And there’s another strike against you in the party scene, perhaps the biggest of all: you are the world’s first and only Doogiesexual. Wherever you go in public you are reminded of this bizarre meta-reality. Almost every girl you meet at clubs thinks of you as Doogie. More often than not, they call you that. You do occasionally parlay your doppelgänger into some action: the loss of your hetero virginity dates to this time, a squalid, 4½-minute limp-dicked affair at a house party in New Mexico that was the direct result of one of the girl’s friends daring her to sleep with Doogie. (Given the quality of your performance, the dare could not possibly have been worth it.) But for the most part your encounters with women are not so much flirtations as bemused interrogations of a fictional doctor. Your actual sexual identity at this time is a mystery, even to you. Especially to you. It’s not that you’re suppressing anything; you haven’t even evolved to that point. You’re not aware of anything. You know that Doogie is playing wingman for you, but you have no idea he is also your inner beard.
* * *
To delve more into the tenuous netherworld that is your adolescent sexuality, go HERE.
If you prefer to keep those kind of issues hovering in your subconscious for now, go HERE.
For all this you still enjoy hanging out with your friends and watching the night unfold from a distance, laughing at yourself for the way you spend night after night breaking the law, wasting hundreds of dollars, and exposing yourself to earsplitting levels of music for the dubious privilege of having the exact same conversation with the exact same forty people from the night before.
But not everyone is as immune to the lures of the early-nineties club scene as you.
Scott Caan, for instance.
(Cue dramatic music sting!)
DANGEROUS PRETENSION: THE SCOTT CAAN STORY
STARRING
SCOTT CAAN as the son of James Caan
NEIL PATRICK HARRIS as that kid from Doogie Howser
And “THE WEST SIDE CRAZIES”
You are dating a very nice girl named Eden Sassoon, the daughter of Vidal. She was once Scott Caan’s girlfriend but they’ve been broken up for a year. You and Eden are out at a club, sitting at a booth enjoying a vodka and cranberry, when someone runs up to you like he’s in the cast of Newsies. “Hey, you gotta get out of here, see? Scott Caan’s here, see? If you don’t get outta here there’s gonna be trouble, see?” And then he runs off and another guy comes up and says, “Scott’s here, and he’s looking for you, ’cause you’re datin’ his girl, see?”1
Not looking to cause trouble, see, you decide to leave. You are waiting for the valet to bring your car around when up walks the one and only Mr. Scott Caan, wearing a hipster porkpie hat with the brim up, like the one Ed Norton wore on The Honeymooners. Scott bumps his chest against yours. He turns his head sideways. Now his face is almost in your ear. And suddenly he begins repeating this mantra: “What’s up with the West Side, yo? What’s up with the West Side, yo? What’s up with the West Side, yo?”
You are terrified and confused. Is this some sort of rap lyric? Children’s book verse? Government code for an incursion into Gaza? None of the above: it turns out that Scott is in “The West Side Crazies.” Is this a real gang? You’re not sure. To you it seems like a self-styled group of hooligans comin’ straight outta Brentwood, a cadre of young stars who’ve grown up deprived of deprivation trying to transform themselves into street toughs by forming ““gangs”” so devoid of street cred it’s necessary to put the word in two sets of quotes. What kind of criminal activity are they engaged in? Script laundering? Agent smuggling? Film miscasting? Who knows. They think they have a posse when what they really have is a pose.
Anyway, Scott Caan’s dope-ass mob is named “The West Side Crazies,” and if you can extrapolate from him, his fellow street-thugs are probably also the sons of famous actors. (Jake Busey? Kiefer Sutherland? Ed Begley Jr. Jr.?) And now, in defense of his honor and that of his gang, Scott Caan—whose father famously beat Carlo Rizzi to within an inch of his life in The Godfather—is repeatedly asking, “What’s up with the West Side, yo?” and bumping his chest into yours, like some mighty ram bumping his horns against a small nerdy kid’s chest.
Eventually your acerbic mind comes up with a simple, devastating response.
* * *
If your response to Scott Caan is “I’m going to do to your face what cancer did to your dad’s body in Brian’s Song,” go HERE.
If your response to Scott Caan is “I don’t know, Scott, what is up with the West Side?” go HERE.
* * *
1You notice how strange it is that people in 1991 are ending sentences with the Edward G. Robinson–style “see?” that hasn’t been used since 1938, but chalk it up to nostalgia.
In an alternate universe this is where Scott Caan takes a swing at you. In the actual universe, this is where Scott Caan begins acting like he desperately wants to take a swing at you if only his friends weren’t holding him back. Only it takes them a few seconds to intervene, so he has to improvise looking like he’s being restrained. None too convincing, you think. Then the whole thing ends as most things do, anticlimactically. The two of you are separated, and Scott, safely ensconced by fellow Crazies, flails his arms and screams, “You better get out of here, kid!” Which you promptly do.
Later in life you will remake the acquaintance of Scott Caan, and while you will like him much better you will still be kind of scared of him. He never brings up the incident. Perhaps he doesn’t remember it. You don’t feel the need to remind him. But you still hold out hope that one day he will offer you a little mea culpa. Like, “I’m sorry I acted like I wanted to kick your ass for dating a girl I’d broken up with a year prior.” Or, even better, “I’m sorry I was un-self-aware enough to be a charter member of a gang called ‘The West Side Crazies.’”
