Booze was the next thing to go.
It wasn’t like I had a checklist, though. Despite all the effort I’d devoted to giving up alcohol in the past, despite programs I tried and the promises I’d made to myself, sobriety just happened as I was living my life.
In the fall of 1985, I made Strong Medicine, a TV miniseries based on Arthur Hailey’s novel about the pharmaceutical industry. We shot in London with a cast that included Dallas’s Patrick Duffy and Pamela Sue Martin, and also Sam Neill, Ben Cross, Annette O’Toole, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who, at eighty-five, provided a debonair air of fun by coming to the set every day dressed to the nines and hitting on all the actresses.
I hadn’t worked there since I made Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the city and the countryside charmed me all over again. Michelle and I settled in a hotel around the corner from Hyde Park. She redid our room, made friends with the hotel staff, and eventually convinced them to redesign their restaurant’s menus. Basically, she took over the hotel and we were treated like royalty.
During downtime on the set, I indulged my interest in poetry, as well as reciting poetry out loud, and poor Michelle had to sit and listen to me recite verse in an English accent, which, I have to say, had improved since I first tried it out in Mary Poppins. As long as I was around people who spoke with an English accent, mine was more than passable. For a while, I entertained the idea of moving there, to a little place in the hills of Broadway, also known as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds,” and if not for the tax structure there we might’ve actually moved.
I don’t know whether it was because I was so relaxed in England and comfortable within my life or whether something in my body chemistry changed, but all of a sudden I lost both my taste and tolerance for alcohol. It first happened in England and continued after we returned to L.A. Instead of giving me a lift, a cocktail or glass of wine made me sick to my stomach.
Michelle still enjoyed a cocktail or two, and if we went to a party she’d get silly with the rest of them, but I began to pass. We were making dinner at home one night and after taking a sip of wine I put the glass down and said, “Boy, that’s making me ill.” From then on, I lost my desire to drink. Finally, I just stopped trying altogether and then I lost the taste altogether.
After a certain point, I never hid the fact that I had a drinking problem. I may not have been open about the long struggle I endured in giving it up completely, but once it happened I never wanted a drink again. Over the years, people would ask how I stopped and I would shrug, as mystified and curious as anyone. It was as if my body did what my mind couldn’t: It said, “Enough!”
Sometimes I wonder if I no longer needed it, if the intricate complications within me somehow, finally, straightened themselves out.
At sixty-one, I was happy and content in my life—and with myself. There were no more internal fires to put out. The conflicts I had battled for years had been resolved. Good decisions had prevailed, and time had proven the strongest medicine. Margie had moved to a lovely house on the Oregon coast. The kids were all doing well, and so were the grandchildren.
Now a decade into our relationship, Michelle and I bought a Spanish-style hacienda in Malibu. We wanted to get married, something we never got around to doing even though it was always on our to-do list. We were either too busy sailing, relaxing at home, or visiting with friends, and time flew by. As friends such as Richard Deacon and Jerry Paris passed away, I counted my blessings. I wanted another series. I read numerous scripts and treatments, but nothing resonated in a way that motivated me to give up my life of leisure.
It made me appreciate even more the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that had come my way back when Carl Reiner sent me not a treatment or a script but eight completed scripts for a new series—and they were all brilliant in every way. What had changed since then? Were there fewer geniuses? Was it the business? Or were expectations off? Did every decade have only a few gems that would stand the test of time, and those of us who were part of them simply have to thank our lucky stars?
George C. Scott lived near us for a while and the two of us wanted to do a series together. We came up with an idea that would have us playing two retired attorneys who opened a tiny law office and did pro bono work, except we were on opposite sides of the political fence. He would be the conservative who helped tax cheats and white-collar criminals, and I was the liberal with the bleeding heart. We thought it would be great, but we could not get anyone at the networks to bite.
Instead, I made the rounds as a guest star on other series, starting with Andy Griffith’s show Matlock. For years, Andy had periodically checked in from his North Carolina home and said, “Let’s do something.” For this first and only time we actually did. I played the bad guy, the judge in a murder trial who turned out to be the murderer.
Next was Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon, who ran the perfect company, since practically all of his crew started with him on Bonanza. They were like an extended family. I played a homeless guy who had a little puppet show on skid row. It was perfect for me: dressing up like an old man, entertaining kids. I think it was one of my best performances ever. But my favorite moment was off-camera.
We shot late at night on skid row in downtown L.A., and during a break I took a walk slightly beyond the production and the cops who were protecting us. I wanted to stay in character for the next scene. I sat on the curb and placed my props—a brown sack of puppets and a bottle—next to me. Soon a couple of real-life homeless guys sat down and asked if I would share my drink.
“It’s—” I was going to explain that it was not booze, that it was actually a prop. Then I thought better of it.
“Here, take it,” I said, after which I walked away so I would not be there when they realized it was tea.
