The Importance of Being Ernie: (22 page)

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Authors: Barry Livingston

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CHAPTER 39
 
Finding My Soul Mate During CPR
 
Working on the plays fulfilled my artistic needs and helped stifle my drug cravings. That was important. There was still a big, painful hole in my life that was missing: a meaningful relationship. I’d troll the pick-up bars or go to the local gym to ogle the pretty girls, but I never met anyone I really liked. One night at the Red Onion Restaurant and Cantina in Canoga Park, I got lucky. My life was changed forever.
I was seated at the crowded bar, nursing a drink and trying to tune out a bad country western band playing onstage. The film,
Urban Cowboy,
was a recent hit and most every nightclub in town had ditched the
Saturday Night Fever
disco ball for sawdust floors.
A pretty young girl sat down next to me. I don’t remember who started the conversation, but the next thing I knew we were chatting; actually, it was more like yelling over the pounding drums and whining guitars. I learned that her name was Karen and suggested we go somewhere else to talk.
Moments later we were outside the club, and things took an unexpected and tragic turn. I noticed a young woman lying flat on her back on a grassy knoll. People were hurrying to and from the club, completely ignoring her. I thought I might score a few chivalrous points with Karen and suggested that we should see if the girl was okay.
As we drew closer, I could see that the girl’s white dress had a floral pattern on it, red roses, I thought.
Once we were standing over her, I realized the red pattern was actually large bloody stains. The girl was motionless, and her upturned wrist was severely slashed. It was a gruesome sight, and I went light-headed, nearly passing out.
Karen was studying to be a physical therapist in college and had some medical training. She sprung into action, using her sweater to tie a tourniquet around the bloody wrist. The girl had a pulse but was not breathing, so Karen started to administer CPR. Between blowing puffs of air into the woman’s slack-jawed mouth, Karen yelled, “Call an ambulance!”
For those of you old enough to remember, there were no cell phones in 1980. You couldn’t just whip out a Motorola and dial for help. In fact, there wasn’t even the universal emergency number, 911, to call. My only option was to run back inside the Red Onion and seek medical assistance.
I plowed through the line of people waiting to get inside the nightclub, all the while yelling, “Emergency, this is an emergency, let me through!” I finally arrived at the velvet rope and a hulking doorman.
“There’s a young girl bleeding to death on your front lawn,” I yelled, trying to be heard over the loud music that was spilling out of the club.
“My front ... what?” the doorman asked, giving me a confused look.
I realized that I had to slow down and carefully explain the situation or the poor girl was never going to survive. “There’s a girl who is lying out by the street, on the front lawn of your club. She needs a doctor and an ambulance because she is bleeding to death!” I said emphatically.
The doorman finally got it. He picked up an in-house phone and reported the problem to management. A long minute later, a club employee appeared onstage and commandeered the microphone. He put forth the famous question: “Is there a doctor in the house? Would a doctor please come to the front door immediately?” It’s a wonder that anybody survived a medical crisis back then.
Seconds later a doctor appeared at the door, and I led him back to the lawn where Karen was still doing CPR. When the man announced that he was a doctor, Karen jumped away from the girl, ready and relieved to hand over the trauma. To Karen’s credit, the girl was now breathing on her own again.
An ambulance soon arrived, and paramedics joined the team. They said she was going to survive thanks to our actions. The police arrived, too. Since Karen and I were the ones who found her, the cops told us not to leave because a report had to be taken. What a swell Saturday night this was turning into.
Eventually, the ambulance sped away with the girl, and a droll policeman interviewed Karen and me. We had nothing to offer about the girl or her suicide attempt, since we had found her unconscious. Nonetheless, the Jack Webb clone meticulously assembled the facts, some of them I found quite interesting. I learned that Karen grew up in Walnut Creek, California, and her age was twenty-one. These were the kinds of things that guys pry out of girls over time. Kudos to the LAPD for their excellent investigation.
The police released us, and we went to Karen’s nearby apartment where we bonded in a comforting and profound embrace. . . one that’s lasted thirty years.
In our first twenty-four hours, Karen and I saved somebody’s life, became lovers, and went to Disneyland for an outing with my entire family—siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. What a whirlwind.
I had never been more instantly enraptured with anybody. Karen was as beautiful as she was smart. She laughed at all my silly jokes, and I laughed at hers. We got each other, simple as that. I had found my soul mate and soon we were married.
CHAPTER 40
 
