by Jon Cryer
“Great,” I told Hugh at the pitch meeting. “Just don’t make me Gary Sandy.”
What did I mean by that? For one thing, it has nothing to do with Gary Sandy’s talent. And yet it has everything to do with Gary Sandy’s talent. Gary Sandy is actually a really good actor, his leading-man looks belying the fact that he’s got comedy skills and character-actor chops. But it was his handsomeness that banished him on WKRP to being the nice guy in the middle of all the nutty, funny people. He was much more gifted than being a wacky comedy’s straight man.
“Please,” I implored Hugh, “don’t make me Gary Sandy. I don’t want to be the nice guy in the middle of all the crazy. I want to be involved in the crazy.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I will not do that.”
When the script came in, I read it, and I was Gary Sandy.
“Hugh, I’m fucking Gary Sandy!” I said to him at our next meeting. “Should I start feathering my hair now?”
“I know, but that’s the way the dynamic is, because he’s the fish out of water.”
“But I don’t get to do any of the fun stuff!”
“Eventually you will, Jon,” he said. “I said you will, and you will.”
This sounded vaguely like a sales tactic. But it didn’t matter. Based on the script, I just didn’t respond to the character of Teddy Zakalokis, who was pretty much the innocent surrounded by agency venality and industry nuttiness. Venality is fun. Nuttiness is fun. Innocence is boring. So even with that rush of adrenaline I got from being in trade headlines for doing a deal to star in a hot series, I turned down the script.
Then the yelling and cajoling started. Hugh called to yell at me. CBS chief Kim LeMasters called to fiercely cajole. The pressure to return to the project was intense, so in good faith I offered to step back in and be involved with reading at auditions for the other parts, even though my deal wasn’t done. Manager Marty was playing it tough, as he’d learned to do in the features world, telling everyone I was still attached, but that all the deal points hadn’t been worked out yet.
But as we got closer and closer to a cast being finalized, it was considered something of a shock that my deal hadn’t closed. This was apparently not the television way. In the midst of one of the auditions, with the first read-through scheduled for the next day, Hugh stopped to take a call. When he got off the phone, he said, “Hey, Jon, can we go out and talk in the hall?”
“Sure.”
His tone reminded me somewhat of that of a schoolkid being beckoned by the teacher for a chat, and then I remembered the stories of Hugh’s famous temper. We walked around a corner, and suddenly his face twisted into one of Hulk-like fury.
“What the hell is going on here?!” he barked.
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hugh.”
“Your agents haven’t made a goddamn deal! They’re still fucking around!”
“I don’t even know what the deal points are,” I said, which was true. Marty kept me insulated from all that. But cornered like this, I was sputtering. “I . . . me . . . deal points . . . agent . . . Gary Sandy . . .”
“Are you allowing this?!” he yelled, his volcanic mug closing within inches of mine, while I tried to dodge the spittle flying from his mouth as if it might be lava. It was mortifying. “Because I’m not going to let you ruin this!”
At this moment, a CBS executive walked by and said, “Oh, hey, Hugh!”
In a flash he turned around, cracked a smile, and said, “Hey, how’s it goin’?”
“Hugh,” the executive says, “is it true you punched out Bill Dial?”
Hugh let out a warm, collegial, “Ha, ha, ha,” all hail-fellow-well-met with the guy, but he didn’t say no, and once the exec was out of his sight, he turned right back to me with his rage face. “Listen, Jon, stop fucking around, and make this deal.”
“Yes! Yes! I’m gonna make the deal. I’m gonna make the deal,” I shot back, wiping Hugh spit from my face.
That night I called Marty like a petrified shopkeeper who’d just had his business threatened by protection-racket goons. Marty told me not to worry, that the deal would be made when the deal would be made, and that some things were worth fighting for. I acquiesced to the wisdom of my manager and calmed down. The next day I went to the studio, excited for the first read-through. Hugh came to my dressing room and said, “I’m sorry, Jon. This is not going to work out. You’re fired.”
