by Jon Cryer
“You want a tour?” she asked with a sweet smile. “You want to see the Grotto?”
My mouth went numb. I think I said yes, but it might have just been a lot of vigorous nodding. Now we’re talkin’! A gorgeous blonde is offering to take you to one of the world’s most famous nooky spots!
We made our way to the Grotto, which was populated at that moment by an eighties television star whose name I’ve forgotten and a bikini-clad woman he was chatting up with bald-faced intentions. But even without a gaggle of swinging guests, the image I’d had of this magical land of wet-and-wild wantonness was being quickly supplanted by the reality in front of me: that the Grotto is essentially a dingy pool with prefab rocks. It looked surprisingly ersatz. Then there was the powerful stench of chlorine, and while I wouldn’t call chlorine the most aphrodisiac of perfumes, one is probably grateful that something is killing a communal recreation “lagoon” that I’m pretty sure by this point was thirty percent water, thirty percent body oil, and forty percent Jimmy Caan’s sperm. Taking in the scene, I thought, If this were the pool facilities at a hotel I were staying at, I’d be calling the front desk to request a cleaning.
Something about the scene seemed to irritate my adorable tour guide, though, because she turned and said, “Want to see the game room?”
The game room! As in “Yes, I’m game!” Now, that sounded like a provocatively private bit of naughtiness, a place where only those familiar with handcuffs, stirrups, and safe words need enter? A lair of intimate recreation where maybe losing was as much fun as winning? I was ready for a wall collection of whips and straps, but . . . no, it’s an arcade you’d find in any mall, and the only person in there was Jonathan Silverman playing pinball.
I was still in the company of a pretty young thing, though, and I decided that if the party and the mansion were considerably different from my expectations of them, talking to a nice girl was worth my mental energies.
“So, you grew up here?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “It’s kind of a wild place, but it’s pretty cool. My dad and Hef are friends, and though my mom and dad aren’t together anymore, he still lets me come.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Well, it’s certainly a pleasure meeting you.”
“I know. It’s so freaky that I’m meeting you,” she said. “I’m superexcited about tomorrow, because I’m taking my driver’s test.”
“Oh? How old are you?”
“I’m fourteen.”
For the second time that night, my mouth went numb. Look, I’m no operator, but you make an assumption about the age of a female allowed to stroll the grounds of the Playboy Mansion accompanied by a man she’s never met before, and you allow yourself to imagine where that encounter might lead. And now that mental projection was being replaced by visions of me knocking on doors in my neighborhood, alerting people that I’m a registered sex offender. With that final break in my evening of shattered expectations, I said, like the twenty-four-year-old father figure I immediately felt like, “Okay, well, we’re going back to your mom now.”
The party was also winding down, and security was making the rounds informing people of such, shooing people out. Once back with the mom, I politely said, “Well, it was very nice meeting you and your daughter.”
I turned and left, looking for my friend Richard. Suddenly I felt a tug on my arm, and it was the mother. With what I can only describe as a conspiratorially suggestive tone, she said, “It seems like you guys were getting along great. If you ever want to say hello, here’s my daughter’s number.”
She handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it, but all I could see were the words statutory rape.
Out of her sight I tossed the number, and then allowed myself to feel dejected, realizing that if I’d just stuck with Richard, I would have talked to Playmates. They were his work colleagues, for Pete’s sake. His beautiful, stunning, supersexy adult work colleagues. I, meanwhile, picked the fourteen-year-old. I had struck out at the Playboy Mansion. I found a small ledge to sit on, where I decided to wait for Richard, and took the moment to stare off into space.
Suddenly, my zoned-out pity party was interrupted by a sultry yet remarkably inebriated voice.
“Heyhowzitgoin?”
