American on Purpose Read online

  It feels like anything is possible, that the adventure of my life is finally unfolding as it was meant to. It feels like I’m where I should be, at last.

  33

  Dudley and Jadis

  I thought the fifty grand I got from Disney would last a long time and even allow me to pay down a bit of the massive debt I still owed from my drinking days to various banks and credit card companies, and the Farm Place as well. I clearly hadn’t thought this through very well. After Rick took his commission and taxes were deducted, I still had to put down the first and last months’ rent, and of course I had to buy a car, because no one could exist in L.A. without one, and it would be nice to own a TV, etc., etc. I was burning through the money at a scary pace, but Rick stayed calm and confident. He told me not to worry, he had every confidence that I would be making plenty very soon and that I would be rich in no time.

  With that vision in mind, he had arranged lodgings for me that I obviously could not afford. He got me a sublet in the swanky Pacific Palisades area of L.A. A small white clapboard house on Amalfi Drive owned by an elderly Australian lady who wanted to return to her homeland for six months. I could stay there for a reasonable price if I took care of her ancient grumpy golden retriever, Dudley, and a pissy cat called Jadis who reminded me a lot of the dreaded Ken.

  It was a great deal for the money, but since I didn’t have any, it didn’t matter how great the deal was. Still, Rick told me not to worry, and, wonder of wonders, he was right. Again.

  Rick sent me out on auditions to meet TV producers who were casting pilot shows for the next season, all of them aligned with Disney in some way, as per my deal. On my third audition, after being in the country less than a month, I struck pay dirt.

  Michael Jacobs, fresh off his hit show Boy Meets World, was in preproduction for a half-hour sitcom starring Marie Osmond and the great comic actress Betty White. Marie was to play a café owner and Betty the crazy mother who helped Marie’s character run the place. They were looking to cast someone as the café’s baker and Marie’s eventual love interest, a character named Logan. Although it was in no one’s head that Logan should be Scottish, after a few meetings I managed to persuade the producers that this was the way to go, and the network, ABC, agreed. In March we shot the pilot of the would-be series, to be called Maybe This Time, on a soundstage in the San Fernando Valley.

  The first day of rehearsals was nerve-wracking because I couldn’t believe I was actually going to meet a real live Osmond. Until then I didn’t believe that real live Osmonds actually existed; to me they were as credible as, say, Scooby Doo, or Santa. Marie was definitely real—a great person right from the beginning. She was funny and charming and warm and kind of sexy, too, although at the time she was happily married, with what looked to be about seventeen children but probably was only five. She and I got along just fine, which was a surprise as I had half-expected some kind of a puritan diva. There were a lot of other Mormons around, too, and I was all ready to be oppressed by them, but it never happened. From what I know about that faith, it’s not for me, but I have to say I never met a Mormon I didn’t like. On the set they were all so darned friendly and upbeat and secretly kinky—or so I told myself.

  Although Marie and I worked well together, it was with Betty that I really clicked. I’d been a fan of hers since I was a tubby schoolboy and she was the sexy Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Now she was coming off of her hugely successful run on The Golden Girls. Betty has been on TV as long as the medium has existed, and she possesses, without doubt, the finest comedic timing of any human being I have ever seen—in movies, TV, or real life. I found her simply astonishing, and there was instant chemistry between us. I think if we had been born a little closer together we would have ended up marrying, or at least spending a weekend together in Tijuana. Actually, I still wouldn’t rule out either of those things since I continue to be in love with Betty. She is the most frequent guest on my show, averaging one appearance a month. Probably she’s the reason I’m still on the air.

  My first experience of making a TV show in the U.S. was a bit unnerving. For a start, there were so many writers, about ten of them, while in the old country there was usually only one writer, and he was me.

  All these writers would come to rehearsals every day and laugh uproariously at their own jokes over and over again. I was baffled by this until my new best friend Betty took me aside and explained that they were laughing at the jokes they had written in the hope that the producers wouldn’t cut them.

  Everyone working on the pilot was very tense during shooting, and that was understandable with so much at stake. A successful sitcom can provide millions of dollars to the production company, the studio (in this case Disney), and the network (ABC), so there are always a lot of management types on the set, and it seemed to me that with all these suits buzzing around it would be a miracle if anything worked. It’s difficult to do comedy by committee, because there’s always going to be someone who thinks the material isn’t funny, and I have concluded that, unfortunately, everyone is an expert on comedy. Really. If you think something’s not funny, then it’s not—to you, but it might be to me. I judge whether comedy is good or not by its ability to make me laugh, just like you do. It takes a very single-minded individual to keep his vision in the fog of studio and network pressure, and I fear Michael Jacobs wasn’t able to do this during the making of Maybe This Time.

  He desperately wanted the show to work, to get and keep it on the air, and I think he was a little too willing to accept the input of executives on what was funny instead of trusting himself. But what the fuck do I know?