* * *
If you are ready to deal with another mercurial actor over a longer period of time, go HERE.
If you would like to put the Doogie period in general, and Scott Caan in particular, behind you, go HERE.
If you would like to learn a cocktail recipe far tastier than the vodka cranberries you’d been drinking just before meeting Scott Caan, go HERE.
If you would like to be verbally assaulted by Scott Caan, visit him on the set of Hawaii Five-0 and tell him you dated one of his exes.
Scott Caan does to your body what his father did to Carlo’s body in The Godfather.
You spend the rest of your life in traction.1
THE END
* * *
1What, you thought this would be more specific? You really want to give Mr. Caan ideas of potential ways to harm you? Have you seen how he’s built? And have you seen how you’re built? Seriously, go look at yourself in Doogie. That Brian’s Song joke was a bad idea, man.
Doogie Howser, M.D. ends in 1993, as do your teens. Together in life, together in death.
The series makes it to syndication, which bodes well for your ability to support yourself, at least in the short term. It also means that it won’t be easy to escape the shadow of your fictional alter ego. You have managed to navigate the waters of child stardom without crashing into the rocks of egomania, the shores of self-entitlement, or the Cape of Cocaine.1 You are eager—or so you think—to move on to the next stage of your career. But others seem less so, and when you focus your attention on returning to movies, you hit a brick wall. You are repeatedly rejected by producers and directors who see you as a TV actor forever linked in the public consciousness with one particular role, like Adam West as Batman or Snuffleupagus as Snuffleupagus.
You also find no luck when you audition for new recurring TV roles. But you do find work in the bastard stepchild of movies and TV known as made-for-TV movies. You appear in six in quick succession, four in 1995 alone, and will ultimately do over a dozen. The good news is the money’s pretty good. The bad news is they are of varying quality and little to no artistic merit.
You begin to feel a litt
le frustrated. You’re in your early twenties, and sometimes you have daymares in which strangers yell “Yo, Doogie!” at you for the rest of your life. Then you’re buried alive in a tomb engraved with the words “Here lies Doogie Howser, R.I.P.” You feel adrift, both professionally and personally. Nothing is grounding you and you don’t know how to go about making that happen.
One day on a whim, you overcome your innate cynicism of infomercials and buy a set of Tony Robbins audio lectures. To your surprise you find them genuinely stirring. Inspired, you decide to attend one of Tony’s weekend seminars in Hawaii. Although lacking the dramatic walking-on-hot-coals and/or climbing-onto-a-big-pole-and-jumping-onto-a-trapeze-style activities you were hoping for, the event is nonetheless profoundly transformative. It’s terrifying but revelatory to spend twelve straight hours in a group of two hundred strangers sharing their stories. You realize that hearing teens yell a fictional name at you ten times a day is a far lesser ordeal than that of, say, a man who’s been through four marriages, or a woman who was repeatedly molested by her father as a child. The weekend makes you realize you have no excuses for being the slave of your own story. As Tony might say, you have to move on from your past, live in the present, and create your own future by following your passion.2
The getting-out-of-LA thing feels nice. No doubt about it: a change would do you doogie. Rejuvenated, you pay a visit to your childhood friends Louis and Elizabeth Rutherford, a married couple living in the tiny New Mexico town of Placitas. Louis, Elizabeth, and their dogs spend their days hiking and mountain climbing and cooking and staring up at the magnificent night sky. Damn, you find their way of life appealing. You decide to move to Placitas, reasoning that since the TV-movie jobs you’re getting offered don’t require auditions, you’re free to base yourself anywhere. You take up residence in a little adobe house, returning to California only for the occasional shoot. Ready to embrace living in the moment, you spend eighteen wonderful months doing little more than climbing, hiking, working out, writing, visiting your family, and watching the tube. It’s a happy period of your life worthy of a cheery montage in one of the TV movies you’re shooting, set to the tune of, oh, Howard Jones’s “New Song.” It’s surprisingly easy to part with your LA life, and surprisingly comforting to learn the only suitcase you really need to travel with is the white bony one covering your brain.
You also briefly experiment with psychedelic drugs. You take mushrooms a few times, beginning each session hopeful the trip will expand your mind, ending each one staring in the bathroom mirror muttering, “Pull yourself together, man! You can do this! You can do this!” So you go the extra mile and drop acid with a group of friends. Afterward the only thing you remember is staring at a weeping willow tree in front of your house and watching its leaves turn into frogs hanging by their hind feet and one of the frogs turning his head and shrugging at you as if to say, “Yep, a tree filled with frogs. What are you gonna do?” You emerge from your one and only LSD experience as one of the few people to find the drug neither transcendent nor horrific, just kinda weird.
Above all you are preparing. You have no intention of giving up show business; it makes you feel too alive, awakens too many nerve endings in you. It’s something you want to do for the rest of your life. But you need to reconnect with yourself, to spend some time a thousand miles away from Hollywood, far enough to hear the quieter stirrings of your own body and deepening soul.
