atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (15 page)

Billy Crystal 

Billy Crystal was the coolest of them all. When I was on Soap a fellow actor asked him how he prepared for the late-night talk shows he’d been doing, and he said he “mulled” about it. He said it was simple: Go into your subconscious and just mull it over. Then say whatever comes out. Of course, he started very young, growing up surrounded by musicians and the unconditional love and support of his family. He was a veteran by the time he got to Soap.

The first time I appeared as a guest on the show, it was the second year for this huge hit. The ratings were solid, and it had a long run ahead of it. I was used to planning everything and rehearsing over and over, so I was horrified to find that in rehearsing with this cast, whenever there was a break for the cameramen to mark their positions, the actors immediately started talking about real estate or swimming pools or vacations in Bali.

We had just run through the scene for the first time and were on a break while the set was being lit. The cast was standing around talking about houses and finding the right one, the right neighborhood, the right price. Blah-de-blah, blah-blah.

I tried to keep quiet, but I couldn’t manage it. I broke into the conversation with, “Why don’t we rehearse the scene? It could use some work, don’cha think?”

There was a long, deadly silence, and then Billy Crystal stepped in and saved me. He said, like it was a new concept, “Oh, yeah. That’s a good idea. Let’s try that. Let’s go over it again and see if we can make it better.”

Everybody joined in to make me feel at ease, and it wasn’t until long afterward that I realized that actors in sitcoms keep fresh by not rehearsing too much. It would be like analyzing a comic strip; it would die on you. The trick is to stay in the present and not pretend that what you’re doing is great literature. Let the writer do that. Just say the lines. You were cast for your quality when you walked in the door. It’s a first-impression kind of thing, so please don’t rock the boat. Mull instead. What a concept.

The Importance of Being Seen 

On New Year’s Day at the beach in Santa Monica at the end of Sunset Boulevard, the Penguins meet at noon and swim around a Coast Guard lifeboat in the ocean to celebrate the event. The water in California at that time is usually no colder than about 56 degrees, but the TV news stations cover the event anyway. It’s of great interest, mainly to the Penguins, who go for pancakes afterward and then rush home to see themselves on the six o’clock news.

It’s fascinating to me that part of this group is made up of actors who are already on TV and in films, and still they gather around the set at six and scream:

“Oh, there we are!”

“There I am!”

“Oh, there’s Dickie!”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“ . . . and Patty.”

“I don’t see them. Say, what’s that old guy doing in there?”

“Dunno.”

Actors are always devising ways to be seen because they’re constantly looking for the next job. In LA, it’s tricky. There are plenty of parties and tennis games and restaurants, yet half of an actor’s life is spent trying to get to them in the isolation of gridlock and road rage.

One year, a Penguin friend of mine missed New Year’s in the ocean because he got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway. The fellow in the car behind him kept bumping him and blowing his horn, and then he cut in front of him and sped down an off ramp. The Penguin got so mad that he followed his tormentor home to find out where he lived. This caused the Penguin to miss being at the beach and on the news, so he went home and sulked. Then, in the dead of night, he went back to squeeze epoxy glue into the keyholes of the offender’s car. It was a social life for which I was growing too old.

I had another friend, Tom, who got arrested for singing while driving on the freeway. Traffic was moving so slowly that he’d sung all the songs he knew and had started referring to some sheet music on the seat beside him. It looked to a highway patrolman as if Tom were reading while he drove. The judge asked Tom to sing a song for him. When Tom finished singing, the judge said that he couldn’t possibly punish someone for loving music as much as Tom obviously did. He wished him luck and let him go.

Rain in California mixes with the oil from the cars on the roads, which become as slippery as ice and cause many cars to skid into one another. Tempers grow as foul as the weather. Drivers blow horns at red lights and mix it up while angled toward each other along the streets. Lawyers, insurance companies, and drivers divide the money three ways.

When I needed to refresh my soul because of this madness, I would meet Angela Crockett, an actress friend, at the LA County Museum for a healthy salad and a couple or three pastries—we would split the third, as we were both on diets—and we would vent.

I always parked behind the museum so I could walk past the tar pits there. A fake dinosaur screamed silently as she appeared to sink into the black ooze. A panther still chewing on a mouthful of flesh from his last victim was about to be sucked under the same way. The scene always reminded me of a Disney cartoon gone wrong.