  Once the pilot was shot, I had to sit on my thumbs for a bit, waiting to see if it would be picked up for a series, because under the terms of my deal I couldn’t try out for any other TV work—movies were okay, but I couldn’t get a sniff from Hollywood. At one point I auditioned to read the audiobook of Mel Gibson’s current hit, Braveheart, which of course was all about the legendary Scottish warrior William Wallace, but the casting director turned me down. She said she didn’t find my accent sufficiently authentic.

  The Disney deal did allow me to audition for guest spots on existing series, so I tried out for TV shows like Diagnosis Murder and Murder She Wrote—just about anything with “murder” in the title, I guess—but I was rejected again and again and again. This produced in me a funky kind of bitterness that I didn’t like but couldn’t help since I was failing to get parts in shows that I thought were crap in the first place. When I told Rick I wasn’t going to audition anymore, he laughed and said it was just a phase I was going through.

  To pass the time I read film scripts, even though I had no chance of getting a part in any movies. I was surprised by how awful many of these scripts were (given that they actually were on the verge of being produced). There were thousands more just sitting on shelves that the studios had already paid a fortune for. I didn’t know if I could do any better than these writers had, but I was convinced I couldn’t do worse, so I started writing a movie script on spec—what the hell, I had nothing else to do—something called All American Man, a romantic comedy about a Scottish shipyard worker and his American girlfriend. Though it was never made into a movie, the script served as a writing sample that would eventually serve me well. I shared the standard immigrant belief that hard work would be rewarded in America. I still believe it, although now I realize it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of luck, too.

  I also used my downtime to explore my new surroundings. I hung out with Rick a lot—he was the only person I knew in town, after all—and we went to some Hollywood parties, where I met several great friendly girls. I was having a high old time, living the bachelor life in L.A., driving around in my used white Ford Bronco. It was 1995, OJ was awaiting trial, and used white Broncos were going cheap. I got on pretty well with Dudley, the old dog I shared the house with. One of us was very farty but we were both too polite to complain. I even got along with the cat, Jadis. The deal was I
would put food and water out for her every day, which suited her, and she would completely ignore the fact that I existed, which suited me.

  I was in regular contact with everyone at home, where my mother seemed to be making huge improvements: the radiation therapy was working, and the doctors felt she would make a full recovery, although it wasn’t lost on me that they had been wrong before. Things were rolling along pretty well in general.

  Then came Sascha.

  34

  The Aspirations of a Phony Frenchman

  Rick decided to throw a little party at Oscar time. His management business was taking off: I had done a pilot that might become a series, and he represented several others in the same position. Rick felt this was the right time for his clients and friends—synonymous, he hoped, with the up-and-comers of Hollywood—to experience the delights of his reasonably priced condo in West L.A. He couldn’t afford to have the party catered, so he got a girl he had known in New York and her roommate to help pour drinks and serve the delivery pizza.

  It was a Saturday-afternoon affair held the day before the Oscars themselves, and by the time I arrived it was in full swing. Ever since I got sober I’ve felt pretty awkward at parties—as opposed to my drinking days, when I was fine but everyone else felt awkward—and have developed the tactic of heading straight to the kitchen if one is available. In my experience that’s where the most interesting people will always end up, plus there’s very little chance of anyone dragging you onto a dance floor.

  I talked to Rick for a while, and he introduced me to a few of his other clients, including a grumpy actress who later went on to become very successful in a TV sitcom and an outspoken Scientologist. Rick told her that I was foreign and she was completely underwhelmed. “Where you from, France?” she asked in her annoying nasal twang.

  “Oui,” I said, and since she kept talking, I pretended I couldn’t understand her so she would go away and leave me alone.

  Just then the girl from New York who was helping Rick came in wearing a striped T-shirt which clung tightly to her spectacular breasts and a pair of jeans with so many novelty patches on them that there seemed to be little actual denim left. The patch that caught my eye was round and red with “Sex Has No Calories” spelled out on it in white letters. She heard me dismiss the actress in French and asked if I was from Europe.

  “Oui,” I said again.

  She rattled off a whole load of French that I had no hope of understanding. I didn’t mind, though. I liked looking at her big brown eyes and her shiny American teeth, and I was happy just to be this close to her breasts. When she stopped talking, I just grinned and nodded.

  “You have no idea what I just said, do you?”

  “Not a word,” I told her.

  Then she smiled her great big smile and we got down to some real talking.

  And that’s how I met Sascha.

  With her parents she had moved to Paris as a child and attended school there until she returned to her native Connecticut when she was sixteen. She went to Syracuse University and lived in N.Y.C. for a while after college, but the endless bickering of her parents, who’d split up ten years earlier, soon after returning to America from Paris, had since driven her to L.A. Sascha’s parents have the worst divorce I have ever seen. They’re still bitching and snapping at each other today. Now that I have been divorced twice myself, I can tell you that it seems to me that the greatest danger is to get so stuck in the resentment stage that you never get out of it.

  Sascha and I were full on right from the beginning—we are both pretty impetuous people. At that time she was only twenty-four and just a ball of energy. Rick said “she’s crazy” and told me to be careful, and I told him I’d never been all that attracted to women who weren’t at least a little crazy. I guessed, but of course didn’t say, that he might have had advances rejected by her and was annoyed or jealous that I was having better luck. I found out later that I’d guessed right.

