My Mother Was Nuts

  Too bad, too. Critics from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times found plenty to recommend. But I knew it needed help. I went to New York to do press with Whitney, and while there, I called Lorne and said, “I think we need Saturday Night Live.” He made it very easy. Even better, he arranged for Rosie O’Donnell to host.

  Unfortunately I lost my voice at the end of the press junket and woke up Saturday morning barely able to make a sound. That had happened to me once before when I was playing Ado Annie in Oklahoma! I went to Ronald’s doctor and told him about some red stuff that I had gargled with right before I needed my voice and it lasted for about two minutes.

  Somehow he knew what I was talking about. I was impressed. As a result, I was able to participate in three sketches, including one where Rosie, Whitney, and I sang “I’ve Got You Babe.”

  Then I left the country, as I always did when one of my movies opened. This time the destinations were Laos and Cambodia. I went with Janie Wenner, the ex-wife of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Janie liked getting away over the holidays, I think because she and Jann had wed at Christmastime in 1967. With a private jet at her disposal, she asked if I wanted to join her and a couple friends. I signed on immediately.

  After SNL, I went home and packed, and we left in the morning. We stopped in Turkey to refuel and let the pilots sleep. Then we arrived in Laos, a country of immense beauty and extreme poverty. The people were sweet. The children we saw had nothing. I gave them everything I could down to the pencils and pens in my bag.

  We explored the capital, Vientiane, and boated on the Mekong River before heading into Cambodia, a rougher country where we needed guards. We went to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, both ancient temples, and I tried to take video but kept shooting my feet, underscoring how mechanically challenged I am. We went to Phnom Penh and saw parents pinch their kids to get them to cry while they were begging for money. It was a different, unsettling culture. As an antidote to all the terribleness and poverty, we bought shit from the locals like you wouldn’t believe and gave it away.

  We spent New Year’s at our hotel, where we bumped into 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun and their wives. They were with a party coming from Vietnam. There’s an immediate camaraderie when you’re traveling abroad and see fellow Americans. We all ate together and listened to an all-girl band lip-sync to American pop songs. We may as well have been in a Hyatt in Detroit.

  On the way back home, we stopped for a day in Hawaii so the pilots could sleep. My brother was still there with his family for their annual holiday trip. I was half out of my mind with jet lag when I saw him. He asked how my trip had been. I showed him a monk’s outfit that I’d bought. Didn’t that say it all?

  In February 1997, the studio sent me to Europe to promote The Preacher’s Wife. I wasn’t against taking a trip, but what was the purpose? The Preacher’s Wife was a Christmas movie. Did they celebrate Christmas later in Europe? I didn’t think so. It just shows the challenges studios needlessly create for themselves. However, the movie turned out to be a warmly received moneymaker, as well as a tribute to Whitney’s talents. I had no complaints.

  Life was good. I went into my office every so often, read scripts, and surfaced occasionally on TV shows, like the episode of Nash Bridges I did at the end of the year so I could hang out with my friend Don Johnson, the show’s star. I appreciated the freedom I had to play.

  I embraced it, too. After shooting a Kmart commercial in Detroit, I flew to Chicago with my hairstylist, who wanted to see his family there. I wanted to go to a basketball game. The Chicago Bulls were in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers, vying to win a third NBA championship in a row for the second time. I was able to get seats close enough to the action that I almost felt like I was in the game.

  Sometimes I was. I knew Pacer forward Chris Mullin from when he played for the Golden State Warriors. At the Los Angeles Lakers games, he would dribble past me and say, “Hey, Bronx.” He was from Brooklyn. He did the same thing at the Bulls game. We had gotten friendly, and then I became close friends with his wife, Liz. She was impressed with my intensity.

  But what wasn’t to like? These guys were gorgeous, and they barely wore any clothes. Then, the Bulls won and moved on to the championships, and I celebrated that night at a Mexican restaurant with some of the players, including Steve Kerr, Ron Harper, Bill Wennnington, and Tony Kukoc. Later, I met up with the team’s flamboyant rebounding and defensive specialist Dennis Rodman at the House of Blues. He put me on the back of his motorcycle and took me to a strip club. At that point, I said no, thank you. His idea of fun wasn’t necessarily mine.

