Love Life

by Rob Lowe

  I felt a mix of love and pride for him, quickly followed by the realization that somehow I had gotten myself into a predicament where I was being attacked by my seven-year-old son in the middle of the redwoods while dressed in an ill-fitting Bigfoot costume. After a brief stare-down, Matthew stalked proudly back to the campfire. I staggered into the woods clutching my groin, stumbling into a tent I hadn’t previously noticed.

  “What the hell?!” said an angry male voice from inside. “Who’s out there?!” he demanded.

  When I heard him fumbling with the tent’s zipper, I tore the Bigfoot head off and fled, crashing through brambles and chest-high ferns. I was positive I was going to be shot, and the circumstances of my death were certain to make me more famous than I ever was in life. But I was due for a lucky break and got one. No shots were fired, and the guy got frustrated by the tent zipper and gave up.

  I got out of the costume, rolled it into a ball and ditched it for retrieval later. I wandered back into the campsite as if nothing had happened.

  “Dad! Dad! Where were you?! We saw a Bigfoot!!” said the boys, who swarmed me, hopping into my arms and crawling all over me.

  “C’mere, we’ll show you where it was! Jacob got scared and vomited, and Matthew attacked it!” said my nephew Lucas, who was still breathing heavily.

  “It was awesome!” said my smallest, Johnowen, with his mischievous smile.

  “Is this true?” I asked Matthew, who, true to form, was standing coolly against a tree.

  “I did what I had to do,” he said evenly.

  Brian and Jodi tried not to laugh, and Sheryl caught my eye and shook her head with a small smile. The boys chattered over each other the rest of the night, each trying to outdo the other in the retelling of their Bigfoot sighting. I just listened and nodded, drinking it in and hoping that I wouldn’t be in too much pain the next day. When I tucked them into bed later, they still wanted to talk about their adventure.

  They talk about it still. We all do. Our family has moved on to other adventures, first serious girlfriends, college, summer internships and more vacations, some very extravagant indeed. All provide ample memories. But not all of them will have staying power. Why do we remember some events and forget others, even ones that are truly extraordinary when they happen? I’ve thought about this a lot as my boys have grown into men, as I try to remember everything of our years together and yet can’t. It seems to me that the big memories, the ones that become sacred, all have two things in common. First, they were created. They were moments that, as a family, we had a hand in making. And also, it seems that the strongest memories all have an element of pain or discomfort that is worked through somewhere along the way. Whether it’s a kick in the groin in the redwoods or the melancholy of that first kindergarten drop-off, a memory’s potency seems to have a direct correlation to the amount of conflicting emotions it contains.

  So I tell my boys that they need to say yes to life, just do it, get out and make their own memories. I tell them to think of it as a vocation; after all, we never think twice about toiling for money and yet when our time comes it won’t be our bank balance that comforts us. I tell them to not be afraid. Don’t fear the rejection that can come from putting yourself out there. Don’t avoid the boredom of the long road trip; the destination may surprise you and be worth every second. You will need something to talk about, something remembered. It might just make you interesting. It will certainly make you fulfilled. And by creating your own memories, you will always have something to share with the rest of us.

  Johnowen, my nephew Lucas, Matthew and my nephew Jacob, stopping for directions as we search for Bigfoot.

  No One Follows the Frog

  In life we look to our parents to guide us, but we also need mentors, those voices that come without the baggage of being your blood. If we are lucky, we may run across someone who can fill in the blanks that our parents can’t or won’t, someone whose life experience is a shared and valuable gem. For me, that person was Bernie Brillstein.

  Bernie was a large, white-bearded, loud, hilarious, opinionated, passionate connoisseur of all foods, in particular most restaurant bread baskets, and more significantly, one of the greatest and most accomplished talent managers Hollywood has ever known. He discovered Jim Henson and the Muppets. He managed most of the original cast of Saturday Night Live, including Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. He also represented the man who discovered them all, Lorne Michaels. Bernie produced TV and movies and even ran a movie studio himself at one point. His projects included Ghostbusters, Dangerous Liaisons, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, ALF, Just Shoot Me!, The Sopranos and many others. He and his partner, Brad Grey, built the entertainment industry’s most powerful management firm, whose clients included Brad Pitt, Nic Cage, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Zach Galifianakis, Courteney Cox, Orlando Bloom, Natalie Portman and many others, including me.

