During his summer job at the rec center, my father had hired a young woman who was his former student. Bright and positive, Linda brought to my father’s everyday life the wit and warmth he lacked at home. Linda was his O’Brien. Later, after Linda had finished her degree, she returned to Long Island to teach in a nearby town. With nowhere to go and no money to fund his escape from the crushing realities of his family life, my father moved into Linda’s home. The animosity this triggered within my family was epic. Even I, living somewhat blithely in Manhattan, was pulled into the tumult. My mother played her usual victim card, telling me she had no money for her bills, including food, so I got my father on the phone and threatened him. I said I would give my mother the necessary funds to take him to court. I could feel his pain, anger, and sense of betrayal through the phone as I sided with my mother over him, an unfamiliar position for me. After that, we spoke even less often than before. But the handwriting appeared on the wall once he left that indicated that it had fallen to me to fill whatever gaps I could.
By the summer of 1982, Michael Bloom was telling me to seriously consider heading out to LA for the network television pilot season, and another excuse to distance myself from my family and their problems presented itself. And although my father was also running away from home, it was too late for him. Right at the time that Bloom was enlisting me to go west, my father was diagnosed with oat cell carcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer. The doctors at the area hospital told him they had found a tumor in his left lung. He chose, for a critical period, to ignore them. It was time to go without again. Like when he and my mom decided to have six children, it was time to rely on Providence again. And by the time he was back in a hospital for tests, the cancer had spread significantly. I asked him, point-blank, if he felt he was in real danger. He said no. And for a period that lasted for several months, he lied to me. My mother lied to me. My sister Beth lied to me. They all told me he had a very good chance of beating it.
I decided I would drive cross-country to LA, sublet a place there for four months, and give it a go. My contract on The Doctors was up in October of 1982. The three producers pressured me to extend for an additional four months. In September, I told the new executive producer, Gerry Straub, that I wasn’t going to sign up again. In a hysterically funny moment, I walked down a studio hallway with Barimo behind me, and Straub shouted, “You’re making a mistake! What? You think you’re gonna go out to Hollywood and become a big star?”
“Well,” I thought, “maybe a little star.” The short span of the extension had seemed odd, and later I found out why. The show was canceled in December, for good.
While Beth was bringing her own children into the world, Daniel was at Ball State in Indiana, Billy was at the State University at Binghamton, Jane was finishing high school, and Stephen was polishing his legend on the streets of Massapequa, I got into a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with Tuck Milligan and headed to Los Angeles on January 7, 1983. While I snorted and drank my way to Hollywood, my sister Beth ferried my dad to work on whatever days he wasn’t at Sloan Kettering and, later, Mount Sinai. Every day, the man I looked up to for his bottomless reserves of power, his intense sense of duty and unswerving commitment, grew weaker and weaker, all out of my sight. When I left New York, I left behind Gary, my dad, and my TV dad, David. Only Bloom, whose California office was beginning to thrive, would be available to me for the next phase of my life. He would become among my dearest friends, as my life turned fortunate and gratifying on one hand, and abruptly and numbingly painful on the other.
5
Perpetual Light
Tuck and I had shared a small rental cottage in Amagansett the summer before and had become good friends. It was during that period that I fell in love with the East End, and Amagansett in particular. We lived the life of two bachelors, with a very small beach house and not much else. The days were spent cooking at home, punctuated by visits from the occasional kindhearted female visitor, drinking and sleeping on the beach—things I’d never want (drinking) or have time for (cooking) again. But the beach in Amagansett is a good place to get acquainted with God.
On our cross-country drive, I may have alarmed Tuck, my future roommate, with a preview of what was to come regarding my developing self-destruction. I suggested to Tuck that our route be guided not only by places where we had family and friends, but also by where I could deepen my relationship with cocaine. Drugs and alcohol, much to my own surprise, would become an increasingly powerful force in my life. At first slowly, then a sudden, rapid acceleration. All of the feelings behind it were the “self-centered fear” that AA’s Big Book discusses. The self-centered fear that we would either not get something we wanted or lose something we already had. My life was changing in so many ways, most of them good, but others, painful. I was lonely and scared. I missed my family, the simplicity of being myself, of being accepted, even loved, simply for who I was. I often dreaded performing and, even more, the performing you had to do off camera. I was alternately tense, cocky, needy, inspired, or depressed. I felt that tremendous opportunities were in front of me and, therefore, there was no turning back. And as I wanted everyone to believe that I had it together, I was unwilling to ask people around me for help. I left my home with a case of OCD, a consuming desire to earn a respectable living, if not make a fortune, and a nagging need for attention that would fill the holes my parents were too enervated to address. But sometimes, dreams where I would go back to Massapequa and wait for my dad to come home and watch the late night movie show with him would flood me with feelings that I didn’t know what to do with. So I drank. I took drugs and I drank. The chance at a career in Hollywood represented ever greater change for which I was poorly prepared. So, LA would prove to be the Kitty Hawk where my addiction really took off.
Our first stop was the Virginia suburbs, where the woman I’d first seen lying on the floor of my freshman dorm at GW, none other than Avis Renshaw, now lived with her husband and kids. We had stayed in touch. Her husband, Steven Cox, resembled Montgomery Clift as photographed by Dorothea Lange. My nickname for him was Male Model Farmer. They owned a farm and grew things. Avis had purchased a pizza oven, installed it in her garage, busted a hole in the wall to allow access to the oven from inside the house, and, thus, birthed Mom’s Apple Pie Company. They had a lot of kids, one of whom, Biansa, later became my assistant. Avis was happy. She had a home and a family, things it would take me another thirty years to find. After a day of envying Avis and Male Model Farmer, we drove on.