Both of Us (8 page)

Farrah and I meet John for the first time when Tatum brings him for a visit to the beach house. There I am sitting in the living room, looking at him and thinking to myself,
Dear God, he’s thin. He’s the number one tennis player?
He’s watching my face and he’s perceptive. He lifts his left wrist, twists it, and says, “It’s all in here.” Like everyone else, I knew his reputation for arrogant bursts of adrenaline both on and off the court, but seeing him with my daughter, her face beaming with adoration, his arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders, I’m relieved that my baby’s finally found someone.
Maybe
, I tell myself hopefully,
he’ll settle her
. I was wrong.

As the birth of our child nears, Farrah and I are buoyant about the future. Patrick is delighted. Grif wonders aloud, “Why do you want one more of us?” And from Tatum we receive overly polite congratulations.

Our commitment deepens. That isn’t to say it’s perfect. When you live with someone, eventually that person will see the unvarnished you. I know that Farrah is never on time, but I’m one of those guys who likes to get there early, and early for Farrah means only being an hour late. It drives me nuts, but I’m able to restrain my annoyance. I’m also finding out that she can become cranky if she doesn’t get her sleep, and can that woman sleep! I’m always up and dressed before
she’s even begun to stir. At the time, I wax romantic about having my very own Sleeping Beauty.

While I’m learning to accept her idiosyncrasies, she, too, is becoming familiar with mine.
Irreconcilable Differences
opens and doesn’t meet box office expectations. The reviews are mixed and while some actors may feign nonchalance when it comes to the critics, we’re all too human, and when someone whose opinion carries weight has less than flattering things to say about your work, it can hurt.

Reading through my journals, I wince at some of my childish behavior. I’m aware of these extreme ups and downs
in my life. One day I love someone to death; the next I’m wishing that person were never born. This emotional immaturity explains why I’ve always struggled with close relationships. And it was no exception with Farrah. Sometimes she would humor me during an outburst. Other times she’d chastise me. More often she’d just laugh. If I was having a meltdown, she’d watch me storm out of the room without saying a word because she knew in twenty minutes I’d come back in fine spirits. We learned the ebbs and flows of each other’s moods and became adept at intuiting what was needed to get through a rough patch.

Later that fall, I begin shooting
Fever Pitch
on location in Las Vegas with Catherine Hicks and Giancarlo Giannini. It’s being directed by Richard Brooks, who made
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
,
In Cold Blood
,
Elmer Gantry
,
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
. Brooks is old school and known to brandish his walking cane when an actor doesn’t hit his mark. Actors don’t appreciate a compliment from Richard Brooks, an irascible genius; they covet it. I like listening to his stories, especially about Humphrey Bogart. Brooks wrote the screenplay for
Key Largo
, which John Huston directed. I knew John Huston. His daughter Anjelica was one of the great dalliances of my postadolescence. And my adolescence lasted longer than most. Marriage and parenthood may have ended my childhood, but nothing has ever interrupted my adolescence. So Brooks tells me how one day he’s having lunch with Bogart. This is when Bogart is in the advance
stages of esophageal cancer. Most of his stomach has been removed. Remember, Bogart was a smoker. Almost every scene he’s in, you see a cigarette dangling from his lips, and when he does get cancer, it will ravage him quickly. So they’re eating and Brooks says he can hear the faint thud of food dropping into Bogart’s lower abdomen. Now Brooks is an ex-marine who’d fought on Guam and Guadalcanal, places few survived. Bogart looks at him and says, “Can’t you take it, kid?”

Brooks’s reverence for Bogart is apparent. He tells me about the time he, Bogie, and Bacall were in the limo en route to the Academy Awards. Bogie had been nominated for Best Actor for
The African Queen
, which he made with Katharine Hepburn. Brooks asks him if he’s prepared something to say, just in case. Bogie laughs, saying that he hasn’t because he’ll never win. Brooks hastily scribbles comments on a piece of paper for him, which Bogie doesn’t take, insisting he won’t need it. So Bacall takes the note, and when Bogart’s name is announced as the winner and he stands, she slips it into his tuxedo pocket and says, “Read this.” Of course he doesn’t, and he stumbles through his overlong acceptance speech. Brooks says it’s the only time he ever saw the great Humphrey Bogart flub. “But that was Bogie,” Brooks says. “He was humble. He really didn’t think he had a chance.”

There’s a lot of buzz about
Fever Pitch
. I begin to feel
optimistic again about my career, hopeful that this will be my comeback vehicle. And like any man, when things are going well at work, the benefits are also manifest at home, especially in the bedroom.

But back to
Fever Pitch
. I enjoy working with Brooks, though I don’t always like the way he treats his crew. It can become easy for actors and directors to take for granted the valuable contributions of these men and women to the moviemaking process, and I’ve always tried to give crew members the respect they deserve. When the fine actor Christian Bale went off on a rant recently against one of the crew during the shoot for
Terminator
, and it went viral over the Internet, for once I was grateful to TMZ and Radar Online for giving Bale, and every other actor who was shocked by all the adverse media coverage, a lesson in humility.

I’ve had more than my share of those, one of which will come with the release of
Fever Pitch
. It will make my disappointment over
Irreconcilable Differences
seem silly by comparison. Though I don’t know it then, Brooks’s final film will earn less than six hundred thousand dollars and be nominated for four Razzie Awards, including Worst Picture. The Razzies, which are handed out the same week as the Oscars, are meant to be in good fun, an example of Hollywood’s winking at itself, and at the time, I, too, laugh it off, thinking,
Well, at least we’re in good company
. Stallone sweeps the Razzies with
First Blood II
and
Rocky IV
. Over
the next several years, these disappointments will have a corrosive effect on Farrah and me.

