Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (9 page)

It’s the first time I drive on my own from Malibu into L.A. The Pacific Coast Highway is always a potential death trap, and as I transition up Sunset Boulevard, I feel a surge of accomplishment. When I make it to Beverly Hills, I look for the prettiest yard I can find, pull over, steal some flowers, and make my way up the winding road to the top of Benedict Canyon to Jennifer’s father’s house.

Cary Grant greets me at the front door in a white terry cloth bathrobe. I have a vague awareness that Jen’s father is an old-time movie actor, but I’m ashamed to say that I knew more about “Cary Granite” from
The Flintstones
than Cary Grant the Film Icon. In my defense, he hadn’t made a movie since I was an infant.

“Hell-o, young maaan. Jenn-i-fer is in her room. Would you like some milk?” he says in his Cary Grant voice. He leads me through a stunning white-on-white modern home with breathtaking views of the city.

“Are you in Jenn-i-fer’s graa-ade?” he asks.

“No, sir. I go to Samohi.”

“Aaaah, well. I see,” he says, as if making some sort of calculation.

We walk into an all black-and-white kitchen, with industrial stainless steel appliances. He grabs two glasses and moves to the single best design feature ever put in a home—a restaurant-style milk dispenser protruding from the front of a gigantic refrigerator. I want to stick my face under it.

“Here you go, young maaan,” he says, filling our cups.

Later, he and Jennifer introduce me to the wonders of shepherd’s pie, handmade by Cary’s beautiful young wife, Barbara. It instantly becomes one of my favorite dishes. To this day, I’ve never had better.

Cary and Barbara leave Jennifer and me in private. We talk about our schools and people we know and we laugh, but there is not going to be anything romantic between us. It feels more like a friendship. Soon, it’s time for my show to air, so we head to the biggest TV in the house, the one in Cary’s bedroom. Jennifer and I sit at the foot of the big bed. I’m still not used to seeing myself on TV and I’m nervous.

Just as the show begins, Cary pops his head in. “Young maaan, would you mind if I watched with you?”

“Not at all,” I say, proving unequivocally that ignorance is bliss. And so, the single greatest movie star of all time takes a seat with us to watch a sixteen-year-old rookie in his first starring role.

When the show is over, I’m not quite sure what to think. (This sort of reaction continues; only rarely do I know right away how I feel about a finished project.) In Cary Grant’s bedroom, as the credits roll, no one says a word. Then, finally, from Cary, “Young maaan, you’re quite goood. You remind me very much of a young Warren Beatty.”

Driving away, down his long, winding driveway, I suddenly see him, running down the hill, chasing me in the big, white bathrobe. “Young maaan! Young maaan!” he calls, rushing up to my driver’s-side window.

“I thought you might like to have these!” he says, slightly out of breath. His arms are filled with products from Fabergé, where he sits on the board. He fills my car with boxes and boxes of Brut aftershave and soap on a rope.

“Thank you, Mr. Grant,” I say.

“Enjoy them,” he says behind those famous big, black glasses. “Good luck in the moo-vies. You’re going to do great.”

As I pull away I can still see him in my rearview mirror, standing in the long driveway and waving. I keep my soap on a rope (in the shape of a microphone) for years after.

*   *   *

When I learn that someone is doing a remake of the Warren Beatty–Natalie Wood classic,
Splendor in the Grass
, Cary Grant’s words ring in my ears and I feel I might have some sort of inside track. It will be a television event starring the biggest young actress on TV, Melissa Gilbert, the star of
Little House on the Prairie
, and every young actor wants the Warren part. I read for the legendary casting director Lynn Stalmaster. I think I rocked it, but by the time I’ve driven back to Malibu, my agents have called; I didn’t get the role. Jesus! I’m the right age, I’m the right look, and I had a great audition. I’m perfect for the part, but if I can’t even get out of the first round on
this
, what does that say about my future?

