Hello Darlin' (21 page)

I didn’t recognize him in the uniform. Who would? Maj didn’t place him at first either.
Who knows why Keith was in that uniform? He never offered an explanation. Keith had
bought a house in Malibu, and he wanted us to see it. He had a white stretch limo
waiting in the street.

On the way over to his new home, we passed a house whose garage was open and we saw
a kid playing the drums. Keith told the driver to stop. He jumped out, moved the kid
over, performed a ten-minute riff that blew our minds, especially the kid’s. Then
he handed the drumsticks back, said, “Thank you, mate,” and we took off. I could imagine
that kid trying to convince his friends that Keith Moon had dropped by and played
his drums.

Cut to my house a few months later. It was morning, and I got a call from Keith’s
girlfriend. Her voice had an alarmed tone. She said Mr. Moon—she always called him
Mr. Moon—was having a terrible fit and she wondered if I could hurry over. I pulled
on my Levi’s and a sweatshirt, then sped to his house.

Keith had moved from Malibu to a smaller rental house in the hills above the San Fernando
Valley. I walked in and saw it was a disaster. There were holes in the doors, the
mirrors in the living room were broken, and everything was covered with shit. Keith
was lying in the middle, facedown.

Slowly, he looked up at me.

“Hello, mate,” he said. “Good to see you, Larry. What brings you?”

I’d heard that he was having a little trouble. With a slight, somewhat comical nod
of his head, he acknowledged the mess—the overturned furniture, the broken glass,
everything. He propped himself up on an elbow, surveyed the damage, and explained
what’d happened. His dog, an enormous Great Dane puppy, had rooted into his stash
of black beauties and lapped up God knows how many. At least it had been enough for
him to have had a shit fit all over the house.

After a night of clubbing, Keith had walked in and caught the dog in the middle of
the rampage. As Keith explained it to me, he’d thought the dog was having too much
fun by himself and joined in, trashing whatever had been overlooked.

“What do you think, Keith?” I said. “Shall we go to Saint Johns Hospital? My sister-in-law
works there. They also have a great detox facility.”

“Yeah? Sounds like a great idea.”

I went back home and cleaned up and then came back and got him. He was very calm.
He’d done this before. On the way to the hospital, we took his dog, now more or less
comatose, to the veterinarian so he could detox too. Then we got to Saint John’s.
Before Keith was allowed into detox, he had to be checked out by an internist. The
doctor, a young man, was in awe of Keith the rock star, but he was more amazed when
Keith described his daily regimen.

“I always wake up around six o’clock and I have some eggs, bangers, and mash,” he
said. “And I have, um, a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a half a bottle of Courvoisier,
and then I take a couple of downers because I take my nap at ten until about six.”

“Uh-ah,” the doctor responded and nodded, wide-eyed.

“Then I get up and have another half a bottle of Courvoisier, finish off the Dom Pérignon
if there’s any left, drop some black beauties, and then we go out on the town. Usually
we go out to dinner, then we go to a couple of the clubs. I’ll drop a few more black
beauties and
drink some more Courvoisier and, uh, then get in around, say, two or three o’clock
in the morning, sleep till six, and start all over again.”

Keith described this as if it were a rather well-balanced day. By the time he finished,
the doctor had put down his notes and was just listening. He’d never heard anyone
describe a routine like Keith’s. Few people who had such daily habits live long enough
to describe them.

Next, the doctor checked Keith’s heart and blood pressure. Afterward he looked stunned.

“Everything seems to be fine,” he said.

Having passed the tests, Keith was allowed to enter the detox ward. He said good-bye
as if going on vacation. While I waited for some of his paperwork to go through, I
asked the doc to check me out too. As long as I was there, I said, “Why not give me
a little exam? Listen to my heart, look at my blood pressure.”

After he completed the checkup, the doc asked if I had a private physician.

“Yes. Why?”

“You better go see him. Your blood pressure’s out of sight.”

Both Keith and I pulled through. But on September 7, 1978, Keith’s lifestyle caught
up with him when he died of too much … hard living. I still had another seventeen
years before my bad habits nearly did me in too.

