So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

As for the Broderick thing, it’s a fact of life that whatever helps you get a job in the acting world is ultimately a good thing. (Except maybe the casting couch, a piece of furniture I’ve fortunately never been invited to test out.) What I’m saying is, there’s getting the gig, but then showing what you’ve got. Really, you’re looking for what gets you to the latter. At the time, my physical similarities to Matthew Broderick were impossible to ignore, and I know that had they not existed, I would surely have not booked those two jobs in the same day. Besides, if I was going to look like another actor, genetics could have been a lot less kind to me. I doubt there would have been a market for an eighteen-year-old who looked like, let’s say, post-boxing-career Mickey Rourke.

  I make that incredibly vicious remark about the Diner star because of something that happened at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles ten years ago. I was working out there with my personal trainer, Rich Guzman, when I noticed over in the corner on the weight machines a bulked-up figure with a battered but just-recognizable face.

  “Is that Mickey Rourke?” I said incredulously. “Wow, what happened to him?”

  “That’s what he looks like now from all that boxing,” Rich said.

  I left after my session, and what I heard later was that Mickey Rourke came over to my trainer and inquired, “Hey, was that Jon Cryer?”

  “Yes,” Rich replied.

  Mickey grimaced, then asked, “What happened to him?”

  * * *

  Around the time I was fifteen, my father moved back to the East Coast. He’d been offered the part of Juan Perón in the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Evita, replacing the talented Bob Gunton, who originated the part on Broadway, and whom you probably know from playing the warden in The Shawshank Redemption. Gunton was leaving, and David Cryer would be his replacement.

  I hadn’t seen much of my dad at all in the ten years or so since my parents divorced. He and his new wife, Britt, had moved to Los Angeles, where they started a family, and I’d visited only a couple of times. Dad had tried his hand at acting in movies and on television, but the roles were few and far between. He played the guard who hoses down Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz and barks sadistically, “Welcome to Alcatraz!” He was also in the midseventies roller-coaster disaster movie enigmatically titled Rollercoaster, playing one half of a bickering married couple whose parking-lot argument forces the bad guy to pause in his bomb assembly. He was in an episode of Wonder Woman, which was actually a big fucking deal to me, because I harbored a pulse-quickening crush on statuesque Lynda Carter. He was also in American Gigolo, which mattered less, as I did not have heart palpitations for Richard Gere.

  This is by way of saying, I’d never really seen my dad do what he was meant to do: act and sing onstage. When I was a wee ’un and he was performing on Broadway in 1776, I had no understanding of what the show was or what my dad did. My recollections were vague. I just knew he played a serious guy who sang “Molasses to Rum.” I didn’t have an appreciation for his talents.

  Seeing him in Evita, then, was a true lightning-bolt moment for me. He was fantastic in it. And now that I’d had my own epiphany about my calling in life, we had a portal to a new communication. Whether it was him driving me up to Stagedoor, or hanging out backstage at Evita—where I first got to meet the phenomenal Patti LuPone, who played opposite my dad for the last month of her run—or bouncing over to check him out onstage after I got out of understudy rehearsals on Brighton Beach Memoirs, it felt like this was a family thing. We’re the Cryers of Broadway! This is what we do! Even though my hopes were dashed after getting fired from Brighton, it still felt like, “Hey, them’s the breaks in this family business of ours! We act; we go home; then we act again somewhere else!”

  My father and stepmother and their children even lived with us the first month he was back in town while they waited to move into a house in Teaneck, New Jersey. Not only was Mom and Dad’s divorce amicable, but Gretchen and Britt became great friends. That time in the apartment with all of us under one roof was a special one, because it seemed to signal a new era for our families. I had a real rapprochement with my stepmother, Britt. There’d always been tension between us, and I know I’d been surly with her on visits to the West Coast. But now I was a miserable high schooler wishing I could just act and act and act and not spend most of my year failing classes. Summer at Stagedoor was the only time I was happy. I opened up about this to Britt—a talented dancer and actress who’d once been part of Paul Taylor’s company—and she comforted me about the realities of following your dreams. We had our first connection as grown-ups. Ever since then, we’ve been close.

