I don’t regret for a minute those thirteen shows that I did. It gave me the experience so that when the next opportunity came along, I was ready for it. You can’t be a risk taker and expect to win each and every time. If you could control the future, then you wouldn’t be taking any risks. And while failure leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, the sweetness of winning more than makes up for it, and you’ll never win at anything unless you take a risk in the first place. As I’ve said a number of times, joie de vivre requires the ability to take the good and the bad. Life is much more like a roller coaster than a calm stream, but those who ride roller coasters often end up going back again and again because the thrills are what make life worth living.
Fred Silverman had taken a risk with me, and he did it again a number of years later. Pierre thought up the idea of a sitcom that I could star in. The basic premise was that I would be a college professor (you know I liked that portion of the idea right from the start!) and that I lived in a big house where I rented rooms to a bunch of students. He wrote the script for a pilot, which I took to Fred. Fred liked it and knew a production company that had a deal with ABC to do a pilot. They liked our premise—and Pierre and I were off to Hollywood.
I was experienced with talk shows. Not only had I been on so many others, but by that time I had hosted hundreds of my own. But sitcoms are a different animal. I was of course familiar with the genre. Fred Westheimer was addicted to The Odd Couple. He watched every episode anew and in reruns, over and over. I never spent that much time in front of the TV, but I’d certainly seen many hours of that show; since they’re all constructed from a similar formula, I had a basic understanding of what the finished product was like. What I didn’t know was how they get to that finished product in Hollywood.
Pierre and I were introduced to Allan Leicht, the head writer and the other writers. They’d all driven up in Ferraris and other fancy cars as sitcom writers get paid handsomely. Of course, in Hollywood the word “writer” is used loosely. When you think of the act of writing, you picture someone with a pen in their hand or a computer keyboard in front of them. And some of that type of writing does take place. But the actual method of how a script gets completed is completely different (or it was back then). The writers sat around in a room and threw out ideas. A secretary took down everything that was said, and her transcription became the script.
I met the actors, most of whom were young as they were playing college students. The cast also included a housekeeper, who was a mature woman, and an older gentleman who was a love interest for me. I’d insisted on that. I refused to be cast as the old biddy. The students in my boardinghouse weren’t going to have all the fun!
It turned out that our first night out in LA was Oscar night, and since the awards were broadcast on ABC, Pierre and I got to go. I’ve walked down many red carpets, but walking down the red carpet at the Oscars is quite another matter.
“Dr. Ruth, Dr. Ruth!” My name was called from every direction.
“Dr. Ruth, how come you’re at the Oscars?” asked one reporter after the other.
“I’m shooting a pilot for ABC.”
“Is it about sex?”
“No, it’s a sitcom. I play a college professor.”
Next. In Hollywood, during what’s called pilot season, everyone is shooting a pilot.
But for me, it was daunting. I can think fast on my feet, but as for memorizing lines and then saying them with the right inflection, that’s not so easy for me. On our first day on the set, we rehearsed in the morning; then in the afternoon, the cast ran through the script, reading our lines for the most part. (Actually, I was reading my lines entirely, though some of the real actors had memorized some of theirs.) The audience was composed of Fred Silverman, some other producer types, some network executives, and the writers—who made a point of laughing uproariously at each joke, not so much to show how brilliant they were but rather to give positive feedback to their cast. When we were done, the writers, including Pierre, disappeared. This was about five in the afternoon.
I went back to the Beverly Hills Hotel and waited. And waited. And waited. No word from Pierre or anyone else. Wasn’t I the star of this show? How could they leave me in the dark like this? It couldn’t be good news. I was certain that when I did hear from somebody, it was going to be to tell me that I was terrible, so I started to pack my bags. I was thinking to myself, “Maybe I can make a redeye home.” At the very least I would leave on the first flight back to New York in the morning. At about ten p.m. the phone rang. It was Pierre.
“I don’t need to hear the bad news. I’m packing my bags.”
“What are you talking about?” Pierre asked.