It was my last best hope for the evening, the sexy Paraplegic Playmate, who was ready to continue this merrymaking somewhere else, was definitely of age, and for some reason had picked me as the guy to make something happen. Now, don’t get me wrong. This was a beautiful woman seated before me. But if my judgment was sound enough to kick Jailbait back to her pimping mom, it was also sturdy enough to avoid a scenario in which one party was so unbelievably hammered she makes four words sound like one. And who, might I add, was already operating semiheavy machinery. It was time to bring this anything-but-decadent excursion to a polite close.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m pretty tired, and I think I’m just going to go h—”
Thump-thump.
She wheeled over my foot.
Chapter 18
Oh, Yeah, Charlie Sheen
The first emotion I felt when I read the script for Hot Shots! was a mixture of elation and relief, because it was not only goddamn hilarious, but the first really good script I’d gotten in a long stretch of diminishing offers. Jim Abrahams, of the ZAZ team (David Zucker, Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker), who changed forever the movie parody genre with Airplane!, had branched off on his own to craft with coscreenwriter Pat Proft a wicked sendup of the jingoistic pageants of machismo and war action that we’d all been bombarded with since the release of Top Gun.
And can I just say, I thought Top Gun was slick, manufactured crap, as artificial as whatever goes into a Twinkie, dumber than cardboard, and written so that every line felt like a slogan. Its recklessness bothered me, too: that this was about air force pilots who negotiate international incidents with . . . missiles? And who the hell were they fighting at the end? If you’re looking for modern warfare devoid of context or clarity, Top Gun is your movie. And frankly, can anybody ferret out what’s going on in those fight sequences? They were universally lauded at the time, but to my mind they represent the dawn of Cuisinart editing techniques, in which there’s just enough fast motion and rapid firing and loud music to distract you from the fact that it’s impossible to follow the fighter choreography. And ugh, that ridiculous shot of the cockpit canopies inverted over each other: “Ha, ha! Get it?! He’s taking a Polaroid of the other pilot! This guy really is a maverick!”
And one other thing. I like Kenny Loggins as much as the next guy, perhaps more. I’ve often found myself giddily singing along with “I’m Alright” from Caddyshack even though I clearly don’t know the lyrics. But one can only imagine when Tony Scott called him to ask that he pen a song for this film, Kenny bought a “fighter pilot lingo” set of refrigerator magnets, slapped them on his Frigidaire, copied down what was there, randomly picked three power chords, and started collecting his royalties.
Where do I sign up for the movie takedown of this shit?
It was a smaller part, the sight-challenged Jim “Wash Out” Pfaffenbach, but I was really pumped. Hot Shots! felt like a chance to get back into the fraternity of feature films after being left out in the cold due to my calamitous movie choices in the 1980s. This was 1990, though, so the new decade was looking up. I had to audition for Jim Abrahams, but he really laughed at how I combined deadpan line readings with ridiculously crossed eyes (a skill of mine), and a couple of days later I learned that I got the part.
In two important ways, the production of Hot Shots! was completely unlike Top Gun. For one, we didn’t have the support of the military, because we weren’t a two-hour recruitment film for enlistment, as Top Gun shrewdly was. So instead of getting an aircraft carrier at sea for those sequences, our production guys had to actually be clever: They built the prow of an aircraft carrier on a cliff in Palos Verdes, so
when we shot on the deck toward the horizon, it looked as if we were on the ocean. That’s movie magic, people.
The other way was initially worrisome, then pragmatic. During the shoot, the first Gulf War broke out, in January of 1991. I remember, the night U.S. forces started air strikes on Baghdad, switching on my TV and being mesmerized by the green glow of the invasion footage on CNN, and when a huge potted tree blew over at my next-door neighbor’s house, I was so startled by the sound I screamed. But the reality was, when we were out filming in the Mojave Desert, surrounded by actors in uniform and trainer jets leased to the production, I thought, Wow, none of this is going to be funny when people start dying. But the Persian Gulf War turned out to be astonishingly brief (at least, that’s what we thought at the time), and what we now had was a villain we could name in Saddam Hussein, so they added a scene of him catching a bomb while listening to Neil Diamond. So unlike Top Gun and its cowardly inability to actually identify the enemy its characters are combating, we named names and, ironically, added actual hard-edged realism to the fighter-pilot genre!