The Worst and the Best
 
With a new love buoying my spirit, I threw myself into a number of theater productions in Los Angeles. The first one was a musical,
Purple Hearts and Other Colors,
about the World War II invasion of Iwo Jima. It was perhaps the most ill-conceived song and dance epic since
Springtime for Hitler
, and featured show-stopping numbers like “We Need a Negro Too.” Sondheim, eat your heart out.
The musical was based on an old screenplay written by Robert C. Jones, an Academy Award winner for his work on the film
Coming Home
. To be fair to Mr. Jones, screenplays rarely transfer well to theater. When a script written for a movie describes a battleship’s blazing guns, landing crafts streaking ashore, and thousands of troops pouring onto exploding tropical beaches, it can work like gangbusters on screen, especially on a 200-million-dollar budget. When you’re trying to dramatize the same mind-boggling action on a minuscule stage, with a few hundred dollars to spend, the spectacle is, shall I say, diminished.
At the Beverly Hills Playhouse, we had ten Japanese soldiers hunkered down on the left side of the stage and ten American G.I.’s (including me ... and the Negro from the song) clumped together on the right side. As the action progressed, we inched (literally) toward each other, pausing occasionally to break out into song and dance.
In the end, my pacifist Negro pal dies tragically in my arms, and a similar senseless fate befalls his Japanese counterpart. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, mainly because everybody left at intermission.
I approached my role, the Innocent Midwestern Kid, like Olivier preparing to do Hamlet. Frankly, I was happy to be working and had convinced myself that we were on the verge of making theatrical history. I even asked Karen to bring her parents, Ben and Nancy, to see me work. When Karen announced our engagement a short time later, it’s no small wonder they warned her: “Are you sure you want to marry an actor?”
Once we opened and the incredulous reviews were in, I saw the musical in a new light. We approached it as a drama, a serious statement about the “madness of war.” It should have been comedy, which it was, unintentionally.
My only defense: I was just the actor, I didn’t write this shit.
I followed up
Purple Hearts,
easily my worst play, with a theater piece that ranks as my best. Talk about a creative whiplash.
The play was called
Creeps,
a story about four men afflicted with cerebral palsy who are living at a run-down institution. The spirit of the play is similar to the story of the Elephant Man. It depicts people with CP as intelligent and sensitive, normal in every way except for their contorted speech and appearance. Because of these external burdens, they find themselves ostracized by society.
The play’s theme resonated with me. I knew what it felt like to be shunned, too, having been labeled (unfairly in my mind) as a has-been. Granted, being spurned by Hollywood was a minor offense compared to the rejection that people with CP experience. Still, as an actor, I found an emotional connection.
The play’s director, Jeff Murray, accompanied me to an L.A. county facility, a home for people with CP, to study physical and speech impediments. One woman in particular, Karen Dick, became a role model for my character. Her handicaps, contorted limbs and strangled speech, would have driven the average normal person to consider ending their lives. Not Karen, though. She faced every obstacle with courageous determination and self-effacing humor. Eventually, she left the institution, got a job, and even bought a home. Karen Dick is a winner and inspired me to never give up, never let other people define who you really are.
During the fourteen-month run at Theatre Theater in 1983, the play was a huge critical hit and won numerous awards. The work I did in
Creeps
was an artistic highlight. It made me grow as an actor. Perhaps more important, playing a person with CP made me reevaluate the rejection I was feeling in my own life. It became clear that you either succumb to your condition or you face it head on and conquer it, no matter what the outside world thinks about you. It’s a matter of heart over mind.
CHAPTER 41
 
