Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Goldsmith

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  DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All photographs courtesy of the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9781101986233

  Ebook ISBN 9781101986257

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  Version_3

  To my father, Milton, who taught me how to live

  To my wife, Barbara, who taught me how to love

  And to my children, for the ongoing inspiration

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACT I

  Don’t Get Left Behind

  Your Body Can Do Anything You Put Your Mind To

  There Are All Different Kinds of Heroes

  You Are Who You Know

  Cultivate Eccentric Influences

  Know Your Roots

  Adventure Is What You Make of It

  The Longer It Waits, the More the Truth Hurts

  Your Most Prized Possessions Shouldn’t Be Possessions

  Every Challenge Is a Chance to Build Your Strength

  What’s in a Name Matters Less Than What’s in the One Who’s Named

  Sometimes, You Gotta Believe in Magic

  Consider Where the Joke That Goes Too Far Might Take You

  Just Because You Fight Fair Doesn’t Mean the World Will Too

  Know When to Make an Exit

  Never Let School Get in the Way of Your Education

  Some Rites of Passage Aren’t Right at All

  If Being You Isn’t Working, Be Someone Else

  Flexibility Isn’t Just for Gymnasts

  Don’t Be Overconfident If You’re Going to Underdeliver

  Put All Your Baggage to Good Use

  Hunger Is the Best Chef

  Play Nice with Others

  Don’t Put It in Writing

  Sometimes, Opportunity Knocking Sounds a Lot Like Bad Tennis

  ACT II

  The Best Time to Go for Broke Is When You’re Already Broke

  If at First You Don’t Succeed, Get Used to It

  Never Make It Final

  Even the Lowliest Job Can Lead to Another Job

  Steal Nothing but Hearts

  When Life Puts You Low, Start Climbing

  If You Can’t Move On, at Least You Can Move

  The Only Way to Get Experience Is to Have Experiences

  Allow Yourself a Very Wide Margin of Error

  It’s Better to Die Onstage Than to Not Get Onstage at All

  If You Want Something Done Right, Do It Yourself

  Your Greatest Teacher Won’t Be Found in School

  Fortune Favors the Bold and the Brash

  Let It All Hang Out

  Quality, Not Quantity. But, Also, Quantity.

  Three’s Company, a Freeway’s a Crowd

  There’s One Thing That Never Gets Old . . .

  People Are Paying Attention to Whether You’re Paying Attention

  Between Good Friends, “Call Me Anytime” Means Just That

  ACT III

  Everyone Needs to Be Haunted Once in Their Life

  Not All Good Guys Are Good

  Some Good Guys Are Just Good

  Some Bad Guys Are Also Good Guys

  Be Happy with What You Have

  The Only Thing You Can’t Make More of Is Time

  FINALE

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ACT I

  I woke up in the back of my truck and looked around the campground. It was empty. It was late fall and the backpackers and tourists who pass through Sycamore Canyon, which overlooks parts of Malibu on the California coast, were all gone. Even the folks who ran the campground had disappeared. I put on my sandals and walked over to the changing station to take a shower. Inside the drafty bathroom, which resembled the men’s room at Mule Creek State Prison, I made my way to the showers, turned the lever, and waited on the cold cement floor in bare feet for the hot water to kick in. It never came.

  Shit, I thought. What luck. A big audition today, my first in months, and I couldn’t even take a hot shower. I was tired, having not slept well the night before, and doubts nagged me. Had I lost the ability to make people laugh in my ten years away from acting? Did I still have the charm, if I ever had it at all? So many years, so many almosts. Could I hide the bitterness? Could I stand another rejection? A whole lifetime of disappointments. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to run away either.

  From the back of my truck, I was reminded of how far I had fallen. The colony across the highway was buzzing. The moguls left their beautiful homes and beautiful wives and beautiful children and drove their beautiful sports cars to the studios. They had everything I wanted. In the distance, I could see the glow in the sky from the incredible houses overlooking the surf in the hills of Malibu. I could hear the sound of the ocean waves crashing as I imagined the lives of the people in those houses. Accomplished people. I felt totally isolated and ineffectual. I was living a nightmare that I used to have as a child, where somebody’s fighting me and I can’t move my shoulders or arms. Nothing works. I’m defenseless.

  I’d been feeling that way a lot, given my downward trajectory. What had happened to me? How had I reached this low point? What had I done? Only a short time ago I had been a prosperous entrepreneur. I had started a company out of the back of the very same pickup truck I was now changing in, and the project had become so successful that my partner and I had more than a hundred employees working in a building that we owned, along with some land, and were netting more than 150 million dollars a year in profits. I had been the president, the leader, and I had passed through most airports in the world to create what was becoming our own little empire. But, as one learns through life’s chapters, the mistakes we make and traps we set for ourselves tend to follow us like shadows. For me, the same old issues never faded away. In this case, I had committed a familiar sin: I had trusted too much. The company sank and split apart.

