TOO MUCH OFA GOOD THING

The writing bug bit me hard. Creating Danny and seeing it come to life made me want to get Barbra’s Wedding produced. I wanted Steppenwolf Theatre to do it. Everything they do is so well-done and smart. But Steppenwolf produces very challenging theater, and I think my play was a little too Neil Simon-y for them, so they decided not to do it. But in a lucky twist, the head dramaturge at Steppenwolf, who was a fan of my play, got a new job at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. She showed the play to the artistic director, and they decided to produce it in May 2002. I was in shock, having just been given another incredible gift from the Gods of Show Business. A first-class production at a first-class theater of the play I wrote sitting in my underwear in Malibu. Unbelievable. We hired a terrific New York director, got John Pankow and Julie White, two brilliant Broadway regulars, to play Jerry and Molly, and got to work designing the set and getting ready for rehearsals.

But before we got into rehearsals, I was offered a TV show for ABC called Regular Joe. The script was really funny, written by the creator of King of Queens, and even though I didn’t need the money, the deal was even crazier than the other shows, one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars per episode. With that kind of bread on the table, it was a great chance to pad the old bank account before my luck ran out, and I would have to have been a fool to say no. Regular Joe was a traditional sitcom in front of a live audience, and I played Joe, a regular guy with a wife and teenagers and a job running a hardware store. Doing a sitcom is kind of like acting in a play or a film, and it was a learning curve as an actor to figure out who I was performing for—the audience or the camera (the answer is the camera). The people were great, the actors were terrific. We rehearsed for a week and then performed in front of a live studio audience. The filming went well, although it felt strange when we did a second or third take that the audience laughed at the same jokes over and over again, even though they just heard them five minutes ago. They knew they were also performers in the sitcom, playing the role of the laugh-track audience perfectly. It was a very easy gig, especially since I was just acting and not involved in the writing or producing, and when it was done, I went off to Philadelphia to begin my new job—playwright.

I loved the process of rehearsals. My job was to sit in the theater, watching the actors and director create each moment of the play. Blocking the action, learning the lines, practicing their props, and the millions of details it takes to put on a play. If a moment wasn’t working, I was there to explain the intention of it, to listen to what the problem was, and make adjustments. They challenged me to make the play as great as it could be, transforming it from ideas on a page into a living, breathing, dynamic piece of theater. I rewrote sections of the play every night. I have always loved being the actor who helps the playwright find his play, but I did not understand the importance of the actor’s contribution until I was the playwright. Goddamn, that was a hell of an artistic experience for me. Laure and the girls came and loved it. Henry came down from Harvard, and my parents came up from Chevy Chase. The play opened to rave reviews. New York producers came down to see it, and before I knew it, I had a deal to bring the play to the prestigious off-Broadway theater, The Westside Theater. Broadway producers called The Dodgers would be producing the play, with the renowned Manhattan Theatre Club coproducing and adding it to their season. Might be the proudest I have ever been—the dyslexic high school dropout was now a fucking New York playwright.

At the same time, ABC picked up Regular Joe as a mid-season replacement, which was fantastic. Six more episodes at that salary was a lot of extra cake, and the writing and part were really good. And there was satisfaction in getting a show on network television again. It meant I still had value in that marketplace. Since it was a mid-season show, it wouldn’t start shooting until January 2003. That gave me six months of no pressure from my agents to look for acting work because I was unavailable, and I could focus on Barbra’s Wedding. I learned a lot about the play by watching the audience reaction in Philly and made more adjustments before it opened in New York. I was excited for the work and the free time to be at home. The only hiccup was I was starting to lose my mind.

Part of it was politics. By this point, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were beating the drums of war, questioning people’s patriotism, keeping the country on edge with color-coded “terror alerts,” and trying to divert attention away from their massive failure to protect the country from the horrific attack on September 11th. The obvious lies they were fabricating about the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were printed on the front page of the New York Times, the Democrats shook in fear of being called “unpatriotic” if they voted against the war, and I was consumed by the ugly turn our country was taking. (Please watch Stephen Colbert’s legendary speech at The White House Correspondent’s Dinner, in which he scathingly ridiculed both the White House and the correspondents for being so dangerously bad at their jobs. It was a brave act of speaking truth to power, an act of patriotic heroism, and a ray of hope in that moment of crisis. I salute you, sir!) There were still many questions about the Bush family letting the Bin Laden family leave the country, as well as the physics and science that contradicted the official storyline of 9/11. But it wasn’t just politics. Malibu itself was making me crazier by the day. Our peaceful little oasis being destroyed one McMansion at a time, their owners more entitled by the minute. My heart broke with every jackhammer blast. Our whole family had devoted itself to making Malibu the best community it could be, giving our time and energy to help keep the small-town integrity that we loved. But I could see the writing on the wall. Malibu was being bought up by a bunch of fucking assholes that I didn’t want to live near or be associated with.