Farrah visits me on location for
Fever Pitch
in Las Vegas. She’s just been featured on the covers of
People
and
Us
magazines for
The Burning Bed
. Farrah is so fit that except for her tiny baby bump, which she can easily camouflage, you’d never know she was six months pregnant. During the photo shoot for
People
, she doesn’t say anything about being pregnant. They find out after the issue hits the stands and are furious. Eager to take advantage of their competitor’s oversight,
Us
immediately runs another cover story on Farrah; only this one is about the pregnancy. I’m bemused by it all. Farrah and I are getting used to this roller-coaster ride with the press. Sometimes we feel like hostages at an amusement park.

Tatum slides in for a visit. The princess of diminishing has returned. I get the feeling that my daughter will never trust men. One moment she’s sitting with Farrah discussing baby names; the next she’s telling Farrah that I’m going to throw her away when I grow tired of her, the same way I did all the other women in my life. Farrah considers the source and isn’t worried, but I am. With Farrah pregnant, the last
thing I want is a confrontation between these two. While they never actually fight, on set I’m distracted, concerned about them spending time together. I thought Tatum’s first serious relationship would change all that. I know now her wounds were much deeper and more complex than any of us understood. But back then she didn’t seem moodier than any postadolescent woman in love with a bad boy. Little did I know that John McEnroe would aggravate those wounds.

Fever Pitch
wraps the week after Thanksgiving. Upon our return to LA, Barbara Walters interviews Farrah for one of her ABC evening specials. She’s in her ninth month and positively radiant on camera. I’m often asked why Barbara didn’t interview Farrah and me as a couple. I suspect the idea made the network queasy with Farrah so obviously pregnant and our not being married. Today I see news stories about expectant celebrity couples, and no one seems to care about their marital status. Maybe they should. Farrah and I were lucky. We were never overtly criticized for having a child without benefit of clergy. We never hired a publicist to handle the story of her pregnancy. We just lived our lives. It didn’t seem to affect our careers.

Farrah and I spend the holidays in Malibu. As I was going through my journals for this book, I found an entry from that New Year’s morning that gave me pause. Tatum and John had come to LA to attend a party. They brought Patrick to the party with them. They all stayed at the beach house with Farrah and me.

I was so relieved to see Tatum and Farrah getting along for a change that I didn’t worry that my daughter, who’d never been a drinker, who would confiscate my glass when she was a little girl, had gotten wasted the night before. Farrah had admitted to me two months earlier, when she was seven months pregnant, that Tatum and John had offered her cocaine. I was surprised because at the time Tatum was still proclaiming her objections to drugs and alcohol. I assumed John was the instigator and Tatum just went along.

The more things devolved with Tatum, the more determined I was to get it right with the new baby. What I didn’t understand back then is that every day you’re a parent is another chance to make things right, no matter how old your children are. That’s why I’m still trying with Tatum even as I write this.

But back to January of 1985. Our first trip to the hospital is a false alarm. I still chuckle about what happens next.
We return home and the moment we walk in the door, Farrah asks me for her special blanket. I have no idea what she means. I’d never heard her mention any blanket before, so I skip to the linen closet and grab the first one I see. “No, that’s not it,” she says. “I want my blankie, get me my
blankie
!” She’s near tears and I still haven’t a clue what she is talking about. I say, “Farrah, I don’t know which one that is, you’ve never asked me for a blankie before.” She replies, “The one in the bag!” She must be referring to the suitcase we’d packed for the hospital, so I lope to the garage to retrieve it. Pleased with my quick thinking, I hand it to her. “No, that’s not it either!” she cries. Suddenly I see a cab pulling into the driveway and Farrah’s mom, Pauline, getting out. Relief washes over me. The Mounties in the form of my unfriendly mother-in-law have come to the rescue. Momma soon retrieves her daughter’s sacred bit of burgundy cloth.

The next trip isn’t a false alarm. Farrah is determined to have an all-natural birth: no drugs and no epidural. We’d decided on the alternative birth center at Valley Presbyterian. Farrah’s room looks more like a deluxe suite at the Four Seasons than a hospital room. They hook her up to a machine to monitor her contractions. This is all brand-new to me. I wasn’t present for the births of my other children. Back then, fathers were banished to the waiting room.

An hour goes by; nothing’s happening and Farrah starts to get bored. “Let’s take a walk around the maternity ward and see who else is here,” she says. “With all those wires?”
I ask. Next thing I know, Farrah is out of bed and on her feet, tiptoeing down the hall, peeking into the other rooms, waving hello to people, while I’m behind her pushing the monitor. The dial starts to beep and it’s getting louder. “Honey, don’t you think we should go back?” I say. Just then she’s hit with her first big labor pain. “Please, for the love of God, can we go back now, Farrah?” So we turn around like a little choo-choo and head to our suite.

Now she’s in full labor, and she’s pushing, pushing. Hours go by. Something’s wrong. All we can see is the crown of the baby’s head. The doctors ask me to leave the room. When I’m finally called back in, a drenched, exhausted Farrah grabs my hand and squeezes it; then she gives one final brave push. Our son enters the world on January 30, 1985. I’m elated. He’s blond except for a bright red shock of hair at the nape of his neck. We decide to call him Redmond, which was also the name of the character I played in
Barry Lyndon.

Motherhood completes Farrah. All of her natural maternal instincts are on display. She’s attentive and calm. Farrah and Redmond are inseparable. We spend happy, lazy days with our new baby, relishing every early milestone, the first smile and the first crawl. We cocoon ourselves that spring and summer, somehow both of us knowing we may never again experience such simple joy in our lives.