I’m what?
“In TV, you don’t mess around with your deal like this,” he said. “This is not how it works.”
He’d even gone so far as to have Marty banned from the lot. Now it was my turn to fiercely cajole, so I called Kim LeMasters and said, “What the hell’s going on here? I’ve been actively involved from day one. You know my level of commitment. What’s this bullshit about barring my manager?” I also might have cried.
He apologized, which is an odd experience, to have the head of a network telling you he’s sorry. (When LeMasters resigned later that year after his fraught reign, I fully expected to read in the trade reports, “Frequently cited as a major reason was his apologizing to Jon Cryer.”) Our talk was good, so I called Marty and said, “Make the fucking deal.” And that was that. Rehearsals started right away, and we were off and running.
The headiest news for me as we began working on the pilot was who had been tapped to play my outsize, big-personality Greek mother. We were working on the script one day when Richard Dubin, one of Hugh’s writers, said “By the way, the woman playing your mother is going to be Lainie Kazan from My Favorite Year. She’s going to be that character.” Everyone couldn’t have been more thrilled. Kazan’s twinkly boisterousness as the Brooklyn Jewish mom who charms Peter O’Toole’s dashing movie star was a scene-stealing tour de force, and I thought, If she brings that to Famous Teddy Z, it’s going to be classic.
The writers just changed the name, made her Greek, and handed it to Lainie, ready for the magic to happen, only to learn she had no intention of doing it that way. She didn’t want to do My Favorite Year all over again, and yet it was clear this was the only way the character was going to work. They tried to dress her like a woman from the old country, but she hated her costumes, too, and let everybody know. Every time the writers tried to make an adjustment, it was still within the region of overbearing ethnic mama that Lainie just didn’t want to live in. In the end, this great actress was fired, and I was floored.
How could this have happened? A part so perfect, tailor-made to a gifted actress’s strengths, tweaked by writers willing to make it work in whatever way she wanted, yet doomed to not work because a proud performer simply didn’t want to repeat what was arguably her most popular role. At the time, I was more shocked than anything else, because the vibe was that we’d locked down the perfect actress for the perfect role. But even though it seemed like she was shooting herself in the foot, I respected her as an artist for saying, “You know what? I’ve done that already. Why don’t we come up with something else?”
It would be a while, though, before I made the connection between Lainie’s intransigence and my post–Pretty in Pink mind-set. Did I want to make Duckie 2: Electric Boogaloo, or an animated Saturday-morning cartoon where Duckie solves crimes with the Harlem Globetrotters, or Alien vs. Wacky Geek? (Well, okay, that last one, yes, had it been written.) No, but would it have killed me to take advantage of a popular persona? Maybe not, but who’s to say a series of Duckie-clone movies would have been any better or more successful than the career-engineered diversity portfolio of duds I did make? We’ll never know, will we? So will you stop reminding me?
The Famous Teddy Z was a quick education in all aspects of getting a show on the air and trying to keep it on the air. Classes involved Being in Every Scene 101, Studies in Learning New Lines Every Week, Introduction to Early Critical Hype, Alex Rocco Appreciation (he crushed it each week as the sharklike
veteran agent), Introduction to Varying Degrees of Script Quality, Introduction to Great Ratings, Intermediate Ratings Decline, Principles of Hiring One’s Realtor, Brother-in-Law, and Best Friend for the Writing Staff (which Hugh did), Advanced Script Rewriting and Rewriting, and Advanced Ratings Decline. And after all that, graduation seemed a pipe dream: Just over halfway through the 1989–90 season, CBS expelled us.
That being said, Hugh—who could be charming and genial, but overall kept any possible personal affection for me under wraps—made good on his word: He did try to give my character more fun things to do, but it was too little, too late by that point. As for Lainie’s replacement, Erica Yohn, she was tasked with a character who was now a grandmother, and so stereotypically old-country she “tok lahk dees,” which, sadly, deed nawt wirk. Besides, the home-and-family stuff was Hugh’s sop to the network heads, who thought people would relate to it. But viewers were bored, and the show was always at heart an office comedy anyway.