When I was in Ohio I could always go to work in a college production of a good play. But there aren’t those options available in Los Angeles. I want to act, not audition. I want to continue to learn my craft. But for now what I really need to learn is that there is very little rhyme or reason for who gets what in Hollywood. There are plenty of dedicated, talented actors destined for jobs they hate, chasing in vain a dream that will never come. Soon I’ll have to start thinking about college and possibly reconsider my life’s direction. I’ve had just enough success to keep me chasing the dream, but not enough to ensure a career. I promise myself I won’t be one of the deluded ones, being the last to know that my moment didn’t come, and that I should’ve hung it up long ago. I’m going to be seventeen soon. Am I already a has-been?

*   *   *

Luckily, I’ve made some great friends despite the time I’ve spent on my career. Jeff Abrams and I follow Magic Johnson’s arrival in L.A. and shoot hoops whenever we can. Jeff’s a huge Bjorn Borg fan, while I’m a Connors man, and we spend hours on the tennis court, attempting to learn the new “topspin” forehand. Along with Chris Steenolsen and Josh Kerns, we hang out and steal booze, go to beach parties and on road trips in Josh’s gigantic hand-painted “road beast”—a 1969 Impala. Good students and serious about school, we are hardly pro-level hellions, but we have some fun. Also in our orbit are the Sheen brothers and the Penns. Chris is still making “Nam” movies and Sean is more of an enigma; he’s older, into surfing and getting serious about acting himself. In history class I bond with a hilarious, madrigal-singing maniac named Robert Downey Jr. No one is funnier or more brilliant at stream of consciousness banter. Charlie Sheen is also one of a kind. While his brother is serious and always has his eye on the ball, Charlie, a Polo preppy clotheshorse in a world of O.P. shorts and surf T-shirts, is a wonderful mix of nerd (he’s a member of the AV club and won’t go near the ocean) and rebel (always ready to ditch class to go to the Dodgers game to root for our beloved Reds). He is also a conspiracy-theory freak, who sometimes wears a bulletproof vest under his clothes to school, and together we debate everything from the likelihood that the moon is hollow and whether the trilateral commission killed JFK to the authenticity of the moon landings. Also, coming from Hollywood royalty, he has all the toys you can imagine. At my house we are still saving money by not buying desserts; at Charlie’s house, it’s never-ending Häagen-Dazs, brand-new BMWs, a lagoon pool with underwater tunnels, and a lit, professional-grade basketball half-court. I sometimes feel like a bit of an Ohio rube with no toys of my own and no access (like Dodgers season tickets) to offer my friends in return for their generosity. No one seems to care or notice except me.

Apparently there is an amazing part in an upcoming movie that Robert Redford is directing. Emilio is preparing for his audition. I hear the mysterious Sean Penn is also gung-ho about the part. They say the role of Connor in
Ordinary People
is the kind of role that changes your life. When I don’t even get a meeting on the project, I’m devastated. At a time when all my friends are choosing which colleges to apply to, or finding an easier path in the business than I am, I’m wondering if Hollywood saw what it needed from me and decided I wasn’t up to a career of substance or longevity. For the first time since I was an eight-year-old, I start thinking about finding something else to do with my life. Luckily, I’ve applied to UCLA and USC and have been accepted to both.

A kid named Timothy Hutton gets the Redford movie and it does change his life. He goes from unknown to Academy Award winner in nine months, with one shattering performance. Some of my other peers/competitors are also doing well. Sean Penn is filming a surf high school movie called
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and then will team up with Tim Hutton for
Taps
. I am unable to get a meeting on either film. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel and be grateful for the amazing adventure I’ve had. I call my agents to tell them that I’ll be enrolling in either USC or UCLA and will be unavailable for any further acting roles. They are disappointed, but understand. When I hang up I feel the loss of all the possibilities I had hoped would come my way. I’d thought that if I worked hard enough and believed hard enough, I could will myself into the life I had wanted for so long. I was wrong. And so I join the ranks of all the other confused, scared seventeen-year-olds standing on the brink of adulthood, looking into the hazy distance for a navigable road to the future.