  It felt as if the family had expanded, with everyone in an emotional place that felt older, wiser, and less stressed. We were all grateful to have one another around now for support. Mom got the time and space she needed to explore herself and become the artist she would become, and a financially secure one at that. Dad was able to try what he wanted to try, and then come back to that at which he was incredibly gifted: musical theater. Dad would go on to spend nineteen years performing in Phantom of the Opera, on Broadway and on the road.

  That’s a long time with one show, writes the guy who’s been acting in a sitcom for twelve years. But it’s a testament to his love for all of it: the show, the job, the atmosphere. He’s been able to make the theater his life, and for an actor, you can’t ask for much more than that.

  Chapter 5

  No Knob on the Gearshift

  As heady as it was to land Broadway gigs like Brighton Beach Memoirs and Torch Song Trilogy with little experience, I still had my sights on the movies. Directing films continued to appeal to me, and now that I was getting my sea legs as an actor, getting a role in a movie sounded like the perfect job, one where I could observe what a director does from the other side of the camera. Act, then watch. Act, then watch. Rinse. Repeat.

  So for a young film nerd and aspiring actor, the words “Bob Altman wants to meet you” are a pretty exciting thing to hear from a casting director. I was doing Torch Song Trilogy in New York at the time, and among the many auditions I was being sent on was one for a part in a comedy Altman was preparing to shoot in Arizona called O.C. and Stiggs. Though I hadn’t seen all his major movies at this point, I knew this was a big, big deal, a golden opportunity made extra nerve-racking because of the talent behind it all. And now, after auditioning for the casting director, I was going to meet the man himself.

  My nervousness was mitigated, though, by one element working in my favor: I was familiar with the film’s source material, a series of stories in the humor magazine National Lampoon about a pair of antihero teenagers named O. C. Oglevey and Mark Stiggs, who got their mean-spirited kicks out of disrupting the stultifying suburbia around them. This was the 1980s, when hatred of yuppies and the prankish antics of young men (thanks greatly to the Lampoon’s own smash-hit movie Animal House) were—to use modern parlance—“a thing.”

  I knew and enjoyed the stories, and was led to believe they meant something to Altman, who had a famously irreverent sense of humor. (Before Animal House, after all, there was MASH.) I was sent to an expensive-looking apartment with a wonderfully casual disarray to it, which is a good description of Robert Altman in general: He was a big guy, tall, white-haired, and rumpled, but friendly and funny. He, his films, and seemingly his life were perfect examples of an appealing messiness. At any rate, he took his time getting around to reading me, partly because we were having such a good time talking, and he was impressed that I was familiar with the Lampoon stories. Before I knew it I was off to Arizona for two months to shoot my first movie, under the direction of a cinema god. Score!

  It’s a common perception that the theater is for intellectuals and movies are for everyone else. Although I don’t believe that, I will say that after landing two stage roles playing very smart people—Eugene in Brighton Beach Memoirs and David in Torch Song Trilogy—I was to make my movie debut
playing a full-on idiot. In the Lampoon stories, Randall is somewhat brain-damaged from, among other things, having a nail accidentally driven into his head during the installing of an acoustical tile ceiling. He also once tried to mow the family’s garden, which is made of rocks. Hamlet he was not. I nonetheless decided to play Randall as if he were the Brighton Beach Memoirs character’s intelligence-challenged cousin, in that I kept Eugene’s Brooklyn Jewish accent while I said and did the stupid things required of me. Why such an accent would show up in Phoenix, Arizona, in a WASP family, I have no idea. But hey, Bob liked it. So I kept doing it.

  In fact, what I started to realize was that Robert Altman liked everything, which was why there was no real script, and once he gives everyone a basic idea of where a scene is going to go, the expectation is that you’re going to just make up a bunch of stuff when the camera rolls. You knew your lines, but kept it loose. This was Bob’s notorious way of working, a free-form jazz improvisation that feels like a party he’s throwing that happens to involve several thirty-five-millimeter cameras. Every cast member is miked, so whichever way a scene goes within an established movie set, the experienced camera operators have a way to capture it. It’s sort of like the way I imagine grouse hunting is among the aristocratic set in England: a scenario controlled just enough around an established perimeter so that the targets eventually make their way into a hoped-for range, ending with someone yelling, “Good shot!”

