CHAPTER 23
Absent Farrah and Suzanne, my life went into a tailspin. What few clients I had left, I let slip away. All of them fired me. I held no hard feelings; I wasn’t doing anything for them anyway. It was as if I had no energy, no desire to wheel and deal.
My reputation had caught up with me. I dated dozens of beautiful girls, but I was never sure if they were interested in Jay Bernstein the man or Jay Bernstein the starmaker.
I met a young woman named Joan at the Polo Lounge. We had one date. It was fun. She said she didn’t know who I was. “Can we do this again?” she asked.
I gave her my number and she called the next night. She was at a well-known producer’s house in Beverly Hills. She wanted me to come over. Her voice was sexy, enticing.
I drove over to the house thinking about Joan. She was a beautiful girl, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four. She looked like a model, except for her bustline. She was bountifully endowed. Full of erotic dreams, I drove over to the house.
Nobody answered the door. I listened; I could hear noises inside—not voices, not laughter, just sounds. The door was unlocked, so I went in. It was an elegant house, big and rambling. I followed the sounds into a den. What I saw was weird.
Three girls were nude, each wearing a dog collar. One was walking in a circle and the other two were crawling, making barking sounds. Joan was not one of them. “What in hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the girls. “We get paid for it.”
I heard more noises and went into the next room. The well-known producer was there. It was as if I were his cousin. “Hi, Jay, come in. Partake.” He was watching another girl wearing only a dog collar. She was down on her hands and knees slurping from a dog bowl.
“Where’s Joan?” I asked.
The man shrugged, his eyes intent upon the girl. “Around here somewhere.”
I got the hell out of there. I never saw Joan again, but she called me the next day. “Where did you go last night? He told me you were there.”
“I’m not into kinky stuff like that,” I told her.
“I’m not either,” she said, “but he’s promised to put me in a movie.”
I didn’t say anything; it wasn’t worth my time. The raw side of Hollywood did not appeal to me. It was an element that appealed to gossips, and it always got blown out of proportion to the detriment of the industry. I resented it, yet I continued my descent into Hollywood hell.
I was still in the doldrums when I got a call from a friend of Ronald Reagan. It was during the presidential campaign of 1980. He wanted to know if I would be interested in managing Patti Davis, the candidate’s daughter.
Patti, who had taken her mother’s maiden name, had been struggling for years to find a career in Hollywood. Except for the fact that her father was a national figure, Patti was like thousands of other would-be actors—she had found little success. Her parents, as well as other members of the Reagan election team, were concerned about Patti’s liberal views. I was quietly asked to represent her, ostensibly to advance her career but also with implicit instructions to control her publicity. The Reagan people considered Patti a loose cannon, a young rebel who often spouted views contrary to her father’s positions.
Patti’s career in Hollywood was not floundering; it didn’t exist. In seven years she had managed to gain just two credits. The press latched on to our relationship like leeches. A trade paper wrote in typical Hollywood lingo: “Hot shot agent puts Reagan’s daughter on road to stardom. . . . [Patti is] being groomed by veteran Jay Bernstein [who says] the statuesque 28-year-old daughter has special star quality.” With that kind of publicity, failure was not an option.
Patti’s advantage was the precise element of her potential that she resented. She was Reagan’s daughter, yet she didn’t want to use her legal moniker as a career stimulus. Her attitude was admirable, but she was being naïve. That she was the daughter of her father was inescapable, especially after Reagan became president.
She was a so-so actor, but talent is only part of the recipe for success. She needed a top talent agent also. Throughout my career I have been tagged as an agent, but I never was, although a manager’s duties often overlap other fields. I sought out Norman Brokaw at the William Morris Agency, where I continued to have a good—even symbiotic—working relationship. Overnight we put her to work. Said Time magazine: “Patti is just about the hottest name in town, appearing on TV’s Vega$ . . . Fantasy Island . . . [and] CHiPs.”
As far as the family was concerned, my involvement with Patti was meant to give her something to do aside from making public pronouncements, especially espousing her view on nuclear weapons. It worked, because when a young person begins to break barriers in Hollywood, life changes. The world looks different from how it did when you were in the unemployment line.
If I was initially hired to keep Patti busy, my efforts did not long remain in that single domain. Nancy Reagan called me infrequently, but when she did call she usually had questions about other aspects of public relations. After one of the presidential debates, she was curious about her husband’s performance. “I thought he was shooting from the hip,” I told her. “He didn’t do his homework, what I call ‘due diligence.’” Nancy seemed to agree, although I saw no improvement during the next debate.
Patti and I became friends. In the early days we got along famously. To quench her thirst for liberal talk, I kept her working. After the TV serial roles, I set up a deal for her to do an NBC Movie of the Week. She was cast as the female lead against Gregory Harrison in a teleplay about the Chippendales, the famous male dancers—or infamous, depending on one’s perspective. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but then Shakespeare never drew a television audience. It was an easy sale because the executives at NBC knew Reagan’s daughter would attract a large audience.
