Ham (14 page)

Liver is liver. But sometimes I will still hold out for paté.

By the time I got to the hospital in Amsterdam, Jerry had already died.

He'd been my director, writer, mentor, friend, and father figure since I was nineteen, and now, nearly ten years later, I'd rushed to catch the next plane from Los Angeles upon receiving the call that “it's almost time.” But I had missed the moment.

•  •  •

For the two years before I met Jerry, UCLA had given me opportunities that far exceeded anything remotely scholastic. When I was a sophomore, my housemate and best friend, Bruce Newberg, and I were so enthusiastic, obstinate and unrelenting about getting to write and produce our new musical—
Hurry! Hurry! Hollywood!—
that the dean of fine arts at UCLA actually allowed us our ambitious request in lieu of taking courses. I was given fake classes and fake grades and never met a professor. It was like they knew I was never going to graduate—or at least they hoped I would leave after I had exhausted everything the music and theater departments had to offer.

I thought this was how show business and, well, life worked: you insisted on what you knew would be wonderful and people let you do it. I couldn't imagine getting a finer education or anything more from UCLA unless they named a campus theater after me, so immediately after the curtain fell on our show, I left college to pursue my own course.

I had other, bigger projects to beg for and get.

I found family in a gang of young singers and comedians at a crusty Santa Monica club called the Horn, where we clumsily chiseled and hunted out our stage personalities, experimenting with new material and singing backup for one another in multiple sets, four or five nights a week, for twenty-five dollars a night and free drinks.

The Horn was a dingy and dreadful and depressing place. Everything was painted black: the walls, floors, tables, chairs, bar, the stage. Not a chic, shimmery, lacquered black—a dull, gloomy black that made you want to drink the moment you stepped in. The only reason the place stayed open was that between the black everything and the dimmest murmur of lighting, no one was ever sure if the people they saw there were actually there. Hence, it was a magnet for a low-life clientele of barflies and cheating out-of-towners.

What the Horn lacked in charm it made up for as a stomping ground for talented, young hopefuls—none of whom were getting anywhere. After I'd played there a few months, a stunningly beautiful cocktail waitress named Paris Vaughan told me, “My mother would love you. I'm going to bring her to see you.” The following week, she did.

“Hi, I'm Paris's mom, Sarah.”

I did the math. Paris Vaughan . . . Sarah. Vaughan. Oh. My. God.

If I'd known beforehand that she was the plump woman in the silk caftan and turbulently crested wave-shaped wig, I doubt I could have sung. My dad had all her records and I'd grown up singing along, emulating her phrasing, tone, vibrato.

“That was fuckin' real, white boy,” she said, and wrapped me in her arms. She hadn't been called “Sassy” for nothing. Sarah Vaughan liked me, and I was confident a pat on the back from such a legend would mean immediate stardom.

Not so much.

Record producers, A&R guys, and Vegas bookers occasionally came slumming, but glimmers of possibilities were always snuffed out like the messy tabletop candles in cheap red glass jars after last call.

My father recognized and related to my fierce drive and, in a remarkable act of true belief, he decided I needed professional help (the show kind, not therapeutic, though it could have gone either way). If success in this business was what I craved, then my father wanted to help me get it faster, and the encouragement he was still unable to verbalize was voiced through action.

By day, I worked part-time in the office of City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, and also in the office of television producer Pierre Cossette, and learned that politics was show business and show business was politics. During a visit from Oklahoma, my dad requested a meeting with Pierre and his associate Dee, and asked them who the best person would be to guide my particular talents.

They gave him one name: Jerry Blatt.

Jerry had been with Bette Midler since her bathhouse beginnings and had basically cocreated her Divine Miss M persona with her. He wrote and then directed all of her shows—and not just the funny stuff. The stuff that made you hurt. They said he would “get me.”

Jerry came to hear me sing at the Horn, and the deal was done that night in a chafed red pleather corner booth, thick with smoke and plans. My father hired him to write and direct an act for me that would attract Hollywood big shots and record companies. I knew he was the guy. What I didn't know was that he would become the single most important influence on the way I think and create and perform, and the greatest gift my dad, or anyone, ever gave me.

