Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One (30 page)

“When you get your moment, play it to the camera,” he said. “Don’t turn your head. Don’t shrink back in those moments. Carry the ball when you get it.”

He pointed out the scenes were I wasn’t focused, and the ones in which I was really shining. “Look, you can see it in your eyes,” he said.

“That’s the detail that I needed to see,” I said.

When my attitude improved, my performance did, too, and he let me know.

“Man, you’re doing it,” he said. “You’re staying in shape. Every time I give you a line to say, you’re killing it. I’ve got to tell you, you’re really making me happy.”

Just like I’d created a net-negative vortex before, when I’d become consumed by my negativity and insecurity, now I created a net-positive vortex. It literally started in my heart, and grew until that was one of the best experiences of my life.

I decided to reframe the
Expendables
experience like I did my security job. I told myself to see the good in everything and everyone around me and not to give off any bad vibes. It worked. Almost instantly, I saw Sly in a new light, and I began to notice things I hadn’t before. I watched him shoot for twelve hours, running around like a wild man at sixty-three years old. I realized this film was his baby. He was taking out scenes that didn’t
work, as he knew the action fans didn’t want their heroes pontificating about social injustice. They wanted action, and we were going to give it to them.

Everything started to turn around. We found out that
The Family Crews
had been picked up. Rebecca and the kids came to visit the
Expendables
set in New Orleans. She ran into Sly while she was walking around by the trailers, and he let her in on a little secret, which she ran back to tell me as fast as she could.

“Terry, oh my God, you won’t believe this,” she said. “Sly just said, ‘Your husband has been so amazing, I’m rewriting the script so he saves my life.’ ”

I couldn’t even speak. I just stood there and stared at her, so happy.

“Terry, I can’t believe what’s happening,” she said.

This was one of the moments when Rebecca got excited, and I knew things were really starting to happen, because she’s always had an excellent ability to read people and situations (not that I always listened to her, of course; again, that’s why this book has a before and an after).

“Terry, this is the one,” she said. “When I heard him telling me how good you are, I knew.”

By the end of that shoot, Sly was sending dailies to my room and giving me lessons every day on how to make an action movie and how to be an action star. I felt like I was in a dream, because I couldn’t believe how good it was after it had first been so bad, one of the worst experiences of my acting career. That was such an important moment for me, because I learned that I truly have the power to reframe anything. Every experience I have in my life begins in my head, and it’s up to me to be positive, and learn, and grow, and make it all worthwhile.

I started to see how
Rocky
and
Rambo
got made. Sly was in
his sixties, and he nearly killed himself during that shoot, but he wouldn’t give up, even when he was limping around the set, and we were running out of time, and people had to leave.

“Sly, I’m with you one hundred percent,” I said. “I’m with you. If I have to stay over, I’ll do it. Man, I’m here for you.”

He appreciated that, and to this day, Sly is not only one of my mentors, but he’s also a true, true friend. He’s become my biggest champion, and he enjoys everything I’ve done since then. There’s nothing better than hearing him say: “It was really good, man. You’ve got that comic timing, brother. You go do it.”

I think everybody needs a dad, wherever they are in life, someone who can give you a thumbs-up, and in Hollywood, more so than anyone else, Sly Stallone has been that person for me. He’s really been a pop to me in the entertainment industry.

He even took my side when I wanted to pull what I saw as a great publicity stunt during the promo tour for
The Expendables
, even though the folks at Lionsgate weren’t so sure. We were down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and we’d just rung the opening bell. Now I had something even bigger planned, but the producers had said, “No.” And then Sly gave me the bump.

“Hey, man, it’s time,” he said.

I took off my shirt, and I screamed as loud as I could. The place was like a locker room to begin with, all guys, running around with ticker tape, and the whole place froze. And then everyone laughed and cheered, and the cameras all just went off. At that moment,
The Expendables
was the number-one movie in America, and when that picture hit the wire, it was huge. Well, after that, we were number one again for the next week, and that experience taught me so much about publicity. I had already done the Old Spice ads at that point, and they’d
been massive, but this moment was different. I’d learned that beyond playing a particular part, I could sell a project.

“You did good,” Sly said. “This is how you do it. You are a real star, man.”

To have Sylvester Stallone call me a star, it was beyond belief. Here I was, this kid from Flint, Michigan, and now I was in his inner circle. It was the tops.

Things were rolling. That summer, we finished shooting for
The Family Crews
, and Rebecca had a ball. She was charismatic. She was sweet. She was wonderful. And best of all, she’d started talking the year before about how she wanted to do something huge for our twentieth anniversary. She wanted to have a big party, but I just didn’t see where I was going to get that kind of money. I was getting more regular work, but I was still a working actor, and we had five kids. Well, BET decided to kick off the whole show with our twentieth anniversary, and so they paid for our twentieth-anniversary party. We had a huge shindig in Malibu. I used money from the show to get Rebecca a new ring, and it was almost like she had willed it to happen. I danced with her and thought back to our first dance on our first date, when I was just a nineteen-year-old kid with big dreams:
Isn’t this crazy?

EVERYTHING WAS GREAT, AND THEN I HAD TO GO TO CONNECTICUT
in October to start filming
Are We There Yet?
Things got bad, and they got bad really fast. Rebecca didn’t want to move. The kids didn’t want to move. This was my first star turn, but from the beginning it wasn’t turning out as well as I’d hoped. And so, being the controller I was, I tried to make everything better than it was possible to be. I went way beyond what was appropriate in terms of my sense of responsibility for
my costars, and the show itself, and this put even more pressure on Rebecca and me.

