Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (16 page)

But now my doorbell was buzzing, killing my buzz, and because there was no wife, no kids, it was up to me to reluctantly answer it.
The “person from Porlock” handed me a package, inside of which was a script entitled
The Whole Nine Yards.
And my manager had written on it, “Could be pay dirt.”

It was no “Kubla Khan,” but I could see it was going to be huge.

I was always bad at reading scripts. Back then, I'd be offered millions of dollars to do movies and barely crack the first few pages. I'm embarrassed to admit that now, given that these days I'm writing scripts myself and it's like pulling teeth to get actors to respond. Maybe they feel how I used to feel: that in a life of fun and fame and money, reading a script, no matter the size of the number attached, feels all too much like school.

The universe will teach you, though. All those years I was too
this,
too
that,
to read a script, but last year I wrote a screenplay for myself and was trying get it made until I realized that I was too old to play the part. Most fifty-three-year-olds have worked their shit out already, so I needed to hire a thirty-year-old. The one I chose took weeks and weeks to respond, and I couldn't believe how rude his behavior was.

“Do I still have enough juice to even get an independent movie made?” I asked my manager, Doug, in frustration.

“Not really,” Doug said.

But back then in 1999, my “person from Porlock” had brought me a script that even I could see had potential, and that potential was that none other than Bruce Willis was attached.

At the turn of the century, there was no bigger movie star than Bruce Willis. He'd already banked
Look Who's Talking
and its sequel, the
Die Hard
franchise,
Pulp Fiction.…
There was no one more successful back then. Not to mention that it would be a welcome relief from the seventy-two romantic comedies I'd just completed. Mitchell Kapner had written a funny script, filled with twists and turns, and it was easy
to read: always a good sign. Best of all, Bruce Willis was in it, and I played the lead character. Show me an acclaimed and successful TV star and I will show you a frustrated wannabe movie star.

Pay dirt? You bet your ass. But first, I had to get through a dinner with the director and my costar's brother.

I showed up the next night at Citrus on Melrose. Back then, this was
the
Hollywood restaurant: expensive, exclusive, jacket required, a line of paparazzi at the door clicking away madly at everyone who came and went. That night, the comings and goings were me; the film's director, Jonathan Lynn, a short round British man who'd made
My Cousin Vinny
and who just so happened to be Oliver Sacks's cousin; and one of the film's producers, Bruce's brother, David (David got the hair, by the way, Bruce got the chin).

I had donned the requisite movie-star black suit for the dinner; I'd arrived a minute or two late, just because that's what movie stars do. The dinner went really well, even if no one touched their food, in the standard Hollywood way. Jonathan was very smart and funny—he had that dry, British approach to humor in which he'd say something that was seemingly serious, but there would be a twinkle in his eye, just enough to signal that he was busting balls. David was attentive and interesting and smart; as for me, well, I had already decided to do the movie. The original script had no physical comedy in it, so I said things like, “I think this would be a great opportunity for some physical comedy, and I'd be more than willing to fall down a flight of stairs and leap down some mountaintops to work with Bruce Willis.”

Jonathan and David laughed and seemed relieved. Eventually, the “dinner” wrapped up. Jonathan said, “Well, you're our guy—we really want you to do this.” Hands shaken, and paparazzi ignored, I jumped into my forest-green Porsche and squealed away.

I'm gonna be the lead in a Bruce Willis movie,
I thought, as once again, all the lights on Sunset were green. Back at my house on Carla
Ridge, the moon had come up, lonely, mournful, casting a strange and awkward shadow across my view. I put on the TV, poured a vodka tonic, and waited.

The stars were lining up again; had the rise and rise of Matthew Perry just taken yet another giant leap forward? This is what I thought as the
actual
stars rose in a clear, dark sky. I started to count them, even though I knew the superstition that once you reach a hundred, you die.

I stopped at ninety-nine, just in case.

The following morning, I got a message on my answering machine.

