by Rob Lowe
When Steven Soderbergh asked me to do Behind the Candelabra, I hadn’t yet read the script but I knew enough to know the things I needed to know: Michael Douglas was playing Liberace, Matt Damon his doe-eyed, innocent boy toy; it was being directed by a master and written by Richard LaGravenese, one of the great screenwriters. So sight-unseen, I was inclined to say yes, unless of course I read the script and my character was blowing a donkey. And given the subject matter, I suppose that may have been a possibility!
As I suspected, the role was terrific. While not huge in screen time, I could see it having a big impact if done in an original, outrageous way. When you are the lead in a picture (as the old-timers would say), you have the luxury of time on camera to inexorably make your mark. In a supporting role or particularly in a cameo, you have to shorten the field. You need to swing at the first pitch and try to crush it, pronto. But you mustn’t be showy or unduly attention seeking. It’s not your movie. You are a guest and you need to fit in seamlessly. If you can pull off both of these competing techniques, you might just steal a movie or two. I believe all great actors should be able to do both, and my personal favorites have. They are memorable in parts of all sizes; they’ve been number one on the “call sheet” (where they list the actors according to the size of their role) and number twelve or thirteen.
After a lot of thought, and with the help of an extraordinary team, I had a very special “look” designed for my character, a seventies-era LA Dr. Feelgood. I based it on some of the guys I used to see at Lakers games, back in the day. When I walked on set the first time, both Matt Damon and Michael Douglas burst out laughing. Later, when shooting, Damon was often unable to look me in the eye.
Their extraordinary work made Behind the Candelabra the most critically acclaimed and highest-rated movie in the history of HBO. It was nominated for every possible award and it earned me my fifth Golden Globe nomination. And although I had only five or six scenes, I truly had never gotten that kind of obsessed, positive feedback from anything I had done before. My face, as Dr. Jack Startz, was everywhere, and people still ask me about that role.
I followed that performance with JFK in Killing Kennedy, which broke ratings records and earned me a Screen Actors Guild best actor nomination, and along with my work that year on Parks and Rec, I am happily able to say that I am an actor working at both edges of my range, in comedy and drama, as a leading man and as a character actor. To do that is every actor’s dream. Or should be.
* * *
My father-in-law, Norm, and I were very close. I was fond of him for so many reasons, not the least of which being that he said okay when I asked if I could marry his daughter. With the reputation I had at the time, and his penchant for gambling, I’m sure he was betting the over-under. But as Sheryl and I grew stronger and the years went by, he became an important part of our married life. He was like a character from Guys and Dolls, a lovable semi-wiseguy, part hustler and all heart. He had a unique and an adventurous past and had fantastic stories to show for it. He loved his daughter and he loved the grandsons she gave him.
When he had a massive and sudden heart attack, he was only sixty years old. I was in line in Starbucks when I got the call from Sheryl, who was distraught. We had to try to get to the hospital right away; the prognosis was grave.
I rushed home and collected Sheryl, who, in shock, was picking out the right shoes to wear for the occasion. Looking at her, pale and shaking, standing in a pile of footwear, I thought, “I need to remember this.” I pulled her out of her trance and into the car.
At the hospital, we rushed to the emergency room. A doctor who looked disturbingly young barred the door. “You can’t go in. We are fighting to save him,” he said, closing it in our faces.
I led Sheryl to a quiet corner where we could watch the ER door. Time expanded and contracted, as it seems to do when crisis surrounds you. Minutes felt like hours and yet everything happened at once. I held my wife’s hand but I didn’t dare meet her eyes.
Eventually the ER door opened. The young doctor began to walk toward us.
“I need to remember this,” I thought. His face betrayed no hint of the outcome. There was no “tell,” which Norm, the inveterate poker player, would have been looking for in this ultimate moment of truth.
“This is just like you see in the movies,” I thought as he opened his mouth to speak, yet in fact, it was nothing like the movies.
“I’m sorry. We did all we could.” His eyes were sympathetic yet businesslike. He was appropriate and decent, but there was nothing more to say and so he didn’t.
I held Sheryl as her knees gave way. Norm was the moon to her, bigger than life and always somewhere on the horizon. She was a little girl who had just lost her daddy. I held her as she cried.
I hope I was a good enough husband to her on that terrible day. I’m sure I could have been better somehow, maybe stronger or perhaps comforting in ways I didn’t think of then. We got through it as well as could be expected and now, years later, I realize why my inner voice had split me off from the unfolding reality and had urged me to remember the awful details.
It’s because I’m an actor. And actors play real life. Actors play doctors who give bad news and actors play daughters who lose their fathers and we play shock and horror and dismay and we can’t do any of it, not honestly, unless we have been paying close attention to those moments in our own lives.
It can make you feel like a cipher, standing outside observing, taking mental notes. Or worse, like some vacant pretender, feeling and participating in the moment only partway, while you file away the details into the ever-expanding emotional toolbox you must fill to successfully ply your trade.
