Tuck and I had shared a small rental cottage in Amagansett the summer before and had become good friends. It was during that period that I fell in love with the East End, and Amagansett in particular. We lived the life of two bachelors, with a very small beach house and not much else. The days were spent cooking at home, punctuated by visits from the occasional kindhearted female visitor, drinking and sleeping on the beach—things I’d never want (drinking) or have time for (cooking) again. But the beach in Amagansett is a good place to get acquainted with God.
On our cross-country drive, I may have alarmed Tuck, my future roommate, with a preview of what was to come regarding my developing self-destruction. I suggested to Tuck that our route be guided not only by places where we had family and friends, but also by where I could deepen my relationship with cocaine. Drugs and alcohol, much to my own surprise, would become an increasingly powerful force in my life. At first slowly, then a sudden, rapid acceleration. All of the feelings behind it were the “self-centered fear” that AA’s Big Book discusses. The self-centered fear that we would either not get something we wanted or lose something we already had. My life was changing in so many ways, most of them good, but others, painful. I was lonely and scared. I missed my family, the simplicity of being myself, of being accepted, even loved, simply for who I was. I often dreaded performing and, even more, the performing you had to do off camera. I was alternately tense, cocky, needy, inspired, or depressed. I felt that tremendous opportunities were in front of me and, therefore, there was no turning back. And as I wanted everyone to believe that I had it together, I was unwilling to ask people around me for help. I left my home with a case of OCD, a consuming desire to earn a respectable living, if not make a fortune, and a nagging need for attention that would fill the holes my parents were too enervated to address. But sometimes, dreams where I would go back to Massapequa and wait for my dad to come home and watch the late night movie show with him would flood me with feelings that I didn’t know what to do with. So I drank. I took drugs and I drank. The chance at a career in Hollywood represented ever greater change for which I was poorly prepared. So, LA would prove to be the Kitty Hawk where my addiction really took off.
Our first stop was the Virginia suburbs, where the woman I’d first seen lying on the floor of my freshman dorm at GW, none other than Avis Renshaw, now lived with her husband and kids. We had stayed in touch. Her husband, Steven Cox, resembled Montgomery Clift as photographed by Dorothea Lange. My nickname for him was Male Model Farmer. They owned a farm and grew things. Avis had purchased a pizza oven, installed it in her garage, busted a hole in the wall to allow access to the oven from inside the house, and, thus, birthed Mom’s Apple Pie Company. They had a lot of kids, one of whom, Biansa, later became my assistant. Avis was happy. She had a home and a family, things it would take me another thirty years to find. After a day of envying Avis and Male Model Farmer, we drove on.
Tuck was living the life of a real actor and, therefore, was not obsessed with box office numbers or red carpets, the adoration of fans and critics, or special treatment in restaurants, hotels, and other public places. He had, and still has, the career that nearly all actors should expect after their apprenticeship, one that is about the work. In this situation, performing roles in the theater is your life. If some degree of security comes your way, like a soap opera or any paying gig, some means to take the pressure off and earn a couple of bucks, that is welcomed. During our friendship, I’ve seen him act in several productions, from La Jolla to New York to Palm Beach. A skilled and dedicated stage performer, he’s traveled the country and, as a result, developed a skill that truly great thespians possess: sizing up one’s overnight accommodations.
En route to Tuck’s hometown of Kansas City, we stopped in Indianapolis and pulled into a nondescript motor inn. It was late and we were beat. The desk attendant checked us in and handed over the keys. Once inside, I moaned about hitting the sack, but Tuck said, “Not so fast.” The boy from the Show Me State wanted to do a bit of inspecting. With a flick of the wrist, he turned down the bed to reveal gray sheets covered in spots of some indeterminate source. “We’re outta here,” he snapped. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “These sheets haven’t been changed in weeks!” he said. He called the desk. A night-shift security guy showed up with supposedly cleaner sheets. In the doorway, Tuck said, “What’s this?” “Your fresh sheets,” the guard muttered. “Keep ’em,” Tuck snorted. We went to the desk, said no thanks, and got our thirty bucks back. Thirty bucks. Years later, I’d end up staying in hotels where a hamburger was thirty bucks. And the movie I was shooting while staying in that hotel hardly measured up to the artistic standard that Tuck had spent his life pursuing. That’s one rule in Hollywood: the shittier the project, the more they pay you.
