I Wrote That One, Too . . .

by Steve Dorff

  When Bill finally went to the podium and began to rehearse the orchestra, something quite beautiful happened. For those next few hours, we were all enveloped by the sound and joy of the music we were hearing played by this incredible sixty-five-piece orchestra. There were tears everywhere, and it was unlike any session I had ever experienced or will ever experience again. The entire session was fueled by a collective emotion of love and compassion. We all felt that way, including the players. In the control room, we were all hugging and telling each other that we would be okay. Everyone crammed into the control room listening to the playback of our song.

  It was, indeed, a miracle.

  When the album was released, accompanied by a beautiful full-color coffee-table book featuring Anne Geddes’s photographs, it was as proud a moment as any I have ever had in this business. It represented much more than just having a song recorded by a world-class artist and one of the greatest voices of all time. The album itself is a timeless masterpiece of David Foster’s making, and what we all had to endure that terrible, tragic day in September.

  Linda and I have remained good friends over the years and have written some beautiful songs together. Just recently, she published her memoir, and I was thrilled that she called it A Little Thing Called Life.

  20

  Lunch

  Everything was going great . . . until I ran into a dancer in Michigan.

  During the big writers’ strike in 1988, I was juggling six successful TV shows and I had to take a break. No one could work. I was definitely not one to cross the picket lines, so I decided to use my time productively: I collaborated on a musical with Rick Hawkins, a successful showrunner (Mama’s Family, Major Dad, The Carol Burnett Show), and my longtime collaborator John Bettis.

  Rick came up with the idea for Lunch, five stories that take place during the same lunch hour in New York City. We wrote the musical and got backing for a soft opening at the Cherry County Playhouse in Muskegan, Michigan. We got a terrific cast, including Brian Stokes Mitchell in his first stage musical gig, and Barney Martin, Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld.

  During dance auditions, something happened for which I was not prepared. Amid the countless dancers, one particularly leggy dancer auditioned, and my world stopped. I had seen those legs before. They were in the George Michael video “Faith.” Being a leg man, I remember watching that video and thinking, “Boy, I would love to see what is attached to that.”

  Two years later, the woman walked into my audition room.

  “The one in the back with the curly hair,” I said to John. “What’s her name?”

  He thumbed through the pile of headshots.

  “Lori.”

  “Okay, we gotta hire Lori.”

  “She’s trouble.”

  “Great. Let’s hire her.”

  In addition to having legs that ran forever, Lori was an exotic beauty who I definitely wanted to get to know better. Part Lebanese, part Irish, she was a tall gymnast who was extremely flexible. We went to Michigan, and I had a crazy affair with her. I had been married twenty-three years, and my boys were seventeen and fifteen. Meanwhile, Rick had also been married twenty-three years with four kids, and John had been married fifteen years.

  A total of sixty-one years of marriage and six kids.

  We did a regional run.

  I fell in love with a chorus girl.

  Rick fell in love with the male director.

  John came home from being on the road, and his wife had emptied the house and left.

  Nancy moved out of the house, but first she smashed every gold record I had.

  Our collective worlds were turned upside down both professionally and personally.

  When Nancy and I went through our divorce in 1995, it was the beginning of an extremely difficult time for me. I have always thought of my career as this rollercoaster ride, with its unexpected highs, lows, and sharp careening turns. With the divorce, the wheels had definitely come off the track emotionally, and, as a result, my career got stuck in some serious lows and sharp turns. I felt as if everything I was trying to do creatively was just a fraction out of sync.

  After just about every pilot I had scored for television got picked up for a series run, I now did six or seven in a row that weren’t even getting past the pilot phase. Songs that were on hold for artists with whom I had previous successes were either not making the albums or not getting cut at all.

  The pain, sadness, and confusion caused by our breakup took a terrible toll on our family. My son Stephen was justifiably furious with me. My younger son, Andrew, was scared and confused, as well he should have been, because, to be honest, I was scared and confused, too.

  After twenty-three years, I totally felt like a small boat lost in a turbulent ocean. The security of my home and family had been shattered, and although there were many extenuating circumstances and reasons behind our split, it was I who had taken the selfish turn in the road that brought our marriage to an end.

  For almost two years, I was fairly consumed by the upside-down nature of the divorce proceedings, therapy, repairing my frayed relationships with friends and family, and, most importantly, trying to stay close to my sons. Whether or not I was truly cognizant of it at the time, my career suffered as a result of the upheaval my life was going through.

  Shortly after the divorce was final, I got engaged to Lori. We were married seven months later, and we began what I had hoped would be the healing process we all needed. After having an early term miscarriage four months into the marriage, Lori became pregnant again, and this time everything was looking good. On a visit to her doctor at about six months, we were asked if we wanted to know the sex of the baby. I held my breath and said yes. When she told us it was a little girl, I cried tears of joy. In addition to being so thankful for the chance to experience being a dad to a little girl, I had hoped that bringing Callie Dorff into the world might just be the event that would also bring acceptance, forgiveness, and healing to my entire family.

