My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (5 page)

Well, my goodness gracious, that would have rendered me
mute.

So I ignored his advice.

I have since learned from working with many alcoholics in early recovery that just because the booze and drugs have been taken away does not mean the anger is gone. It has been my experience that it usually intensifies during early sobriety. As a newly recovered alcoholic, I had not yet acquired the tools needed to deal with my anger. This usually takes years and years of going to meetings and doing the recovery work. A person who has always dealt with life’s problems by having a drink has no earthly idea what to do when anger—a lot of which comes from not being able to have a drink!—rears its ugly head.

Somehow we made it through the torturous shoot, and the film wrapped on June 22, 1999. At the first screening, my agent, Billy Miller, leaned in to me and whispered, “What a beautiful, glorious…mess.”

Julia had made a really stunning picture. Her shots were interesting and very pretty to look at. Her use of color gave the picture a big-budget look. She had hired a lady who had done some editing for the famous German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so the picture moved along nicely. The glowering problem was that somehow the story had gotten lost.

There was no story. It really was a mess.

My agent said, “Leslie, I have no idea what this film is about. Plus, this film is dependent upon the audience liking you and we don’t see enough of you as there are very few close-ups.”

AHA! See?
See?
I was now going to get my revenge. I told that bitch a long time ago that I wanted my close-up!

But there was very little time for that. Julia, Erin, and I huddled out at the ranch in Calabasas for days and days. We finally came up with a good fix. To this day we still argue over who actually came up with the idea, but all that is irrelevant because I know who came up with it. Me.

We decided to put my drug overdose at the beginning of the film instead of at the end. We then raised an additional sixty grand and rented a studio for one day of reshoots. In the studio we built a beautiful all-white room, with billowing white curtains, a perfect white table with a perfect white vase holding a perfect white calla lily, and a perfect white chair sitting upon a perfect white rug.

When the drug overdose happens at the beginning of the film—
BAM
!—I land in the white room. The audience quickly ascertains that this is Gay Purgatory, where God keeps homosexuals until he decides what to do with them. Throughout the film I intermittently argue my case to a perfect white light as I sit in the perfect white room in a perfect white suit.

Essentially, I tell my story to God.

And it worked. The film now worked!

We took
Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
on a long film festival circuit. Erin, Julia, and I carried our precious baby in an enormous film canister all over the country. We had only one copy of our film. It would have cost an additional four grand for another one and we were tapped, so we made do with one copy. We were too embarrassed to explain this to film festival coordinators, and so it was sometimes a nightmare crisscrossing the country trying to make all those festivals, lugging our one-and-only ragged copy of the film.

At some film festivals, especially the gay and lesbian ones, we were a hit. But at some others we were completely ignored. Sometimes the reviews were good, sometimes they weren’t. We had an awful time getting distribution. Every once in a while we would get someone to try to shepherd us through the process, but after about a year, our sad film canister ended up sitting in Erin’s closet.

We eventually secured a tiny distribution deal that at least got the movie into most major movie-rental stores. It certainly wasn’t what we envisioned. Just the other day at Amoeba Records up on Sunset Boulevard I saw a copy of our precious, precious baby in the Three for Ten Dollars bin.

Three for ten dollars? Apparently that is what my life story is worth. I wanted to cry. It was all just heartbreaking. No one sets out to make a bad picture, and
Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
was certainly not a bad picture. It was a picture that did not quite know what it was, and never found its audience.

It was a beautiful, glorious…mess.

What I was left with were memories of some really bad behavior. And what bothered me most was that this was not the first time I’d been through this. My experience on
Lost in the Pershing Point Hotel
mirrored what I had gone through years before, with my first one-man show,
Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life Thus Far.

My first mentor in Hollywood was Carolyne Barry, the energetic owner of an acting school originally called the Professional Artists Group. I met Carolyne a day after stepping off the bus in Los Angeles. She was instrumental in helping me find a lucrative career in commercials. She also taught me the important lesson that “show business” is two words, and “business” is the more important one. I learned to treat my quest to become a working actor as a business. This worked wonderfully paired with the training I had received under Fred Beranger, my first mentor. Dr. Beranger headed up the Department of Theatre at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and he had taught me a great reverence for the craft of acting, but not a whole lot about how to earn a living at it.

Carolyne Barry was also instrumental in taking my first one-man show from her living room all the way to a seven-month run Off-Broadway in New York. She directed and shaped the show from day one.

And how did I repay her? By acting like something out of
The Bad Seed
!

I was a tiny terrorist nightmare.

Even to this day, when we do bump into each other, Carolyne and I are very polite and friendly, but the scars from that experience are so deep I don’t think I will ever be able to fully make amends. And I know that we can never have the deep friendship we enjoyed before we took our show to New York.

