Could It Be Forever? My Story (8 page)

I caught up with some of my old friends, like Kevin Hunter, who wasn’t having any luck at all finding acting work, and Sam Hyman, who had found steady, if far from high-paying, employment as an apprentice film editor. I wasn’t sure how serious Kevin was about making it as an actor. I thought that creatively he would have been better suited to being a writer.

One night Kevin and I got on his lightweight, girls’ model Honda 50 motorcycle and drove up to the Los Angeles V.A. hospital. We scaled an 11-foot fence and stole a big metal
tank of nitrous oxide – laughing gas. We rode back to his place with me carrying the tank. We got high on that for a week, then one night we went back to the hospital, returned the empty tank from the room we’d taken it from and liberated another tank for us to party with. Had we been caught, I later learned, we could have been sent to a federal penitentiary. But we never thought about the consequences of our actions. We didn’t actually steal them. We just borrowed them for a week. We did return them, albeit empty.

I started seeing Don Johnson again from time to time once I was back in Los Angeles (Sal Mineo was in London for a spell, directing a play). Don and I would often wind up seeking the same parts. Sometimes we’d both get shot down. But a couple of times, it came down to a choice between Don and me, and I was chosen. He was always really nice to me about it, but I have to believe he must have resented me at least a little. I certainly would have felt that way, but he was always decent about it. Don and I saw each other for the next few years around Hollywood; he was having a hard time getting work back then.

I saw Elliot Mintz a little, too. For a while we even wound up living right across the street from each other in Laurel Canyon. He was more interested in the struggle for political change than I was. I’d sort of become disillusioned with politics when Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968. I couldn’t believe people couldn’t see through Nixon’s act. (I felt the same way when Reagan was elected in 1981.) I was more concerned with building a career and a life for myself.

When things start to happen in television, they can happen very quickly. The casting directors hear about you and the next thing you know you are working a lot. That began happening to me. In 1970, I appeared on episodes of a half dozen network series. You could’ve seen me acting on
The FBI
(the episode called ‘The Fatal Imposter’ which aired on 4 January 1970 on ABC);
Marcus Welby, MD
(‘Fun and Games and Michael Ambrose’, 13 January 1970, ABC);
Adam 12
(‘A Rare Occasion’, 14 February 1970, NBC);
Bonanza
(‘The Law and Billy Burgees’, 15 February 1970, NBC);
Medical Center
(‘His Brother’s Keeper’, 1 April 1970, CBS) and
Mod Squad
(‘The Loser’, 7 April 1970, ABC).

I was gaining experience quickly. My acting was lame on my first couple of shows, but I was really pleased with the job I did on
Marcus Welby.
I played a diabetic youth who, as a way to punish his father, wouldn’t take his insulin. I had to do some highly emotional stuff. Ruth said it was a great piece of work and she would help me get more. That sounded good to me. So long as I could make enough money to live simply, I’d be happy.

Sam Hyman and I used to enjoy driving up to Laurel Canyon, so we decided to buy a house there. Because of his apprentice film-editing job and my assorted TV acting jobs, we had enough money to make a down payment. My income was not steady, but we knew we could carry the house for at least the next three months. We just crossed our fingers that I’d keep getting enough guest shots on television to cover our bills beyond that point. Because I was making more money than Sam, I offered to pay about two-thirds of
the mortgage. Our monthly payments were $315; I paid around $200 and he paid the rest. Sam and I were good friends. We’re still friends. When I became famous, he went all around the world with me; he went through the whole experience with me. Although we rarely see each other now, he’s still one of the only people I really can talk to and trust.

Back in that first home in Laurel Canyon, we lived like hippies. No furniture to speak of. I found an old mattress someone had discarded behind a supermarket and carted it home. We had no money in our pockets, but we were in great spirits nonetheless. We were the most successful guys from our high-school years, the only ones who had made it and were living independently.

We considered Laurel Canyon the hippiest place in town. Bohemian Rhapsody. It was just very cool there, still very much in the spirit of the 60s. Hippies next door, acid rock everywhere you went. I used to think,
This is the life. Freedom in Laurel Canyon.

In mid 1970, with only eight network TV appearances
to my credit, I was hardly someone the average American would have known. I was just one of a thousand faces on the tube. But I could take pride – and figured my dad could also take pride – in the fact that I was becoming, like him, a reliable working actor. My career seemed to be on the upswing. And, at least as important, I was totally satisfied with my life outside of work. What more could I possibly ask for?