The payoff of this period takes place in Albuquerque, at the Landmark Forum, another popular series of intensive weekend group self-help sessions. You are psychologically ready for the trek back to the West Coast but you’d like some tools to deal with the expectations other people will put on you. The Forum gives you these tools, teaching you to recognize the ways people project their own layers of subjective meaning onto reality, to distinguish personal agendas from objective truth. Through exercises you come to understand why it is that, for example, when you innocently tell someone “You look great today,” they are less inclined to respond with “Thank you” than “Why, do I normally not look great?” or “Dude, are you hitting on me?” Such insights into human motivation and behavior are not only wonderful in navigating the world of other people, they mark a crucial step toward eliminating such distortions in yourself.
And in that spirit, after much reflection, and insight, and quite possibly a shot or two of whiskey, you boost up your courage and, when asked to say something about yourself in a small group discussion, stand up and haltingly but confidently say, “I am bisexual.”
There’s a long pause. Then one of your married friends who’s attending the weekend with you says, “Really? Cool, so am I.” You find that nice to hear, as opposed to, say, “Get out of my face.”
In retrospect your admission of bisexuality will come to seem like a half-truth. But right now it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth … insofar as you are prepared to acknowledge it at that moment. It’s a very important step. It boosts up your courage. Not every veneer comes down at once, but once they do, they start dropping like lemmings.
In the meantime, life doesn’t stop. The show must go on … or the movie. But which?
* * *
To re-experience the wonder that is the made-for-television movie, go HERE.
To attempt to embark on a stage career, go HERE.
To return to LA and make another push to star on the big screen, go HERE.
* * *
1It’s off the Santa Monica Pier.
2You are also befriended by Tony, who takes you on a helicopter ride to a friend’s house in the middle of a Hawaiian rain forest to have lunch. This is less profoundly transformative and more just really frigging cool.
Over the decades you guest-star on episodes of more than a dozen different TV sitcoms and dramas. Without exception, each one is very special.
For instance, you do a very special episode of B. L. Stryker starring Burt Reynolds in 1989. (You’re asked to do it because the previous year Burt’s wife Loni Anderson had drowned you in a lake in the TV movie Too Good to Be True, and evidently she was impressed by your drowning technique.) You play a precocious young evangelist whose life is being threatened until B. L. comes on the case. At one point you are hanging out with Burt, who’s a lovely guy, sitting in the passenger seat of a convertible filming a scene. As a joke at the end of one take, Burt leans over and kisses you square on the mouth. The crew thinks this is very funny, but it makes you uncomfortable. Uncomfortable and, it will ultimately turn out, gay. Burt Reynolds’s kiss makes you gay.
You are on a very special episode of Blossom starring your lifelong friend Mayim Bialik. They’re doing a parody version of the Madonna documentary Truth or Dare and you play Warren Beatty’s part. You make out with Blossom and persuade her to fire her father-manager. Then you make out with her some more. It’s far more action than you ever get on Doogie Howser, M.D.1
You do a very special episode of The Simpsons called “Bart the Murderer.” It’s so cool! You’re not a die-hard Simpsons fan, but just being part of that world for an afternoon is unforgettable. In the episode Bart becomes involved with organized crime, and at the end he sits down to watch a fictionalized TV-movie version of his own story, and you are “cast” as him. This might make you the only voice actor other than Nancy Cartwright to play Bart.
You are on a very special episode of Roseanne. It’s a quasi-Doogie cameo: after deciding to get a breast reduction, Roseanne has a nightmare in which she wakes up to find her breasts have actually grown in size. The operating room door opens, you appear, the crowd gives its standard-issue recognition applause, and you say, “What’s wrong? Not big enough?” All the backstage stories you’ve heard about the show appear to be true. As you wait to rehearse, you watch Roseanne and her then husband Tom Arnold whisper to each other. Roseanne screams, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!” and storms off, and then everyone waits a half hour until the first assistant director sheepishly says, “Okay, everyone, that’s our
day, thank you!” Not the most emotionally stable set, Roseanne.
You are on a very special episode of Murder, She Wrote, your mom’s favorite show. You play a grocery boy wrongly accused of the eponymous offense.2 You harbor directorial ambitions, and Angela Lansbury is kind enough to let you be an “observing director,” meaning you get to spend the week shadowing the director and asking him annoying questions like “Is this a camera?” and “Where’s the bathroom?” Angela is the consummate pro. And she is a longtime outstanding Tony host. And the two of you make sweet, sweet love in her dressing room. What a week.
You are on a very special episode of Quantum Leap, which is awesome because it’s one of your favorite shows ever. You love the time-travel premise, you love Dean Stockwell, and you love Scott Bakula. He’s a sexy, great actor whose work you’ve already admired in the criminally underrated Broadway musical Romance/Romance. It’s odd casting, though, because you’re playing a bad-guy hoodlum in the fifties, and you look nothing like a bad guy. Your neck is long and your ears stick out of the side of your head and you look like Beaker from the Muppets. Your dialogue may as well be “Mi mi mi mi mi!”
Neil Patrick Harris Page 6