So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  I was nineteen, starring in a movie, and in love. What could be better? Calls back home to my best friend, David (Dennis), invariably involved many iterations of this piece of advice: “If you ever get the chance to fool around with a beautiful actress in a hot tub, do it, because it’s incredibly fun.”

  Demi was cast fairly late in the process, so we had only three weeks to be together before the start of principal photography, but I was doing my best to cram many years’ worth of relationship expectations into that concentrated period. I was certain what we had was the real thing, and that we would last.

  So imagine my surprise when, mere days after we began filming, I started feeling this gorgeous wild child slip away from me. It started with the sense that perhaps she didn’t view her downtime as first and foremost an opportunity to see me, or even let me know what she was doing. When the production moved to San Francisco for a few weeks, one night after shooting I returned to my hotel and thought, I’ll swing by her place! Not fully cognizant that San Francisco is a series of paved and zoned cliff faces, I walked, or should I say climbed, up the hill to the house she was renting, which I began to envision had to be a mountaintop lair surrounded by goats.

  In any case, with romantic visions of a canoodly overnight stay scored to the Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now” (my Walkman accompaniment of choice that night), I reached the door and rang her bell. No answer. Ring, ring. More waiting. Ring, ring. Nothing. I was beginning to get an inkling that maybe she didn’t think we were exclusive.

  Then there were the days she seemed agitated on set, and I couldn’t get through to her no matter what I said. I started to think about a seemingly innocuous piece of information she’d revealed to me once in a moment of honesty: that while shooting Blame It on Rio in Brazil, she’d tried cocaine and apparently found it enjoyable. At the time I twisted that admission of hers into something about my own feelings of being left out—why had she never offered me a snort? Sharing is caring. But I was now beginning to think something else. One of the makeup artists on No Small Affair even came up to me at one point and said, “I think maybe Demi’s got a problem.” Well, that must be it, I concluded. It felt weird to think that she’d opened up to me about the past, but not the present.

  After the production moved back to Los Angeles, I had this idea that things would return to the way they were before shooting: laughs, love, near-death experiences in her car. Wait until things are hunky-dory, I thought, to address what went wrong.

  I went over to her house on Willoughby Avenue one afternoon, rang her bell, and was greeted by her housekeeper.

  “Is Demi around?” I asked hopefully.

  “She’s out with her boyfriend,” she said through a thick Spanish accent.

  I tentatively ventured, “But . . . I’m her boyfriend.”

  She bit her lip and, with a sad look in her eye, shook her head.

  Later that night I went back to Demi’s place to hash out what was going on in our relationship as well as my fears about her drug use. I tried to play it cool, as though I were a grown-up and it wasn’t a big deal.

  At a certain point I was helping her take off her boots—she’s sitting on the bed; I’m standing, hands firmly pulling on her footwear as she uses her other foot to press on my back for leverage—when I brought up the more sensitive topic.

  Had I called my friend David after that night with more advice, it would now have started with: “When you are helping your hot but troubled girlfriend off with her boots and your back is turned to her, don’t suggest she has a drug problem.” Demi sent me halfway across the room. I realized that whatever was going on with her, my intervention wasn’t going to help it, and with that, we were officially broken up. Driving home in my rental car to my shithole hotel, the “Hold Me Now” of happier times was being replaced by a radio deejay’s eerily cosmic playing of Michael Jackson’s “She’s out of My Life.” (And no, movie geeks, I had not seen Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance at that point.)

  I was devastated, but we were still working together, even if we didn’t have a whole lot left to shoot. Then it was decided during the last week of filming that the big finale we’d shot in a beautiful San Francisco loft with a gorgeous view of the city didn’t work. Not only that but we couldn’t get everyone back to the Bay Area, so they were going to rebuild an exact replica of the loft with a model San Francisco outside the window. In the movies, reality truly is warped into the shape you desire. The good news, though, was that the focus of the scene was going to shift from Demi’s character to mine. I was going to get the big emotional moment, a challenge I was more than up for, and I suspected the reason the ending didn’t work the first time we filmed it was because it had been one of Demi’s irritable, off-her-game days. Though I was still smarting from the breakup, I took pride in the fact that if Demi hadn’t picked me, in a way, the movies had.

