Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir

by Ron Perlman

  So I immersed myself in spending time with my newborn son. Not only was it a pleasure; it was the only thing that seemed worthwhile to me. All things showbiz had completely lost their allure. Everything that came across my desk seemed pallid, ordinary. After coming off not only being the straw that stirs the drink but also being on a project with the dignity and integrity of Beauty and the Beast, nothing even came close to living up to that. So I hid out. I stopped answering the phone, just listened to my messages, and nothing was going on that titillated me in any way, shape, or form. So what started out as cool detachment slowly started morphing into complete disinterest, which in turn led to the malaise that gives way to total inertia. In other words, at a certain point I couldn’t do anything to jumpstart myself even if I’d wanted to.

  And it wasn’t as if I had the luxury of resting on my laurels. Aside from my firstborn, who at this point was six years old and already enrolled in private school, and a beautiful adoring wife who I wanted the best for, there was this new fucking house. Lemme paint you a picture.

  Opal and I started lookin’ for our first house in ’87, just as the series started to kick in for real. We had a budget and a few neighborhoods we dug. Now, I have no idea what was up, but in the year we were house hunting it appears that all 13 million of the other muthafuckas who lived in LA got the same notion. ’Cuz it was frenzy time. In the year it took to finally close on a place, real estate prices in the ’hoods we were looking in pretty much doubled. It got to the point at which you went to an open house, and there would be about seven other couples there, and the joint was decent—not great but decent—and by the time you turned to your wife to ask what she wanted to do, two other couples just bid fifty thousand bucks above asking.

  So now the heat was on. The longer this took, the more expensive shit got. We finally found a place we both liked—really liked. And we saw it before anybody else, so we were gonna be the first bidders. The problem was that it was exactly twice what we originally wanted to spend. Twice! So I invited my spanking-new financial fucking adviser to come have a look and give me his educated opinion. He told me, “Nice house, very nice. Looks like it would make for a solid investment. I like it.”

  And I asked him, “What would make it a stupid investment?”

  “Well, in order for it to be a really stupid move,” he replied, “virtually three things would have to happen: they cancel your show, you don’t find another job to replace it, and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And the bottom would have to fall out of the real estate market. But it’s so hot right now, that’s a virtual impossibility!”

  Funny how life works. The month after we took possession of this “solid” investment, the show got canceled. Then right after that, suddenly people are shying away from real estate, so a major correction is under way, eventually leading to my house becoming worth half of what I paid for it. And then . . . well you know about this new phase of my career I lovingly call profiles in-ertia! So aside from the two kids and the wife, I got other issues.

  Then I find out that, in all the confusion with the network ultimately deciding to cancel the show, the producers drop the ball and forget to formally submit me for an Emmy. The way it works is nominations are not automatic; one’s name has to be put up for consideration as well as an episode you would like the committee to watch before they vote. And considering I was twice a bridesmaid, I figured I had a decent chance of maybe winning now that the show was history. So I found out I’m not gonna get the nomination ’cuz of a technical snafu, and I went nuts. Ends up I fire my manager, which was really stupid, ’cuz he was also one of my best friends at the time. But I was seeing red so I was hardly thinking straight and needed to lash out. Dumb fuckin’ move. And one of the only moves I ever made that I have never stopped regretting. Erwin “Levon” More. The guy who sent me the script for Beauty and the Beast even though I ordered him not to. If ya haven’t figured it out by now . . . sorry, pal.

  So with all this on my plate and pressure building, tension rising, there was this one unrelenting reality that was overwhelmingly trumping everything else: the fire had gone out. Which confused me. That had never happened before. Regardless of the slog that these first forty years were, I can say I was never disengaged. There was always a hunger that saw me through, charted my direction. But not now. And as concerned as I was about doing what was right for the family and myself, the will to do it was nowhere in sight. Makes a muthafucka wanna go hmmmm . . . !