For our whole marriage, Laure and I dreamed about getting a farm in the country. We rented cabins in Woodstock as soon as we had a couple of extra bucks and almost bought the house there. We bought the house in Moss Beach. We looked at property every time I went on location in Lake Tahoe, Colorado, Utah, or Montana—always doing the equation of how much the farm would cost, how much land we could get, how much time it would take to get there, and how often we would use it, and always coming up with no good answer. We wanted a big piece of land with water on it, but the only thing like that near LA was in Santa Barbara or Ojai, and we couldn’t afford more than a few acres of land there. Besides, they seemed like they had already been taken over by the same privileged class of people that were currently taking over Malibu. The places we could afford were all so far away that we would have to take a plane or drive for twelve hours to get there. There were places out in the desert, but that was not the kind of living that appealed to us. The dream of the farm in the country was getting further away just when it was turning from a dream into a necessity. I felt more and more like I needed to escape, but I had nowhere to go. By now I had a computer, and one day I was looking at Ojai real estate online, and a house with four hundred acres was for sale for one point eight million. I did a double take because in Ojai (a) there was never a piece of land that big for sale and (b) if there was, it would cost about ten million or more. I looked at the ad more closely, and it was for a ranch in Tulare County, not Ojai. I had never heard of Tulare County and was astonished to see that it was about a three-hour drive from Malibu, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. I called the owner, made an appointment, and Laure, the girls, and I drove up there. It was an easy drive up through Bakersfield up to the Sierra Mountains. The owners had us for lunch and the place was amazing, jaw-droppingly beautiful, drenched in fall colors. It had a grape vineyard, a part of the Tule River running through it, an historic battlefield on the property, huge trees, and steep mountain trails. I had no idea how big four hundred acres was. It’s big! The house was tiny, both in size and in scale. I barely fit through the doorways. It must have been an old hotel of some kind, because there was a row of motel rooms on the property, down a little gravel road, which was absolutely charming. The girls fell asleep on the ride home and Laure and I drove back that night, living the dream we had envisioned on our honeymoon, when we saw a farm in Pennsylvania and said one day we would have some kids asleep in the back seat and a farm of our own.

That house was too expensive for us because we didn’t want to go into debt or take money out of the nest egg we were living off of. But within a couple of months, I came upon an ad for a nearby ranch, 350 acres for six hundred thirty-five thousand dollars. How could this be? It was a third of the price of the other place for almost the same amount of land. Between the money I made on Danny and the money I was going to make on Regular Joe, if this place was decent, I could afford it. I drove up and met the realtor. He took me around the property in his truck. I had absolutely no sense of direction and didn’t know where on the property we were, but it was the most beautiful ranch I had ever seen. It was a beef cattle ranch, with mountains and meadows and barns and dirt roads, tucked down a long driveway off a small road. The house was a thousand-square-foot cabin with a porch and a fenced-in backyard, to keep the cows out and the dogs in. The realtor was an old cowboy who said he loved this ranch and that “it had a lot of character.” He took me into the house to meet the owner, a heavyset cowboy in overalls, sitting at a typewriter at the table in the tiny living room/ kitchen area. He told me his wife was sick and they needed to sell. The ranch had been in their family for generations (the creek that ran through it was named after their family), and it hurt like hell for them to give it up. He told me about his cattle operation, the water rights, and the neighbors. He had already broken off 145 acres and the original house and sold it to the family that lived there now, and he couldn’t break up the original ranch anymore. I asked him if it got hot in the summer. He said, “Oh, about seventy-eight degrees.” I thought I’d found paradise until he added, “That’s what I keep the air conditioning at in the summer. Outside it gets up to about 105.”

