CHAPTER 22

Hooray for Hollywood

We had earned the time off. We needed to rest, recharge, and rejuvenate. Professionally and, as it turned out, personally.

Rikki and I had been living together for four years. One night after a gig in Northern California, we had the plane drop us off in Monterey. We told everyone we were going to spend the weekend. What we didn’t tell them was that we were going to get married. The next day, just before sunset, we tied the knot on Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, with the pounding surf breaking in the background. Saying those vows, I felt like I was on acid.

I have been married three times, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that a happy marriage is predicated on the recitation of the following phrase: “Honey, I want to do whatever you want to do, that’s what I want to do.” It can get way, way more complicated than that, but if you start out from there, you’ll save everybody, especially yourself, a lot of grief.

You may not entirely mean it when you say it, and your partner may know that you don’t entirely mean it when you say it. But it is essential that you say it. It acknowledges that, all things being equal, you don’t want to fight over trivial shit. And in the long run, most of it turns out to be trivial shit.

I like being married. I like having a relationship with one person I can count on who can also count on me. In a marriage with one person who is a celebrity, it’s like having a third person in the union. The third person requires selfish attention and can intrude upon the intimacy of the couple, and it requires a great deal of patience and understanding to make it work. It is never easy.

I have learned over the years, sometimes in the very hardest way, to try to eliminate the battleground aspect of marriage. I have not always been successful, but I have always been happy when I succeeded… because, after all, “I want to do whatever you want to do” is the sine qua non of a happy marriage.

Back in LA, Rikki and I settled into a 1920s beach bungalow on El Matador State Beach in the most northern part of Malibu. We were almost the only ones out there. It was the first house I ever bought, and I would live there for the next forty years. Matador Beach has been voted the best beach in Los Angeles for as long as I can remember. You can see it twenty times a day on TV commercials, with its massive rocks on the beach. I took to the water immediately and either swam, body-surfed, or fished just about every day. I felt as if I could almost live off the land.

The first time I went out to see the house, nobody was home and it was locked up. I peeped in the windows and checked out the minimally furnished interior. In the living room, I saw an old black leather couch, sagging a bit, a pole lamp, and two Oscars on the mantel. The house had been rented for the previous five years by Conrad Hall and his wife, actress Katharine Ross. Conrad has been voted one of the ten best cinematographers in the history of film. He would eventually win three Academy Awards for cinematography, including one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the film on which he met Katharine.

Katharine Ross is, for my money, one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen. Besides Butch Cassidy, she also starred in the blockbuster film The Graduate and The Stepford Wives. The next time I went out to see the house, Katharine was standing at the kitchen sink washing the dishes. She had her hair pulled back and was the picture of effortless, natural beauty. I watched her through the window from afar for as long as was decent. We would become friends and my son Joey and her daughter Cleo would carpool to school together.

The house was a wooden bungalow that was originally purchased from the Army and then moved in three pieces from Zuma Beach to where it is now. It had no heat or gas when we moved in and depended on fireplaces and portable heaters. It was really a tear-down. I decided to make it an add-on. I recruited my friend Robert Gilbert to turn it into a handcrafted Hansel and Gretel–looking cottage. It seemed to fit the times. Robert went on to make similar, handcrafted houses for Bob Dylan and Don Henley of the Eagles.

Over the years, I made many lifelong friends in Malibu that I’m still close to today. One day, I was lying on the beach when I saw a guy coming down the hill from one of the neighboring houses. As he got closer I recognized him. It was Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo and I had met each other in New York when Cheech and Chong appeared on a telethon for his charity, One to One. He came jogging up to me with a big smile and said, “We should be friends.” And we have been for almost forty-five years. Actually, we have been more like family. We have children the same ages who have grown up with each other on both coasts. We are bicoastal brown brothers.

“G-Man” is a world-class sailor, and we have had many aquatic adventures on his various sailboats around the world. He continues to be one of my best friends, even though he eats different colored beans… and we have never ever smoked dope together, even when nobody was watching.