  You never knew what would happen with Bob at the helm—see the dove-shit story at the beginning of this book—and as a matter of course, the structured-improv modus operandi of O.C. and Stiggs was quite fun, actually. But there are rules to dealing with such looseness. I learned the hard way when I had to shoot a scene in which Randall gets his hands on an Uzi at the big wedding. The two main characters give him the gun just to cause trouble, and—being a class-A nimrod—he fires it. But when the camera started rolling, on a take that Bob planned to shoot only once, the gun didn’t work. I turned to the crew’s weapons guy (I want to say his name was also Allen) and said, “Oh, it kind of jammed.” Bob was incensed: He hadn’t yelled, “Cut,” and now the shot was unusable because I broke character the second I perceived something was wrong. What I should have done was played along, even if I’d said aloud something like, “Damn thing doesn’t work,” gnawed on it, playacted firing it, whatever. Ever since then, until I hear, “Cut!” I keep it in character.

  That was the only time Bob got mad at me. For the most part, everything about O.C. and Stiggs was pretty enjoyable, from the filming, to watching the dailies with Bob making snarky comments, to the Friday night screenings he had of his movies, which amounted to a quick education in the strange variety of his oeuvre (Brewster McCloud, yes; Popeye, no; 3 Women, huh?). In retrospect, I’ve realized what an honor it was to sit with Robert Altman and watch his work with him. I think what I took away from it was that his puckish sense of humor infuses every frame of his films, even the more somber ones. Yet it also hinted that the installment we were making might turn out to be an impenetrable in-joke. As in, fun for us but maybe not for an actual audience. It was starting to dawn on me that Bob’s risk taking, while invigorating for an artist under his umbrella, might also make the whole thing go down in flames when put together.

  As it turned out, O.C. and Stiggs wouldn’t get released for another three years, long after I’d made a few other films and seen them open in theaters. Bob may have had it in mind to wring a few nasty chuckles at a certain clueless strata of moneyed America, but the final movie was too disdainful to get an audience to laugh along with it.

  After shooting my first movie, I returned to the theater when I was asked to play David in the touring version of Torch Song Trilogy. That meant a run in San Francisco and a stint in Los Angeles. The reviews for Torch Song in Los Angeles were great, and now the auditions I went on meant occasionally getting to enter a real, bona fide movie studio. Hollywood dreams seemed closer than ever, especially when my agent sent me to the Burbank Studios—now known as the Warner Bros. lot, but then a facility Warner shared with Columbia—to audition for the lead in a teenage love story called No Small Affair.

  Strolling past the massive soundstages, hoping to catch glimpses of movie stars in crazy costumes, I wondered, How does anybody get jaded working here? I tried to imagine a future in which it wouldn’t be thrilling, and thought, Impossible! Walking by the office of powerful producer Ray Stark, who’d brought so many Barbra Streisand and Neil Simon movies to the screen, I realized there was no way I’d seem anything but wide-eyed and wowed at this audition, no matter how self-assured and nonchalant I may have wanted to come across.

  No Small Affair was a little movie about a teenage photographer who falls for an older woman. As he tries to help her career, they fall in love, but come to the bittersweet conclusion that it won’t work. This was the second start for the project, actually. Director Martin Ritt (Hud) had originally begun shooting it, but fell ill, necessitating a shutdown. His stars? Sally Field and . . . who else, Matthew Broderick. I’m sure I went in to read for new director Jerry Schatzberg and instantly mentioned that I’d understudied Matthew twice by this point. Hey, for all intents and purposes, with my doppelgänger’s movie career now in full swing—War Games had come out the year before—I had no issue hinting that I’d be a much less expensive Matthew.

  Jerry Schatzberg was a soft-spoken guy, known for low-key seventies dramas like Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow with Al Pacino, and sophisticated adult fare like the political tale The Seduction of Joe Tynan. It seemed odd to me that he was doing a kind of teen romance like No Small Affair, but it wasn’t a broad movie, and was meant to be in a minor key. Besides, Jerry started out as a professional photographer, which led me to believe the story might have personal resonance to him.

