by Jon Cryer
“You have to understand,” she told me at one point, “I end up doing a lot more talking. A lot. That seems to be what a lot of guys want, almost as much as the other stuff.”
I was also apparently one of the very few nonmarried customers she’d had. Yikes.
I suppose if Charlie’s example of his evening’s entertainment was best exemplified by a snapshot of lady parts, mine would be a picture of me hunched over a table of papers and telling a hot chick, “The real estate boom is building up, so I’m sounding a note of caution. You might want to diversify.”
* * *
My first opportunity to dip my toe into the nonprofessional pool of available women came soon afterward. Rich, my trainer, one of the sweetest, goofiest guys to ever stretch your groin for a living, threw a party one night, where I met an engaging, beautiful woman—an aspiring actress and comedian—and we hit it off. I was with my son, and she got along with him, too, which was also wildly attractive to me. I asked her out, and before long we were dating regularly. It felt great. I was finding my sea legs again as a social human being, and I couldn’t have been more at peace about it.
I even took the risk of bringing her to the set. I say “risk” because for most aspiring comedians, getting face time with anyone working on a sitcom is a sought-after networking opportunity. I was initially worried that she’d try to pitch the writers and make them uncomfortable, but I let that go, and when she actually met them all, she was charming and funny and they all laughed at her jokes. I thought, Nothing to worry about here.
I introduced her around, and we ran into Charlie, who looked at her blankly.
“We’ve actually met before,” she said. “I was a waitress at La Moustache?”
“Right, right,” he said. “Hello. Nice to see you again.”
As we walked off, I thought, Good! That was handled well.
A few weeks later, I was sitting around on the set with a shit-eating grin on my face, and a sense that my life was coming back to an even keel, when Charlie strolled over.
“What’s going on? What’s with the smile?”
“Things are going good with Stephanie,” I said.
“Hey, listen, we gotta talk.”
He took me outside, pulled me to a place with some privacy, and said, “I’ve been talking to my therapist, because I don’t know if I should say anything. I’ve been agonizing about this, dude, really. I . . . I don’t know how to say this, but . . . Stephanie and I used to date.”
“Oh?” I said, my grin suddenly replaced by something pursed and worried.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess she hasn’t told you that we did.”
“Well, how long did you date?”
“A month, maybe a month and a half.”
“So it wasn’t a single date, or even two or three. It was . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Well, was it serious, Charlie?”
“No, no, not really.” I could tell he was trying to play this down for my benefit.
“Okay, but was she really into, you know, drugs and stuff?”
“No, not really. I mean . . . if I had some, she would, you know? But she really wasn’t into it.”
I tried to gather my train of thought with this new information. “Well, I’m annoyed that she didn’t tell me this. But if I may ask, how did you two break up?”
Charlie said, “Well, I wanted to bring another girl into bed with us, and she was not happy about that.” And then he looked me straight in the eye, and with no trace of irony, said, “So heads up on that.”
“Thanks, Charlie. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I went home that night and broke up with Stephanie. She tried to explain that this aspect of her past was something she didn’t want to freak me out about, and that as the weeks went on she realized it was going to be a bigger and bigger deal, and that she and Charlie were never serious, and it wasn’t something to get upset about, yadda, yadda, yadda. But it was something she should have said right away when we met. I couldn’t go forward after that. I tried to wrap my head around the fact that I was living some romantic-comedy version of a deception, one that in the movie might end with somebody saying, “Forgive her! She obviously loves you!”
Not this time.
What’s a harmless lack of initial honesty? I once dated a striking English singer who sheepishly admitted a few dates into our courtship that she was, in fact, a baroness. She said it the way you might murmur worriedly, “I used to be a Shriner.” Now, that’s endearing.
“I used to bang your costar”—that’s up-front information, ladies.
* * *
A few seasons in, Charlie started to bellyache to me occasionally about the rewrites, and executive producer Lee Aronsohn’s nitpicky notes, which admittedly can get highly specific when it comes to line readings. One time Charlie decided an actress playing opposite him wasn’t attractive enough. Other times he’d call a gag he didn’t like a “clam.” That was his derogatory term for an unfunny joke. It was pretty small potatoes complaining, mostly to me.
Baseball terminology made its way into his comments, too. He’d call something “bush,” which I assumed meant good, because of his love of vaginas. But then I realized it was short for “bush league,” which meant “unprofessional” or “amateurish.”
* * *
During the divorce I moved into a rented house seven minutes from work, and one day I could swear I caught a glimpse of entertainment reporter Lisa Joyner coming out of a house nearby.
Interesting.
Back in the early nineties she had interviewed me at a television press tour event, and we had an incredibly funny, breezy, and enjoyable conversation. She was a FOX reporter and I thought she was fantastic. But when she came to my place of employment a few years later when I was on Getting Personal, and I noticed her smoking outside the studio before her scheduled interviews with me and the cast, I was suddenly a nervous wreck with a schoolboy crush. (Again, smoking is insanely attractive to me. Just ask the Holy Name girls from my youth who puffed away in their Catholic-school uniforms as I walked by—puberty hit me badly right at that moment.) No longer blithely charming like in our first chat, I gave her a terrible interview, and it didn’t even make it into the piece.
