CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME

When Blue Thunder came out, I was invited to go on Late night with David Letterman to promote the movie. I was such a fan of the show and Dave was a fun and funny interviewer. A day or so before I was to appear, I got a call from the producer asking what I wanted to talk about on the show. I told him that we could talk about whatever Dave wanted to talk about. He told me that is not the way it works. He wanted me to tell him stories of things that had happened on set, anecdotes about my career or my life, and then they would pick the ones they thought were funny and have Dave ask me about them. I had no idea that was how it worked and had to come up with something funny and interesting enough for Letterman on the spot. I told him something off the top of my head, but there was dead silence on the other end of the phone, followed by, “Anything else?” I tried again, same reaction. I was getting desperate and realizing just how uninteresting a person I am, and getting the feeling that if I didn’t come up with something immediately, I might not be appearing on the show after all. I have no idea why I said it, but the words, “My uncle is a helicopter pilot,” came out of my mouth, trying to pick up the theme of Blue Thunder.

The producer perked up immediately. “That’s fantastic. What did he think of the film? Did he give you any tips?” I have no memory of the lie I spun for him, but it was enough to get myself off of that disastrous phone call and onto the show. Walking into the Ed Sullivan Theater, I couldn’t believe any of it was happening—me on Letterman in the theater where I saw the Beatles play on TV. The producer came into my dressing room and told me that Dave loved the stuff about my uncle and was going to go with that story. I feebly tried to guide him back to one of my other scintillating stories, but to no avail. Sure enough, when I sat down Dave’s first question was about my uncle, the helicopter pilot. Although I have not often been compared to George Washington for my unflinching truth-telling, the old adage, “Honesty is the best policy,” really came into play that night. Instead of trying to make up a fake story about a fake uncle, I told Dave and his audience I had lied. I told them how I had panicked when the producer asked me for funny stories because I did not understand how talk shows work, that I thought they were real conversations, not discussed beforehand and written on cue cards. Dave thought this was a fucking riot, and the whole segment turned out to be Dave loving the chance to go completely off script. Boy, did I pull that one out of my ass or what?

I wanted to keep making money. I took a terrible movie, a remake of Samson and Delilah, having to say phony biblical dialogue: “I anoint thee with this oil of hyacinth, on this day of days and this night of your nights,” which I still cannot get out of my mind. We shot it in Durango, Mexico, and I had to ride a horse, which was as foreign to me as being in this new country. I nearly bit the dust when the asshole who was supposed to teach me to ride put me on a horse bareback and with no reins, slapped the horse on the ass, and yelled “Hold on!” I barely clung to this wild animal’s mane while it raced across the dry plains of Mexico until it finally threw me off. (After that, I did my horseback riding scenes sitting on a tall ladder with wheels on it, being pushed by underpaid locals.) I did a movie called Get Crazy, a weird little film about the Fillmore East concert scene with Malcolm McDowell, Lou Reed, some awesome punk rock bands, John Densmore of the Doors, Dion, and Ed Begley Jr. The movie was silly, and I was terrible in it, but Laure, Henry, and I rented a house from Scherrie Payne of the Supremes, which included a swimming pool and a disco room, and we had the time of our lives. Laure and Henry went back to New York a couple of weeks before the movie ended. It was the first time I had been away from them, and I felt the punch in the gut of “life on the road when your family is at home.” It was bad enough before, being away from Laure, but with the baby in the mix, it was nearly unbearable. Henry and I were buddies in New York; we played all the time, going to the park, restaurants, food shopping—and being in a movie didn’t hold a candle to those simple pleasures.

When I got home, we had enough money to buy an old VW Bug and started driving out of the city so we could all experience nature a bit. We eventually rented a small cabin in Woodstock for two hundred dollars a month, and it gave us an entirely new lease on life. I had grown up a little hippie and so had Laure, and we were realizing that this was the dream we wanted to be living: getting back to the land in the ultimate hippie village. We spent more and more time in Woodstock, and it started to make New York seem claustrophobic. We still loved our friends, but we were our own family now, and our role in the group was changing.

