My Mother Was Nuts

  But they were in L.A. at the beginning of October when Tracy went into labor. She was in what I considered one of her hippie-dippy phases, insisting on a home birth, and so she was in the bedroom with her midwife when I arrived at night after getting a call that it was time. My ex-husband Mickey was in the living room with Dan, and we had a warm reunion. He was remarried for the third time and excited about becoming a grandparent.

  He and Dan made small talk and were oblivious to the panic I saw on the midwife’s face when we peeked into the room for an update. Her expression caused me to step straight into the action and hold Tracy down. “Look at me,” I said. The problem was that the baby coming out of her, a boy they named Spencer, weighed eleven pounds, seven ounces. I told Tracy that he came out asking for the car keys.

  Two weeks later I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. Carrie and I had one of our joint parties and the world showed up. After starting them in 1981, these parties had become major events. We alternated between our homes. No invitations went out; everyone received a phone call telling them the date and time. A few days later, we would receive calls from people asking if they could come.

  Most guests were longtime friends like Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, and Robin Williams. New people, like Ben Affleck and Nicole Kidman, were added every year. One year David Bowie and Iman crashed. The food was a big draw. Carrie’s housekeeper, Gloria, and her mother’s longtime housekeeper, Mary, made fried chicken, meatloaf, mac and cheese, and other Southern staples. Barbra Streisand wanted to hire them for a party. Carrie wouldn’t let her.

  Albert Brooks once cracked, “If a bomb went off at one of their parties, Anson Williams would have a career.” That’s what the scene looked like at my fiftieth. My brother’s wife, Barbara, still talks about introducing herself to Al Pacino, De Niro, and Pesci, who were huddled in a corner. As soon as they found out she was a nurse, they began asking her about their aches and pains. Pesci raised his arm and said, “When I do this, it hurts. What does that mean?”

  Jerry Belson had gone home early that night with ulcer pains. But he called around 3 a.m. I was still up, getting the stragglers to go home.

  “Penny, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t even know if you should know.”

  “Jerry, what?”

  “I saw Gregory Peck stealing tchotchkes,” he said. “I didn’t know if I should tell you.”

  I knew he was joking and had called to find out what he had missed. He also knew that I’d be up at that hour. Despite reaching middle age, I felt as energetic as I did twenty years earlier. If necessary, I could go all night, and sometimes I did. After fixing up a house for Tracy in L.A.—she and Dan split soon after—I went to New York where I now owned two apartments. It was December, and I made the rounds of friends getting ready for the holidays. One night I went to a play with Greenhut, and afterward we went to a party Ronald Perelman was having for his then-wife Claudia Cohen. It was her birthday, and he was celebrating at the Paramount Hotel. When Greenhut and I walked in, Marvin Hamlisch was playing the piano. As soon as he spotted me, Marvin switched songs midverse and sang, “We flew to the sky with tears in our eyes …”

  It was a song he had written for my group in camp. I immediately joined in. The funny thing was, another woman at the party had also gone to camp with us and she began to sing, too. Ronald hadn’t gone to camp, but he had grown up in Philadelphia and knew a number of the girls I knew from camp. It was a small world. We enjoyed comparing notes.

  Ronald and I clicked. Like me, he was a little quirky, but fun, smart, and loyal. He liked to travel. I guess this was what I’d call my CEO period. I was friendly with Paul Allen, David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Ronald. All of them had private jets. It was nice. You just don’t meet many people who call you up and say, “Come with me to Germany tomorrow. We’ll go on the jet. I want to look at a yacht.” Another time Ron invited me to London for a Paul McCartney concert. I took the Concorde, thinking we were going to a rock show. It turned out to be one of Sir Paul’s early classical symphonies. We ate dinner with Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. That’s the way Ronald rolled.

  In early 1993, I tried to develop various projects, including The Nature of Enchantment, a moving story about a traumatized child growing up. I also worked on a script called The Boys of Neptune, a portrait of four men in their mid- to late forties who return to the Jersey Shore and take the same lifeguard jobs they’d had as teenagers. The studios weren’t interested.

