American on Purpose (21 page)

W
ith Philip McGrade, a good friend since we first met in London when I was newly sober, I wrote a spec screenplay called
The Family Business
, about a has-been rock star who finds out he has a daughter he never knew existed. It was quite a dark story but ultimately uplifting, so when I shopped it around the studios, I got a bit of interest. Eventually we made a deal with Morgan Creek Films, which was prepared to let me direct the movie as well as play the lead. I thought that as director instead of producer I would have more control over the outcome of the film, but in this I was hugely mistaken, especially with Morgan Creek involved.

It’s an indie studio owned and run by James “Jim” G. Robinson, a Baltimore businessman who at the time had a distribution deal with Warner Brothers. You will no doubt remember that Warner fucked my last movie, but that’s showbiz; you can’t bear a grudge too long or you’ll never get anything else made. Jim is a forceful, bullish man who likes things done his way, and so am I, so it was a difficult relationship. Jim is a businessman, a good one, but he is no filmmaker, and he has about as much taste as a carny with a head
cold. Though if you want your film made by Morgan Creek, you’d better not tell him that.

The Family Business
was shot in and around London in 2002, and I made all the classic mistakes early on. Like allowing the studio to insist I use an actor I really didn’t want in the role of the rock star’s daughter. In the script she is also a singer, and the studio wanted the Welsh teenage soprano Charlotte Church, already a big star in Britain, for the part, on the assumption that she’d be a box-office draw over there. My problem was that:

(A) Charlotte was a tabloid magnet with a pushy alcoholic showbiz mother and no credibility as an actor, having never done anything but sing.

Plus:

(B) I never have
any
success in Britain. For the movie to have a chance, it had to be aimed at a U.S. audience. Shot in Britain but made for America, like
Saving Grace.

I was overruled, yet the casting of Charlotte, who actually isn’t that bad in the movie, might not have been catastrophic if the yes-men at Morgan Creek who called themselves “development executives” hadn’t shit all over my script. Changing music choices, changing lines, changing the title of the movie from
The Family Business
to the loathsome and insipid
I’ll Be There
. Generally just sweetening the whole thing beyond recognition until it became an expensive Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

Much as I would like to blame those guys, it was really my fault. I should have been stronger from the start, should have said “Fuck it, no way!” and pulled the project. I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love. The shoot was arduous enough, but to cap it all I was in a motorcycle crash halfway through
production, which meant I had to act and direct with a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs. Plus, it was summer in the U.K., triggering my hay fever, and every time I sneezed, a white-hot bolt of pain shot through my battered skeletal structure.

Sascha and Milo came to London for a visit, but I was such rotten company, my wife took our son off to Paris with her friends.

Somehow I finished the movie, which opened in May 2003 to resounding failure in the U.K. Predictably, Warner declined to release it in the U.S., so it went straight to video. I had spent a year of my life on a project that had damaged my marriage beyond repair, ruined me as a filmmaker, and had been no fucking fun at all. I didn’t even make much money after all the taxes and commissions and travel.

Also in May of 2003 I went to the Cannes Film Festival, hoping to raise money for another project and salvage the doomed
I’ll Be There,
but I came away deeply discouraged and empty-handed.

It was time to clean house. I felt that no one had protected me from the disaster, that the agents had been lazy, and that Rick, my friend and manager for eight years, had been outmaneuvered. I fired them all, and I wished I could have fired myself, too. On the way back from Cannes I stopped in Paris. As I walked around the city, trying to figure out my next move, it seemed to me that I had hit some kind of a wall. I determined that if I ever had another story to tell I would do it in the form of a book, not a film, so that I wouldn’t have to collaborate with a bunch of people I wouldn’t trust with a fork.

As it turned out, I did have an idea for a story. It was about a Scotsman who experiences a lot of setbacks but ultimately triumphs, albeit in a very obscure way.

It would take the form of a novel, and although I didn’t yet know how it ended, I would start writing, as an act of faith.

I returned to my hotel and on a leaf of embossed Georges Cinq notepaper I wrote:

“Fraser had a problem. His problem was that he wanted people who didn’t know him to like him.”

And with that sentence I began to build a bridge to a new freedom. I had found a medium that required no collaboration or approval. No equipment, other than the computer I already owned. It had no union rules and no producers. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted.