Maybe a year after settling in, Rikki and I got the good news that the adoption of our daughter, Carmen, had been completed, and in four days we would hold a little fuzzy-headed girl in our arms. We named her Carmen after my maternal grandmother, who lived to be ninety-five. When she was little, Carmen held her arms upright, bent at the elbows, like she was getting ready to take off. So it was fitting that she became a Park City ski patrol member. She also became an EMT and eventually a nurse. But not before becoming a professional downhill mountain biker… and I lived through it. She and her husband, Mark, are now the parents of my three grandchildren, Randall, Katelyn, and Madelyn. I love them all, every day.

As I was saying before Malibu took over, Tommy and I both needed some rest. But we took the time off for another reason. We both realized that if Cheech and Chong was to continue we needed to go in another direction… and that direction was the movies.

All the great comedy teams of the past—Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis—did movies. We told Lou Adler that we were coming off the road but not going into the recording studio. We were going to concentrate on creating a movie. He took a big breath and said that he would try to get us a deal.

Chong and I were both living in Malibu, so getting together to write our first movie was easy. Figuring out what to do was the hard part. We had no idea how to begin or what to focus on.

One of my neighbors at the beach, two doors away, was the eminent screenwriter Waldo Salt. Waldo had won Oscars for writing Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home. He also wrote the screenplay for Serpico and was working on The Day of the Locust when I met him. In 1951, Waldo was blacklisted by the studios for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. For a clearer picture of what that McCarthy Era hysteria was like, look at the 2015 movie Trumbo starring Bryan Cranston.

Waldo liked to hang out and smoke dope. During one of our conversations, I asked him, “How do you write a movie?”

He took a big hit and said, “See that girl over there?”

He pointed to his secretary across the room.

“She follows me around all day and takes down everything I say… and that’s how you do it.”

I took a hit and said, “Can I borrow her?”

Waldo laughed and took another hit.

Chong and I finally got together and started. Our first idea was to do a greatest-hits movie. We would try to combine part of our stage show with some of our record bits into some kind of story. Adler was all for that idea, because it would involve the material on our records, in which he had a huge interest. As a matter of fact, when we finally started shooting, the temporary title was Cheech and Chong’s Greatest Hits.

Just as we got going, a few random people joined the mix.

Chong has a lifelong habit of being influenced by the last person he spoke to. So our tai chi teacher Joel Laskin, an aspiring screenwriter, joined the conversation. I guess Tommy thought that he had a lot of experience, because he had something like twenty unproduced screenplays. They were unproduced for a reason.

Next came my cousin Louie, a writer as well, with a budding drinking problem. A few other people came and went, until we finally figured out that we had to do it ourselves. And by ourselves.

The biggest decision we faced was what or, more important, who was going to be the focus of the movie. We were used to doing a lot of different characters in our records and stage shows, but movies were different. They needed central characters to follow. “Pedro and Man” were the obvious choice. They were our most popular characters. So we started writing for them.

We wrote and we wrote and we wrote. Scene after scene. Finally, we handed Adler a giant stack of pages. He read them, and I suppose he showed them to some of his movie friends. The word came back that we needed more story. We took that to mean write more. So we wrote more.

We had no idea of standard structure. No sense or feel for first act, second act, third act, and so on. And it was a good thing that we didn’t. We didn’t fit in a standard structure. We didn’t fit in a round hole or a square hole. We fit only in our own unique hole.

After almost a year, no deal had come together. The studios didn’t understand us. They understood Hello Dolly! They didn’t want to invest in us.

We had faced the same situation a few years earlier when they wanted us to do a network TV show. James Komack, an actor turned producer, got on to us and started following us around the country, watching our shows. He thought there was a great sitcom in there… somewhere.

NBC offered us a big deal, but they had no ideas on what they wanted us to do. To us, network TV was straight society, and we were in the middle of making records and doing concerts, which were the most happening things in entertainment. Why should we do some square-assed sitcom?

So we passed.

I thought Komack was going to have a heart attack. A big network deal was something he had really been chasing, and we just tossed it away.

So what he did was take the essence of two of our characters “the Old Man in the Park” and the Latino “Lowrider” and made Chico and the Man, which turned out to be a huge hit that launched Freddie Prinze. A couple of years later, we ran into Komack at some event and he told us rather sheepishly that he had created the show from our characters.

Duh, really?

We told him that it was all cool. He had done his own thing with it, and we didn’t care because we didn’t want to do TV at that point. He breathed a big sigh of relief, because I’m sure he thought we would sue him.

