Crane (37 page)

At that same time, the upstart Fox Network (“with the Fox attitude”) had started a movie night on Tuesdays to compete with NBC and CBS. Berger, Candy, Brooks, and Kari and I took the project to Fox, which wanted to work with John Candy real bad. Plus, 20th Century Fox had a retainer deal with John, through which it tried to find film projects for him. This was payback for his appearance in Fox’s
Home Alone
at the Screen Actors Guild day rate—for a film that grossed a mere half billion dollars. The Fox Network went along with Candy making his directorial debut as long as he showed his face in a cameo role.

George Wendt from
Cheers
was cast in what would’ve been the John Candy role. Wendt was the small-screen Candy. Oh, yeah, and everyone involved except the screenwriters wanted the script to be funnier. It was adios, Crane and Hildebrand, hello, Second City alumnus (like Candy and Wendt) Peter Torokvei. His brief was to punch up the words. That included the new title,
Hostage for a Day.
Upon receiving the news of our untimely demise, Kari and I looked at each other with disappointment, but we still felt pride and a sense of achievement, tempered by Hollywood war weariness. Our tour of duty was finished. We were being furloughed.

Our home front went through an upheaval as well. Like the iconic actress Greta Garbo, Kari announced, “I want to be alone.” Although she was surrounded and supported by family and friends, she had come to feel that facing cancer was a one-on-one fight. After all the Hallmark cards, the flower arrangements, the candles, and weekend retreats, it came down to something like a Vincent Price/Boris Karloff standoff from a bad AIP horror film of the 1960s. Kari wanted no dance partner for this routine. I was hoping death wasn’t part of this pas de deux. I dislike the phrase, but Kari “needed space.” The intellectual side of me got it, but my emotional side took her announcement as pure rejection.

Kari’s comfort zone was our house and yard, so the only civilized thing for me to do was to pack up and move. Luckily, my stepdad Chuck
had a vacancy at his twelve-unit complex where Kari and I had previously lived. I settled into a one-bedroom that, coincidentally, was where Chuck lived during his divorce from his first wife, Virginia, but Kari and I were not talking divorce. We were five minutes apart. We talked on the phone. We went to movies together. We had dinners together. But at the end of the evening, after a goodnight kiss and hug, she would go into our house and I would drive back to the apartment. I would “give her her space.”

My own ego screamed, “My wife doesn’t want me by her side while she’s going through hell!”

Her friend Linda tried to soften the hurt with “Kari is seeing certain things for the first time.” Was this the equivalent of my dad discovering the color orange?

Kari was taking a creative writing class at Valley College during this period. After a few months of separation, I got wind that there was an attraction between Kari and one of her classmates. Now, during our occasional “date nights,” she was preoccupied, distant. During the course of her treatment she had told me how she felt so unattractive. She had a skin rash, her hair had fallen out again, and she had lost a lot of weight. She felt old. She was only in her late thirties, but her body felt beaten up, exhausted. I felt in my rational self that if, indeed, she had an admirer, a fan, even a lover from her writing class, someone other than her husband who was making her feel beautiful, inside and out, I couldn’t argue with the end result. If the newness of a man, the excitement of an unexplored relationship, made her rise above the gravitational pull of illness and what she saw as a stale relationship, and if it made her feel like an alive, vital woman, I could only wish her well. If our separation was the beginning of the end of us as a couple, then so be it. I tried. I did my best. I loved her. She had pushed me away. There was no pushing back. This infatuation, or whatever it was, was completely out of my control. If someone else was making her feel good, excited about being alive, then I was all for it. The bottom line was that she felt something other than feeling like shit.

Kari and I had had no sex life for quite a while. Getting her better was my priority. Sex didn’t seem important in the overall struggle between life and death. Kari was such a great person, such an asset to the world that, ultimately, her existence was way more important than our union. Though our relationship had started in a very serious and almost businesslike manner, through all our hardships and enjoyments, we had come to love and respect each other in the deepest possible way.

37

In October 1992 I received a letter from deputy county attorney Myrna J. Parker: Re:
ROBERT CRANE MURDER INVESTIGATION
STATE V. CARPENTER,
CR
92-04718. Having been interviewed by the police and county investigators, I was a potential witness for the prosecution, and my name and address would be shared with the defense, which had the right to speak to anyone on the prosecution’s list. I never heard from any of John Carpenter’s representatives.

