22

I PICKED UP GOLF AGAIN WHEN I MOVED TO MAUI. I hadn’t played since freshman year of college. Soon I was playing four or five days a week. I never really took it seriously enough to get very good at it. For me it’s like it was with my dad, a way of bonding with friends. Michael Douglas and I have been on some epic golf trips.

I started taking Chase golfing with me when he was six, and he grew up to be a much better golfer than I am. Alice and I have golfed together a lot, too. A lot of ex-alcoholics and ex-druggies play golf because it’s a great way to be addicted to something safe. Golf is extremely addictive. If you have an addictive personality, you’re probably never going to get rid of that part of your personality. It’s integral, chemical, hardwired in you. Rather than try to cut off that part of who you are, I think it’s better to embrace it and just shift the addiction from dangerous things like drugs and alcohol to something good, safe, and fun like golf. Why torture yourself every day, denying who you are? Embrace the fact that you’re an addict, and use it. Don’t run from it, don’t get depressed by it, don’t get eaten up by it. Use it. Say to yourself, I’m lucky to be an addict. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be such a good golfer! It’s another miracle.

One morning in January 2012 I drove out to the Kapalua golf course with Chase and Alice. Kapalua is about a forty-five-minute drive from my house, which is farther than we usually go, but the Hyundai pro golf Tournament of Champions had just been there and we wanted to go play while the course was still in tournament condition. For years I’d had a history of gas and irregular movements. This day I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in a couple of days, so it wasn’t abnormal for my stomach to hurt. I just thought it was gas. It had hurt a little the night before; I woke up in the morning and it was still there. By the fourth or fifth hole I was getting really uncomfortable. I put my feet up on the front of the golf cart while we were driving, to try to release the tension. At the ninth hole I said, “I think I’m gonna go home, guys.” They didn’t think anything of it. I rarely play eighteen holes.

On the way home I stopped at a pharmacy and bought some Gas-X. By the time I got home, my guts were starting to hurt a little more than normal, but still not so much that I thought it was anything but gas. Still, something must have shown on my face, because Nancy, my assistant, asked if I was okay. I made a couple of phone calls and then got in the Jacuzzi, hoping the heat would bring out the gas. After fifteen or twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi I realized this wasn’t going away; in fact, the pain was getting worse. This wasn’t just gas. It was sharp pains and dull ones, every kind of pain, rumbling all over my guts, getting more intense by the minute. I called the office on my cell, but Nancy had gone home by then, so I texted Chase, who had just come back.

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” I groaned, “and I don’t think I have time to wait for an ambulance.”

Chase helped me to the car and started driving to the hospital, which is in Kahului, near the airport. Normally it’s about a thirty-minute drive, but he was driving really fast. The pain was now so intense I was stomping my foot and punching the door and dashboard, which really worried Chase. He knew me as such a placid guy. Through gritted teeth I told him not to drive so fast, because if we were pulled over I was really fucked. But he was really concerned now and we pulled up outside the emergency room in twenty minutes. He jumped out and helped me inside.

I had asked Chase to text Nancy, so she was there waiting for us. We rushed past the other people in the waiting area and went straight to the admitting desk. I remember her asking me for my ID and my insurance card, and that’s pretty much it. I have a vague scrap of memory of lying on an examination table and looking up to see Nancy, Chase, and a nurse, a friend of Nancy’s who was running the emergency room. And that’s all I remember until I woke up in a hospital room days later.

Afterward I learned what heroic efforts Nancy had made while I was unconscious. For two days she was on the phone 24/7 with all my doctors in L.A., all my friends. They sent a plane over to get me, because half my friends and half the doctors said I needed to be brought to Los Angeles right away. The other half said no, I needed to be operated on right away, I’d die on the plane. Nancy had to make that decision. A tough decision to make for your boss. I would not have wanted the pressure. Meanwhile, I was lying there, blissfully unaware that I was dying.

Nancy finally said, “Do it.” So they operated on me in Maui. It was touch-and-go. I flatlined twice. Died on the table. I had suffered an intestinal infarction, colloquially known as “a heart attack of the intestines.” Just as the arteries to the heart can get blocked, so can the ones to the bowels. The lack of blood flow causes the lower intestines and colon to stop functioning. The doctors told Nancy that about a foot of my small intestine had died and had to be removed. I was extremely lucky. I’m told that four out of five people don’t survive.

I woke up in a blank white hospital room. Nancy’s was the first face I saw. I felt this incredible sense of peace and ease. I had no pain—I was still on a drip, of course—and no idea of all the drama that had just ensued. I was feeling really blissful. And it occurred to me that I would have been just as happy if I hadn’t woken up.

The next day, I was beginning to feel pretty low and sorry for myself. It struck me as a bit sad that the first face I saw when I woke up was Nancy’s. She talks about this in the movie, because it struck her as well. I don’t mean that I was sad that it was Nancy, but sad that it wasn’t a wife or family standing there. It was an employee. And now even she wasn’t there. I was sixty-six years old, I was alone in my hospital room . . . and it was Friday the thirteenth.

