by John Lurie
Basically, the Moroccans were not allowed to eat off the white people’s table. The whole thing didn’t seem very Christian to me, and Marty had claimed he was making the movie to get closer to Jesus.
The ones who enforced these rules were Moroccans, the ones with the higher-up jobs who spoke perfect English. They treated the other Moroccans like shit, so it was sanitized and never addressed. But to some extent I blamed Marty for this. Everyone could see what was happening, and there was no way a lot of this, which in the end was racism, should have been allowed to stand.
* * *
—
If you watch me carefully, you will see the scene where I lift up the sleeve of my robe over and over again to expose the Band-Aid on my arm. Or there is my brilliant acting moment where Willem cures a blind man and you can see me laughing over his shoulder.
I think they were having a lot of money trouble on the movie, and the way they were shooting this was ridiculous. The blind man has some gook on his eyes that looks like Play-Doh, and as the camera passes around the man’s back, Willem peels off the gook and drops it on the ground. He is cured! I honestly couldn’t keep a straight face.
On another scene, somebody was talking nine miles away from where they were shooting and Marty had a panic attack.
“This is very complicated! I have to concentrate!”
Everybody was doing the movie for what it cost them to pay their secretaries back home. I was sharing a cigarette with Willem a hundred yards away, outside, and Scorsese, who has asthma, screamed through a megaphone, “If anybody smokes, I’m going home!”
I said to Willem, “Then go home, you little creep,” but I said it in a whisper, because if he could smell the smoke from that far away, then maybe he could hear me.
Early on, I told Marty that I wanted to watch him work. He didn’t seem enthralled with the idea but said I could come to the set the next day and hang out behind him. I wasn’t in the scene.
It’s out in the desert and it’s beautiful. I mean, insanely beautiful. I watch for a while. Ask him some idiotic, nervous question and he doesn’t respond. I can’t blame him. So I go for a walk in the giant hills of floating sand for about an hour. It is so beautiful. I get a little turned around and have to guess where they are on my way back. I come over a sand dune and I’m right smack in the middle of the shot that they are about to shoot. It’s bad, I haven’t ruined the shot as they haven’t started, but they have to wait until I run down to where they are. I’m definitely not good. This is not cool. Don’t you just love when you’re with a group of new people in the middle of nowhere and you want to make a good impression, and suddenly you’ve done something this stupid? Don’t you love it?
The next day on the call sheet, it states that only those people in the scene will be allowed on the set. It should have said “John Lurie” after it. And this is fair, I’d fucked up. But this was not what made me turn into an acting vandal. Well, this was partly it, but Scorsese kept dropping these little insults on me, all the time, and he hurt my feelings.
I was practicing the soprano outside, quietly and far away from anyone, during a lunch break. Scorsese and a few others were heading out to the location before everyone else and they walked by me. A donkey started to bray in the distance, which sounded sort of like a response to what I was playing. Scorsese laughed, but way too hard, and it wasn’t a real laugh. Actually, his laugh never seemed quite right.
Once he turned to me during lunch and out of the blue said, “You make music for alienated people,” then got up and left the table.
It is my last day on the set. I am going home tomorrow and it is also my thirty-eighth birthday. I thought that I was done for the day but they’re making me wait around for hours.
“Why? I’m done.”
I’m told they might need my reaction shot on something, that I have to wait.
“This is nonsense. I’m done. Michael Been’s already gone and you can’t shoot the shot because he’s standing right next to me. And it’s my fucking birthday!”
So I wait and wait and at the end of the day, I’m led around the corner and everyone’s looking at me. Someone says, “Look, John.”
There is a wheelbarrow in a dusty lot. I say, “Oh, a wheelbarrow.” Harvey thinks that is hysterically funny, but then I see that there is a table with champagne and a giant cake on it. Is this for me? Oh fuck.
The cake says, “Happy Birthday, John.” I get a little choked up and everybody’s scrambling around. Everybody’s lining up behind the table, me in the middle next to Marty. Someone says we should take the group picture now and others start to argue that, no, this isn’t good, everyone’s not here.
“But this is the most people we will have together from now on, people are going home.” The sentiment is divided in half and people are getting pretty angry arguing about it.
I say “Thank you!” as loudly as I can, but my voice cracks. And as everyone is arguing and I’m about to cry from this really sweet thing that they’ve done, Marty leans in to me and says, “Okay, John, direct this.”
Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I thought it sounded mean.
Went back to my room and painfully hacked off my beard. Saw my lascivious face for the first time in months.
33
The Last Time I Saw Willie Mays
I gave up the apartment on Eleventh Street before the band went to Japan. I started staying in hotels, mostly at Morgans on Madison Avenue. Steve Rubell was astounding to me. He and Ian Schrager used to do Studio 54 in the old days and now they owned Morgans Hotel and Palladium, a giant club on Fourteenth Street.
I would be out all night and at five a.m. get a lift from the Palladium back to Morgans Hotel with Rubell in his limo. He lived there as well.