Then, just after Christmas 1982, my phone rings. My agents are calling with a question: “Do you want to give it one last shot? We’ve gotten you a reading. We think it could be a big movie. It’s called
The Outsiders
.”

CHAPTER
9

A vicious winter storm sends driving rain into the streets in front of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal movie empire, Zoetrope Studios. Thunder and lightning crackle as I hunker down in my Mazda, parked just outside the front gates. In my hand I have the five-page scene I will be reading. I have it memorized now; anyone would. This will be my fourth audition for
The Outsiders
. Originally I met with Janet Hirshenson, the casting director who was seeing every male actor in Hollywood between the ages of fifteen and thirty. She has been good to me in the past, and even though I have never gotten a job on her watch, she has brought me back whenever she felt I might be right for a part. After I made it past Janet, I read for the film’s producer, Fred Roos. Fred cast all of Francis Coppola’s early movies as well as George Lucas’s. Among the actors whom Fred Roos would discover were Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Diane Keaton, and Al Pacino. He was intimidating as hell; his face betrayed absolutely no emotion. I didn’t know whether he loved or hated me, but he kept bringing me back.

I turn the car radio on. I need to relax; with each level of audition the pressure has built. I try, but I’m not hearing the music. I’m not even hearing the rain. I look down at the scenes. I look once, twice, and then again. Each time I make more mistakes, forgetting lines I knew just hours ago. I look up into my rearview mirror but I see no reflection. In five minutes, I’ll be reading for Francis Ford Coppola and I’m starting to choke.

A bunch of sixth-graders had the idea to make
The Outsiders
into a movie. The kids at Lone Pine Elementary School in central California wrote a letter to the biggest, most famous director they could think of, petitioning him for his services. Although the book was (and still is) required reading in middle schools across the country, Coppola had no idea of its existence, let alone the massive built-in following of
The Outsiders
. The book began as the high school English project of a Tulsa teenager, Susie Hinton. She wrote a spare, moving, and authentic story of teen alienation and want of family. Set in the 1950s in the slums of Tulsa and following the orphaned Curtis brothers and their gang of “Greasers,” the book (as well as the movie) was the forerunner to cultural youth sensations like
Harry Potter
and
Twilight
. In fact, when young Susie changed her name to S. E. Hinton in order to hide her gender and to ensure young male readers and old male editors that she could handle the subject matter, somewhere in England a very young Miss Rowling may have taken note.

The guard at the Zoetrope Studios gate directs me to stage 5 and hands me a map. “Go right on Marlon Brando Way. Follow it to Budd Schulberg Avenue and it’s just next to the commissary.” I wonder why I’m reading on a soundstage and not in an office. I look for a place to park and run through the scene again in my head. My nerves are threatening to unravel all of my preparation. I try to quiet these inner voices that are telling me that my success so far has been nothing but a fluke, but they are gaining strength and I can feel it. I park the car and jog through the rain to soundstage 5. I can’t believe what I see. There must be twenty-five other actors huddled under the overhang at the stage door. A lot of them are famous, some of them are dressed head to toe in full Greaser regalia. Most of them are smoking and all of them look older than I do. It’s like the Screen Actors Guild version of the prison yard. Posing, fronting, and intimidation. I look for a friendly face. I see Emilio Estevez wearing an almost ridiculous pompadour.

“Dude! What the fuck is going on?” I ask. A reading for a director is supposed to be a low-key, private meeting. This looks like a public cattle call with every important young working actor in the universe.

Emilio, ever the old soul, smiles and shakes his head. “Hey, it’s Francis.”

