Pieces of My Heart

by Robert J. Wagner

  That said, I like to work. To appear on a cracking good show like Boston Legal or Two and a Half Men and not have to pull the train is a treat. But the day when I carry a show is over. That said, I’d love to be in an ensemble cast. My professional goal is the same as it was when I was twenty-five: do good work and keep doing it.

  In other words, I don’t believe in retirement. I never wanted to sock my money away for a rainy day and spend my eightieth birthday reading the paper. I don’t think building a life around cruises and golf is a healthy mind-set, although I know that a lot of people love it. I think retirement is a hype that has nothing to do with life as it needs to be lived. It’s a collusion between industries that barely existed fifty years ago—life insurance companies and cruise companies—that need to manufacture endeavors in order to sustain themselves. I’ve never bought into it.

  Jill has continued to be very influential as a sounding board for my career—guiding and suggesting, never commanding. She’s only put her foot down once. I was asked to do Dancing with the Stars, and I was leaning toward doing it. And she stepped up and said, “I’ve never said anything to you about whether or not to do something. But you shouldn’t do this.” She didn’t think it was the right thing, and I think she was absolutely right. Beyond that, at those times when I’ve been really down and on the bottom, Jill has always been there. You can’t ask for more from any human being. Plus, there is the fact that she’s loving and caring, a wonderful wife, 100 percent for me.

  As I said, our experience with Love Letters was entirely positive, but I sweated over it; most nights I would stay up and think about the next performance, because I was doing it for a different person in my mind every night. I knew where the high points were, and I didn’t want it to become rote, which is the great danger in the theater.

  Because of the success we had with Love Letters, I’ve had lots of offers to do theater, but I don’t want to work that hard. When my agent calls me with a part, the questions I ask are basic: “What is it? Where is it? How much? For how long?”

  I have finally learned that when you work, you work, and when you play, you play. Jill and I have designed our lives so that we can be away together on vacations. It’s a continuation of the rule Natalie and I made when we remarried: the first thing is the family.

  I don’t really understand those people who say they wouldn’t change anything about their lives. Hell, I would change a lot of things. Among other things, I lost a woman I loved with all my heart, not once but twice, and that is a truth I will never completely come to terms with. But I have learned through grueling experience that there is no such thing as “what if….” There is only “what is.”

  For the rest of it, I would have taken more time in certain ways. I’m not proud of everything I’ve done. There’s no way to get through life without hurting people, whether because of ignorance, or because you think it’s necessary for your own survival, or because you’re just too full of yourself. Those are the moments I regret.

  As for Warren Beatty, we run into each other occasionally around town. And when we do, he always puts his arm around me, and I do the same with him. In a sense, we were brought together by the loss of Natalie. Her death was so much bigger than any animus I might have had.

  The world of movies and TV has changed, but I’m not going to pontificate about how things were better in my day. Well, maybe just a little. Some things were indeed better then, but some things are better now. Certainly, there’s more independence for young actors now—nobody is trying to marry people off because of inconvenient pregnancies. But that increased independence also means that it’s everybody for himself—there’s no studio watching out for young actors, trying to build a career step by step. The only people with a vested interest in young talent are managers and agents, and there aren’t many who possess a developmental skill set. That’s why many careers are more erratic, not to mention shorter, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. There’s more independence, which equals freedom, but there’s also much greater risk. For everything you get, you have to give something up.

  I’m sure the people who were my age now in, say, 1960 thought things were going to hell too. I will say that money has changed things, and not for the better. In the world at large, everything is a corporate commodity. A football game isn’t just a football game; it has to be sponsored by a corporation—Toyota, or AT&T, or Capital One, or, for God’s sake, Tostitos.

  In terms of show business, the economics are entirely different as well. A few years ago, I proposed a revival of It Takes a Thief. I would have the Fred Astaire part; I would be running a place in Las Vegas called Mundy’s. Catherine Deneuve would come to see me and tell me that we had had a child years before who was trapped in the Middle East. I would have to go in and get her, and we’d be off into a variation on the original show. It was a good idea, and I think it could have worked, but Universal was practically out of the TV business, because it’s no longer profitable unless you have a big, big hit. Since nobody ever knows what’s going to be a big hit, they had simply edged over to the sidelines.