Once I had to get up at nine a.m. to do an interview and was a complete wreck. I could barely see, and when I stumbled into the elevator, I hoped no poor soul would be in there to have to encounter the mess of a disaster that was me.
But there was Steve Rubell. All fresh and clean. Sparkling. And talking with four businessmen, sharp as a tack. Conducting business in the elevator with a big white smile on his face. I just had to hand it to him. Did he do this every day? Stay out partying all night and then get up, three hours later, first thing in the morning and conduct business as though he were one of them?
When he died, some magazine said something like, “Steve Rubell has gone to a club that, finally, one day, we can all get into.” It was easy, certainly from the outside, to hate him and what he stood for. And in a way it was fair. But the guy sure as hell had something.
I lived in hotels in New York for a long time. I liked it. But it was crazy expensive. So finally, I reluctantly got an apartment on West Eighteenth Street. The people who owned the building, Tojili Partners, were a very sweet couple who ran a business designing ship parts. They worked on the top floor, in the place above mine.
The deal was that they gave me a key to their office so after eleven p.m., when playing the saxophone would disturb the neighbors, I could go up there to practice and not bother anyone.
Kazu had gotten her five-year visa and moved back to New York. She stayed on Eighteenth Street with me. We got her a futon, which she called “the Stingy Bed.”
* * *
—
Ribot said I had the perfect life. Kazu was my companion, took care of me and the apartment. There was a lot of love between us and we had immense amounts of fun. Valerie took care of the business and sorted out whatever my mayhem had broken. And I was going out every night and sleeping with the most beautiful women in the world. I suppose he was right. But if he was right, why was I so fucking unhappy?
* * *
—
I was about to go to Taormina, Sicily, to shoot my part in Roberto Benigni’s movie The Little Devil. The script was brilliant. Benigni is a little rascal of a devil who esc
apes from Hell and comes into this world to wreak havoc. Walter Matthau plays a priest, and I am the big devil who comes into this world to bring Roberto back.
The movie was going to be shot in English and Italian. They shot two whole separate movies. I wanted, very badly, to do my part in Italian so that I wouldn’t be dubbed. Jon Ende hooked me up with an Italian teacher named Rosella.
Rosella was soft and smart and pretty. Kazu said that I should marry her. She was right, but Rosella was already married.
She would come to my apartment for three hours at noon every day, and we would work on my Italian—both learning regular Italian and then studying my lines.
It was February when I went over to Taormina to do the movie with Roberto. It was colder than I had hoped. You look on the map and it is right near North Africa. But you study the map a little further and Sicily is barely any farther south than New Jersey.
There was no schedule.
I thought that I had my part down in Italian, or at least I was close. There was a language instructor on the set who was supposed to help me with the dialogue. We had five different meetings set up and he never showed up for any of them. He was an American guy, very clean and snotty. It looked like he brushed his hair a hundred strokes per day…suddenly, my memory is telling me that maybe he was the original yuppie who overcharged me for the ride back from the West Coast when I was seventeen. But, of course, he wasn’t. He was just an archetype for that irritating creature whose mission it is to block people from a happy and decent path. There seem to be more and more of him lately.
There was some kind of feud going on in the movie. The producers were undermining all the heads of the departments. They would go to the underlings and tell them not to do the set the way the set designer wanted it but the way that they wanted it, and if they did, they would be guaranteed a job on the producers’ next feature. I don’t know exactly what it was, but there was very uncomfortable shit going on, and when I became friendly with Antonio, the set designer, somehow this language guy and his tiny band of cohorts decided that I was their enemy.
It really made little sense. But people in a large group, off somewhere on location, head into some very uncomfortable patterns. Last Temptation was awkward, but there was some warmth on that set. This was different. There was some Machiavellian shit going on. People really seemed to not like one another and wanted to do harm.
There was a buffoon of a man who was the line producer. He would go out of his way to lie to you when the truth would not have been a problem for either him or you. He just lied first, no matter what, as though from habit.
I asked Roberto how to say buffoon in Italian.
“Is the same, buffone. Why?”
I pointed to the line producer with a tilt of my head.
Roberto said, “I see, yes, very good.”
* * *
—
I don’t know when I am shooting. I can’t get an answer. There is no schedule. I can never leave because they might need me, but I am never needed. I am there for weeks.
I have one scene that is a couple of pages of straight dialogue. A little speech. I work on it over and over and over again. It is still stuck somewhere in the recesses of my brain. “Una razza senza mutandine!” It is like touching a memory part of the brain with a pin and it comes flying out.
I am close to getting this dialogue, I just need a little help. But then after lunch the buffoon says that they are shooting that scene right now. Like, Surprise!
No warning, no meeting with the language guy. Today is your day.
I try. I try so hard.
First off, I am nervous. Not out of control nervous, but it is my first day acting in this movie, in front of this crew, and there is a lot of inexplicable hostility floating around.