I was trying to break into voice-over work at the time. It paid well—into the six figures, I was told. The field, of course, was dominated by men who had been cutups and class clowns since third grade. I knew one of them, Jackson, who liked nothing better than to call up Severn Darden, an original 2
^nd
City Improv actor from the Days of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. You couldn’t get any better. So Jackson would call up Severn and talk to him in Severn’s voice. It would drive Severn crazy because he would have to talk to himself and not know who he was.

There were about three women who could do forty voices apiece, including mine, so the competition was fierce. But you never know what can happen unless you try. In California, you had to live from fluke to fluke. One lucky break, and you’d be in. I’d done everything else, so I figured this might be possible too, and I didn’t have to look young or dress up and wear makeup to the auditions, which was becoming an issue for me in my formidable forties.

I found Angela with the Dutch Masters. She was packed into a black fitted suit with a ruffled, cream-colored collar and cuffs and black T-strap shoes. A squashy black tam was settled loosely atop her faded curls. She seemed to belong more to the forties, wandering through the Metropolitan with Alice and the Mad Hatter hovering in the background, than to the eighties among the tar pits of La Brea.

We eavesdropped on a docent cultivating her voice as she discussed the paintings with a cluster of eight-year-olds. Some of the children were looking at ships about to be caught in a storm. Sailors struggled to reef the sails and save their lives and cargo. One child had started to cry, some were becoming restless, and the others had sat down on the floor in a politely rebellious manner. The docent, her agenda intact, proceeded, “Now what do you think Holland would put in all those boats to send throughout the world in such a storm?”

“Cocoa!” Angela sang out, startling the children and causing the crying child to scream. Angela had performed the classics in large theaters.

“Oh, that takes me back,” she turned to me. “We drank cocoa in the WAVES. Let’s go get some.” She had served as a lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the U.S. Navy during World War II, which she said had been the happiest time of her life.

Leaving the chaos she had caused behind us, we fled to the cafeteria, where coffee won out over cocoa because of the calories. We ripped into a couple of salads, which turned out, we agreed, to be pretty good for museum food, especially with the roasted peppers instead of loose California raisins.

“Those raisins make a salad look like a rabbit strolled through it,” I said.

“I have to call Thayer,” said Angela. “Check in, see if his agent called, if he needs a ride. You know he’s terrified of driving. Since they took away his license, I drive him everywhere—appointments, work, rehearsals, basketball, everywhere.”

I wondered if she was still annoyed with me for having sung “Windflowers” at their anniversary party. She had said, “Just bring something that doesn’t cost anything—a poem or a song or something you’ve baked.” But my half-baked rendition of “Windflowers” from The Golden Apple had seemed to cast a pall over the party. It’s a song about Penelope waiting for Ulysses to come home from the wars. She’s fearful of growing old during the passing years, yet it turns into a testament to her love for him, which will keep them both young forever. It’s a gorgeous song, but in Hollywood, the mention of growing old is simply in very poor taste, and once again I had felt out of the loop.

Angela, mouth full or empty, talked nonstop. She spoke all of her subtext all of the time. It was the kind of chatter that I strove not to hear in myself or others, the ever-repetitive tapes. Yet Angela could hear, free-associate, and incorporate what was said to her and steam on like a UN interpreter. I admired her facility even as it got on my nerves. Why can’t she just talk to me one-on-one? In the middle of my tomato, I started to cry.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. It has nothing to do with you,” I lied.

Angela immediately assimilated me into her stream of consciousness.

“I noticed the tears in your eyes. Could you pass the guava? I have a little bit of bread left.”

“I don’t want to make you feel bad,” I said.

“Darling, you’re the one who feels bad. What is it? Is there something I can do?”

She reached across the table to comfort me, brushing her sleeve through the salad on the way.

“No,” I said.

I handed her a napkin so she could wipe the dressing off her cuff and said, “I don’t know what it’s coming from. Mostly it happens when I look, really look, into someone’s eyes. They don’t look back anymore. They don’t see me. They look right through me. Do you know what I mean? I feel isolated. I feel invisible.”

The hot flashes and sweating that were now happening every time I ate were coming on. I jabbed at a carrot. It slid across the table onto the floor.

“I saw that,” said Angela in an attempt to lighten things up.