  It used to be that you made a show for a network, they got three runs of each episode, and then the studio owned the show for the rest of the world, for the rest of time. The rule of thumb was that you broke even with the networks and made a profit in syndication. But to make a series today costs $2 million an hour. Twenty-four shows cost $48 million, and there’s no way to recoup that much money unless the show is a success and runs five years’ worth of negative for syndication. It’s not a business Universal is particularly interested in. So I suggested doing six two-hour movies, which didn’t go down. And they wouldn’t let me take the property and do it someplace else, and now they want to do a theatrical version of the property. They might offer me a part, but I doubt I’ll take it.

  But let’s face it: the world moves on. Last Christmas I picked up my daughter Courtney to take her to a Christmas party at Natasha’s house. She was on her cell phone to the airlines to check on her airline ticket, then called about a car she had to pick up. Then she needed to stop at an ATM to get some cash. I sat there in the car thinking about my daughter getting money out of a wall and how, right around the corner from the ATM, I had built hot rods as a teenager. It was one of those moments when you realize how much change one life can encompass.

  There’s a general perception that show business is far more pervasive than it used to be. Actually, American show business has ruled the world for most of the last one hundred years—Japanese people in the 1930s went to see Charlie Chaplin movies in droves. What has changed is the immersion in show business of people who are not themselves part of it.

  Years ago, there was a man named Milton Sperling who produced Marjorie Morningstar for Natalie. Milton decided to take his family to see the most magical place on earth: Venice. He painstakingly prepared his son for the experience he was about to have, and being a producer, he also prepared the experience. He positioned a man with a starter’s pistol way back in St. Mark’s Square. He was to fire the gun when he saw Sperling wave a red handkerchief, so the pigeons would swoop up in a magical swirl at just the right moment.

  Sperling brought his boy blindfolded around the corner of the Doge’s Palace and placed him right beside one of the columns at the entrance to the square. Then he waved his red handkerchief, the starter’s pistol was fired, Sperling uncovered his boy’s face, and the pigeons swooped up.

  “What do you see, son?” Milton asked proudly.

  “I see…Dore Schary!”

  A confused Milton Sperling followed his son’s line of vision and saw a smiling Dore Schary passing in front of the boy, blocking out the carefully prepared vista of St. Mark’s Square.

  That’s one of my favorite stories because, besides being true, it’s an accurate metaphor. For those of us in it, American show business has always had a way of blotting out the real world. That’s because American show business is cleaner, smoother, and easier to process than the real
world, which, unfortunately, is where we actually live. But I’ve learned to have one foot in both camps, and I like to think I’m able to appreciate both the gamesmanship of the movies and a stream full of trout in the Rockies.

  If somebody had told me sixty years ago what my life was going to be like and had enumerated the terrible pain I had waiting for me, I would have gone ahead anyway. Because, along with that pain, I’ve experienced great joy, and I’d like to think that I’ve given some as well.

  In many respects, I remain pretty much as I was. That little boy who basked at being the center of the photographer’s attention at the preview of The Biscuit Eater became a man who needed attention and could get disappointed if he didn’t get it. In other words, I had the essential personality of the actor—wanting, needing a reaction—before I became an actor. Another character flaw is a plethora of optimism, which can mean I sometimes lack objectivity. In my own defense, I should say that I’ve become more realistic as I’ve grown older.

  I look around me and see so many wonderful actors. Johnny Depp is probably the best one working these days—the face of a leading man and the soul of a character actor, which is probably the ideal combination. And I think that Brad Pitt is, for some reason, very underrated. He’s very simple, very basic, and you never catch him acting.

  Recently I went out to the Motion Picture Home to visit Helena Sorrell, my first dramatic coach. She’s 104 years old and still pretty sharp. She was in the Audrey Hepburn Room in the hospital, and it was lovely—the sun was coming in, and it was Edie Wasserman’s birthday. Every year, on Edie’s birthday, she goes out to the Motion Picture Home, and everybody there gets wonderful food catered by Alex’s, which has all the recipes from Chasen’s—the chili, the hobo steak, and everything else.

  “Do you like it here, Helena?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t.”

  Helena gave so much to so many people, myself among them, and she ended up alone. So many people end up alone, and for what must be the millionth time, I realized how lucky I’ve been.

  No, not just lucky. Blessed. I have a wonderful family and true friends. I never walked away from my own life, like so many people in show business do, and I’ve worked hard, but as I sit looking out over the valley in Aspen, I feel gratitude for my life and think, Am I the luckiest man on earth?

