I was now where I had hoped to be. In addition to Bob Wachs, heavy hitters including the Zippels were fighting for me. But as months of auditions rolled by without success, it still was not clear where my niche was. I did not fit on Wachs’s roster like the others. He knew what to do for them, but my offering was too broad and uniquely individual.
Mark Brown heard me say I was “going crazy” waiting for my big break. He had started seeing a therapist and knew I could benefit from therapy, too. But rather than doing that, we devised a new show, Jenifer Lewis on the Couch, in which I spoke to an unseen shrink and “analyzed” why I wasn’t a star yet. David Zippel and Joanne Zippel were the producers. Backed by a full band and two muscle-bound singers named Keith McDaniel and Craig Frawley, I opened Jenifer Lewis on the Couch at the Roundabout Theatre in April. This was big; the Roundabout was a “real” theater, not a cabaret. The show was a hit with critics and audiences, and even won me a spot on The Today Show, where I was interviewed by Jane Pauley, who was very pregnant at the time. I wore a beautiful white suit and added some dangly gold earrings my mother had given me the Christmas before.
JANE PAULEY
[smugly]
So Jenifer, are you ever going to be a star? When do you think it will happen?
JENIFER
Um, I don’t know. I guess when I’m calmer.
JANE PAULEY
Well, maybe it will happen when the earrings are real.
Excuse me? I know this woman did not just insult me on national television! I was stunned by her rudeness. Later, I thought she must have had morning sickness or something. But, fuck that! Now that I have the opportunity, let me say this: “Ms. Pauley, that was rude. I did become a star. And trust me, the earrings are fucking real!”
At the urging of Bob Wachs, my new manager, I decided to move to LA. I’d been in three Broadway shows and made a name for myself as a solo performer; now it was time for Hollywood—for movies, TV, Oscars, and Grammys. Bob bought me a used Mazda 323 and I had saved $6,000 from my Billie to Lena tour to cover me during what I thought would be a brief period before I achieved stardom. I moved in with Roxanne Reese, who had remained a friend after our concert in Cologne, at her small bungalow apartment on Troost Avenue, deep in the San Fernando Valley. Rox was working steadily in TV and as Richard Pryor’s opening act.
Bob put me in the hands of his assistant, Tess Haley. Right off the bat, Tess commissioned a highly respected writer named Deborah Dean Davis to create a movie script for me which Bob could shop to the studios. Although the script got no mileage, Deborah and I became bosom buddies.
Bob was a powerful player whose client roster easily opened Hollywood’s gates. He got me meetings with every major studio in town. Opportunity seemed to be banging on my door when Bob arranged a showcase for me at the Comedy Store and filled the audience with Hollywood bigwigs. One of these was George Schlatter, the legendary producer who had transformed American television comedy in the late 1960s with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Schlatter loved me, but once again, he found me unmarketable. He told me, “If this was twenty years ago, you would become a star overnight.” To this day, I believe this is true. Unlike the bygone ’50s and ’60s when multitalented performers like Flip Wilson, Carol Burnett, and Jackie Gleason reigned, show business in the ’80s was designed to market artists who fit in a simple box—comic or singer or actor or sexy starlet—and I was all of those.
Yet, I persisted. I cast my net wider, auditioning for the movie Beetlejuice, to be a vee-jay on VH1, for a Fritos commercial, and for a CBS series called Sirens. I was rejected over and over.
Bob set up meetings with Paramount, Columbia Pictures, and Lorimar, the highly successful company that produced Dallas, Knots Landing, and Falcon Crest. After the meeting at Paramount, I was driving off the studio lot when I saw Chris Rock walking in the blazing California sun. I pulled up, and like back home in the Midwest, leaned out the car window and asked, “Want a ride, Negro?” We acted a fool in my little white Mazda until I dropped him off at his hotel.
I auditioned for the lead in Clara’s Heart, but Whoopi got the role. I auditioned for a role in the movie Scrooge, and all I got for that was felt up by crazy-ass Bill Murray. All in good fun, but I got the hell out of there! I also met several times with Ralph Bakshi, whose film Fritz the Cat had been the first animation to receive an X rating. Bakshi gave me a super-funny script, but nothing ever materialized. I think he might have wanted to get in my pants (which did not happen).