After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

B
y March of 2004, Sascha and I concluded that we could no longer live under the same roof without fighting, and we wanted to protect Milo, so I moved into a rented apartment near our house. The split was utterly heartbreaking, although I credit us both for keeping the worst of it, the pain and resentment and bitterness, away from our son. Sascha is Milo’s mother and she is and always will be family to me. We loved each other and we had a child together and though the love changed its shape, it did not go away.

Divorce lawyers stoke anger and fear in their clients, knowing that as long as the conflicts remain unresolved the revenue stream will keep flowing. I like to believe that there is an extra warm corner of hell for these fuckers who traffic in emotional misery. We fell prey to them for a while, but thankfully not too long.

We avoided going to court, we did the whole thing through mediation. Eventually I moved back into the house in the Hollywood Hills and Sascha got the one that was two doors down. The proximity has been a challenge for us at times, but the advantages for
Milo outweigh the disadvantages for us. Our family has “suffer[ed] a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

For a year after Sascha and I split up, I lived in a cheesy rented apartment that Milo dubbed “Daddy’s Funny Home.” Funny, as in the lamest bachelor pad ever; as soon as I moved in I had the place completely baby-proofed, and Milo and I agreed that girls weren’t allowed. (After a decent interval, I broke that rule from time to time when he was staying over at Sascha’s.)

Through the trauma and heartbreak and surges of rage produced by the divorce process, I kept plugging away at the novel I had begun in Paris. Whenever I was feeling trapped or like I couldn’t cope, I would escape into the world of the book, where my characters were taking on a life of their own. In that world there was justice for the just and punishment for the wicked and for me it was all extremely therapeutic.

After the Morgan Creek fiasco I spent time with my friend Philip as we nursed our bruised egos slowly back to health. One day we went out for a walk and the subject of suicide came up. I think I may have been talking about my transcendental sherry experience, or the pain of divorce, or both, and Philip told me about once asking a Jesuit priest if he believed that if someone kills himself he will go to hell. The priest thought for a moment and then answered no, not all suicides went to hell. For example, if a fellow were to jump from a high bridge and
genuinely repent
his actions before he hit the river and died, he would yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

As soon as Philip told me this I knew I had the title for my book. I’d call it
Between the Bridge and the River
—unexpected redemption brought about by authentic atonement for a regrettable life. Around this time I started seeing a beautiful dark-haired girl, Andi
O’Reilly, and she and I became very close for a while. Andi was fascinated by the novel; she kept pushing me to keep writing because she wanted to find out what happened to the characters, and if not for her enthusiasm and energy maybe I wouldn’t have finished it. But I did. By then I’d become a client of the giant ICM corporation, which had offices in New York and Los Angeles, so that’s where I took my manuscript, to their literary department in N.Y.C., hoping that the agency would help me find a publisher. Unfortunately the woman I met with was a snooty
Sex and the City
type who told me, “We get a lot of ’L.A. celebrities’ here,” pronouncing “celebrity” like it meant “leper” (although given the state of my career at that point, “leper” was a more accurate description). “They come here trying to sell their little books and I just tell them—go home.”

When I asked if she read the book she said yes, but I could see in her eyes that she was lying. Still, I was crushed and walked out of her expensively furnished office and wandered in Central Park, trying to collect my thoughts. I had poured my heart and soul into that book and I couldn’t even get it read
by my own agency
!

I felt sick and sad, so I sat down on a park bench. For some reason I happened to turn and look behind me, and there was Mr. Big Shot himself, albeit in bronze. My countryman, Sir Walter Scott.

He stared down at me patronizingly, even though his head was covered in pigeon shit.

I read the inscription at the base of the statue:

Erected by the New York friends of the great Scottish novelist.

I don’t know why but this chance encounter made me feel better and I decided to keep trying with the book. Sooner or later, someone other than Andi would read it, and, who knows, maybe even like it.

I did eventually find a publisher for
Between the Bridge and the River
. It received terrific reviews and sold a lot more copies than I thought it ever would. I even had the satisfaction of the ICM liter
ary division apologizing to me for the way I was treated. I still left, of course, and I am ashamed to admit that I enjoyed listening to their apology a lot more than would be considered seemly.

Back in Los Angeles, I was offered a part in a dark independent film being shot in Winnipeg. Although I was less inclined to leave town now that I was a father, I still had to earn money because, as anyone who’s gone through it will tell you, divorce ain’t cheap.