“I haven’t heard from you in five hours, so I suppose the show is kaput.”
“No, we were rewriting the script. That’s how it’s done. The writers listen to how it goes, figure out what jokes work and which ones don’t, and then they rewrite lines.”
“So they’re not upset with me?”
“No, not at all. They’re very happy.”
“We need to talk. Did you eat?” I asked Pierre.
“No.”
“Then come pick me up. Let’s go to Spago.”
Spago is a restaurant owned by Wolfgang Puck, who is Austrian; every time I go to his restaurant, he comes over and we speak German. He also sends over his signature smoked-salmon pizza to start. The place is always jammed and it’s a little hard to talk, but it’s the type of atmosphere I love, particularly after having spent so many hours in my hotel room stewing.
Pierre explained what had gone on with the writers as they made adjustments. He was having a bit of a hard time contributing—even though he’s written over twenty books with me and thus is a facile writer—doing it verbally, on the fly, took some getting used to for him. What he ended up doing was not paying attention to the page they were on but instead flipping ahead a few pages to see if he could come up with a joke that he would then contribute when they’d turn to the right page.
And that’s how it went for more than a week. The actors would rehearse in the morning and afternoon. We’d then perform for Fred, the writers, and network executives in the late afternoon on the set that they’d built on a soundstage. The writers would all laugh like crazy at the jokes they’d written and then off they’d go to do rewrites. Then at about three in the morning, a new script would be shoved under the door to my hotel room, as if I could possibly memorize it before the next day’s rehearsal.
At the end of the week we taped the episode in front of a live audience. I thought it went well, and when it aired, we won our time slot. But the big shots had first shown it to focus groups, and there it hadn’t done so well. That’s what did the show in.
Was I terribly upset that this experience ended in failure? To tell you the truth, no. I didn’t want to move out to Los Angeles for half the year to shoot a sitcom. Yes, I could have made a lot of money, but money doesn’t fascinate me as much as leading an interesting life. And in LA, working long hours to shoot a show ends up being boring. As I said earlier, my desire to be on television was to educate, not to make people laugh. I have nothing against laughter, mind you. I cannot stress it enough: the Talmud says that a lesson taught with humor is one retained, and if I can make my students laugh, I know that they’ll remember what I said. But a sitcom rarely carries an educational message. And if I had ended up starring in a sitcom, I bet I never would have ended up teaching at Yale and Princeton. Yes, my wallet might have been fatter, but in my opinion I would have been poorer.
You know the saying, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Money is very important, especially having enough for the bare necessities. But look closely at the lives of poorer people—you’ll see that many have more joie de vivre than those much richer than they are. That’s because money can also get in the way of joie de vivre. Let’s say you’re going to visit a foreign country. If you stay in a luxury hotel and dine only in the finest restaurants, you’ll never get
a realistic picture of the country you’re visiting. But if you rent a small house and shop in the markets next to the local citizens and talk to your neighbors, even if you can’t speak the language, you’ll appreciate where you are so much more. So I want you to have plenty of money, but I also want you to have a sense of joie de vivre so that the money doesn’t dull your senses to all the enjoyment that the simple life has to offer.
Rubber Dress
This story also took place in Los Angeles, and I suppose it too could have ended my academic career—but luckily, Madonna’s breasts saved the day.
I was asked to take part in an AIDS fund-raiser. Because AIDS is considered a sexually transmitted disease (though drug users can also transfer it via shared needles), when the epidemic was at its height, I felt that it was my duty to do what I could to combat this killer. That it was affecting gays more than any other group—and that I care deeply about everybody’s freedom to express their sexuality—also made me want to put a little extra effort into this campaign. And so I agreed. But to tell you the truth, I hadn’t really understood what I was agreeing to.
