I'll Scream Later (No Series) (21 page)

A
RSENIO
H
ALL WAS CALLING
.

Michael Jordan—as in Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan—was supposed to be on Arsenio’s breakthrough, late-night talk show. But the NBA all-star had to cancel at the last minute.

I was from Chicago, right? Well, yes.

I love the Bulls right? Well, sure.

Then would I come on in Michael Jordan’s place? Why not!

I always had the best times on Arsenio’s show—it was so loose and fun, as if we were just teasing and playing the entire time. Some people you click with instantly, and that definitely was going on with us. Maybe because Hollywood didn’t really know what to do with either Arsenio or me most of the time—so I think we saw the world, at least a little, from the same side of the fence.

That night I showed up in jeans, high-tops, and a Chicago Bulls
GETTIN MEAN
T-shirt. There was a giant bowl of candy backstage and I grabbed it at the last minute. I was ready to rock.

After he introduced me, I jumped in.

“The reason I brought all this candy…everybody here was expecting a big, tall black guy, and instead you got a short, white, Deaf Jewish bitch.” And I started throwing candy to the audience—they were roaring. Arsenio was doubled over laughing.

I liked that so much that I got a license plate for my car that read
SWDJB
. Near the end of Arsenio’s run, when he knew his show had been canceled, I gave him that plate as a the-show-may-be-over-but-don’t-forget-the-good-times present.

“People expect you to be shy and introverted,” he said when the laughter died down that night.

“Well…they’re wrong!”

Then he told the story of our recent stint on the Comedy Awards. The censors were all set to bleep him, but they ended up bleeping me instead.

He asked me about my glasses—I’d taken a fair amount of public grief for wearing them, the fashion police at it again. I tried to explain. Pointing to the glasses, I said, “I think they’re me.”

“They say you should wear contact lenses.”

“I say, ‘They should go to hell.’”

It was definitely me unleashed that night, and the chemistry onstage was just working. Ruthie, who was in the audience, got a shout-out from both of us and some face time on camera.

He closed out my segment by having me do a triple-reverse, spinning slam dunk into the hoop. It was crazy, campy, and I ultimately landed on my butt. I knew people had come to see Michael Jordan, the least I could do was give them a good time.

I would turn up pretty often on Arsenio’s show—sometimes when I had a new project, but just as often to simply sit with a friend and talk. We always found some kind of common ground—once it was my newfound love for rap music. I loved the bass, I could feel the beat.

One time when my mom was there with me, he bounded up into the audience, camera following every move, and gathered her up into the biggest hug. Here’s Arsenio towering over this tiny woman—my mom barely hits five feet—and she just disappears laughing into his hug. She had a fantastic time that night, and I’m glad I was able to make it happen.

Too often, I’m taken for a serious person—I can be when it’s called for, but at heart I love having fun, making jokes, playing pranks. Life is infinitely better when you’re happy, and humor is really not a solitary occupation—you need to have people to laugh with you, to share in it, and I love that, too.

I
WAS TRYING
to milk the Hollywood scene for a little fun, too. I wasn’t in the mood for any serious relationship entanglements. Since I’d spent my high school and junior college years with Mike
and gone straight from that into two years with Bill, I think I just wanted to play. Over the next few years I would go out with, well, a lot of guys—maybe making up for lost time.

Dennis Quaid, who was just so hot! Timothy Hutton, whom Ruthie and I dubbed Mr. Airport because it never failed, if he called from an airport it meant our date was off. I went out with an absolutely lovely Canadian assistant director, David Till, for a while, but the distance did us in. A short interlude was spent with an ICM agent, Steve Rabineau, who’s since climbed to far greater heights in the talent-agency world, most recently at William Morris. There was a terrific surfer dude, Darin Pappas—he turned surfboards into art, seriously—who has since tried his hand at rapping. And there was a night with David Copperfield.

I met David after one of his shows. We chatted for a few minutes, and before I left, he asked me out. Before the date, Ruthie and I hatched a plan. She would show up where we were having dinner, camera in hand, and pretend she was a paparazzo.

