Love Life (28 page)

Backstage, the alphas were in full but respectful peacock mode. The list of eulogists was a roster of comedy killers like Martin Short, Bill Maher, David Spade, Jon Lovitz and old-guard assassins like Norm Crosby and Jack Burns. Megaproducer Jerry Weintraub,
SNL
writer Alan Zweibel, both Brad and Lorne, Jennifer Aniston and I would also speak. There would be Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi performing as the Blues Brothers, as well as Kermit the Frog.

Everyone had two goals: remembering their fallen father and absolutely
killing
it in front of all of Hollywood. After all, this was mainly a comedy crowd, and if you don’t think there’s no one more competitive than a big-time pro comic, then you’ve never met one.

“Looorne,” crooned Jon Lovitz in his distinctive tone, “when do I speak?”

“I’m doing the order now,” said Lorne in the same focused/casual manner in which he runs
SNL
.

“I think the Blues Brothers should open,” suggested Jerry Weintraub helpfully.

“I’m keeping it short,” said Brad Grey.

“Try to be funny, Jon,” said Spade to his old
SNL
pal.

“Kermit or Blues Brothers first?” asked a production assistant with a clipboard.

“Can I see the running order?” asked Brad Grey.

“Put me with Jennifer Aniston!” said Lovitz.

“Just tell me who’s gonna close the show, okay?!” someone demanded.

Lorne had had enough.

“I haven’t finished the speaking order, but I will tell you this: No one follows the frog.”

When we did speak, the order, like everything that evening, was perfect. Everyone spoke deeply of their love for Bernie and lampooned him with equal measure. He would have
loved
it. There were times when I knew exactly when I would have heard his booming laugh/yell: “AAAAH HAAAAH!”

When we were all done, and after John’s brother Jim partnered with Dan on the Blues Brothers hit “Soul Man,” I remembered something
Bernie always said about one of his most famous and tragically lost clients.

“Kid, I’m pretty sure there’s no heaven. If there was, Belushi would have called.”

I thought of them both, now reunited, probably looking down at us, laughing, wearing comfy tracksuits, as Bernie’s discovery Kermit the Frog appeared onstage. Sitting on a log, he began to sing. I recognized the song at once, as did many around me in the audience, and you could plainly hear stifled gasps and muffled sobbing.

I remembered the last time I saw Bernie and how he tried to speak but I couldn’t hear him. I thought of his joke about not hearing from Belushi from heaven. I thought about how lucky I was to have known him and how much I would miss him, as Kermit sang “Rainbow Connection”:

Have you been half-asleep and have you heard voices?

I’ve heard them calling my name.

Is this the sweet sound that called the young sailors?

The voice might be one and the same.

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it

It’s something that I’m supposed to be.

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection

The lovers, the dreamers and me.

W
hen I was young
and wild, being a father was the farthest thing from my mind. The only extent to which it was ever a consideration was the lengths I went to in order to avoid becoming one. I would see parents with their kids, chasing them around malls or shushing them in restaurants, and think, “What a nightmare.” Having children seemed exhausting and life with them boring. And in my twenties, nothing was more repellent than being boring.

But my dark secret was that I connected to kids. I related to them, even as an “it-boy/man” eighties media sensation. In truth, some of the more grounded and humane times I can recall from that crazy era were moments when I would find myself confronted with, say, a friend’s newborn or when I was commandeered into spending time with kids.

In a decade where there is so much I don’t remember, I think it’s significant that these moments stay with me, even today. Clearly,
even though I didn’t know it at the time, the relationship between fathers and children spoke to me.

When I changed my life, when I sobered up, when I saw that show business couldn’t fill that place that was empty, those buried feelings rose, and having found the love of the right woman, I started a family of my own. The best chapter of my life began.

Together, the four of us left Los Angeles to make a stab at a normal life, to the extent that someone like me can ever have one. We found a town where not everyone on the PTA was a studio executive or agent or absent on location with their latest project. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but since I had the ability to live outside Hollywood, I wanted my boys to have a more diverse social environment, because LA truly is a company town. And, so, instead they were raised with kids whose parents were from all walks of life, and today I see the dividends in my boys’ broad spectrum of interests. And, so far, neither has asked me to get him a SAG card.

As a child of divorce (three of them, if you are keeping score at home), my experience with fathering was limited. Although I am blessed to have a loving relationship with my dad, he was gone from my daily life (other than summers) once I was four years old. Then there were two stepfathers, the first also a good man and the second a man of complex inconsistencies. Like so many, I never had a consistent male figure who wasn’t eventually switched out.

So, when my time came, I took the many good things I learned from the men in my life and was left to make up the rest from whole cloth.

Being a father became the focus of my life. My career was now a means to an end, to make it easier to devote myself to my real passion: helping Sheryl raise our boys. I still worked with drive and purpose. I think some of my best work was done in this period, this era where
I had the perspective to know that a hit movie or TV show is great, but your sons growing up healthy and well-rounded is better.

It’s funny how almost all clichés turn out to be dead on the money. It’s not a new concept, but I am constantly amazed by how much a young man needs both his mother and father. At the same time. In the same debates. Giving equal push-back and support. I hate to think of the mess I would have made raising Matthew and Johnowen without Sheryl’s 24/7 presence. And vice versa (although she’d probably have done better without me than the other way around). I need her unrelenting attention to detail, her indefatigable drive for organization and order, and most of all, her utterly selfless ability to put her needs last as she focuses like a laser on the needs and wants of those she loves. She hooked a complicated fish with me, and I can’t see another being able to love me and our boys with her nuclear devotion.