Then, a few months after that, my Getting Personal costar Duane Martin and I went on Good Day LA when Lisa guest-hosted. Duane and I had just heard that our show was canceled, yet couldn’t tell anybody because the official announcement hadn’t been made. We had followed through on doing the publicity out of obligation. Since we were devoid of any real purpose on the show and filled with screw-’em giddiness, we acted like total buffoons. The cameramen didn’t know what we were doing, and I saw Lisa look around with a “what the fuck do I do now?” expression as we began making up songs, doing lame impressions, pantomiming illegal sex acts, whatever. . . .
Now, seven years later, she’s a neighbor! I think.
And I’m single!
The KCAL van in front the next day confirmed it. I left her a note, apologizing for making a mockery of Good Day LA lo those many years ago, hoping she was well, and informing her that I was her new neighbor. There was also a, “Hey, if you need to reach me”—why? Oh, just write it—followed by every known way to contact me short of emergency numbers for relatives and a schedule of my daily routine.
Fingers were crossed.
* * *
The first actors to get Emmy nominations from the show were Holland Taylor and Conchata Farrell. It happened in our second year, and it gave us all the sense that the ball was starting to get rolling with recognition for the show. It was clear from the beginning that the A story each week—in sitcoms, that’s the primary conflict of the episode—was Charlie’s, whereas I got the B story, typically a purely comedic subplot. Even though this was already the clear pattern, Charlie and I had inexplicably both been s
ubmitted as lead actors for the show up to this point. So starting in the third season, I decided to submit myself as a supporting actor, because he was carrying the main story every week, and I was not in every scene, as he was. When the Emmy nominations came in that next year, we were both nominated.
I was okay with not winning, but Charlie took award recognition personally. I told him, “Look, some years voters watch the shows. Other years they don’t. The Emmy voters are just like you and me. They can’t see it all. They’re into some things, not into others. Some years it all comes together and you’re the guy they pick. Other years they don’t.”
“You don’t understand,” Charlie said. “It’s all about exclusion, and inclusion.”
He wanted in to what he perceived as the cool club. It surprised me that you could be a massive worldwide star like Charlie and still worry about eating lunch with the cool kids.
I didn’t care about whether I had the A story or the B story each week. I’ve had both over the years. The quality of what I was doing was always paramount. Besides, having the A story each week is exhausting, because you’re in practically every scene. If I have a well-written secondary story line that gives me something really funny to play, I’m happy. The best material comes out of an organic process, and if you encumber writers with demands like, “Give me that character’s funny lines!” or, “Why don’t I have more to do?” then they’re writing from a place of hampered creativity and pressure. I want the writers to go where the funniest stories are, period.
I always think of Beatrice Straight as William Holden’s wife in Network. She was on-screen less than six minutes total, and won the Academy Award. The most airtime is not the key.
* * *
My mobile rang, and I just saw LISA JOY on my phone display: It’s her!
Lisa Joyner, that is. The display cut off the “NER.”
She’d been in Puerto Rico filming segments for a charity fund-raising video, which was why she hadn’t responded to the I’m-your-new-neighbor note I left her over a week ago.
“Hey, let me take you out to lunch!” she said.
At that first lunch, reminded of her gorgeousosity, I was so terrified that I refused to look at her, directing everything I said to the sushi chef, who must have thought I was nuts. She’d even brought me a new-neighbor package of her neighborhood favorites, like car-wash gift certificates, a café coupon, etc. It was so adorable and nice. And yet I shook her hand afterward like we’d made a deal on a new car.
But I got up the nerve to ask her on a date-date, and she said yes.
* * *
As the episodes of Two and a Half Men were piling up, I’d had cause to reexamine my character and come to the conclusion that Alan is mostly me, with brushstrokes provided by some of my friends. His cheapness comes from one pal I won’t name, but he knows who he is.
Again, though, he’s mostly me. Alan is so thwarted in so many aspects of his life that had I been thwarted in similarly, and not been possessed of my special self-delusional sense of destiny, I would probably have become an Alan-like mixture of uptight, judgmental, anxious, and flawed. In a way, Alan reminds me of how things could have gone.
And the writers even worked in how I sit! The mixed signals my body sends out have clearly inspired Alan’s, shall we say, elastic sexuality. His odd mélange of desperate hetero and undeniably effeminate behavior has supplied the show’s creators with vast comedic opportunities.
As the years would go on, they would end up throwing some heavy stuff my way for Alan as well: nervous breakdown, sexual identity, a second marriage, split personality, a heart attack. It would be pretty ballsy material to find humor in, but I loved the challenge of it, especially since our prime directive was simply to make people laugh. Chuck Lorre and the writers would keep raising the bar of how ridiculous Alan could be, and keep hoping I could jump over it. Our characters deepened in ways you wouldn’t have expected from what is unapologetically an old-school sex comedy. As an actor, it’s a privilege to get a role like that, one that expands with the years, rather than stagnates.