  Bernie and Brad ran this empire with a stable of tough, smart managers, all of whom were renowned as iconoclasts and hilarious misfits. Their company was not cast with the cookie-cutter Armani-wearing drones of the big talent agencies. In fact, Bernie often wore a tracksuit to work before Carrie, his chic last wife, began insisting on a more upscale look. Bernie personally managed very few people. With so much on his plate (literally), he mainly managed those who had been there at the beginning. Henson and Belushi (until they died). Lorne Michaels, Ed O’Neill, Martin Short and one or two others.

  In 1990 I hosted SNL for the first time. I loved Bernie the moment I met him; his was the loudest laugh during my monologue (I would later learn that that was part of his fiduciary duty). From that experience I became close to Lorne and then, through him, to Bernie. We would play doubles together, where Bernie would move surprisingly well—“like Gleason!” he would say—in spite of being close to 300 pounds. After a match one day, we had a long talk about life. He was funny and provocative, honest in a way that few are, particularly in show biz, and had a very realistic and specific idea of what I should be doing with my career. He was that rare man who, in his late fifties, was already a legend and needed no one, yet was still as excitable and engaged as a kid—he was still a lover and a dreamer. He loved talent, not “the deal” or “the press release” or the parlay into the Next Big Gig running an entertainment division for a conglomerate. He still, after all these years, loved artists. And he loved me. I asked him to be my manager and he said yes.

  * * *

  People who are not in show business (“civilians,” as they are called by some) often ask: “What is the difference between an agent and a manager?” It’s a good question. The most important distinction is that an agent must be licensed and can only charge you 10 percent. Truly anyone can be a manager and could charge as much as a client might pay. This is why you see so many sports figures with family members as managers bilking their clients into the poorhouse. Also, managers (in theory) used to do what agents traditionally didn’t do. Managers planned long-term. They thought about “career planning,” while the agent focused mostly on bringing any and every deal to the client.

  But today, between superagent Mike Ovitz’s eighties business influence and Entourage’s cultural one, agents have become stars. And as an actor, when your agent becomes a star, you’d better have someone keeping them honest. And so today, everyone has a manager.

  Bernie loved keeping people honest. Which was pretty rare; the standard mode of honesty in Hollywood usually went something like this:

  CLIENT

  I’m really upset. The studio owes me money.

  MANAGER OR AGENT

  It’s despicable . . . I’m gonna make a call and fix it!

  CLIENT

  Thanks. I just bought a new house and have another baby on the way.

  MANAGER OR AGENT

  I understand. How dare they! I’m gonna ream these guys at [Paramount, Universal, NBC, HBO, whatever].

  I’ll call you back!

  CLIENT />
  Thanks, man.

  MANAGER OR AGENT

  (to his assistant)

  Get me the head of [Paramount, Universal, NBC, HBO, whatever].

  The STUDIO or NETWORK PRESIDENT gets on the line.

  PRESIDENT

  Hello?

  MANAGER

  How dare my client cause you trouble like this?!

  I’m trying to talk sense into him.

  Meanwhile, are you green-lighting the new Channing Tatum movie?

  Chan is very anxious to get started!

  Bernie was different and everyone knew it. When I did a movie that became a surprise hit and the studio tried to screw me, he called the studio head with me sitting next to him. After a few pleasantries the honcho told Bernie that “there was nothing [the studio] could do” about the money owed me. Bernie erupted. “How ’bout go fuck yourself!” (This to one of the most revered, powerful and tenured studio heads in history.)

  I had my money by the end of the week.

  Bernie was by no means perfect. He often had truisms that I struggled to understand, among them: “Beware of redheaded Jews,” and “Never trust people whose last names end in vowels.” He assured me that I was exempt because “the ‘e’ in ‘Lowe’ is silent!”