It is all so sad. We are taught in recovery to not regret the wreckage of our past, but it still hurts. What is interesting is that I am such an accommodating actor for hire, when my own words are not involved. Directors love me. Directors hire me over and over because they know I can be counted on to deliver the goods with very little extraneous drama. This is of utmost importance in television work, where there is just not time for any bullshit.

But when it is something I have written myself, I walk around loaded for bear, as we say in the South. Perhaps it is because my writings are always so damn personal. I learned at the age of seventeen, when I first began writing in a journal, that when I wrote about stuff going on in my life, it helped me sort it all out. If I read what I had written aloud to another person, it really helped me gain clarity. And when I realized that I had a talent for standing onstage and telling stories about my life, and could do it in a really entertaining (and lucrative) manner, my demons truly began to let me go free.

And I have learned over the years from thousands and thousands of letters and e-mails, and the response from people after my shows, that whatever I am doing is a good thing. So I have quit wondering why I spill my guts.

The problem I had with Carolyne—as with Julia Pierrepont—was that my vision of the piece was very different from hers. She had a strong personality and I constantly felt like I was losing my show. It was
my
story of growing up in the Southern Baptist church. It was
my
story of growing up gay in the Deep South. It was
my
story of dealing with my mother’s psychosomatic illness, hysterical blindness. It was about the death of my father and all that the death entailed. It was the story of my twin sisters and some of their troubles. I was even going to trot out my mother’s disastrous second marriage—to my stepmonster.

It was all just too much.

My mother is an intensely private woman and I was tossing out the family’s dirty laundry for the whole world to see and to laugh at. I knew she would be incredibly upset, so I was freaking out constantly.

And I took it out on Carolyne.

She once took me aside and told me a heartbreaking story involving her parents and their habit of sometimes bickering in public. She asked me nicely to please not scream at her in front of the cast as it brought back terrible memories and literally made her want to break down and sob. I did not listen to a word she said. My anger was unmanageable.

Finally, the show was about to open Off-Broadway, and my mother insisted on coming and bringing my favorite aunt. I had to make the dreaded phone call. I called my mother in Tennessee and laid my cards on the table. I told her everything that was in the play.

There was a long, dead silence.

“Leslie Allen Jordan. Do you mean to tell me that you are going to stand onstage in New York City and just talk about
all that
?”

“Yes, ma’am. I am going to sing about it, too.”

Carolyne had added a Baptist choir to stand behind me. The choir functioned as a Greek chorus. As I told my stories, the choir members became all the other characters. They were the voices in my head, the voices from my past. There were also eleven original songs that my dear friend Joe Patrick Ward had written. It was the most overpopulated one-man show since Shirley MacLaine hit the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles.

There was one line that I knew would probably cause my mother and my aunt to faint. Taken out of the context of the play, it sounds risqué, but it was delivered at a point when I am trying desperately to reconcile my devout Baptist upbringing with my homosexuality.

“Let’s face it, it’s hard, it’s hard to be a good Christian
and a cocksucker too!
”

I worried myself sick. I considered dropping the line, but it was the big showstopper. I did not think it would be fair to the other audience members. Besides, what if there were critics in the house? That line was important.

At last I hit upon a solution.

I discreetly bought the four seats surrounding my mother and my aunt. I got four friends to sit in those seats. We practiced and practiced until the four of them were able to simultaneously cough loudly at the exact moment I said “cocksucker.”

To this day, when asked about the New York fiasco where she had to endure the torment of her whole life paraded out onstage, my mother only says, “Well, I missed the big laugh. I’m not sure I even want to know what it was, but both my sister and I missed the big laugh.”

My mother is of the opinion that if you can’t say something nice about something it’s best to not say anything at all. She rarely mentions
Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life Thus Far.

I have quite a history with the word “cocksucker.” My second one-man show,
Like a Dog on Linoleum,
also used that word. I peeped my head out of the curtain once when I was performing in Los Angeles and there was Reba McEntire with her husband, Narvel Blackstock. I almost tossed my cookies. I had a cute, reccurring character on Reba’s sitcom and had fallen in love with her. Everyone falls in love with Reba. She is just that kind of gal. Her show was the only show I had ever worked on in Hollywood that had a prayer circle before going in front of the studio audience. The prayer circle certainly wasn’t a requirement, but anyone who wanted to join in was invited. It always had a lovely interdenominational prayer and gave the cast a real sense of purpose.

How on earth was I going to say “cocksucker” in front of Reba? I had prayed with her just a week before!

I came running onstage and began the show. I could not take my eyes off Reba and Narvel. I should not have been worried. They laughed and laughed, especially Reba. She laughed hardest at the naughtiest parts! They may be fairly conservative but, come on, they are in show business. Half of Reba’s writing staff were gay men.