The character I played in the movie, eerily enough, was a man who tried to commit suicide by jumping into Niagara Falls but inexplicably survived. I seemed to be surrounded by thwarted suicide attempts, which I suppose is infinitely preferable to being surrounded by successful ones.

A few weeks into the shoot I got a call from my new agent.

“Do you know Craig Kilborn?” she asked.

I said I didn’t know him, though we’d met. He was the host of
The Late Late Show
and I’d been on it a few times to promote movies. I didn’t care for him much. He seemed arrogant and distant and I preferred the company of his competitor, Conan O’Brien.

“He’s quit his job,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

Then she told me that to find a replacement for him the network (CBS) and the production company (David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants) were inviting a whole bunch of people to guest-host the show. Would I be interested?

I said I would love to guest-host but couldn’t see myself doing it on a permanent basis, it wasn’t really my thing. Although by then I wasn’t sure what my thing actually was anymore. I was bored with acting. I hated producing. Writing for other people was too hard and too annoying, and I hadn’t done stand-up comedy in ten years. I was thinking maybe I should go back to drumming or delivering milk.

They were only offering two nights, but my agent warned me that if I agreed I’d have to sign a six-year contract with the studio and the network just in case the job became permanent. I accepted their terms. As I said, no one seemed close to offering me
The Late Late Show
itself, that was unthinkable. So I would enjoy myself for a couple of nights—who knows, it might be fun. At the very least I’d get a little bit of exposure, which is always helpful when you’re trying to raise money for something, and I always seemed to be trying to raise money for something. In September of 2004 I walked into the CBS studios in West Hollywood for what I was convinced would be the first of a two-night run.

A
late-night talk-show host is supposed to be cool. I am not for a second suggesting that I am cool. I am a middle-aged white man with graying hair, a thickening waist, and a creepy laugh. That is not cool.

Nor am I suggesting that I am a late-night talk-show host any more than I was a stand-up comedian or writer or actor or drummer or milk delivery boy. Late night is just what I do now—it’s only my job. It’s the job itself that is cool.

A little bit of cool goes a long way; it lands on you if you are a late-night talk-show host. Consider the other guys: if Dave wasn’t the king of late night he’d just be a cranky old man who drives too fast. Jay would be a weirdly needy mechanic, and Conan would have kids following him down the street calling him names. Without his show, Jimmy Fallon is just a thirty-five-year-old giggly adolescent; and Jimmy Kimmel is a good guy, but he’d be the first to admit he’s not cool—in another life he’d be a genial maître d’.

None of us are cool, but if we appear cool it’s because of one man.

Johnny Carson.

Johnny was cool. Jeez, even his name was cool…
Johnny
.

Johnny did not invent the late-night format but he branded it. He’s Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods. The game belongs to him anyway.

Johnny Carson fronted
The Tonight Show
for an astounding thirty years, and no one has ever done it better. He was smart and quick and flawed and warm. He made men want to be him and women want to be with him. Johnny could take a lame gag that clearly didn’t work and turn it into the funniest part of the show. I never knew this stuff until I drifted into late night myself; up until then I’d seen
The Tonight Show
maybe three or four times, but I was probably too drunk to pay attention.

Before I got into the late-night game, the only person I ever watched was Dave, because Dave was funny and bitter and I got the feeling he secretly (or maybe not so secretly) despised showbiz. I felt I could relate.

When I agreed to guest-host
The Late Late Show
, I prepared for it as if for an acting gig. I did a little research into the character I’d be playing, into the people who really did what I would only be pretending to do.

If Dave was the best of the current crop, and I believe he is, then I wanted to know who he considered the gold standard and how they work. I’d read that he greatly admired Regis Philbin as a broadcaster and downright revered Johnny, so I plowed through a ton of old tapes of
The Tonight Show
, and I watched
Live with Regis and Kelly
every morning.

Dave was right. Johnny was great, you just loved the guy. Like he was your best pal and uncle and dad all rolled into one, and Regis was astonishing in a different way. Here was a kind of TV Proust, a man who could take the most mundane moment of his existence and spin it into five, sometimes even ten minutes of entertaining talk. I studied these three guys, Dave and Johnny and Regis, for hours, not to try and impersonate them but to get a few pointers. I don’t know if I learned anything, but I laughed a lot.

