My Mother Was Nuts (34 page)

Dennis Rodman driving Penny away on a motorcycle after a 1997 Pacers-Bulls playoff game
Nunu Zomot

L
OGIC WAS MY COMPASS.
On- and off-screen, I tried to base everything I did on what I thought made the most sense. Was it logical? Most of the time things worked out, but
The Preacher’s Wife
tested my faith. We had shot in one of the coldest winters on record, starting on a day that dropped record-breaking snowfall on the East Coast, and yet when we traveled up to Portland, Maine, to shoot the scene with Whitney and Denzel ice-skating, the weather changed.

It started to get warm. The ice melted. Things began to grow. We had to make fake snow and work fast. I went straight to Whitney and said, “Now I need you. I don’t care what’s going on. You’ve got to be here every day.”

And she was.

I edited through the summer and was looping some of the actors that fall in New York when I heard that my close friend Ted Bessell had died unexpectedly at UCLA Medical Center of an aortic aneurysm. Ted was only fifty-seven. I knew that he’d gone to the doctor twice before, complaining of chest pains, and they’d said it was anxiety. He was directing
The Tracey Ullman Show
. He had also joined my production company and was preparing to direct
Bewitched
, the
feature film that eventually got made with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell.

My jaw hit the table when I heard the news. I loved that man. I didn’t want others who were close to him to also hear about it on TV. I called Louise Lasser, who had gone with Ted years earlier and lived in New York. Then I called Rob at home in L.A.. His wife said he was busy. “Just get him,” I insisted. Rob hadn’t heard yet. Like me, he gasped, “Oh, my God.” It was a deep shock; Ted was a dear friend for thirty years. He was one of us.

At his funeral, the casket was open. MTM writer-producer Ed Weinberger’s wife, Carlene, and I put rouge on Ted’s cheeks. He looked too pale. Ted’s wife had a high mass, but about a month later Ed Weinberger rented a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel so those of us who were Ted’s friends could say a less formal good-bye. Wearing buttons that said “I’m a Ted Head,” we reverted back to the people we’d been in our twenties. We laughed, we cried. It was a fantastic night, as much as such a night can be.

Then, as I worked on finishing the movie, the studio began talking to me about their marketing plan, and I didn’t quite get it.
The Preacher’s Wife
was a Christmas fable told through the eyes of a child who talked to an angel. It was a family movie for the holidays. But the studio wanted to sell a love story between Whitney and Denzel. The record label also couldn’t make up its mind about which songs, and further, which versions of which songs, they wanted on the soundtrack. By the time the movie opened, the Christmas season was half over.

Too bad, too. Critics from the
New York Times
to the
Los Angeles Times
to Roger Ebert in the
Chicago Sun-Times
found plenty to recommend. But I knew it needed help. I went to New York to do press with Whitney, and while there, I called Lorne and said, “I think we need
Saturday Night Live
.” He made it very easy. Even better, he arranged for Rosie O’Donnell to host.

Unfortunately I lost my voice at the end of the press junket and
woke up Saturday morning barely able to make a sound. That had happened to me once before when I was playing Ado Annie in
Oklahoma!
I went to Ronald’s doctor and told him about some red stuff that I had gargled with right before I needed my voice and it lasted for about two minutes.

Somehow he knew what I was talking about. I was impressed. As a result, I was able to participate in three sketches, including one where Rosie, Whitney, and I sang “I’ve Got You Babe.”

Then I left the country, as I always did when one of my movies opened. This time the destinations were Laos and Cambodia. I went with Janie Wenner, the ex-wife of
Rolling Stone
founder Jann Wenner. Janie liked getting away over the holidays, I think because she and Jann had wed at Christmastime in 1967. With a private jet at her disposal, she asked if I wanted to join her and a couple friends. I signed on immediately.