  One day Sara Colleton, a producer I knew from Fox, sent me Renaissance Man, explaining it was based on a true story. Written by her friend Jim Burnstein, a professor at the University of Michigan, it was about an unemployed single dad named Bill Rago who gets a job with the Army teaching recruits struggling with their class work in basic training.

  As the story had gone down in real life, the recruits had to pass their high school equivalency as part of basic training. But the new Army required a high school diploma. So the story sort of went in the crapper. But we made it about the accomplishment of learning, in particular discovering and performing Shakespeare. Rago loved the Bard; his students had never heard of him—or much of anything else that came from a book. They were known on the base as “double D’s”—dumb as dog shit. As he said in the first classroom scene, “I’ve never taught before, and you’ve never thought before. So good luck to all of us.”

  I didn’t think Renaissance Man was a blockbuster (and I didn’t know about the blockbuster part of the business, anyway), but I liked its message. Renaissance Man was a nice story about a guy who turned his life around as he helped kids. I knew that if I did my job, people would leave the theater feeling a little better—or, in the words of my mother, they’d leave feeling entertained—and that’s what I was into.

  The first reading at my house was an A-list evening with Leo Di-Caprio, Keanu Reeves, the Wayans brothers, and Courtney Vance among those who traded their talents and a couple hours of their time to help me to explore the script in exchange for a nice dinner. Danny DeVito wanted the lead, and I liked the idea of working with him. I had once played myself in an episode of Taxi where Danny’s character, Louie De Palma, and I both wanted the same apartment. After signing on, he said, “Put wood in the budget.”

  “What?” I said, like I knew how to make a budget.

  “You’ll need extra wood,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  It was because Danny is short and I had to put planks of wood under him to raise him up. When he was teaching, he was up on a platform, and when he walked between the desks we switched the actors into lower chairs. For those young soldiers, I wanted a mix of guys who would look like they needed the Army to give them a boost in life and also who would tackle Shakespeare like regular-sounding people. Leo had looked too young. Though Keanu read, he didn’t relate to the Army. And I badly wanted Marlon Wayans, but his pilot got picked up.

  As I searched Hollywood for fresh actors, I went to a fashion tribute to Calvin Klein at the Hollywood Bowl. I had known Calvin since junior high and reminded everyone that night that he was one of the few boys who could dance well. The last model to walk out on stage at the fashion show was its biggest star, a rapping pop star known as “Marky” Mark. The crowd went nuts, and he stood front and center and drove them into an even bigger frenzy.

  “Who is he?” I asked. I had never heard of Marky Mark or the Funky Bunch. I did period movies and didn’t keep up with popular music. However, before we had left the Bowl’s crowded parking lot, I was on the phone to my assistant, telling her to bring the kid in.

  I met Mark in New York. He walked in looking confused, like he had no idea why he was there. Between modeling, concerts, and personal appearances, he was probably on a schedule where he woke up and didn’t know where he was. But he gave me a strong reading and impressed me even more as a person. He was tough, sweet, and intelligent. I liked him. Whatever
it was that made people stars, he had it. After an hour together, he left the room with his first movie role.

  “Hey,” I said before he disappeared. “What do you want your credit to be? Marky Mark? Mark? Wahlberg?”

  “Just Mark Wahlberg,” he said.

  The other actors who played privates with Mark included Lillo Brancato, Kadeem Hardison, Stacey Dash, Greg Sporleder, Peter Simmons, and Richard T. Jones. I wanted Tupac Shakur to play Hobbs, a street-smart soldier who rapped. He auditioned and was very good. He gave me props for pronouncing his name correctly, too. But he didn’t think Hobbs would rap. As we talked, the real issue emerged: He didn’t want to rap onscreen.

  I liked him and didn’t give up easily. I knew the rap in the script wasn’t any good because it had been written by a white, Jewish professor in Michigan. I told Tupac that he could write his own rap. He still said no.

  The role went to New York actor Khalil Kain, and Mark wrote a new rap. To balance James Remar as the good, understanding captain, I wanted Ving Rhames to play the tough drill sergeant. He said, “Penny, I’d love to do your movie. But this other guy wrote a part specifically for me in this movie called Pulp Fiction, and I said I’d do it.”