  I was back in New York when the Bulls played the Utah Jazz for the NBA championship, and I was caught up in the excitement, the team’s quest to make history. I watched the first two games on TV since they were in Utah; they each won one before returning to Chicago. Ronald’s then-partner, Donald Drapkin, had the corporate jet, and we took it there for game three. I brought a friend from New York who liked the Bulls, and we ended up staying in Chicago for the next three games.

  There were celebrities at every game, but I thought the athletes were the real stars. I was awed by Michael Jordan’s ability and poise on the court; off it, he had an equally impressive knack of always saying the right thing, like when he told me not to pay attention to the fans’ boos when they put me on the JumboTron. “They just know that you’re from L.A.,” he said. “But I know you’re a basketball fan.” Dennis and Scottie Pippen were great, too.

  Led by Jordan, the Bulls won two games, but then they lost the third, ruining their chance of winning the title in front of their hometown fans. They had to go back to Salt Lake City, and we arranged to follow. How could you break away from the excitement and drama?

  I couldn’t—and game six turned out to be the best one of all. The Jazz held the lead late into the game, but Jordan made a crucial steal and then hit the game-winning shot with five seconds left on the clock. The Bulls owned the title for the third time in a row, the sixth time in eight years, and Jordan was named the MVP. Leonardo DiCaprio was there, and he wanted to meet Michael. After the game, I took him into the locker room. Actually, both of us followed Dennis’s bodyguard, George T., who cut a path through the crowd. The whole scene was pretty remarkable.

  Those of us looking to Chicago to fourpeat were disappointed. During the off-season, the team began a rebuilding phase. Michael Jordan retired and Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, and Luc Longley, all mainstays, were traded. With the Bulls’ dynasty ended, the Los Angeles Lakers saw their opportunity to recapture some of the glory they had enjoyed in the Magic Johnson–led “Showtime” era. They had two young superstars in Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and the team put together a talented supporting cast that included veterans Robert Horry, Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, and Glen Rice.

  The Lakers also wanted Dennis Rodman, who had not been offered a new contract with the Bulls. The team had run out of patience with his off-the-court antics. Wearing a wedding dress to promote his memoir didn’t win him any fans in the front office. But the Lakers saw value in him, and they called me.

  I guess word had spread that I knew the game’s flamboyant bad boy. Why wouldn’t I know him? I had radar to the insane. One day I got a call from the team’s owner, Jerry Buss, asking if I would speak to Dennis about playing for the Lakers. They had spoken to his reps and felt they also needed someone who knew show business to pitch him on the benefits of playing in Hollywood.

  Dennis was unconventional. He was scarred from a childhood spent in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas. For most of his youth, his two sisters were considered better basketball players than him. Nothing about him was normal, including his work ethic. He may have had green hair, but he was one of the hardest-working athletes in the NBA. He practiced before games, played hard, and then worked out again after the game.

  I understood my mission and s
poke to him one day in the private club at the Forum. I said, “Look, you’re doing your whole act. Why not do it in Hollywood?” The harder part, which wasn’t my job, was keeping him with the team. He only played for twenty-three games. Then he showed up once without his sneakers, and the team’s general manager, basketball legend Jerry West—who was respected for his shrewdness as an executive even more than as a player (and he’s a Hall of Famer)—fired Dennis’s ass.

  I fared better. In appreciation of the effort I made recruiting Dennis, Jerry Buss gave me a set of coveted floor seats for Lakers games at the L.A. Forum and then at the Staples Center where they moved the next season. I had to pay for the tickets, but they were fabulous. I was with notable Lakers diehards Jack Nicholson, producer Lou Adler, and Dyan Cannon; and best of all, I was next to the action. They spoiled me forever.