After
SNL
, I went home and packed, and we left in the morning. We stopped in Turkey to refuel and let the pilots sleep. Then we arrived in Laos, a country of immense beauty and extreme poverty. The people were sweet. The children we saw had nothing. I gave them everything I could down to the pencils and pens in my bag.

We explored the capital, Vientiane, and boated on the Mekong River before heading into Cambodia, a rougher country where we needed guards. We went to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, both ancient temples, and I tried to take video but kept shooting my feet, underscoring how mechanically challenged I am. We went to Phnom Penh and saw parents pinch their kids to get them to cry while they were begging for money. It was a different, unsettling culture. As an antidote to all the terribleness and poverty, we bought shit from the locals like you wouldn’t believe and gave it away.

We spent New Year’s at our hotel, where we bumped into
60 Minutes
executive producer Don Hewitt and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun and their wives. They were with a party coming from Vietnam. There’s an immediate camaraderie when you’re traveling
abroad and see fellow Americans. We all ate together and listened to an all-girl band lip-sync to American pop songs. We may as well have been in a Hyatt in Detroit.

On the way back home, we stopped for a day in Hawaii so the pilots could sleep. My brother was still there with his family for their annual holiday trip. I was half out of my mind with jet lag when I saw him. He asked how my trip had been. I showed him a monk’s outfit that I’d bought. Didn’t that say it all?

In February 1997, the studio sent me to Europe to promote
The Preacher’s Wife
. I wasn’t against taking a trip, but what was the purpose?
The Preacher’s Wife
was a Christmas movie. Did they celebrate Christmas later in Europe? I didn’t think so. It just shows the challenges studios needlessly create for themselves. However, the movie turned out to be a warmly received moneymaker, as well as a tribute to Whitney’s talents. I had no complaints.

Life was good. I went into my office every so often, read scripts, and surfaced occasionally on TV shows, like the episode of
Nash Bridges
I did at the end of the year so I could hang out with my friend Don Johnson, the show’s star. I appreciated the freedom I had to play.

I embraced it, too. After shooting a Kmart commercial in Detroit, I flew to Chicago with my hairstylist, who wanted to see his family there. I wanted to go to a basketball game. The Chicago Bulls were in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Indiana Pacers, vying to win a third NBA championship in a row for the second time. I was able to get seats close enough to the action that I almost felt like I was in the game.

Sometimes I was. I knew Pacer forward Chris Mullin from when he played for the Golden State Warriors. At the Los Angeles Lakers games, he would dribble past me and say, “Hey, Bronx.” He was from Brooklyn. He did the same thing at the Bulls game. We had gotten friendly, and then I became close friends with his wife, Liz. She was impressed with my intensity.

But what wasn’t to like? These guys were gorgeous, and they
barely wore any clothes. Then, the Bulls won and moved on to the championships, and I celebrated that night at a Mexican restaurant with some of the players, including Steve Kerr, Ron Harper, Bill Wennnington, and Tony Kukoc. Later, I met up with the team’s flamboyant rebounding and defensive specialist Dennis Rodman at the House of Blues. He put me on the back of his motorcycle and took me to a strip club. At that point, I said no, thank you. His idea of fun wasn’t necessarily mine.

I was back in New York when the Bulls played the Utah Jazz for the NBA championship, and I was caught up in the excitement, the team’s quest to make history. I watched the first two games on TV since they were in Utah; they each won one before returning to Chicago. Ronald’s then-partner, Donald Drapkin, had the corporate jet, and we took it there for game three. I brought a friend from New York who liked the Bulls, and we ended up staying in Chicago for the next three games.

There were celebrities at every game, but I thought the athletes were the real stars. I was awed by Michael Jordan’s ability and poise on the court; off it, he had an equally impressive knack of always saying the right thing, like when he told me not to pay attention to the fans’ boos when they put me on the JumboTron. “They just know that you’re from L.A.,” he said. “But I know you’re a basketball fan.” Dennis and Scottie Pippen were great, too.