The night was strange from the beginning. He’s this famous guy and he asked me to pick him up. So I went to the St. James Club, where he was staying, and met his assistant in the lobby. David came down dressed all in black—with his dark hair and dark eyes he looked striking, definitely turned heads when he moved through a room. He looks theatrical, but at heart he’s a sweet, genuine, down-to-earth guy.

He got into my black, sporty Toyota, probably not at all the sort of transport he was used to, and we headed to Beverly Hills for dinner. I pulled into the parking lot and reached for my wallet, and he stopped me and pulled out of his pocket the biggest wad of cash I have ever seen in my life. It could have been a scene from a movie—both the cash and my double take were completely over-the-top! I was dumbfounded, but then I thought,
I guess he’s going to pay for dinner, too.

Inside, we were sitting there chatting and I was beginning to feel that we didn’t have a lot in common, but then I’m known for making fast judgments about people, so maybe we just needed a little more time. I was also having a hard time understanding him—I
couldn’t read his lips well—and for me that is always important, particularly when I’m on a date with no one to interpret for us.

But we’re talking, or still trying to, and I had completely forgotten about Ruthie. Suddenly there she is, camera in hand, and she’s snapping away, the flash is pop, pop, popping.

Oh, I jumped! She scared the heck out of me! But then I started laughing; it had turned into such a bizarre, quirky moment. David was startled, then puzzled, then just confused, even after I introduced Ruthie and tried to explain.
Hmmm
, I thought,
not in sync with me when it comes to the jokes.

I was done with the date then; it wasn’t going anywhere. He was the sweetest guy, but I was bored. The communication wasn’t there.

We headed out and I asked him, “Where’s your car?”

“I don’t drive.”

“Seriously?”

“I really don’t drive, I’ve never gotten a license.”

That was hard for me to believe. One of the most famous guys around, and he doesn’t drive? He’s a magician for heaven’s sakes, he can make things appear and disappear, surely he can drive!

So I pulled over and made him switch seats with me. He was lost behind the wheel, he really couldn’t drive! I guess even a magician has limits to his powers.

We got back to the hotel and he asked me upstairs. I tried to beg off, but he insisted. I was nervous.

It was a penthouse suite and had this beautiful view of Los Angeles—lights twinkling everywhere like a million diamonds had been tossed down. A really romantic setting, but I wasn’t feeling anything and was nervous.

We sat on the couch, looked at the lights of L.A., talked a little longer. He reached over to put his arm around me and I stumbled to my feet, apologizing that I really had to go. I had an early call in the morning. It was Saturday night; no one has an early call on Sunday! His face fell and I got out of there as fast as I could. No insult to Mr. Copperfield, he just wasn’t my type.

But in the years since, he’s always been generous. Whenever he comes to town and I need tickets for his show, whether for my family or friends, he makes sure I get them.

I
RAN INTO
Billy Baldwin not long ago. We were both headed to the All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game at what would be the final year of Yankee Stadium and managed to get seats next to each other on the bus en route to the game.

It was so great to see him, to catch up. We talked kids—he’s got three, I’ve got four—and it reminded me of our mutual crush years ago.

Billy is one of
the
greatest kissers in the world. He is seriously a wow!-makes-your-knees-weak-and-your-heart-pound kind of kisser. So a hundred years ago we were hanging out, and it was getting a little more serious. One night he stayed over in my apartment and we finally slept together—and I mean that literally, we both fell asleep, nothing more.

When he was leaving the next morning, he gave me the longest, sexiest kiss ever—I somehow knew right then that was the last time we would go out. I’m glad that it ended that way, with just that kiss.

Billy and I ran into each other at JFK Airport last year and sat together in first class. We talked almost all the way from New York to L.A.—about kids and work.

When I saw him again on the bus ride to the softball game, I had been thinking of that last night we had and reminded him. He said he remembered it well. Then I reminded him of that last kiss. He remembered that, too. I told him I was writing a book and asked his blessing to write about us, and he gave it.

