My mom seems to remember him as a guy who discovered me at my school, the Hollywood Professional School. However he came into our lives, David MacLeod was definitely around a lot. He initially contacted my mom and said to her, “I’m Warren Beatty’s cousin. Leif is a good actor, and he has a wonderful look.” As with a lot of parents in Hollywood, this was music to my mom’s ears, so much so that she probably overlooked the fact that he was a guy in his early thirties without any real credentials. But the mere fact that he was Beatty’s cousin meant something. I mean, come on, this was 1975. The year Shampoo came out. Had the internet been invented at that point, it would’ve been easy to do some background checking on him. Perhaps then we would’ve discovered that he had been convicted of sexual crimes in his native country of Canada. But all we knew was that he seemed like a straight shooter and a normal enough guy, so he was allowed into our lives. It also helps to remember that my mom was always looking for ways to allow male influences in my life. Even though I wasn’t thinking about father figures at that point (it would hit me much later in life), I think that was a good thing, but obviously she needed to be more selective in whom she let near me. It’s a strange balance. I don’t think for a moment my mom would ever have deliberately wanted to put me in harm’s way. She loved me and my sister and cared for us very much. But I can’t deny that there was also a blind spot that allowed for this sort of thing in the hope that maybe it could have advanced my career or given me a much-needed adult male role model.
Regardless, here was David MacLeod. He was shrewd. He understood me right away. He dressed well and presented himself well, and there was nothing threatening about him. He was very smart, cultured (spoke several languages fluently) and a good dresser in a casual, cool way. He would stop by and take me to the movies. He would take my family to dinner. He and I played racquetball (sometimes, in the locker room afterwards, he might be admiring his own body and say something like, “Not bad for a guy in his thirties, huh?”). David and I became friends. When he invited me to Warren Beatty’s place high up on Mulholland Drive, it was cool. We would go up there, swim, hit some tennis balls on the court, and then soak in the Jacuzzi. Warren was never home when we were there except for one time when a chocolate-brown Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the house and out stepped the star himself.
As time went on, the only work I ever got from David was a voiceover role in the 1987 film, The Pick-up Artist. But I will admit I did get to do some interesting things with him. I remember I was in the Bay Area visiting my family a couple of years later, and he brought me to the set of Heaven Can Wait, which he was serving as an administrative associate on. Warren Beatty saw me, said “Hello” and we made some small talk. (We would run into each other occasionally over the years. One time in particular that stands out was around 1980 when we saw each other in a restaurant. By then I was dating Nicollette Sheridan; she was with me and I thought Warren would have a heart attack. I never noticed how much Nicollette looked like one of his first loves, Julie Christie, until he mentioned it to me that night.) They were shooting Heaven Can Wait at a beautiful mansion in Filoli gardens, in Woodside. At a distance, I saw the stunning Dyan Cannon, and I was reminded of that crazy schoolboy crush I’d had on her a few years earlier on the set of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
David MacLeod was fun to hang out with. But he had secrets I would not learn about for many years.