*   *   *

There was no shortage of characters with colorful stories to tell, and many of them
got told in our hot tub. I found that people always talk more freely and openly when
they strip off their clothes and relax in the water. Roger Vadim, the filmmaker who’d
married Jane Fonda and lived down the beach from us, was one of those people. One
day, as the two of us soaked prior to his and Jane’s divorce, he confided, “My greatest
mistake in our marriage was to teach Jane how to read a newspaper.”

Roger told numerous stories about his love affairs with Catherine
Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, and Jane, and his worldly travels, but the one story he
told that’s stuck over the years was how he lost his virginity. He was in his mid-teens
when his parents sent him to stay with relatives in the country to spare him from
the bombing they believed was headed toward Paris.

One night his cousin, a beautiful girl—as is always the case in stories told by the
French—invited him into her bedroom. As he climaxed, Roger heard explosions, a constant
stream of them. The walls shook, the ground quaked, and the nighttime sky seemed to
be on fire.

“It was my first orgasm, and I’ve had one like that since,” he said.

Of course, it was D-Day, the invasion of Normandy.

During this time, we arranged for Burgess Meredith to buy the house next door to ours
on the beach. He got a very good deal, and to celebrate his moving in, Maj built him
a Jacuzzi. Sometimes he was a great neighbor, sometimes he was a pain in the ass.
It depended on his mood. But we loved him anyhow—and there were some big any-hows.
A few years later, we remodeled our house in a Santa Fe style, but when we finished
Burgess claimed that we’d built two inches above the roof line and sued us for blocking
out
his
sun.

I remember telling my friend Bob Wynn that Burgess was suing me. He said, “Larry,
I have a prayer session every Thursday night. About twenty-five of us get together
and read the Bible. If you’re having trouble with Burgess, we’ll just pray that old
fucker dead.”

I saw no need to go to that extreme. But I spent a considerable amount of money fighting
the suit and eventually I won it. By then Burgess (who’d played the Penguin on the
hit TV series
Batman)
and I no longer spoke to each other. The next time he gave a big party, of course
I was not invited, but I thought it was a good opportunity to get his goat for all
the trouble the lawsuit caused.

I knew that Burgess hated playing the Penguin. Even though it was one of his most
famous roles, he was offended that someone with
such memorable radio, stage, and screen credits should be reduced to waddling around
in a tux and quacking like a penguin on what he considered a lowly TV show.

Knowing this, I had Michael Woolbrech make fifty silk flags with penguins on them,
and then on the day of the party I flew them up on the top of the offending roof.
I also made a loop tape of Burgess quacking like the Penguin and blasted it on my
stereo all day long. Maj made me take the flags down and turn off the stereo when
she looked over and saw that Burgess was on the verge of apoplexy. It was one of the
meanest—and funniest—pranks I ever played.

*   *   *

That summer Peter Sellers rented our house for six weeks. It was right after a big
storm. We’d lost part of our beach and were having it and our house repaired. I warned
Peter that we had to have some work done. Burgess was also replacing his seawall.
I emphasized it wasn’t going to be idyllic.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I love the house.”

“It’s twenty thousand a month.”

“Money’s no object.”

Good, because I was broke and needed the money. So Maj, the kids, our three cats,
two dogs, and turtle moved into a spare room in Peter Fonda’s office on Melrose and
Seward. The next day the pile driver set out right outside Peter Sellers’s bedroom
and started hammering. Peter thought it was going to last for a few days, but the
work spanned six weeks. He was livid.

“I’d like my money back,” he said.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I spent it. I paid off bills.”

Though his lawyers threatened to sue, he stayed the entire time. In the midst of that,
Peter Fonda celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday with a giant party at his office.
He had about a hundred people, including his dad and sister. I put on my magenta gorilla
suit and stood by the door, making sure that only invited guests came inside. I had
a
great time, and around 2
A.M.
I went to sleep on the lawn. In the morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover and
got on a rickety old bike I saw and started pedaling toward a nearby stand that made
the world’s greatest milk shakes.