I thanked him for ending it between us that way, for knowing that we were better as friends and not ruining that friendship. That I knew with that kiss, it was going to be the last time we would ever be together. He started laughing and said, “Well, I didn’t!”

Ah, well, we’ll have to save that for another lifetime.

I
N THE LATE
eighties, a lot of people around town in the circles I moved in were talking about David E. Kelley, this writing prodigy, an attorney who was currently working on Steven Bochco’s already popular
L.A. Law
and, if that wasn’t enough, had just cocreated
Doogie Howser, M.D.
with Bochco, too.

L.A. Law
was one of my favorite shows. It tapped right into my interest in criminal justice. But as much as I loved the legal tangles, I was completely hooked on the relationship intrigues even more. Because I found the writing so compelling, I was curious about this up-and-coming TV writer and hoped I would have a chance to meet him.

One day a mutual friend introduced us, and I looked up into these amazingly intelligent eyes, a lopsided smile, and tousled hair and was smitten.

David, without question, is one of the smartest, most decent, kindest human beings on the planet. If you’ve watched any of the unbelievable string of hit shows he’s written and created in the years since—
Picket Fences, Ally McBeal,
and
Boston Legal
in particular—you know he’s got a sense of humor that is quirky, completely off-center, and remarkably sophisticated all at once. That man never has a simple thought, he’s always operating on about five different levels.

We had the strangest first date in history—certainly in my history—the same December night in 1989 that Bill and I went to that final AA meeting together. Jack, who was interpreting at AA for me that night, left before I did to let David know I was running late. When I walked into my apartment, I was clearly showing signs of
just how much that meeting had taken out of me—from my brutally honest recounting of the way drugs, alcohol, and violence had destroyed the relationship Bill and I had, to Bill’s anger that I had spoken publicly about our situation, even during an AA meeting.

David couldn’t have been sweeter when he saw his date walk in with a red nose, puffy eyes—all the signs of someone who’d been sobbing. “Let’s go for some pizza,” he said. And we did. That pizza tasted better than any I’ve had before or since.

We started dating a lot, and for the first time in a long time I looked at him and thought to myself,
This is someone I could see spending the rest of my life with.

In David, I also had an avid sports fan, though since he was from Boston, he followed all the wrong teams. When Boston played Chicago in anything, it could get pretty messy! He was a terrific hockey player, too, so I was back to watching pickup games, which are the best.

Before long I was spending more time at his place than mine, and when he bought this incredible home at the top of Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills with panoramic views—I moved in for good.

His TV series kept him so busy that when he wanted to redecorate the place, he put it pretty much completely in my hands. That was the first time in my life that I’d ever really thought about how to create a home so that the space you walk into feels unquestionably as if it belongs to you.

I tried to make sure everything reflected us and had incredible help from the wackiest but most talented and brilliant interior designer ever. We even worked on a design for the tiles in our bathroom that had hearts and our initials intertwined. That’s how it felt inside that house—like hearts and sweet love. When we gave a housewarming party, I hoped all our friends could see the peace and fun and joy that filled that house.

W
HENEVER
I
WAS
traveling or on location, I couldn’t wait to get David’s faxes—they would never fail to bring a smile. They always started out with his “Heyyy!!!”

One of my favorites, one I’ve kept for years now even though the paper is fading into purple streaks, is a photo of an angry baby boy, probably around six months old, sitting in diapers, with a little American flag clutched in one hand, his face scrunched up into a squall, with the note
DEK without MBM.

He sent that one to me in March of 1990 while I was on the set of
The Man in the Golden Mask,
which was filming in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. If ever I needed a lift in my spirits, it was then. That was an extremely difficult shoot, and the location was so remote—much of it was shot in the tiny village of Pozos, about three hours north of Mexico City—that I was begging anyone who came to the set to come armed with Evian, candy, and board games that Jack and I could use to help pass the time.

