COCAINE COUPONS

Once Breaking Away came out, I started to get auditions for good parts. The most exciting shot I got was for the role of Conrad in Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s directorial debut and another absolute masterpiece of a film. I got flown out to Hollywood to do a screen test. This was a ground-shifting event for me. The only time I had ever heard about “Hollywood Screen Tests” was in the old “Hollywood Movies About Show Business” I might have seen as a kid, and now I was flying in an airplane for maybe the third time in my life, in First Class, going to meet with Robert Redford and do a Hollywood screen test for what was obviously going to be an extraordinary film. Literally living the dream.

I worked very hard on the part. I even read the book—the whole book, start to finish, which took a long time for old Dyslexic Dan. I met with Redford before the test and we talked for a long time about the script, the part, the book. He must have known how nervous and excited I was, and took all the time necessary to put a green actor at ease. He wanted me to succeed, after all. That’s why he flew me out there. And he also wanted to get a feel for who I was as a person, how I would be on the set, and how I would handle it all. We went onto a small set with a skeleton crew and did take after take as he gave me great notes and I did my best to make the adjustments. Anyway, I did not get the part and was crushed. I had so clearly imagined myself in the part, as well as the leap I would make in The Biz. It was a good wake-up call, letting me know that my story was not going to be “the kid from nowhere gets a Hollywood Screen Test, shows his amazing acting skills, lands the part of a lifetime, and the doors of Hollywood Heaven open wide.” And when I saw the movie, I knew there was no way I could have played that part. In the vision that Redford had for that film, there is no one who could have played that part except Timothy Hutton. He gave an unbelievably beautiful performance that won the Academy Award, deservedly so. I felt good that I had at least been in the running, got to take my swing and be taken seriously for such a serious part. I mean, I had a Hollywood Fucking Screen Test with Robert Fucking Redford! Not bad.

John Schlesinger was one of the premiere directors in the world at the time, having directed Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man, and other iconic films. So when he cast me in his newest film, Honky Tonk Freeway, I felt I was taking a huge step in my career. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing that his best days were behind him and I would be participating in one of the biggest flops in American film history—luckily overshadowed by an even bigger flop which had come out a few months earlier, the infamous Heaven’s Gate. The script didn’t seem that great to me, but what did I know, I had only read about five film scripts at that point (plus the one-and-one-sixteenth pages of Woody Allen’s movie) and was not going to question the legendary Schlesinger. The movie was a huge ensemble filled with amazingly talented actors like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, William Devane, Teri Garr, and Beverly D’Angelo. All of the characters are taking the same freeway to the same final destination for some ill-conceived finale at a big hotel or something, and I played a hitchhiker named Spanky, who was a coke dealer and got rides in various characters’ cars. With so many characters, I didn’t have all that many scenes, but the ones I had were okay. In my pathetic Method acting attempt to create a memorable character, I decided to get my ear pierced with not one, but two earrings, and grow my hair out into a ponytail. My ear got infected right away, probably because I had it done at the pharmacy in the neighborhood, and the holes in my ears are still with me today, a forever reminder that for an actor like me, there is only madness to the Method. The movie was supposed to be a comedy, and even though we all were trusting Schlesinger’s track record to make it come together, the scenes all felt pretty lame. There were spectacular stunts being performed—car crashes, explosions, a water-skiing white rhinoceros—but the main source of entertainment on the set was cocaine.

The movie was a five-month shoot in Florida and Los Angeles and seemed shady from the beginning. My salary was fifteen hundred dollars a week, just over minimum, but the living expenses, the per diem, was two thousand dollars a week, which was paid in cash. So each week I was handed twenty one-hundred dollar bills to pay for all of my expenses. That is way too much cash to be carrying around, especially in Florida, and I just squirreled it away in a sock in my duffel bag. This was 1980, and cocaine was rampant. I had never tried it because I could never afford it, but on this movie, everyone was doing it—the director, producers, actors, prop guys, drivers—carrying around little vials with tiny spoons attached, filled with white powder, and whiffing it up all day long. I was playing a coke dealer in the movie, and there were scenes where I was supposed to snort the stuff, for which the prop department provided ground-up B-12 vitamins, but the real stuff was as available as the coffee at the catering truck. A gram of coke cost one hundred dollars, and the hundred-dollar bills everyone was getting for their per diem were soon referred to a “coke coupons.” I cashed in a few of mine, but I was still way too poor to be burning up my money that way. My gram would last a week or two while most people could snort theirs in one good night of partying.

One day, one of the head honchos called each actor into his office, one at a time, for a private meeting. When I went in, he had a grave look on his face. “I know there is a lot of cocaine flowing around on the set and I am very concerned. I hear there might even be an undercover NARC on the set and that would be very bad for the movie and the production. So you need to be very, very careful. I am not saying you are doing coke or not but please, if you are, I want you to promise me that if you want to buy coke, you will only buy it from me. That way you know it will be good and safe.” Not quite the ending to the lecture I was expecting, but eye-opening. Maybe the coke sales were funding the film? Who the fuck knows, but it was crazy.

