silly and fetching as Gabe’s imitation of Marilyn Monroe singing in her breathy-sexy voice, “I Wanna Be Loved by You.”
Soon after that meeting, friends out from back east came to visit for Thanksgiving—one of my oldest friends, Danny, and his wife, Freke, and young daughter, Samara. While Julia did the Universal tour with the girls and the twins, I took Danny for lunch on Sunset Boulevard for a glimpse of the Hollywood scene. We sat an overpriced outdoor café and reminisced about our first meeting, on a game show in New York called Let’s Play Post Office, where fictitious letters from famous people were revealed line by line to the contestant, as they tried to guess who wrote them. We wrote the letters, filled with funny clues and usually ending with a pun on the celebrity’s name. Dan wrote one for Ernest Hemingway, pleading with his tailor to make him pants with wide belt loops because he was a man “for whom the belt holes” were famous. (For Whom The Bell Tolls?) (Groan) And I ended the Robert Kennedy letter about a touch football game refereed by an incompetent woman named Kay with, “So, what are we going to do about our ref Kay? (RFK?) (Groan) No job we’d had since was as much fun. But sitting here now, older fathers of young kids, finally making a decent living and basking in the glitz at a Sunset Boulevard bistro, we asked ourselves, “Are we lucky, or what?”
“Absolutely! At our age, Mozart was dead.”
“ At Mozart’s age, we were unemployed and chasing crazy women.”
“We finally settled down. It’s amazing isn’t it.”
“No, Don Giovanni’s amazing. This is pitiful!”
We laughed and sipped our seven-dollar ice teas. I looked up to see Jack Lemmon crossing the street to our café.
“Jack!” I yelled as if we were long lost friends.
I escorted him to the table, introduced him to Danny and invited him to join us. He was on his way down the street to another lunch, but he chatted a moment and danced off. It was as if I’d planned this just to impress Danny.
“So, when does Marilyn Monroe stop by?”
“She’s dead, Danny.”
“Yes, but that would really impress me.”
It was getting chilly in late November, but we kept the pool heated. Steam rose up from the water as we swam and ignored the fortune it must have been costing us. We had an Exiles’ Thanksgiving Dinner with our houseguests and a bevy of New Yorkers who had moved to L.A. in search of work and sunshine.
The boys dressed for dinner, pants and shirts! And asked,
“Are we going to have turkey out here?”
“Of course!”
“Do they have turkey out here?”
“ Yes, they fly them in. Or sometimes they fly in themselves.”
“You mean, from Massachusetts?”
Danny jumped in. “Do you know what you’d be eating if you were having Thanksgiving in Turkey?”
“What?”
“Hot dogs!!”
What a relief. To know that other people’s fathers made stupid jokes. And we pretended they were funny. I did point out to the boys that people in Los Angeles felt it was strange to celebrate Christmas where there was no snow, even though this was very much like the climate in Nazareth, where Christ lived.
“Yes, Dadoo, but not where Santa Claus lives!”
But, sitting around the big glass table, Navajo rugs hanging on the walls, the smell of ripe kumquats wafting in from the patio, I knew, as we sat amidst the comforting banter of old friends that this was temporary. The boys, in a way, had brought us out here, but I’d hope we would not stay long. We missed the changing of the leaves in fall. We missed snow. We missed walking to the corner for a slice of pizza. Hell, we just missed walking.
And we thought we should try to settle down somewhere where the boys could establish relationships with other kids. One afternoon, we invited the two boys who played Sam and Gabe over for a play date. To say it was odd to see the kids cast as Sam and Gabe on TV playing with the real Sam and Gabe at our house is an understatement. They played well together. Swimming, shooting water guns, etc. But that night in bed, as we asked them what stood out about the afternoon, Gabriel piped up.
“Peter doesn’t know where Paris is.”
Oh dear, my kids weren’t going to become snobs were they? One trip to Europe and they were snobs?
“Neither of them knows what’s the farthest planet from the sun.”
Uh, oh. I didn’t like the sound of this.
“Different things interest different people. Don’t make value judgments.”
“What’s a value judgment?
“When you … when you judge someone’s worth … when you decide if you like someone or not by how much they know, or how they dress or what they eat or how they look.”
“What’s wrong with doing that?”
“A person can, for instance, know less than you but be a good person. A kind person. That should be more important.”
“Can a person know a lot and also be a good person.?”
“Yes.”
“Is it okay to like that kind of person?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Great. We’ll do that. Okay Gabe?”
“ Okay.”
“ We’ll do that, Dadoo.”
But as the end of May approached and our lease was up, we changed our minds and decided to stay. It had been twenty plus years since my heyday in TV, and now, at last, having gotten a series on, I had some cachet. Minor cachet. Very, very minor cachet. But it beat none at all.
Julia is an athlete—a runner. And she was enamored of the warm weather and the ease of living and opted to stay also. The boys, bless ’em said, “Sure.”
“Are we going to say in this big house?”
“No, no we can’t afford this. But we’ll find a very nice smaller place.”
“And Dadoo, we won’t have to worry about hurting the strange man’s furniture.”
“Right!”
“And Mommy says there’s a good school right down the hill.”
“Yes, Sammo, that’s true.”
“Gabe, we can walk to school.”
“Samuel, Dadoo’s going to take us in his beat up old convertible. Nobody walks out here.”
Julia and I had stayed up nights agonizing over the decision of whether to stay or not, but something as gleeful as the idea that they could walk to school in a city where everybody drives excited the boys enough to make it an adventure.
“And maybe we can skate to school. It’s all downhill.”
“Yes, but Sam, coming home would be all uphill.”
“So? Mommy’s a jock. She could pull us.”
Julia and I, “mature adults,” had agonized. The kids just found a way to make it work.
SCENE: A SMALL RENTED HOUSE IN STUDIO CITY, LOS ANGELES.
(The boys are playing ball with their parents in the small yard, as Pasquale, the 83-year-old Italian gardener whose services came with the rented house, calls Lee aside. He and the cherubic old gardener chat for a moment. Pasquale hands Lee a large manila envelope and Lee returns to the game.)
JULIA
Everything okay with the garden?
LEE
Fine.
SAMUEL
He’s not going to put that smelly stuff on the lawn is he?
GABE
It’s cow poop!
No, no, he’s not.
JULIA
What did he give you?
LEE
Uh … a screenplay.
GABE
Dadoo, he barely speaks English, how can he write a screenplay?
LEE
Honey, last week the pool guy, Vince, pitched me a TV series.
GABE
Is everybody in Hollywood a writer?
LEE
Just about.
SAM
I don’t care what he is, as long as he doesn’t put that smelly poop on the grass!