Crane (35 page)

Kari became a student of New Age remedial alternatives, homeopathic medicines, cures, potions, lotions, and juices. She went to a Native American sweat lodge in Lancaster one weekend. That was followed by a visit to a curative diet clinic and health spa in San Diego. Kari had embarked on a body makeover, using diet, mega vitamin doses, and macrobiotics. I spent a lot of time praying—to Jesus and Allah and Yahweh and Buddha and Krishna, shooting stars, lucky pennies—to anything and everything that may have the power to control the universe, or at least some diabolical cells in Kari’s body. I was just throwing up a Hail Mary pass and hoping something caught that sucker in the end zone.

I am a skeptic by nature, but I am especially leery when it comes to nontraditional, non-Western medicine. I don’t know much about it, and I don’t trust any so-called experts. They’re all snake oil salesmen to me, and even Kari’s friend Linda, who was all for chanting and incense, thought the San Diego adventure would be a waste of time and money. But Kari wanted to do it, and if Kari wanted it, I was going to get it for her. If any of it could help, then great, as long as it couldn’t do any harm.

She went through the program and her always-conscientious diet was now even more refined with the addition of rounds of vitamin shots, oral vitamins, rectal vitamins, pills, juices, seaweed concoctions, you name it. None of these curatives kept her left lung from refilling with fluid, and her gurgling snorkel returned. So it was back to the world of real medicine to have the lung drained again, which stemmed her bubbling wheeze. I could only imagine how awful that lack of oxygen felt. All I could compare it to was my own experience as an inept snorkeler whose misadventures ended in coughing, choking fits as I tried to get a good part of the ocean out of my lungs. Still, not much of a comparison.

While Kari’s medical issues continued, I was juggling my full-time jobs as husband, support, and driver for Kari with in-house publicist and
handler for John Candy. For the first time in our lives together we were unencumbered financially, but now we were overwhelmed emotionally.

John was set to do a new ensemble comedy called
Once upon a Crime
for the financially crippled MGM. It was going to be shot at the world-famous Cinecitta Studio in Rome. Over the decades, its soundstages had been graced by the likes of Fellini, Bertolucci, and Visconti, just to name a few. William Wyler had shot
Ben-Hur
there, and Joe Mankiewicz had settled in on the lot for years making
Cleopatra.
Presently, it was the studio of choice for veteran producer Dino DeLaurentiis and his rookie director Eugene Levy, Candy’s fellow
SCTV
alum.

My job was to accompany John to Rome. We boarded the Alitalia 747 out of LAX and had the entire first-class section in the upper deck to ourselves. I was laughing at John’s stories and sipping champagne, but I was thinking about my wife being ferried to chemo by her mother, Loretta.

When we landed at Roma-Fiumicino airport, we cleared customs, walked past Italian soldiers toting machine guns to a waiting curbside limousine, and navigated the wild Roman traffic to the Hotel Hassler, located above the Spanish Steps. As we settled in, I thought, my god, I’m in Rome. It could be like
Roman Holiday.
I was excited—thrilled, really—to be in this beautiful place. The only problem was that my princess, unlike Gregory Peck’s, was in Los Angeles, probably heaving her guts out at that very moment. I felt unrelentingly guilty for even being there.

My days were spent solving minor problems for John, walking the grounds of Cinecitta, watching John, Ornella Muti, Jim Belushi, and Cybill Shepherd film an absolutely witless Charles Shyer/Nancy Meyers script. I ate pasta and drank wine for lunch, and fell asleep at 3:00 in the afternoon. I talked to Kari every night when it was morning in Los Angeles. I felt like I was a million miles away from her. It felt so wrong to be in Italy having an almost good time while she was in California going through hell.

At the end of our second week away, I was sitting with John on his patio overlooking Rome. The burnt-orange glow of the city was breathtaking. I explained my guilty feelings to John. I was in a total quandary: working for him, making my money, but at the same time wanting desperately to be by my wife’s side. His powers of observation had already informed him that Crane hadn’t been behaving like Crane over the past two weeks. John stopped me as I fumbled for the right words to explain
my dilemma. “You’re out of here,” he said. “You can’t be in two places at once and being with Kari is more important right now.” He knew the making of a silly movie was way down the priority list. Human beings were always the first of Candy’s Commandments. “Get on the next flight. You’re covered here,” John said, wrapping me in a bear hug.