I turned up at CBS Television City in L.A. the night before my scheduled slot to get a feel for the place, and, of course, to see what kind of act I’d have to follow. That night’s guest host was a young chap by the name of Damien Fahey, and so I stood in the green room and watched him work. He seemed pretty good to me, good enough to take over permanently. I was approached by Michael Naidus, the segment producer who had shepherded my guest appearances on the show when Kilborn was the host. Michael is an affable fellow, so I felt comfortable talking to him. He asked if I was looking forward to giving it a shot the next night and I said of course.

Then he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” and he led me out to the corridor.

“This is Peter Lassally,” Michael said, introducing me to an elegant and genial older man. I knew the name. Lassally had been a producer on
The Tonight Show
for thirty years when Johnny was the host. He’d set Dave up at CBS after the late-night wars of the nineties and still held a senior position at Worldwide Pants, Letterman’s production company, which also owned
The Late Late Show
. This was the man who had mentored Jon Stewart and Garry Shandling and Steven Wright. He is a legend in the business.

I told Peter that I was honored to meet him, and after we chatted a bit, I thanked him for letting me guest-host for a couple of nights.

“This should be a lark,” I said.

“This is not a lark,” he said. “I want you to take this seriously. I have few discernible talents, but one of them is finding guys like you. I watched you as a guest on Letterman and Kilborn and Conan, and if I’m right about you, you are lightning in a bottle. I think you may be the one we’re looking for.”

I nodded somberly and promised to take it seriously and said
that I was looking forward to seeing him the next day, too. As I walked out to my car I thought, “Poor old coot. He’s lost his marbles.”

I was wrong, though, and Peter was right, and so began a pattern that continues to this day at
The Late Late Show
. He is still executive producer of the show and nearly every day I am wrong and he is right.

Back in the green room at five o’clock the following afternoon, I heard Richard Malmos, the show’s announcer, call my name, and I walked out onto the floor of tiny Studio 56 to bask in the riotous applause of a paid audience who had no earthly idea who I was.

I loved it anyway.

For a second you get to feel like Johnny. I’m convinced that’s why we all do it, Dave and Jay and Conan and the Jimmys and me, because every now and again you get to feel like Johnny.

I also felt comfortable being in front of a television camera—eight years on
The Drew Carey Show
had immunized me against any nasty rushes of adrenaline. I rattled off the gags from cue cards, but the guys responsible for writing the gags had worked as a team to create Kilborn’s TV voice and had about as much in common with me as I have with Dakota Fanning.

The material was generic and mostly lame, but having seen Johnny on tape, and how he coped with bad jokes, I became convinced that somewhere in there, fucking around between written gags—the glue between inanities—lay the key to me winning the job that I wanted so badly about five seconds into my first night as guest host.

I yakked it up with the guests in a satisfactory way apparently, something I didn’t find difficult at all. I was genuinely interested in what they had to say; plus, I had been given a very important acting lesson by Brenda Blethyn on the set of
Saving Grace.

“If you truly listen to what the other actors are saying, everyone will think you’re a fucking genius, dear.”

God bless her, the mad old trout. But she’s right. Everyone picked up on it right away.

“I loved the way you actually had a conversation with the guests,” said Peter after the first show.

“I thought that was the job?” I said.

“It used to be,” he said, smiling his lovely big sad clowny smile.

So I was in love again. I wanted very badly to host the show on a permanent basis. The trouble was, so did a whole lot of other people more famous or more qualified than me. But I had a secret weapon, and I knew it: Peter liked me, and I liked him, and I believed he would champion me if I did my best, so that’s exactly what I did.

“Gimme a week of shows and I’ll nail this,” I told him after that first night.

“We’ll see,” Peter said.

All together about fifty or so people had guest-hosted the show, some of them very big stars just doing it for fun and some of them very big stars who wanted to appear like they were just doing it for fun lest they not be chosen.

The field was finally narrowed down to four contenders. They were: D. L. Hughley, the only real name of the lineup; Damien Fahey, the kid who had gone on the night before I did; Michael Ian Black, the popular trendy comedian; and me.

