Living in a Foreign Language (3 page)

He smiled at both of us—a beautiful smile that made us feel approved of.

“Your journey has already begun.”

This was the perfect thing to say. Jill was beaming. How could he know us so well? I was a little less impressed. I mean our friend who was channeling him knew very well that we
were already on a journey. We had talked to her many times about all the New Age stuff we'd been doing—meditation, tantra, Chinese herbs. So it wouldn't have been difficult for her to pass this information on to him—or Him, I guess I should say. She wouldn't even have to tell Him because she
was
Him for the moment—or He was her—or whatever.

“You will move to a house with a circle of pines outside your bedroom window.”

Now this was a little better—an actual prediction, something we could document.

“Sounds wonderful,” said Jill, still beaming.

This chitchat went on for a while. Whenever we tried to pin him down to specifics, he reminded us that “Life has its own plan” or “Your path will present itself in unexpected ways.” I don't recall any other flat-on predictions like the circle of pines, but in general, he seemed to think we were headed in the right direction. Our journey had already begun and that, according to Jesus, was a good thing.

Exactly how far along we were on this journey didn't reveal itself until the following evening in the makeshift pressroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. There was a TV monitor on the table next to us carrying the affiliates' meeting from the ballroom down the hall. And as I sat there, sopping up second-rate wine, brooding on the vicissitudes of fame, snarling at the perfidy of our publicist, I became aware of Don Ohlmeyer speaking on the TV about the coming season—about how NBC was going to deliver a whopping audience to all the local eleven o'clock news shows every night. Ohlmeyer had recently moved over from the sports department and had been made head of NBC West Coast or some such thing. NBC had more heads than it knew how to feed.

“. . . And the most important announcement of the
evening is that we're going to finally retire that old warhorse,
L.A. Law
, and put her out to pasture where she belongs. We have a new show in the works that will make ten o'clock on Thursday nights the most watched hour in television.”

I don't think I actually heard it when he said it—they say you never hear the one that gets you. Jill and I flicked a look to each other and then quickly flicked away—as if we instantaneously agreed to deny what we'd just heard. Then, as he droned on with the particulars, the reality dripped into my body—like an IV with a lethal injection.

Drip. The bitterest truth of all—he was right. The show
was
old and tired. We had played out all the stories and then gone back around and played them again. Time to put it out of its misery.

Drip. Rejection—right into the heart. It wasn't just the show they were tired of—it was us. They'd seen our shtick; it worked for a while, now it was time for someone new.

Drip. The money. Oh my God, the money. We were about to take the biggest salary cut in the history of the world. My world, at least. Did I save enough? Can you ever save enough?

Drip. The money again. Did I play it wrong? Did I try to cash in on our fame so much that people developed contempt for us? Yeah, I did. They did.

Drip. Drip. Dead.

So, what now? We could hold on like hell; I know people who have parlayed their diminishing fame into years of celebrity—decades. Just by traveling to smaller and smaller cities. You may not be able to get a seat at Spago but they'll throw a fucking parade for you in Pittsburgh.

Or we could return to the relative purity of our life in the theater. Recycled TV stars were all the rage in New York.

I looked at Jill again—really looked this time. Her eyes were blue and deep. They were more worried for me than for her. She didn't care all that much about money and fame—she never had. She slipped me a smile that said, “Don't worry, we'll be all right.” But I didn't feel all right. Anger was bubbling up—my typical response to fear.

“Who is this
Wide World of Sports
hack talking about us like we're an old bag of shit?” I wanted to say. “We carried NBC for eight years—we
invented
Thursday night at ten o'clock.”

But I didn't say anything. Instead, I recalled the lesson that Jesus had taught us the night before—that our path would reveal itself in unexpected ways. Yeah, but
this
unexpected? Don Ohlmeyer as the angel of destiny? It's enough to shake your faith.

Jill and I walked out of the hotel, arm in arm, into the warm May evening. We weren't TV stars anymore, just people. It would take some getting used to, but we could do it. We'd have fun with it. Maybe we'd find a seminar—a week at Esalen—“Re-Humbling,” or “Embracing Your Obscurity.” Hell, we started out as real people; it wouldn't be so hard to get back to it.

“Oh my God!” A woman who was checking in to the hotel with her family recognized us.

“Can you wait here one second? I'll be right back!”

She herded her husband and three small children over to where we were standing. She knelt by her children and admonished them sternly.

“You look very carefully at these two people, you hear me?”

She pointed to us like we were a stop sign.

“They are on TV. And one day when you're older you'll
see them on reruns and know who they are. These are real live stars.”

She didn't know we were already on reruns.

“Now, give each one an autograph. I want you to sign, ‘You met me at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.' Then sign one for Elizabeth, one for Peter James and one for little Jessica. Do you have a pen?”

I told her I didn't and she looked at me with contempt. I borrowed a pen and paper from the doorman and we signed the autographs. Then she had her husband take pictures of us with all of the children and then with each one separately. She thought she owned us.

While they were snapping away I felt Jill squeeze my hand, which meant, “Let's get out of here.” I looked over my shoulder and saw an empty taxi with its door hanging open. Thank you, Jesus! We jumped in and snuggled down into the cracked leather seats like two kids playing hide-and-seek. We held hands and I felt a sudden rush of relief mixed with euphoria mixed with an optimism I'd never felt before—I knew I could get through anything as long as I could hold her hand. After a while the driver turned around.

“Where ya headed?”

Damned if we knew. The only thing clear to me—crystal clear—was that if I had a choice between spending an evening with Jesus Christ or with Don Ohlmeyer, I wouldn't have to think for a second.

We opened our windows to get rid of the old-taxi smell and gave him our address. It was no limo, but it would get us home.