  On the moviemaking front, No Small Affair was a continued education for me. I realized that the way Robert Altman makes movies—do whatever you want!—isn’t the way everybody makes movies. On No Small Affair, you learned your lines, said your lines, and didn’t mess around. Whereas nobody on O.C. and Stiggs said one word to me about how to treat my costume, on No Small Affair I had to be taken aside by the wardrobe woman. “Don’t just leave your costume in a ball,” she said. “Don’t expect that we’re going to clean it. Take care of it. Respect that everybody on this crew is here to work.” Believe me, I was grateful for being instructed on how to be part of a well-functioning team.

  Another time, while we were in San Francisco, I contracted mono as well as a terrible throat infection, which you can actually hear in the movie. It sounds like I’ve got golf balls behind my tongue. At any rate, I was so sick that the production had to shut down for a week, which—if you’re familiar with the ins and outs of filmmaking—is a near-calamitous interruption for such an expensive undertaking. But in my naïveté, I figured, Hey, no big deal. Everybody flies back to LA and gets to see their families! Uh, no. The bond company has to pay the studio for the time lost, and this doesn’t make any of the money people happy. I’m not sure how I could have prevented getting so deathly ill, but I learned how much a movie depends on its lead actor or actress being healthy.

  Some severe geeking out happened as well, when I learned before filming that our cinematographer would be Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-born genius who won the Academy Award for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my all-time favorite movies. (Need extra proof of Zsigmond’s talent? How about McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, The Deer Hunter, and Blow Out?) I was a little perplexed that someone so adept at epic images and big-canvas moments would take a small-scale adolescent romance, but he’d worked with Jerry Schatzberg before and probably thought it’d be a fun gig. It gave me the impression that even the greats don’t always take jobs with the idea of doing something important. Besides, actors want to change things up all the time—why can’t cinematographers? No Small Affair may not have been Zsigmond’s most memorable work, but he was gracious and pleasant and indulged my questions about Close Encounters. I also remember that he had a grip in his employ named Dickie Deats, and when he would need an “inky”—which is a small spotlight—he’d say, “Deekee, geev me an eenkee!” No, I’m not above laughing at a masterful painter of light’s thick Eastern European accent. He has an Oscar. He can take it.

  Jerry, meanwhile, was a nice, soft-spoken director, but I didn’t get close to him. You always felt you were intruding if you were having a conversation with him. Besides, he would never tell me how I was after a take was finished. He’d just say, “Cut,” and move on to the next shot. At one point I asked him point-blank, “What did you think of it?” Slightly taken aback, he murmured in this tiny voice, “Oh, oh, it was wonderful, wonderful. . . .” It was as if I’d bullied him. That meager little “wonderful” was so underwhelming and forced out of him, it wasn’t worth the effort. From then on, I assu
med I was perfect in every take. (Surprisingly easy, actually.)

  Truthfully, when I finally got to see myself on-screen in the finished film, which opened in November of 1984, I thought I was awful. For one thing, to my Star Wars–besotted eyes I looked nothing like Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford. I did sound like Yoda, however, in the throat-infection-afflicted scenes. As I watched myself, I recall that the overriding concern was, Why on earth would anybody want me to play somebody in their movie? Because it looked to me as if all the work I’d done internally came off as painfully obvious and clichéd, whereas the stuff other actors were doing was genuinely creative and interesting. Needless to say, back then my self-esteem wasn’t a reliable source of positivity, and a still-percolating melancholy over Demi probably had something to do with that reaction. For all the ways I couldn’t act jaded when I visited a big Hollywood studio to try out for No Small Affair, it was pretty easy now to return to New York—all of nineteen—and snarl to myself like a grizzled veteran, “Hollywood? Bah! All it does is chew ya up and spit ya out! Look at me; I’m a husk of a human being!” (Literally, too, according to the New York audience member I heard opening night who shouted out during a scene in which I had to take my shirt off, “Where’s the beef?!”)