When Reagan became president-elect, Patti asked me to be her date for the inauguration. I said yes, I would be delighted. Meanwhile, I introduced her to some of the young up-and-coming actors I knew. One night when I had to take my client Melissa Sue Anderson to a social function, I set up a date for Patti with Timothy Hutton, my old friend Jim’s son. Patti fell in lust. A few days later she called me: “Jay, would you mind if I take Timothy to the inauguration instead of you?” I didn’t mind, and she made arrangements to take Tim.
A week before the inauguration, Timothy had second thoughts. He was a Democrat, and he didn’t think the idea of escorting Patti was so cool after all. He said he didn’t want to look like George Hamilton, who had dated Linda Bird Johnson back in the sixties. He bowed out, and Patti called me. “Jay, I want you to be my escort after all. Will you?”
Actually I had been excited about going the first time she’d asked me, but now I had reservations. Patti was too protean. “Patti, I’ll commit to take you if you promise you’re not going to change your mind at the last minute,” I told her. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do, and the press will want to go through me to get information about you. I don’t want to tell them something that’s subject to change on a whim.” She promised there would be no further changes.
The Air Force was sending a plane. For security purposes we had an entire floor reserved at a Washington, D.C., hotel. One of Reagan’s campaign aides scheduled a photo session for us with her parents. I started feeding the press pre-inauguration stories about Patti, in which I included myself. I announced on Good Morning America that I would be Patti’s date and escort for all events. The day before we were supposed to leave, Patti called me.
“Jay, I’ve been thinking.” She began to hem and haw without saying anything of importance. She didn’t have to; I knew what she wanted to say.
“Get to the point, Patti.”
“I’ve decided to go alone. I mean, you’re still invited to the inauguration and the parties and all, but I think I should fly to Washington by myself.”
“And how am I supposed to get there? By stagecoach? And where am I supposed to stay? Every hotel in Washington, D.C., is booked out by now, Patti.”
She talked around the issue until I grew tired of it.
“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up.
Patti and I didn’t speak again for a long time, although I continued to manage her career. I was angry as well as embarrassed. Essentially, she was dumping me publicly, and now I would have to deal with all the newspeople who had reported that I was going to be her escort.
I speculated as to why I’d been dumped. Perhaps it was because I represented an image the Reagans were trying to avoid. It was the same when JFK switched from Sinatra’s house to Bing Crosby’s house before his visit to Palm Springs. Sinatra had the wrong image; he was no longer valuable to Kennedy. I wore a beard, carried a walking stick and was a show-business mover and shaker named Bernstein. Somebody in the Reagan coterie had decided my image was not what he or she wanted to portray. Now that Ronnie was president, it was time to avoid the Hollywood stuff, the flamboyant stuff and the Jewish stuff. Maybe that’s why Nancy Reagan was so nice to me later.
I was really down in the dumps. My biggest clients were starting to disappear, and it seemed that so, too, was a lot of money. I wasn’t exactly sure what my accountants thought of me, but I thought I had a really good relationship with all my accountants, who worked with Union Bank. By most standards I was rich, a millionaire on the low end of the scale, but wealthy enough that I no longer watched my money with scrutiny. My accountant was a young man named David Flynn. When David went into partnership with Ed Trabner, it seemed like a good idea. Ed handled a number of established stars, including Red Buttons and Gig Young. David had several up-and-coming stars, including Farrah and Lee, who I’d sent to him. Their firm quickly became a powerhouse, representing stars like Paul Newman, Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty.
Once Flynn and Trabner became my business managers, I didn’t give them much thought. They had a blue-chip clientele, which included me somewhere down the list among the $2 and $3 million group, and I felt secure. All seemed well; then weird things began to happen. I started getting calls from businesses I owed money to, a hundred dollars here and a thousand there. “Mr. Bernstein, could you please pay this outstanding bill? It’s been four months,” or “Mr. Bernstein, we’ve billed you time and again. We would hate to turn your bill over for collection.”
I called Union Bank to check my accounts: savings, investments and checking. Collectively they were $1 million short. Not only was nothing there, but also I was in debt $500,000. It seemed someone had embezzled my hard-earned fortune. I was bankrupt, and to top it off, Union Bank wasn’t very cooperative.
It was one of the most horrible periods of my life. I had lost Farrah and Suzanne, and with them my energy. I was playing a game with myself, feigning retirement. I was in the process of building a big terrace deck off the second floor of the Carole Lombard home; suddenly I didn’t have money for the construction workers. My life was a mess, but I kept plodding along as if everything was fine.
I had booked Patti Davis on The Dinah Shore Show. I went to the studio to see the taping, but Patti wasn’t there; furthermore, she wasn’t on the guest list. When I discovered she had been bumped from the show, I was angry. How do you bump the daughter of the president of the United States? I went to the casting director to find out what the hell was going on.