W
E FOUND OUR CIRCLE OF PINES
—right outside the bedroom window of a rambling old house in Marin County, Northern California. We found a great school for our son, Max, and we got to know a whole new group of friends. The Bay Area is a food lover's paradise, so we gave up nothing on that score. We would go back to L.A. for the occasional TV movie or guest shot; or do a play maybe once a year in San Francisco or Marin; but mostly we focused on things other than career. It was the first time since we'd been together that a job—or the promise of a job—didn't dictate where and how we lived, which was liberating and frightening at the same time. While we were trying to figure out what was next, Jill reminded me that our life had always worked best when the two of us were good together, solidly in love. We knew if we could get that part right everything else would fall into place just fine. So we decided to use our newfound freedom and time to explore . . . well, each other.

We took courses. Marin County is the world center of
self-improvement so we had no trouble finding courses, seminars and weekend retreats in which to delve into the more arcane aspects of the “man / woman paradigm.” We took lots of courses in communication; we attended lectures by various experts who talked about what men want as opposed to what women want. And we took courses on sex. On sex, about sex and all around sex. And I must say it came as a surprise to me how much there was to learn on that subject.

This was all going along wonderfully until one afternoon, at the checkout counter of the Mill Valley Market, the cashier asked me to sign something. I looked down and it was the front page of some tabloid with the headline,
“L.A. Law
Stars in Kinky Sex Cult.” Which was, by the way, incorrect in all aspects—in that we hadn't been stars for a while, our sex life had no noticeable kinks and the only group we had joined in all the years of our marriage was the Automobile Club of Northern California.

It seems, though, that we had talked too much. We had come off like missionaries, bringing the couples of the world to a higher plane—you can imagine how boring we were. We lost some friends. The jobs dwindled. We became fringe people, which was okay except when we saw someone we knew in a movie or on TV playing a role that we'd have been good in. That still irked.

Money became an issue. We were still living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, without earning any income to speak of. The pressure of our dwindling bank balance started to undermine our little paradise. So I decided to get an appraisal on our house in Big Sur. This was our getaway place, our dream house, perched on a ridge between the mountains and the sea that we built when the TV money was flowing like
water. I had to approach Jill carefully about this idea, because she had often said in moments of great tenderness that we would grow old together in that house. I was concerned that we would just grow poor. It wasn't that Big Sur cost us that much out of pocket—we had built it for cash—but after the appraisal it was clear that it was worth too much for us not to sell it.

“Home” is a funny word; it means different things to different people. Jill grew up an only child; her dad's business required the family to move every year, so she was perennially the new kid in school. She grew up to become a nester with a vengeance—ostensibly for her kids, but for her own peace of mind as well. For Jill, home is a cause.

I, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get away from my roots—nice people and all, but I was more interested in seeing the world, checking out how the gentiles lived. And whereas Jill and I had had a series of homes over the last thirty years, I'd never thought twice about selling one in order to move on to the next. For me, home was a base for the next adventure. This was always an area of tension between us, and when I sold the Big Sur house, thinking to put us in good financial shape, I broke her heart.

Then when Max, our youngest, got ready to leave for college, our different philosophies of mothering and fathering came into conflict as well. Jill was feeling extremely umbilical about the whole thing. Not that I was blasé, mind you—I would miss Max enormously. But I thought of his going off to college more as a celebration. He had gotten into his first-choice school, he was pursuing his dream of a career in music, he felt confident in himself, he was sure of his path. As a dad, I felt, frankly, successful—not an emotion I'd experienced in this area all that often. But for Jill,
his departure was a wrenching loss, the fatal final curtain on a role she'd been playing with total commitment and steely determination for thirty-three years. So, while I was chilling the bottle of champagne to celebrate our incipient liberation, Jill was quietly gearing up to play the last act of
Medea
.

So I blundered right in—while she was reeling from the loss of her home and her baby—to convince her that what we really needed to do was buy a house in Italy. This was an old bone of contention between us. I had tried for years, in vain, to convince her that we should buy a house in the south of France—in Ramatuelle, just outside Saint Tropez. There's a beach there five miles long filled with young, naked women. I couldn't understand why she wasn't interested.

Then, a couple of years later, a friend asked me why I wanted to buy a house in the south of France and I told him it was because it was so close to Italy. Eureka! Ever since then I'd been trying to sell Jill on the idea of a house in Italy. And now that Max had left for college in New York, I pushed even harder.

Jill was understandably cool. She couldn't get why, if we'd had to get rid of her dream house in Big Sur, we would plunge into buying another house—especially one that was six thousand miles away. For me it made perfect sense: The Italian house wouldn't cost us a fraction of what we earned from the sale of Big Sur; our nest was empty and forlorn; we had—regrettably or not—no professional reason to hang around; and we were at a perfect time in our life to start a new cycle—to learn a new language in an exquisite, ancient country, to meet new friends. Now was our time to travel—while we could still do stairs. Now was our time to savor the glories of Italian cuisine—while we still had our
original teeth. Now was the time to take a romantic plunge together—while our plumbing was still up and functioning. Jill looked at me like I was crazy. Or worse, she told me that if I really wanted it, it was okay with her. This is the kiss of death. If I learned one thing from all those courses we took, when she says, “If you really want it, it's okay with me,” she's actually saying, “I don't want this.” And who needs to be in Italy with a woman who doesn't want to be there—who's unhappy with me for insisting on my own agenda? Not going to work. What I could do was occasionally put it in front of her—like an item on a menu that she might one day develop a taste for—and wait to see if she bit.

So, a year later, when a friend of ours, Birgit, invited us to her sixtieth birthday party, I saw my shot. Birgit was born in Germany, lives in Mill Valley and is building a house in Tahoe with her husband, but her birthday party was to be in Puglia, at the very southern tip of the heel of Italy. Which tells you something about Birgit.