I was in a rut, and as Jake Bloom suggested, I needed a tow truck to pull me out. Ron Meyer, one of the founders of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), arranged for me to come to his Malibu home to talk about leaving Michael Bloom and coming to CAA. Meyer, an ex-marine, is a compact, bespectacled man with the look of a wrestling coach who favors cardigan sweaters. His lack of pretension is legendary. But in Hollywood, a town overwhelmed by its obsession with personal power, Ron Meyer is the OG. Together with Mike Ovitz, he transformed the business. The formation of CAA heralded a period of unusual power for agents who packaged their writer, director, and actor clients into deals that created a sellers’ market that spelled huge fees for them.
I asked Meyer which agent would do my day-to-day, meaning the person with whom I would communicate about offers, etc. He said he would be that person. I laughed out loud. How would someone like Meyer, who headed a company that handled the biggest stars in Hollywood, find the time, let alone the interest, to cover my career? Meyer promised to handle everything personally, and he wasn’t kidding. Over the course of the next few years, right up until he sold the agency and went on to his lengthy run at NBC Universal, Meyer took my calls like I was his brother. People joke that Ron would take calls as he was being put under for surgery. But the truth is, he was generous and forthright with me in a way I was unprepared for. “We’ll just keep throwing it against the wall till something sticks,” he would say. Eventually, the offers for starring roles in big films would become fewer and further between, but Ron gave it everything he had. I remain indebted to and fond of him to this very day.
The painful task of parting with Michael Bloom occurred in a small café near the Miracle Mile in LA. Bloom had been in this boat before, having watched several of his stars-in-training move on to other, usually more powerful agents and agencies. Also, by 1988, his business was on the ropes. That year, the Writers Guild of America had taken its members on strike from March 7 to August 7. At 155 days, it was the longest strike in their history. The town shut down, and the ripple effects were staggering. Restaurants, dry cleaners, private schools, travel agents, florists, clothing stores, limo companies, you name it, everyone was affected. Some B-level agencies in Bloom’s league folded. Others were smart enough to merge, and though their power was diluted, they survived. Bloom, with his outsized faith in himself, refused such merger offers. He couldn’t imagine working for someone else. His name was on the door and it had to stay that way.
At a café that day, Bloom cried. I think I cried, I don’t remember. (I am a pretty good crier.) He asked if Kim was in some way an influence here, as she was already with CAA. Kim had in fact voiced the opinion that I needed a change. (When Kim spoke about Bloom, I reminded myself of the changes that Mace Neufeld had recommended.) But the reality was that when I was in trouble and I needed answers, the heads of studios didn’t even know Bloom’s name, let alone return his calls. Underlings would get back to him, offering little in the way of hard information. When I was struggling with the Jack Ryan deal, Bloom called Stanley Jaffe at Paramount many times. Jaffe never called him back.
Ron Meyer could never be Bloom, and I would miss our trips to the West End of London and our long dinners in New York after a show, critiquing everyone and everything we’d seen. But I knew I had to climb out of this well I had been thrown into. I told Bloom we were done, and I headed to New York to start rehearsals for Streetcar. In the coming years, mutual friends told me that Bloom took my decision hardest of all his clients’ defections.
As I prepared to begin Streetcar, a decision that forced me to rethink my career, I was questioning other things as well. Life with Kim was largely centered around the narcissistic passions of two childless actors. We worked most of the time, and when we weren’t working we were thinking about work. But troubles on the set of The Marrying Man, along with Kim’s age (she turned thirty-eight in December of that year), had seemed to let some of the air out of her tires. I, on the other hand, needed a break from the sweepstakes mentality of Hollywood, and I went to New York knowing that I needed a break from her and her self-absorption as well. Kim could be funny. She could be a mess. But, most of all, Kim was about Kim. I needed to heal and she wasn’t built to comfort her significant other. Kim lived to be understood, not to understand. To heal, I needed a meaningful experience, a mountain to climb. So Tennessee Williams would help me by providing me with one of the greatest challenges of all.
I had seen a production of Streetcar, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos, at Lincoln Center in 1988. It had starred Frances McDormand as Stella, the wonderful Frank Converse as Mitch, Aidan Quinn as Stanley, and Blythe Danner as one of the best Blanche DuBois I’ve ever seen. I’ve always admired Aidan and thought he was good in the part of Stanley, in a production I’d actually auditioned for myself, but he seemed to hold back, like he was asking permission for this or that. At one point in the play, Stanley slugs his wife, and in less than five minutes, she comes back to him and they go to bed. Unless the director makes cuts or you’re doing some revisionist production, it’s World War II New Orleans and you play these roles without comment or apology.
When I’d studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute on East 15th Street, I’d met Elaine Aiken, who became my friend and private coach. When I worked on scenes from Streetcar with her, she would say, “Honey, you’re either sexy or you’re not. No acting lessons can help you there. This guy is an animal. You can’t be polite about it. You’ve got to be clear. It’s more than ‘You want something, you take it.’ When this guy wants something, he’ll destroy anyone who gets in his way.”