  If there was one thing in this world Nancy loved more than anything, it was children. Nancy was one of the first people to come visit Callie when we brought her home from the hospital, and it was an emotional and beautiful moment for all of us. Two and a half years later, my second daughter, Kaitlyn Hannah, was born. Once again, Nancy was there to help and love both of our girls. From then on, we were invited to every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, as one extended family. Nancy truly loved Callie and Kaitlyn as if they were her own. The gift of healing had touched us all.

  Things began to get better on all fronts after Kaitlyn was born. Shortly after we brought Kaitlyn home from the hospital, it became apparent that we needed some help with the baby. Lori was battling a bout of postpartum depression, which she hadn’t experienced with Callie, and was struggling to keep everything together with the house as well as an infant and a toddler. We found a wonderful woman named Martha who would become like a second mom to all of us for the next fourteen years. Martha was the platinum standard of a nanny to our girls, and is one of the most selfless, decent people I have ever known.

  We moved to a beautiful house in Hidden Hills, California, which would prove a wonderful place to raise the girls. Although she was still suffering from the depression, Lori was excited for a fresh start in a new home, and we were both looking forward to making new friends in new surroundings. Little did I know that some of her “new friends” would be the beginning of the end for us.

  The Hidden Hills community was nicknamed “Horses and Di-vorces,” and for a good reason. Sometime during our sixth year of living there, Lori was befriended by several women, whom I will refer to as the Misery Loves Company bunch. They will remain nameless to protect the guilty. If they are indeed reading this book, and I hope they are, they are well aware of who they are.

  All of these women were walking clichés . . . Stepford wives who were fairly miserable with their own lives
, often cheating on their husbands, possessing a universal jealousy of any woman prettier and happier than they were.

  And, trust me, Lori was a lot prettier and happier.

  They derived their desperate relevancy and self-importance from bringing other women into their club in order to have someone new to jump off the cliff with. The women were snakes who slid out of their houses at 8 a.m. in full makeup, with their coffee klatches, to go on trail walks while spreading rumors and giving bad advice. They were filled with toxicity and anger that spread like a biohazard of which even the CDC would have been wary.

  Unfortunately, Lori fell prey to their shenanigans—innocently at first, but nonetheless it was deadly for our relationship. I knew exactly what was happening, and although I tried to communicate to Lori what was so obvious to me and everyone else around us, it landed on deaf ears. I was all of a sudden the bad guy, trying to get between her and her new “soul mates.”

  I watched and lived that movie, and it was apparent that our marriage was quickly heading south.

  I suppose, in retrospect, I wasn’t really blindsided, as I saw and felt it coming for a period of six months with these devious twits she called her friends. Yet I was shocked and bitterly disappointed that after all the sacrifice I had gone through with Nancy and my boys, that now the poison spewed by these ignorant women was the reason for another divorce. It was unfathomable.

  My daughters were barely six and four, and I knew how devastating this would be for them. Lori began to go to therapy with a woman that was recommended to her by one of “the club.” It was time for me to make a last-ditch effort to try to salvage this mess. I agreed to attend a joint therapy session with one of the biggest charlatans I have ever met in my life.

  How she ever got a degree as a therapist will forever be a mystery to me. After the second therapy session with Dr. Disaster, I knew the situation was hopeless.

  Later, after Lori and I had one of the most inane conversations of my entire lifetime, the writing was clearly on the wall. I tried one more time for my girls’ sake to convince her that these women were toxic, had no other motive than to derive self-importance from invading her life, and, most importantly, would probably vanish from the scene within a year after they had accomplished their mission. Once again . . . deaf ears.

  As I predicted, the misery bunch vanished from Lori’s life, having undoubtedly found some new victims or eaten themselves into oblivion. Probably both. They can go to hell for all I care—not for what they put me personally through, but for what they put my innocent daughters through at such young ages.

  I had no other choice than to file for divorce.

  The hardest part for me this time around was making sure that my girls’ best interests came first. Fortunately, the proceedings went quickly and, under the circumstances, as well as possible. I didn’t much care for Lori’s attorney, but in the mood I was in I suppose I would have hated any attorney opposing me.

  The adjustment to being a single dad to two young daughters would be one of the toughest yet most rewarding things I’ve ever done. We agreed to joint custody, and I stayed in my house in Hidden Hills, while the girls and Lori moved to a condo nearby. Helping them move out was the saddest day of my life, and yet somehow, during that sleepless first night alone, I wrote one of the most meaningful songs of my career, which I knew would never get recorded because it was too personal.

  After about a year, at my son Stephen’s urging, I sold the house and moved to Malibu. I found a great three-level condo on the beach. My studio was on the lowest level, a sliding glass door from the sand. My daughters loved it there, and they would spend as much time as possible with me. After being married for my entire adult life, some thirty-one years, I was single, living in paradise with four beautiful kids. I was starting a brand new chapter of the journey, and although I was still hurting from not having my girls with me 24/7, I felt like we were all going to be okay.