One of the gang, Shep Abbott, wrote a script called C.H.U.D. Doug Cheek found a producer who would let him direct if he got John Heard and me to star in it, since we both had a bit of a movie career going. John didn’t even read it before he said he would do it. I read it, but there wasn’t really a part for me, so I said I would do it, but I had to write a part for myself to play. It is a story about homeless people who live underground and get poisoned by a secret toxic waste dump in the sewers. I decided to play a social worker who, like my real-life hero, my dad, fights for justice for the marginalized. So I invented The Rev. I rewrote the script from top to bottom, giving myself a great part, the hero who kills the bad guy in the end, and Doug was wide open to all the changes. We hired our friends and family in the cast and crew, including Laure as the first victim in the opening scene. We spent the summer filming in the sewers of NYC, and we were all in creative heaven. I got to go into the editing room as much as I wanted and for the first time helped make a movie from start to finish. The producer had the final cut, of course, and added some really terrible, cheesy monsters for the C.H.U.D.s, so the final product was kind of disappointing. But it was one of the best learning experiences of my life, and the movie has held on as a cult classic. I have even met people with C.H.U.D. tattoos on their bodies, which is nuts.

I was working on good films, but their success was hit and miss. I got to work with legendary director Sidney Lumet on Daniel, performing a page-and-a-half-long monologue as a 1960s revolutionary lecturing Tim Hutton’s character, but it was eventually cut out of the film. I had a great part in a mediocre movie based on a very good play called Key exchange, although the worst part of the film was that I had to do another nude scene, which went better than the two previous ones but was still absolutely traumatizing. Disney decided they were going to bring back “the short,” popular when movies first started showing in theaters in the 1930s and 1940s, a short film that plays before the film you came to see. Their first effort was a short film called Frankenweenie, about a dog who is killed and brought back to life by his young owner. A young animator named Tim Burton wrote and directed it, his first film. I am so proud to have been able to teach Tim everything he knows about filmmaking in our short time together and I accept his gratitude for my guidance. Seriously, he was a genius right out of the gate, shooting in black and white, with strange camera angles and an extraordinary set built on a soundstage. Such a great little film; but after we shot it, Disney basically abandoned the idea of showing shorts, and decided to focus instead on taking over the entire world.

One of the hottest plays at the time was Steppenwolf’s production of Sam Shepard’s True West at the Cherry Lane Theatre, imported from Chicago, which starred John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. I got an offer to be in the replacement cast and said yes immediately. The play blew me away. It was wild, animalistic, violent, absurd, and dark, and sparked laughs like I had never heard before in the theater. The play is about two brothers, one a meek Hollywood screenwriter and one a violent and dangerous drifter, trapped in a house and a fight for survival. Gary not only starred in but directed the play as well. I assumed I was replacing him as the intellectual writer, but when I got to the theater for the first day of rehearsal, Gary told me I would be playing Lee, the psychopathic brother, and that he was staying in the show to play it with me. That was a mind-fuck and took me a minute to wrap my head around it, but it turned out to be one of the greatest roles I ever got to play. The audiences went crazy for the show, and I got to act in a way I never had before, playing a larger-than-life character by finding the truth of that character and taking the audience along for a crazy ride. Gary was brilliant, and when he eventually left, the understudy, Jere Burns, took over the role. He and I became dear friends and brothers and knocked the shit out of each other, eight shows a week. We did the show for three or four months, and Jere and I were wild animals onstage by the time the producers brought in Tim Matheson to join the play and replace Jere. When Tim finished rehearsals with my understudy and had to get up on stage with me and an audience, I think I scared the shit out of him. He felt I took the violence on stage too far, scratching his face too hard with the toast and strangling him too hard with the telephone cord, and maybe he was right. I definitely made people fearful. He and I lasted about a week, and then one day I came in to do the show and was met by two security guards and the producers. They told me I was fired and said to get my stuff from the dressing room and leave. I was tired of the show anyway, and the fact that they thought they needed security guards to escort me out was an acting badge of honor I still take pride in, in some fucked-up way.

