The USFL began play in 1983. John’s idea was to play in the spring, the NFL’s off-season, both to satisfy hard-core football fans suffering from withdrawal and to avoid competing directly with the established league.
The Bandits got off to a fast start. John had learned a lot from his WFL experience and was determined to do things the right way in the USFL. He hired the famous Florida Gators quarterback Steve Spurrier to his first head-coaching job in professional football. Steve assembled a team of guys who dreamed of being pro football players but couldn’t make the cut in the NFL. Some of them were real bandits—when they weren’t playing football, they were doing time—which gave the team a certain swagger. Not the most talented bunch, but they had plenty of guts. It was a lot like The Longest Yard.
John was a showman. He wanted the Bandits to be fun to watch, and he made what came to be called Bandit Ball colorful and unpredictable. It was a wide-open, freewheeling style of football played in fan-friendly Tampa Stadium, affectionately known as “The Big Sombrero.”
They weren’t just football games, they were happenings. There was always some kind of promotion: We had a Dolly Parton look-alike contest, a mortgage-burning night, and whenever the team scored, our masked mascot, Bandit, galloped across the field on his trusty steed Smokey. I went to all the games and did publicity for the team whenever and wherever I could. Jerry Reed wrote and recorded the fight song, and Loni Anderson appeared on billboards wearing a Bandits jersey with the team motto: All the fun the law allows.
Bandit Ball was a hit. The team drew forty thousand fans a game, got good TV ratings, and had a winning record. We were more popular than Tampa Bay’s NFL franchise, the Buccaneers. Some of the other USFL teams weren’t so successful, but the exciting championship game the first year between the Michigan Panthers and Philadelphia Stars was a welcome change from the boring NFL Super Bowls, and it lifted the whole league.
Unfortunately, some of the USFL franchises were underfunded and some of the owners weren’t exactly sportsmen. There are always guys who come out of the woodwork and take everything they can get. Donald Trump was one such offender. He swooped in and bought the New Jersey Generals. He wanted us to go head-to-head with the NFL and play our games in the fall. But we weren’t near the quality level of the NFL and couldn’t compete with them for fans or advertisers. John and I both told that to Donald: “You can’t go against the NFL. It’s too big of an apple.” We tried to convince him that the USFL should stand alone and continue to play in the spring, when the NFL was inactive.
John and Donald were both rich kids, but that’s where the similarity ended. Donald was born on third and thought he hit a triple. John was the son of a Canadian media mogul, but it didn’t turn him into a jerk. He worked hard to build his own fortune without help from his father. Unlike Donald, he’d been a jock himself, having played college football and high-level tennis as a member of the Canadian Davis Cup team. He had a permanent limp from multiple knee operations. (John’s daughter Carling was quite an athlete, too. At the age of sixteen she came out of nowhere to make the finals in the WTA Championships and then won a tournament in France. And she was a real character. She reminded me of a lot of jocks I knew who didn’t always abide by the rules but gave everything they had in competition.)
John wanted to keep improving the quality of play and grow the USFL into something that would someday rival the NFL. Donald didn’t have John’s vision or passion for the game. He admitted that he came into the league intending to move the games to the fall to compete directly with the NFL. I had the feeling that instead of trying to develop the brand, Donald was angling for a merger with the NFL so he could wind up with an NFL franchise for a song.
In my opinion, it was Donald’s fault that the USFL didn’t survive. Now don’t get me wrong. I like Donald. I hold on to my wallet when we shake hands, but I like him. I just think his personal ambition sank the USFL. He was interested in only two things: money and publicity. John summed it up when he said that Donald’s “ego transcended his business sense.” (In the years since, every time Donald runs for president, I pray he never gets the chance to do to the USA what he did to the USFL.)
When John got sick with cancer, the way he broke it to me was typical of his dark humor. I called to say that I was coming to Canada to do a film and that I hoped we could spend time together.
“I may not be around, pal,” he said.
“Oh? Where are you going?”
“I’ll be dead. I’ve got a couple of inoperable tumors.”
Within a month he died of brain cancer. He was forty-seven.
I think John might have held the league together, but after he died, Donald was like a shark in a tank full of guppies. The other owners were in awe of him because he’d made a lot of money in real estate. But he knew nothing about football. Donald won the battle, but we all lost the war. The NFL didn’t want him or anyone else from the USFL, and our league folded after the third season.
Almost two hundred USFL players went to the NFL, including marquee names like Steve Young, Mike Rozier, Reggie White, Brian Sipe, Doug Flutie, and the great Jim Kelly, who was the toughest guy we had. Forget that he was a quarterback, he thought he was a tackle. He went to the Buffalo Bills and became the first former USFL player to make it into the Hall of Fame. The USFL pioneered the instant replay challenge, the two-point conversion, and the overhead suspended camera, all of which were later adopted by the NFL. Above all, I think the NFL took the lesson that they needed to make their “product” more exciting.
John Bassett was gallant and brave. He wasn’t afraid to gamble everything on what he believed in. If he lost, he went out and made more money and started again. I’ll always remember him as a true sportsman with an old-fashioned sense of honor and a deep respect for athletes. Because of him, a lot of people still remember the USFL fondly.