Working for Coppola had almost killed Emilio’s dad. The stress, the hours, and the heat of making
Apocalypse Now
had given Martin Sheen a heart attack in his midthirties. He barely survived, and it changed him. Martin, usually full of life and laughter, was strangely quiet on the subject of all of us competing to work under the great master. In fact, he rarely speaks of
Apocalypse Now
or Francis at all. But for his sons and their friends (as well as film fans worldwide) it is the stuff of legend: Francis replacing Harvey Keitel supposedly because the actor bitched about not having a trailer; Martin flying in on a day’s notice for a ninety-day shoot and staying for 360 days of shooting over the course of two years; Brando showing up so fat and bald that they could only shoot him in shadow and making Francis read
Heart of Darkness
aloud to him in its entirety before he would begin shooting; hurricanes threatening lives and destroying sets; the Thai military pulling all the jets and helicopters to quell a coup; Dennis Hopper electing to live (and party) in the jungle with the natives instead of staying at the hotel; Playboy Bunnies being written into the film on a whim and wrecking a marriage or two in the process; sickness everywhere; a tapeworm poking its head out of Martin’s driver’s mouth, gagging the man until he pulled the wiggling, pulsing worm out of his own body on the side of the road; dark tales of stunts gone wrong and actors being asked to do dangerous and reckless things. But to watch Eleanor Coppola’s own recollections in her brilliant and frightening documentary
Hearts of Darkness
is to suspect some of the legends are true.

The stage door opens. Another group of actors emerges from the soundstage. They all look bummed, out of it. One guy, though, has a huge, toothy, wolflike grin. He whispers to Emilio and me, “Francis sent these guys packing, but he asked me to stay.” Emilio gives a high five to his buddy, a new young actor from New Jersey who has been staying at the Sheens’ house while he auditions in L.A. “Fucking Francis, I mean the guy is unreal! He just sent ’em away! Said it right in front of everyone!”

I start talking to the kid from back East. He’s open, friendly, funny, and has an almost robotic, bloodless focus and an intensity that I’ve never encountered before. His name is Tom Cruise.

It will be survival of the fittest for all of us. We will need to intimidate, dominate, and crush our competitors for these roles of a lifetime. But there’s no reason why we can’t try to stay friends while we do it.

“What part are you reading for?” I ask Tom.

“Christ, up until today, it was Sodapop, but Francis has everyone switching parts and bringing us all in and out while everyone watches everyone else! I just got done reading Darrel.”

“But you’re not old enough to play Darrel,” says Emilio, mildly panicked.

“That’s what I thought. Plus I hadn’t prepared that part,” says Tom.

The three of us stand under the overhang, out of the rain, trying to calculate how the various age pairings Coppola is trying will affect our chances. If Darrel, the oldest part in the movie, is played by Tom Cruise, I’m screwed.

“Okay, next group!” a man says, ushering us into the darkness of stage 5. And for the first time, I can hear the blasting sounds of Italian opera …

*   *   *

Francis Ford Coppola won his first Oscar in 1971, as the screenwriter for
Patton
. He then took a dime-store pulp novel and, despite countless attempts to have him fired, created
The Godfather
, giving us Pacino, reintroducing us to Brando, and winning the Oscar for Best Picture. He made its sequel in an era when to do so was considered a shameful, soulless, explicitly commercial folly.
Godfather II
made history by being the only sequel to also win Best Picture, a record that remains to this day. He mentored his young protégé, George Lucas, through his breakout,
American Graffiti
, after having used George to shoot pickup shots on the first
Godfather
. Like Lucas, Francis deeply distrusted Hollywood and lived and worked in San Francisco, away from the bullshit and the schmooze. And like Lucas, when massive success came, he created his own personal fiefdom, filled with murderously loyal counterculture artistic geniuses. The Zoetrope group made its own rules and broke them at will. It was the center of the bull’s-eye in the nexus of artistic achievement, prestige, controversy, and mystery.