The next morning, feeling guilty about leaving my responsibilities (I couldn’t win) and already missing Rome, I caught a ride with a production driver to the airport. I had missed one of Kari’s chemo treatments, and I didn’t want to be absent for another. I needed to be with her, driving her, taking care of her.

Back in Los Angeles, I spent time with Kari and took care of Candy business at the office. After weeks of blood work, checkups, and chemo, Kari announced that she was at a point where the worst was behind her. She had the routine down. Her mother and sister would alternate shifts helping her. She knew I was torn, wanting to be with her and wanting to be with John in Rome. “I’ll be okay,” she said, her tired eyes watching me as she made her pitch. “You only have two more weeks on the movie. Go and enjoy Rome. I’m feeling better. In fact, I’m going to work on our script while you’re gone.”

I was happy to hear that Kari was going to write again. She had taken short story–writing classes at our local city college, and she had a knack for crisp, economical dialogue. Over a decade earlier, Chris Fryer and I had written the first draft of a film script entitled “Easy Money,” about a poor slob who takes himself hostage to get out of his unhappy marriage. I wrote another few drafts over the years. Then Kari became interested and we worked on it, together and separately, and the script became “Suburbia Blues,” a Sidney Lumetesque drama with humor, a
Dog Day Afternoon
–flavored piece. The fact that she felt well enough to write, or at least said she did, convinced me I could return to Italy to help John as he wrapped up his work on the film.

The highlight of those two weeks had nothing really to do with the film, just an evening at dinner with John and a group of people from the cast, including Lina Wertmuller’s favorite, Giancarlo Giannini. I was living my version of
La Dolce Vita.

Out of the blue, while John was filming
Once upon a Crime,
aka “Troublemakers,” aka “Criminals” in Italy, his legend-worthy longtime agent, John Gaines of Agency for the Performing Arts, fielded a call from Ixtlan Productions’ A. Kitman Ho asking about Candy’s availability in
June for an Oliver Stone project called
JFK
being shot in New Orleans. An inquiry for a project like this was so far removed from the usual kind of John Hughes, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, or Jim Belushi vehicle that landed on John’s desk that he said yes without even seeing a script. It was a serious, important film involving an Academy Award–winning writer/director who wanted to do a bit of stunt casting by using funnyman Candy in a straight role opposite Kevin Costner and Gary Oldman. John was shaken by the opportunity. He liked Stone’s work, particularly
Platoon.
The idea of sharing a credit crawl with a star-studded cast that also included Sissy Spacek, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Joe Pesci, and Tommy Lee Jones validated all John’s acting aspirations.

I had been to New Orleans several times, the first time accompanying my dad and Patti in the mid-’70s, then with John during Mardi Gras 1984, and with Dave Thomas during Mardi Gras 1986. John and I checked into the Windsor Court Hotel off Canal Street a few blocks from the Mississippi River.

We stayed focused on John’s big scene with Costner, where John’s character, the New Orleans bottom feeder Dean Andrews, who knows all the wrong people, has lunch with Costner’s character, local attorney Jim Garrison, who is in charge of the definitive report on the assassination of John Kennedy. The scene was eight solid pages of dialogue. There was no partying for John on this trip. He was in his dedicated actor mode. Over the course of three days, we ran the dialogue a hundred times, John as Andrews, me as Garrison. During the first day of our rehearsals in a secure conference room at the five-star hotel, a cold sore resembling Mount St. Helens broke out near John’s mouth. I felt really bad for him as I tried to keep the cheerleader aspect of my job alive. Although John would appear onscreen only for a few minutes, this was an important job for him. It was arguably the most prestigious production of which he had ever been a part. He was working beside Oscar-winning filmmakers Costner and Stone, not Bobcat Goldthwait. These were A-listers, and John wanted to prove to all of them, Costner, Stone, Warner Brothers, and the moviegoing public, that he was a much better actor than most of the material he had appeared in. In the meantime, the cold sore had doubled in size, and I bought bags of creams and ointments in an attempt to mitigate the burgeoning volcano on John’s lip. And poor me, I was jonesing for a beignet from Café du Monde.

