In the play’s final moment, I was supposed to climb into the sack with the babies. Up to that point, I refrained from ad libbing about the rain on strict orders from the stage manager. He was afraid that if I acknowledged the theater’s leaky roof, the audience might want refunds.
The second I crawled into the soaking bed, the crowd laughed again. They had watched the downpour all evening and knew how wet it was. I couldn’t resist a final ad lib and yelled, “Ohmi-god! These babies pissed everywhere!” The audience went wild. Our rain-soaked efforts were rewarded with a standing ovation that night.
CHAPTER 44
New Roles
The most incredible, life-changing events occurred during the dinner theater era. It was the birth of my two children. Spencer was born in 1989 and Hailey came along three years later. I gladly threw myself into my most important role to date: playing Mr. Mom.
While Karen was bringing home the bacon working as a physical therapist, I was in charge of packing lunches, taking the kids to school, picking them up, and playing with them in the afternoon. If we weren’t at the zoo or museums, we’d be home making up imaginary games.
Being an actor, I loved to play Cheetah the Chimp to Spencer’s Tarzan or give a voice to Ken while Hailey pretended to be Barbie. In a traditional marriage, dads work all day at the office and miss their children’s wonder years. Not me. I had a blast. It meant revisiting all the things I loved doing as a kid with my own children.
Being a father had an unexpected impact on my career, too. It made me want to work even harder to hot-wire my inert career. Call it pride or ego, but I wanted them to be proud of their dad. At the very least, I wanted them to see me fighting for something.
I intensified my campaign to reintroduce myself to casting directors and producers with a barrage of letters inviting them to see me in my stage productions: Grease (produced by Fran Drescher), The Last Good Word, Very Cherry and Extra Clean at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, and the American premiere of Cause Célèbre at the Ahmanson Theatre.
I also took a screenwriting class at UCLA in the evening, hoping to sell a script that would have an acting role for me in it. It worked for Sylvester Stallone in Rocky when nobody else would hire him.
The script that came out of my class was titled Blessing in Disguise. To my amazement, it won an award in a university competition, the Diane Thomas Screenwriting Awards. Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito, and Steven Spielberg sponsored the contest, so it elicited a huge number of script submissions.
DeVito was the presenter at the awards ceremony. When my name was called, it created quite a buzz among the reporters who recognized me from MTS. They were eager for any angle to hype this low-key ceremony. Camera crews from Entertainment Tonight swarmed me the minute I stepped off the podium with my award.
Once things settled down, DeVito sidled up next to me and covertly whispered, “Congratulations on the award but ... who the hell are you anyway?” He confessed to not being a fan of the show.
Suddenly, I possessed an award-winning script; I thought the industry would snap it up. Didn’t happen. The script was universally rejected because the subject matter involved a Hollywood bugaboo: old people. The story focused on three senior citizens living at a retirement villa who start a detective agency, using the old folks home and their geezer qualities as their cover. It was CSI meets The Golden Girls; not the best idea ever conceived but certainly as good as My Mother the Car.
Between taking care of the kids and acting in plays, I cranked out scripts with the help of my Remington electric typewriter and gallons of Wite-Out. I didn’t sell anything (until years later), but it kept me busy. If writing, acting, and child rearing weren’t enough, I decided to try out another title: director.
A playwright friend named Michael Farkash had written a play titled Meat Dreams. I found it to be perverse, sexy, and original. Perfect. Plans were made to stage the piece on the off nights (Monday through Wednesday) at a theater in Century City. This was the fiefdom of a man I’ll call Ivan Cohen, the most unscrupulous theater producer in Los Angeles, a fact I wish I’d known before signing the contract.
At first glance, Ivan the Terrible (a nickname we gave him) struck you as a typical old-school hippie: owner of a rusty VW bus, tattered blue jeans, and a long gray, bushy beard. His Grateful Dead T-shirts and love beads suggested that he was a love child, full of peace and understanding.