Let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, Charlie Sheen. (How long were you waiting for me to talk about him—be honest?)
We’d met before Hot Shots! actually. We both auditioned for a movie years prior that never got made, and I remember thinking he was friendly, talkative, and strikingly handsome. That hadn’t changed when we remet on Hot Shots! but what had changed was his level of stardom, and that he was prone to tabloid-worthy incidents—he’d accidentally shot Kelly Preston in the arm that year (Oh, Charlie, you scamp!) and famously enjoyed recreational mind-altering substances.
It did surprise me that Sheen was making Hot Shots! frankly, because he wasn’t some Leslie Nielsen type trading on years of journeyman work and getting comic juice out of a has-been status. Sheen still had marquee power. It had been only five years since Platoon and Wall Street. But he had made one of the umpteen Top Gun knockoffs the year prior—Navy SEALS, which fizzled—so he was uniquely qualified to do a full-on parody. It was also immediately obvious that Charlie was born to do the kind of precise, straight-faced, never-overplayed line delivery that movies like Airplane! and Hot Shots! need to sell their brand of silly. Charlie just turned on that great charisma and swagger, and we were off. He needed almost no direction adjustments from Abrahams.
It was also clear that our star was deeply invested in partying, and made no apologies about it. Charlie was hitting clubs and strip joints almost nightly—not with me, because we weren’t socializing—but his extracurricular fun never seemed to affect his work. As the production got going, he might roll in an hour late in the morning in his convertible, with then-squeeze Ginger Lynn in the passenger seat, but once makeup and hair were finished with him, Charlie hit his marks and got everything on the first take. One could not help but respect it.
Meeting Ginger Lynn, who had been a figure of some eminence in fantastical imaginings of mine inspired by filmic works typically found on store shelves shielded by a flimsy curtain, was interesting. Sort of like meeting your office buddy’s girlfriend. She wore jeans and gingham shirts, nothing leathery or heeled or tied around her in suggestive ways, as one might expect—hope?—to discover about the casual wear of adult-film stars. You could sense the eyes darting toward her from the male crew folk, but she was polite and sweet and kind of regular-gal boring, to be honest. I do remember being struck by how petite she was. I thought, So that’s why guys look so big in those videos. It’s a trick of perspective. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.
Speaking of perspective—like that segue?—I had absolutely none when I had to sport Wash Out’s ridiculous eyewear, the glasses that looked thick enough for fishbowls. When I’d get direction like, “Okay, we need you to come over here, then run down these stairs,” I’d say, “You do understand that I’m blind with these things on? I’d be falling down those stairs, if I could even find them.” I’d literally have to memorize spaces like a legitimately blind person.
Being in a movie like Hot Shots! you really appreciate the time, thought, and effort that goes into getting a well-crafted joke to play. It is often a mysterious art, but with a scientific side: When you get a laugh, you know it works. One day we were shooting the bit in which Wash Out is dragged by an ambulance and slammed into the back of it when it stops, after which he stands up, responds to a concerned query by saying, “Why, thank you, Andre. I’ll have the veal piccata,” and falls out of frame. But every time we reached the beat with the veal piccata line and falling down, it wasn’t funny. We all huddled over the video-playback monitor like lab technicians at a microscope, trying to suss out why the gag wasn’t landing. Was it the fall? Was it the wrong kind of pratfall? Was it the way I said the line? The line itself? You’d have thought we were trying to solve a murder.
Eventually we hit upon a look I gave between saying the line and falling. I would glance at the other characters before falling, or just look anywhere, and that killed the joke. I had to say the line, not look anywhere, and fall. Then, almost as if by magic, it was funny. In much the way my gun scene in Dudes was radically altered by the smallest of gestures, I realized the same thing applied to jokes predicated on exactness.
The success of Hot Shots! in the summer of 1991 was immensely gratifying. I was finally in another hit, and one that gave me renewed confidence in my ability to make people laugh. Eventually the mechanics of comedy would prove to be the place for me, but before that could happen, I made another stage detour, to do a play that would lead to some of the best highs of my life as an actor and, in one fateful night, one of the lowest lows.