  Even forever has its limits. In January 1999, Harvey Miller returned to L.A. from the Hamptons and died of a massive heart attack. I helped organize a memorial at my brother’s theater, the Falcon, in Toluca Lake. It was the first of a few such gatherings we’d have there over the years. All of us who knew and adored Harvey were there, including Garry, Danny Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, and Rob, who looked around the theater and said it was like being back in our old living room on Hesby.

  It felt like it, too. We reminisced, traded stories, and agreed that the previous year had been the happiest of Harvey’s sixty-three years. We all watched a video of clips I put together from his recent one-man play, A Cheap Date with Harvey Miller: The Comedic Life of a Legendary Unknown, which had been backed by my basketball friends Dennis Rodman and sports agent Dwight Manley, and Harvey made us laugh again. If you want people to remember you for something, laughter ain’t a bad thing to leave behind. Danny recalled his favorite Harvey joke (“A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop”), and Dick Gregory, who’d given Harvey his first break as a joke writer, sent a note that said, “Laughter is the best medicine and you’ve given us a big dose.”

  Seven months later, we dealt with another loss when my father passed away. Garry, Ronny, and I had been taking good care of him since his stroke. He didn’t want for anything and had all the help he needed. He went to his country club every day and drank with his cronies. My sister went over to his place and paid his bills. When he saw me, he shook his fist. “You never come over!”

  That summer he was diagnosed with cancer. Garry broke the news to him. “Pop, you have to go into the hospital and have surgery.” He died the next day. “I wish we would’ve told him ten years earlier,” I joked. “We could’ve saved a fortune.” He was cremated and remembered at his country club where his friends, including Bob Hope, toasted him with a shot of vodka and a middle-finger salute.

  “Here’s to you, Tony,” they said. “Fuck you!”

  I called Lorne and asked if I could use his office again. Then I flew to New York and sprinkled my father’s ashes out his window. “Be with Mommy again,” I said. I’m sure that thrilled her. Unlike my mother, though, he didn’t get a song.

  But all was not heavy-hearted. After fifteen years of struggling in secret, David Lander revealed publicly that he had multiple sclerosis. I had known since the early ’80s. He said he felt strange during the last year of Laverne & Shirley. Sometimes he fell down. Then he was diagnosed with MS. But he kept quiet about his condition for a long time so he’d still get work. He said he’d rather be thought of as an alcoholic; there was less stigma to that in Hollywood. I had used him in League. He was a huge baseball fan. A while later I spoke to Tom Sherrick, Fox’s president of marketing, who was very involved in MS fundraising, who asked if David had MS. I said I didn’t know. But I told David that he should speak to Tom about coming out if and when he was ever ready. In June 1999, he came out, and his wife, Kathy, told me that it changed his life. He wrote a book, Fall Down Laughing, started speaking to groups, and has continued to do fine.

  About a year later, David called with news he knew I’d want to hear. He had spoken with Cindy Williams and learned that she had split with her husband, Bill Hudson, after 10 years of marriage and two children.

  “You should call her,” he said.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She’s doing a play in Kansas City.”

  I was eager to reconnect. I had seen Cindy once or twice over the years at TV Land specials, but these occasions were more professional than personal, always fleeting and in crowds. We never sat down and talked about the unfortunate way we had parted on Laverne & Shirley, or how much I had missed her over the years. I still considered her a friend. We had shared too much for me to consider her anything but a special person in my life.

  So I called her as soon as I hung up with David, and the two of us had a good conversation. I told her that I’d heard the news, asked if she needed anything, and if she wanted to stay at my place. Everyone else did. I also told her to call Bill’s first wife, Goldie Hawn. “Just call Goldie,” I said. “It’s the best advice I can give you.”

  After Cindy finished her play, we got together at my house and had the conversation I wished I’d been able to have fifteen years earlier. I told her of my frustration with the way the show had ended and that I’d called numerous times to get her back, but Bill never let me talk to her. The same thing happened in the years after we finished. I hadn’t been able to get through to her. Naturally, she had her side of the story and remained unapologetic for leaving the show and forcing me to drive it solo through the last season. She was steadfast in her belief that we didn’t want her. Of course, I reiterated how wrong she was, but in the end what could I do? We agreed to disagree. I didn’t have to be right. Those things happen in life. You move on. Our friendship was more important.