Wanted, Again
 
In the 1980s, my focus was on theater because that’s the only place I could practice my craft. The eight-year drought in TV that began in 1975 ended when I was cast in a TV movie,
High School, U.S.A.
Ironically, the cast was a hodgepodge of ex–child stars (me, Tony Dow, Todd Bridges, Elinor Donahue, etc... . ) playing teachers and TV’s current child stars (Michael J. Fox, Crispin Glover, Nancy McKeon) were the students. It was high concept at its tackiest.
Michael J. Fox was the hottest young actor on the tube at that time. He seemed cocky as hell, too, oblivious to how fickle youthful fame can be. I couldn’t resist reminding him of this fact during a cast publicity photo. He was kneeling in front of me, Jerry Mathers and Frank Bank (both from
Leave It to Beaver
) and Bob Denver and Dwayne Hickman (both from
Dobie Gillis
). I tapped Michael on the shoulder, drawing his attention to the motley crew standing right behind him. I whispered in a gleeful, ghostly voice: “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Michael snorted sarcastically. “Yeah, sure.” Lucky for him, he was about to start work on
Back to the Future.
That mega-hit franchise launched his film career. He could have just as easily joined our ranks. You never know.
I followed the TV movie with guest spots on a couple of hit TV shows,
Simon & Simon
and
Hart to Hart.
Out of nowhere, things started looking up. The film industry is such a crazy, unpredictable business that it’s hard to say what might have precipitated this mini-revival. A few things come to mind.
I was drug free and in love. Both things really lifted my spirits. Nobody wants to hire a slug. I was also hungrier for work than ever before. I had reached a point where it bugged the hell out of me that I could be dismissed by the industry so summarily. That stoked a fire in my gut, and I prepared for every audition like it was my last. My readings couldn’t be merely good; they had to be amazing. I had to blow the producers away so they would have no choice but to give me the role. That’s what I aimed for anyway.
I was on a roll, again, and got a nice supporting part in a major feature film,
Masters of the Universe.
The
Star Wars
franchise was the envy of every studio for the millions of movie tickets it sold. More than that, the film’s characters were an ongoing, bottomless gold mine in the toy market. Every producer was hungry for a taste of the merchandising bonanza that followed a hit sci-fi film.
In the case of
Masters,
the studio was going to try something different: make a movie based on an existing line of action figures. Mattel Toys had already built the
Masters
toy line into a worldwide phenomenon. Every little boy under fourteen had He-Man, the hero, and Skeletor, the villain. In today’s parlance, the franchise was already a
brand name
and seemed like a slam-dunk at the box office.
The Swedish hulk, Dolph Lundgren, was hired to play He-Man opposite the brilliant actor, Frank Langella, as Skeletor. I was a mere earthling, Charlie, whose record store is demolished when the hero and villain do battle in my shop. Rounding out the cast was Courtney Cox (years before
Friends
), Billy Barty, and Christina Pickles, among others. The accountants were already counting the profits as production on the film began. They never foresaw the nightmares involved in making the movie.
Dolph Lundgren was an amazing physical specimen, perfect for He-Man, but was barely intelligible when acting. Example: He-Man would enter a scene and exclaim, “Grab Gwildor! (Billy Barty). Skeletor’s men are coming!” In rehearsals, Lundgren’s words were fairly clear. He wasn’t Richard Burton doing Hamlet, but it was passable English. Once the director yelled
action,
though, He-Man’s adrenaline kicked in and the words came out as: “Graeeeb, Gweeeelda! Skaaaalatooor’s mans ahhhrrrr kaaaaming!” Lundren was emoting in a language of his own making.
Apart from the fact that the star couldn’t be understood, a serious flaw, there were other production problems. The plan was to start shooting every night around eight o’clock, using downtown Whittier, California, as our main location. Most nights shooting for the first scene began at three in the morning,
seven hours
after our scheduled start. Why? I honestly don’t know.
An actor is supposed to get into wardrobe, put on makeup, do a rehearsal for the camera people, and wait for the crew to set up lights. Once that’s done, the actors are called to the set to start filming. If the scene is complicated (car chases, explosions, dancing girls), it can take an hour, sometimes two, to go from camera rehearsal to filming. On
Masters,
even the simplest of scenes, say two actors sitting on a bench talking, required endless hours to set up.
Meanwhile, the actors would sit around, shooting the shit, playing cards, reading the newspapers or, in some cases, doing drugs to keep awake. I was playing an earthling and spared the grief of having to sit around in some crazy alien makeup. Poor Frank Langella wasn’t so lucky, though. His entire head was encased in heavy prosthetic Skeletor makeup.
Every night Langella arrived at our location two hours before the other actors so the makeup artists could slather his face with layers of gooey latex. The goop would then harden into a rubber skull mask and was claustrophobic as hell. Making things even more miserable for Langella, he could only eat liquid meals ingested through a straw, so as not to ruin the makeup.
Langella got so fed up with the routine of sitting around in full makeup every night for nine to ten hours, he eventually snapped. In a claustrophobic fit, he ripped at the layers of latex coating his face, yelling obscenities. Of course, the moment his face was finally freed, an assistant said they were ready to shoot his scene. With bits of rubber dangling from his nose and ears, Langella screamed, “Screw it. I’m going home!” And he did. The production of
Masters
seemed cursed with such moments.
After weeks of filming, the movie was far behind schedule and way over budget. Cannon Films (the producing company) was on the brink of bankruptcy, completely out of money, and stopped production before the film was completed. The Mattel Toy Company, having a keen interest in the film’s success, coughed up a few more bucks to shoot the final scene, a climactic fight between He-Man and Skeletor. For anyone who saw the movie, you might think that the battle was shot in a big dark box. It was. Mattel didn’t pony up very much dough.
Eventually, the film was released and sank like a brick at the box office. So much time had elapsed between the first day of filming and the premiere, the popularity of the He-Man craze had faded. Kids, ever the fickle consumers, had moved on to the next phenomenon:
Transformers
. My hopes of having an action figure made in my character’s image were history.

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