My strengths lie elsewhere. I am, to put it mildly, not detail-oriented and not particularly orderly. I
do
like those around me to be, however. I, like many in my line of work, can fall easily into self-centeredness, which is probably the single worst noncriminal attribute a parent can have. There is no greater curse than being the child of a narcissist. Not that I’m copping to being a narcissist, mind you. I’d like to think I have a modicum of self-awareness that allows me to avoid at least the clinical diagnosis (although the brilliant and astute Rashida Jones claims that I am what she likes to call a
benevolent
narcissist). I’m well suited to run interference with teachers, parents, administrators, friends of my boys or any other third parties who inevitably enter the family equation. I am happy to engage, argue, charm or advocate as needed. I’m the “face” guy for our family, while Sheryl works her magic behind the scenes. Different people, different skills, but both needed.

Soon we will have to find another use for those skills. For a brief time your children belong to you, but soon they belong to the world. I am humbled to watch this process play out in my life as my little boys begin to go their own way. It makes me proud and it breaks my heart. And so, now, like any unadmitted but possibly qualified benevolent narcissist would say, “What about
me
?”

I suppose I could buy a Harley or a seventies muscle car and drive along the coast with Sheryl until we sit side by side holding hands in matching claw-footed tubs placed strategically on a beautiful oceanfront cliff, like in those erectile dysfunction commercials. I could adopt a litter of puppies. I could dust off the old golf clubs, the ones I hung up when the boys were born, despite having killed the Iowa state bird in flight with a wedge shot the last time I played. I could write another book, I guess. I could do a lot of things with the new expanse of free time I will have. But first I will have to come to see it as an opportunity and not as a loss. I know I’ll get there soon; I’m not there yet. But I’m trying. We are the authors of our own lives; it falls only to us. It’s time for me to pick up that pen and begin to write again. Because my hope is that the story of my life with Sheryl has many chapters. I’m blessed to have finished such a beautiful one.

People sometimes ask me if I have any advice for how to maintain a long and successful marriage, having been happily married for more than twenty-two years.

I used to wonder the same thing when I looked from afar at my hero, Paul Newman, and observed his longtime union with Joanne Woodward. They were always Hollywood’s happy example, the exception to the cliché of ridiculous and frivolous show-biz marriages.
And while it’s true that Newman’s love affair is to be admired, I disagree with the notion that the entertainment business has a lower success rate at marriage than any other high-stress, high-stakes line of work. I’m sure it’s just as hard for couples in the military or others who are forced to spend weeks or months apart in the forced company of many new personalities, some of whom can be quite compelling, charming and attractive. In the end, in terms of temptation and loneliness, there’s probably not much difference between being on a movie location in Saskatoon for four months or being on an oil rig in the North Sea for the same amount of time.

I suppose the idea that Hollywood is the center of kooky love affairs isn’t helped by reality stars who marry for publicity or the number of truly certified wackos who have every right to give love a shot, but after a year or so have only a tattoo of their partner to show for it. But my judgment is that kind of thing happens everywhere, all the time. You just hear about it more in my business because people are paying attention.

Regardless of your circumstances, the best bet you have for long-term marriage is obvious: Choose well. Many don’t. They do it for the great sex or the life they hope to achieve with their partner or with the thinking that with the commitment of marriage things will be simpler and better. Some do it because they really want to get married, instead of really wanting to
be
married. Many don’t know the difference.

I was not looking to get married. If you weren’t aware of me in the eighties, let me just say that I was quite active in the R and D arena of female companionship. In fact, when I first met Sheryl I was still in the thick of being a single, twentysomething male movie star maniac.

Even then, Sheryl cut through the clutter. Physically, she was
stunning. And please, people, let’s drop all the highfalutin PC pretense here; someone’s looks are important. They are the first thing we judge each other on, and it’s impossible not to; we can’t “know” anyone from across a crowded room. And when I saw this tall, long-legged blonde with her particularly emotive sky-blue eyes, I wanted to know her.

It was a double date, a blind one; we had been set up by a friend, and I am forever in his debt. But I’m sure that he could never have imagined that margaritas and chips at a Mexican restaurant would lead to my life today, and looking back these twenty-two years, the fact that it was a blind date seems all the more incredible.

That I had no preview of how I might feel about Sheryl makes the fact that I came to love her a true odds-defier. But consider Sheryl’s situation: She
knows
she’s meeting me. Seen a movie or two, read the
National Enquirer
. Probably heard some opinions about me, possibly from many and probably for quite a while. I was used to everyone having a preconceived notion of who I was.

Sheryl didn’t.

She saw parts of me no one had before. She somehow knew I longed to be better than I was. She saw potential in me to be more, as an actor and as a man. As we got to know each other, she emboldened me to do things that I hadn’t dared before. To quit drinking. To get sober. To try to stop chasing the latest, hottest girl. I began to grow.

When she would visit my
Miami Vice
–looking Hollywood Hills bachelor pad, she would decorate. I have a vivid memory of her reorganizing the books and items on my coffee table into a design straight out of Ralph Lauren. She would also often insist we stock my kitchen with more than a beer bong and Wolfgang Puck’s frozen pizzas. Then she would cook her special pasta broccoli. While these are not revolutionary efforts, for me they might as well have been. No one had ever thought to do any of it for me before.