The weeks following my father’s death, I spent more time back home with family, which made me realize how much I had missed them. Perhaps unconsciously, I had created this bogus myth that I had crossed some ocean to make my fortune by going to Los Angeles. The truth is that I was simply uninterested in going home, back to a place that required me to explain who I had become. I wanted different experiences now. The one person who had a genuine interest in my life, as well as an insightful perspective, was gone. Meanwhile, my mother floated in a haze of grieving widowhood. My sister Beth was off beginning her own family. My sister Jane was just a kid who fell between the cracks of my reality, which was sad because she was and is such a bright person and is engaged by learning in the same way that I was.
While I was home for this grieving period, I relied on my brothers, by then ages twenty-three, twenty, and seventeen, to cope and on a wholly different level. I had money in my pocket, so we partied. During the summer of 1983, it was a weird mix of sweet and unsettling to go out “on the town” with them when the town was Massapequa. The white-flight suburbs were now the easiest of places to buy drugs, to get fake IDs, and to walk into bar after bar. By six a.m., we’d hit the Sandbar in Seaford, and I would see some of my friends’ dads. As dawn broke outside, there was Mr. Smith here, Mr. Jones there, my dad’s peers stewed at the hour when my father would have been in the kitchen making breakfast. I thought about how good we’d had it with him as our father, and how alcohol drowns our dreams, silences our beliefs, and relieves us of our responsibilities. Although my brothers and I had some laughs that summer, none of it felt right. I didn’t want any of us to grow up to become the guy sitting on the next bar stool at the Sandbar.
Tuck had gone down to West Palm Beach to appear at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in a production of The Apple Tree, so I flew down there to join him. He and his female costar were put up in a couple of condos in a swell building by the beach. We spent the days sleeping by the pool, waterskiing, and drinking while attempting to win over some girls who worked at the theater. If mourning your dead father and presenting yourself in a state of overall numbness were an aphrodisiac, then I might have made a better impression upon these women. Some women go for needy men. However, I do not recall any of them taking me up on my offer. I went home to Long Island a week later, still feeling lost.
When I got back to New York, I got a call from a very young and very beautiful woman named Janine Turner, whom I’d met in LA when she’d auditioned for the Cutter to Houston pilot. She told me that she came to New York regularly and promised to call me when she did. When we met at the old Café La Fortuna for coffee, I told her about my dad’s death, and she was genuinely moved. After she went back to California, she sent me a beautiful and thoughtful letter. I selfishly felt that there weren’t enough people checking in on me during this difficult time, so Janine’s letter made a real impact on me. Janine was only twenty-one and completely without cynicism. Thus, I found myself smitten by what is often the greatest aphrodisiac of all: sincerity. So that’s how Janine Turner became my first show business love. Within a matter of months, we were living together in LA, getting engaged, and then just as quickly heading for a breakup while I was in the throes of my self-destructive behavior.
Once, while Janine was performing the musical Grease at a dinner theater in Denver, I had, of course, made the necessary connections to procure my illicit pharmaceutical needs. I went to brunch with Janine, her mother, and her mother’s parents, who were out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Everyone sipped coffee or wine while I retreated to the bathroom every fifteen minutes. At one point, Janine’s grandfather leveled me with a look that said, “There’s somethin’ not right about you, boy.” If only he knew the extent of it. Janine and I broke up a few months later. She was an extraordinarily kind woman, but we were too young to be making those plans.
At the same time, the pilot for Cutter was picked up, and I raced back to LA, excited to be working as a lead in my first prime-time show. We shot eight episodes, but the result was tepid reviews and unspectacular ratings. Even as inexperienced as I was, I knew the show wasn’t working and that something had to give. I learned then that producers never give the prognosis of a show in fear that everyone will start to phone it in. One day a director named Bernie McEveety walked on the set, and a crew member muttered, “It’s the Hangman.” I asked what he meant, and he said, “They bring him on to wrap up the last few episodes under budget.” McEveety, a polite and quiet man, would snap, “Cut, print, fine!” after one or two takes. Within a couple of days of McEveety’s arrival, word came down that we’d been canceled. The excitement of scoring any job as an actor comes with that dichotomy. The movie bombs, the play closes, or the TV show is canceled, and your joy is quickly replaced by disappointment. But you try to remember that it’s not your fault. At least, not entirely. Finding an audience is a difficult task and failure is the norm.
CBS signed me to a holding deal, whereby one is paid a fee to work exclusively for one company for a period of time. The results of that deal were shows like Sweet Revenge, a TV movie with Kelly McGillis, and The Sheriff and the Astronaut, a very bad pilot from a very good writer named Gerry Di Pego. Di Pego had written Sharky’s Machine, which starred Burt Reynolds, and was a movie I liked a lot. I couldn’t imagine how the writer of that ballsy, gritty script had also come up with this soft, precious TV show.