It was one of those still mornings. There wasn’t a car on the road. But on the way,
I crashed my bike—the front tire slipped into a drainage grating. I injured my knee
and was lying dazed in the road. The next thing I knew, two cops were staring down
at me.

“Are you all right?” one of the cops asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good. I don’t know what I could book you for—impersonating a gorilla on a Sunday
morning—but just do whatever you have to do and get the hell off the street.”

*   *   *

My next offer was much better. Paul Mazursky asked me to be in
Harry and Tonto,
his memorable film starring Art Carney as an old man who, after losing his New York
City apartment, sets off on a cross-country journey, visiting his children and friends,
and living life as he’s never done before. Art was brilliant. I played his son, a
real loser who begged his dad to move in with him and share the rent. Every one of
my scenes was with Art and I had a delicious time working with him.

But for every film like
Harry and Tonto,
I did five on par with
The Big Rip-Off,
a TV movie that was forgettable—with three exceptions. One was Tony Curtis, the star,
who was so much fun. He was the best cribber I’ve ever worked with. You’d never know
he had tiny slips of paper with his lines written down pasted everywhere. He’s a master.
We did one scene in a car where I held a flashlight so he could see his lines.

The second exception was meeting Brenda Vaccaro, a fabulous babe.

And the third exception? My hair. Before shooting began, Maj had said, “Let’s try
perming your hair.” I’ll just say two words: big mistake.

In 1975,1 played Linda Blair’s father in the made-for-TV movie
Sarah T—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic,
but otherwise I barely worked the whole year. I started off the next year by making
The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective,
a TV movie about an L.A. cop whose motorcycle falls on him while he’s lying down
reading a Sherlock Holmes novel during his lunch break. He wakes up believing he’s
Sherlock Holmes. The movie was intended as a pilot for a weekly series, but it didn’t
go.

I’d put a lot of creativity and energy into that project, and it took a while before
the disappointment faded.

Fortunately, I stayed busy. I made
The Big Bus,
a parody of disaster films directed by James Frawley, another friend from New York
days. He put together an unusually strong cast, including Joseph Bologna, Stockard
Channing, Ned Beatty, Ruth Gordon, Lynn Redgrave, and about twenty-five other terrific
actors. Next, I took a part in
The Eagle Has Landed,
a World War II epic about Nazi soldiers who plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. It
shot in London during the hottest summer they’d had in fifty years, and I took the
family with me so they could have a vacation.

The movie featured another stellar group of actors: Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland,
Robert Duvall, and Anthony Quayle, the very beautiful and talented actress Jenny Agutter,
and Treat Williams, who was beginning his movie career. The film’s director, John
Sturges, had made classic movies like
Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven,
and
The Great Escape.

He was brusque. He barked orders like an old-fashioned movie director. A few times
I fell into his crosshairs. Like the scene when I had the muzzle of my carbine pointed
down. He wanted it up. But it was raining.

“I don t want water going down the barrel,” I said. “When it rains, you sling it down.”

I could almost hear him thinking: Youngsters today. But he said, “That makes sense.
If that’s what you want, go ahead.”

I shot my final scene with Jean Marsh, who’d been a friend of mine in London when
I did
South Pacific.
In the movie, she played a German spy and I barged into her cottage, prepared to
throw a hand grenade into her room. Suddenly she opened the door and shot me in the
forehead. Blood was supposed to splatter everywhere as I tumbled backward down the
stairs.

It was a great scene.

We did it without a hitch and shooting was over for me.

I took Maj and the kids to Ireland, where we stayed at a historic castle with Kevin
McClory, who had produced a James Bond picture. The castle looked like something out
of an Irish fairy tale. We played croquet on the expansive lawn and servants brought
out champagne. I felt very civilized. I also went to the horse races at the Curragh,
Ireland’s oldest and most beautiful racetrack. My friend Bob Sangster owned horses
that ran there every day. Through him, I got in tight with the trainers and made a
few bucks at the window. I also lost some too.