“Matthew, this is Bruce Willis. Call me back, or I'll burn your house down and break both your knees and arms and you'll be left with just the stubs for hands and feet for the rest of your life.”

Click, dial tone.

I figured this was a call I should probably return.

A few days later we met at Ago, yet another fancy Italian restaurant in Hollywood, in the private room in the back, the one that's reserved for people of Mr. Willis's status. Once again, I jetted up in my Porsche, barely putting it in park long enough to hand the valet my keys.

But this night, I was on time.

Bruce Willis did not disappoint—he
oozed
A-list. He didn't just take over a room, he
was
the room. In fact, I knew he was a real movie star when the first thing he did was teach the bartender how to make a perfect vodka tonic.

“Three-second pour,” he said to the petrified man.

Bruce was forty-four years old, single (separated from Demi Moore at the time I met him), and he knew the exact recipe for the perfect drink. He was a party; to be near him was invigorating. After a while, we were visited in our private little room by Joe Pesci, whom Jonathan Lynn had directed in
My Cousin Vinny,
as well as several attendant
attractive women. Bruce laughed at all my dumb jokes—he seemed to enjoy the spectacle of a younger, funny guy paying him his due respect and keeping up with his drinking (if he only knew). I was thrilled to be around him because he knew how to live life.

Dinner once again untouched, the two new best friends headed to his massive house off Mulholland—Bruce, too, seemed to like a view. The night ended with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, drinks in hand, hitting golf balls into the San Fernando Valley below.

Those balls are going to land somewhere,
I thought, and before I could imagine the damage a shot from a well-addressed five iron could do, or even the metaphorical nature of what we were doing, I stopped thinking at all and had another drink.

“Welcome to the pros,” Bruce said at one point, referring, I presumed, to the life of a movie star, not to my golf game. We had begun a friendship, one in which we drank together and made each other laugh and complimented each other's swings.

Eventually, as always happens, the sun came up, and we said our bleary goodbyes. As I drove home, I remember thinking,
Watch this guy—this is the way to be happy.
Nothing seemed to bother Bruce; no one said no to him. This was, indeed, the A-leagues.

Around lunchtime that same day, Bruce called to invite me back to his house for a screening of his next movie, but I was way too sick and hungover to even contemplate showing up. Making my excuses, I asked him what the movie was called so I could catch it later.

“
The Sixth Sense,
” he said.

So, I'd gotten
The Whole Nine Yards
and had embarked on a friendship with the most famous movie star on the planet, but even I knew I was drinking way too much to pull this movie off. Desperate measures
would be needed. Some might be able to party perfectly well and still show up and do the work—but they were not addicts like I was.

If I was going to keep up with the partying, and with Bruce, and not go back to my hotel room and keep drinking, then I'd need something else to wind me down and make sure I could get to set the next day.

I called a friend—I use the term loosely—who I knew sold Xanax.

“How many would you like to purchase?” he skeeved at me.

“Give me a hundred,” I said.

When they arrived, I sat on my bed, counting them.
This way I can drink with Bruce and the others but then when I'm finally alone I can just pop one of these and go to sleep.
I may have been a man with a plan, but I was also ignoring the fact that this was a completely lethal combination.

We flew on Bruce's plane (of course we did) to Montreal to make
The Whole Nine Yards,
arriving like conquering heroes ready to take the town by storm. I was the prodigal Canadian son, now returned, ready to party.

We set up shop at the Intercontinental Hotel. I had a regular room; Bruce had the whole top floor, which he immediately dubbed “Club Z,” for no apparent reason. Within hours, he had also had a disco ball installed.

The Globe Restaurant became our other home away from home. The money and the drinks were flowing, and all the waitresses were hot.

Months earlier, I had started dating a woman called Renee. I'd met her at a restaurant in Los Angeles called Red. I was having dinner with the first assistant director of
Friends,
my pal Ben Weiss, and our waitress came and sat down next to me and started chatting to me. This was not normal waitress behavior, it seemed to me. When she had taken our order, I said to Ben, “Her name is going to be Samantha.”