  I hate using clichés! I hate terms like midlife crisis. But you know why a cliché becomes a cliché? ’Cuz it’s fuckin’ true, that’s why! And I didn’t know it then, but as sure as I’m sittin’ here, I sure do know it now—that’s what the fuck was goin’ down! I was in the midst of a classic, full-bore midlife crisis. Because having gone through it, here’s my definition: whatever it is that drives you for the first half of your life to right around forty, you have either by now achieved or you realize the dreams you dreamed are no longer pertinent, no longer seductive enough to energize you. So the fire goes out. The crisis part is that sticky period it takes till you get a new dream to replace the old one, one that is powerful and compelling enough to propel you forward into the second half of your life. And why I insist mine was classical in nature is because I was exactly forty when it came on; the beginning of it was clearly and powerfully precipitated by coming to the end of an incredibly defining episode in my life and was ended by an even more defining episode, one that has had the juice to propel me to this very day.

  The call came in 1992, two-plus years after the Beast was laid to rest, and, interestingly enough, it came from my old dear friend Bobby Littman, from whom I had been estranged for quite some time. Seems he was helping find Hollywood actors for this movie that was to be shot in Mexico for a first-time filmmaker by the name of Guillermo del Toro. He said they were prepared to make a firm offer pending my reaction to the material, and would I consider reading the script? Now, by this point, I wasn’t quite finished with my malaise, so my first reaction was no, thank you. But before I could say that, I thought about the fact that it was Bobby, for whom I always had a soft spot, as well as the notion of Mexico, which bore an exoticism to make it potentially interesting . . . and oh, by the way, I hadn’t had any income in two years. “Send it over!”

  The script arrived accompanied by a beautifully handwritten note from this young unknown would-be filmmaker. The letter, which I still have, was the most moving I had ever received. He talked about him having to turn himself into a special effects makeup artist because there was no one in Mexico he could find to execute his designs. He talked about studying my work, virtually all of it, in his personal journey to learn what he needed to know from the masters. And he said what a privilege, on the auspicious occasion of his foray into filmmaking, it would be if I would take the leap of faith and join forces with him in this adventure. I was charmed.

  I read the script on the stationary bike at the Hollywood YMCA. There was another young filmmaker on the bike next to mine whom I had never met but would eventually direct me in a movie called The Last Supper. She was reading the script over my shoulder and complaining that I was reading too slowly—remember the dyslexia from Chapter 2? Eventually we engaged in a real conversation. She asked me what the fuck I was reading, and I told her it was this unique and sophisticated vampire movie to be shot in Mexico. She asked whether I was going to do it, and I said, “This script is way too original to ever be done in Hollywood, so, for that reason alone, I guess I should say yes.”

  Before I could respond to the offer, Bobby called to say that Guillermo is coming to town, and would I like to join him for dinner? Well, join I did at an Indian joint he picked out on Wilshire Boulevard. Within a minute of meeting him there was an ease that was uncommon among people who are just feeling each other out. By thirty minutes into the dinner it was as if we had known each other for twenty years. He had boyish joy and enthusiasm just pouring out of him and an ad
olescent sense of humor identical to mine. But mostly what he had was vision. Whenever the discussion veered back to what this film he was about to make was going to look like, he was overcome by a slightly different persona; he stopped being this funny, self-deprecating kid and started looking like a Renaissance master. This was my very first glimpse into the glorious, twisted, classical, rebellious, unique, and original mind of Guillermo del Toro. The malaise was over! I was finally in the presence of greatness, but this time of a scope I never conceived could exist. Start the clock, ’cuz the second half just got under way . . .

  It turns out that Guillermo came to know me by a plaster cast bust of my face. He had been writing, directing, and producing anthology pieces in Mexico, sort of like Twilight Zone or Zane Grey Theater shorts, which focused on paranormal and horror characterizations and plotlines. His only problem was that there were no special effects and makeup studios in Mexico that could do the work to match his vision, so he started his own company, which he named Necropia. First, he managed to get an invite to the United States to learn from the masters of the craft: Dick Smith, of Exorcist fame, and Rick Baker, who not only pointed to Dick Smith as the Jedi master but who also eventually created Vincent and, later, the masks for Hellboy. My plaster face, with all its transformations as Rick turned me into Vincent, were all around Baker’s studio. Guillermo fell in love with my anatomy before I ever met him.

