Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (25 page)

From reading the script of
Beauty and the Beast
, I could see it was going to be the very first ever for these producers and a one-hour, one-camera drama. Everything else they had done were half-hour sitcoms, filmed in front of a live audience. So I went and had the meeting with Paul and Tony, and that led to an audition at the network. It was the first time I had ever gone to a network to audition for a show. The way it works is that they negotiate your contract prior to you going in for the audition, ’cuz if they fall in love with you, they don’t want you to rape and pillage them after the fact; they want you to negotiate when you have no leverage whatsoever. So we negotiated a deal, and then I went in there. I was in a waiting room with three other guys who were also auditioning for the Beast. We were looking at each other and thinking, “I wanna fuckin’ kill you right now, you cocksucker . . .” But we exchange the “Hey, how you doing? Nice to see you! How’s the
wife, how’s the kids, you’ve never looked better”—ya know, all the shit that is sometimes unfortunately required for living in a civilized world.

I did my reading at CBS with Paul Witt and Tony Thomas in the back of the room. Tony is a very funny and witty guy, son of one of the greatest of all time, Danny Thomas (and brother of Marlo) and an example of the apple not falling far from the tree. He was actually yelling out catcalls while I was auditioning, and this was the biggest audition of my life. But he was trying to keep it really light and loose. And I guess I realized at that point that he was in my corner, that he was trying to say, “This is no contest. You know, the other three guys are basically the beard, but this is our choice.” Anyway, I walked out of the audition and felt like, on a scale of one to ten, my audition was probably a strong nine. You know, I was nervous, but not too nervous that I completely sabotaged myself, which happens a lot in big-time auditions, especially to me.

An hour and a half after I got home and changed my clothes, my manager called, using a phony voice: “You got the gig.”

“Fuck you, you prick. Who is this really?!” Erwin laughed, which gave him away, and he hung up.

There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony when you’re going to a network. There were only ABC, CBS, and NBC back in the day. A lot of actors go to the network three, four, five times a year. They’re just TV material. Because I never was TV material, it took a show that was as obscure, obtuse, and off the beaten track, requiring this kind of special effects and transformational makeup acting, to get me this offer. I soon found out the reason I was on the short list. It seemed that the first person who got hired when they were crewing up, when they decided to actually pursue doing a pilot for
Beauty and the Beast
, was Rick Baker. It was his design for the Beast that captivated everybody, but especially the network. At the time Baker had already won an Oscar for makeup design and special effects, and he would go on to win seven more times! He was the number-one guy in the industry in terms of creating the transformational makeup the Beast would need.

Rick was instrumental in providing my name to these guys. He didn’t do
Name of the Rose
or
Quest for Fire
, but he was very, very good friends with the people who had done them, and he had already heard stories about how I was one of those guys who was kinda comfortable in the chair, kinda comfortable with the rubber on. I didn’t let anything bother me. There are a lot of actors who just can’t stand hanging out in the chair for more than fifteen minutes, whereas jobs like this take four hours to execute. You don’t want to hire a guy who can’t do that time in a chair without revolting, which could definitely fuck up the rapid shooting schedule of a series and cost the producer headaches and money. I was flattered that there were apparently glowing reports about me in the makeup world as someone one who could handle the process. It’s always nice to get good feedback, ’cuz it’s not a given, but for someone of Rick Baker’s genius to be advocating for you—that was big.