The event was a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show, with various celebrities modeling the clothes, I didn’t know much about fashion or anything about Gaultier, and I never would have imagined the outfit that he cooked up for me. This wasn’t a fashion show, where the object is to sell the designer’s clothes, so much as an entertainment event. Jean Paul wanted to push the envelope to keep the crowd gasping as each new celebrity came out. And what did he think the perfect look would be for me? A black rubber nurse’s outfit. It had a little rubber hat and a large white bib with a red cross on it. It was the type of costume I wouldn’t have felt comfortable wearing to a Halloween party, much less to parade in front of a theater full of people with the press in attendance snapping away. But I’d agreed, and I didn’t find out what I would be wearing until the day before the event, when it was too late to have him come up with something else. My only other option would have been to pull out altogether, and that would have gotten me more bad press than the outfit.
When I went to the theater for the fitting, I was aghast. But here I was in front of this world famous designer, so what could I say? He was very attentive to me, putting pins here and there to make sure that it would fit just right the next night. Since he’s French, we spoke in French a lot. I let common sense take a back seat and decided to let the chips land where they may. I knew that when I came out, I would get a huge reaction from the crowd, so I just told myself to have fun and hope they’d raise a lot of money for AIDS research.
Backstage the next night was quite a scene. The other celebrity models included Madonna, Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway, Billy Idol, and Patti LaBelle, but there were also a lot of regular runway models, and they were strutting around half-naked—and in some cases totally naked. Jean Paul rushed from one celebrity to the next to make sure that their outfits would make the sensation he’d planned. With all the commotion that was going on backstage, under normal circumstances little me would have gotten lost, but once I put on my rubber dress, everyone was coming up to say how great I looked. I was thinking to myself that what they probably meant was how outlandish I looked. However, I maintained a positive attitude and tried to take some comfort in the compliments—and the fact that I was in Los Angeles and not in New York with any friends or family in the audience.
I was in the wings watching Raquel Welch strut her stuff on stage, knowing that I would be next. “Ruth,” I said to myself, “you wanted to be in show business, so just make the best of it. You’ll never be looked at as a serious academic again, but if some of the money raised here tonight saves even one life, then it’s worth it.” As I awaited my cue, I felt like someone standing on the edge of a cliff getting ready to make a very long plunge into the cold Pacific. As Raquel left the stage she gave me a big smile. Then it was my turn to walk out.
As soon as the crowd saw me, they started to scream. It was a mostly gay audience, and they don’t hold anything back. If Jean Paul had wanted to get them excited at seeing this little sex therapist, he’d succeeded. I smiled, walked around the stage as I’d been instructed, answered a few questions that Jean Paul asked me, and then headed back for the wings. The press had taken hundreds of pictures in the short time I was out there, and I could just see myself on the front pages of the New York tabloids in my rubber suit.
A few other celebrities did their thing, but Jean Paul had saved Madonna for last. When I saw her backstage, I thought to myself, “For me he makes a rubber nurse’s outfit, but Madonna he dresses rather sedately. Oh, well.” Of course, the crowd went wild for Madonna. After all, she was one of their idols. But then the volume increased, because what I hadn’t known was that she and Jean Paul had planned that she would take that sedate top off—and there was nothing underneath. So there she was, parading around with her breasts exposed. Now the photographers really went wild. Typically I wouldn’t have been all that interested in seeing Madonna’s breasts, but in this instance they made me smile from ear to ear, because I knew immediately that Dr. Ruth in her rubber dress had just been pushed off the front pages. If I was lucky, nobody outside of those in the theater would see me in my costume at all. It didn’t turn out that way, as People ran a whole story on the show and included a shot of me as Nurse Rubber Fetish. But all of the attention remained focused on Madonna’s nudity so that even though I had my picture shown, it didn’t make a lasting impression.
In that instance, it was the paparazzi that I was worried about. Today it’s not just celebrities but everybody who should be concerned about how they might be portrayed to the outside world—intentionally or not. Because the Internet has become so much a part of most people’s daily lives, people treat it like the air they breathe, without thinking. But the Internet and all these electronic means of communication can have their dark side, and you must keep that in mind when using them, because the consequences can be serious. If you take compromising “selfies,” you need to understand that you may not have control over where that image ends up. Personally, my attitude is that if your naked body is seen by thousands because of a cell phone hacker or malicious leak, in the end the same thing could have happened if you’d visited a nude beach. Nudity needn’t be that big a deal. But if a picture of you doing something more compromising or even illegal gets around, you might never get a decent job again. Now, that’s a consequence you want to avoid at all costs.