In Kansas City, Tuck’s dad, a “Missourah” gentleman of the old school, took us for the obligatory stop at Romanelli’s for a roast beef sandwich. Next, we visited Dallas and Tuck’s brother, Bill, a former military pilot who went on to work for Delta Air Lines. Tuck, the youngest child, was the lone “artist” in his family. I related, as my own home had lacked any cultural trappings. Though acting had never been my goal and I had grave doubts about my future while heading to LA, living with a comedian like Gary and then an actor like Tuck was rubbing off on me. Gradually, people outside the business seemed dull, guarded, and predictable. Part of falling in love with acting is falling in love with actors. And before money began to contaminate the whole enterprise, there were so many to fall in love with.
We then drove through the Texas panhandle and headed toward Santa Fe to see Amy Irving, whom Tuck had performed with in Seattle. In Chillicothe, Texas, we got caught in a speed trap, where the speed limit seemed to drop from 150 miles per hour to 25 inside of a block. We were pulled over and taken into the police station, which appeared to double as the local DMV, courthouse, and feed store. Late in the frozen evening, standing in front of a schoolroom-style retractable chart bearing the schedule of fines, we could overhear the arresting officer saying to the judge, “But they got traveler’s checks from the Chase Manhattan Bank IN NEW YORK CITY!!!” It was the Pace picante sauce commercial brought to life. We then drove to Flagstaff to rest, drink, and blow a kiss to one of the wonders of the world. “I give you the Grand Fucking Canyon,” Tuck said as we walked onto the viewing platform at the edge of the South Rim. We took it in for about twenty minutes, the last pure thing I’d do for some time to come. Then we jumped in the car and headed to LA.
One week after we had left New York, we arrived in West Hollywood to find that the apartment we were subletting wasn’t ready. The great stage actress Roberta Maxwell, whom I had seen at Williamstown, and her husband, Phil Dunne, an audio engineer for the likes of Elton John, needed a couple more days to move out. Our first night in LA, we slept on the floor of Toby and Bob, a couple whom Tuck had worked with in New York. It was there that I met and fell in love with Ken Page. I was falling in love every half hour back then, enamored as I was by this newly discovered crowd. Ken, a great musical theater actor who had come to LA to branch out, having played roles in Cats and Ain’t Misbehavin’, is one of the most talented Broadway performers I would come to know. Through Tuck I met a few other New York actors, directors, and writers who had relocated to LA: David Marshall Grant, Victor Garber, and a writer named Ron Dobson, who would eventually become the best friend I would ever have.
After a few days, we finally moved into Roberta and Phil’s. Roberta, a dark and stormy Canadian, and Phil, a lanky and chirpy Brit, lived on Larrabee Street, above Sunset. When they were finally vacating the place, Phil paused to lay out his dos and don’ts. In a scene reminiscent of a National Lampoon movie, Phil finished his checklist saying, “Now, in this closet”—Phil indicated his closet—“in this box”—Phil indicated a box inside the closet—“are my mah-stah pressings of Elton’s reck-hords.” Along a wall, heading up the stairs, were framed gold records from some of the Elton John recordings Phil had engineered. “Please do not touch them. They are vinyl pressings from the original mah-stah tapes, and I tell you, you must never handle them. Please. I must insist. Don’t even take them out of their sleeves. I implore you.” Well, I think we had them out and on the turntable before his car hit the bottom of the hill. We pulled the trophies off the wall, too, as the prospect of snorting cocaine off framed Elton John gold records while listening to “mah-stah pressings” of “The Bitch Is Back” was just too tempting.
