In a training run just a few months prior, I had hit “the wall,” that dreaded wave of fatigue and bodily revolt. I’d ended up splayed on a sidewalk in Santa Monica and had to crawl to a hose bib, lying on the sidewalk with my mouth open to take in a few drops from the spigot. Somehow I revived myself enough to lurch home. I did not want to repeat that experience during the race, so I’d taken every liquid I’d been offered along the course. I didn’t quite hit the wall, but I was dragging. The race was becoming an ordeal. I wondered if I could finish.
But just then, I saw the finish line. I don’t know if I’d ever experienced such elation. I started dancing. Tears came to my eyes. I caught sight of the exact spot where one year prior I’d leaned against a tree, freshly fired, taking pictures, feeling like a beaten man. I remembered thinking, “I can’t do that.” Now some other guy was there, taking pictures. Of me. Finishing. I would never again say “I can’t do that.” That’s what I told myself. Never again.
Bad Guy
In the 1980s, if you were a series regular, you were a good guy. Guest stars were either bad guys or victims. I was the bad guy on a CBS show called Airwolf, starring Jan-Michael Vincent, Ernest Borgnine, and a helicopter. A helicopter! The helicopter saved the day in every show.
My character was a jilted lover who’d hijacked a sorority reunion aboard the Queen Mary. I was the head hijacker and I had a couple of henchmen. One of my victims was Alicia, played by Robin Dearden. I held her hostage at gunpoint. She smelled good! And she was pretty and funny, too.
But I had a girlfriend and Robin had a boyfriend, so dating was off the table. That turned out to be a good thing. There were no expectations. We could relax and flirt without the pressure of wondering what’s going to happen next. The call times aboard the Queen Mary were at the crack of dawn, so each long day we did a lot of carefree laughing and bonding.
One of my henchmen was taciturn and suspicious and explosively dangerous, and the actor took method acting to a whole other level. In one scene, he was supposed to push Robin against the helicopter. And rather than making the move appear forceful, he actually slammed her hard. He wrenched her finger and bopped her head. An on-set medic attended to her, and she was fine, more shaken than hurt. The guy was inappropriate in his aggression. (A year later Robin was in the supermarket and saw him, and she walked away from a full cart of groceries because she was so unnerved.) As bad as hurting her was, this guy showed no contrition. He was flippant in his response. He said something like, “My character is abusive.” That made me mad. Do you not realize you’re on a set? You’re acting. You have to have some boundaries. You have to look out for your fellow actors. When someone gets hurt on the set, it spoils everything. The fun you’re having, creating—if someone gets hurt, it all goes away. I was concerned about Robin. I tried to comfort her and make her laugh even though she was in pain, and I suppose that brought us closer. We exchanged phone numbers.
On March 7, 1986, I ran in the first Los Angeles Marathon. It was also my thirtieth birthday, and I threw a party at the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier. I invited Robin, but she had a prior commitment. She often says if she’d come to that birthday party we wouldn’t be married today. I don’t quite know why she thinks that, but I believe her.
The next time I saw her was a year later, in 1987. I was in Andy Goldberg’s comedy improv class, and she walked in one day. There was instant recognition and mutual happiness. We started getting on stage together once a week. One day, as class was starting, we kissed hello. Actors kiss hello and good-bye all the time, with no lasting consequences. But even for actors, there is an acceptable kiss duration. Any longer than that . . . something is afoot. That day, Robin and I lingered at each other’s lips. It was a millisecond too long, and we both felt it. We both swore later that neither of us had planned it. But we both felt it.
Still, I didn’t realize how much I liked Robin until I was watching Letterman one night with Javier. We’d become close friends since our Cover Up days, and he was now my roommate. He was also in my improv comedy class. During a commercial break, he said offhandedly, “I think I’m going to ask Robin out.”
“No!” I said. I was surprised at how strongly the word sprang out of me.
He was, too. He said, “Oh, did you ask her out?”
“Well, uh, no,” I said.
That was my impetus to get off my ass. Was I going to go through the Carolyn Kiesel experience again? Hell no.
One day after class we were talking and she found out that I’d never been to the Huntington Library, which was close by in Pasadena. It had a great art collection and beautiful botanical gardens. “You should go,” she said. “We should go.”
Did this constitute a date? I hoped maybe it did.
It was late spring 1987 in Los Angeles, so of course I was wearing white slacks and a short-sleeved shirt with a green floral pattern and mesh shoes. She wore almost the exact same outfit in reverse: a green and white skirt and a white shirt. It worked better on her. We laughed.
We had a beautiful day. Robin drove because I had never been to the Huntington Library before. She knew how to get there.
When she dropped me off, we sat in the car talking for a long time. Then I got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s side door and kissed Robin through the open window. I watched as she drove away, thinking: I hope I get to do that again.
Punter
That summer Robin was doing an acting program in Oxford at the British American Dramatic Academy, and coincidentally I had planned a hitchhiking trip throughout England and Scotland. “I could stop by Oxford and see you,” I offered. We made a plan. As I traveled, I called her from red-box pay phones all around the United Kingdom to make sure she still wanted to see me. Every time I called, she seemed eager for me to get there. But not as eager as I was.