  Sascha was working in the music department of MGM and knew a lot more about the film business than I did. She was also more fun than a barrel of monkeys, always had a scheme or a road trip or an adventure planned, and was deeply into physical fitness—a quality I admire in others but don’t possess myself. Exercising is prudent for health, but otherwise I’m not much taken with it. Luckily we could shove our differences to the side and just enjoy being together.

  On one trip to San Francisco we took one of those little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars. It was a clear day, rare for that city, and I don’t know what made the idea explode in my head, maybe it was the blue of the sky or the romance of the tram or the soft breeze coming off the bay. Maybe it was just the view of the notorious island prison Alcatraz, but before I knew what I was saying, I asked Sascha to marry me.

  She looked shocked, and then said, “What you mean is that you’re happy and you wish you could feel like this forever.”

  “Yes! Exactly!” I agreed gratefully.

  We dropped the subject, but it would return.

  My house-sitting deal on Amalfi Drive ended just as I found out that Maybe This Time had indeed been picked up as a series. ABC ordered an initial thirteen episodes and I rented a groovy bachelor pad on Sunset Plaza Drive, where the rich(-ish) trash of L.A. gather every lunchtime to watch each other pick at overpriced chicken salads, the men in Armani and aftershave and hair dye and the women in silicone and leopard skin. I really wanted to be part of all that sleazy glamour, but Sascha wouldn’t have it and she hated my new apartment on sight. I only lasted six months there before Sascha and I moved in together, renting a little house in Laurel Canyon. In a typical spasm of spectacular inaccuracy, the Scottish Daily Record back home reported in its gossip column that I had become engaged to an American woman called Laurel Canyon. The item had an alleged “insider’s” assessment: “Craig and Laurel are very happy, said a source close to the couple.”

  I was pretty happy with Sascha then, at home anyway, but work was a pain in the ass. Maybe This Time was killing me. Much as I loved working with Marie and Betty and the other lead actors, Amy Hill and Dane Cook, I was horrified by the writing. I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut about how awful I thought it was, nor could I stop making suggestions to improve it. None of this endeared me to the writing or producing staff, but where I came from an actor is treated as a collaborative artist rather than a hired gun, so I approached the work in a way that is anything but normal in U.S. television production. Eventually, after much discussion with Sascha, I decided I had to quit. I’d made enough TV garbage in the U.K. and didn’t want to continue the practice in America. I told Betty about my decision before I officially quit and she thought it brave, if maybe a little rash. Marie was astonished. Some of the Mormons even came to my trailer to try to talk me out of it. I thanked them for their input and then waited quietly, knowing they’d become uncomfortable enough to leave. They really were such nice people. It’s not so easy getting out of a TV contract just because you’re unhappy with the writing. I would have to get permission from the head of the studio, the Dark One, the Earl of Hell himself, Dean Valentine.

  Rick called him and said I wanted out. To my own astonishment, not to mention Rick’s and the producers’, Valentine let me go. More than that, he said the studio would continue to pay me to the end of my contract. Even though Rick negotiated this, he still can’t believe it actually happened. When I saw Dean a few months later at some Hollywood event and thanked him personally for his kindness, I couldn’t help telling him that his reputation as a ruthless Machiavellian hardass was unfair.

  “Oh no,” he insisted, “it’s fair. I don’t think I was being nice. I made a perfectly sound business decision. The way I see it is you may have a future in this town whereas the sitcom you were on clearly doesn’t. If you become a big star I don’t need to be remembered as the asshole who fucked you over.”

  I still think he’s softer than he lets on.

  After the thrill of quitting, though, comes the cold, harsh r
eality of unemployment. I kept writing and rewriting my screenplay. I let a producer friend of mine in L.A. from London read the script; and while the story wasn’t really to her taste, she liked my writing enough to recommend me to another producer who was looking for a writer to collaborate with him on a project.

  Mark Crowdy had found a local news story in his native Cornwall, in England, about a respectable woman who had been convicted of growing marijuana in her greenhouse to escape financial difficulties. He thought it might be a TV show. I said it sounded more like a film. He liked that.

  After a genial lunch at Café Med on Sunset, the affable and charming Mr. Crowdy asked me to collaborate with him on the script. There was no money in it right now, but if the film was made I would get paid, and maybe I could even be in it.

  I didn’t have anything else to do so I agreed and we started working on a movie we would call Saving Grace.

  35

  The Fat Man, the Gay Man, Vampires, and Marriage

  Mark and I worked Monday through Friday and in about six weeks we came up with a first draft. Then he went off to London to begin the long and arduous task of raising the money for production. He felt that since the movie was set in Britain he’d have a better chance of getting it financed there, which made sense to me, but in the meantime I was left with nothing to do. Sascha and I took some trips, and because we were burning through money pretty fast, I revised my “no auditions” policy and tried out for anyone who would look at me, but I couldn’t get a bite. The only paid work I had for almost a year was a one-episode guest spot on a faltering sitcom called Almost Perfect as the ex-boyfriend of the show’s star, Nancy Travis.