SUGAR TITS AND ME

Garry Marshall was a show business hero of mine. A brilliant comedy writer who created Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, and other hit TV shows, he then transformed himself into a top film director with Pretty Woman, Flamingo Kid, and A League of Their Own. Garry’s passion was theater, and he owned the beautiful, 130-seat Falcon Theatre in Burbank. So when he said he wanted to produce the West Coast premiere of Barbra’s Wedding, I was beside myself with excitement. He told me how much he loved the play and asked if I would consider being in it. The role of Jerry Schiff was obviously written as my pathetic, self-loathing alter ego, and he thought it would be quite something to see me play it. It was a great part (if I do say so myself) that I had acted out in my head everyday while I was writing it, and I decided to see what it would be like to actually play it. We cast Crystal Bernard as Molly, hired a terrific young director, and had a wonderfully successful run. I loved playing the part; it was emotional and cathartic, and every laugh we got, I got a double dopamine hit—one as actor and one as writer. Getting to perform in a first-class production of my own play in front of Garry’s show business friends, giants of Hollywood, was the cherry on the cake of this adventure I had created for myself out of thin air, with the inadvertent help of Barbra Streisand.

Speaking of Barbra Streisand, Malibu was getting crazier and crazier. It had been discovered, with McMansions popping up all around, and I was getting more and more claustrophobic. Where I used to have electricians and car mechanics as my neighbors, now I had Kid Rock and Cindy Crawford. The fireman across the gully passed away, and his son, who became the realtor-to-therich, turned their humble home into a McMansion monstrosity, with construction going on for years. On the other hand, I was fundraising for the Malibu Foundation, and networking my ass off, especially with wealthy potential donors. The parties we went to were over the top. Christmas parties with acres of real snow (in Malibu!) including sledding hills, piles of caviar, free-flowing booze, and hot chocolate bars. A private concert with the legendary Tom Jones performing in the backyard. An afternoon with an enormous crowd in an authentic Bedouin tent, chanting with some guru introduced by Tony Robbins himself. But the craziest night of all was when we went to television producer Mark Burnett’s house for an intimate dinner, just twelve of us, and who should be sitting across from me but none other than Barbra Streisand herself and her handsome husband James Brolin. And sitting next to them was Donald Trump, who was starring in Mark’s show, The Apprentice. Mr. Trump was thrilled to see me, since we had “starred in Home Alone 2 together,” and spent the evening bragging to me about the ratings for The Apprentice, which was the Number One show on TV, going into minute detail about the different demographics that were watching. He was just another boring actor, needy and egotistical, and having quality time like this with him did nothing to diminish my first impression of him, from back in the day in New York when he was a tabloid playboy, living off his daddy’s money. Who knew he was presidential material?

But the chitchat at the table got bizarrely awkward when Mark focused the conversation on me for a moment, saying he had heard I had written a play, and asking me what it was about. My face burned red with embarrassment. The whole night I had been on edge, not knowing if Barbra and James had ever even heard of Barbra’s Wedding, let alone knew I wrote it, and feeling guilty about the jokes I had written at their expense, especially Mr. Brolin. So I responded by saying the play was “about marriage and how tough it can be.” He pressed for specifics, but I gave him back only generalities. I was looking at all of them to see if they were fucking with me, but they weren’t. It was just regular show business small talk to them and I, like Mr. Trump, was just another actor talking about his play. I changed the subject as soon as I could, but Laure and I were stunned when we got back in the car. What are the chances that I would end up at dinner with Barbra Fucking Streisand and have to explain my play to her directly? And that having dinner with the future president of the United States would be the least interesting part of the evening?

The biggest celebrity in my real life at that time was Mel Gibson. Robyn and Mel were so generous to the Malibu Foundation, giving a one-million-dollar donation that gave the organization long-term stability. Mel and I did another fundraising show together and had a blast onstage making each other laugh. When he produced his first TV comedy series, Complete Savages, he asked me to direct, which gave us a chance to work together. He bought a Gulf Stream G5 jet, and I was touched and amazed that he invited me, out of everyone, to go with him on its maiden flight—flying to Las Vegas for the day to play a round of golf and fly home. It was crazy, just the two of us on that plane, with leather seats and sofas, two stewardesses, and all the food and drink you could consume. Mel felt guilty about buying it, worried that his dad would think it was a ridiculous waste of money, and I somehow found myself advocating that the plane was a good thing to buy. We played a round of golf at the fanciest course I have ever been to, with caddies who rode ahead in golf carts to find the ball you shanked into the woods or rough (which came in handy because we were both terrible golfers). Then we got back on the jet and home in time for dinner. The carbon footprint of that trip probably equaled a family-of-four’s energy consumption for a year.