When I got to Oxford, I planned a romantic escapade for us and got lucky with an unusually sunny and gorgeous Sunday. I bought sandwiches and a bottle of wine and decided we’d go punting on the Thames. When I rented the punt—a flat-bottomed boat—and the guy handed me something like a long stick, I realized that in all of my romantic planning I hadn’t factored in my total ignorance about what to do with that stick. But how hard could it be? I’d figure it out.
We found our boat and Robin got settled in, facing me, smiling sweetly. We shoved off from the shore. I pushed the stick in, and it hit the soft riverbed. I pulled it up slowly, and water and mud and silt sprinkled everywhere—on my pants, my shirtsleeves. This couldn’t be right. What was I doing wrong? I tried to cloak my ignorance about the art of punting with an easy smile; Robin smiled. She must have known, but she was too kind to let on.
On a rare, beautiful day in England, it seems everyone is outside drinking a beer. From a bridge above the river I heard a guy yell, “Hey, Yank, use it as a ra-ah-ah.”
“A what?”
“Use it as a RAH-AA-AHHHH.”
How does he know I’m a Yank? And a rah-ah? What the hell is a rah-ah? I strained to hear as I soaked myself in river water. Finally I deciphered the code. “Hey, Yank, use it as a RUDDER.” Ah, you propel the boat by pushing the stick into the riverbed and then letting it trail behind, so it acts as a rudder. Robin didn’t hold my punting skills against me.
We docked the boat and set up a picnic under a tree. We talked, we laughed. We made out like bandits.
I was crazy about her. The only hitch was she had a boyfriend. Record scratch.
The girlfriend I’d had when Robin and I first met had broken up with me, but Robin and her long-distance boyfriend hadn’t technically split up. They’d been together for years, I think seven, and though they’d been long-distance and drifting apart for some time, she didn’t have the heart to let him down.
But now Robin and I had this connection. Emotional, passionate, on every level. I was ready to make a commitment to her. Was she ready to make the same commitment to me? I beseeched her to break up with him. I said, “I want you unencumbered. T
he sooner you do it, the better for all of us, including him. The longer this drags on, the more painful it will be. Please do it.”
We returned to Los Angeles, and he was due to visit. “I’m going to tell him when he comes out,” she said. That news drove me to distraction. He was coming to see her with the notion that they were still together. He was going to have . . . expectations. I begged her to tell him. But she couldn’t. I think it was probably the most painful decision to that point in her life. So out to California he came.
Robin was so stressed by all this that she got laryngitis. She completely lost her voice. And then to make matters worse, while they were together at Robin’s condo, he found a love letter. From one Bryan Cranston. That’s how he discovered we were together. He was shocked. She was weeping. And later I was fuming as I listened to her tell me how awful it was for her. She wanted to be with me, but she didn’t want to break anyone’s heart. That’s Robin in a nutshell. She’s the most loving, caring person I’ve ever known.
She’d had lots of dates but only a few real boyfriends in her life. That was part of the reason it was so difficult for her. I listened patiently but then I said a stupid, passive-aggressive thing: “I won’t tell you where you went wrong,” implying, of course, that she had gone wrong and I was uniquely able to tell her all about it.
That was an early hiccup. But we got past it. And then we were together, rudder in the water, steering for distant shores.
Husband
Outwardly, I am measured. Inside, because of my childhood, a key can turn, and I can get emotional. I wasn’t really allowed to express my feelings as a kid. Boys weren’t supposed to cry. Also, I was losing my mother emotionally, I’d lost my father physically, and I was too busy figuring out how to survive to cry.
So I have a lot of tears stored up, along with anger and resentment—you know, the good stuff. I didn’t quite know how to activate the healing process in my personal life just yet, but anytime I was working I gave myself permission to tap into that store.
And then sometimes that key involuntarily turned on its own.
I knew I wanted to propose to Robin, but I had the overwhelming fear that I wouldn’t be able to face her without that key turning, without getting blubbery. I thought I couldn’t get through it. I wanted to tell her how I felt, how much I loved her, how I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, have a family. I’d passed through the gauntlet of a marriage that was not right and relationships that were not right, and now it was time to nurture one that was. If you don’t nurture a relationship, it will die. I wanted to nurture ours, but I didn’t want to water it with my tears.
One day, it dawned on me: What if I wasn’t facing her? What if we could be close and intimate but not be looking at each other? How could I accomplish that?
I thought about it for a while, and then I was in the shower and I had it. A bath! What if we took a bath together? She couldn’t face me because the spigot would be jammed into her back. She’d have to sit between my legs, facing away from me. I’d bought a cabin in the mountains with my dear friend from Loving, John O’Hurley, and we had a tiny tub there. Perfect!
I brought Robin there just after Christmas. I didn’t want to do it on Christmas. The proposal wasn’t a Christmas present. But a holiday would be good cover, an occasion to celebrate. So I decided on New Year’s Day.