By mid-November Carpenter was still in California. As the jury selection process began in his molestation case, Carpenter wangled a plea bargain down to one count of sexual battery. In December Los Angeles Superior Court judge James Pierce sentenced Carpenter to three years’ probation, thus clearing the way for the Pied Piper of Home Video’s return to Arizona to stand trial in the murder of his friend, a man, Carpenter had told me, “I’ve never said a bad word to … in the twelve … or thirteen years that I’ve known him.”

On Tuesday, February 16, 1993, a hearing began in Phoenix’s Maricopa County Superior Court, Judge Gregory Martin presiding, to determine whether there was enough evidence to try John Henry Carpenter for first-degree murder. Carpenter sat quietly as the prosecution presented color photographs of my dad’s lifeless body and the clinical appearance of Winfield Apartments’ Unit 132A on Chaparral Road in Scottsdale.

On March 11, after a three-week evidentiary hearing, Judge Martin commented to the court that all the law enforcement personnel originally involved in the almost fifteen-year-old case performed “sloppy work.” Despite his stinging remarks, Martin then ruled that “probable cause has been shown that the crime of murder … was committed.” He went on to state in a three-page finding that the blood and tissue (the speck) found on the passenger door of Carpenter’s rented Chrysler Cordoba created
the “only reasonable inference … that the blood is that of the victim and the tissue is body tissue of the victim transferred from the scene of the crime to the defendant’s rental car.” A May 26 trial date was set. Until that time, Carpenter was free on $98,000 bail. His new attorney, public defender Stephen Avilla, told the press that he would appeal Judge Martin’s ruling to another judge and, possibly, all the way to the Arizona Court of Appeals.

38

As a lark, I threw a surprise party for Kari at Marix, a Mexican restaurant in Encino, inviting twenty friends and family members. We gathered to celebrate, to separate the hell of the recent past from the wishful anticipation of a healthy future. We all crossed our fingers, no one knowing what was going to happen, purely enjoying the moment. John, Rose, Jennifer, and Christopher were part of the observance, clearly at ease and happy as they talked with everybody in the room. We had a great evening. John and Kari talked and shared a lot of laughs together, and I watched them with a feeling of warmth and calm. John’s presence was more than I expected, and his making the effort to be there meant a lot to Kari.

While Kari was in the midst of chemo and radiation and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office was in the process of finally building its case against Carpenter, Frostbacks was running short on cash and employees when John Candy got a call from his latest new agent, Michael Menchel at Creative Artists Agency. Walt Disney Studios and former film executive turned producer Dawn Steel were offering John a supporting role in
Cool Runnings,
the inspiring true tale of four Jamaican bobsledders participating in the 1988 Winter Olympics. John would play the over-the-hill coach, an ex-Olympian who had hit rock bottom. It was a semiserious role. The project reminded me of my dad and
Hogan’s Heroes.
It was an out-of-the-ordinary, off-balance idea with great potential.

In no time I was back on the road in Calgary, Alberta, with the Candy posse. Chuck joined me for a week at the eighty-year-old Canadian National–built Palliser Hotel, during which time we observed filming at various Calgary Winter Games locations. In typical Hollywood fashion, the second half of the movie was being shot first.

John was the heaviest I had ever seen him, and he adopted a grizzled, weary appearance to help sell the coach as having lost his way. He spent many of his off hours with actors Leon, Doug E. Doug, Malik Yoba, and
Rawle Lewis in an “us against them” stance, just as the true Jamaicans and their coach had experienced. There are many actors who do their lines, film their scenes, and disappear back into their trailers. John wanted these unknown actors to trust him, know that he believed in them. He took the young actors playing the disorganized, inept sledders under his wing offscreen just as Coach Irv Blitzer did with them onscreen.

Everyone in Hollywood has a Dawn Steel story. Allegedly, when she ran Columbia Pictures, she called her female staff “cunts and bitches” and proved to have bigger balls than most male executives and producers in town. Now she was an independent producer, teaming up with her husband, Charles Roven, and a newbie director, Jon Turteltaub. Everyone benefited from being under her enormous, bullshit-proof wing.