Paramount had made zillions from the Eddie Murphy movies. When Beverly Hills Cop II opened with a record-breaking $26.4 million box office, Bob Wachs threw a huge celebration for Eddie at his house in Beverly Hills. It was my first big Hollywood party, an all-day barbecue featuring all-day drinking. I felt a bit out of place and did not socialize much. However, I managed to down two margaritas when I arrived, drank a couple of glasses of red wine with dinner, and when they brought out the giant cake, enjoyed a few goblets of champagne.
When it was time to go, Tess put me in my Mazda and asked if I was okay, which I felt I was, until, driving back home to the Valley, I tackled the curving roller-coaster that is Coldwater Canyon. I had to pull over twice to pee and vomit in the dark bushes. It was the first time I knew what blind drunk meant. I could see only the yellow lines, and I followed them slowly all the way to my right turn on Victory and left on Troost. When I stumbled into the small apartment, Roxanne said “Damn, Jenny, you smell like a distillery.”
After a few months I began to get anxious about work. I wasn’t getting cast in anything. A big mouth and a deep backbend weren’t cutting it in Hollywood. I had signed with ICM for movie and TV work on the West Coast, but a string of unsuccessful auditions led Iris Grossman, my agent, to tell me to get out of the business. This is not exactly what you want to hear from your agent. Tess was also getting frustrated with my failure to secure any jobs. Clutching at straws she bitchily told me I needed to lose weight—“You’re in Hollywood now!” I wasn’t obese by any stretch, not even chubby. In fact, my strength and flexibility were two great assets that had served me well. But the pressure to meet the size 2 Hollywood standard was real.
I questioned more and more if I could cope because I was not centered or prepared. I had not yet trained to audition for screen roles; I was used to playing to live audiences, and now I had to pull everything back for the camera. And I hadn’t “acted” in a long time—to develop a character for a role required more focus than my scattered mind was able to muster. I found it difficult to concentrate. My mind was always racing off on tangents.
I became homesick for New York City. I especially wanted to be in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow in mid-August to participate in the global meditation marking the Harmonic Convergence, a big event in the New Age movement. The importance of the date had to do with the Mayan calendar and a prediction of something big and transformative happening, signaled by an alignment of the sun and planets on August 16, 1987. Some believed the spectacle would usher in a new era for humanity. Well, that turned out to be bullshit.
The first thing I did when I returned to New York was see Thomas. But being with him was a drag. He was really worried that we would never get married because now I was living in Los Angeles. But he was still telling me not to curse and to “act like a lady.”
Thomas had good reason to be worried. I was jetting back and forth between the East and West Coasts for auditions and meetings, taking acting classes, performing in nightclubs, and sleeping with a few other guys in New York and Los Angeles. The Harmonic Convergence did not seem to extend to my crazed ass.
To relieve my anxiety and try to get a grip on my life, I continued to search for answers by immersing myself in popular spirituality—Rolfing, crystals, chakra cleansing, totems, channeling, past-life regression, and on and on. I reread Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman and became motivated by Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization, which spelled out how to manifest your dreams. A few of these approaches helped me imm
ensely, although they didn’t solve the underlying problems. I also was consuming titles such as Overcoming the Fear of Success by Martha Friedman and Love Yourself Into Life by J. Z. Knight.
I had begun to build my West Coast corral of lovers. First with a man named Tim who pulled out his HUGE dick and said, “Not bad for a white guy, huh?” After Tim, my stable of men grew as I began to date Gary, a musician, as well as Aaron, Jeff, and Peter.
Dick. The men weren’t human; they were my tool, my drug. My need for the euphoria of the orgasm was acute. I was starting to think there was something off about my behavior, but I felt compelled to have sex. It was the best way I knew how to calm my anxiety.
I could no longer deny the fact that I was fucked up in deep fundamental ways that were too overwhelming to contemplate. It was becoming more difficult to overlook my extreme, abiding depression or to deny that my clowning and promiscuity were, in fact, inappropriate behavior.