He gave me the paper he had typed up, which was his calculations for the price—what the average acre cost, how much it had cost him to put up the cabin, etc.—and the total was six hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. He said, “I won’t take one penny more and I won’t take one penny less.” I told him I understood. He said, “If you want this ranch, I’ll need to meet your wife first. And I will need you to both promise that you will take your responsibility to this land seriously, keep its character and respect its history.” I can still remember that moment so clearly, and I have taken my oath to him seriously ever since. I called Laure on the way home and told her excitedly, “I found it! At long last, we are going to have our own ranch. A 350-acre cattle ranch!” Laure drove up the next week and, of course, impressed the owner to no end. A forgotten part of Laure was about to emerge and change the course of our lives once again. Laure’s family history is of California farmers, going all the way back to the late 1800s. Laure’s grandparents owned a walnut farm in Northern California, so she knew in her bones how to talk about water, weather, markets, and everything else that goes into ranching and farming. She is so sophisticated and yet it turns out she was completely at home in the middle of California ranch country. The owner and his wife both shed a tear that day, sad to be saying goodbye to their family ranch, but knowing they were passing the torch to very capable hands.

The Westside Theatre had a show close and became available, so Barbra’s Wedding was now starting rehearsal for its New York debut on January 13. That also happened to be the first day of rehearsal for the first episode of Regular Joe. I couldn’t believe it. Two hugely important pieces of work that needed my full attention, both happening at the exact same time. It was frustrating to have it all happening at once, but both shows had strict opening dates and lots of money riding on them, so I just had to suck it up for a couple of months. The producers of the play rented the community theater in Malibu for two weeks and bent the rehearsal schedule around my TV schedule. I had done a lot of work on Barbra’s Wedding and loved watching the actors and director bring it to life again, investing it with pain, laughs, and a physicality that took it to a whole other level. In the meantime, Regular Joe had been entirely revamped. The actor who played my father had been replaced by the sublime Judd Hirsch and, after many attempts to find someone to replace the actress who played my wife, they gave up and made my character a widower. The scripts were funny, and the shows went great. I got two weeks off from the show and went to back to New York to attend the technical and final rehearsals and the first week of previews.

I don’t think I have ever felt so overloaded in my life as I was those weeks in New York. As if it weren’t enough having my NY playwriting debut and my ABC TV sitcom happening at the exact same time, we also took possession of our brand-new cattle ranch that week. A twenty-year dream come true, and I was too busy with these other amazing experiences to be there. If ever there was a case of an embarrassment of riches, this was it. And yet, there was a dark cloud hanging over the whole thing, and my memories always include that sickening feeling. Bush and Cheney pulled out all the stops for military action at the United Nations, trying to get other countries to support their proposed war. The weeks I was in New York for those final rehearsals were the same weeks that Colin Powell held up his phony anthrax vial, that the UN inspectors testified that they had done exhaustive searches and found absolutely no WMDs, and that people all over the world took to the streets to protest the needless conflict the Bush administration was forcing on the world. Henry came down from Harvard to stay with me for a few days and we went to the huge rally outside the UN. Such a helpless feeling, knowing our country’s corrupt and inept leaders were willfully ignoring the facts and the truth and tarnishing America’s reputation.

I went back home, finished shooting the last episodes of Regular Joe, and then hightailed it back to New York for final previews and opening night of Barbra’s Wedding. I did a bunch of press for both but was also competing with coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War. The play opened on March 5 to great audience reaction and great reviews. The play ran for six months, which was a very solid run, and was published by Samuel French, the flagship publisher of plays. The Iraq War began on March 20. It got terrible reviews and ran for over twenty years. Regular Joe premiered on March 28 and was canceled within a month, because who the fuck would want to watch a new sitcom about a regular Joe at his hardware store when the networks filled the airwaves with the sensational wartime footage the Bush administration provided. It made much better television. George Bush had now fucked the country over in ways that would change history. He was too arrogant to take security warnings seriously before 9/11, letting his guard down for the worst attack ever on our country. He lied his way into an illegal war, destroying our credibility, our morals, and our economy. And because of the chaos these events created in the media, he destroyed the chances of both Danny and Regular Joe becoming successful TV shows, thereby depriving the world of all of those sweet stories-that-could-have-been. I far as I was concerned, this was war!