But Seriously

by John McEnroe

  I thought it went well, Adam seemed happy, and as we needed very few takes I went off to Paris thinking that had been yet another positive experience and looking forward to taking my family to see me on the big screen sometime the following year. I knew I didn’t want to do movies on a full-time basis, but maybe I could do a few more, when the projects seemed right and fun. It would be a good way to throw a few curveballs in my life over the next few years.

  My hopes of occasionally making a mark in movies took a blow in April 2003 when the film was finally released. I got a call from my oldest son, Kevin: “Hey, Dad, I saw Anger Management last night.” “Oh yeah? How was my scene?” I was psyched to hear all about it. “Your scene? You don’t have any words!” “What?” “Yeah, you’re just in this crib at the end, getting a timeout like every other baby, but you don’t say anything.” What? No way!

  A week later, I was in New York, at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants, hanging out with a couple of friends. We were standing at the bar, having margaritas, and the tequila buzz had kicked in nicely, when my phone rang and it was Adam: “Hey, Johnny—” “What the fuck happened, man?” I cut in, before he could get another word out. “Oh, well… I don’t know…” And then, he just said it: “You didn’t kill, Johnny, you didn’t kill.” There was a lot of background noise, I was with my two friends, I had to shout to make myself heard, so the conversation ended fast, let me tell you.

  When I got home, I told Patty what had happened, and she was mad at me. “Why did you do that?” “Do what?” “Why did you get pissed at Adam?” “I didn’t!” Not for the first time she was pointing out that I should perhaps have toned down my reaction. Poor guy. The truth was that I was angry, and I was buzzed from the margaritas, but it was his movie and he could do whatever he wanted with it. The worst part was that after watching the movie I realized he was right. I hadn’t killed. In fact, my contribution was pretty mediocre.

  But at least things worked out better in the European version of the film, where most of my scene did make the cut. Thank God tennis is big in Europe. So instead of me, they’d edited out the famous American basketball coach Bobby Knight, because they assumed no one in Europe would know who he was. This was a minor consolation for me, but I wasn’t in another Adam Sandler movie for five years. Obviously there is a funny side to your wife ripping you a new one because you couldn’t stop yourself from losing your shit when your childish tantrum cameo got cut out of the film Anger Management. I can see that now, although I couldn’t necessarily see it then.

  3

  “It’s ‘War-hole,’ actually… as in ‘Holes’”

  David Bowie, “Andy Warhol”

  When I first met him, coming up through the junior ranks at the age of twelve or thirteen, Vitas Gerulaitis was already the coolest guy at the Port Washington Tennis Academy (the go-to place on the East Coast for would-be tennis stars of the future). To be honest, he was probably the coolest guy I’d met in my entire life at that point. Alongside the long curly blond hair, he had this incredible charisma that girls loved, and I remember thinking, “Man, I’ve got to be like this guy.”

  Later on, once we’d both broken onto the circuit, Vitas was still the perfect role model. He wasn’t just welcome at Studio 54—the famously decadent New York nightclub which David Bowie, Robin Williams, Elizabeth Taylor, Pierre Trudeau and everyone else who was anyone wanted to go to at the height of the disco era—the guys on the door acted like their evening wouldn’t be complete without him: “Yes, Mr. Gerulaitis. No, Mr. Gerulaitis.” They’d roll out the red carpet for him, and he’d be hanging out with Andy Warhol, Cheryl Tiegs, Bianca Jagger and all the coolest people of the time, whereas I’d be outside practically begging to be let in. “I’m six in the world,” I’d tell them, and they’d go “So?… Hey, McEnroe, get the hell out of here!” In fact, I don’t think they even knew my name—my memory has added that in the hope of making me feel better.