  Cronos, or The Cronos Device, as it was originally called, was to be the first look into what has become the magical and singular world of Guillermo del Toro. Essentially a vampire movie, it was like none other you had ever seen. The backdrop for this extraordinary look at the obsession for eternal life was quite ordinary: an old antique dealer and his granddaughter upon whom he dotes are at the center of the story. So for the first time, but not the last, in Guillermo’s world pure innocence and the protection thereof are juxtaposed against a crept-out world of corruption, cynicism, and a lust for the unattainable. There was elegance to the storytelling, a sophistication and purity; one almost envisioned Cary Grant as our lead character. (Instead Guillermo got Federico Lupi, the South American version of Cary Grant and a beautiful actor in his own right.)

  The grandfather is a sophisticated man of letters with a poetic soul, a beautiful human being, devoted family man, who, in his world of collecting and selling rare antiquities, happens upon this thing that’s in great demand from this underworld.

  He tries to figure out what this thing is and why these guys are killing for it. He comes to find out this beautiful whimsical object grants the user the gift of eternal life. In using it, one becomes undead.

  I went down to Mexico and we made The Cronos Device. I watched this young fellow, fourteen years my junior, work in the most different way from I’d seen anybody work on a film before. He had a skeleton crew. There was very little money, in fact, even less than very little because one of the investors pulled out moments before the start of principal photography. The crew all seemed like they had known each other their whole lives. And everyone there, including the producers, were lovingly surrounding this young genius so as to enable him all of the creative room to make his movie his way. Nobody was questioning him. Nobody was creating roadblocks that didn’t need to exist. Nobody was making his life any harder than it already was. In fact, it was just the opposite. This was as happy a film set as I’d ever witnessed, and it was infectious. And I didn’t quite understand this term till later, but what I was involved in was the very first independent film I’d ever signed on to do. And I took to it like a kid who just got the coolest toy in the world. I was suddenly flung back to that original feeling I had when I first discovered the true excitement of being an actor—there was that kind of idealism and enthusiasm. It was boyish, it was naked, it was unbridled. Here it was in full bloom, on a tiny little low-budget movie in one of the funkiest cities on the planet.

  Not only was I being asked to come out of my stupor to act again, but the setting of it was also this ideal, beautiful utopian landscape, at least that’s how I saw it. For even though it was Mexico City—23 million people, horrific traffic, smog to the point that you can’t see your hand in front of your face on certain days—I was deeply in love with all of it. I felt like I had been drugged, and I was becoming addicted to the feeling.

  Not only that, but Mexico was completely new to me. I’d never been there before, but it completely and immediately spoke volumes to me, almost as if, in a way I cannot explain, I had come home. I became obsessed with the culture, the mindset, the point of view, the humility, the joy (even in poverty) that I witnessed. They brought humor and goodwill, couched in pure humility, to their every waking moment. They never, ever took themselves seriously. No one in the Mexican culture I ever met seemed like they were entitled, imperious, or dogmatic.

  We went out every night, ate, and danced. One night it was Cumbia, one night it was Merengue, one night it was Salsa, one night it was Cha Cha. Every single night they took me to somebody’s favorite bar with live music and immersed me in this magical realism that Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about, which is the Mexican experience. Hell, it was just fraught with magical realism everywhere you looked, ’cuz it’s the realest place on Earth, and yet they have this mindset, this way of moving through life, that is very sort of . . . I don’t know, two or three feet off the ground. And I got hooked into it in a big way, to the point at which I was looking for a house down there to buy. I was gonna fucking move there. I was gonna chuck everything and become a fucking Mexican. Get myself a sombrero, a poncho, whatever. I bought in, hook, line, and sinker. I was reborn. Praise the Lawd!

  So many things have changed, so many things have evolved, so many things have happened as a result of meeting Guillermo. There have been so many new experiences, with so many old ones getting crossed off the list, but the things I learned in those eight weeks on Cronos in Mexico I’m still trying to apply to this very day; I’m still trying to duplicate, for this little experience down south of the border was to become my model. And even though my friend Guillermo has become a world treasure, having had bestowed upon him heaps and heaps of resources to make movies, I am still in search of the next Guillermo, the next Cronos.