Laure got pregnant again, and we needed to move to a bigger apartment, but this time we could afford to buy instead of rent. We found a little two-bedroom on 87th Street for eighty-five thousand dollars. I was nervous about having a mortgage and wasting money on paying interest, so we took all the money from our savings and paid for it in cash. (Since then, I have bought every house, every car, and paid every tuition with cash, never wanting to be in debt to anyone, ever.) I loved owning it and felt like I was investing in myself when I painted it, put in a new kitchen counter, and got our first dishwasher. Two weeks before the baby was born, Laure’s father died, completely unexpectedly. The juxtaposition of the grief from that loss with the joy of the newborn baby still lives with us today, all these years later. Laure dealt with it with her iron will, keeping the pain and sadness of losing her dad at bay, knowing she had to focus on bringing this new life into the world safely and with joy. I got to see her go through labor all over again. The same doctor was with us and again, when the baby’s head popped out, he let me reach in, grab the shoulders, and pull the baby out. I held the baby to show Laure and I saw the little balls hanging down between their legs, just like with Henry, and announced “It’s a boy!”

Laure and the doctor looked at me like I was crazy, and said, “It’s a girl, you idiot. Look again.” Sure enough, I had missed the call, mistaking the baby’s engorged labia for testicles. (I still feel like a dummy about that one.) Sophie entered our lives that day and changed our world forever. She was a very different kid than Henry. She hated the noise and action of the city, and we started spending more and more time in Woodstock, where we were all much happier. More space, more nature, more focus, and more time together.

My only guiding principle for my career was, “work with the best film directors,” and so far that had served me well. Woody Allen asked me to play a fun character, a famous rock star shopping for art, in his new film, Hannah and Her Sisters. The scene was with Barbara Hershey, Michael Caine, and Max von Sydow. I had met Michael Caine through the Yateses and knew Max from the Samson movie, so I felt very comfortable playing an arrogant asshole in the scene with them. This time, Woody was friendly, hanging out in the trailer with me, talking trash about other actors, being funny. He was so meticulous in setting up a huge, intricately choreographed master shot that we didn’t have time to shoot one frame of film before we broke for lunch. Woody invited me to join him at a fancy restaurant along with other actors. Just Max Von Sydow, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, and Daniel Stern at a table. Talk about imposter syndrome—I spent the meal having a complete out-of-body experience, with the phrase, “One of these things is not like the other,” running in a loop inside my mind. It felt like a huge milestone to be included in the troupe of New York actors that Woody Allen called on to be in his films, my talent recognized by my idol.

The city was driving us crazy with two kids—taking them to the park, playdates, day care, living in four little rooms. Woodstock life was so much easier, so after a year or so, we decided to sell our apartment and buy a house in Woodstock. I figured it was only a two-hour drive from Manhattan, so I could come down for auditions. Our apartment was already worth one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and we sold it immediately. We found a beautiful, woodsy house on twenty acres in Woodstock for the same amount and opened escrow on it. We were excited and scared, but the school seemed good, and we could finally commit to our dream of raising our family in a small-town community. Laure and I went to dinner with one of my agents to tell her the news. She said, “What are you, retiring?”

I said, “No, I want to keep working, of course. But we just can’t live in an apartment anymore with two kids. We need a house with a yard so they can go outside and play without having to go to the park or a play date. We need a house!”

To which she replied with these fateful words—“They have houses in Los Angeles,” and stunned Laure and me into silence. The thought of moving to Los Angles had never even entered our minds. “They have houses in Los Angeles and they have show business. What are you going to do in Woodstock?”

Laure and I went home that night and talked it through, unable to refute anything my agent had said. But we had already sold our apartment, so we were committed to moving. We were luckily still in the window where we could get out of escrow on the Woodstock house, and we did. I spent five days in Los Angeles and found a house to rent in an area called Beverly Hills Post Office, and we told the moving company to take our stuff there instead of Woodstock. Within a matter of weeks, we were living at the top of a canyon, at the end of a dead-end road, with a swimming pool, deer eating in our backyard, sheep grazing on the side of the hill, in a house that the famed singer Lola Falana once lived in, and seeing Fred Astaire drive his Rolls-Royce up our canyon road when we went into town for supplies. No wonder we fell in love with California so deeply.