  Bernie and I spoke every day, multiple times. Any excuse was enough for us to talk. He was interested in and loved my family. He was Matthew’s godfather. Sometimes we spoke for so long that it reminded me of the days of the never-ending teenage girlfriend telephone talks. Bernie guided me through many phases of life, marriage in particular. Never has better marital advice been dispensed by someone with so many wives.

  His struggles with his weight were legend. “I’ve lost forty pounds!” he would say, yet look exactly the same. In the late nineties he and I were flying out of Aspen (a notoriously dangerous airport) on a private plane he had rented. We were with our wives, the comedy writer and Breaking Bad star Bob Odenkirk, David Spade and Hall of Fame TV producer George Schlatter, who also struggled with his weight.

  “We have too much baggage, so I need to get a proper weight count,” said the pilot sternly.

  The wives answered, then me, then Odenkirk. I could see Bernie getting nervous.

  “What about you, Mr. Brillstein?” asked the pilot.

  “I weigh two hundred fifteen pounds,” said Bernie with utter conviction.

  Spade and I looked at each other disbelievingly.

  “And you, Mr. Schlatter?”

  “Two hundred five pounds!” he said.

  Spade could take no more.

  “Sir, I weigh two hundred eighty-five pounds,” he volunteered.

  We took off safely.

  It wouldn’t be the last time Bernie’s idiosyncrasies almost got me into hot water.

  In spite of his love for sports, he always had terrible seats. When you would bust him on it, he would protest, “But I like my seats. They’re near the exits!” Bernie also loved playing craps and Sheryl and I often went with him to Vegas, where he would bring fifty thousand dollars cash in a brown bag.

  “I have great seats for the Holyfield fight,” he told me on one such trip. He must’ve sensed my lack of enthusiasm because he added, “Don’t worry, I spend so much at Bally’s my host got ’em for us!”

  Since I was a fight fan, Sheryl, Bernie and I went. It was Evander Holyfield vs. Mike Tyson. About as big a marquee fight as you could possibly want. The Strip was on fire that night, as it always is for the Big One, but that evening it was thick as a brick, even by Vegas standards. We knew we were in for an adventure but could not possibly have imagined what lay ahead.

  In the VIP holding area of the MGM Grand we mingled with fellow actors, singers and star athletes. We chatted with Garry Shandling, Dennis Miller, Christian Slater and Nic Cage, until we were led en masse into the arena. I’m not too proud or blasé to deny that one of the better perks of success is the thrill of being led from the top of an arena all the way down to the front row. As we arrived ringside, Cage settled in next to Slater while Shandling and Miller tried to figure out who’d sit where. I’d been ringside before, a number of times, and seen Hagler, Tyson and others; I couldn’t wait to see the sweat fly and feel the lovely violence, which is palpable at that range.

  An usher looked at our tickets.

  “Oh, right this way, Mr. Lowe,” he said, and we followed him to the other side of the ring.

  I waved over to the gang, who seemed confused that we weren’t in the same area. I shrugged and pantomimed, “Let’s meet up later,” as Bernie, Sheryl and I fell in line again. This time the usher turned and began marching up the stairs and out of the VIP section.

  It got ugly quickly.

  Soon we were so high above the ring that I could barely make out the faces of my friends sitting ringside, although the look of horror on their faces as we were led to Siberia was something I was glad not to witness.

  Like Sir Edmund Hillary summiting Everest without oxygen, our harrowing, debilitating ascent seemed to take forever. I’m certain Sheryl had never climbed higher in high heels. She might as well have been on a StairMaster.

  Finally, mercifully, it was over.

  “Here you are, Mr. Lowe,” said the usher, who seemed to have the cardio capacity of Lance Armstrong on dope. “Enjoy the fight.” Panting, I looked around. We were in the absolute top row of the arena. Bernie had struck again.

  “Yo! Rob Lowe! Whatcha doin’ up here!” shouted a large man with tattoos, wearing an oversized Oakland Raiders jersey.