Jerry was twenty years older than I, and two inches shorter than my pint-size five-foot-eight. His muscled, gym-rat upper body was perpetually stuffed into T-shirts sized for a teenager, in odd contrast to his spindly legs. He wore a curly, full beard and his hair may or may not have been streaked with a dash of purple or lime green. “It's
lypple
green!” he would specify. His intelligent eyes were framed by round wire glasses, which, despite his attempt at a worked-out, punk-haired, über-now image, recalled a scrawny little Jewish boy, perpetually studying for his bar mitzvah.

Jerry taught me to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and see the world as art. On a stroll through Greenwich Village, he would point out the way the sunlight hurtled between two buildings and splashed against a widowed tree next to a stump, to create a thriving jagged shadow on the pavement. Or the incongruous beauty of a vigorously painted red wall as the backdrop for a street crazy peeing on the sidewalk. He introduced me to Tom Waits and Jean-Paul Goude and taught me how to make perfect sautéed mushrooms. He took me to the Horn of Plenty nightclub to see Cissy Houston, whose opening act was a hypnotist (I was the volunteer) and whose guest was her daughter, an eighteen-year-old, unknown Whitney, who sang “The Greatest Love of All.” He told me about the 1960s experimental theater movement in New York, describing a particularly fabulous production in someone's West Village loft apartment in which the first act was a man carrying around a bag of dirt and carefully sprinkling it all over the furniture, and the second act was the same guy vacuuming it up.

Jerry thought everything was important, but he didn't take anything very seriously.

He believed that singing is just storytelling and the opposite of trying to create a specific outcome, or, worse, trying to
re-create
a specific outcome. He made it clear that in stepping onstage, I had to surrender to the terrifying, dangerous process of preparing thoroughly and then releasing the preparation, like blowing a kiss, not knowing where it would land or what would happen. The biggest lesson he taught me—to which Bette was a testament—was that if you tell the truth onstage, you can do anything. Try anything. If you feel like standing on your head and it's authentic, it will work.

My first show with him was called
Sam Harris and Fries to Go!
Fries to Go were my backup singers. Because of my youthful, corn-fed appearance, Jerry decided they should be old white ladies wearing flower-patterned housedresses, church hats and sensible shoes, as if they'd chaperoned me by bus from Oklahoma and their presence was the only condition under which my parents would let me leave. After numerous auditions, we realized that actual old white ladies couldn't sing the ripping gospel parts we were creating, so we settled for young women who
dressed
like old ladies in flower-patterned housedresses, church hats, and sensible shoes.

With Jerry, I turned my soulful style into the theme of the little white boy from the sticks with the big black voice. The first song in the show said it all: “Bless My Soul, Mama, You Got to Know There's Love in Them There Hills.” We rehearsed at a hole-in-the-wall space in East Los Angeles with decades-old, nasty stained carpeting and chipped, lead-loaded, mud-brown-painted walls. When Jerry and I rehearsed alone, we both moved pianos and chairs and speakers, but when anyone else was present, he would not allow me to touch a thing. Even in this hovel, I was the star and “stars should not be seen
schlepping.
”

My debut was in a dump of an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called Gio's. There was a tiny squibble of a listing in the
Los Angeles Times
announcing that I would play there for a month of weekends. It was my first mention in a major newspaper, and I felt as if I'd been knighted. The restaurant included a small, dreary room adjacent to the dining area with scarred wooden tables, a few dozen rickety cane-back chairs, and a tiny platform stage at one end. We brought in an entire band, the girls, and me—all costumed and choreographed and charted to the gills. There were only three small stage lights and no gels, so Jerry took red straws from the bar and lined them up in the barn-door frames for mood.

We were ready for the masses. There was no backstage, so I paced nervously in the alley outside the kitchen, surrounded by garbage cans puffing wet, rancid food smells, and a couple of illegal immigrant busboys on a smoke break. Jerry burst outside with excitement in his eyes and said, “Think of it as a rehearsal!”

“What do you mean? We've been rehearsing for weeks,” I said.

“The house is small.”

“How small?”

“Very small.”

“How very small?”

“No one is in the audience.”

I stood in a pool of some sort of leakage and took in the news.