  The next two years flew by. I loved being in Malibu, eating regularly at Nobu, staying busy with new projects, and meeting a lot of women who were either going through or had been through what I had. It was an interesting time, to say the least.

  On one beautiful July 3 afternoon, I was in the ocean with Callie and Kaitlyn. We were playing in the waves and having fun. The undertow was a bit stronger than usual, so I was keeping the girls fairly close to the shore. I was in water up to my waist when I heard someone yell out, “Look out for this one!”

  I turned and saw a humongous rogue wave approaching. In a split second I determined that I was not going to negotiate trying to dive under this one. Instead, I would run for my life to the shore. I took two steps against the unusually strong pull of the undertow and felt like I had either been shot, hit by a rock, or bitten by a shark in my right calf muscle. I went down immediately, got totally smashed by the seven-foot wave, and felt like I was in a washing machine for about twenty seconds, until being beached like a dead whale.

  My terrified daughters ran over to me and asked, “Daddy, are you okay?”

  I slowly got up, took a step, and collapsed on the beach. I couldn’t put any weight on my right leg. A friend saw me and ran over to see if he could help. With his aid, I slowly hopped to my house, and he offered to take me over to urgent care, as it was apparent that something was very wrong.

  We dropped the girls off at Stephen’s house down the beach and then went directly to Malibu Urgent Care. The doctor checked me out and determined, without an MRI, that I had torn either my calf muscle or my Achilles tendon. Because it was the July 4th weekend, the specialist she wanted me to see in Santa Monica had gone on holiday, and short of going to a hospital and sitting in emergency for six hours, she put me in a cast as if it was the Achilles that would require surgery. She then gave me a shot of something for the pain that was so potent it temporarily sent me to another planet.

  I remember little of the next few hours, how I got home, or what had happened. When I finally “woke up,” I was on my living room couch with my leg elevated. The front door was wide open, the refrigerator was open, and chicken bones and cheese were littered all over the kitchen floor. The whole day had become something out of a surreal Fellini film. I have no idea how the news spread, but I started receiving calls from friends to see if I needed help or food.

  My friend Laurie Seigman, who is in the party events and catering business, thought it would be fun to send over two cute twenty-something girls with wine, cheese, pizza, and sandwiches for me. They brought enough food for fifty people, and I was still out of my mind, buzzed from whatever that shot was that the doctor gave me. One of the girls, Amy Handelman, was a delightful, intelligent, and sweet person who was interested in show business. A few days later, when I was a bit more coherent, I called Laurie to thank her, and asked if Amy might be interested in working for me as my personal assistant.

  Amy had moved to Los Angeles from the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, to become an actress, and was working as a hostess at a Hollywood restaurant. Luckily for me, she agreed to my offer, and for the next seven years she became a part of our family. Her contributions to my career, and to helping me with my girls, were invaluable. I still often say, “Geez, where’s Amy when I need her?” when I get frustrated trying to multitask at things that I’m not very good at in the first place. I’m happy to say that Amy has gone on to a successful casting and acting career.

  I finally got to the orthopedic doctor on July 5. I had the MRI and spent the next six weeks with a cast and boot on my torn calf. I didn’t need surgery. It was a crazy ordeal, but I never would have met Amy if I had successfully dived under that wave. Funny how the slightest of decisions affects our destiny.

  With the girls getting older and more involved in school and activities, and having less time to go back and forth to Malibu, I decided to buy a house closer to them, so I could be in their lives much more frequently. Lori had become engaged and was going to get married
and be based in Orange County, so she was selling her house. I saw the inevitable coming. Rather than do the back-and-forth thing, we decided that the girls would have more stability, and be happier living in one place: they would live with me full time. It worked out to be the best decision I ever made for the girls and me. Lori and I have a good, friendly relationship, which I think, in the big picture, has benefitted all of us.

  A year before I met Lori, she was doing a dance gig for Adidas at the Trump Hotel in Atlantic City. Donald Trump had seen her and told one of his wingmen to invite her up to his suite after the show. Being fairly naive, Lori thought Trump would possibly invest in her singing career, accepted . . . but brought along six of her dancer friends. He offered to help her with her career by introducing her to high-end people he knew. She said no because she had a boyfriend.

  She didn’t leave her boyfriend for Trump . . . but later she left her boyfriend for me.

  Looking at today’s politics, I’m not quite sure she made the right decision—or then again, maybe she did!

  21

  The Assistants

  I have always considered myself to be adept at multitasking.

  I had never really had a personal assistant of my own. When things started to get busy for me on the television/film front, it became pretty evident that I needed some extra help to get me through the daily grind.

  When I first got to Warner/Chappell, I was given an office on the executive floor. There was a receptionist working at the front reception desk named Debbie Datz who had recently made the move to L.A. from New York. Mostly manning phones and distributing messages, Debbie felt like she needed to do more.

  I was starting to get unbelievably busy in the studio, with both recording and TV/film projects. Often, I had to be in three places at one time, and I was in desperate need of someone to point me in the right direction, take accurate messages, and, in general, help assist me in getting a daily laundry list of stuff handled.