“She was canceled, Jay.”
“Canceled? By whom?”
“Well . . . by you.”
I didn’t remember doing it. I had no idea why I would have canceled Patti, but it was there on the log. Suddenly Hoyle was more than a cliché; nothing was working accordingly. It was time to have a long talk with my best friend: me. The conversation went like this: “If you don’t know what you’re doing, then maybe it’s time to check out.” I had always been a winner; suddenly I felt like an abject loser.
I went home, packed a bag, took my .38 and six shells, and drove away. I went to a bookstore and bought two new biographies of Susan Hayward. Then I got a few tins of Russian caviar and two bottles of Russian vodka. By the time I finished shopping, I had ten hundred dollar bills and a handful of credit cards to my name. But where was I going?
The Beverly Hills and the Beverly Wilshire Hotels were out of the question. I did not want to run into someone I knew who would say, “Hey, Jay! Did you hear? I put a deal together at Columbia!”
“That’s great. Congratulations.”
“And what about you? What are you up to?”
“I’m on my way to commit suicide.”
“That’s great, Jay! See you later!”
Instead, I went to the Beverly Crest, a three-star high-rise at Pico Boulevard and Beverly Drive, a few blocks south of downtown Beverly Hills. A Japanese clerk was behind the desk.
“I want a full suite,” I told him.
“You have reservation?”
“No.”
“No reservation, no suite. No rooms vayable.”
I didn’t want to fool with this guy. “How much is a suite?” I asked.
“Four hundred dorras.”
I put six hundred dollar bills on the counter.
He looked at the money and said, “No room vayable.”
I placed another two bills on the counter.
“No rooms.”
I lay down two more bills, and asked, “Have you got a broom closet?”
“No rooms vayable.”
When he turned down a thousand dollars, I knew I couldn’t bribe him to open the sushi bar a half-hour early.
I drove down Pico Boulevard toward the ocean. Off on a side street I saw a high-rise Ramada Inn. I took a small suite on the ninth floor. The building reminded me of my first apartment in the Mexican hood. It wasn’t the place I had pictured in my mind for suicide. I thought of Edward G. Robinson’s pleasant death scene in Soylent Green. I put off my death until the next day. I went to bed and began to read one of Susan Hayward’s biographies.
I was ensconced in the room for two days trying to work myself up to committing suicide. When I realized it wasn’t working, I called my answering service. One of the messages was from Kathy Dutler in Chicago. She was upset; her sister had given birth to a stillborn child. I decided to put off suicide for a while longer and go to Chicago.
It was the same as usual at O’Hare International, cold and windy. Kathy met me. She was cold, too, having seen her sister’s baby dead at birth. I tried to soothe her feelings, but it didn’t work. I stayed one night and flew back to Los Angeles.
Since I was still alive, I honored a luncheon engagement with Michael Roshkind, vice-chairman of Motown. Mike knew I wasn’t myself. He began to quiz me. I told him everything—Farrah, Suzanne, Kathy, the embezzlement, even my botched suicide. “I don’t want anything from you, Mike. I’m not a good businessman, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Let’s go to the bank. I’ll loan you a half-million dollars.”
“Sure,” I said, “and what will I put up as collateral?”
“I’ll take a mortgage on your home.”
“I already have a mortgage.”
“Then I’ll take a second mortgage.”
“I have a second mortgage, too.”
“Then I’ll take a third mortgage.”
“There isn’t such a thing, Mike.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this, Jay.” He stood up. “Don’t fight it. Let’s go to the bank. I’ll loan you a half-million, and you can pay me back when you get the money.”
“Will the offer still be open if I call you tomorrow?” I asked.
Mike laughed. “Sure. Call me tomorrow.” And he left.
The next morning, I thought, “If Mike has that much faith in me, then I should have faith in myself.” Then I went to Vegas.
For a reason beyond my comprehension, I took on a partner. I was still depressed, although I had overcome my flirtation with suicide. Vegas is the worst place in the world to resolve one’s problems, unless you hit big at the tables, which I didn’t. I was on the phone with my lawyer, Larry Thompson. Suddenly I said, “How would you like to be my partner?”
“Let’s do it,” he said, and that was it.
It had never occurred to me to have a partner. Larry said he would make me rich if I would make him famous. “Okay,” and suddenly we became the Bernstein-Thompson Entertainment Complex. We became the hottest management team in town, except I was the one who was signing the talent. I brought in Linda Evans, William Shatner, Steve Gutenberg, Donna Mills—about three dozen clients. Drew Barrymore was the only person Larry Thompson ever signed during our partnership.
It turned out we were not compatible. Larry was a brilliant lawyer, an excellent negotiator and a good man, but I felt from the beginning that he was in the business for money. I did not fault his attitude, but my motivation was achievement. We were sure to clash. The one thing Larry did, for which I will be forever grateful, is get my bank account straightened out. He discovered the improprieties and I got my money back. I was rich again.