I wanted to be different, to take control of my life. And I did find hope. Many of the books I read gave me new perspectives and new self-help tools for becoming the person I wanted to be. The Seth books by Jane Roberts were hugely important to me. The themes they addressed made me increasingly convinced that maintaining positivity and staying focused on what I wanted, instead of what I did not want, would enable me to manifest the life I sought.
My metaphysical studies taught me that energy is highest where the water meets the land, so I booked myself for a weekend at Gurney’s Inn, a historic spa resort in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, New York. The sunset was magical as I stood on the rocky shoreline. It seemed the perfect setting for manifesting, and each time the waves crashed against the rocks, I shouted, “I want a job in Hollywood!”
The next day, I lay in a darkened spa room, mummy-like in a seaweed mineral wrap. I heard the attendant enter, sensed her bend in close to me, and softly whisper, “Someone is calling from Los Angeles, Miss Lewis. I believe it’s Hollywood.”
The moment felt just like one of those scenes in an old movie where the actress gets the call that changes her life: “Hollywood calling.” The attendant had a phone on a long cord and held the receiver to my ear as I said “hello” through the mud that restricted my face.
Bob Wachs was on the line shouting from excitement that I had to catch the earliest flight to Los Angeles because a producer named Haim Saban wanted me to audition for a pilot called Love Court. There was a limo already waiting for me, which drove me back to my apartment and idled at the curb while I hurriedly packed. On the way to JFK airport, I had the limo stop briefly at Thomas’s apartment to pick up a few things I had left there.
Thomas said, “How long will you be gone this time?”
I said, “Baby, this might be it.”
I saw his face and thought to myself, let the fucking limo wait. I held his face in my hands and kissed him. He drew back just a little—I could see he was trying to cover the heartbreak he was feeling. I felt bad, but I didn’t feel horrible, because I had never lied to him. He knew this day would come. We had a sweet and powerful quickie, and like the gentleman he always was, he carried my luggage to the limo and waved me off.
You’re wondering if I cried in that limo. The answer is yes. And the five hours on the fucking plane.
I had just ended a seven-year relationship, and by the time I got back to Roxanne’s apartment, my whole body was itching. The next morning, I broke out in red welts and my entire body was sore. This had never happened to me before. I was sure it was AIDS. I couldn’t get to the doctor fast enough.
Roxanne and I were holding hands when the doctor came into the room. He asked me if I had been under heavy stress. I looked at him like he was a damn fool and told him I had just gotten a divorce. He said, “Well, this is very common. You have shingles.”
I had remembered playing hopscotch with torn shingles from our rooftop in Kinloch made of sand and tar. Good Lord, what a come-around and what a hideous name for a hideous ailment.
I proceeded to skip my happy, itchy ass to the car and took my scratchy, itchy ass home.
From the Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1987:
Jenifer Lewis has been appointed to the bench in Love Court, a new syndicated half-hour series to premiere in September 1988. Lewis, an actress, will dispense opinions to couples wrangling over romantic problems. The series is described as a comedy takeoff on TV’s Divorce Court, People’s Court, Superior Court and Love Connection.
And here it was: my first television gig.
After we shot the pilot for Love Court, things got really busy for me during the next few months—but not in Hollywood. Once again, Erv Raible came to me with a great opportunity—this time a concert in Paris featuring me and several wonderful singers: Sharon McNight, Lena Katrakas, Naomi Moody, and Nancy LaMott.
On the way to Paris, I stopped in New York for a few days and Thomas asked me to marry him. I said yes! When I told Mama, she said, “There’s no way you’re marrying anybody.”
While in Paris, I became friendly with our pianist, Michael Skloff, and his wife, Marta Kauffman. When we got back to the States, Marta and her creative partner David Crane cast me in a musical called Let Freedom Sing, which played in Philly and then at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Completely forgetting I was engaged, I simply couldn’t resist the adorable young doorman at the Kennedy Center. I was his first, and I pity the poor girl who was his second—nobody could follow the acrobatics I performed after he escorted me into an elevator and I pulled the Stop button!