I really like this foreshadowing thing. Don’t you? Don’t you just want to go right to the next page and find out what I’m referring to? I mean, do you really need to go to the bathroom? Tell you what. Just hold the book in your hand while you do your business. I don’t care if you get pee on it. Ladies, that’s unlikely to happen anyway, but, guys, that’s a distinct possibility. And yet, hey, it’s your book. Unless you got it from the library. In which case, now you know what those discolored splotches are in other books you borrow. And you thought they were coffee stains.
Sorry. This got weird. Just turn the page.
Chapter 19
That Time the Very Worst Thing Happened
“Here ’tis,” he drawled, dropping into my hands what felt like a phone book, its weight heavy in my palms. The dropper’s name was (and is) David Beaird, and he was (and is) a playwright known for being, shall we say, eccentric. Which is to say batshit. Yes, I was about to have yet another outlandish guy named David in my life.
“It’s my new play; it’s a little long,” he deadpanned.
It was indeed “a little long,” as it was conspicuously in excess of three hundred pages. It was also bound into separate volumes, I assume so that the brads tenuously holding it together would not be overtaxed. It was titled 900 Oneonta, which sounded mysterious, to say the least. It seemed I was holding a terrifying magnum opus wrought from the pain of a playwright’s tortured soul, the kind of self-indulgent (and did I mention lengthy?) exercise in introspection that actors, or pretty much any friend of the playwright, must slog through every now and then out of loyalty. I regarded it queasily.
“Can’t wait.”
Little did I know that this play would lead to that time the very worst thing happened.
First, some context. Back in 1989, David had directed me in the Los Angeles premiere of Howard Korder’s play Boys’ Life at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and we’d bonded over that piece’s particular and twisted journey to the stage. What happened was, Korder had submitted an early draft of his play to the Theatre Center dramaturge quite a while before it became an off-Broadway hit. So when said dramaturge decided to mount the play in LA for the first time, he just assumed it hadn’t changed.
Ah, but it had, as we were informed by the playwright’s lawyer, who by chance had come to a preview perform
ance. We were performing the wrong ending. So we found ourselves on the afternoon of opening night staging a completely new denouement that utterly altered the arcs we’d spent weeks toiling over to bring all of our characters to satisfying conclusions. It was as panicked as you’d imagine. Lots of knees-bent running about. But in the middle of it, David, who’d up to this point in rehearsals been by turns mercurial, brilliant, bizarre, manipulative, depressed, and exultant, was now suddenly, eerily calm.
I’ve found that when shit goes down, crazy people often handle it very well, because the world is finally conforming to their worldview. Instead of freaking out, David simply, methodically blocked the new ending and hoped for the best, a completely rational approach, considering the circumstance. Actually, come to think of it, that is probably the best attitude for a director to have at all times.
At any rate, I admired him greatly for this, and to his credit, the cast of Boys’ Life rallied and put on quite an opening night. It would turn out to be one of the oldest stories in show business: An amiable and oddball bunch of actors is cast in a troubled play; they’re thrown a curveball at the last minute; the plucky director and cast band together to assemble an inspired and magical fix; they stage a triumphant opening night; and it all leads to the big finish: crushing reviews and the show closes quickly.
But that was not the very worst thing that I was talking about.
The so-called “actor’s nightmare” actually varies from actor to actor. Some are stricken with the “I’m suddenly in a different play” type, in which he or she is ready to do one play when abruptly, everyone around them is performing another. There’s also the “why am I naked?” variation, where you’re doing a familiar play, but inexplicably nude. There’s also the “I mysteriously can’t remember lines that I’ve known backward and forward for months” dream, which is pretty self-explanatory. And not far down the list of dreadful scenarios that keep actors dramatically waking up in a cold sweat (perhaps the reason why they are so good at that in the movies) is the “something happens that absolutely, irretrievably stops the whole fucking show” nightmare.