It is the details of human experience that matter. And as always, what even the most talented screenwriter could write pales in comparison.
* * *
When Arnold Schwarzenegger defied the skeptics and odds by running for governor of California, I was among the first and, as it turned out, somewhat shockingly, few members of our industry to actually work for his election. Arnold and I crisscrossed the state campaigning, raising money and doing the day-to-day grunt work necessary to get to the finish. In the end it was his not-so-secret weapon, Maria Shriver, who closed the deal, convincing Californians to buy into a postpartisan candidacy.
It was a tough fight and certainly no “gimme.” California is a blue state and Arnold was going up against an incumbent Democrat. Having worked exclusively for that party all my life previously, I was putting my money where my mouth was for the first time as a newly converted independent voter. My days of being a knee-jerk supporter of any party were over for good. I now choose my candidates on any number of criteria, but never by party affiliation. Like “recreational” drug use, the idea of slavish party loyalty seems like an outdated and unhealthy concept. Certainly no one could think that the word “partisan” is anything other than pejorative.
At any rate, as the campaign drew to a close it had captured the attention of the world. Part of it was California’s standing as the world’s eleventh-biggest economy, and part of it was the attention that always follows Arnold, one of the great characters of our time. On election night every news outlet in the world was waiting in the ballroom at the Century Plaza Hotel. As with Ronald Reagan over three decades earlier, everyone wanted to know: could an actor become governor of the most important state of the most important country in the world?
Sheryl and I worked our way through presidential-level security up to the floor that had been secured for the campaign brain trust and members of the sprawling Shriver/Kennedy/Schwarzenegger clan. The hallway was thick with staffers, volunteers and huge men with Secret Service–style earpieces.
The drone of CNN and Fox News spilled from every room we passed as we made our way to the hotel’s presidential suite.
I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. After a moment I saw that it was unlocked, so I opened it for Sheryl and I followed her in.
It was a huge s
uite, with a living room and hallways leading to additional seating areas and bedrooms. Few lights were on, so the giant glass windows glowed with a breathtaking panorama of the Los Angeles skyline. Unlike the crackling energy of the hallway outside, the room was as quiet as a tomb. A huge flat-screen TV was dormant, probably the only one in the hotel and probably one of the few in the country not in use at that moment, as the votes were almost in.
Sheryl and I looked at each other, wondering if maybe somehow we were in the wrong place. Then I saw a woman whom I hadn’t noticed, sitting alone in the shadows. Although she was frail and old, her posture was ramrod straight. She had likewise not noticed our entrance. I moved closer and recognized her steel-blue eyes, which were gazing into the cityscape outside the suite’s windows. Her eyes were afire, blazing with a passion and a sort of emotion I couldn’t name. It was Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
I wondered if we should leave and not interrupt her private moment.
“Where is everyone?!?” she asked with authority, turning her gaze finally to Sheryl and me.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Shriver,” I replied. “I hope we aren’t disturbing you.”
“Not at all!” she said, crossing to the giant TV. “We should turn this on,” she said, trying to navigate the remote.
I thought of all the elections she had watched before, for her brothers, for her husband. I was overcome with emotion to be so close to her, she who had been so close to history, she who had played such a role in creating it for so long.
Although I had spent time with her over the years at various family functions, it wasn’t until very recently that we had gotten to know each other. Every year Maria and her brother Anthony hold a bike race as their fund-raiser for their Best Buddies charity for individuals with intellectual disabilities. One of the highlights being an extremely competitive bicycle-built-for-two race along a tight and dangerous course where a number of teams have gone ass-over-teakettle. At the last race Eunice had insisted I be her partner. I was shocked. I wasn’t about to put her, at eighty-three years old, in a crash helmet on the back of a race bike.
“Come on, let’s go!” she said, grabbing me by the shirt.
Desperately I looked to Maria for help. She gave me a look that could not have been more clear: “You see what I deal with?!” along with underpinnings of a huge and prideful love.
Mrs. Shriver and I finished second that day.
Back in the presidential suite, I knew to hop to it when Mrs. Shriver wanted something.
“Can you help me with this remote?” she asked.
At that moment the door burst open to a raucous crowd of supporters and family members led by the great Sargent Shriver, brandishing his cane like a drum major.
“Woo-hoo!” he yelled, as Maria, beautifully dressed for the occasion in a white and black Armani dress, helped him to a chair.
The technology gods, who so often forsake me, smiled this night, and I managed to click the remote to CNN.
Now the room was filling in earnest with the big donors, the campaign brain trust and every member of the family. Other than Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, there were few members of the entertainment community. The vibe was quiet, filled with tension, but with an unmistakable sense of occasion. I found Arnold’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt (later to be played by Woody Harrelson in HBO’s Sarah Palin movie, Game Change).
“How’s it looking?” I asked.
“Good,” he answered tightly. I awaited some evidence to support the assessment but got none. Maria sat with her kids and her cousin Caroline Kennedy on the big couch staring intently at the TV. I looked at my watch—it was seven P.M. and the polls had just closed.