If anyone had told me that by year’s end I’d be a household name, a best-selling recording artist, the number one ‘teen idol’
with my picture on the back of Rice Krispies boxes, I would have asked him if the acid had kicked in yet.

‘L
isten, David, don’t start.’

I can hear Ruth Aarons’ voice now, silencing me when I tried to say I wasn’t too interested in auditioning for a situation comedy that was being developed over at Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. It was something about a widow and her five kids who had a rock band. It sounded contrived.

She said, ‘By next year you’ll be asking me if I think two swimming pools in the backyard is a little much.’

Everyone Ruth represented became very successful – they won Oscar and Tony awards, they made lots of money. Many other aspiring young actors in Hollywood would have died to have someone as savvy as Ruth Aarons take
an interest in them. And I certainly respected her judgment. Yet I could not quite understand why she seemed to be pushing me toward this fluffy-sounding sitcom. My instincts told me I should be doing more sophisticated work. My television appearances to date had all been on dramatic shows. No comedy. No music. I was building up a reputation with casting directors as a serious young actor. Ruth wanted me to try out for this show and I was deadly opposed to it. She saw this as an opportunity for me to become a superstar and felt I was uniquely right for this role because I could sing and I could play. She went so far as to get my father to sit me down and tell me to do it. She never mentioned to me who else might be trying out for a role in it.

I read for the part a couple of times. I went into Screen Gems and met Renée Valente, who headed casting, Paul Witt, one of the show’s producers, who was just beginning his career but would go on to produce the Emmy-winning TV series
Golden Girls
and the Robin Williams film
Dead Poets’ Society
, and Bernard Slade, the writer of the pilot, who’d created a lot of the studio’s half-hour TV shows like
The Flying Nun
and
Love on a Rooftop
. He would later write the hit Broadway plays,
Same Time, Next Year
and
Tribute.

They felt this could become a popular, family-oriented show. They said it was about a rock group. Screen Gems, they noted, had had considerable success in this field with The Monkees. When they mentioned rock, I started telling them about Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, as if that really mattered to them. The scenes they had me read seemed awfully thin. I had lines like ‘Gee, Mom . . .’ and ‘Can I borrow the keys to the bus?’

I said, ‘This doesn’t really seem like any kind of part for me.’

Their position was, ‘Well, you’re not a star, what do you want?’

I said, ‘I want to be an actor, eventually in the movies. I want to be deep and real and serious. I’ve already done some weighty roles on TV. On
Bonanza
I played a killer.’

I told Ruth I wasn’t interested in the show. I knew from my father that turning down the wrong roles is very important for an actor’s career. My father had turned down plenty of roles he didn’t feel were quite right, and rarely regretted his decisions. In fact, he’d just turned down a role that was actually written with him in mind – a vain, shallow, buffoon-like newsman on a proposed sitcom starring Mary Tyler Moore. Ruth said that, as a newcomer in Hollywood, I was not in a position to turn down any potential opportunities for work. And there was that dark cloud hanging over my head called the rent.

She convinced me to do a screen test the following Monday morning. And who was the first person I saw?
Shirley Jones. Genuinely puzzled, I looked at her and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m playing your mother!’ she told me. And I nearly fell over.

She explained that she’d been talking to them about the lead in the proposed sitcom for weeks and the night before she’d been told that the producers had in fact chosen her for it. Ruth, who was, of course, Shirley’s manager as well as mine, had told Shirley that I was auditioning for the role of Shirley’s son, but hadn’t told me anything at all about Shirley’s involvement. I was happy to find Shirley there; I really liked her and had always respected her acting ability.

That same morning I also met Susan Dey, who would be playing my sister Laurie on the show. She was 15, a teenage model who’d appeared in
Seventeen
magazine. Her skin was almost translucent. Very beautiful. Very skinny. Very naïve. And she seemed somehow very alive. She’d never been to California before. She lived in a little town in upstate New York, Mount Kisco. I remember the first time we did a scene, when they said they were going to do a close-up, she came over to me and said, ‘What’s a close-up?’ I would remind her about that many times, which irked her no end.

Because we were so close in age (she was almost 16 and I was 19), we instantly got along. But because of her sweetness and her naïvety and her age, I just couldn’t take advantage of her. She also had her agent as a constant chaperone. We went on a couple of dinner dates, but it
was always the three of us, her agent watching me like a hawk.