  “Just checkin’ out the fight!” I smiled.

  I helped Sheryl to her seat. She was being a champ, sucking it up and acting cool as a cucumber. Bernie, for his part, was silent and avoiding all eye contact, mopping the raining sweat off his brow.

  “Hey! Hey! Excuse me! Hey! Yo!” yelled another guy holding a clown-sized cup of beer. “Hey, my wife says you’re somebody! Are you somebody?!”

  I tried to pretend I couldn’t hear but my silence only emboldened him.

  “Are you famous? She says you’re famous! What do you play in?”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t “play” in anything but had acted, directed, produced and written some things he might have seen.

  “What do you play in? Can my wife kiss you?! She wants to kiss you!! I don’t care, fuck it, it’s Vegas, right?! What do you play in?!”

  This kind of patter happens more than you might think, and I’ve come to accept it as the cost of doing business. I also knew that it was likely to continue unless something more interesting got the couple’s attention.

  Happily, in the third round, Mike Tyson had one of the greatest meltdowns in the history of all sports and bit off Evander Holyfield’s right ear. This shut the guy up. Finally.

  The entire arena was on its feet. No one knew what to think. Was the fight over? What was going on in that ring? God knows from our seats we could barely tell it was a boxing match at all. When the referee disqualified Iron Mike and ended the fight, the crowd’s mood turned ugly. Like a switch being thrown, the place felt very unsafe. Bernie, always a pro at reading a room, whispered to me urgently.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here, kid.”

  Taking direction is what I do for a living, so I grabbed Sheryl and hightailed it. For once, I was happy to be so close to the exits.

  The doors to the arena had barely slammed behind us when the crowd went absolutely bat-shit. I could hear yelling and the unmistakable rumblings of an angry mob. Quickly, we made our way from the MGM sports complex into the casino, where we caught our breath. Soon, surly, wild-eyed fight patrons began filling in around us.

  “I’ll see you kids at brunch, I’m going up,” said Bernie wisely.

  “Sheryl and I are gonna gamble,” I said stupidly.

  My wife loves her some casino. She is completely capable of sitting uninterrupted for eight or nine hours in front of a slot machine. She strokes it, talks to it and gazes upon it with a face that is usually reserved only for the handsome werew
olf guy on True Blood. Since I am not single, don’t drink and hate gambling, for me Vegas always becomes a lonely adventure in room service and ESPN. For me, “what happens in Vegas” is . . . not much.

  But not tonight.

  In the time it took Bernie to walk to the elevators, the entire casino floor had been transformed into a sea of fight fans bent on destruction. Packs of scary-looking dudes eyeballed anyone who glanced their way. The area was thick with people. If there was such a thing as maximum capacity, the casino was now very close to it, and suddenly it was very hard to move.

  Sheryl and I exchanged glances. It was a very bad crowd; we were packed among them like sardines and it was time to get out.

  Then came the unmistakable sound of gunshots.

  Pop. Pop. Pop. In rapid succession. The triple burst that is the proper way to shoot a semiautomatic handgun. Between recreational shooting in my civilian life and working with all kinds of weapons over the years on sets, I knew what I heard. Someone in the crowd was a shooter.

  In the panic that exploded, men were throwing their wives under tables, screams rang out and people began to scramble in confusion, pushing and knocking over anything in their way. I grabbed Sheryl by the arm, hard. Her eyes were huge and scared.

  “Follow me!” I shouted.

  I put her behind me, lowered my shoulder and began to jog through the panicked and roiling crowd. I watched as a gang of young men overturned a blackjack table. I saw people grabbing and pocketing the chips that flew everywhere.

  This escalated things quickly. Now the security staff began wading in, meaning business, and from the looks on everyone’s faces on both sides of the equation, I knew people were about to be badly hurt.

  There was a single, piercing woman’s scream followed by aggressive male yelling. I could see a crowd of probably a hundred people start to run from whatever was going down. Within a second it was a stampede in the casino.