I met some smart and wicked characters in LA in 1983. Through the actress Hillary Bailey, our other roommate, I was introduced to a small group of writers who worked in network sitcoms. They typed away at an early form of computer in their apartments in the Hollywood Hills, pumping out episodes of some of the most successful comedies on the air. An afternoon of writing, and boom, they were done. Then we played tennis and drank while I listened to them bullshit about a business that I was barely in. But because they were in it, I could listen all night long. Driving is everything in LA, so drugs suddenly seemed more practical than booze. People drank, but that was often how they balanced the high of cocaine. As these guys were civilized sorts, we’d go to dinner at Lew Mitchell’s Orient Express, the old “gourmet” Chinese joint on Wilshire near the Miracle Mile, before we blasted off for the evening. It was the LA equivalent of Hurley’s. I watched them eat squab in lettuce cups. Imagine this New Yorker in LA, where pigeons were on the menu.
Tuck and I had a phone answering machine, and as neither of us had a job, we reveled in recording long, self-indulgent outgoing messages, usually employing ridiculous dialects. The result was bad Monty Python. One day, we got a message from an old friend of Tuck’s, Dick Clayton, a bygone actor who had appeared in films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton before going on to a big career as an agent, representing James Dean and Burt Reynolds at the Famous Artists Agency. Clayton, polite but firm, said, “I don’t know what that is, Tuck, but you ought to knock that off. No one wants to sit and listen to that over the phone. It’s not very professional, and I think it makes you look bad, if I may say so.” A lesson about Hollywood as a serious business, courtesy of James Dean’s agent. We changed the outgoing message.
Los Angeles quickly became a blur of Thomas Guide maps, gas stations, burger joints, studio parking lots, and bars like Barney’s Beanery and the Formosa Café, which were the Polo Lounge and Dan Tana’s for out-of-work actors. I went to lots of auditions for films, TV shows, and some TV commercials. TV commercial calls in LA highlighted how the business differed from New York. In New York, guys showed up for auditions with a game face on. Commercials were viewed as a trite yet necessary evil, so you’d chat about what else you were working on, typically in the theater or film. In LA, the guys who sat around the holding area talked about hang gliding, biking, horseback riding, surfing, hiking, or anything else one might do under the perfect Southern California sun. Each was a perfect specimen in terms of height, fitness, hair, and skin, and nearly everyone was named Chad, Rick, or Steve, with maybe one or two Coles. They were male models auditioning to play cowboys, cops, or the guy half of some perfect-looking straight couple. In New York, actors talked about the latest play at the Public Theater. In LA, they talked about the newest cars, diet shakes, or workouts.
In the majority of my early auditions, I was either dreadful or totally unmemorable. But it didn’t matter. I was perfect for TV in the ’80s. I met Jean Guest, the mother of director Christopher Guest and the head of casting at CBS. Jean was a kind, intelligent woman who seemed to be in my corner in those early days. After a series I shot for CBS was canceled, the network signed me to a holding deal, paying me a relatively small stipend in exchange for simply not working for anyone else. In one meeting, an opaque colleague of Jean’s said, “We like you and want to try to find a good fit. We’ll keep throwing something against the wall until it sticks. We want you to be the next Bill Bixby.” In New York, the carrot might be a career like Pacino’s. In LA, it was the chance to be the heir to the star of My Favorite Martian.
The series I shot was called Cutter to Houston, a drama where Shelley Hack, a wonderful actor named Jim Metzler, and I played doctors bringing our talents to some Texas backwater, each for our own complicated reasons (I was a physician/drug thief who was sentenced to work there as community service, if you can imagine such a thing).
The pilot was written and directed by Sandor Stern, who had a heart attack in the final days of shooting it and was replaced by another director. The show was eventually taken over by the producer Gerry Abrams, father of the prolific J. J. Abrams. We wrapped the pilot at the end of March 1983.