We’d each get a week of shows to prove what we could do and then Worldwide Pants and CBS would pick one of us. I was pretty sure that D.L. had nailed it because he was experienced as well as funny. Rumor had it that Dave favored Damien Fahey, which seemed to be confirmed when Damien appeared as a guest on
Letterman
during the tryouts. I was frantic about this until I watched the show and quickly guessed that if Dave had been hot for this guy, he cooled considerably once they began conversing.

Michael Ian Black was definitely the hippest choice, and it was no secret that he was the friend and favorite of Rob Burnett, the CEO of Worldwide Pants—a considerable ally, to say the least.

The entertainment press speculated that of all four candidates I was the longest shot, and although it pained me to admit it, I had to agree. I went first, and I like to think I threw down a pretty strong challenge to the others, except for a huge misstep on my fifth and last show, Friday night, when I decided to introduce “Formal Friday.” The whole thing was shot in black and white, I wore a tuxedo, and the guests dressed appropriately, and it stunk. Peter said that was okay, because it showed I was willing to stick my neck out and try things. He very kindly neglected to point out that he had advised against my doing it in the first place.

I didn’t watch what the other guys did, it would have been like watching someone else kiss your girlfriend, which was bad enough, and maybe doing it better than you, which was worse.

During the big late-night bake-off, I was lucky enough to book a guest spot on a struggling ABC show called
Life As We Know It
that starred Kelly Osbourne. I was to play another rock star, the father of Kelly’s character (where do they get their ideas?), and although I wasn’t crazy about the script, they were filming in Vancouver, which would get me out of L.A. and away from all the noise about who was going to win
The Late Late Show
job. I also thought the work would distract me enough to relieve some of the antsiness I was feeling.

I drove my car from L.A. to Vancouver; a road trip always provides distraction for me and at that time I would only get on a plane if I absolutely had to.

Michael Ian Black was last up, and when he finished his Friday-night show I spoke to the other Michael (Naidus—
The Late Late Show
producer) by telephone. Mr. Naidus had by then become my mole on the inside; he told me whatever he knew, and although he stopped short of actually saying so, I could tell he was rooting for me. He said that the head of CBS, Les Moonves, would be having
a conference call with David Letterman, Rob Burnett, and Peter Lassally on the following Monday morning and the final decision would be made then. These were the four horsemen I had to worry about over that weekend.

Speculation was running wild as to who it would be. I felt instinctively that Peter was for me. We had just clicked as soon as we met. The others were a different matter.

Like the three other candidates, I had sat down with Les Moonves, and I thought it had gone well. Les, as anyone who’s dealt with him will tell you, is a straight shooter. He’ll shoot you, but it’ll be straight; he comes across as a guy who is just too busy for bullshit, and I liked him. I looked him in the eye and told him I wanted the job and that if he gave it to me I wouldn’t let him down. He had nodded.

“I know you wouldn’t,” he said but gave nothing away about his selection.

I knew I was not Rob Burnett’s first choice, and whatever Dave was thinking was anyone’s guess, although he later confessed he didn’t pay much attention to the whole thing, leaving the pick to the others.

The tension was unbearable. My work was finished in Vancouver, and since I couldn’t sit still, I bit the bullet and flew to New York, where my girlfriend, Andi, was visiting relatives. I was very gloomy and convinced that terrible disappointment was headed my way. I must have been miserable company because Andi suggested we go and see something on Broadway, it would take my mind off things.

As it turned out, Brenda Blethyn was performing in a show, a two-character piece with Edie Falco called ’
Night, Mother
, so we went to see it, but it didn’t do much to lighten my mood, given that it’s a play in which the lead character announces at the top of the show that she is about to commit suicide, argues with her daughter about her decision for two hours, then finally (spoiler alert!) does
herself in. I love Brenda, and she is without doubt one of the best actresses on the planet, but that is a fucking awful play.

Afterward we had dinner with Brenda at Joe Allen’s. Andi and I kept the conversation focused on how much we’d enjoyed her performance while tactfully not mentioning the material itself.

Come Monday morning there was still no news—which I took to be bad news. I flew back to Vancouver, where I was going to spend the night, have dinner with some friends, and then drive my car back to L.A. to lick my wounds.

I had just gotten into my hotel room when Peter Lassally and Rob Burnett called.

“It’s you,” said Peter.

I then did something that surprised me.

I dropped the phone, fell to my knees, and said, “Thank You.”