I soon learned that Ivan was petty, loutish, and flat-out dishonest. He probably worked for Dow Chemicals in the 1960s and hated “flower children.” Whatever. Ivan told me that Meat Dreams would have a budget of one hundred bucks and, oh yeah, we’d have to provide our own toilet paper. Now that’s cheap, I remember thinking. Our first production meeting ended with my producer saying, “You’re sure you really want to direct this piece of shit?” Not exactly a confidence-building pep talk.
Rehearsals commenced, and we worked in the garage of my house, mainly because Ivan wouldn’t let us use his theater. Apparently, he needed every spare minute to polish up his long-running hit, Bleacher Bums. It was playing on weekends at the theater, and a gala re-opening of Bums was in the works. We’d have to rehearse our little “piece of shit” elsewhere.
As fate would have it, Meat Dreams premiered in the same week that Ivan’s Bleacher Bums re-opened. The Los Angeles Times printed the reviews of the two plays, side-by-side. Bums was savaged by the critics while Meat Dreams got a rave review written by the esteemed theater critic Robert Koehler. Ah! Sweet revenge!
On the strength of more good reviews, Meat Dreams became a cultish hit and drew large audiences. People barely go to the theater in Los Angeles under the best of circumstances, let alone on a Monday or Tuesday. Smelling money, Ivan decided to move our show to his other, larger theater, so we could perform on the weekends. It was great that more people would see our hard work, but the move also had a big downside: we’d be closer to Ivan’s office and his intrusive reach.
Tensions were already high as we switched venues. For months at the Century City Playhouse, we’d coped with Ivan’s faulty sound and lighting equipment, his negligence in paying the actors, and of course, the TP issue. As long as the integrity of our show wasn’t horribly compromised onstage, we coexisted. Now that we were under Ivan’s close supervision, my worst fears came true and our relationship exploded.
Neither of Ivan’s theaters had air-conditioning. It’s a luxury that few small theaters can afford, and the audiences who attend such venues understand this fact. They’ll accept a modest amount of discomfort in exchange for challenging theater. For some reason, Ivan decided to address the temperature problems on our second opening night. He installed six ancient, rattling, oscillating fans in the room where the play was being performed. The fans didn’t do a damn thing to cool the room and created a clacking, rattling racket.
Gene Butler, the lead actor in our show, alerted me to the problem about ten minutes before the audience was admitted. I walked into the theater and was stunned by the noise. It sounded like a squadron of Sopwith Camel airplanes from World War I had started up their propeller engines and were preparing to take off.
Ask any stage veteran, and they’ll tell you that a theater space should be as quiet as a church because silence can be as compelling as the author’s words. In Ivan’s theater, our words and silences were going to be buried under a wheezing, whirring din. This crossed the line in terms of protecting the play’s integrity, and I wasn’t about to let that happen.
I hunted for Ivan and found him in his office, counting the money from the evening’s admissions. I made a passionate plea for him to turn off the fans and pointed out that it wasn’t even that hot.
He barely looked up from his pile of dough and grumbled, “I got a good deal on the fans at a swap meet. We’ll be using them from now on.”
Ivan owned the theater and had the right to change things as he saw fit. Fair enough. What really got under my skin was his instantaneous dismissal of my concerns. I’d tolerated his bullsh
it for months, and I’d finally reached my overload point. Sewer workers call this “blowback time,” when a holding tank can’t take any more pressure and the shit literally comes flying out the open pipes. Ivan was about to get blasted.
“Either the fans are turned off or the performance is canceled,” I snarled. This got his attention.
“Nobody cancels a performance in my theater, except me!” he bellowed.
“It’s our play and we will cancel the performance if the fans stay on. All of that clacking and whirring white noise is going to ruin the show! What’s the fucking point?”
“The point is that the audience has already paid for the show!” he said, pointing to the piles of cash on his messy desk.
“Then you’ll have to give it back!” I yelled, and dashed out of his office.
I marched into the theater and stood before the chattering audience, waving my hands to get their attention. I said, “Due to technical difficulties, tonight’s show is canceled. I’m very, very sorry.”
Ivan burst into the room and began screaming, “The show isn’t canceled! This show is not canceled!”
I yelled over his voice, “Tonight’s performance is canceled, and you should see Ivan for a refund.” Hearing that, Ivan’s eyes bugged out of his head like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. I rushed outside rather than continue the debate in front of the confused spectators.