  Ving helped me out with some casting, but in his place I turned to Gregory Hines, a sweetheart who could do anything—act, sing, and dance—except play mean or tough. Even if he got angry, Gregory was nice. Everyone loved him. During breaks, the two of us would go off in a corner and tap. His ability as a dancer made him impressive at leading marching drills, which we shot alongside actual basic training graduates at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina.

  We shot there for six weeks. Fort Jackson was and still is the Army’s largest training base. Kadeem and Richard missed their plane and arrived late, and Mark was this wide-eyed, inexperienced kid who told people that he was working with Laverne and the little guy from Taxi. All of these guys were young. Before every scene, I sounded like a drill sergeant myself: “Lillo, put on your glasses. Mark, pull up your pants.”

  Mark was a quick study and excellent improviser, a skill that I valued in my actors. He annoyed the shit out of the base’s major by wearing his hat sideways. I was amused. His only complaint was the same as mine: boredom. We didn’t find much to do outside of work. The big thing there was Rally Burgers and Krispy Kreme donuts. Danny had a private chef who passed out cloves of garlic every morning as if they were vitamins. They didn’t prevent stir-craziness. One day Lillo said something insulting that made everyone want to beat the shit out of him, which happens sometimes when you’re too on top of one another. Mark stepped in, spoke to Lillo, got him to apologize, and kept the peace.

  He was poised even then when he didn’t know much, and we’ve stayed friends ever since. I’m not surprised he became a mogul while staying a great guy. I like that he’s credited me with getting him out of underwear and the Funky Bunch.

  We finished production on the lot at Sony, where Mark and the others would steal the golf carts and race around the studio. I also brought in the La Jolla Playhouse’s acclaimed artistic director Des McAnuff to oversee the production of Shakespeare’s Henry V that Danny’s character took the soldiers to see. It was a play within the movie, and I wanted it to be authentic.

  As George Bowers and Battle Davis edited the movie, Danny asked a favor. He was on the lot making Get Shorty, a dark comedy about a mobster who goes to Hollywood, and he wanted to know if I would play myself as a movie director in the movie’s final scene. I said sure. It was only one day of work.

  Get Shorty director Barry Sonnenfeld welcomed me onto the set. We hadn’t seen each other since we made Big. He had been my director of photography. After that movie wrapped, Barry, Robert Greenhut, the writers, and I had all sworn never to work with one another again. It was a joke. Greenhut was producing Renaissance Man and we had worked together on League.

  On Get Shorty, I only had to say a few lines and then get in an SUV and drive away. It was the end of a movie—a wrap. As a stickler for detail, though, I explained that I didn’t drive. I always had a driver. Everyone knew that about me. If I was playing myself … As a result, my assistant Kristin ended up in the movie, too.

  At that point, Renaissance Man was ready to test. I insisted on showing it at a theater in Oakland, California. It was in a rough neighborhood. Andy Vajna, one of our executive producers, asked, “What’s going on? I test Rambo films there, not comedies.” That was my point. I felt like the film was for inner-city kids who might be dropping out of school or having self-esteem issues because learning didn’t come easily to them, and I wanted to see their reaction.

  It seemed positive. They laughed at the beginning and applauded at the end. They also teared up when the soldiers are on a drill at night in the cold and pouring rain, facing challenging elements and considering giving up, and Lillo’s Benitez character recites King Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. It was an emotional measure of how far they had all come, including their teacher, Rago. The only glitch at the screening came when my wallet was stolen from my purse as I helped get Danny out of the theater. I got it back later, minus the cash.

  The real problem was that Sony opened Renaissance Man in June 1994, the start of summer. They told me it was The Fugitive spot. I suppose they thought that was good. Even though this was yet another movie where the studio executives changed between the time I started and finished the movie, they were the experts. But I thought a summer release killed its chances at the box office, and it turned out that I was right.

  It went up against The Lion King and Speed. I think if the movie had opened when school was in session, teachers would have sent their students to see it. I tried to be philosophical, though. You can only do your best.