Despite his insane schedule, David took a few days to come visit me there—he was like an oasis in the middle of the desert. He could just take my mind miles away.

When his thirty-fifth birthday rolled-around, I wanted to do something special, unexpected. What else but a big surprise birthday party?

I spent weeks contacting family and friends from around the country, planning everything down to the smallest detail. Well, except one…

With his success came more and more pressure, and David seemed to be living with a massive writing deadline hanging over his head virtually every day. But the weekend of the party—a yummy dessert party—I didn’t realize he was in overdrive. For someone who would come home each night, have dinner with me and catch up on the day, then go work for another four to six hours of writing, that was significant.

The evening of the party I had it all planned out. First we met a friend for dinner. He showed up saying, “Oh, man, my car died. I ended up taking a taxi here, hope you guys can drop me off.” When we got to his house, he casually asked, “Come in for a second, I want to show you something.” So we walked in—Surprise!—the house was filled with people from all parts of David’s life. Man, was he ever surprised!

It was a great party. He couldn’t have been more gracious to everyone, and I like to think he did really relax for a bit and enjoy it.

He never let anyone know the kind of crushing pressure he was facing. I realized how bad it was after everyone left and all the out of towners were packed off to the airport. We were both ready to collapse when he said he was going to work for just a little bit.

When we were together, David worked on legal pads, writing out pages and pages of dialogue in longhand. I think he liked the mental discipline of that—no computer with its ability to seamlessly shift everything from words to scenes around in a split second. His method took a different kind of concentration and focus.

I would guess that weekend he worked straight for the next twenty-four hours to get the script he was working on finished in time. All this and, except for a brief, and
very
quiet “Oh, shit” that slipped out when he first saw everyone, not even the whisper of a complaint.

Love and caring in any relationship can be measured in many ways. For David and me, one of those ways was a kitten named Lucy. She was a beautiful white fur ball, a Persian that David brought home for me one day. Now, he is definitely
not
a cat person; still, he got that kitten for me because he knew I was.

We’d only had her about a week when she fell from the top level, where the den was, down to the living room. She was just a little baby. She landed on her feet and at first seemed to be okay, but then she wasn’t.

I couldn’t bear to take her to the vet alone because I was so afraid of what he would say. David did and came home without her and, when I was inconsolable, took care of me, too.

All this is not to say that David was a saint, though he came pretty close at times.

As our relationship deepened, ironically communication became more difficult for me because we were relying almost solely on my ability to read lips and talk. I needed the person I was going to commit to for a lifetime to learn my language. In the end, I needed him to be more in my world that he had the time to be.

Ultimately that—along with his singular focus on work, which made him such a success in Hollywood—would leave us drifting apart.

The day I packed up and moved out was incredibly sad for both of us, but I knew I had to follow my heart.

Sometimes I think fate decides to intervene, even if it starts in pain, in all the right ways. If David and I had stayed together, neither of us would have found our true soul mates. He met the exquisite Michelle Pfeiffer, whose kind heart and gentleness matches his, not long after we broke up. And I met my own amazing partner, my favorite guy in uniform, Kevin Grandalski.

I will always treasure David and his family. He and Michelle came to our wedding, and it wouldn’t have been the same without them.

S
AN
M
IGUEL DE
Allende is a beautiful old town in the mountains of central Mexico. Cobblestone streets wind through it, and the city is filled with colonial architecture and baroque chapels, which makes it seem like a little bit of England lost in the Mexican highlands.

But we spent most of the shoot for
L’homme au masque d’or
(
The Man in the Golden Mask
) in Pozos, about forty-five minutes from San Miguel and civilization. The village was dusty, with dirt roads, no running water, virtually no electricity or telephone lines—impoverished.

I had jumped at a chance to work with Jean Reno, who was starring in the film. He had already established himself as one of France’s finest actors and was developing a rich, creative collaboration with the great French director Luc Besson.

Unfortunately, Luc Besson was not the director on this film. Instead we had a relative newcomer in Eric Duret, also French, whose only experience was directing a few episodes of a TV series. But he had written the script and was able to parlay that into a deal to direct it.