That’s when Mike Myers called.

“Ready to say yes now?”

I really liked Mike. We had met on the set of Wayne’s World in 1991, at an important point in Alice’s life and career. The early 1980s had pretty much been one long lost weekend for Alice. In addition to the drinking he started smoking crack. The quality of his albums deteriorated. For a while he was so bad I couldn’t stand the heartache of being around him. He was terrifyingly malnourished and emaciated, sick in other ways, and always zonked out of his mind. I couldn’t pull him out of it. Nobody could—not me, not Sheryl, not his poor parents—until he decided to do it himself. Finally, he agreed to go back into rehab.

He called me from a hospital bed and I agreed to help him try to make a comeback. It was a long, tough climb. For a while I took most any offer that came his way, just to get him started up again. That’s how Alice starred in one of the worst movies I have ever seen, a horror picture called Monster Dog. I knew the producer, Eduard Sarlui, who ran Trans World Entertainment, a small production and distribution company. They shot it in Spain, with an Italian director and an entirely Spanish cast except for Alice, then dubbed it in English for the U.S. home video market. When they showed it to me and Alice, the voices were completely, wildly out of synch. I mean way out of synch—and no one had even noticed until we pointed it out. They just shrugged and released it anyway.

It was all up from there, but slowly. Alice put out a new album in 1986, Constrictor, on MCA, and went on tour for the first time in a few years. We billed the tour as “The Nightmare Returns,” and he worked really hard on it, staying on the road pretty continuously from the fall of 1986 through the spring of 1987. It worked—his old fans were glad to see him back, and younger fans were glad to see him, period.

In 1991, we got a call that Paramount was making a movie of Mike Myers’s “Wayne’s World” routine from Saturday Night Live. They needed a big rock icon to be in the scene where Wayne and Garth (Dana Carvey) fall to their knees and do their famous “We’re not worthy!” Alice was not only one of the biggest rock stars of all time, he could act, so it was an excellent match. They would shoot a bit of Alice onstage, and he’d get one song on the soundtrack.

When I met Mike, he was pretty set on the idea that the song had to be one of Alice’s giant hits from the early days, either “I’m Eighteen” or “School’s Out.” But Alice had a new album coming out, Hey Stoopid, and I didn’t see any point in his being in the movie if it didn’t feature a new song and help promote the album. You know, win-win.

Mike said no.

I was firm but not unreasonable with him. I said, “I happen to know that you start shooting in two weeks. You really don’t have a choice. Now, I read the script, and I see the band is only onstage for eight seconds. No one will remember anyway. He’s got a great song on the new album, ‘Feed My Frankenstein.’ Put that one on the soundtrack, and if you put ‘School’s Out’ in the credits, everyone will think that’s the song he sang.”

The movie came out in 1992, and “Feed My Frankenstein” is on the soundtrack, and it was a great moment in Alice’s career. Since then, I have never walked through an airport with him where he didn’t get a few dozen people going down on their knees and chanting, “We’re not worthy!” And it was the start of a beautiful friendship with Mike. After Wayne’s World his father died and Mike was struggling with grief. He came to my house for a weekend and ended up staying two months. I cooked for us both. It’s what I do. He’s the best audience for my stories. He loves hearing my stories. After a while he started saying, “You have got to let me get these stories on film. Let me tell your story. The story of a guy who created all this culture.”

That day in the hospital I finally agreed.

They sent me home a few days later. Marty Kriegel was living in Taiwan at that point. He flew to Maui to keep an eye on me. He’d gone to med school, done everything except actually get an M.D., so he was great to have around. He changed my bandages and monitored my condition. At one point he noticed some excessive bleeding and got me right back to the hospital to fix a stitch. The first few nights he actually slept in the bed with me, keeping an eye on me. He ended up staying for two months. That’s a pretty good friend.

Three or four weeks into my recuperating, when I was feeling much better, I called Mike and asked him to call the movie off.

“Too late,” he said. “We already staffed up.”

So he made his movie. My agreement with him was that I would not be involved in any way, other than to sit for a few interviews and refer him to some other people who might have something interesting to say. “It’s your movie,” I told him. “Your story. Tell it the way you see it.” I did ask him to show it to me when he had a rough cut done, just in case there was anything in it I really didn’t think should go public. I wasn’t thinking about covering my own ass. I just wanted to make sure that it would not contain anything that might be hurtful or damaging to others.

It was a labor of love for him. He put a lot of time and some of his own money into it. When he was ready I went to his apartment in Soho in New York City to see it. When I walked in the door his little dog got all yappy and snappy with me. “Oh sorry,” he said quickly, and locked it in another room. It’s one of the ways I know who my real friends are. They never force me to pretend I like being around their dogs.

It’s a very strange feeling to sit and watch a whole movie that’s about you. I thought it was great, but it’s definitely Mike’s movie, his version of my life and who I am. When it ended, he said, “Well?”

“It’s your story,” I said. “Just do one thing for me.”

“Name it.”

“Take me to lunch someday with this guy Shep.”