  Danny, Mark, and I promoted the movie in Europe. We helicoptered into Brussels for a press conference and landed next to a theater where a bunch of reporters waited for us. But the rotors kicked up a storm of dust that drove them all away. When we returned to Paris, my brother and sister had left messages for me at the hotel. That was not a good sign. I reached Garry first. He said that my father had suffered a stroke.

  “Do I call Lorne yet?” I said.

  It was a roundabout way of asking if I needed to make arrangements to scatter some of his ashes over Broadway, too.

  “Not yet,” Garry said.

  At eighty-eight, my father was unable to speak and had trouble walking without assistance, but he refused to go to therapy. He would shake his arm at people and give them the finger. He was content with that; maybe that’s all he felt like saying or all he had to say. We got him a driver who took him every day to his country club in Toluca Lake, where he drank vodka and gave the finger to everyone. Whether he was saying hi, ’bye, or thanks, it all came out the same: Fuck you.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Gospel

  Penny on the set of 1996’s The Preacher’s Wife with

  Whitney Houston and Denzel Washington

  “The Preacher’s Wife” © 1996 Touchstone Pictures & Samuel Goldwyn Company

  NOT LONG AFTER the movie opened, Ronald bought a gorgeous estate in the Hamptons on fifty-seven acres known as “The Creeks” and invited me to decompress in his four-bedroom pool house. He asked me to tell him if it needed anything to make it more comfortable. After a few days, I told him he should get some bathmats, wastebaskets, and hair dryers, stuff like that. I also bought him some magnifying mirrors for next to the sink. “You’re friends aren’t that young,” I said. “I can’t see over the sink to put on my makeup.

  Ronald was the king of what I called speed partying—stay fifteen minutes at each place. That’s all he needed to see those he wanted or needed to see, and to be seen in return. One night I went with him to three events. I had a sip or two of a drink, but no more, and the next morning I woke up feeling stiffness in my left arm. It didn’t hurt as much as it felt weird. I paged Ronald, who couldn’t answer the phone because it was the Sabbath. He prayed for three hours on Saturdays. But security
rushed in and then the paramedics. “Hey, it’s Laverne,” one of them said.

  After we got around to talking about my symptoms, they checked my vital signs and then loaded me into the ambulance, all while I was protesting that I was feeling better and didn’t need to go to the hospital. I stopped protesting when I was wheeled into the ER and saw that the doctor waiting to examine me was an Andy Garcia look-alike. That was not an unpleasant way to spend a Saturday. After sunset, Ronald showed up with the head of the hospital in tow.

  By this time, they had given me a nitroglycerin pill even though the tests they ran earlier hadn’t indicated a heart attack. I was feeling strong and feisty and was ready to go back to Ronald’s, but the doctor wanted to me stay in the hospital twenty-four hours so they could watch me. I thought that was unnecessary. I asked what they thought the chances were of me suffering another bout of this mysterious whatever-it-was. The doctor put the odds at 50-50. “I’ll take that chance,” I said.

  Although Ronald offered to have all of the hospital equipment shipped to his house, I ended up spending the night at the hospital. Cell phones were now being used, and I borrowed one from one of Ronald’s security guards who stayed in the room with me. I called my brother, sister, and daughter and let them know I was fine. I also canceled a trip to Houston the next day to visit my good friend and editor Battle Davis, who had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma after working on Renaissance Man. That was the dark cloud in my life then. Battle and I were close. His prognosis didn’t look good—and it didn’t get better. He died a few months later, at age forty-one.

  The next day, as I returned to Ronald’s, I heard a report on the radio that I’d suffered a heart attack. No, I hadn’t. I was fine. Despite all the tests, the problem had never been diagnosed. The doctors said I had Syndrome X or Prinzmetal’s angina, which I thought meant I’m not supposed to listen to heavy-metal music. I still don’t know what it means. But I do know I only get it when I’m totally relaxed. My remedy? I needed more stress. Yet as we turned onto Ronald’s estate, I had one of those moments when the extraordinary beauty of his property, especially the trees, which had been there forever, made me appreciate all my good fortune. Life happened too quickly—except for Ronald’s trees. I had to remember to take it in—and find a project.