The CNN breaking-news theme played.
“We can now project that Arnold Schwarzenegger will become the thirty-eighth governor of the state of California.”
Now, in a movie, the script would have had the room erupt, like New Year’s Eve, with lots of shouting, hugging and victory fists in the air. But in real life, it turns out, the celebration, if you could even call it that, was subdued, dignified, quiet and imbued with a dreamlike quality that made you begin to doubt that it was really actually happening. There was happiness and there was giddiness, sure, but it was way, way down deep, covered over by the dawning realization of the scope of what had transpired and the almost incomprehensible level of responsibility now at hand. As my mother used to say, “Be careful what you wish for.”
There was still no sign of the man of the hour, and now people really began to notice that Arnold had been AWOL, undoubtedly in a back room working on both a victory and, if needed, a concession speech.
“Can you fucking believe this?” said Ivan Reitman. “From Kindergarten Cop to governor.”
And now everyone was talking excitedly, in a low buzz, the room animated by a collective desire to put the moment in context. It became hard to hear.
But it was quickly, deathly quiet again as someone holding a phone said, “It’s Governor Davis calling.” CNN can declare winners all they want, but as anyone who watched Bush–Gore remembers, it ain’t over until someone cries uncle.
At the end of the big room’s hallway, a door opened. It was Arnold, suddenly and improbably looking like a governor. I studied his face—again, the truth vampire in me wanting to file this away for the moment when I might need to play a victorious candidate, as I indeed would in Brothers & Sisters and Killing Kennedy. If I’d have played the candidate as beaming, acknowledging all my supporters with a smile, wink or handshake, luxuriating in an energetic and triumphant trot to the vanquished waiting on the phone, I would have gotten it completely wrong. The governor-elect’s walk was purposeful yet slow. He met no one’s eye; he stared straight ahead. There would be a time to hug his family and acknowledge friends, but that would be later.
This scene was not playing out as I had expected and I was trying to understand what I was seeing. People stood on either side as Arnold walked to the waiting phone. The wait felt excruciating, at least to me, but Arnold was in no hurry. He almost seemed unsure, a quality I never associate with him.
An aide handed him the phone. For a brief moment Arnold held it at his chest, almost on his heart, but I knew it was subconscious. I knew what I was looking at; I finally got what was happening here. I was watching someone step into their future, a man aware enough to understand that his life would never be the same and changes he would never see coming were part of success’s bargain.
“Governor Davis, how are you?” Arnold said.
It’d been a fairly tough campaign and not without its personal vitriol in the final days, as is common, so I could only imagine that Governor Davis, if he were to be truthful, would have answered, “Not so good!”
I tried to get a clue from Arnold’s face or body language as to what was being said on the other end of the line, but there was no indication. But clearly Governor Davis was doing all the talking.
Then after a moment, from Arnold, “Thank you.”
Another shorter bit of listening, then, “Thank you . . . thank you so much. Bye.”
Arnold hung up the phone. For the first time he looked around the room. “Governor Davis wanted to offer his congratulations on the victory and was very gracious.”
In a TV show or movie, theme music would have played now, and finally the winner would have smiled and people would certainly have rushed to him for the beginning of a huge celebration. But I noted that on this night, in real life, the crowd didn’t know how to react. It waited to take its cue from how the winner would react, and he, unlike an actor playing a made-up governor-elect, had to focus on the next piece of business at hand. The victory speech was now moments away and would be seen all around the world. So Arnold and his staff headed back down the hallway to prepare. Nothing tangible, in fact, had really happened.
It’s this kind of life detail that you can’t write or act with total authenticity unless you’ve experienced it. You literally can’t make it up. And if you try to, it will look
, feel and play like you did.
Whether it’s a death of a loved one or a life-changing event with the world watching, these are the kinds of big moments that are often the turning points in stories and performances. With a knowledge of life’s details, the performance becomes the next challenge. And to do that, you have to build your “character.”
I never had an acting teacher, unless you count my drama classes in junior high. I was fortunate to work at a high level from the time I was fifteen, so I didn’t have time or need for the kind of traditional acting classes that most actors attend at some point. I learned by doing the actual deed, which I believe is the ideal.
(Sidebar: Remember how I discussed how much I will miss not having my son Matthew around when he leaves home? He has just cranked up his ever-present techno Studio 54–meets–Eastern European–authoritarian–marching–song music, making it next to impossible to write this. Can he go to college today?)
In 1993 I found out that one of my early favorite books, Stephen King’s The Stand, was finally coming to the screen as an eight-hour miniseries for ABC.
I took a meeting with the executives at ABC and they offered me one of the great roles, Larry. The romantic wannabe rock singer and major hero.
I had other ideas.
“I want to play Nick Andros.”
“The deaf-mute?” asked the exec.
“Yes.”
“But he has no lines!” said the exec.
“Sure, I know, but I feel like it would be more of a challenge and for sure less expected than playing a sort of traditional romantic lead.”