I plowed on. “It can be anyone,” I said. “Man, woman, child—well, no, not so much children—animals, especially dogs, not so much cats. There’s always this possibility of looking into someone’s soul and actually getting in there, inside of someone—and more, letting them climb inside of me…”

Angela’s response was, “I wonder if we should keep sitting here. Look at, uh…, there’s all those, uh, people… standing.”

“We’re having coffee. Let’s get another cup,” I said, my misery shifting into truculence.

“I’ll get it,” she said. “Oh, I wonder, do they give you another cup? Do they give you a second cup free? Where should I go? What? What should I, ah… ?”

She couldn’t decide whether to get up or sit down.

“You get it, Angela. I’ll hold the table. Here’s some money.”

“No, no, no. It’s free. It’s probably free. What do you think? It’s probably free. What?”

“Well, go see. Here’s fifty cents just in case.”

Angela was off.

I reached over and picked the linen napkin out of her salad. I felt less alone then than when she had been sitting with me. I sat back and thought about Jessie. I often ran into Jessie at casting calls. At the café across from Paramount, drinking wine in a dark booth after an audition, Jessie had told me that she had been horribly depressed herself, beyond anything I could imagine. That’s why she’d gotten a face-lift.

Then she started bragging about her husband, a surgeon who drilled sinuses and did extremely creative work. How was drilling sinuses creative? I wondered if she’d ever seen Kings Row, where Ronald Reagan wakes up from an operation and finds his legs missing and says, “Where’s the rest of me?” I should have told her about Dad’s friend who left the scissors behind when he took out an appendix, charged his patient for a second operation to remove the scissors, and then went off to Europe for a vacation.

Competition for recognition—I was sick of it. I didn’t care if I never did another commercial. In New York, in the last one I was up for—it was for Dove soap—the sponsor asked me if I could just give them an idea of how I might fly around the room. I said, “No,” and left. Apparently Georgia Engel was able to do it. Well, at least I don’t have a lisp.

“Here, I got it!” Angela was back, waving coffee cups.

I put my napkin in the saucer under my cup.

“Have you seen Jessie recently?” I said.

“Oh, that Jessie. She can really fertilize a problem,” said Angela.

“Yes. Do you know what she told me? She got angry at me for something or other and said, ‘You know, you can really dish it out, but you can’t take it!’ So I went over to her the next time I saw her to straighten it out. She was in her car, and she said, ‘I don’t want to be friends with you anymore. You don’t understand.’ In one hundred-and-one-degree heat, she rolled up her window and started changing her blouse.”

“Oh, she’s toxic,” said Angela. “What were you, at an audition?”

“Yeah.”

“I never change clothes between auditions.”

“How old do you think she is?” I said.

“Fifties. Fifty. She’s gotta be fifty if she’s a day. I would say fifty. I heard she went somewhere, I think Romania, for the summer for those youth treatments.”

“You can get that stuff here,” I said. “It doesn’t work. I took a bottle of it to the pharmacy at Cedars-Sinai to have it analyzed. The pharmacist told me to hold the bottle in my right hand next to my heart and to hold my other hand stretched out in front of me. Then he took hold of that wrist and pushed my arm down twice. It kept rising of its own accord, so he said not to take any. It wouldn’t agree with me.”

“Really? A holistic pharmacist?” said Angela. “At Cedars-Sinai?”

“Yes. They have an art gallery there too.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“In the halls on the celebrity floor, for the patients to look at while they’re recovering.”

Angela finished her coffee, then emptied the cream pitcher into her cup and drank it down.

“I’d like to go to that sleeping spa in Switzerland,” I said.

“What’s that? I never heard of it.”

“You sleep for a month while they feed you intravenously, inject lamb fetuses into your veins, and wake you up twenty years younger. Like Rip Van Winkle in reverse. Ann Miller does it every other year.”

“I love my Doctor Cary. He did my eyes and my neck, you know.” Angela made a fleeting swipe at her tam, which flopped around on her head as if it were alive before settling back on her overflowing curls.

“I know. You told me. How long were you black-and-blue?”

“Oh, a couple of minutes, that’s all. You know something interesting? This is why I love him so much, Cary. He told me that if you’re happy and content when you do it, you don’t get black-and-blue.”

“I’ve been very conflicted,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of research, and I have come to the conclusion that I want to look real. I want to look like who I am. ‘My face, I don’t mind it because I’m behind it. It’s the ones in the front get the jar. (a long ago quote from my father.) So the hell with it. No way, and that’s that. Finished. Over and out… . Why are you looking at me like that?”