* * *
My buddy Paget Brewster had opening-night tickets to the Los Angeles premiere of Doug Wright’s play I Am My Own Wife, starring Jefferson Mays in his Tony Award–winning role as a gay transvestite who lived through both Nazi Germany and Communism.
Now, that’s first-date material.
I’m serious. It was a great play, with a great performance, and I snapped up Paget’s tickets and took Lisa. There was one problem, though: For all the ways Jefferson was amazing in the role—and it was a brilliant tour de force—he was, to put it bluntly, a spitter. And our tickets were in the front row.
It may as well have been a Gallagher show for all the liquid raining down on us. Much of the play is in German, too, which is a prime linguistic enabler for excessive-saliva cases.
Seriously, whenever he’d turn and face stage right to speak, that side of the row would flinch. When he walked across, the rest of the patrons would squirm in preparation for the monsoon.
I was, to put it mildly, worried about what Lisa would think. I kept glancing at her periodically to check whether she’d become too disgusted to stay. At one point, Jefferson approached the lip of the stage shouting emphatically right in front of us. I winced as I saw my date directly in the line of fire. He got closer . . . closer. . . Yep, he got her.
“Aww, man,” she said with a scowl, but as she wiped her face I heard one of the most beautiful belly laughs I’d ever experienced. She thought it was hilarious and remained a good sport about it throughout the rest of the performance.
That’s when I realized that on such a moistened base, a foundation for falling in love could be laid down.
* * *
The week that seventy-nine-year-old Cloris Leachman guested on the show, I had the honor of discovering one of my comic inspirations was not only brilliant, but a little nuts. All through rehearsals, she wouldn’t say lines as written, and always seemed a bit lost. She’d make jokes about not knowing what the scene’s comic rhythm was, and run-throughs never seemed to nail down anything. She was funny—don’t get me wrong—but we all approached performance night on Friday with a vague sense of worry. Then, when showtime arrived and the cameras were on and the audience was primed, she knocked it out of the park. If she came up with something weird, it was also wonderful—something you hadn’t seen before but within the parameters of what was needed. It was amazing to watch.
Over the years the show would eventually have an extraordinary variety of guest stars: Stacy Keach, Marion Ross, Mike Connors (Mannix!), Michael Clarke Duncan, John Amos, Morgan Fairchild, Gary Busey, Martin Mull, Jeri Ryan, Judd Nelson (still strange), Jenny McCarthy, countless others. Countless! I geeked out over a lot of them. The insanely charismatic and amiable Robert Wagner told me to call him “RJ,” which remains a life highlight. (I walked around for weeks repeating in my head, Oh, my God, I’m Robert Wagner’s friend!) Carl Reiner discovered that he’s got at least one fan (me) who considers his direction of The Jerk—an expert balance between the absurd and the deadpan—as worthy a career pinnacle as The Dick Van Dyke Show. He laughed at that, to which I said, “No, I mean it!” and he laughed even harder. On the show that week, my character had a bit where he had to sing an incredibly cheesy version of “Jingle Bell Rock,” and this also sent Carl into paroxysms of laughter. I’m telling you, it’s an indescribable feeling to crack that guy up. He’d made me giggle so often with his work, it was like returning a favor someone didn’t even know that they had done for you. Virtually every time we’ve seen each other after we shot that episode he insists that I perform the song for him again. And I am only too happy to oblige.
* * *
“Hi, foxy!”
The words were innocent enough. But they sent an electric jolt through my body. I’d called Lisa to ask her out to a movie. When she picked up the phone and realized it was
me, that was her greeting. Her salutation was significant for two reasons: 1) She was still happy to hear from me even though our first date involved getting spit on by a guy playing a German transvestite, and 2) she called me “foxy!” This was a big fucking deal. I’d long given up on ever being called that, not only because the term hadn’t been popular for twenty years, but also due to the fact that I was still pretty goofy-looking. Hearing it, I immediately regressed to my teenage years and felt all my angst from that time spontaneously heal and resolve into a warm, glowing sensation. Could it be that she actually found me attractive?
Still emotionally off balance, I struggled to invite her to the movie after that. But I needn’t have worried, because she cheerily invited me over for dinner at her house instead. Her house! You know what that means. If things go really well . . . (porn music).
That night I discovered that Lisa was also a tremendous chef. When she asked me to help in the preparations, I jumped at the chance. All she needed me to do was roast some pine nuts.
I was secretly thrilled that it involved something so easy, as I was woefully inept in the kitchen. Just how woefully inept was about to become clear. As I sprinkled the pine nuts onto some aluminum foil and put them in the broiler, I made a few attempts at small talk. Then I leaned on her stove in a debonair fashion to emphasize my guy-helping-out-with-the-meal charm. In a flash, her eyes widened with alarm. I turned around to see flames shooting out of a vent in the top of the stove! Huge, superflamy flames! Like, set-the-ceiling-on-fire flames!