I returned to LA and had good auditions for shows on CBS and ABC, and at MTM, which was Mary Tyler Moore’s production company. It was disappointing when the Love Court pilot didn’t get picked up, but nonetheless, things were moving in the right direction and stardom seemed within reach. More opportunities came along, including a pilot with Eddie Murphy called What’s Alan Watching?, which unfortunately did not make it to the airwaves. Around this time, I went on a date with Eddie’s brother, Charlie Murphy. (I swear I didn’t touch him, y’all!) We laughed so much, I think we just forgot to screw!
In March 1990, I was cast in my first regular television role, on Crosstown. The series star was Tony Alda of the famous Alda acting family. I was nervous as hell. It was the first time I had acted on camera on a consistent basis. During the second day of filming, the director stopped me mid-scene. He shouted, “What are you doing? This is a soundstage, not a theater stage!”
I had been trained to hit the back row of a large theater. But when the director showed me the footage of my performance, the problem was clear. I came across loud, over-the-top, exaggerated, like a kabuki actor among regular people. The camera is intimate, it sees more keenly than the eyes of an audience ten feet away. On stage, you have to tell the truth; on camera, you have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Anything less comes across as fake acting—we call it “ackin’.”
I realized that in order to deliver that much truth, I had to know the truth of who I was. It meant I had to take that “journey within.” I wanted to please the director; I wanted to be as great in Hollywood as I’d been in college and on Broadway. I had to play to the intimacy of a camera and a few people in my face, not a cabaret full of nightclubbers at a distance.
I listened as the Crosstown directors helped me. And I did the work. I dove all the way in, and it was a hell of a transition. Stanislavski. The Method. Acting classes with the brilliant Janet Alhanti served as a sort of therapy for me, because I was forced to examine my emotions in order to create authentic emotions for the characters I played. The greatest method actors achieve unity with their characters—Marlon Brando, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis. They say Robert De Niro comes to set with a stack of index cards of notes he has rooted out about his character. I focused on my Crosstown character. How could I create her truth? I was so proud the day that same director yelled “cut,” then smiled at me. “Very good, Jenifer.”
Working on a TV series is no joke. Like running a
marathon every day. Great actors can make it look easy. Trust me, it is not. Sometimes we’d start at five or six in the morning and shoot two episodes in a single day. A couple of times Tony Alda and I stayed at the studio overnight. I was exhausted during Crosstown. But I was very happy.
Despite our failed engagement, Thomas and I were still on the “make up to break up” treadmill. We flew to Hawaii together for a vacation, hoping the beautiful setting would help heal our differences. Conveniently, we both forgot that our trip to Jamaica had failed at achieving that goal. We boarded a helicopter to sightsee over Kauai. The helicopter lowered itself down into the canyon surrounded by all sizes and types of waterfalls, absolutely gorgeous. Then, as the helicopter ascended upward, the song “[Love lift us] Up Where We Belong” blasted through the headphones they had given us. It was utterly breathtaking and romantic. I reached my right hand to take his left. Thomas was left-handed, and when I didn’t feel his sweet fingers reach back for mine, I turned to discover he was writing a note.
I remember mouthing to him over the music, “What are you writing?”
He said, “I just want to remember to tell my mother what I saw today.”
God, help me, his mama always came first. Would I ever really be able to be number two for any man? I’m gonna let y’all answer that and keep it moving.
I came to find the scenic hills and dramatic ocean views on the West Coast calming to my soul. They say nobody walks in Los Angeles, but one of the joys of living here is hiking. From my first days as a resident, when I felt confused, I would hike the mountains that frame the San Fernando Valley, sometimes singing a song that was a favorite when I was a little girl, Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, ’til you find your dream. I’d choose the steepest slopes, singing a gospel phrase I loved that went God give me mountains with hills at their knees; mountains too high for the flutter of trees. God, give me mountains and the strength to climb them. This was a soul-searching time for me. I sought to be more connected to nature, to pay more attention to sunsets and the rising of the moon.
The Mother of Black Hollywood Page 12