And it turned out Schlesinger was one of the biggest abusers. He was an abusive man, anyway. He was nice and wanted to be liked by all of the actors, but he was absolutely terrible to his crew. He was semi-closeted gay and had a lot of gay men working around him, but treated them worse than anybody else on the film. The first assistant was a great guy named Michael, but John would only call him by the humiliating nickname he chose for him, “Cunt,” said with such an ugly bite I can still hear it today. John might have made one of the best movies I have ever seen in Midnight Cowboy, but he had a total lack of understanding of our movie or comedy in general, and was incredibly unprofessional and cruel. He ended up working the rare water-skiing white rhino to death, literally, refusing to stop doing takes with the poor animal until it finally had a heart attack and died. The ASPCA was on the set after that, and it is one of the few movies that cannot claim “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.”

And he almost killed me too. I had a scene where my character is sitting on the hood of a school bus, snorting coke. It was the end of the day and the last shot on location in Sarasota before the whole crew had to pack up everything and move to Fort Lauderdale, so tension was already high and everything was being rushed along. They brought me onto the set, I got up on the hood of the bus, and John yelled, “Action” as quickly as he could, before we had even rehearsed the scene. I had to stop the scene because I didn’t have the prop vial of cocaine to snort and John got pissed. He started calling everyone “cunts,” screaming for the prop department to hurry up and get me the prop. But the prop guys were either in the truck packing up or getting high, or both, and couldn’t be found, further enraging John. He finally yelled to his assistant, “Cunt, get me my briefcase!” The assistant brought John his briefcase, from which he pulled out his own little vial of coke and handed it to me. “Here, use this! Now let’s shoot this piece of shit and get the hell out of here.” At first, I thought, “Cool.” Not only would this satisfy my hope to be a Method actor and be more “real,” but I was going to get some free cocaine and save my “coke coupons” to take home when the movie was over. But I almost didn’t make it home, because with everything so rushed and the crew scattered, the crane with the camera kept fucking up as it came zooming into my face for a close-up. We did take after take, each time John getting more pissed, and each time me taking a big whiff of cocaine. I finished his first vial, so he gave me his backup. I must have done fifteen hits, one after another, and my heart started racing like it never had before. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t want John to yell at me. They finally got a usable take, John yelled “Cut and wrap!” and everyone launched into packing mode to hightail it to Fort Lauderdale. I smoked a pack of cigarettes and didn’t sleep for two days.

Sam Cohn opened a new restaurant and market in East Hampton that summer called The Laundry and hired Laure to run the market. Laure lived in Sam’s guesthouse, right on the beach, and was having the time of her life working with food and living in a million-dollar house. We missed each other so much but were both too busy to be able to visit. We talked on the phone but could both feel ourselves drifting away. Five months is a long time, and we were both living in worlds the other one knew nothing about. The final sequences of Honky Tonk Freeway shot in Los Angeles. To save money, I stayed at the Tropicana, the cheapest motel I could find and as sleazy as you can imagine. I was robbed there, someone breaking into my room while I slept, but luckily, they only took the wallet from my pants and not the huge roll of hundred-dollar bills in the sock in my duffle bag. By this time, Breaking Away had been nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture. Peter and Virginia Yates came out for the ceremony and invited me over to their suite at the four-star Beverly Wilshire Hotel to have champagne and caviar with them beforehand. When the limo took them to the awards show, I went back to the Tropicana and watched the Academy Awards sitting on the end of the flea-infested bed. Steve Tesich won for his screenplay and Barbara Barrie won for her acting, and it was incredibly exciting. When it came time for the Best Picture award, they showed a clip from each of the nominees. To my absolute astonishment, the clip they showed for Breaking Away was my biggest scene in the film, a sweet and funny monologue about how my father loves when I fail so that he can be sympathetic. I was stunned as I watched myself on the television, and even though another movie won, I felt as proud as if I had just won an Academy Award myself. Laure called me within seconds and we both screamed in amazement and joy. My parents called and none of us could believe that they had shown my biggest scene at that crucial moment. One of the biggest thrills of my life.

Honky Tonk Freeway finally ended. I flew home with my huge wad of cash. It had been so long since Laure and I had seen each other, and so many things had happened to each of us, that we were both a little anxious about seeing each other again, hoping we still had our connection after five months apart. That first night we went out to our neighborhood bar, the Dublin House, a very old-school Irish pub, for a drink. We sat in a booth in the back room, which we had to ourselves. Any awkwardness was gone within minutes, and we sat and drank and talked for a couple of hours, falling in love all over again. I mean, really falling in love, harder than I ever knew I could. In fact, my love for her exploded so much that at the end of that first night back, I surprised us both when I asked her to marry me. I had no idea I was going to do that, no ring or anything like that, only pure, overwhelming love. She said yes, and six weeks later we got married in my parents’ backyard in Chevy Chase with just our families and a few friends present, catered by the same people who did my bar mitzvah and paid for in hundred-dollar bills.