“Let’s take a bubble bath,” I said.
“Really?”
It’s not like we made a habit of hopping into the tub together in the middle of the day. But it was New Year’s. I made it an occasion. I got candles. Music. Champagne.
I had the ring. But then—oh shit—I had to hide it. But I had to put it within reach—I couldn’t jump out of the bathtub midproposal, sopping wet and stark naked, to go searching for the ring. The only thing I could think to do was put it on a digit. I decided on my baby toe.
We got in the tub and listened to music and talked for a while, all as she was facing away from me. It took half an hour to get my courage up before I finally said, “Are you happy, Robin?”
“Yes, I’m happy.”
“It’s been a great year. You make me so happy. I love you so much. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.” I was whispering into her ear. And as she started to realize what was happening, she kept trying to turn around to look at me, and I kept turning her face back around. I needed to get to the question first! I finally asked if she would marry me. It was an instantaneous yes. And then she twisted to face me and we kissed.
Oh, the ring! I hoisted my leg out of the water, and it was covered in bubbles, and at first she didn’t see the ring. I shook my leg and some suds floated off, then I bent my knee so my foot was near her. Look! Oh my God! She was now charged with taking her ring off my toe, and she gave it to me and I put it on her finger. It was glorious. We called her parents and they were overjoyed, though her dad did give me some ribbing for not asking his permission first.
Robin came from a stable family, so that’s what she was familiar with, and I lacked a stable family, so that’s what I wanted. We were perfectly matched, and we didn’t want to waste time, so we got married six months later on a beautiful Saturday, July 8, 1989, at the Hotel Bel-Air. Reverend Bob, the pontiff of Catalina Island, married us. Robin looked stunning in an off-the-shoulder white dress. She wore white flowers in her hair. I looked as if I was ripped out of a 1980s JC Penney catalog. But damn, we were happy. Both my parents came, and we had to do separate pictures for each of them. They couldn’t sit together. There was some tension between them. But nothing could put a damper on our day.
Honeymooner
Robin’s parents footed the bill for our wedding, so we were able to afford a monthlong honeymoon in Europe. We were in our midthirties, eager to start a family, and we knew this could be our last chance for a long time to see the world.
The travel agent recommended that we take our rental car on a flatbed train from Switzerland to Italy. It would save us hours on the road. And the journey was apparently a rite of passage for newlyweds.
A twinkle in his eye, the agent described three tunnels the train would pass through. The third, dubbed the Tunnel of Love, was fifty minutes long. Plenty of time for . . . you know. The twinkle in his eye started to seem kind of creepy.
Robin and I discussed it. We were both game, and when the day arrived we drove up to the designated train station in Switzerland and got in line with all the small rental cars. We were instructed to follow the flagman’s signal and drive up onto the train’s flatbed. One flatbed held three small cars bumper-to-bumper. We were situated between two other cars, my bumper kissing that of the car in front of us, the one behind us kissing mine. Engine off, emergency brake on, a lurch from the unseen locomotive way up ahead of us, and we were off.
It was July, stifling hot, and the breeze created by the speeding train was welcome. We sat in our car, windows open, sighing with pleasure at the cool breeze; when the train got up to full speed, the air whipped into the car like a tornado. The grind of metal on metal of the train’s wheels on the track and the creak of the train cars as they flexed their form around the curves created a furious cacophony.
Soon the train was in the first tunnel. The breeze became a wind. We were swept up in the whoosh and pitch darkness. A fantastic sensation.
Blasting out of the tunnel into bright daylight, coming to a stop at another train station, I looked to Robin. “That’s one,” I said. She rolled her eyes. Perhaps she wasn’t looking forward to this escapade quite as much as I was. I peered into the car behind us: two couples enjoying the ride with food and drink. I nodded hello. They waved back.
We entered tunnel two. Again, total darkness. We couldn’t see our own dashboard. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. Soon, wham! We were out of the tunnel, stopping at another station. “That’s two,” I whispered to my bride.
At last we were roaring into the final tunnel. We waited for total darkness, and it was go time. I climbed over
the stick shift. These European rental cars were tiny, like clown cars, so removing my pants was nearly impossible. For Robin, too. She slid her seat back. I crept forward. My knee pinched her thigh against the console.
Ouch!
Sorry, sorry.
Now, my elbows—where to put them? She groaned. Oops, sorry again. I couldn’t put my arms around her, so I just raised them. I misjudged the space and knocked her in the jaw. Sorry, honey.
Robin was ready to give up, but I was no quitter. Focus, I told myself, and her. Failure is not an option. We’ve come this far. We can do this. Tunnel of Love, Robin. Tunnel of Love.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. I was able to see Robin’s face, in surprising detail. Her expression wasn’t one of pleasure. It was one of enduring patience. The sooner this happens, the sooner it’s over, that’s how I read her. But I also read the contours of her beauty, all the contours, and thought how extraordinary, how really extraordinary, she was. And how extraordinary also is the human eye. I could see her so clearly, all the things I loved about her face were vivid and evident, and then I realized why.
A Life in Parts Page 14