Charles Nelson Reilly
When I told my dad I wanted to be an actor, he said, “If you ever bring any of those sissy boys around here, I’ll shoot ’em and make a rug out of ’em for your mother.” At the end of his life, whenever he saw Charles, he kissed him on the cheek. Dad always called him Chuck, because Charles had this other personality. He’d affect a deep voice and introduce himself to some of the real butch guys I knew, including my dad, as Chuck Reilly. Dad must have known that Charles was gay, but he never talked about it. He just looked at him kind of sideways. And then one day he said, “You know, I like Chuck. He’s a good guy.” That was high praise coming from Big Burt.
Our 150-acre spread in Jupiter was a working ranch complete with livestock. We had a few head of cattle and we were loaded with horses. The first time I brought Charles around, Dad said, “Do you ride?”
“Like the wind!” Charles said.
So they went down to the corral. A young man walked by who could have been played by Brad Pitt. (Charles had the habit of saying who would play the people in his stories. You knew how he felt about them by who he would “cast.”) “Brad Pitt” was leading a beautiful stallion.
“That’s some stud, isn’t it, Chuck?” my father said.
“The horse isn’t bad, either,” Charles said.
I met Charles in 1957, when I was in a Broadway revival of Mister Roberts (directed by John Forsythe and starring Charlton Heston as Roberts, Orson Bean as Pulver, and Fred Clark as Doc) and he came backstage after the show.
Charles was a great raconteur. Everything reminded him of a story. He acted out all the parts and could go for half an hour without ever touching on his topic. But he was never boring. He was one of the best guests on The Tonight Show. If he was on the panel, all the guests could relax. You’d do three spots with him before you realized that you’d bumped two other guests. He lived near the NBC studios in Burbank and they’d call him at the last minute to replace no-shows.
Charles was a marvelous performer. His autobiographical one-man show, Save It for the Stage: The Life
of Reilly, cowritten and directed by Paul Linke, was brilliant. In it he talked a lot about his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut.
Though Charles was a man of the theater, he never sat in an audience. It went back to a horrible childhood experience: One hot July afternoon in 1944, when Charles was thirteen, he went to the circus in Hartford. Eight thousand people were crowded under a 500-foot-long big top to watch a matinee performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
Twenty minutes into the show, with the Great Wallendas on the high wire, flames began crawling up the sidewall of the tent toward the roof, which had been waterproofed with paraffin and gasoline. When the roof ignited, there was an explosion that turned the big top into an inferno. In the chaos, people were trampled to death and others fell from the bleachers. It took only ten minutes for the tent to burn to the ground. In what is still one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history, almost two hundred people were killed and hundreds more—mostly women and children—were badly burned or seriously injured.
Charles got out unharmed, but he could never sit in any kind of auditorium for the rest of his life. He joked that he should join Audiences Anonymous, but he was deeply scarred.
Charles had another demon: his Swedish mother. She was hell on wheels and scared everybody to death. When he was growing up, she had an arsenal of racial and ethnic insults that she would rain down on passersby from her apartment window. She was so unpopular in the neighborhood that she had to take a baseball bat whenever she went out.
“I spent my adolescence in an Ingmar Bergman movie,” Charles said.
I met her once, backstage at one of Charles’s shows. She was General MacArthur in a dress.
I think Charles was underrated as an actor. Maybe it was because he was on so many game shows. But long before he ever did The Match Game or The Hollywood Squares, he’d created unforgettable roles on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly! and won a Tony for the role of Bud Frump in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Charles studied acting with Uta Hagen and became a wonderful teacher himself at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York. He also trained to be an opera singer, but the voice wasn’t there. Whenever we talked about it, I’d say, “I don’t understand opera,” and he’d say, “I didn’t either.” But that wasn’t true. He wrote and directed operas and was a commentator on Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
Charles directed Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst and won a Tony nomination for directing her again in a revival of The Gin Game. He also directed a bunch of TV shows, including quite a few Evening Shade episodes.
And, of all things, Charles was a yachtsman! He always had a big boat. People would laugh and say, “No way will I go out on the water with him,” but he was a good captain. He even made a series of powerboat training films for the U.S. Coast Guard.
Charles never tried to conceal his gayness, but he never found it necessary to proclaim it, either. Early in his career a network executive dismissed him with the words, “They don’t let queers on television.” Maybe Charles did all those game shows to prove the guy wrong a thousand times over.
One night I took Charles to the fights. We visited the dressing room first and a guy came in wearing boxing headgear and Charles said, “That’s my part.” We sat in the front row. The chances of it happening are one in a million, but in the first round of the first fight, a boxer got knocked out of the ring and landed in our laps.
“Are we winning?” Charles said.
—
CHARLES DIRECTED, I think, seventeen shows at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre. It surprised a lot of people who didn’t know how talented he was.