  When I returned I had the enthusiasm to put this new energy surging through me to work. But, more importantly, I also started to experience some other types of changes in my worldview. Guillermo lit the fuse that would end up defining the second half of my life. The old dream that had burnt out two years earlier was finally rekindled, replaced by a new one, and it was powerful. Like I said, very rarely does change come in the form you imagined it would. When you’re in the cocoon you never know what kind of butterfly is gonna come flying out.

  (CHAPTER 17)

  They Call Them Shrinks for a Reason

  We survived those two lean years by burning through whatever savings we had left from Beauty and the Beast. And a few little odds and ends that popped up hither and thither. Opal was great. She never put any external pressure on me; in fact, she acted as if nothing was wrong, and another job would come along, just as it always had. However, for me, it was a very worrisome period, tinged with the uneasiness that comes from thinking about the possibility of losing everything. I was obsessed with hanging on. I didn’t really have anything very valuable at that point other than the family and the house, but I was still putting so much external pressure on myself because I would have just hated myself if, five minutes after I got it all, I lost it all. So upon my return from Mexico I took whatever gigs came my way.

  If you look at my IMDb credits in the nineties, you would say, “What the fuck was this guy belly achin’ about? It looks like he was working all the time.” And I would say that, with a few rare exceptions like City of Lost Children, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Alien: Resurrection, and then at the very end of the decade, Enemy at the Gates, all the other gigs were basically taken out of pure desperate desperation. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was ashamed of them; it’s just that I’d rather no
one ever sees them. It made me look like a total schlepper. But it was essential I keep stringing together a living: I had kids in private school and a roof over my head that I really wanted to hold onto. So whereas most guys can sweep their embarrassments under the rug, with me, every fuckin’ mistake ends up on Cinemax at 11:00 p.m., eight nights a freakin’ week.

  But on a much more important level the nineties provided just the right amount of turmoil to start me looking inward. I guess I finally got fed up enough with the extreme nature of the highs and lows that I woulda had to be a total schmuck to not start looking for ways to remove some of the drama. I began to grow tired of leavin’ so much of my inner peace to outward events—indeed, events I took very little part in creating. Because as much as people want to think I had control over the jobs I ended up taking, that just wasn’t so. They just came at me and I took ’em, for the most part. Or they came, and I didn’t take them. But nothing that ever happened to me happened as a result of my own efforts; they always came out of the blue. Always.

  Nevertheless, I think about the nineties as the toughest decade of my life. But, let me be clear, this decade also had pockets of pure sublimity, pockets of beautiful little things. But for the most part it was a real grind: there were real growing pains, a lot of testing. Our marriage got tested. Opal and I as parents got tested, whether we were good at raising kids got tested, whether I was ever going to be this vision of the man I aspired to be got tested, whether I truly even had any talent was tested. When I think of the nineties I think of it as a time of major assessment, as a period with a lot of sturm und drang. A lot of unease.

  Opal and I actually had discussions about how tough it was starting to be to find that couple we started out as. And it didn’t take long to admit to ourselves that maybe this was a discussion we weren’t fully equipped to have. So she got me to agree and then went out and got the name of this shrink, Phil Stutz, who was supposed to be tops in taps. Don’t tell Opal this, but the idea of going to a shrink never really seemed like it was for me. I was never really too sure about this therapy thing. I’d heard about it, of course, because it was all the rage, especially in Hollywood, where, on a per capita basis, it was second only to plastic surgery. And I never did understand how answering the question, “How old were you when you first discovered you hated your mother?” was gonna help me pay the fuckin’ rent, ’cuz, let’s face it, that was the real problem all along. I thought it was kinda like chasing your own tail to talk about psychotherapy. When she told me the shrink’s name and I told her that our friends went to him and the doctor told them straight out, “You can keep coming to me if you want, but your marriage isn’t worth saving,” Opal said, “Jesus Christ, how the fuck could my friend recommend me to this guy?” But that’s how fucking cool Phil is. He just fucking tells it to you like it is. So after a small degree of deliberation I figured, hey, this could be good just for the entertainment value alone. And thus started my long and beautiful friendship with what I endearingly refer to as the fourth leg of the stool, the other three being Ralph, Jean-Jacques, and Guillermo.