“Nah,” he said, “she's definitely a Jennifer.”

When she came back with our food, I said, “We're having a bet on
your name. I have money on Sam, and my friend here thinks you're a Jen.”

“Hi,” she said, “I'm Renee.” And somehow, a few drunken parties later, we were a couple.

Suffice to say, Renee had substituted for someone who'd broken my heart on an earlier movie, which put her already behind the eight ball … by the time I went to Montreal, we were mostly on the outs, but in any case—and I'm not proud to say this—I would have fucked mud at that stage in my life. Canadian mud at that.

The role itself was a snap. All I had to do was act scared of Bruce—which was easy—and act in love with Natasha Henstridge, which was even easier. The director, Jonathan, whom for some unknown reason I had taken to calling “Sammy,” ran the kind of set I love—a very creative one. The best joke, no matter where it came from, would be picked, just like we did on
Friends
.

Amanda Peet was also in the cast. She was funny and smart and very attractive, and even though she had a boyfriend, she didn't mind flirting, which she did at the drop of a hat with both Bruce and me, to the point where one day Bruce shouted at her, “
Pick
one!”

At night, the parties raged under Bruce's disco ball in Club Z. Somehow, everyone still managed to show up at 6:00
A.M.
for work. I say “somehow,” but I know how I did: those hundred Xanax worked like a charm, though combined with my drinking they did tend to make my head resemble a Spalding basketball. Meanwhile Mr. A-list Willis over there looked like he could open an envelope with his chin.

Each day, with me nursing a killer hangover, but young enough to deal, we would gather and look at the sides (TV- and movie-speak for the work slated for the day). “We” was me, Jonathan Lynn, Bruce Willis, and the hilarious Kevin Pollak, who was playing Janni Gogolak,
another mob boss. It was almost like a writers' room—we'd discuss what might be funny, what might go here in a scene, what might go there. A lot of the effort was to add physical comedy for me to do. I would run into windows, slam into doors. At one point I did a take in which I see a criminal, then turn, run into someone, get knocked back, clatter into a lamp, pick the lamp up and try to shield myself from the baddie with it. All my idea, all worked great.

At one point, Kevin had the line: “He shouldn't be able to breathe the air.”

I suggested to him that he insert an unnaturally long pause before the words “the air.” That was about the only time in my career where I could not keep it together—Kevin's performance of that line was so funny, and the pause kept getting longer and longer with each take we did, that in the end he had to do his coverage with me in a different room.

When the veil of Bruce Willis was removed, I just wanted to be his friend. I didn't want to be a suck-up to him like everybody else in the world. At one point when making
The Whole Nine Yards
we had a three-day weekend, and he flew me and Renee, and him and his girlfriend, to his house in the Turks and Caicos. It's a beautiful place with a stunning view of the ocean. They'd even thought to buy out all the surrounding properties so that paparazzi couldn't get their shots. All weekend we carried umbrellas with us to block us from the sun so that our faces wouldn't get too tanned and not match for the movie. A new movie star trick, one of many I learned from Mr. Willis.

But there was a big difference between Bruce and me. Bruce was a partier; I was an addict. Bruce has an on-off button. He can party like crazy, then get a script like
The Sixth Sense
and stop the partying and nail the movie sober. He doesn't have the gene—he's not an addict.
There are plenty of examples of people in Hollywood who can party and still function—I was not one of them. When I was in my drinking and using days, if a police officer were to come to the door and say, “If you drink tonight, you're going to jail tomorrow,” I would start packing for jail, because once I start, I cannot stop. All I had control over was the first drink. After that, all bets were off. (See under:
The man takes the drink, the drink takes all the rest.
) Once I believe the lie that I can just have one drink, I am no longer responsible for my actions. I need people and treatment centers and hospitals and nurses to help me.

I can't stop. And if I didn't get ahold of this soon, it was going to kill me. I had a monster in my brain, a monster who wanted to get me alone, and convince me to have that first drink or pill, and then that monster would engulf me.