The makeup for the characters I played in
Quest for Fire
and
Name of the Rose
both took about four or five hours to apply, depending on the weather. The Beast took the same. You got to be still, keep your face unflinching all that time. You can’t just fall asleep; rather, you have to engage in the transformation. I guess that’s the mindset I have when I get into the chair. It was easier for those long hours for
Quest for Fire
and
Name of the Rose
’cuz I was so grateful to be in those movies. They could’ve hammered nails into my palms and feet, because this was my shot. This was the only way I would be invited to that particular party—if they wanted to completely disappear fuckin’ Ron and reappear something else, then I was all for it. And the exercise, as I mentioned, of creating a character under those conditions, which were very abstract, because nothing like it existed in the real world, to solve the riddle of where the humanity is, that is what made it all the more fascinating to me, engaging me multidimensionally. Because how to bring your intellectual recognition of who that character might be as well as your own self and the behavior that lies within you and then marry the two, therein lies the riddle. A lot of that happens in the chair
as you see yourself physically transformed by the prosthetics seamlessly joined with exquisitely and artistically applied makeup.

Now the notion of doing these long makeup sessions for a TV show, which was open ended, was another story. If the show actually got picked up, I would be working on it for nine months out of the year, which would be a different exercise from what I had experienced to date. With movies, no matter how much you’re suffering, you know you’re going to be going home in a few months when shooting ends. Whereas with a TV series, this is gonna be a real test because, potentially, there was to be no relief in sight. And sure enough, the pilot got picked up—they order thirteen episodes. But the networks generally wait to see how the public receives the first four or five before they decide to order the back nine, thus giving the show a full first season.

But whether this show would ever get past the pilot was anyone’s guess. I would have been betting against it. The first time I sat in Rick Baker’s chair he already had something in mind, but of course, my face was the canvas, so I was interacting with him to a degree. By the time I got hired, his designs had already been approved, so they already knew what the Beast was going to look like. This all happened without me knowing it, happening off to the side, before I even knew there was a project called
Beauty and the Beast
. But he was so sure he wanted me for the role that he actually sculpted the makeup onto my face prior to ever meeting me, making a bust of me from an eight-by-ten headshot. And so by the time the network saw me at the audition they were already slightly pregnant with the idea that I was gonna be the guy. All I had to do was fucking not trip over the furniture and be able to read the lines in English, and I think I would have had it.

Of course, I didn’t find this out until well after the fact. But the makeup he designed for the Beast needed to be sexy as well as otherworldly, ’cuz, after all, it was to be a highly stylized gothic romance with two main figurative lovers, the Beast being one of them. So when he showed me the sketch of the makeup he was going to build and, ultimately, apply to my face, it looked like I was fucking Rod Stewart—just
total rock star! I mean, he had this kind of, like, blond mane and an exotic look around his eyes. He had this leonine royalty to him, and if you just wanted to put a couple of piercings and a few tattoos on him, you know, you’re talking about “hot” bro. Like fantasy hot. I said, “Holy shit, man. I
wish
I could look this fuckin’ good!”

And Rick said, “Gimme four hours!”

So sure enough, now that he had me, now that the network had approved me and I’m the guy, I’m hired for the pilot, now I’m going to be in Rick Baker’s studio day after day, getting a life cast done on my face so he could actually sculpt the makeup and apply it to me, custom made. The process is rather arduous, very exacting, and trippy. For the Beast I was in the makeup chair every single morning at four to be ready to shoot at eight. And even though Rick was working off a master plan, the makeup kind of evolved once he had the real human to apply it to. Rick was taking what his forebears had given him, mainly Dick Smith and a few others, and was raising the bar in special effects makeup to places former generations only dreamed of: inventing compounds that were incredibly supple, magnificently lifelike, and really user-friendly to make it through the arduous demands of a fourteen-hour shoot day. That was all Rick Baker just elevating the state-of-the-art to something of pure artistry and elegance. It wasn’t a mistake or a coincidence, his winning eight Oscars.

He made pieces of foam rubber for facial features. I’m not sure what animal they got the hair from, but it was real hair. With regard to the Beast there were probably three pieces that went on separately and had to blend into one another so you couldn’t see the seams or where they joined to my face. There were parts of me that were uncovered, so there had to be a seamless transition between my own features and these features that were glued on.