But as Tom, Emilio, and I take our seats along with the twenty or so others on stage 5, Zoetrope Studios is fighting for its life.
Time
magazine has just put Coppola on its cover for a story about the cost overruns on
One from the Heart
, his latest movie, a groundbreaking special-effects-filled musical meditation starring Nastassja Kinski. Financial power plays are everywhere, with Chase Manhattan Bank threatening to shut Zoetrope down and foreclose on the studio. Francis’s artistic/financial high-wire act is the biggest story in the entertainment industry.

Our chairs are against the walls of the soundstage. There are too many of us, though, so some actors sit on the ground. The only light is an illuminated area in the center of the floor, which appears to be exactly the size of a boxing arena. A table and four chairs have been set up in the light. Just beyond, in the shadows, I see Francis for the first time. He is wearing a beret and fiddling with a state-of-the-art video camera, recording everything. On the table next to him is an old-style record player. My tastes run toward Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, so I’m a little foggy on the genre of extremely emotional Italian music emanating from the turntable. Francis has an assistant with him, no one else, and she turns down the music.

Francis walks to the edge of the illuminated area and looks out at us. No small talk, no introductions. He gets right to it. “Hi. I thought we’d all get together today and sort of run through things,” he says casually, as if auditioning while thirty of your competitors watch is the most normal thing in the world.

“Some of you may be asked to play different roles than you have prepared and some of you won’t. This is really just an opportunity to explore the material,” he says mildly.
Explore
the material? Is he serious? I look over at Tom Cruise. The only “exploring” he’ll be doing here today is to try to find a way to bash my brains in and take my role from me. And from my perspective—right back at him! This may be an abstract artistic exercise for Coppola, but for every single one of us young actors huddled in the darkness, this day will be the difference between continuing the struggles of our daily lives and seeing those lives changed forever.

Francis points for three actors to step into the light. “Say your name into the camera and what role you are reading for,” he instructs.

Quietly I ask the actor next to me how long this has been going on. “I’ve been here five hours already,” he says. The chosen actors face the Sony prototype video camera, which looks to me like something from
The Jetsons
.

“Hi, I’m Dennis Quaid. I’ll be playing Darrel.”

“Hi, I’m Scott Baio and I’m playing Sodapop.”

“I’m Tommy Howell and I’m Ponyboy.”

They take their places around the makeshift “kitchen table set.” Francis turns up the opera. They start the scene.

They are good. Quaid is doing it all from memory and he’s a major guy and he will be tough to beat. The Tom Howell kid, I’ve never heard of; he looks like a baby and is so low-key it seems like he is not even trying. But he also seems real, there’s nothing forced about his performance. Baio is a huge TV star on
Happy Days
, so if Coppola wants stars, he’s got a shot. He was also terrific in Alan Parker’s
Bugsy Malone
with Jodie Foster.

Like everyone else, I’m watching, judging, looking for any edge I can find to help my own audition when I’m finally called.

I run through a matrix of possibilities. Do I play it from memory, like Quaid? If I do, Francis may think I’m so prepared that it’s a final performance with no room left for improvement (or his direction). But being “off book” also shows nerve, craft, and dedication. Do I stand on it emotionally and really crank up the conflict that’s there to be exploited in the writing? Or do I play it understated, withholding something? When great actors do this (like Pacino as Michael Corleone) it’s riveting; when lesser actors do it, it’s dull. I watch Tommy Howell—it’s clear he is in heavy contention for Ponyboy—and he stays in first gear almost all the time and never “pushes.” I consider my biggest dilemma, one that every actor at any level struggles with; at the end of my big scene, I have to break down and cry. How much is too much? And behind that unanswerable question is the one that makes any actor’s heart stop—what if I can’t cry on cue?

And that’s all it takes. In that one nanosecond of doubt, I feel the blood rush to my head, and my chest begin to tighten. I don’t know if I can cry during the scene but I sure as hell could cry right now. In the lit arena the actors are killing it, knocking it out of the park. When they finish, another group takes over, and another, and then another. No one flames out. No one sucks. It is unheard-of to actually sit and watch your competition, and there’s good reason for this protocol: it makes the pressure almost unbearable.