I met some smart and wicked characters in LA in 1983. Through the actress Hillary Bailey, our other roommate, I was introduced to a small group of writers who worked in network sitcoms. They typed away at an early form of computer in their apartments in the Hollywood Hills, pumping out episodes of some of the most successful comedies on the air. An afternoon of writing, and boom, they were done. Then we played tennis and drank while I listened to them bullshit about a business that I was barely in. But because they were in it, I could listen all night long. Driving is everything in LA, so drugs suddenly seemed more practical than booze. People drank, but that was often how they balanced the high of cocaine. As these guys were civilized sorts, we’d go to dinner at Lew Mitchell’s Orient Express, the old “gourmet” Chinese joint on Wilshire near the Miracle Mile, before we blasted off for the evening. It was the LA equivalent of Hurley’s. I watched them eat squab in lettuce cups. Imagine this New Yorker in LA, where pigeons were on the menu.
Tuck and I had a phone answering machine, and as neither of us had a job, we reveled in recording long, self-indulgent outgoing messages, usually employing ridiculous dialects. The result was bad Monty Python. One day, we got a message from an old friend of Tuck’s, Dick Clayton, a bygone actor who had appeared in films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton before going on to a big career as an agent, representing James Dean and Burt Reynolds at the Famous Artists Agency. Clayton, polite but firm, said, “I don’t know what that is, Tuck, but you ought to knock that off. No one wants to sit and listen to that over the phone. It’s not very professional, and I think it makes you look bad, if I may say so.” A lesson about Hollywood as a serious business, courtesy of James Dean’s agent. We changed the outgoing message.
Los Angeles quickly became a blur of Thomas Guide maps, gas stations, burger joints, studio parking lots, and bars like Barney’s Beanery and the Formosa Café, which were the Polo Lounge and Dan Tana’s for out-of-work actors. I went to lots of auditions for films, TV shows, and some TV commercials. TV commercial calls in LA highlighted how the business differed from New York. In New York, guys showed up for auditions with a game face on. Commercials were viewed as a trite yet necessary evil, so you’d chat about what else you were working on, typically in the theater or film. In LA, the guys who sat around the holding area talked about hang gliding, biking, horseback riding, surfing, hiking, or anything else one might do under the perfect Southern California sun. Each was a perfect specimen in terms of height, fitness, hair, and skin, and nearly everyone was named Chad, Rick, or Steve, with maybe one or two Coles. They were male models auditioning to play cowboys, cops, or the guy half of some perfect-looking straight couple. In New York, actors talked about the latest play at the Public Theater. In LA, they talked about the newest cars, diet shakes, or workouts.
In the majority of my early auditions, I was either dreadful or totally unmemorable. But it didn’t matter. I was perfect for TV in the ’80s. I met Jean Guest, the mother of director Christopher Guest and the head of casting at CBS. Jean was a kind, intelligent woman who seemed to be in my corner in those early days. After a series I shot for CBS was canceled, the network signed me to a holding deal, paying me a relatively small stipend in exchange for simply not working for anyone else. In one meeting, an opaque colleague of Jean’s said, “We like you and want to try to find a good fit. We’ll keep throwing something against the wall until it sticks. We want you to be the next Bill Bixby.” In New York, the carrot might be a career like Pacino’s. In LA, it was the chance to be the heir to the star of My Favorite Martian.
The series I shot was called Cutter to Houston, a drama where Shelley Hack, a wonderful actor named Jim Metzler, and I played doctors bringing our talents to some Texas backwater, each for our own complicated reasons (I was a physician/drug thief who was sentenced to work there as community service, if you can imagine such a thing).
The pilot was written and directed by Sandor Stern, who had a heart attack in the final days of shooting it and was replaced by another director. The show was eventually taken over by the producer Gerry Abrams, father of the prolific J. J. Abrams. We wrapped the pilot at the end of March 1983.
By then, the California sun had seduced me a bit, as I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway and hung out at Zuma, La Piedra, Pescador, Matador, and Nicholas Canyon Beaches in Malibu. I thought that if I found a lot of work in LA, I might live in Malibu, which possessed a wonderful sense of community. Beyond the lifestyle, LA represented the chance for me to learn more about the business than I could in New York. I thought about staying a bit longer, driving around California, seeing the place in a way I never had time for when I was working all day. But right about that time, my sister called to tell me to come back home as soon as I could. Everyone there had underplayed my father’s condition, and now his health had declined precipitously.
In my first few days back in New York, I learned that my father had only weeks to live. The lymphoma, detected in August of 1982, had raged through his body and was now in his lungs. Initially, he went to Mount Sinai on the recommendation of his brother Charles’s second wife, Vera, for whom promising treatments involving macrobiotic dieting bought more than a year of comfort and some hope. But after this period of remission, her cancer recurred and she died. At Sloan Kettering, they had essentially told him to go home and die as comfortably as he could. My sister told me that he dragged himself to work until some of his students’ parents complained to the administration that his appearance “upset” them. He called my sister Beth and, throwing in the towel, asked her to take him back home to Linda’s house, where he’d been living.
My uncle Charles found a hospital in Philadelphia that agreed to see him, so when I got back to New York, I traveled by train to the Mercy Catholic Medical Center’s Misericordia Hospital. Charles, battle-hardened as he was by Vera’s illness, was at my father’s side much of the time. When I arrived, the halls seemed so ominous: dark, long, and wide. The walk to my dad’s room seemed to take forever. When I entered the room and finally saw him, I was speechless, and not only because of his sallow skin or the tubes coming out at different angles. It was the look in his eye, a look I had never seen before, that crushed me. I saw fear in this brave and self-abnegating man. This was not my father. He spoke only once that first afternoon, to tell me that he wanted neither a wake nor a funeral. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in Lake Coeur D’Alene in northern Idaho, the place he had dreamed he might retire.