As a warm-up to John’s big scene with Costner, one afternoon John was called out to a courthouse in town where his character, Dean Andrews,
was on the witness stand being questioned by Costner as Garrison. This was just a brief scene—half a script page—but a nice way for John and Costner to meet.

The schedule was fluid because the temperamental New Orleans weather continually caused shooting changes. The exterior scenes would have to be scrubbed because of rain, and as a result of one such cloudburst, John’s interior shoot came up at the last minute.

John went into makeup, and the crack team went into high gear camouflaging the Etna on his lip. We picked up a vibe that the set was tense at the moment because of a verbal skirmish between Stone and Tommy Lee Jones. It was whispered that director Stone had to remind Mr. Jones how many Oscars he had on his mantelpiece. So into that atmosphere walked Mr. Candy, who possessed no Oscars, but did have something almost as big ready to explode on his face.

Stone shot the scene in a few short takes. He knew he had a great script (by Zachary Sklar and himself), a fine cinematographer in Robert Richardson, and the ace editing team of Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia. John’s scene was finished in no time, and he was placed on call for the next day for his eight-page restaurant scene, subject to the weather report, of course.

I watched John immediately relax, having gotten his toes wet, cracking the seal on his participation in this big studio Christmas release. Even his facial eruption started to retreat. We retired to the hotel, John and I having cocktails for the first time in a few days. We read through the restaurant scene dialogue a dozen more times.

The next morning, with New Orleans anticipating a considerable amount of rain, the production moved indoors for John’s star turn. The scene between Dean Andrews and Jim Garrison took place during lunch at a French Quarter restaurant, the actors facing each other, spewing their pages and pages of dialogue as they devoured a platter of crab. John lit a cigarette and pretended to imbibe. Stone and his actors rehearsed the scene a few times and were ready to try a take. I positioned myself directly behind Stone who, like most contemporary directors, faced a video monitor and wore a headset. I was excited for John, rooting for him to do well, and interested to watch and hear Costner, a real actor, perform the part of Jim Garrison, though I have to say the real Garrison would have been pleased by all the nuances I had brought to the role back in the hotel conference room over the previous several days.

During the many takes John and Costner kept pushing the scene, making each other better with each ensuing take. The rapid-fire dialogue was covered in a variety of camera angles—stationary and handheld, close-up and extreme close-up, though not too close on John’s lip. As the crew readied for yet another take, I was so focused I stepped closer to the video monitor, my head positioned just above and behind Stone’s left shoulder. Suddenly, Stone spun around, looking past me, and exclaimed to all set workers and watchers, “I hate when people look over my shoulder!”

I, of course, spun around as well, looking behind me, trying to locate the asshole who was interrupting the maestro’s train of thought. L’asshole, c’est moi.

I snuck a look at the always-aware-of-his-surroundings Candy, who was convulsing with laughter at my miscue. Even filming the heaviest scene of his career, John could appreciate me gettin’ blowed up real good in front of a hundred dedicated artistes. Having a clown on set is always a good tension destroyer. I always enjoyed making John laugh because, of course, most of the time he was in charge of the laughter department. I backed slowly away from Stone and never again even looked him in the eye.

Later, between camera setups, I felt someone sidle up to me. I glanced over. It was Kevin Costner. He was sucking on the pipe his character carries through most of the film. “So, what do you think?” he asked, sotto voce.

I studied his face. “About what?”

There was a prolonged silence. I waited.

“The scene,” Costner clarified.

“Oh, the scene. Yeah, the scene.”

Costner waited.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, looking around to see whether Stone was nearby. “It’s terrific. You guys are doing a great job.”

Costner nodded as he was called back to the set. That was the first and last time I ever spoke with him. Later, I told John about my encounter and facetiously described how Costner, by consulting me, obviously felt my opinion ranked with the likes of Pauline Kael and Siskel and Ebert. John and I shared a good laugh.

A few weeks later, John was called back to New Orleans to film a short interior scene with Tommy Lee Jones and one of John’s favorite actors, Gary Oldman, who was playing Lee Harvey Oswald. Over the years, John
had watched his laser disc copy of the cult classic
Sid and Nancy,
with Oldman playing punk rocker Sid Vicious, at least a dozen times. He’d marveled at Oldman’s performance, and now he found himself working with him, albeit in only another half-page scene.