I paced outside the theater’s door, trembling, trying to regain my composure. I heard Ivan’s panicked voice still yelling, “The show is not canceled. It is not canceled! Nobody move! I’ll be right back!”
Ivan burst through the theater’s door, and we went nose to nose, like a couple of WWF wrestlers.
“Give the audience their money, Ivan!” I said.
“I won’t give it back!”
“Turn off the fans then!”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“Turn off the fans!”
“I’ll call the union on you!” he threatened. “This is my theater! You can’t tell me what to do!”
I repeated, “Turn off the fans! Turn off the fans! Turn off the goddam fans, Ivannnnn!” Every time the word fans exploded from my mouth, I leaped into the air like an enraged chimp, levitating on adrenaline and anger.
Ivan abruptly fell silent, and his neck puffed up from the venomous words being choked back. I wasn’t sure what was coming next. Either he was going to punch me in the nose or I was going to rip his smelly Grateful Dead T-shirt off his back. He turned away and stomped back inside the theater.
I stood there wondering, What the hell is this lunatic doing now?
Moments later, Ivan blasted back out the theater door and hissed, “I’m leaving one small fan on. Just one!”
The thought crossed my mind to go “all or nothing.” I was still damned steamed. Before firing back, though, I glanced over at Gene Butler and the other actors in the show. They were huddled together in costume, torn between supporting me and wanting to perform that night. I also thought of the audience who had schlepped down to Ivan’s theater, only to have their evening ruined by our amateur theatrics. A compromise seemed the only sensible thing to do. I acquiesced to Ivan’s one rattling fan.
The play went on that night, and the performance was one of the best. Ivan disappeared for the next few days, resurfacing when our next good reviews hit the press. He offered up a conciliatory handshake, and I accepted it. My mouth dropped, though, when he asked me to direct another play for him. This was an offer that only a masochist could embrace. I declined.
It may sound strange, but I’ve come to believe that my confrontation with Ivan marked a cosmic turning point in my life. Cosmic? I know, stay with me. When I was protesting the fans, in essence yelling I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! I was finally taking a bold stand and bellowing my righteous indignation. My rage against windmills, or fans, finally got the attention of the gods, and my luck changed dramatically.
CHAPTER 45
A Brave New Nerd
I was asked to audition for a new kind of role, an authority figure. The part was Doctor Rickett on the hit TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. This was a first. I had spent my entire professional life playing nerds: the child nerd next door, the teen nerd at college, the twenty-something nerd who can never get laid after college, the middle-aged nerd whose record store gets blown up by Skeletor. I was always the clueless goofball asking all the dumb questions. Finally, I had a shot at portraying an authority figure, the guy who has all the right answers. I read for the producer, Steven Bochco, and got the part. One small role for Mr. Bochco, one giant leap in Barry’s career.
To be honest, the role of Doctor Rickett wasn’t all that pivotal in the storylines. My job was to blow into a patient’s room, make a diagnosis, and educate young Doogie with tongue-twisting medical terms. Not every actor can rattle off this kind of complicated verbiage and make it sound as easy as reciting a grocery list. I could. Casting directors could now envision me in a whole new vista of mature roles: doctors, lawyers, and professors. I fit the description of a cutting-edge 1990s prototype: the yuppie (young, urban professional).
Ironically, there was another factor that made me seem more mature and professional, something that I’d been fighting for years: hair loss. Talk about a blessing in disguise. The more hair that fell out, the more I began to work. That may seem like a silly way to account for my new image, but it’s a pretty silly business. In my mind, the hair-loss theory is just as valid as my cosmic fan thesis. Take your pick.
I noticed another shift in my universe while working on Doogie Howser: the younger actors treated me like the “old pro.” Suddenly, people wanted to hear stories about my days working at Desilu, MGM, and Paramount when I was a kid. It felt good, like the circle was completing itself. I was becoming William Frawley! Okay, maybe Roddy McDowall.
