By that point, Tuck and I were living just off of the Ocean Front Walk in Venice in an apartment that looked out onto the water and the surge of beachgoers who flocked there on weekends. Venice was a Bleecker Street–type carnival of humanity, vendors, and food. The walkway was a filthy and garbage-strewn mess by Sunday evening. On Monday mornings, the beach cleaning crew arrived, a small brigade of sand-sifting trucks and workers who spent the day soaping and rinsing the benches along the promenade. By Tuesday morning, it was as clean as the entrance to Buckingham Palace. The smells and sounds of those Tuesday mornings became my Bright Lights, Big City moments. A sparkling, clean Venice made me think that maybe I could be cleansed, too.
In the winter of 1985, Larry, an old friend from New York, came to visit me at the beach, and for the first time in six months, I got high. He drove away after just an hour or so, claiming he was off to procure more coke. He never returned, leaving me to pace the floor in a desperate, metronomic march, waiting for him. That was it. That was the last day: Saturday, February 23, 1985. I spent most of Sunday sleeping, thinking, praying, and accepting. On Monday morning, I went to an AA meeting in West Hollywood. To tell you what was said there would be a violation of the principles of anonymity that I respect. I’m comfortable telling you I am a member, but I’ll leave it at that. I haven’t had a drink or recreational drug since that day over thirty years ago. I surely have not had the courage to face all of my issues in the way AA gently recommends. However, I am profoundly grateful for discovering the program that saved my life. As frequently as I have gotten in my own way throughout my sobriety, I shudder to think of how much more painful and destructive my behavior might have been had I not been sober. Most important, through AA, I have a renewed relationship with God, a relationship I call upon every day. A couple of short years later, Larry died of AIDS from IV drug use.
AA teaches you to make no serious decisions in your first year of sobriety, including moving, changing jobs, and getting into serious relationships. I obviously ignored the last part as soon as I met Holly Gagnier, who visited the Knots Landing set one day to see her father, Hugh, the cinematographer. Beautiful and funny, Holly would be my girlfriend, off and on, for the next five years.
Knots Landing was a good opportunity, but it wasn’t my show. The cast was a lovely bunch that had formed a family, and Joan Van Ark, who played my sister, made me feel like a real sibling. But I didn’t want a career like that of my castmate Ted Shackelford, whereby you come in week after week and do the same thing every day. The women in the Knots cast ruled the roost, and the show’s creator, David Jacobs, expressed his beliefs, curiosities, and passions through the three female leads, who were given more interesting things to do on-screen than the men. The producers of Knots Landing had my character commit suicide, and although I had mixed feelings about leaving, I was off the show in the spring of 1985.
In the beginning, I had thought I might try acting for a while and see if it fit. As the work I was offered became more interesting, it became my life. The challenge of doing it well at an ever-higher level appealed to me more than anything else. It also took its toll on the rest of my life. I dated a bunch of women from 1980 through 1985. The cycle was always the same. I fed them crumbs and water and insisted they pretend it was a five-course meal. The moment work presented itself, and another chance to get ahead, I rushed into the arms of The Business. I discovered that in my private life, I was a chauffeur. People got in. I drove them around. Everyone seemed to arrive somewhere except me. I was a taxi that brought women to their next relationship and, hopefully, a better one. They got out of the cab and got married, had kids. I just kept reading scripts, going to meetings, trying to hustle my way into the movie business.
By the end of 1985, I had been in Los Angeles for a few years and California had begun to seem like a bit of a political loony bin, with Reagan having won reelection the year before. The lens of sobriety forced me to see everything more clearly. I wanted to go home. When I flew to New York on a red-eye for an audition, the city’s stark reality overwhelmed me. Jet-lagged and hungry, I walked to the old 79th Street Coffee Shop on Broadway. That morning I thought, as some elderly folks shuffled by, “New York’s got so many old people.” A moment later, “New York’s got so many fat people.” And then, “I never realized how black New York is,” as I noticed at least a third of those on the street were African-American. “New York is so old and fat and black,” I thought. Coming home from LA, the land of the trim, youth-obsessed, and racially polarized, made me realize that I had been away too long. I ate breakfast, went home, and slept. Once I was in my right mind, New York seemed just right. Perfect, in fact. I sublet my half of the Venice apartment, bought a little place on West 80th Street in Manhattan in December of ’85, and in the spring of 1986, I moved back to New York. Within a month, it would prove to be one of the best decisions I had ever made.
7
Prelude
The first Broadway show I saw was Shenandoah, starring John Cullum. Our high school bused us into New York for a field trip to the stock exchange, police headquarters, the United Nations, the botanical gardens, or Broadway. New York in the 1970s was filthy and unlovable, but while watching a good Broadway show, you could forget that. And inside the grimy Alvin Theatre, Cullum showed me, for the first time, what acting talent truly is. Leading men on Broadway like Cullum, Philip Bosco, and Len Cariou may have lacked the symmetrical features, perfect bodies, and ability to hold a close-up solely with a style like Cary Grant or Bogart. But they more than made up for it with wit, technique, and timing. Cullum had that theater eating out of his hand.