But a problem was brewing. Mel had just directed Passion of the Christ, which caused a worldwide, phenomenal, box-office, and cultural explosion. It was also drawing worldwide condemnation for the anti-Semitic stereotypes it portrayed. I held off seeing it as long as I could because I preferred being in the dark, but one day my dad and I went to a matinee. Mel was in the press arguing that there was no anti-Semitism in the film, that it was just “historically accurate,” at least according to the New Testament as he interpreted it, and I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. But the hooked-nosed Jews, their bloodlust, and their culpability in the killing of Jesus was the same anti-Semitic bullshit I had been hearing since elementary school, and I was disturbed that Mel was giving that hateful crap so much media attention. But truthfully, what was even more disturbing was Mel’s bloodlust, the way he fetishized the torture, wounds, and pain in close-up after close-up, over-dramatizing it to a ridiculous degree. At least in Braveheart there was a complex story to justify the gore in some way, but this film was only about suffering. It was disgusting to watch, and a pretty terrible, one-note movie, and I was at a total loss as to what I would say when I saw him again. But before long, Mel had the famous drunk-driving incident in which he called the arresting officer “Sugar Tits” and ranted that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” When I saw that on the news, I felt very bad for him. He is a very twisted guy—raised by a fucked-up, racist father and crippled by religious guilt, while also being the “Sexiest Man Alive” and a hugely talented artist—I can’t begin to imagine what that must be like. I didn’t want to let him off the hook, but I wanted him to know I was there for him, that I wanted to help him dig his way out of the terrible hole he had put himself in. I left him a funny voicemail message from “Rabbi Stern,” asking if he wanted to talk, although I don’t know if he thought it was funny because he never called back, and I have not spoken to him since. He soon got divorced, and Robyn and Laure remained close, so there has never been a way to reconnect. But if Mel is reading this book, Rabbi Stern sends love and peace to you.

My life was changing. I had been a dad since I was twenty-four years old and by forty-five, I had two kids in college and the last one getting ready to do the same, so I no longer had any day-to-day responsibility for them. We convinced my parents to sell the old house in Chevy Chase and move to Malibu, where they bought a sweet little place overlooking the ocean, in a mobile home park about a mile from our house. It was great to have them in the mix of our family life, although at times it felt like a never-ending episode of a family sitcom, with my parents bursting into our house unannounced, judging and commenting on my life choices and making sure I never got “too big for my britches.” I spent weeks at a time at the cattle ranch, hiking our property and learning its nooks and crannies. It was profound to find myself deep in the mountains, like a dream of being in Eden, alone with nature. Or at the top of our mountain at sunset, looking out over pasturelands and orange groves, with the Sierra Mountains in the distance, actually living the American Dream.

O beautiful for spacious skies

For amber waves of grain

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain

Even though my Quad was my horse, I impressed my cattleman (and myself) with how good I was at herding cows, so thankful that I was getting to act out the City Slickers fantasy for real. I felt like myself there. And the ranch needed me. There was a house to be painted, porch to repair, single-wide trailer to restore, drainage and erosion to take care of, pest control, brush to clear, and the endless other chores that go into keeping up a ranch. Laure had been given a horse from a friend, and so there was, of course, shit to dispose of, hay to stack, an arena to groom, and on and on. I even grew to love working in the 105-degree heat in the summer, drinking gallons of water and sleeping like a baby when it cooled off at night. The fame thing was tricky in a place like this. A trip to Home Depot inevitably ended up in a photoshoot with the employees. The intrusions made Laure crazy, but to me, it felt like the civilian extension of my USO Handshake Tour, bringing the Power of Marv to the far-off reaches of Central California, and answering those same burning questions—“What the hell are you doing here?” and “Was that a real spider?” The only time anyone crossed a line was when some of the neighbor kids thought it would be funny to prank The Wet Bandit and broke into the single-wide trailer while we were away. They stuffed rags into the sink drain, turned on the water, and flooded the whole trailer. I’m not sure if the wasted money or the wasted water pissed me off more, but it showed the Power of Marv had a dark side as well.