Led by Jordan, the Bulls won two games, but then they lost the third, ruining their chance of winning the title in front of their hometown fans. They had to go back to Salt Lake City, and we arranged to follow. How could you break away from the excitement and drama?

I couldn’t—and game six turned out to be the best one of all. The Jazz held the lead late into the game, but Jordan made a crucial steal and then hit the game-winning shot with five seconds left on the clock. The Bulls owned the title for the third time in a row, the sixth time in eight years, and Jordan was named the MVP. Leonardo DiCaprio was there, and he wanted to meet Michael. After the game, I took him into the locker room. Actually, both of us followed Dennis’s
bodyguard, George T., who cut a path through the crowd. The whole scene was pretty remarkable.

Those of us looking to Chicago to fourpeat were disappointed. During the off-season, the team began a rebuilding phase. Michael Jordan retired and Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr, and Luc Longley, all mainstays, were traded. With the Bulls’ dynasty ended, the Los Angeles Lakers saw their opportunity to recapture some of the glory they had enjoyed in the Magic Johnson–led “Showtime” era. They had two young superstars in Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and the team put together a talented supporting cast that included veterans Robert Horry, Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, and Glen Rice.

The Lakers also wanted Dennis Rodman, who had not been offered a new contract with the Bulls. The team had run out of patience with his off-the-court antics. Wearing a wedding dress to promote his memoir didn’t win him any fans in the front office. But the Lakers saw value in him, and they called me.

I guess word had spread that I knew the game’s flamboyant bad boy. Why wouldn’t I know him? I had radar to the insane. One day I got a call from the team’s owner, Jerry Buss, asking if I would speak to Dennis about playing for the Lakers. They had spoken to his reps and felt they also needed someone who knew show business to pitch him on the benefits of playing in Hollywood.

Dennis was unconventional. He was scarred from a childhood spent in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas. For most of his youth, his two sisters were considered better basketball players than him. Nothing about him was normal, including his work ethic. He may have had green hair, but he was one of the hardest-working athletes in the NBA. He practiced before games, played hard, and then worked out again
after
the game.

I understood my mission and spoke to him one day in the private club at the Forum. I said, “Look, you’re doing your whole act. Why not do it in Hollywood?” The harder part, which wasn’t my job, was keeping him with the team. He only played for twenty-three games.
Then he showed up once without his sneakers, and the team’s general manager, basketball legend Jerry West—who was respected for his shrewdness as an executive even more than as a player (and he’s a Hall of Famer)—fired Dennis’s ass.

I fared better. In appreciation of the effort I made recruiting Dennis, Jerry Buss gave me a set of coveted floor seats for Lakers games at the L.A. Forum and then at the Staples Center where they moved the next season. I had to pay for the tickets, but they were fabulous. I was with notable Lakers diehards Jack Nicholson, producer Lou Adler, and Dyan Cannon; and best of all, I was next to the action. They spoiled me forever.

Even forever has its limits. In January 1999, Harvey Miller returned to L.A. from the Hamptons and died of a massive heart attack. I helped organize a memorial at my brother’s theater, the Falcon, in Toluca Lake. It was the first of a few such gatherings we’d have there over the years. All of us who knew and adored Harvey were there, including Garry, Danny Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, and Rob, who looked around the theater and said it was like being back in our old living room on Hesby.

It felt like it, too. We reminisced, traded stories, and agreed that the previous year had been the happiest of Harvey’s sixty-three years. We all watched a video of clips I put together from his recent one-man play,
A Cheap Date with Harvey Miller: The Comedic Life of a Legendary Unknown
, which had been backed by my basketball friends Dennis Rodman and sports agent Dwight Manley, and Harvey made us laugh again. If you want people to remember you for something, laughter ain’t a bad thing to leave behind. Danny recalled his favorite Harvey joke (“A skeleton walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop”), and Dick Gregory, who’d given Harvey his first break as a joke writer, sent a note that said, “Laughter is the best medicine and you’ve given us a big dose.”