  I did my first and only screen test in my career for Jerry, and it was the kind of experience that immediately clued me in to how unprepared I was for certain aspects of movie intimacy. The production was looking at Ellen Barkin to play Laura, the nightclub singer that young Charles the photographer falls for. At that time Barkin was riding a wave in Hollywood due to movies like Diner, which showcased her offbeat beauty and sultry toughness. She had a ferocious, tigerlike strength, and my character was this young, goofy kid. The scene they paired us up for was intended to show off any romantic pizzazz we might have.

  I was terrified, as I generally am with any sexually tough lady, but hey, it worked for the part of Charles. She, meanwhile, must have thought she was doing a scene with a quivering rabbit. Put a tiger and a rabbit in a cage, and the rabbit is not going to last long. The scene ended with a kiss that, of course, she managed to make supersmoky because she’s Ellen Fucking Barkin, and I managed to make look as smoke-free as a nicotine patch, because I’m Jon Niven Cryer. (Editor: fact-check Ellen Barkin’s middle name.)

  At any rate, after the kiss, we heard, “Cut!” and she looked away with a “What am I doing here?” expression, and I just assumed at that point that they’d go with her erotically charged Laura, and find another Charles, someone who wouldn’t look like his costar might leap on him and tear out his throat. We went out to lunch afterward with Jerry, with the intention of getting to know each other as we embarked on this wonderful journey, but the prevailing mood at the table was that we had zero chemistry.

  And yet . . . they kept me, and started looking for another Laura. I couldn’t have been happier, not just because I got the part, but because among the next group of women I read with was a beautiful up-and-comer named Demi Moore. Fresh from a stint on General Hospital and her first big movie, the beach-set farce Blame It on Rio, Demi was unlike Ellen Barkin in that she mixed a palpably smoky sexiness with an incredible approachability. Our screen test worked, and we hit it off immediately.

  I discovered that on top of her sex appeal and openness, she was an absolute goofball, which I quickly learned is a devastatingly attractive combination to me. She got the p
art, and very kindly offered to show me around town, as she knew that I was an innocent to Hollywood nightlife. That evening was a bit of a blur, probably because at one point she kissed me. And as there is simply no way to overstate my wonderment at this event, my mind still has difficulty processing it. Let’s remember, I’m the guy who had a hard time understanding why the feathered-haired Stagedoor gum chewer from Long Island wanted to make out with me, much less a woman who would later be regarded as one of the most alluring on planet Earth. I was flabbergasted at the intimate turn, and after that, performed that most graceless of noncognitive dives: the emotional belly flop. I fell for her hard.

  As an inaugural Hollywood romance, Demi was a gas: fun, engaging, and stylish. She’d had a few more years on me in the business, and she had a great attitude about her experiences, which included everything from TV to movies to—she sheepishly admitted to me—being the woman on the iconic poster for the slasher film I Spit on Your Grave. (Do you know it? It’s a yowza image of a woman in tattered clothing walking away with a knife in her hand. Yes, that famous ass is Demi’s.)

  She took me out to dinners and parties and introduced me to her crowd. She took me to the set of General Hospital while it was shooting and I got to meet John Stamos, a man whose overpowering star wattage engenders giggling in teenage girls and straight men alike. I, meanwhile, introduced her to my circle of friends, and through me she got to meet Torch Song Trilogy author and star, Harvey Fierstein, the only person with a voice more gravelly than her own. It was like introducing a food processor to a cement mixer.

  She tooled around Los Angeles in this beat-up Honda Civic convertible that only added to her edgy-hot-girl charm, when being a passenger on such occasions didn’t scare the bejesus out of me. The rearview mirror had fallen off, there was no knob on the gearshift, and the brakes didn’t work anymore, so every stoplight approach—occasionally with an open beer in one of her hands—involved the long, screechy futility of a useless brake pedal followed by the bone-rattling yank of the emergency brake. Once at a standstill, I’d be grateful to be alive; then I’d look over at Demi’s gorgeous mug offering a guilty smile and, well, be grateful to be alive!