The cancellation of The Famous Teddy Z—a show that never lived up to its early heat—pretty much knocked the wind out of me. The movies that didn’t work at least weren’t roller coasters the way this had been: I’m in, I’m out; I’m in, I’m fired; I’m in, critics are in, audiences aren’t, then the network isn’t. There were emotional bruises on me by this point, and I felt as if I had further reason not to trust my instincts when it came to my career choices. I’d made the proverbial step down from movies to do television, and when even that didn’t shine a light, it left me clinically depressed. Weight gain, slurred speech, and an intense need to not give anybody a reason to be disappointed in me busted up my relationship with my girlfriend at the time, the beautiful and kind Jane Sibbett, who had played my girlfriend on the show. She wanted marriage and kids, and I was so shot emotionally I didn’t even know how to be myself.
It would take doing theater again in my hometown to bring me back to a place of healthy artistic purpose. And a place in which I tried to get somebody fired.
Chapter 16
The Art Garfunkel Role
The lure of movies and television, and my meteoric flameouts at both, left me with only one obvious career choice. No, not porn. Back to theater. In 1990 an offer to do a play that sounded exciting enough to consider came along.
The call came from Martin Charnin, an acclaimed Broadway writer and director, who famously conceived, wrote the lyrics for, and directed the musical Annie. His track record is long, going all the way back to the original production of West Side Story, in which he played—wait for it—Big Deal, the same character I played in my junior high production. Yet we can assume Martin’s audiences were able to hear him, unlike mine, who surely wondered what the Big Deal was with the hamster-voiced zombie kid. But I digress.
Martin sought me out because he’d secured the rights to stage Carnal Knowledge as a play, and he wanted me for a role. Jules Feiffer’s decades-spanning dissection of male sexual dysfunction via a pair of college pals and their relationships with women was originally conceived as a play, but Mike Nichols thought it should be a film, and in 1971 it was one, with Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, and Ann-Margret. What Martin wanted was to stage its New York debut as a play, and I would play Sandy, the Art Garfunkel role, the sensitive guy. Since that was virtually the only part that wasn’t played by a legend—no offense, Art, but I mean “acting” legend, and don’t get me wrong; you were still great in the role—I would have the smallest shoes to fill of any cast member. Boy, that still doesn’t sound nice, does it? I take it back: Art, I quivered at the prospect of failing to do justice to your Sandy. There.
The reality is that the role of Sandy—introverted and maladapted—appealed to that part of me that still wanted to prove that I wasn’t Duckie, whom somebody once described as Jerry Lewis with a bit of Jerry Lee Lewis thrown in for good measure. Of course, evidence suggested I should have milked that persona for a while, but if I were the type to take plain facts and actually heed their portent, I’d never have tried this whole acting thing to begin with. And I liked that a respected director I admired had come to me with an interesting part that would allow me to be an actor, not a highly paid circus act.
Plus, Martin said he was going after John Cusack, hot off of Say Anything, for the Nicholson part of Jonathan—a callous womanizer—and Brooke Shields, hot off of being hot, for Candice Bergen’s role, the shy Smith grad whom Sandy marries. That casting sounded exciting to me, so I committed to it.
The next phone call from Martin: “We’re not getting John and Brooke. It’s going to be Judd Nelson and Justine Bateman.”
O-kaayyy. I readjusted my sense of the project’s interestingness in my head. Well, Judd was working the same complicated-guy thing that Jack Nicholson emanated so effortlessly, so I figured that could benefit the project. And Justine had a certain dry, cynical Bateman-family delivery that if not quite reminiscent of the next-door-girl persona Candice or Brooke give off, suggested a possibly intriguing route to take. Filling in the Ann-Margret part of the emotionally troubled, coquettish girlfriend of Jonathan’s was Northern Exposure star Janine Turner.