  As much as I loved the house in Brentwood, I simply didn’t need seven bedrooms and a cottage anymore, so in 2007 we sold it for an astonishing price. I’m not going to pretend it was easy; Jill and I had been married in the garden, as had Natasha, Katie, and Peter Donen. We had a hundred parties there over the years, and when I looked out over the expanse of lawn and trees, I could see my mother, Jill’s mother, Roddy McDowall, Howard Jeffrey, Peter Donen, Bill Storke, Watson Webb, and dozens of other dear friends who had brightened our lives in that house.

  But it was time.

  Now Jill and I spend most of our time in Aspen, although we retain a condo in Los Angeles.

  My children are all well and happy in their lives, and recently Katie and her husband, Leif Lewis, gave me a spectacular gift: my first grandchild, a boy named Riley John—yet another RJ! I’ve maintained my health and seen and done a lot.

  Show business has been my college and my doctoral program. I’ve met queens and kings, seen America and the world. Years ago, Jimmy Stewart got me involved in the Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon for the Child Care Center at St. John’s Hospital. When Jimmy died, his will made me a founder for the hospital, and my continuing work for them and the John Tracy Clinic has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

  For my family, the goal was to go to college, but I rolled the dice and opted to go to work; I like to think that I’ve grabbed hold of life and shaken it. If some of it blew into my eyes, well, that’s called being alive.

  When my time comes, I will be buried in Aspen, in an old cemetery that was originally laid out in the nineteenth century. A lot of children are buried there, and it’s in the middle of a glade of aspen and birch trees—very wild and overgrown. As soon as someone is laid to rest, the land is allowed to return to its natural state. The cemetery looks out over the valley, and deer and elk walk through it all the time. Sometimes you’ll notice a large patch of grass crunched down, and you realize that a bear has been sleeping there after dining on the berries that grow wild in the middle of the cemetery. It’s absolutely pure and totally peaceful.

  I have four plots in the cemetery, and Jill and my beloved shepherd Larry will be buried with me. And any of the kids who want to be with us. Things change in children’s lives, and I’ll be fine with whatever they decide. It will be a peaceful place for them to come and pay their respects. They won’t have to bring flowers—just some seed, so that the birds and flowers will arrive every spring and enable me to once again be surrounded by life.

  I hope that the site enables them to appreciate their father, and, beyond that, reminds them of the beautiful confirmation of life itself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of the following people have gone ahead, some are still here, but all of them have earned my devotion many times over. You have my thanks and my love, and anyone I may have inadvertently overlooked has my apologies.