By then, the California sun had seduced me a bit, as I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway and hung out at Zuma, La Piedra, Pescador, Matador, and Nicholas Canyon Beaches in Malibu. I thought that if I found a lot of work in LA, I might live in Malibu, which possessed a wonderful sense of community. Beyond the lifestyle, LA represented the chance for me to learn more about the business than I could in New York. I thought about staying a bit longer, driving around California, seeing the place in a way I never had time for when I was working all day. But right about that time, my sister called to tell me to come back home as soon as I could. Everyone there had underplayed my father’s condition, and now his health had declined precipitously.
In my first few days back in New York, I learned that my father had only weeks to live. The lymphoma, detected in August of 1982, had raged through his body and was now in his lungs. Initially, he went to Mount Sinai on the recommendation of his brother Charles’s second wife, Vera, for whom promising treatments involving macrobiotic dieting bought more than a year of comfort and some hope. But after this period of remission, her cancer recurred and she died. At Sloan Kettering, they had essentially told him to go home and die as comfortably as he could. My sister told me that he dragged himself to work until some of his students’ parents complained to the administration that his appearance “upset” them. He called my sister Beth and, throwing in the towel, asked her to take him back home to Linda’s house, where he’d been living.
My uncle Charles found a hospital in Philadelphia that agreed to see him, so when I got back to New York, I traveled by train to the Mercy Catholic Medical Center’s Misericordia Hospital. Charles, battle-hardened as he was by Vera’s illness, was at my father’s side much of the time. When I arrived, the halls seemed so ominous: dark, long, and wide. The walk to my dad’s room seemed to take forever. When I entered the room and finally saw him, I was speechless, and not only because of his sallow skin or the tubes coming out at different angles. It was the look in his eye, a look I had never seen before, that crushed me. I saw fear in this brave and self-abnegating man. This was not my father. He spoke only once that first afternoon, to tell me that he wanted neither a wake nor a funeral. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in Lake Coeur D’Alene in northern Idaho, the place he had dreamed he might retire.
My brother Billy and I spent the night at a weird motel where the lounge, called the Frank Sinatra Room, featured a trio of middle-aged guys playing and crooning the hits of the Chairman of the Board on Friday and Saturday nights. One wall had a mural, perhaps fifteen feet wide by eight feet high, a knockoff of the cover from Sinatra’s Main Event album from 1974. Maybe this was God offering us something truly bizarre to take our mind off of the situation. Just across a narrow alley, my father was suffering unimaginably, while we drank and listened to “The Shadow of Your Smile,” performed by the Frank Sinatra of South 54th Street, Philly.
The next morning, my dad opened his eyes, and as a tear rolled down his cheek, he said, “I’ll never see my grandchildren.” Then, overwhelmed by morphine, he went back to sleep. An oncology resident from India asked, “Did your father ever work in heavy industry?” No, I said. “Near a steel mill or factories?” No, I said. “Your father has a very high lead content in his blood,” he informed me. I told the doctor that my father had coached riflery in a high school for twenty-eight years, and he ventured that an unventilated shooting range may have been a cause. There, for over a quarter century, lead dust was inhaled not just by my dad, but by his team members and my brothers and me as well. Other area schools had installed ventilation in their shooting ranges long before. Some months later, my sister asked school officials to provide us with sample material from walls, flooring, and ceiling tiles to assess the level of toxicity. These men, my father’s colleagues for decades and some his longtime friends, denied our requests and gutted the rifle range, incinerating all of the material in order to shield the district, and themselves, from the litigation we were exploring.
* * *
On April 15, I was back in New York to meet for a general audition with the casting director John Lyons, and read “Let us sit upon the ground . . .” from Richard II. It was probably bad, but John only smiled and said, “Well, I’ve never seen that done that way before.” Though some casting agents were assholes, others genuinely cared, like Lyons and the late Howard Feuer. In 1986, I auditioned for Peter Shaffer’s Yonadab, and at one point, the director, Peter Hall, expressed concern about the paucity of my theater credits. Feuer, who was short, corpulent, and spoke with a wheeze, blurted out, “Well, he’s very stageworthy!” Dear, dear Howard. I owe so much to people like him.