Jean, who was an absolute delight to work with, played a village priest working with an impoverished orphanage. He begins to make extra money to plow back into caring for the children by donning a gold mask and wrestling in area matches.

Along the way, he gets offered a shot at the big time. Professional wrestling, big money, orphans in need, what’s a humble priest to do? My character, Maria, is Father Victorio’s sister and helps him care for the children.

Duret’s script intrigued me. He had envisioned my character not as Deaf, but reluctant to speak to anyone except the children and her brother. Playing a character who wasn’t Deaf, but who had a unique and distinctive way of communicating, was challenging. So many of the scripts I was sent would cast me as the victim, and I wanted to resist the poor-little-Deaf-girl stereotyping as much as I could.

Much of the film took place inside either the orphanage or the church, and Pozos had absolutely nothing that resembled either. The crew, and I think most of the citizens of Pozos, constructed an entire complex to house the church and the orphans.

In what was, I thought, a wonderfully humane gesture, the church/orphanage was built of brick and wood, rather than the false fronts that Hollywood usually throws up, and was given to the village when the film’s cast and crew departed.

I think virtually all of Pozos worked on the film while we were there. Roughly forty-five of the village’s children were cast as orphans, and I fell in love with one tiny boy with the sweetest, saddest dark brown eyes set off by the most angelic smile. I kept hugging him and holding him throughout the shoot, and I knew that someday, before too much longer, I wanted to have children of my own.

Eric decided that to get deeper into my character I should sleep on the newly built chapel floor one night. Only then would I be in the right frame of mind to shoot a particular scene the next day. I had spent enough time in that church to know that scorpions scuttled across the floor every day.

Beyond that, nights in the high desert were cold and unpredictable. One night a huge storm, with lightning crackling and thunder that I could feel, rumbled through. The electricity went out, and the few lights we had were courtesy of the generators that had been trucked in. The next morning, you could look out and see the desert covered by a layer of ice, sparkling white in the sun.

On every production, large or small, I try to accommodate whatever my director asks of me. I’m always anxious to dig deeper into my experience and my emotions to enrich a character. But Eric had failed to explain how sleeping with scorpions in a desolate church would accomplish anything productive.

There is no nice way to put this. The production was a mess and too many days were ruled by chaos. Sometimes a director’s first film is breathtaking; sometime it’s a disaster. You always hope for the best.

Making it even more complicated, four languages were being spoken on set—French, Italian, Spanish, and sign. The director and Jean and actor Marc Duret, Eric’s brother, were French; the director of photography, Ennio Guarnieri, who had shot for Fellini on occasion, his assistant, the set decorator, and the gaffer were all Italian; most of the rest of the cast and crew were Mexican; and I, of course, was signing.

Day after day the shoot went on at a glacial pace. I got a one-day reprieve from the director and producer to go to L.A. for a Billy Joel concert that I refused to miss! David and I had a great time at the concert, and the time we got to spend together was so unexpected and last-minute, it felt like a gift.

Then it was back to Mexico and the shoot that would take forever. I was desperate for another break, and David couldn’t make another run south of the border.

So Ruthie came to the rescue.

She flew down and spent a long weekend with me. I couldn’t have been more excited.

The morning after she arrived, I told her to look in her coat pocket—I’d slipped two tickets to Mazatlán in there. We hopped the flight and headed for the beach.

Mazatlán was beautiful and restful, and neither of us wanted to leave, so of course we pushed it to the last minute. Still we were careful, had everything timed right down to the second, and by now we were masters of down-to-the-wire arrivals.

We pulled into the airport in plenty of time—we thought. Turns out when Ruthie looked at the tickets, she didn’t realize the Mexican airlines used a twenty-four-hour clock. At a glance our depar
ture time had looked to be 5:30 p.m.—it was actually 15:30 hours, or 3:30 p.m. The ticket agent explained the plane was gone, with no others due for a couple of days.