I happen to have allergies to most of the glue, so they had to invent special glue that was hypoallergenic for me. And to this day it’s the only glue that can be used on my face. Originally called 355, it was taken off the market because of its deleterious effects on the environment and replaced with something called Telesis. Back in the day the
only glue they had was spirit gum. Weirdly enough, if you even open up a bottle of spirit gum around me and I smell it, my face breaks out. Truly ironic that I entered a world that was exclusively about makeup, but I possessed skin that refused to tolerate it. Rick kept saying we gotta find a way to make this work and not kill the guy, not destroy his face. I was the guinea pig for a lot of products that ultimately ended up becoming state of the art.

Even before I sat in Rick’s chair and watched his physicalization of this most exotic creation, I had a profound notion of the magnificence of this character called Vincent. He was an incredible distillation of all the characters who moved and touched me throughout my own life. And his poignancy lay in the fact that due to an accident of birth that places him in his outcast state, he is prevented from participating fully in the world he so loves in the most uncommon of ways, thus forcing him to exist in the shadows, where his interactions with the world are disturbingly minimized. The sadness that befalls his situation, juxtaposed against the magnificent force of nature he turns himself into, made for as tragic a character as I’d ever seen in popular culture. He was the outsider I felt myself to be during so many of my early years. But I chose to counteract whatever might compromise him with grace, elegance, kindness, and a self-given education to all things sublime that made him extraordinary.

Ron Koslow lovingly conceived the character. Ron had to be
the
most romantic of screenplay writers in all of Hollywood. I know of no other writer who could have created this particular creation. As Koslow conceived it, Vincent’s world was a counterpart, a juxtaposition to the gritty world of New York City, underneath which existed this almost Swiftian subculture that made up the Beast’s lair. Vincent chose for himself an Elizabethan style of dress and even worldview, possessing a rich ease with the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and Shelley, totally educated in the arts and all things classical, all the way up to current cultural forces.

When I was first starting to absorb the fact that I was to create this character, I recalled the first time I saw Charles Laughton, in
The
Hunchback of Notre Dame
, on that rotating torture wheel where he’s being whipped, shunned, laughed at, and having things thrown at him, and suddenly, through the crowd, moves this stunning waif in the guise of the beautiful Maureen O’Hara, approaching him, caressing him, feeding him the sips of water he so desperately craves. That was the seminal moment for me, when I decided what an actor could do, given the right set of circumstances. And here it was, that self-same dynamic, without me seeking it, somehow magically falling right into my fucking lap in the form of the Beast. In prime time. On CBS, the Tiffany network. And not only did it go to the pilot—which to me, was miraculous—but it also got picked up for the first half of the season, then it got picked up for the second half of the season. And then suddenly people were getting nominations for things and winning awards for things, and suddenly I’m on the cover of
Us Weekly
as one of the twenty sexiest men in the world. And then suddenly . . . and then suddenly . . . and then suddenly . . . and this shit was starting to rain down on me as a result of what can only be described as the greatest free psychotherapy of all time, which was me getting a shot to play this thing that lived inside of me, something innocent and precious and dying to be heard. I was getting to finally live out, act out, and exorcise that very bestial thing that had been such a harbinger of pain throughout my formative years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It took about four days into the filming of the pilot for the Beast to be called in to work. But when I finally did walk onto the set in full beast regalia, man, it was like, “Whoa, dat is some crazy shit right dere! Dat shit is off the chain!” I mean people were looking at me with total shock, wonder, and fascination, like I was Buddy Love in
The Nutty Professor
and just sauntered into the room. There was an excitement to it that was palpable. So one of the first ones to see me walk on was Linda Hamilton, because my first scene up was with the Beauty. So Linda saw me walking through the doors to the set. She ran over, gave me a big hug and a kiss, and there we were. It was like Gable and Lombard, Hope and Crosby, Tracy and Hepburn, Ginger
and Fred! There was an iconocism to this union that was immediate and palpable and classical from the start.