When Charles first came to Jupiter to direct, I made a grand gesture. I had two houses on the beach, and I was in a generous mood when I said to him, “If you want this house, you can have it.” I drove Charles to the house and said, “This is your home from now on.” And then I couldn’t get out of the car. It was the house I’d lived in with Sally and I couldn’t go inside. Too many memories. Here I was trying to give him this wonderful present but couldn’t show it to him.
“Can we do take two?” he said.
I tried, but I still couldn’t go in. I felt terrible, but I couldn’t help it. We sat there without speaking for a long time and I could see that he was getting impatient.
“Give me the keys,” he said. “I hardly knew her!”
Loni and Quinton
About a year ago Loni Anderson decided that I should sell personal items to satisfy an old debt. She got a judge to order me to auction off the memorabilia I’d collected over the years, including my high school football trophies, my Emmy, my Golden Globe for Boogie Nights, my People’s Choice Award, my autographed photos, my Western art. Those things meant a lot to me, and I didn’t think it was fair that I had to part with them. But my lawyers told me I had no choice. I had to give it all up, so I held a yard sale in Las Vegas. I wouldn’t have done it voluntarily, but now I’m glad I did. I’m a pack rat, and I had so much stuff it became a burden. Most of it didn’t mean anything anymore. I was sick of so many pictures of myself in my own home, and who needs two dozen pairs of cowboy boots?
The auction turned out to be a liberating experience. Going in, I thought, If the stuff sells for half the estimates, I won’t have to work for the rest of my life. As it turned out, many of the items went for three or four times the amount. That’s nice, and not just for the money. It showed that people all over the world still think kindly of me.
—
I MET LONI on The Merv Griffin Show. I’d seen her on WKRP in Cincinnati. She’s damn good at comedy, and the part of an intelligent blond was perfect for her. I’d never seen anyone quite so striking . . . but I was with Sally then, so that was the extent of it. I didn’t see Loni again until a few years later, at an awards gala, after Sally and I had broken up. She asked me to dance and whispered in my ear, “I want to have your baby.”
“Right here?” I said.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean and I’m flattered, but don’t you think we should find out if we like each other first?”
The truth is, I never did like her. We’d be together and she’d be gorgeous, though I always thought she wore too much makeup. It would be nice and all that, but I’d be thinking, This is not the person for me. What the hell am I doing with her? I don’t remember actually asking her to marry me. There was just this pressure in that direction . . . coming from her direction. I kept telling her that we’d get married as soon as I finished building the chapel on my ranch. It took four years because I kept adding on. When it was finally done, I had no excuse.
So why did I marry her? Besides the physical attraction, it was the force of her personality. Her determination. It was something she wanted and she would not be denied. She was that way about everything. Anything she went after, she got. Did I have a choice? Of course I did. What was I thinking? Obviously, I wasn’t thinking at all.
We had to make all the wedding arrangements in secret to fool the tabloids. The county clerk brought the marriage license to the house to save us a trip to the courthouse. We placed orders for the reception, like for the two tons of ice, in the name of one of my students. And we waited until the last minute to invite the guests.
On the way to the ceremony my best man, Vic Prinzi, said, “Do you really want to do this?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. “We’ll go to Miami.”
“But my mom and dad are sitting there waiting for me. My mom loves Loni. It’ll kill her.”
“I hate to break this to you,” Vic said, “but your mother can’t stand Loni.”
I paused in the doorway of the chapel. As I stood there looking at the assembled guests, Mom caught my eye. She was shaking her head NO.
But I d
idn’t have the guts to pull the plug.
The Reverend Jess Moody performed the ceremony. Jim Nabors sang “The Lord’s Prayer” and “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” Bert Convy sang “Just the Way You Are.” Some of my dearest friends were there, including Ann-Margret and her husband, Roger Smith.
After the reception, with press helicopters swarming like killer bees, Ann-Margret and Roger boarded a decoy chopper and flew to Miami, with the killer bees right behind them. Ann-Margret is fragile-looking, like a porcelain doll, but she’s tough as nails. When they landed in Miami, they were met by a bunch of pissed-off paparazzi.
We’d jumped on our own helicopter and flew to Key West, where we boarded a 120-foot yacht loaned by a friend. We’d planned a cruise to the Bahamas, but Loni was seasick.
“Don’t you think we should cast off first?” I said.
Instead of sailing to the Bahamas on the Atlantic, we turned around and motored up the Intracoastal Waterway back to Jupiter. Not a good omen.
It didn’t help that we lived out our marriage in a fishbowl. To keep my sanity in the face of all the idiotic things that have been written about me, I’ve had to adopt a don’t-give-a-damn attitude. And Dinah taught me that you can’t treat the press like an enemy, even when they attack you.
But it can really sting. Rags like the National Enquirer don’t care about the truth. They make things up out of whole cloth and dare you to sue them, because they know how hard it is for a public figure to win. Carol Burnett was one of the few to sue them successfully. The Enquirer reported that she was falling-down drunk in a Washington, D.C., restaurant and that she had a shouting match with Henry Kissinger. The truth was that she had a glass of wine and was introduced to Kissinger on her way out of the restaurant. She spent a lot of time and money to win a retraction and $150,000, which didn’t cover her legal fees.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 19