  The legal morass was crippling, and not only emotionally. I had no income, and the bills—attorneys’, mortgage, and so on—had piled up on me so fast I was worried about bankruptcy. What was I going to do for work? Where was I going to live? After a lifetime, I had
finally built my own house in the High Sierra. It was constructed of wood milled from sixty thousand feet of timber sprawling over 120 acres, all of which I had been forced to sell to cover my growing expenses. Also on the chopping block was Celebration, my sixty-foot sailboat, which I and my captain (well, former captain; I had to let him go too) had returned to our winter berth in Miami, following the most fabulous passage through the Caribbean from Trinidad. I was never desirous of owning fancy cars: my ’65 Ford pickup could go anywhere. The diesel behemoth would do, but with my dwindling finances I must confess the feelings of panic, anxiety, and dread were overbearing. How was I going to survive? Could I go back to show business after such a long absence?

  I remembered those presentations in hotels, boardrooms, and church basements when I imagined myself to be onstage, trying to perfect my performance. Someday, I thought, I might get another chance. Now I had it: Once again, I had to start over.

  At least that was something I had a lot of experience with.

  But I wasn’t eighteen or twenty-three anymore. I wasn’t thirty-five or forty-five. I was in my late sixties, past the age of retirement, and looking to start fresh in a world and economy that was far faster than I was, and hyperdigital as well. Too many buttons to push. Too few people left to speak with. I had become an alien.

  I was in survival mode, conserving every dollar. Instead of enjoying the comforts of a hotel room before an audition, ensuring that I got a good rest, I had crashed in the back of my pickup and was living like a hobo. Maybe I had become a hobo, I thought, now getting dressed outside my truck for the audition. I had a sport jacket that I wore on special occasions, folded in the back with a camping stove and other gear. Sitting on the open tailgate, I put on my pants, socks, and loafers and was reminded of my first days in Hollywood, hauling industrial waste around the city to earn a few extra dollars and changing into my suit in my garbage truck, which I used to get to auditions. More than forty years had passed! Had anything changed? Christ, I couldn’t even play a lobster on ice skates in one stupid commercial.

  I had no mirror to use. For some last-minute grooming, I leaned in front of the side mirror of my truck with my razor, trimming a few spots on my beard line without shaving cream or hot water, and in the reflection of my truck’s mirror I was again confronted with myself, the immense challenge of trying to resurrect a career in front of me, my past gnawing at me, and the inescapable burden of that most precious commodity: time. It always hurtles along too fast, and no matter how hard you try to slow it down, you never have a chance to get any of it back. Had I spent my days wisely? Could I have done more?

  I hopped into the truck, turned over the gears, and pulled out of the campground, a cloud of diesel smoke behind me. Out on a familiar road, all those memories came to me—of the nights we set campfires out by Point Dume; and that time I helped save a girl who was drowning in Malibu; and the other time the lifeguards had to come save me and Rosie, a red-haired, freckle-faced beauty I had coaxed into the water (and then out of her bathing suit) before we both got swept up in a riptide. Indeed, my finest moments had not cost a dime, financed instead by a mix of courage, boldness, and stupidity.

  I thought back over the many years of auditions. Getting my energy up. Being on when I was really falling apart. How would I handle another disappointment at my age?

  I pulled out the instructions that Barbara, my new agent, had given me for the audition.

  The address was 200 South La Brea; the time, one o’clock. It was a casting facility, one of hundreds peppered throughout Hollywood, a place I hadn’t been to in years. I knew very little about the gig, only a few scraps of information that Barbara had told me over the phone. It was a commercial role for a beer company. Heineken had a new campaign they wanted to launch for Dos Equis, a beer that needed a boost in their Latino market, and was hiring a new spokesman of sorts for the brand. What specifically were they looking for?

  “They want a Hemingway kind of guy,” she said. “That’s you!”

  I wasn’t so sure. Dos Equis had a Latino market. I was not Latino.

  “Honey, I’m all wrong for this,” I told her.

  “Just give it your best and then forget about it,” she said.

  I asked her for instructions. Was there any script to read? Any storyboard?

  “They want improv,” she said. “You can do any kind of monologue you want, but you have to end with their line.”

  “What’s the line?” I asked her.

  “No matter where you start your monologue, you have to end with the line ‘And that’s how I arm-wrestled Fidel Castro,’” she said.

  The engine of the truck grinding beneath me, I pulled out onto the Pacific Coast Highway. I searched my past. A life of lessons, some learned the hard way, some learned laughing, some learned in the heat of passion or the cold of rejection. So many lessons—but had any given me a clue as to how I could have ever come to arm-wrestle Fidel Castro?