We were coming up on the premiere of
The Family Crews
, which meant doing press together as a happy family, and yet we were getting along worse than we had in years. And then Rebecca sensed that something deeper was wrong between us.

“Terry, you’ve done something, and now you’re going to put me out here on TV in front of everybody,” she said. “I want to know what it was before anything goes down. I don’t want any surprises.”

I denied it, of course, but I’d never told her what had happened in Vancouver ten years earlier, and I knew she was right: It wasn’t fair.
If you don’t tell her now, you’ll never tell her, and your marriage will never be able to survive this moment
.

More than ever, I was terrified of losing her. I denied and denied. But she could sense there was something I wasn’t telling her, and she kept bringing it up.

“I don’t want to be somewhere, and somebody comes up and tells me something about you, and I’m going, ‘What?’ ” she said.

And I knew that, with what I’d done, this was a distinct possibility.
Who’s to say that it wouldn’t happen? Oh my God, that could happen
, I thought.

I knew I had to be fair to Rebecca, but at the same time, it was easy for me to keep making excuses as to why my behavior and my secrecy were justifiable. First of all, I honestly felt like everybody looked at pornography and behaved the way I had. You couldn’t have convinced me that everybody didn’t have secrets. I’d seen it growing up in my church. I’d certainly seen it in the NFL. Even our former president, Bill Clinton, had been getting up to all kinds of stuff behind closed doors.

I was always comparing myself to people who were a lot worse than I was, in order to make myself feel better. I might
have messed up, once, but I didn’t have any chicks on the side. And other guys fed into this by telling me I was one of the good guys because I didn’t cheat. I’d even gotten a little bit of a strut about this.

MEANWHILE, THERE WERE WARNING SIGNS FROM THE
beginning about
Are We There Yet?
I hadn’t been given a producer credit. I’d been strong-armed into working with Ali LeRoi again, even though we’d had such issues on
Everybody Hates Chris
. I’d been told I had to go to Connecticut. Once there, we were shooting three episodes a week, which was almost like ending up on the line back in Flint after all, only we were making entertainment instead of cars. This whole time, everyone just kept telling me that once we got the first ten episodes done, we’d get our order for the full 100, and I’d be all set, and so I just had to hang on.

I thought back to
The Expendables
, and I told myself I needed to reframe my experience once again. But instead of just working on my attitude, I took it upon myself to be the pleaser I’d always been, and to be the savior of everyone else on the show. I took a pro-sports mentality, like: If I go out there, and go full speed, and get knocked out on the field, then I’ll just get knocked out. Well, usually in the end, you’re the guy in the hospital, and they keep on going without you. They love guys like me, who can’t say no, who don’t have any boundaries.

And so I just kept giving. That’s what eventually led to the worst day of my life: D-day. In February 2010, I was working on my new show, and I went to New York City for the weekend. I took my costar out to dinner, trying to act like the producer who was going to fix everything, when there was really no reason for me to do it. I felt like I was responsible for everyone’s happiness,
and so I didn’t realize I was creating more problems than I solved.

Rebecca was still on me about the secret she suspected. “Terry, there’s something you’re not telling me,” she said. “I don’t know what it is about you.”

“Nah, it’s cool.”

This went on, over the phone, all night. Meanwhile, a huge snowstorm was bearing down on the city, and even though I was staying at one of the most beautiful hotels, the Mercer, my room was like a prison. It was dark, heavy with snow. All of a sudden, something told me:
Man, this is your opportunity. If you don’t tell her now, you’re going to be divorced. You’re not truthful. You’re probably going to lose her if you do tell her, but at least this is a chance for you to actually be clean
.

I really didn’t want to tell her. The whole reason I hadn’t said anything to her for all of those years was because I knew I was going to lose her if I did. But it kept coming to me:
You’ve got to tell her. She’s got to know who you really are. Everything
.

By morning, the snow had covered up the windows. I felt awful, oppressed, stuck in this dark, dark place. Rebecca called me again.

“Terry, you need to tell me, because you’re not telling the truth.”

This went on and on. I denied and denied. And then, it just flew out.

“One time, ten years ago in Vancouver, I got a hand job at a massage parlor.”

She made a sound that was like a whimper. It was just so much pain. I honestly felt like I’d shot her in the chest. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt: It hurt her AND it hurt me. We sat there on the phone, and she just cried and cried.

“How could you do that? How could you even?”

“It was ten years ago.”

“That makes it worse. So you’ve been faking for this long, for ten years?”

I didn’t have anything to say in my defense. It really was D-day.

“You can’t live here,” she said. “You’d better find a place to live. I’m done.”

“I know. I know.”

I didn’t know what to do. It was so dark.

“You put me on television, and you did this, and you never told me.”

I understood everything now. I was like:
Oh my God, you’re right
. Finally, after another hour on the phone, there was really nothing more to be said, and we hung up. I was lost. I called my current pastor and told him everything.

“Man, what do I do? I’m going to lose her. I wasn’t truthful.”

“Look, do the normal routine, at the very least,” he said. “If you were going to go work out, go work out. If you were going to work, go to work. You don’t want to just sit in this. You want to do your normal routine so you don’t disintegrate.”

So I went, I worked out, I came back. I just tried to hang on. I knew without a doubt I had just lost everything. I was officially done. I was never honest with my wife, or myself. I was broken. For days, I didn’t hear a single word from Rebecca.

I BEGGED AND BEGGED REBECCA FOR HER FORGIVENESS
, but she let me sit with what I’d done for several days. Finally, just as I was headed back up to Stamford to start shooting the show again, she called. My heart was pounding.