After the audition, I took a long trip by subway, then bus, to Yonkers to meet a bail bondsman. It seemed that my brother Daniel had either borrowed or stolen a car and had been arrested while visiting my brother Billy at college in Binghamton. I had to post the bail so that Daniel could get down to Philadelphia to see our father. I got to the bail bondsman’s office and, matter-of-factly, he said, “I am authorized to use deadly force, if need be, to bring him in. You realize that, don’t you?” After a pause, he repeated, “Deadly force . . . if necessary,” his tone suggesting that he was rather fond of deadly force. I signed the bail papers to spring my brother and made my way home to the apartment on 58th between 1st and 2nd. I walked up the three flights of stairs, opened my door, and got a glass of water. It was five p.m., and I hadn’t been in the door five minutes when the phone rang. It was my sister Beth, convulsing. I could barely understand her until she got out the words “Dad died.” I don’t remember anything after that. I don’t remember the cab ride to Penn Station, the train ride to Massapequa, or the taxi to our house. When I got there, my mother, Beth, and I seemed to unconsciously move into the den, where we stood near the daybed that my father had slept on for many years. I felt as if I had fainted and come to in that room. My journey to LA had been not only encouraged by my father but also underwritten, in some sense, by the lies about his health, lies that had brought us to this awful place. I started to sob uncontrollably, and I blacked out again, awake but unable to hear or recall anything.
My father was the first person for whom I was charged with arranging a burial. His wake was held at the Massapequa Funeral Home. Prior to the services that evening, the owner, a man not much older than me, quietly asked me if I was ready to bid farewell to the body. I hesitated, not quite sure I wanted to see my father’s body, and that must have showed. The man leaned in and said, “One day, I assure you, you may see your dad walking down the street or sitting in a park. You’ll swear it’s him. So I urge all of the family members to view the body and say a proper good-bye. That way, you have no doubts.” The thought had never occurred to me. The next thing I knew, I was in the room, standing over my father. With makeup, he looked a good deal better than when I’d last seen him. He was beloved in my hometown, and that night many, many in our town came to his wake. My mother sat in a widow’s chair and received the condolences of half the town, with no acknowledgment of the state of their marriage.
After my father’s death, my relationship with my mother would hit an all-time low. As I look back, I attribute this to her fear and economic insecurity as a widow. However, we now entered a period where I was more of an ex-husband than a son. My mother had often relied on Beth and me to function as lieutenants in her army. However, as I spent more time in Los Angeles working, my mother’s needs and her inimitable way of expressing them drove us to a frosty, unpleasant place.
The funeral was held at our church, St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Amityville. Another Catholic church, St. Rose, had opened nearer to us in Massapequa, but by then we were dedicated St. Martin’s parishioners. It looked like every seat was taken. I came in and out of my battered state, picking up on snippets of the Mass text. I stared at the floor. Then, I heard the priest recite, “Eternal rest grant unto him and may perpetual light shine upon him.” I cracked again, but it was different this time. The word, as I learned, is “keening.” I thought I might pass out. My sister reached over and squeezed my thigh and whispered, “You’ve got to stop.” But I couldn’t stop, because this was incomprehensible. My father couldn’t be dead. That wasn’t possible. The only person in the world I trusted was now gone and everything would be different. Throughout that day and beyond, I worried about the lost opportunities to thank him for his generosity and selflessness. I fantasized about the clothes I would have bought him, the trips I’d have sent him on. Many in my family needed help, and I tried to provide that help, but I always imagined that, in his case, I would have done anything to thank this man. Anything. He had sacrificed so much to carry me on his back up this hill of life.
Two years later, while shooting a TV show, Dress Gray, at Warner Bros., I noticed a man sitting at a picnic table at an outdoor commissary. It was my father. I froze. Then I walked a few steps toward him. The funeral director had been right. It was not my dad. After that began the unconscious and ultimately unhealthy search for someone to substitute for him.