As rehearsals started, what immediately struck me was that I had some pretty quirky costars. New York theater folk aren’t terribly enamored of Hollywood types who swan into town to do a play, and judging from the eccentrics around me, I was beginning to understand what they were worried about. Justine was in the middle of her poetry-slam phase, which meant she would, unsolicited, burst into bouts of verse when the moment seized her. Janine’s character had to attempt suicide at one point in the play, so she set about an archaeologically obsessive search of the depths of her psyche that matched her character’s bleakest, darkest impulses. She appeared to be driving herself insane. This manifested itself in bizarre outbursts and her occasionally sitting against a wall with her legs splayed and banging her head into the floor. (Phenomenal flexibility, that Janine.) Judd, meanwhile, worked his rebel persona, wearing a leather jacket and army boots unlaced—because tying one’s shoes is somehow too conformist—and showing up to work on a motorcycle, no matter how snowy the weather. He also papered our entire dressing room with pornography—specifically nude women with the heads snipped off—to get into a misogynist’s frame of mind. (Either that, or I never picked up on the signals he was sending me.)
I’m pretty sure he was used to always being the most unorthodox member of whatever cast he joined, so when Judd was faced with Janine’s wackadoo tomfoolery he actually seemed flummoxed. How do you top that? He’d often circle the rehearsal space muttering to himself in frustration. Upon my arrival at the theater I’d usually be greeted by the following tableau:
Justine: (Shouting at full volume) “All the tinsel’s melting down the tree / The bulbs explode in prickly sparks!”
Janine: (Pounding her forehead on the stage) Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!
Judd: (Pacing) “Mutter, mutter, mutter . . . Unbelievable . . . mutter, mutter.”
After about a week of this Judd simply started showing up late in order to minimize his work time with her.
Now, I’m not saying I don’t have my own odd work habits and mannerisms, but being the experienced New York theater hand in this foursome, I knew how to comport myself as a professional, so I just tried to slog through and be the guy who kept the wheels turning. Janine provoked head scratching, for sure, and I could understand Judd’s irritation—after all, he had the most scenes with her—but what increasingly irritated me was Judd’s lateness, and acting as if he didn’t even want to be there. One time he was tardy enough that I decided to rehearse with his understudy. When Judd finally showed up, he saw me working with his understudy and said, “Oh, perfect!” Then he turned around and vanished for the rest of the day.
That was the straw that broke this camel’s back. I went to Martin that very night and said my piece. “Listen, Martin,” I said, “this thing has just been a bizarre ride, but you’ve got to fire Judd. What h
e did was inexcusable. You don’t stroll into rehearsal late, then turn around and walk the fuck out.”
Martin looked at me wearily. “Okay, okay, Jon, I’ll think about it. That’s a big step, but I get it. I’m trying to keep this show on track.”
“I understand,” I said. “It’s a horrible thing to ask, but it’s simply egregious what’s going on.”
Was I feeling a little self-righteous about theater protocol, since I had gone through a somewhat ignominious Broadway firing myself as an in-over-his-head youth? That experience was surely running through my mind, but however unready I was on my first Broadway gig, I at least showed up for work. Janine may have revealed herself to be odd, but she was at least there, trying to put something together. Judd’s rebel shtick seemed more important to him than getting the play up and running.
The next morning, a downcast and ashen Martin gathered that day’s rehearsing cast together for a big announcement. They didn’t know what was coming, but I did, and I was starting to feel some relief.
“Listen, I’m sorry to say this to everybody, but I’ve got some news,” he said. “We fired Janine.”
Wha-say-huh? Janine? I looked around. No Janine. My eyes seemed to grow exponentially larger in their sockets as my brain kept wanting me to say, Um, wait, wait! What part of “You’ve got to fire Judd” did you not understand? Did your ears stop at the J sound?