  Vitas was always kind to me, though—he’d never brush me off when I’d be bugging him about when we could go to Studio 54 again. And boy did he set me a good example once we were inside. He used to stay out till all hours of the night. He wore me out. By 3 or 4 a.m. I’d be like, “Listen, we’ve got to get out of here, I need to practice tomorrow.” And he’d say, “No, no, it’s fine.” He seemed to know the world and to be confident within it. So when he took me down to Soho to have a look around some art galleries, I assumed that was a normal thing for tennis players to do—we had some money now, so it was natural for us to want to spend it. What’s the first thing you do when you earn some money? You get yourself a place to live, you buy a nice car and a stereo (at least in those days you did), then you get some art to put on the walls.

  We went to a bunch of galleries and then ended up at some kind of photo-realist show, where we both bought a couple of pieces. I wasn’t particularly thinking of art as an investment then, but if it made me some money down the road, it’d be hard not to like it even more. It was just kind of fun because there was so much less at stake. After I stopped playing the main tour at the end of 1992, when I was at a loss about what to do next, it seemed a good idea to get more involved in the art world and maybe even become an art dealer while I continued to collect. In my first book, I described the way I got in on the ground floor and learned the business from the bottom up—which was a challenge I really enjoyed. I had a fair amount of success too, but by the early 2000s, other commitments—mainly tennis—were taking more of my time and I realized I’d be better off changing the gallery I’d established in Soho to open by appointment only.

  Even though I was still active in the art market (and continue to be to this day), I needed to take a step back from being a professional art dealer. I’d started to feel like, “To hell with this, I’m not hanging around here anymore—these artists are even more high maintenance than tennis players.” The other reason I got turned off by the art world—which was that art had become too much of a business—probably doesn’t make sense at first sight. “You’re buying and selling paintings: how can that not be a business, you dumb-ass?” Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an “Art for art’s sake” type of guy. I loved the fact that it was a business as well. But that shouldn’t be all it is. And that’s what it seemed to be turning into.

  I love art and as a result know a little more about it than the average person, but I’m no expert. What I would say is that when you look at some of the biggest artists in the world right now, people like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons—what’s keeping them a step ahead of the competition isn’t only their art, it’s the fact that each and every one of them is a brilliant businessman who knows how to maximize the return from their talents.

  Of course, that wasn’t always the case, and there’s no question these artists have produced great art at some point in their careers. Richard Prince, for example, was shunned by the art world for much of his career, but he stuck with his beliefs about the art of appropriation, and gradually people came around to it. And if you take Damien Hirst, when he first did that thing with the dead shark, he went to Australia, hired shark fishermen, had the shark shipped back to England and put it in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde… a lot of thought and effort went into it. It was cool.

  At a certain point, though, artists always seem to get to this stage where they are replicating a formula. And why wouldn’t they, if people are willing to pay for it? I thought Hirst’s medicine cabinet pieces were great in the beginning—and I still like them—but after a while it seemed he was just running them off to make an easy buck. And some of those dot paintings he gets the people who work for him to do are ridiculously bad. But then at the same time he’ll make $50 million selling his own art and spend it on a Francis Bacon. So I have to respect that and give him credit for supporting the art world, even if I’m not too wild about some of the stuff he’s done lately.

  If you compare Hirst with someone like John Currin, who is considered one of the top figur
ative painters in America, if not the world, their approaches are totally different. Currin probably only does twenty paintings a year, so if you’re one of the twenty people that owns one, then you’re part of a select group. I would think that would be a little more meaningful. But that doesn’t seem to be what it’s about these days—it’s like the herd mentality has taken over. So you end up with one of the two thousand flowers Warhol apparently painted in his life—they’re not my favorites; in fact, I find them boring—so everyone can say, “Hey, I’ve got a flower.” “Hey, I’ve got one too.” So you’ve both got flowers. Wow, that’s great.