Her reputation had preceded her to the set, and the Chongos anticipated fireworks when Candy met Steel. The day of the first script read-through, John, almost always in the moment, walked in the rehearsal room, cracked a joke to Steel that made her laugh, and then hugged her, Steel’s tiny frame disappearing into the six-foot-two, three-hundred-pound-plus of Candy. All the buildup about the Steel legend didn’t mean anything to John’s work technique and demeanor. He had taken the bull by the horns and diffused any potential producer-actor bullshit in two seconds. I smiled at this proof that no challenge, human or otherwise, was too large for John. He set his priorities, and doing good work was at the top of the list. He wanted, needed, to get his career back on track.

I always tried to emulate John’s “in the moment” existence, and I had an unsettling test of my progress shortly after the
Cool Runnings
shooting began. Laura Ziskin, my college heartthrob, now a successful producer of films like
Pretty Woman, No Way Out,
and
What About Bob?
flew into town to visit the executive producer of
Cool Runnings,
Susan Landau. I was immediately reminded of my inadequacies, not only in my one and only sexual encounter with Laura but in the show business arena in general. Laura, Susan Landau, John, and I had lunch on one of John’s days off. Here was Laura, star of the USC Cinema Department, who had given me a one-night audition over twenty years ago, then worked her way through menial television jobs, rising through the film ranks to now stand proudly and assuredly alongside Steel, Sherry Lansing, and Amy Pascal as a leader in the motion picture industry. I was a minion in the Candy camp, feeling awkward and a bit embarrassed. I was proud of Laura, in awe of her, really, and slightly scared of her. I tortured myself with this comparison
while she enjoyed her lunch with her friend and her new acquaintance John. There was much laughter and no apparent unease on her side of the table, and the afternoon played out as if Laura Ziskin were meeting me for the first time. She was, as always, bright, gracious, and beautiful.

John was going to need living quarters in Jamaica, so after Chuck and I returned to Los Angeles, I was dispatched to Montego Bay. I met with the Jamaican Film Commission personnel, who were excited about Disney, producer Dawn Steel, John Candy, and millions of dollars coming to their island. For John and the Candy clan’s housing needs, I was sent to the private enclave of Round Hill, west of the airport. There, individual homes and a hotel sat on beautifully manicured grounds facing the ocean. William Paley, Ralph Lauren, Truman Capote, and director Robert Zemeckis were just a few of the boldfaced names connected to the gated facility’s history. I found an open-air house with jaw-dropping views of the bay, a swimming pool, a full-time cook, and wait and cleaning staff on call. I was told Paul McCartney and family had just ended a monthlong stay. The tab for this tropical paradise was $1,000 a day. I called John in Calgary. He sounded pleased. Then I called my mom and Chuck in Los Angeles to say I was coming home. I saved Kari for last. As I looked out on a Caribbean Eden, I listened to my wife describe how awful she felt. The chemo and radiation were kicking her ass. She said she felt like a tackling dummy for the Chicago Bears’ Refrigerator Perry. I told her I had one meeting in the morning with the
Cool Runnings
Jamaican office, and then I’d be on a flight back to L.A. I told her I missed and loved her. I hung up the phone, sipped a Red Stripe beer, and watched one of the most breathtaking sunsets I’d ever seen. I was the loneliest guy in the world.

Kari and I were in our ninth month of separation. I was beginning to wonder if we would ever get together again. She called me one day, sounding hesitant. I thought, “Oh, shit, here comes more bad news.”

“I’d like you to move back,” she said in a low voice. “Do you want to come home?”

My cynical, sarcastic side wondered whether the relationship with the man in the writing class hadn’t worked out. Had Kari rejected him? Was the cancer too much for him to handle? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. “Of course I do. Are you sure about this?” I asked, not certain I wanted the answer.

“Yes.”

I collected my clothing, futon, portable television, meager kitchen items, and books, and made the five-minute move back home.

Perhaps Kari had initiated our separation because she had just tired of her whole lot, which included me. Perhaps she felt she was preparing me for a life after Kari. Perhaps she had chemo brain and just wasn’t thinking clearly. What had happened? Why was it over now? Analysis was irrelevant. I was home with my wife. We never talked about it.