I run a couple of lines, and they are moving some lights when I hear loud laughing coming from my left. I look just in time to see the assistant director pursing his lips into what is clearly an exaggerated John Lurie face, and the crew is laughing. At me.
This makes no sense. Like, at all. I have never spoken a word to this guy. We have had no interaction and now, before my first scene, he is mocking me. I really don’t get it and never get to the bottom of what is going on on this film set.
I have the words down in Italian. I am pretty sure I have the pronunciation down, but I am also sure my phrasing is weird as hell. Probably like an animated robot spouting off this speech.
I am delivering all this dialogue in front of a crew of seventy Italians and I know that I haven’t pulled it off.
I’m furious. Had we done a couple of the smaller scenes first, I could have gotten it. Had anyone helped me with it, I would have gotten it.
I’m angry and the crew is just, “Well, he can’t speak Italian. Why is he angry?” Which I can understand. I can’t imagine being in a movie with a foreign actor who is barking out nonsensical English and then he gets angry because he can’t do it.
But I have worked for months on this.
Roberto is working so hard and looks so frail that I am worried about him. He is in the hallway of the hotel waiting for Nicoletta. I call to him but he is lost in thought and doesn’t hear me. I watch him move and gesture and then turn the other way like he is rehearsing and figuring out the camera angles for the next scene, all at the same time. Then he slumps, exhausted, against the wall.
It’s beautiful in Taormina, but I am getting stir-crazy. I only have four scenes in the movie and I am there well over a couple of months. The hotel is a very old monastery. They work it out so that I can practice in the cathedral. I go there to practice and it sounds beautiful. I write the song “Voice of Chunk” in there but only go twice because something about it feels haunted and scares me.
I don’t know why I say “feels haunted.” It was fucking haunted.
As the grand devil, I want my voice to sound like John Huston’s in Chinatown. Deep and rich. And I am doing the part like that.
In my scene with Walter Matthau, he says this is a terrible idea. That even when he won the Oscar, he didn’t change the sound of his voice.
He calls me Baskets. He says it’s because I walk like a basketball player. Someone once said that even in Last Temptation, in my robe and sandals, I walked around like a basketball player, all lanky.
Matthau seems to have no idea who I am. Which doesn’t matter to me, but then I learn from his wife, Carol, whom I really love and who was married previously to William Saroyan twice, that she and Walter saw both Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, the latter right before leaving the United States.
Why on earth would he pretend to not know me?
That night, after he told me that all my acting decisions were wrong, we have a game of poker, where Walter tells me that everything I do in the first few hands is wrong.
Then I take all the cash he has.
* * *
—
Back in New York, I ran into Jean-Michel at the video store on Lafayette Street. I went, “Willie Mays!” He grinned at me but wouldn’t talk. Just kept grinning at me without speaking.
Not an easy thing to do, actually. Just stand there and grin at someone without speaking. But he just stood there, staring at me and grinning.
In the last year of Willie’s life, I only saw him a handful of times.
The time before the video store was particularly eerie and wrong.
A few months before, we had gone to the Odeon to eat. He hardly touched his food, just played with it. He loved to flaunt his money by wasting things. He’d order the most expensive thing on the menu and then smash it up with his fork, uneaten. He’d buy a four thousand dollar suit at Comme des Garçons and then paint in it the same day. I was jealous of that one, I have to admit.
After dinner he directs the cab to go way into the East Village to cop. It’s odd, because he used to ridicule me for ta
king heroin, but now he’s way into it, and I have stopped, this time maybe for real.
He bought ten bags, which seemed like a shitload of heroin to be buying at midnight on a Sunday. There was no way this could be good dope, the reliable dealers were only out during daylight hours. At night it was always a gamble. But around midnight on a Sunday, forget it. There was almost no chance you were getting actual heroin.
I am kind of shocked by the idea that he is going to do ten bags of street dope by himself in one night. But Willie was always like that with drugs, his pot was always the strongest and he could always snort more coke than anyone without wigging out.
We go back to his place and he wants me to snort a bag to see if it is any good. But I’ve kicked heroin and don’t want to do it. Granted, this is the fortieth time that I have quit, but I may have really quit this time, it seems to be holding. Has been several months.
But, for certain, if I were to get high, I would be very particular about what dope I would take, and it isn’t going to be this late Sunday night East Village shit.
I pour some on the mirror, take a speck with my finger, and taste it with my tongue. The allure is still always there.
“It tastes weird.”
“Can I shoot it?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Tastes weird how?”
“Just tastes like chemicals. Like you might be better off unclogging your kitchen drain with this product.”
“Snort it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“John Lurie is turning down free dope?”
“Fuck you. I’m not your fucking guinea pig.”
This went on forever. I couldn’t believe he was even contemplating shooting this stuff.
After that night I decided to avoid him for a while. It seemed I had really quit heroin and I couldn’t be in a situation where it was around.