  Collecting art has become a lot more complicated over the years. When I first started buying, I did it on the basis of acquiring things I liked—that I would want to put on the walls in my house. I thought that was my biggest strength—that I didn’t have some kind of dogma I’d learned from studying art history holding me back. With hindsight, that probably hurt me quite a bit, financially. If I had listened to people that knew, who told me to buy certain things at certain times, pieces that I wasn’t sure about, I would have done even better. I started to do that after a while, so I wasn’t a total moron, but I’d still get stubborn sometimes. And that would cost me.

  I’ll give you an example. When I was in college at Stanford, I became friends with a guy named Doug Simon, whose grandfather Norton was a famous collector and philanthropist in the art world, who eventually had a museum named after him in Pasadena. One time on a weekend off from Stanford, Doug and I came down to LA and we stayed at his grandfather’s house. I don’t think his grandfather was even there, but he had all these Picassos and Matisses—it was unreal. I felt like his house was a museum. Fast forward five years, to say 1983, and Doug and I had become even better friends—in large part because of the art, which I was getting very interested in.

  At that point, there was a Jean-Michel Basquiat show at the Gagosian Gallery. Back then, he was just another up-and-coming artist. If you’d told me he would go down in history as one of the transformative artists of the late twentieth century and Larry Gagosian would become arguably the biggest art dealer in the world, I’d have said “You cannot…” Well, you get the picture. At that time, Larry—who has since become a friend of mine—was starting out doing shows in LA, and Doug’s wife, Tina, was working with him. Doug came to me and said, “You’ve got to buy one of these Basquiats.” I went to have a look. They were $9,000, and I said, “They’re terrible, they suck.”

  I used to do that a lot. I’d see a Lichtenstein and think, “That’s total crap,” and now it’s worth tens of millions. With those Basquiats—even though I’ve got one now which I love—at first I didn’t like them. I didn’t get it. Doug told me, “Buy one. Trust me.” But I said, “I wouldn’t pay a thousand dollars for this piece.” And I didn’t. I thought his work looked childish, you know? I don’t even remember the specific one Doug showed me, but good or bad, it’s probably worth $5 million now, which would make me like it a hell of a lot more than I did at $9,000, I’ll tell you that.

  One guy I never fully came around to was Andy Warhol, who to my mind was the godfather of that whole “getting your assistants to make the paintings” thing. I know Da Vinci and Rembrandt had a lot of help in their studios, but that doesn’t seem the same to me as Jeff Koons having twenty-five people working on “his” art—or Murakami, or Hirst. Does Richard Prince even bother to do his joke paintings himself anymore? I don’t know. Who cares? Maybe that’s the joke, and if other people don’t care, well, that’s up to them.

  My personal opinion of Warhol when I first came into the world he inhabited was that he was mediocre. But on top of that, he was annoying. He was always there at every party I was ever at, taking your picture late at night even when you were super fucked up. I remember thinking, “Who is this weirdo with the fake hair? Why is he waving his camera around when we’re here at three in the morning? Isn’t there a place where that could be off limits?”

  I’ve heard he averaged two or three parties a night for thirty-five years—the guy was at everything! When the hell did he work on his art? When I was on the road forty weeks a year, I couldn’t be going to as many parties as Andy did—nor did I want to be. But certainly those times when I was in my late teens or early twenties and you’d head over to someone’s house at one o’clock in the morning and it would be kind of a mellower scene, and there would be forty or fifty people there, some of whom would be the Mick Jaggers of this world, so you could potentially loosen your collar and try to find a good-looking model or whatever… At that point, Warhol always seemed to be up in everyone’s face with his camera, being a pain in the ass. I couldn’t tell you how many times he took my picture, but even if it was only one, that was more than I wanted him to take.

  I’d always known Andy was an artist, but his reputation had taken a hit over the years and I’d heard he was doing portraits for $15,000 a pop. The problem was I couldn’t relate to him as a person, and while I later came to understand and appreciate some of his work, especially the electric chairs and the car crashes, at the time I thought his art was totally lame. But what did I know? I was only a kid. So a few years later, in 1987, when he dies and all of a sudden everyone’s going, “He’s one of the world’s greatest, unbelievable…” I’m like, “He is?”