I got another dose of the streets when I worked with comedian and Sanford and Son star Redd Foxx on the TV movie Ghost of a Chance. I played a detective who misfires his gun while chasing a drug dealer in a nightclub and accidentally kills the club’s piano player. Naturally, the musician comes back and haunts him—but with the charge to turn both of their lives around. Some network executives saw it as a possible series. We would not have survived twenty-six episodes. The one was dangerous enough.
On the set, Redd fueled his funny bone with Grand Marnier and cocaine. Always high, he was volatile and unpredictable. You never knew what might set him off. One day, he thought he overheard the director make a racial slur. The director had said the word “boy,” as in “boy oh boy,” while speaking to a black guy on the crew, but it was not a slur.
Only Redd heard it that way. But that was enough to incite him. First he glared at the director. Then he pulled a large knife out from a sheath in his pant leg and said, “I’m going to cut him up.”
Taking him at his word, I moved quickly to head off any bloodshed that wasn’t fake by wrapping my arms around Redd and physically restraining him until I was able to convince him that he had misheard things. It was the most tension I had ever experienced on a set and the first physical altercation I’d been involved in since kindergarten.
At the end of March 1987, I flew up to Vancouver to work with my son Barry on the series Airwolf. The show, starring Jan-Michael Vincent, Ernest Borgnine, and Alex Cord, had been canceled by CBS after three years, but the USA network picked it up for a smaller-budgeted fourth season. They moved production to Canada, recycled helicopter shots from old footage, and recast the show with Barry, Geraint Wyn Davies, Michele Scarabelli, and Anthony Sherwood. I was cast in an episode as a mad scientist, and we were finishing up work when tragedy struck the family some 2,500 miles away.
My son Chris’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, was at home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived with her mother. She was fighting a mild fever brought on by chicken pox. Feeling crummy, she took four baby aspirins. I’m sure she thought she was helping herself. Instead, by taking those aspirin, she inadvertently triggered a fatal infection that went straight to her liver and brain. Three days later, she fell violently ill and was rushed to the hospital, where exactly a week after taking the aspirin, she died, the result of a rare disease known as Reye’s syndrome.
First reported in 1963, Reye’s was and still is a medical mystery whose cause is largely unknown but connected to people—mostly children—who take aspirin when they have viral infections like the flu or chicken pox. At the time, there were warnings in small print on most but not all bottles of aspirin. “God knows,” Jessica’s stepfather told the L.A. Times, “we never knew about Reye’s syndrome.” None of us did.
But it changed all of our lives forever. Chris came in from Annapolis, where he was a lobbyist for Nike. By the time I jetted back east from Vancouver, Jessica was gone. The loss destroyed everyone—Chris, Jessica’s mom, her stepfather, me, Michelle, Margie, the whole family, and countless others in her school and community who knew her.
My first grandchild was a bright, vibrant girl just coming into her own. She played sports, liked the outdoors, and wrote poetry. Always precocious, Jessica had been putting her thoughts on paper for years. Her feelings reflected an old soul, someone concerned with the big, more profound issues of love and death and the relative brevity of life. “A special girl,” her parents said of her—and indeed, that was true of the eleven-year-old who wrote this poem titled “Dreams”:
All is white,
Objects floating everywhere,
People sleepwalking through life,
Stopping, picking up reality, walking on.
Suddenly a flash,
Out of a dreamworld into reality;
Nothing can last forever.
Only some people never see the flash.
My mind drifted back to a day a year or two earlier when she’d been staying with Chris and his wife, Christine, on the boat where they lived in Annapolis. Both of them had gone to work and left me to watch Jessica. She was all questions, nonstop questions about life, religion, our family history, the universe, everything. She kept me talking all day. It was one of the best and most challenging conversations of my life.
That night, I took her out to dinner and she was absolutely fascinated that everyone knew me. All night long people asked for autographs or said they had enjoyed my work, and each time Jessica looked at me with wide eyes, trying to figure out what was going on. She couldn’t believe it.
“Are you special, Grandpa?” she asked.
“No more or less than anyone else,” I said.
“Can I be like that someday?” she asked.
“You already are,” I said.
Time lessened the immediate pain of losing Jessica, but there was no getting over the loss of someone with so much potential at such a young age. I could not begin to count how many times I asked myself “Why?” The poets have talked about sorrow reminding us of the stuff that matters in our life, but still, why? Why a child? I returned to the many theologians and philosophers I had read, brilliant people who had explored the existence of God, His will, and the meaning of life. Had they said anything about the meaning of life in the aftermath of such a shattering experience?
As near as I could figure, no one had ever said anything on the subject better than Jessica herself. I got out her poems, a little book she put together called Collected Poems, which I had saved for years, and I reread the verse that had flowed from her heart. I saw that she got it, she understood, she knew that life was love.
Loving each other forever,
Orchestras of heart-beats,
Visits to paradise—
Every word is a kiss.