  Brian Estabrook; Merv Adelson; Bud and Cynthia Yorkin; Mike and Mary Lou Connors; David and Gloria Wolper; John Ma; Robb Baxter; Frank and Gloria Westmore; Dick and Margaret Michaels Fleming; Bob and Sandy Papazian; Blake and Julie Edwards; Paul Rudnick; Tom Mankiewicz; Alan Nierob; Arthur Malin; Ron Shelton; Jim and Judy Hirsh; Mart Crowley; Howard Jeffrey; Sister Marie Madeline; Roddy McDowell; George Hamilton; Lon and Manu Bentley; Grant and Brook Tinker; Leo Ziffren; Arthur and Regina Loew Jr.; Tom Todderof; Guy McElwaine; Don Johnson; George Segal; Lionel and Stephana Stander; Watson Webb; Paul Ziffren; Bill Storke; Richard Widmark; Dionisio Munoz; Greg Barnett; Stymie; Harold and Sandra Guskin; Joe Barrato; Tony and Sue Morris; Bill Smith; Steve and Elaine Wynn; Quincy Jones; Tom Ulmer; Peggy Griffin; B. J. Jiras; Ted Bell; Ernie and Marlene Vossler; Gil Cates; David Marlow; Jaclyn Smith; Randy Ringger; Ed Marrins; Bob and Nancy Magoon; Jack and Marisia Silverman; David Niven Jr.; Delphine Mann; Perry and Abby Leff; Veronique and Greg Peck; Jamie Niven; Barbara Sinatra; Jason and Amanda Bateman; Bob Bennett; Ray and Wendy Austin; Jim and Pat Mahoney; Larry Auerbach; Linda Marshall; Bill and Terry Hickey; Little Joe Torrenueva; Sue Block; Fred Gibbons; Jimmy Borges; Dotty Gagliano; Dick Butera; Joe Pantoliano; Wendell and Nell Niles; Dick Clayton; Leslie and Evie Bricusse; Alan Folsom; Sydney Chaplin; Bernie Yumans; Irving Brecher; Pat Newcomb; Nancy Sinatra Sr.; Russ and Karen Goldsmith; Jill Donahue; Nikki Haskell; Jerry Ohrbach; Lazslo George; Michelle and Giuseppe Torroni; Robert Osborne; Helen and Gene Offut; Tony and Cristina Thomopoulos; Agnes Gund; Steven and Elvia Goldberg; Chuck and Lori Binder; Woody Stuart; Russell Chatham; Patricia Moore; Howard Curtis; Larry Manetti; Elizabeth Pepke; Marcy and Leo Edelstein; Jeff Pogliano; Fabian and Fritz Benedict; Woody Stuart; Bernard Lochner; Jack Frey; Harvey Eisenberg; Lew Ayres; Elia Kazan; Mort and Linda Janklow; Alex March; Geri Bauer; Sid and Jane Harmon; Bill and Peggy Ruser; Jimmy Stewart; Bill Wilson; Steve and Edie Lawrence; Dick Powell; Bob Greene; Jimmy Cagney; Walter and Fieldsie Lang; Kelly Ripa; Mike Myers; Jane Russell; John Linden; Roy Palms; Elizabeth Applegate; Clark Gable; Angela Thornton; Dick and Dolly Martin; John Ziffren; Irene Ma; Gloria DeHaven; Jim Bailey; Roy Stork; Cheryl O’Neal; Jerry and Ann Moss; Fred Astaire; Lew Spence; Tom Selleck; Ray Smalls; Dick Zanuck; Conrad Stoddinger; Cubby and Dana Broccoli; Bob Conrad; Dorothy Lamour; Rosemary Stack; Dan Dailey; Holland Taylor; Alan and Cindra Ladd Jr.; Ella Fitzgerald; Peggy Lee; Bill Shatner; Chita Rivera; Rory Calhoun; Ken and Pauline Annakin; Tom Poston & Suzanne Pleshette; Stefanie Powers; Tony Curtis; Billy and Audrey Wilder; Florence Henderson; Jennifer Stander; Margareta Sierra; Kate Hepburn; Charlie Barron; Andy Williams; Gloria Puentes; Suzy Tracy; Willie Mae Worthen; Jane Withers; Dick Williams; Elizabeth Taylor; Burt Lancaster; Gene, Dorothea, and Barbara Rodney; Jane and Dick Moore;
Laurence Olivier; Barbara Lawrence; Sandy Koufax; Sonja Fitzpatrick; Gloria Swanson; Howard Keel; Roland Kibbee; Debbie Reynolds; Stewart Stern; Peter Lawford; Lennie Gershe; Ron Macanally; Marisa Ma; Judy Garland; Lew and Edie Wasserman; Rosalind Russell; Tommy LaSorda; Martha Luttrell; Eric Calderon; Maureen Stapleton; Jonathan Ma; Susan Zanuck; Ruben and Maria Agular; David Walsh; Senta Berger; Faith Ford; Steve DeMarco; Roger Moore; George Folsey; Kevin Costner; Lawrence Rudolph; Sam Pryor; George Kirvey; Paul Kleinbaum; Mortimer and Caroline Adler; David Capel; Malachi Throne; Ronnie Rondell; Howard Curtis; Sylvia Sidney; Mary and Dick Sale; Larry Stein; Barbara Rush; Leonard Pennario; Terri Garr; Sharon Gless; Anne and Terry Jastrow; June Allyson; Newton Brantley; J. Stanley Anderson; Melinda Markey; Gloria Lloyd; Carol Lee Ladd; Cary Grant; Claudette Colbert; Nancy Nelson; Louise Fletcher; Glen Larson; Nick Adams; Robert Ward; Abie Bain; Dick Crockett; Susan Schlundt; Susan Saint James; Angie Dickinson; Kirk and Anne Douglas; Charlie Callas; Bob Webb; Dr. Zeus; Bill Brant; John Derek; Debbie Reynolds; Paul and Joanne Newman; Jim Garner; Noel Clarbut; Jeff Hunter; Terry Moore; Flo Allen; Scott Dolginow; Nancy Nelson; Sidney and Caroline Kimmel; Abe Lastfogel; Joe Schoenfeld; Bob Jacks; Sophia Loren; Uncle Joe and Aunt Adair; Jean Leon; Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas; Judy Vossler; Stanley Wilson; Judy Shepherd; Vittorio de Sica; Darrylin Zanuck; Jane Smith; Samantha Smith; Sydney Guilaroff.