I even passed along Roddy’s advice to a young Neil Patrick Harris: If you want to make it as an adult actor, go to New York and learn your craft onstage. Harris, in fact, did exactly that and had a big career breakthrough on Broadway with the musical Rent. I’m not trying to take credit for his success. He’s earned every adult accolade on his own. Then again, who knows? Maybe my words, courtesy of Roddy, stuck. If I ever run into Harris, I’ll have to ask.
After finishing Doogie, I played another medic, this time acting as O.J. Simpson’s doctor in a TV movie, The O.J. Simpson Story. The one amazing thing about this Fox project is we started shooting one week after O.J.’s famous Ford Bronco “slow speed pursuit.” The script was literally written on the fly, ripped from the daily headlines as the Simpson story unfolded.
Now that I had two doctor roles on my résumé I branched out into the legal profession with a recurring attorney role on the TV series, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I played Sheldon Bender, the unscrupulous consigliere for Lex Luthor. This role added a new dimension to my widening list of characters. It was my first adult “bad guy.”
One of the show’s producers, Paul Jackson, told me an interesting story about how I won the role. My job interview was being held in the office of the series show-runner, Robert Singer. Right in the middle of my scene, a long-winded monologue, a telephone rang in the room and Singer answered it.
Now I was in a pickle and had a choice to make: do I stop reading because the executive producer, the man who might hire me, is ignoring my performance, or do I press on, ignoring the slight? Believe it or not, the latter option is the smart choice and that’s what I did, even though I was secretly irritated as hell.
I finished my monologue just as Singer concluded his phone conversation. He uttered the typical critique, Thanks for coming, and I left the room, crestfallen. My shot at a terrific “bad guy” role was blown by a phone call ... or so I thought.
Jackson told me later, after we’d become friends, that the call was from the studio head, Les Moonves, and Singer had to take it. My buddy also confided Singer’s assessment of my talent: “If Barry is that good duri
ng a phone conversation, he’s good enough to hire.”
I really was becoming the “old pro.”
CHAPTER 46
My Dad
On the home front, my dad moved in with my family. He was eighty years old and ailing with Parkinson’s, emphysema, and congestive heart failure. This did not prevent him from driving to Las Vegas whenever the mood struck him, which was often. We feared for his safety, as well as the other drivers on the road, but a parent rarely heeds the warnings of their children. Long-standing roles don’t change easily, at least not without outside intervention. That’s where the CHP finally stepped in and put an end to his reckless road trips.
My dad was driving back from Vegas and stopped at a Bun Boy coffee shop in Barstow. He missed the driveway entrance by a good ten feet, went up over the sidewalk, and came to a stop in front of a CHP officer sitting in his car eating lunch. Dad’s driver’s license was promptly revoked, which was a good thing. The downside was his morale and health declined quickly.
He succumbed to his illnesses after living with us for three years. It was a very difficult thing, taking care of a parent at home, but it also had a silver lining. My kids, Spencer and Hailey, spent a lot of hours with their grandpa that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. I was grateful that he lived long enough to see my career start to turn around. I know he feared that might not happen. He was a pessimist to the end.
CHAPTER 47
Nerd in the New Millennium
The twentieth century was nearing an end. I was in my fourth decade of acting and still picking up momentum, booking television roles on The Nanny, Ally McBeal, Sliders, Boston Common, and a slew of movies for the Hallmark Channel. Some of these projects were quite good, others were not. That’s the curse of a journeyman actor: you don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing your work like Brad Pitt. Sometimes you wind up in a real stinker, being grateful just to be employed. Case in point: a miniseries titled Final Approach. It was an “airplane in distress” story and about as realistic as John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. I recommend catching this epic in reruns for its unintended comedic moments. I play a passenger, an aeronautical engineer (just like Steve Douglas), and Dean Cain is my seatmate, a disgraced FBI agent. Once we vanquish the hijackers, I’m forced to take control of our Boeing 747 since the pilots have been killed. My character has never flown a plane before but somehow manages to land the damaged jumbo jet on a desert airstrip that’s about the size of a postage stamp. It was akin to dragging a rookie nurse into an operating room to single-handedly perform open-heart surgery. I suppose it didn’t hurt to have Superman as my copilot. Sorry, Dean.
The Importance of Being Ernie: Page 20