Love Life (3 page)

“I have two Burt Reynolds movies for us in the screening room,” said Warren, leading us down a flight of stairs to a setup that had a theater-size screen, rows of comfy couches and almost unbearably romantic mood lighting. He was padding around barefoot, in jeans and a crisp white shirt; the whole scene would have made Mother Teresa want to bang him.

Warren’s date for the night was an actress I recognized as a semiregular on
WKRP in Cincinnati
. She sat to his left, with me on his right. Warren picked up a phone built into the arm of the couch and asked the projectionist to start the movie.

“I think we’ll watch
Stick
first.”

I had always been fascinated with what movie stars felt about one another. Were they supportive? Jealous? Did they take notes and learn from each other? As the movie began, I was curious what, if anything, Warren would say about it. After all, at that moment, he was the undisputed king of Hollywood. The movie started.

“Hmm,” mumbled Warren.

“Oh, I see,” he said to no one in particular.

“Ahh.” He smiled to himself.

Halfway through the movie, my curiosity got the best of me.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Very interesting. He’s using a lot of long lenses,” Warren replied sagely.

I tried to comprehend how he could look at the scene and know what kind of lens it was shot with. I wondered what he was seeing to recognize these technical details so easily. It made me realize that I had a tremendous amount to learn about moviemaking.

Meanwhile, the girl from
WKRP
was getting restless.

“Is there any ice cream?” she asked, clearly not as enthralled with Burt or dissecting what equipment he was using on-screen. “I’m
starving
.”

Warren and the girls immediately disembarked for the kitchen. Like an idiot, I stayed in the screening room watching the movie.

After a while, it became clear they weren’t coming back. I made my way up to the kitchen to find them. I came upon them each eating directly out of containers of Häagen-Dazs. They seemed to become immediately quiet as I entered, but Warren was as gracious as ever.

“We were just talking about you,” he said, offering up his pralines and cream to me.

I looked at my girlfriend, who was scrunched up next to
WKRP
, looking like the cat that ate the canary.

“You remind me
so
much of Warren,” said
WKRP
. It was a great compliment, and standing right next to him I felt my color rise.

“It’s true,” he said. “I started young like you and was dating an actress more famous than I was, just like you.”

“Natalie Wood?” asked my girlfriend, glowing with pride from the comparison.

“Exactly,” answered Warren. “She was a big deal and I wasn’t, but I had a huge movie about to come out in
Splendor in the Grass
and I knew my life was going to change. Like you, Rob, when
The Outsiders
comes out.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” I said, realizing that ice cream had never tasted so good. I looked at the clock on the wall and thought, “I’m eighteen years old, it’s midnight at Warren Beatty’s house and I’m having dessert while he talks about my future.”

“You remind me of Natalie Wood,” he remarked casually to my girlfriend. I remember thinking, “
There
it is. The lay-down hand. The line that would turn any young actress into his personal concubine for life.”

“It’s funny,” he said, continuing. “Natalie was always getting asked by Frank Sinatra to come up to his house and lay by the pool. I never paid much attention to it, but years later, just a few years before
Natalie died, I asked her, ‘Hey, we’re both adults now, what exactly were you doing all those days at Sinatra’s?’ And she looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘Oh, Warren, what do you think we were doing? We were fucking!’ Isn’t that funny?” He smiled at me, shaking his head at the memory.

I looked over at my girlfriend, who looked away, ashen faced. And the penny dropped.

Thanks for the heads-up, Warren Beatty. You’re my hero to this day.

M
y son Matthew is eighteen.
When I look at him, I often don’t recognize any part of the little boy I have loved for so long. Sometimes I do; I’ll see a fleeting expression or the light will catch him in a manner that for a moment makes him look as he once was. With his size-thirteen feet and his mother’s long limbs, he can still look like a young colt navigating an open field. He has my love of history and politics, my interest in factoids, trivia and obscure information, most of it of limited interest to anyone else. Unlike me, Matthew is content to let you come to him, confident in his silences. He auditions for no one.

We’ve always been close, but I have come to realize our relationship has been predicated on proximity. We’ve loved reading together from the time he was a baby; we explored the hills and beaches and railroad tracks of our neighborhood. We ran in the yard with our dogs; we navigated the laughter, love and hurt of adolescence together. Soon the geography of our relationship will change and we will build
a new one based around distance, and while I hope it will be as close as before, I know it will never be the same.

Matthew is in the middle of the college application process. Choosing a school has always been an arduous and drama-filled travail for our family. I have only recently recovered from the great kindergarten search. After gaining a coveted meeting with a prestigious school’s admissions director, I watched my son jam a shark’s tooth into the woman’s ear. Why a supposedly learned child-care expert would have such a small health hazard within a child’s reach remains a mystery and should have been a sign that perhaps this fancy-pants school wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. There were other signs that I chose to ignore as well.

While some of the school’s third and fourth graders carried books through the hallways, a larger portion carried skateboards. Having grown up in Malibu, I was not unaccustomed to Southern California’s less-than-respectful fashion ethos, but even I was taken aback by the sheer numbers of boys dressed like Jeff Spicoli. When we were touring a sixth-grade science class, a kid raised his hand with a question. “Pete,” the eleven-year-old student asked the teacher, who was in his midforties and wearing surf shorts, “what is more common, zooplankton or phytoplankton?” While I struggled to come up with the answer myself, I struggled even more with the concept of a little boy referring to his adult teacher by his first name. I was well versed in this sort of educational culture; in fact, my mother had placed my younger brother Micah in such a kindergarten in Malibu years ago, a local institution. The founder of the school didn’t believe in “structured” teaching or apparently discipline of any kind. Whenever I picked my brother up from school, many kids were AWOL, running around in the hills above the school like savages. Even as a sixteen-year-old I had the notion that this was no way to run a railroad, so,
years later, I was sort of relieved when Matthew took matters into his own hands and ended our application process with the shark’s tooth.