We had used other material and made it our own, so we held no grudge. All comedians borrow material and make it into their own thing. The good ones do, anyway. That’s how they all start, doing their idols’ jokes. Like Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby. You start out in a familiar place and then make it your own.

Things are obviously going to overlap if you are talking about the same subject. Komack took two characters, or types, that we had developed. But he took it from there. No harm.

After a year went by, there was still no deal in place to make a movie. We were not privy to any of the deal-making negotiations, so anything could have happened. We were totally in the dark. We had not had any revenue-producing jobs for a year, and we needed to get back to work.

Lou informed us that we had a unique job offer. The Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas wanted to do an after-hours show with us, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Gallagher. The idea was that once a month we would come in for three days and do some shows at 2:30 a.m., and the others would do the same on a rotating basis. This situation would go on for a year. I don’t know about the others, but we had a ball.

We established a routine of getting up, working out, and then playing basketball at the Sporting House, which was a twenty-four-hour fitness facility that had weights, basketball, racquetball, swimming, and massage. The whole deal. You could go there at 3:00 p.m. and there would be twenty guys waiting to be next in basketball. I would then go and play poker, have dinner, and then go back to the hotel and sleep until 2:00 a.m. and then walk downstairs and do the show. And then go party after.

It was a nice routine, and a good time was had by all. The Aladdin paid three times what we had been getting per night on the road. So it was a pretty sweet deal to have while we waited for a movie to happen.

Finally, we got word from Adler that we had a deal from Paramount to do a movie. We always figured that if we did a movie it would be with Lou. He had been our guy from the beginning. We were so naïve that we didn’t even have a lawyer representing us. We never had a lawyer for our record contract, either. We trusted that Lou would always give us a fair deal. He was a homeboy. We were to learn otherwise, and it would end our business relationship with Adler and take ten years to resolve in court.

Anyway, we were about to make our first movie. There is no more thrilling feeling (with your clothes on, anyway) than your first time in front of the camera. When I started seeing the first dailies, I finally fully connected with what I was doing as a movie actor.

When making a record, you only had your voice, and it took me a while to get used to hearing how I sounded.

Onstage you were using your body, too, but you couldn’t see yourself.

Film was the whole package. It was like finding the perfect guitar to play. I was filled with an explosive energy that I had never felt before. Filming is a very energy-draining process, but I couldn’t wait to get to the set every day. I felt like the Chicano Energizer Bunny.

We started right in using the same improvisational technique that we had used with records. The script, what there was of it, was mostly directions, like “Pedro walks out of the front door and gets in his car.”

There was nothing describing the dance he does as he polishes his car, or the actions he goes through once he gets in the car and then drives off. Some of it was from what I did in the stage show, but most of it was made up for the first time on camera. I applied the same technique throughout the movie. Even bits that I had done a thousand times, like getting stoned in the car, had stuff that was seen for the first time in the movie. I was having the time of my life.

I couldn’t say the same for Tommy. At first, he was uncomfortable in front of the camera and kept looking into the lens during a lot of the takes. Acting for the camera is pretending that the camera is not there. He eventually got better, but I think the thing that was really bothering him was that he was not the director. Lou Adler had usurped his position.

Since the beginning of his time in show business, Tommy had been the leader. He had started our group, just as he had started all his other bands. It was his natural position offstage, but onstage he was not the star performer. He always had a lead singer whose name was in the title. In Little Daddy and the Bachelors, he was a Bachelor. In Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, he was a Vancouver.

So when we began Cheech and Chong, he had his name in the title at last. And he was still the organizer of the group. (At the beginning, I followed his lead because he had much more legit showbiz experience and he was eight years older.)

When we started making records it was not a question of who was the leader; it was the process of coming up with funny stuff. We had many battles during the record years, but they were part of the standard creative process.

As we moved along in show business in those early years, people always assumed that we were best friends and had grown up together. That was how close our chemistry was. We were never “best friends.” We were more like brothers. As brothers, we could love and hate with equal intensity, but we always had each other’s backs… because we were brothers.

When Adler told us about the deal, he said that Paramount would do the deal only if he was the director. They knew him and they didn’t know us. He said not to worry, because we would proceed as usual and direct ourselves. He would be there only to lend his expertise, as he had been involved in the production of Brewster McCloud, which was directed by Robert Altman, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sounded good. We just wanted to make a funny movie.