  CHAPTER 43

  Riding in Cars

  Penny directing Drew Barrymore in 2001’s Riding in Cars with Boys

  “Riding in Cars with Boys” © 2001 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

  JIM BROOKS HAD gotten ahold of the rights to Riding in Cars with Boys from Sara Colleton, who had optioned Beverly Donofrio’s memoir about getting pregnant at fifteen and overcoming numerous challenges on her way to getting a degree and becoming a writer. After reading the script, I didn’t love it. But, as Jim probably knew would happen when he pushed the project in front of me, I identified with the character from my own experiences of having a kid and getting married. Even if a girl hasn’t gone through that she’s probably thought, What if.

  My wheels began turning. I had people in New York read actresses for the part of Beverly and I read them like crazy at my house. I brought in Kate Hudson, Marisa Tomei (I didn’t need her to play ball in this one), and Reese Witherspoon, who was pregnant and asked me not to videotape her. I said fine. So she read and did a good job. Hillary Swank and Angelina Jolie both came in. Anne Hathaway did, too. But she was too young. I sent her over to my brother, who used her in The Princess Diaries and said thank you to me.

  I had readings for the other parts, too. I wasn’t even through the list of actresses and actors being sent to me and I could have cut a whole movie together just from my readings. But then Jim came to me and suggested Drew Barrymore for the lead. He saw her in the role. I thought she was a terrific girl and very nice, but I had Marisa and Kate in mind.

  It didn’t matter. Amy Pascal, the studio president, informed me that Jim had already promised the part to Drew. I was furious. If that was the case, why not tell me? That’s all I ever asked from anyone. Tell me the truth. I wouldn’t have wasted so many people’s time, including mine.

  So I hired Brittany Murphy as her best friend, added Sara Gilbert, and got ready to go. Then suddenly we had to put everything on hold and wait for Charlie’s Angels to wrap. Once we did start, nothing was smooth. Drew didn’t think my Academy Award–winning cinematographer, Chris Menges, was lighting her properly. Chris explained why she was wrong. But Jim made me fire Chris, one of the nicest people in the business, and I ha
d to bring Miroslav out of retirement.

  I brought in Jimmy Woods to play Beverly’s father, but he was on a movie with Denzel that went long, requiring me to shoot pieces of scenes as I waited for him. Lorraine Bracco, who played his wife, would say a line that should have had Jimmy there to respond to, but what could I do? The script also drove me crazy; there were no transitions. I’d call Steve Zahn in all the time to make them up as we went along. One time he said, “Can I bring my dog?” I said, ‘Sure.” I didn’t care who or what was there as long as I could get from one part to the next. I mean we saw Beverly as a child, then as a teen, then raising her child, and then as an author needing permission from her ex before she could publish her book. There were no in-betweens. It just skipped years.

  Plus Jim, who could normally be counted on for his share of brilliant ideas, was going through a divorce and producing What About Joan, a television series with Joan Cusack, so he was a little preoccupied. It all was a mess from the get-go. As a general rule, don’t work with people who are getting divorced. They’re thinking about other things.

  We shot a bit on City Island, in New York, but spent the bulk of production in New Jersey. We built our own town on the campus of the defunct Upsala College, in East Orange. After we finished, the fire department set fire to the homes and storefronts we’d built and used them for practice. Meanwhile, I brought in people I knew, like Rosie Perez, who was funny, and David Moscow, who had been in Big. If he could understand me when he was twelve, I figured he could do even better now in his twenties, and he did.

  Brittany Murphy was also a trouper. She would work through anything. She was sick as a dog when we shot a scene where Drew’s kid fell in the pool. No problem. I also knew she could sing; I’d seen her test for the Janis Joplin movie that never got made. So I asked her to sing “Soldier Boy.” She jumped into it. No problem. I appreciated that attitude. Drew required more finesse and patience. However, Miroslav was able to say whatever he wanted to her because he didn’t speak any known language, so she always thought it was something nice.