My wife, Sheryl, and I did eventually find the right school for him. I think we all react to the way we were raised as we try to navigate our roles as parents. Neither my mother nor my father was particularly involved in my life at school (although they did instill a work ethic and made sure all homework was done). With my own kids, I wanted to be as much a part of their school experience as I could, as did Sheryl.

For me, this meant taking part in as many school functions and extracurricular activities as I could. I coached both of my sons’ elementary school basketball teams. One of my fondest memories is winning the league championship for the school’s first time. (As Ty Cobb said, “it ain’t bragging if you’ve done it.”) Even though some of what I thought were my best motivation techniques were probably too advanced for sixth graders, I loved being with the kids. I’m not sure if they fully appreciated my grabbing them by the jerseys at half time, eyes blazing, and admonishing them with, “No one, and I mean
no one
, comes into our house and pushes us around!” When the kids looked at me with blank faces, I would tell them, “It’s from the film
Rudy
. You know, Ara Parseghian? The great Notre Dame coach? . . . Ah, never mind, just toughen up out there!” And you know what? Inevitably, they would.

I learned that kids are like actors on a set: They want to know that their director gives a shit, has an actual plan and, just maybe, knows what he’s doing. In other words, they want leadership. And you can’t attempt to lead by being all things to all people or a slave to PC society—which brings me to why I was eventually overthrown as the basketball coach in a parent-led coup d’état and why they’ve never won a championship since.

Lots of kids wanted to play basketball in that sixth-grade class. I
suggested that rather than having one huge team on which some kids would inevitably not get much playing time, we field two teams, with two different coaches, so the greatest number of kids could play. I then went through almost Manhattan Project–like analytics to ensure both teams were equally matched. But after my first few practices, I began to sense trouble.

A gaggle of moms had been eyeballing me throughout our first scrimmage game with the grade’s other team. It soon became clear that they were not fans of my methods.

“Why didn’t my son play very much?” asked the ringleader with the same righteous fire as Norma Rae. I couldn’t very well tell her that her boy had no interest in learning the fundamentals of basketball or playing basketball, and certainly not winning at basketball.

“We’re all just getting our footing out there. The more they learn, the more they’ll play. But your boy’s working hard,” I lied, and immediately hated myself.

Then the next mom spoke up. “I don’t see why you are dividing these boys’ friendships by letting your team win. These teams are from the same class!”

“You . . . You don’t want anyone to win?” I responded. I had heard about this new mind-set about sports in schools, but thought it was only a BS punch line for late-night talk show monologues.

“Well, I certainly don’t think you should be
keeping score
!” she answered. The other moms nodded gravely.

I explained that, in my view, the tradition of noting the amount of baskets achieved, adding them up and comparing the total to the other team’s is the only objective method to see who played better. The moms sniffed and looked at one another. I haven’t felt such tension and disapproval since I sang with Snow White at the Oscars.

“Well,” Norma Rae said with finality, “I don’t think it’s fair to have winners and losers.”

I thought about debating that point. In my estimation, there is no more virulent motivator in life than wanting to win.

As the season progressed, so did our team. We practiced hard, but always with an element of fun. Still, I could see that there was a type of parent who didn’t want to have their kids do push-ups if they goofed off, or run laps if they were late, or get benched for a lack of motivation.

I loved these boys and loved coaching them. Telling a shy, awkward kid that he “can do this” when he clearly thinks he can’t, and has probably never been told he can, would almost move me to tears. When that kid made his only basket of the entire season, in our league championship, I wanted to run out and hug him. Instead, I gave him the game ball.

After winning the championship, I found out that there were no awards (or anything else) to memorialize the boys’ achievement, so I decided to buy each kid a small trophy myself. I had it inscribed with the school’s name, the year and the word “champions.” I soon heard from the school’s PE teacher that he’d been getting complaints from parents whose kids didn’t win the tournament and so would not be getting a trophy. Furthermore, I was told that the kids would not be allowed to attend the awards/pizza dinner I’d arranged unless I got trophies for the other school team as well.

“Does anyone object to the winning team’s trophy showing that they were, in fact, the winning team?” I asked.

“Honestly; yes. But if
all
the kids got the same style and size trophy, I think you could get away with it.”

“Okay. Do you want me to pay for these additional trophies?”

“Yes. That would be great.”

“What about the other coach?” I asked. I was happy to foot the bill but curious as to where the other team’s leader was in all of this nonsense.

“Oh, he says he’s done with the season.”

I held our awards dinner at our local pizza parlor, setting up an awards table on top of the Ms. Pac-Man machine. As I handed out the Golden Basketball Man to each kid, the television above us showed the Oscars being handed out down in LA. The pizza parlor was decidedly more fun and fulfilling. A few weeks later I was informed of a new school policy: Parents would no longer be permitted to participate in after-school athletic programs. This was probably as it should have been in the first place. The next year local college volunteers were brought in. I watched and rooted as an incredibly sweet and well-meaning young lady tried to figure out what a three-second violation was and how to inbound the ball correctly. Turns out she’d never played basketball; her expertise was water polo. The team went two for twelve that year.