  Not long before Warhol died, I’d played a charity tennis event in Tahoe for a friend of mine whose mother had multiple sclerosis. I wanted to do something to support the charity, and one of the items being auctioned was the chance to have a portrait of yourself painted by Andy Warhol. Maybe as a joke on myself because of the way I felt about him, or maybe thinking that being part of this process might change that opinion, I paid thirty thousand dollars to have him do a pair. I was still married to Tatum O’Neal then, so that’s what he was going to do—paint the two of us together.

  He came over to the apartment I still live in now and took some Polaroids. All the while he was doing that, he kept saying, “It’s great, it’s amazing.” You had no idea what this guy was thinking, because everything was “great” and “fabulous” the whole time. I guess if he only said it was good, you knew it was horrible, and if he only said he liked you, you knew he thought you were a total asshole. It’s possible the guy was brilliant and I just couldn’t see it, but I thought he was weird.

  Anyway, once he’d taken his Polaroids he said, “I’ll get back to you,” and then he went off to, I presume, silk-screen the pictures using a certain angle or color—whatever he’d decided to do. We’d already paid the money and eventually we were going to end up with two Andy Warhol paintings—that was the plan. After that, a year went by and we still hadn’t got the painting. So I said to Tatum, “Call him and find out what the hell’s going on,” and she does. His people told her, “He’s working on them—in fact, he’s taking a special personal interest in them—they’ll be great, don’t worry about it.”

  A couple of months later, he dies. There’s still no sign of the pictures, so Tatum rings his people again to check what’s happened. Luckily, it turns out they have been finished, and they send them both over.

  Five more years pass, and Tatum and I are getting divorced. At that point I say to her, “You should take one of these Warhol portraits, and I’ll have the other.” It made sense for us to have one each, but things weren’t too happy between us and she told me, “Forget it—I don’t want one.” I guess she didn’t want to look at me.

  Now, at the time—this is 1992, and Warhol died in 1987—the paintings hadn’t gone up much in value. I’m going to put them at fifty grand each. And by the way, who the hell would want a picture of me and Tatum at that stage, right? We weren’t love’s young dream anymore—we were getting divorced. So I thought the best thing to do would be to give one of the pictures to each of my kids. The problem was I only had two Warhols, and I had three kids with Tatum.

  Around this time an old friend of mine named Richard Weisman alerted me to the fact that sometimes Warhol would run off extra co
pies of his portraits. Richard put me in touch with the Warhol Foundation, where I got in contact with Tim Hunt—brother of the late James Hunt, the British Formula One racing driver—who worked there. I asked him, “Is there a third portrait? I’d like to buy it if there is, so I can give one to each of my kids.” Tim said he’d look into it and the process went on for what seemed like years, until I finally found out that there wasn’t another picture, only the beginnings of a drawing of me and Tatum. That sounded interesting, but when I saw it, it was only half or even a third finished. Believe me, I wanted it to be good—“Why don’t I get the drawing? That would solve the problem?” But when I saw it, it was horrible… terrible—and it wasn’t even signed. So no way was I buying it.

  The ridiculous part of all this was that my kids didn’t seem to want the pictures that much. It was just me being stubborn and trying to resolve the issue. A few more years passed, I’d say we’re up to the mid 2000s now, and interest in the portraits—and Warhol’s work in general—had grown. Someone asked me if they could have one for a show, and they said it was probably worth $100,000. I thought, “Great, if you can get a hundred grand for it from someone, go right ahead.” So they took one, but it didn’t sell.

  Then someone else who knew I had the pictures asked if they could borrow one for an exhibition of portraits by Warhol and various other people. This happened a few times, and the value kept going up: one minute someone thought they were worth $75,000 the next it was $200,000. Either way, no one bought them. I was starting to get confused. I mean, OK, Björn Borg didn’t need them, but you’d think Jimmy Connors might have wanted one for his bathroom!