WHEN RITTER FIRST GOT THERE, WE WERE STAYING AT THE RAMADA Inn in this little town we were shooting in, Benton, Arkansas. We had a makeup girl and then a hair girl. The hair girl really didn’t do hair, she did makeup, but we didn’t have a lot of money for anything and she was friends with the girl doing makeup. Her name’s Kate, good gal, now she’s a huge makeup artist. So I told Kate, “Look, here’s what we want for Ritter. I want you to give him a kind of flattop or one of those hairdos that goes up in the air like gay dudes have. Something kind of hip-looking … but not quite.”
Here’s the story: Ritter’s character is a gay man from St. Louis who works for a chain of Dollar Stores. They transfer him to this little town in Arkansas. We never said it was Arkansas, but it was a little state. Anyway, he still gets all the magazines he subscribed to in St. Louis—GQ and shit like that—in this little one-horse town. He takes his copy of GQ down to the local barber shop, and he shows them a picture and says, “I want to look like that.” So it’s Peggy from Millsburg’s version of this GQ haircut.
“I want it dyed,” I told Kate, “and I want him to be blond.” And Ritter goes, “Well, I got to do something when I get back to L.A.” He had to do some public service announcements for something, I can’t remember what they were for, but he said, “Don’t go too crazy with it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
So, we’re in his motel room at the Ramada Inn, and he’s sitting there. There’s no mirror in front of us. Kate dyes his hair first. It comes out red and black. It’s, like, maroon and black in the movie, but you know hair dye—when you first do it, it takes a couple of hours before it settles in. Then she cuts his hair. She gives him fucking whitewalls on the side and a flattop standing straight up in the air, and I look at Kate and say, “This is perfect. This is fucking genius. I had no idea it was going to be this perfect.” Ritter, all excited, goes, “What? What is it? Let me see!”
Ritter goes and looks in the mirror. “I’m going to fucking kill you!” he says. “I look like an idiot! Do you understand that I have to fucking be on television when I get back?!”
“No, this is perfect, it’s ideal! This is going to be great! You’re going to love it.” After the movie was over, he appeared on the PSA for whatever it was with a Dodgers cap.
RITTER WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST FUCKING GUYS. YOU TALK ABOUT A shock when he died.
We had just played Farm Aid in Columbus, Ohio, that past weekend, and I got the flu real bad. I was sick as shit. Columbus was our last date, but I was so sick I couldn’t come home after the show. I had to stay in the hotel room there for two or three more days by myself. Everybody else left. (Thanks, guys.) When I got off the stage after the show, Stephen Bruton was there with me, as was Jim Marshall, the photographer. Marshall took pictures of me with Bruton and Dennis Kucinich, the guy that ran for president—he was Willie Nelson’s candidate because he was all for pot—standing between the buses and stuff.
Anyway, I was getting sick already and my lungs were on fire. Warren Zevon was my buddy, and he was real sick at that time with lung cancer—that mesothelioma or whatever it was he had. After Marshall took these pictures, I did an interview, and they told me Warren had just died. I think that was on Sunday.
I get over this flu enough to fly home. A couple of nights later, I get this call from Jerry, my business manager—who was also Ritter’s manager—at midnight. He was all emotional. “We’ve lost John,” he said. “We’ve lost John.” It didn’t make any sense to me. I was thinking of my brother because my brother’s name is John, so I said, “What do you mean lost him? Where the fuck is he?” And he, knowing I didn’t understand, goes, “No, John Ritter. We lost him.” And I’m still not understanding, because when somebody tells me “we lost” somebody, it means they’re in Bakersfield and won’t tell anybody. “John died,” he says.
Dwight called me literally thirty seconds into the conversation with Jerry. Dwight was just calling to bullshit—we talk late at night all the time—and I said, “Dwight, hang on a second, Ritter just died, I’ll call you right back.”
I got off the phone with Jerry and got back on with Dwight. We talked for three hours about Ritter. But then I woke up the next morning, Johnny Cash had died. The very next morning. Warren Zevon, John Ritter, and Johnny Cash within, like, five days. I was friends with all those guys. Particularly Warren and John, but I knew Cash very well. It was just a strange week.