  Don’t Get Left Behind

  I didn’t run away the first time. Mother did. I was only six weeks old, just a newborn swaddled in cloth. The supermarket was just at the bottom of the hill, only a few blocks from our apartment in Riverdale. I’ll never know what happened next. I do know that Mother left the store, taking her groceries home, but she left one package behind.

  Mind you, she was busy. And adored. She had started working for Conover’s Cover Girls, a leading model agency run by Harry Conover, then the fashion czar of New York. The job was the gateway to fame, stardom, and fortune. She modeled sable pelts, feather boas, silk brassieres, hats, bathing suits. She was close friends with Lauren Bacall, who also started her career as one of Harry Conover’s Cover Girls, and always ran late to auditions. Maybe that was why, in the bustle of juggling grocery parcels and a budding career, something had to get overlooked and left behind in the aisle of a supermarket.

  Unfortunately, that something was an infant. And, most unfortunately, that infant was me.

  When I asked her about it years later, at least her answer was honest.

  “I just forgot,” she said. But I never did.

  It would not be the last time she left me someplace. When I was five years old, perhaps the earliest age a parent can legally send a child away, I was enrolled in Mrs. Hunt’s Boarding School, a depository for errant children, in Cedarhurst, Long Island. My memories? Pulling up to the brick building in a taxi, dressed in a suit and tie, the late spring snow dusting over the windshield in flakes that quickly disappeared.

  Mrs. Hunt was the headmistress, and she scared me. Even at that age I could recognize an attractive woman, but her blue eyes were cold, austere, and judgmental. My mother and I sat across from her at her desk, my legs dangling from the seat. Mrs. Hunt listened as Mother told her how I had become a difficult child at home.

  The problem was, I was listening too. Apparently, I was a naughty, unloving, unmanageable boy. This was news to me. I wanted to speak up. She’s lying! But, being five, I was not adept at personal representation. So I just sat there, and soon I was watching the taillights of her taxi disappear through the windows. I chased after her, and when I knew she was not coming back and I could not catch her, I hid under the yellow flowers of a forsythia bush, already in bloom in spite of the late snowfall. As I had yet to learn the finer intricacies of covert operations, I was soon discovered, picked up under the arms by Mrs. Hunt, and ferried through the dorm, which for some reason smelled like burned toast, and into a quaint room. I watched the heavy door close behind me.

  The truth was, I wasn’t a bad kid. I just missed my father. And imagining him coming to rescue me, wearing the maroon Woolrich coat he always did when we went fishing, the hood hanging back over his shoulders, got me through my days. When was he coming to get me?

  At night, I cried myself to sleep at Mrs. Hunt’s, staring at the ceiling. My mother was wrong about me, and I knew it. If I had known more about her past or had the
ability to understand that she was doing her best, it would have been different. But I was a five-year-old; my emotional maturity and deep sense of empathy were less than developed.

  Your Body Can Do Anything You Put Your Mind To

  The truth is, Mother was not suited for parenthood, a predilection that was not her fault. Her own mother had died in front of her, suffering a stroke in a shop the family ran in Brooklyn. Her untimely death left my mother, Greta, and her older brother, Eli, to fend for themselves. They had their father, my grandfather Alexander, but he was a radical eccentric, an intellectual, and a drifter. And after my grandmother’s death, drift he did.

  Alexander was disabled, so it’s amazing he drifted so far, landing on that pirate boat off Costa Rica and living for a time on a Navajo reservation. As a young child he developed a bone disease, osteomyelitis, and his legs never grew. His disease was difficult to treat professionally. So he treated it himself, most unprofessionally: On his shin, there was deep open wound that revealed his faulty bones. He’d take out his pocketknife, flip open the blade, and start carving away at his shin bone, eliciting a terrible odor that reminded me of rotten meat. I don’t know why cutting up his own leg caused such a foul smell or why it was therapeutic, but I do know it happened. I assure you. I saw it.

  As odd as he was, Alexander was an inspiration. To compensate for his failing legs, he followed an intense muscle-building regimen for his upper torso, which came to resemble that of a Greek god. He was so strong he could perform an iron cross, a gymnast’s maneuver in which he suspended himself between two steel rings with his arms held horizontally. And yet he couldn’t even walk on his own. To steady himself, my grandfather used a shillelagh, a cane made from dark hardwood, which doubled as a cudgel to threaten anyone who disagreed with his Bolshevik politics, which was just about everyone.

  He was hardly a nurturing soul. Once, I remember Flight, our springer spaniel, jumped up on the nightstand and ate my grandfather’s dentures, then washed them down with a delicious black slipper. Grandpa was pissed. Shillelagh in one hand raised for battle and the surviving slipper in the other, he hobbled spastically after the frightened dog, frantically whipping the air with the footwear.