  There was closure with Demi, however. When she came through Manhattan the following year to do publicity for St. Elmo’s Fire—during the shooting of which she’d apparently bottomed out and reportedly almost been fired—she came to a restaurant where I was hanging out with some friends to say hi. Although we hadn’t worked out, I was glad to see her look as if she was in a different, better place in her life, newly sober and committed to making the most of her career, the results of which eventually proved to everyone how dedicated she was. For a brief, exciting period, though, Demi Moore was my first big Hollywood romance, and it stands as a mostly fond, fun memory.

  By the way, do you think she ever watches Ashton and me on Two and a Half Men and thinks, Well, there’s a trajectory?

  Chapter 6

  For Some Reason, a Trench Coat

  Did you know I got to work with George Wendt on No Small Affair? You know, barfly Norm from the great show Cheers? Well, this story has almost nothing to do with George Wendt.

  But it does start with him. One day on the set, a guy visited who sold earthquake kits. Being new to Los Angeles, and aware that occasionally the moving and shaking around town is literal and not figurative, I considered purchasing one. Then I saw George Wendt laying down cold, hard cash for a kit, and because of that, I did. (It’s a little-known fact that I’ll do anything George Wendt does.) The problem was, I didn’t have my wallet on me, because I was in costume, which necessitated going back to my trailer to get it. I bought the kit and resumed filming, safe in the knowledge that the likelihood of my surviving the next jostling of the earth was considerably higher.

  After I got home that day, though, I realized I’d left my wallet in the character’s pants. I quickly called the costumer, told her that my wallet was in the pocket of my costume, and learned to my dismay that today, Friday, was when the production’s clothes were sent out for dry cleaning.

  Inconvenient, but fine, I thought. “I’ll just swing by the lot and get them,” I said, assuming that vast, seemingly fully functioning operations like studios had dry-cleaning plants on the premises. Probably next to the oil refineries and cattle pens.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “We send them to a place off the lot. The trucks pick up everything; they hit a few studios, then take it all to a dry cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard.”

  More inconvenient, but still fine. I’d simply go intercept the truck somehow. I figured the studios would be highly protective of their costumes, and therefore my pants would be easily retrievable once I tracked down where they were. I decided that waiting at the cleaner’s was the simplest solution, so as nighttime hit I arrived at the shop, a mom-and-poppish place whose relative modesty surprised me, considering they handled the dry cleaning for the big studios. As I took a seat inside—having luckily arrived before the truck—I realized how much an industry like moviemaking really affects the economy of a city.

  But then, as sweat began pouring down my face, I also realized that dry cleaners are virtual saunas if you spend more than five minutes in them. With no clear sense of when the truck would arrive, I told the woman behind the counter I would wait outside.

  Ah, much better as I stepped onto the sidewalk. It was a warm night on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, but not nearly as warm as being inside that place. There was nowhere to sit, so I leaned on a lamppost. So there I am, leaning on a lamppost. On Santa Monica Boulevard. In West Hollywood. In jeans and a T-shirt. On a Friday night. (You’re ahead of me, right?)

  “Hello-o-o-o!” I hear from a honking car slowly driving by.

  “Hey, there,” says a driver coming from the other direction, also well under the speed limit.

  “How’s it going?” say a couple of young guys walking past me, all smiles.

  “It’s going great!” I cheerfully chirp.

  Wow, this is one really friendly town, I think. Why was I so nervous about getting acclimated? Here I am running a dumb errand and the citizens are making me feel like I’m one of them. Now here’s a . . . well, okay, an older man, in glasses and—for some reason—a trench coat. And he also wants to know how it’s going.