And afterwards, Narvel, Reba’s very masculine, very straight husband, paid me an amazing compliment.

“Every straight guy in America should hear your story,” he said.

I was moved beyond words.

When I finally got sober and was told that it was very important to make amends to anyone in my past that I had hurt, Carolyne Barry was near the top of the list. I knew that a letter saying “I am sorry” would not be enough in this case. So I tried being inventive. Carolyne has continued to teach over the years and is brilliant at what she does. I began to send her students. Over the years I have probably recommended her acting class to a hundred people. It is the least I can do.

I
HAVE
been blessed with a deep appreciation for beauty. I think that’s why homosexuals were put on this earth—to make things pretty. I love to be around beautiful things, and that is why I love to be around Mark Harmon.

Mark Harmon is a walking work of art. He is absolutely breathtaking. And he is, may I add, aging like fine wine. I worked with Mark and Marlee Matlin on the TV series
Reasonable Doubts
in the early 1990s, and then had the pleasure of being directed by him years later on
Boston Public.

The first time I worked with Mark Harmon, I thought I was going to faint. Seldom are we mortals allowed to be in the presence of such godlike creatures. Mark and I had a stakeout scene together. My character talked incessantly, to the point where Mark’s character, in desperation, was supposed to throw me to the floor, straddle me, and tape my mouth shut.

The director yelled “Action!” and Mark threw me to the floor, straddled me, and began to tape my mouth shut. Before he got it completely taped, I was supposed to yell out the next line. But as I gazed up at that flawless face, I couldn’t speak. His physical beauty rendered me mute.

The director said, “Leslie, you have the next line.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. Can we go again?”

So once again, Mark threw me to the floor, straddled me, and began to tape my mouth shut. Oh dear. I gazed up at all that loveliness and I could not speak.

“Do you need the script supervisor to read you the line?” the director asked, exasperated.

“No, no. I know the line. I’m terribly sorry. Could we just go again? Please.”

Round three. As Mark put his face near mine to apply the tape, I noticed a tiny scar somewhere in the vicinity of his right eye. It was just a tiny little flaw. But it was so endearing.

I fell hopelessly in love.

The director was at his wits’ end. “Damn it, Leslie, what is the problem? How long are we going to have to do the fucking scene over and over?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m so sorry.”

It was at that point that Mark leaned in and whispered, “I think I know what you’re up to.”

He was on to me! He knew I loved being manhandled! The horror and humiliation began to sink in. I sputtered, but nothing of any consequence would come out. Then something amazing happened. He laughed. What a wonderful, hearty laugh! I began to laugh, too.

The poor director just threw up his hands.

Mark stood up and joked to the director as I lay prostrate on the floor in a fit of giggles. “I have a deaf woman and a trick dog to deal with. And now this!”

Speaking of beauty, I once had the enormous pleasure of working with George Clooney. We did sixteen episodes of the television series
Bodies of Evidence
together. This was years before George became a big star. There is no one on this planet that deserves success more than he does. George Clooney has paid his dues. He has been around forever. He has been around almost as long as I have. George once told me he had twelve television series under his belt.

Only twelve? Including pilots that were shot but not aired, I have had fifteen series regular roles. I have been in so many failed television shows I always feel the need to apologize to the cast in advance.

“This show had a shot but…they hired me. Sorry!”

What a business.

I get so tickled when I hear people making a big fuss over George. When I see him portrayed as the suave, sophisticated ladies’ man, I think,
Huh
? Yes, George always gets the girl. But he gets the girl because he’s the class clown. He’s always cutting up and carrying on. George has this enormous capacity for happiness, and it is infectious.

I loved working with George. And he’s easy on the eyes, that’s for sure. Oh, what a crush I had on George. He knew it, too. He had me running myself ragged to do his bidding.

Bodies of Evidence
was a big-city-detective show and the only show I’ve ever been cast in where I was not allowed to be funny. I played a forensic detective.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I tripped over my bag and fell as I was collecting fiber samples?” I asked.

“Mr. Jordan, just say the line, please, and do the business as directed.”

I had started this low-fat diet and I talked about it incessantly. I suppose George heard about it, because he went to the wardrobe people and secretly told them to pull an inch out of the waist of the pants I wore on the show every day. I would show up for work, get in costume, and harp to anyone who would listen how my diet was working so miraculously.

“Oh, look y’all!” I would shout gleefully as I stretched out the waistband of my pants as proof. “I weigh the same every morning, but I guess this diet makes you lose inches, because look at this, y’all. Look!”

By the third or fourth day, I was cinching my pants with an enormous belt and practically skipping all around the set because I thought I was getting so skinny. When I found out about George’s deception, I confronted him. He laughed and laughed. He swears to this day that he was not the culprit.