But sculpture had taken over my days, and my life. It felt empowering to get up every day and go to the little house and work, not beholden to anyone to cast me or fund me. By now, I had filled the little house with crazy, huge, papier-mâché pieces—a man doing a one-handed handstand, a swimmer in mid-flight off the high-dive, a man bursting through a painting. I started making more durable pieces with plaster-cloth, plumbing pipe, and exterior paint that could live outside and placed them around the property—a surfer riding a huge wave, a fat man jumping over a picket fence. I loved the physical labor and problem-solving of making them. I tried to come up with new poses I hoped would make the audience laugh, learning how to make these seemingly impossible poses stand securely on their own and make the viewer smile at the visual trick. It gave me the same artistic satisfaction as the performance art I had been involved with, communicating a story to the viewer, even if the sculpture was only one frame of film. People started seeing my stuff and, through word of mouth, I got offers to buy some of my work, which, for a fledgling artist, was such a validation.

Henry moved back to LA, and we helped him look for an apartment while he applied to law school and worked at a nonprofit. He was going to need a little help with his rent, but before that happened, I had an epiphany—instead of spending money renting a place for him, why didn’t I give him the little house and spend that money to rent a sculpture studio for myself? I found a funky, industrial space on La Cienega Boulevard in Culver City, a one-thousand-square-foot space behind a mom-and-pop computer repair place. My place was an old refrigeration storage space with a roll-up door, corrugated metal walls, and thick, commercial refrigerator doors dividing the place into three separate rooms. Besides the space itself, the best thing was that my block was becoming the hippest art scene in LA, with galleries popping up in weird spaces like an old gas station or industrial storage spaces like mine. The galleries created a lot of foot traffic, especially when they had regular art walks, so not only did I have a space to make my art, I could open my doors whenever I wanted to and try to sell my art as well. I thought if I could sell enough to pay for my rent, I would be truly winning. I loved commuting every day and getting out of Malibu. My friends started coming over and hanging out. There was a great bar on the street and always new art to see at the galleries, although I was the only person on the block actually using my space as a working studio. I used the front room as a gallery, the back space as my work area, and the small space for a hangout area, and it worked perfectly. For the first year, I made more life-sized, dynamic, plaster sculptures and sold a bunch. I also started using the space to showcase other artists, giving them The Iceboxx, as it was now being called, for shows of their work and at the art walks. We did play readings and shot a little film there, and I loved having my own gallery right in the middle of the Art District. But most importantly, it made me take myself seriously as an artist. I wasn’t hiding anymore in my little house and garage. The coolest gallery owners in LA were my neighbors, coming in to see what I was working on, and it lit a fire under my ass.

The God of Sculpture is Rodin. I visited the Rodin Museum in France and was moved to tears by the people he created and the stories he told in a single gesture or pose. His bronze sculptures are huge, with the size and weight of them impacting the viewer just as much as the characters. I felt if I wanted call myself a sculptor, I would have to move past the Pop Art I was making and teach myself how to make sculptures like his. But how the fuck do you make a bronze sculpture? Get a piece of bronze and hammer it until you get a face or a hand? I did my homework, learning that bronze sculptures begin as sculptures in clay. A mold is made of the clay sculpture and then a bronze casting is made from the mold, using the lost-wax process, the same way bronze sculptures have been made since Egyptian times. I had forgotten how much I love clay. As a teenager, I built a potter’s wheel in our basement and sculpted a few small busts for fun, but I really didn’t know much about sculpting the human form. My drawing skills are truly at a toddler level, and I am always blown away when someone can draw people realistically, with accurate proportions and perspectives, tricking the eye into seeing three dimensions. But there is no need for those skills when you’re sculpting with clay because you are creating humans in actual three dimensions, and right off the bat I was able to shape the clay into the exact form I wanted. I could feel in my hands if a nose was too big or a finger too short. Clay is very forgiving. Unlike pottery clay, sculpting clay is oil-based and never dries out, so if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can add on more or take some away until it is just how you want it.

I bought a book on anatomy and a hundred pounds of sculpting clay and dove in. I made a half-life size young surfer, working long and hard to get the musculature and facial features right. I made a life-size young woman, her dress flying as she runs, balanced on one foot. These were also my first opportunities to work with a foundry and go through the whole process of creating a bronze sculpture—making the molds and wax castings, pouring the molten bronze, welding the pieces back together, adding patina and polishing it until it is finished. Like a movie crew, I now understood the crafts and laborers needed to produce the final vision. And seeing the strength of the material and the engineering possibilities, I got inspired to create even more out-ofbalance poses than I was already making. Casting a sculpture in bronze is not cheap, so the financial investment in a piece was also a factor, and now I committed myself to selling my pieces to make my money back. I started sculpting smaller pieces too, making things that were more affordable to people coming through The Iceboxx Gallery. I made a ton of mistakes, but overall I was pleased with what I was doing. I was barely breaking even, but creatively I was on fire in a way I had never experienced before. Even though I made my living in the performing arts, for the first time in my life, through sheer will and hard work, I could finally call myself an artist.