  “Goin’ good,” I reply.

  “Nice night.”

  “Yeah, it’s great,” I said. “Kind of hot, though.”

  “You look like you work out.”

  I burst out laughing. Come on, there’s being friendly, and then there’s just being ridiculous. I mean, seriously, even when I’ve exercised, when I’ve done triathlons, I don’t look like I’ve worked out. Well, my laughter must have seemed rude, because the guy eyed me oddly, as in, Why are you laughing at me?

  He said, “Well, look, if you need a place to stay tonight, I think I can help you out.”

  And with that, ladies and gentlemen, lightbulb on.

  Very, very on.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh! Um, no, thank you! No, thanks!”

  I said that as I stumbled back inside the dry cleaner’s, where I dutifully sat for another forty-five minutes, losing a tremendous amount of water weight in the process. Still, I figured, a better option than looking like an all-too-good-natured male prostitute with a penchant for giggling through transactions. The truck arrived, and I got my wallet and headed home.

  When it comes to that particular goods-and-services section of Hollywood, it’s probably difficult for passersby not to make certain judgmental assumptions about the people they see milling about. But because of my experience that eye-opening night, I’ve learned to take the optimistic view. To this day, if I ever find myself driving by that area, and I see young men with expectant eyes standing outside, I think only one thing: They’re just waiting for their dry cleaning.

  It gives me a certain solace.

  Chapter 7

  Jon? Jon!

  Gretchen Cryer is a Tony Awards voter, so she gets free tickets to all the Broadway shows, and in the spring, close to nominations time, my mother is at the theater a lot. She takes her responsibilities as seriously as a UN inspector in a country possibly hiding nuclear weapons. One night in the spring of 1984 she took her seat at a show, and who should be next to her but director Gene Saks, the guy who fired me from Brighton Beach Memoirs the year before.

  Mom is friends with Gene, but that didn’t stop her from recalling how she wanted to pound him into the pavement twelve months prior. Being a lady, though, she kept her thoughts to herself; she simply turned and said, “Hello, Gene.”

  “Oh, hello, Gretchen,” Gene replied. “Good to see you. How’s Jonny doing?”

  “Gene, he’s doing great,” she said, which was true. Mom cooled down a bit so she could play proud parent. “He opened Torch Song Trilogy in Los Angeles, go
t great reviews, and then got cast opposite Demi Moore in a movie opening later this year. He’s just doing great!”

  “Wonderful,” Gene said. “We always knew Jonny was going to be a star.”

  Mom kept her composure the rest of the evening, despite the fact that “Hey, asshole, if you thought he’d be a star, then why did you fire him?” was on the tip of her tongue all night. (As it turned out, she discovered many years later, the decision to can me was made soon after I was hired, but couldn’t be acted upon until they’d secured a Matthew replacement for when he’d eventually leave the show. I was kept in rehearsals as a last resort. Which doesn’t sound any better, but at least couches the whole thing as practical rather than deliberately cruel.)

  So Mom stewed in her seat, her success-is-the-best-revenge news undercut by Gene’s incongruous remark. And yet the next day, my manager, Marty, got a call from the office of Neil Simon’s longtime producer Manny Azenberg, asking if I wanted—drumroll, please—to step into the role of Eugene in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Boo-yah! Now, we’ll never know if Mom sitting next to Gene Saks and portraying my career as an unstoppable juggernaut of achievement got that ball rolling, but it sounds possible, no? That was a sweet phone call to get, let me tell you. I was filled with pride over being able to slay that dragon finally.

  Once that euphoria died down, though, I was still left with the feeling that I had to prove myself, and erase the fact that I’d screwed up before. By that point the show had been up for a while. The mark Matthew had left was still apparent, because Doug McKeon—who went from understudy to replacement when Matthew ended his run—supposedly wasn’t that well received. Well, that wasn’t going to be me. I was going to be a more-than-worthy relief pitcher.