“No one? Not one person? No one?” I begged.

“Sean is here,” Jerry offered with a positive grin.

Sean was Jerry's lover/partner/appendage who had so much brain damage from the festival of drugs he had taken throughout his life that it was more like having half a person attend my show. He was missing important teeth. But you didn't notice right away because his broomish mustache hung over most of his mouth and was always littered with remnants of his last meal. Not crumbs. Enough to qualify as leftovers. I loved Sean. He taught me about gardening and did a dead-on impersonation of a Shasta daisy, but he was hardly enough audience. Besides, he was photographing the show for my archives. Up to this point I didn't have any archives so this would be my maiden archive. What a start.

I unstuck my shoes from the alleyway goop and bummed a smoke from one of the busboys. I hadn't asked any friends to come, as I wanted a few performances under my belt before their scrutiny. Now I wished I had.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“Well, we're doing the show.”

“What do you mean,
we're
doing the show? You're not the one who has to play to nobody!”

“You are getting paid, not much, well, you're losing money, but you are billed and you need to fulfill that promise . . . Think of it as another rehearsal.”

Gio's was supposed to be the next step toward my destiny of stardom. I wanted to be famous. So famous that I would be vehemently hated by all the people I admired most. I wanted mobs of fans to remind me that I was not alone in the way I felt about myself. I wanted to complain that the tabloids were printing
Lies! Lies! Lies!
but I would know it was all true. Suddenly, as I was standing in a stinky alley outside an audience-less cheesy Italian restaurant, an avalanche of reality and doubt invaded my head and I feared that I would never reach my full potential because I was disillusioned about the potential of my full potential.

I did the show. Full-out. The manager of the restaurant didn't even pop his head in to see if we were there. Midway through the first act (yes, there were two acts with an intermission), a slob of a drunk staggered in, slouched into an unsteady chair, sucked down most of a cigarette, and left. I played an entire comic monologue to the gray plume that continued to rise from the ashtray. Sean's effortful cackle landed at all the punch lines. I looked to him for support and when he lowered the camera from his face, I saw from his mustache that he'd just had veal parmesan, a side of linguini with clam sauce, sautéed spinach with garlic, and a cannoli. It just made the whole thing all the more pathetic. At the end of the first act, Jerry switched off the three stage lights for a lackluster blackout and I returned to the alley for a costume change.

At the end of my first show, Jerry grabbed me and held me tight. He had tears in his eyes. He was
kvelling.
Fifteen minutes later, I was fired for singing too loudly. “People can't digest their food in the next room with all that noise,” the manager explained. It would have been kinder to bring up that I hadn't brought any business, but for some reason he wanted to make it personal.

•  •  •

Jerry and I began working in every awful club in Los Angeles. I am not a “club” person. I don't do well with vomit-stained greenroom sofas and low-ceilinged rat holes that shouldn't be seen in the daytime—call me a snob—but Jerry said we were building something and we needed places to fail. After two years, and with no Hollywood big shots pounding on my door, I needed a
proper
place to fail, and found a fifty-seat venue called Theatre/Theater, where I convinced the owner to let me play for six months. The show was called
Sam Harris: Out of Control.
Just as we were about to begin rehearsals, Jerry got a writing gig in New York that actually paid, and announced he was moving back, tossing me out of the nest but leaving me with a vision.

My backup singers were now known as the International Pancakes and each had a character name and nationality: Leipi von Biesterfeldt—from Germany; Zorova Petrova—from Bulgaria; and Fiore Bellini di Vicci—from Italy. They wore black corsets and puffed taffeta skirts with picture hats and stilettos and lace gloves. Ann Marie, who played Leipi, made all of their costumes by hand with a budget of nothing and added some sparkle to what would be my look: a pair of 1940s dark teal, pleated trousers with a pencil-thin, pink pinstripe, a white cotton fake-front dickie covered by an oversize tuxedo tailcoat, and a pair of black high-top Converse sneakers. All but the tennis shoes were from thrift shops. Ann Marie sewed on a sad, slightly tattered silk gardenia to the lapel and sequin piping to the tails. I looked like Groucho Marx meets Magic Johnson, with a little Cher thrown in for good measure.