I am not going to defend hitchhiking. I know there’s the risk that one can get picked up by the wrong person and end up a statistic. However, I also think that the average psychopath looking to pick up a young girl or boy isn’t going to stop for a short, older sex therapist who might just talk him out of his mania. And it’s not that I do it for kicks (at least not most of the time!), but out of necessity.
I don’t know about other cities, but in New York, during the late afternoon rush hour when you’re heading off to some opening or cocktail party and so many worker bees are heading home, all the cabs go off duty. You’ll be standing on a corner looking to hail a cab and there will be hundreds of them passing you, all with their off-duty signs on. It’s so frustrating. And I would use stronger language than “frustrating” if it happens to be raining! You can try to call for car service or use Uber or whatever, but since everyone else has the same thought, you’ll be told there’s a forty-five-minute wait. And I don’t like to wait for anything for forty-five seconds—forget forty-five minutes. So I’m standing on a corner, there’s not an available taxi in sight, and some car driver opens his window and shouts out over the traffic noise: “Hey, Dr. Ruth!” They’re just being friendly, but little do they know what that open window represents to me. I go over to the car and with a big smile say, “Which direction are you heading?” If they’re going anywhere near where I am, I say, “Can you give me a lift?” They’re a bit shocked, but they know—as I know—that this will make a great story to tell over the water cooler: “You’ll never guess who I gave a l
ift to!” And if they have a partner, they may even be able to weave the story into one that might lead to a sexual episode. So while they may hesitate a second, as the wheels inside their brain turn, something clicks, and they open their door . . . and I’ve hitchhiked once again. I’ve been picked up by fancy limos and cars where the driver had to throw a dozen old coffee containers into the backseat. But as long as I can get to where I’m going, I don’t care. I don’t think many celebrities consider it a perk of fame to be able to hitchhike when in need, but I do.
Once I was in Los Angeles with Pierre. We were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is just off Rodeo Drive—the residential part, not the strip with all the shops. We’d said we were going to walk to the shops, but when we got to the corner and were waiting for the light to cross Sunset Blvd, there was a Jeep waiting for the light to change. The driver spotted me and waved. I walked over to him and said, “Can you give us a lift?” and he said, “Sure.” We hopped in, Pierre shaking his head; he hadn’t hitchhiked since he was a teenager. The kicker to this story was that the Jeep driver was an Israeli. Next thing you know, we’re babbling in Hebrew, which really left Catholic Pierre in shock.
The irony of these escapades is that if my children knew, they’d scold me. (Now that I’ve written about my wandering thumb, I suppose I’ll have to promise never to do it again—a promise I’m unlikely to keep.) Having been forced to take full responsibility for myself at age ten, I have this feeling that I don’t have to listen to anybody. And I don’t see hitchhiking in mid-Manhattan as all that risky. If I were out in the country somewhere, I’d be a lot more careful because there are people out there who prey on hitchhikers. But so few people hitchhike in New York City that I don’t really see it as taking much of a risk.
I can’t end a chapter on taking risks without at least mentioning the one risk I’m always advising people not to take, risky sex. I never use the phrase “safe sex,” because other than masturbation, I don’t believe such a thing exists. Many people who have a sexually transmitted disease (STD) aren’t aware they have one, so even if you ask someone whether they’re disease free, their answer may be worthless. And condoms don’t protect against all STDs; they also can break or fall off. So you can reduce the risk and have safer sex, but not eliminate the risk altogether. Does that stop people from having sex? Of course not. And plenty of people have sex without taking any precautions, and suffer the consequences. So please be daring—but also be careful.
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