So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  But Steve never talked about it in interviews. Ever. Neither confirmed nor denied. For me, the resemblance was just too close. The Medallions song was written by its lead singer, a guy named Vernon Green, but we couldn’t find any sheet music to check on the lyric.

  So here’s where it gets weird. Flash-forward to the release of the film, and I’m on CBS This Morning promoting it at the ungodly hour of four a.m. They ask me what the title means and I mention the Medallions and how the lyric is just too close to be a coincidence. Later that day my publicist gets a call from none other than the only other dude in California who was up at four a.m.: Vernon Green himself. He left a number.

  We had a great conversation; he talked about growing up in LA with polio in the 1940s and what inspired him to write the song.

  “You have to remember, I was a very lonely guy at the time,” Green said. “I was only fourteen years old, I had just run away from home, and I walked with crutches.”

  The song was supposed to be a letter to the woman of his dreams. I asked him what the words meant. Turns out what Steve Miller heard as “epismetology” was actually “pizmotality.” Pizmotality! Of course! I thought. That means . . . um . . . uh . . . What does that mean?

  “Pizmotality was a way to describe words that were so secret they could only be spoken to the one you loved,” he explained.

  “Oh. Okay. And what about ‘pompatus’?” I inquired, barely containing my anticipation.

  He paused, cleared his throat, and said, “That was ‘puppetutes.’”

  Now it was my turn to pause. “Beg pardon?”

  “Puppetutes,” he clarified (sort of). “It was a word I made up to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [like a puppet], who would be my everything and bear my children.”

  “Uh-huh . . . Sure. That . . . makes . . . sense,” I ventured. “So one of the great rock mystery lyrics is actually kind of a misquote?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard the song.”

  “You’re kidding,” I scoffed.

  “Nope.”

  I played “The Joker” over the phone to him and he erupted with laughter.

  “That’s it!” he said through cackles. “That’s it!” He seemed pretty sure the song was referring to his lyric. I was too, quite frankly.

  We ended the call on a high. I was glad that my movie gave me the chance to be the guy who made him aware that his legacy would include having influenced one of the defining hit rock songs of the seventies, as well as clearing up one of its most enduring perplexities.

  If anything, The Pompatus of Love gave me a taste of what’s possible when inventing a movie from scratch. We told ourselves we could make a movie, and we did. For someone who aspires to be an artist, that is intoxicatingly empowering.

  When Richard and I tried to tackle an independent film again, we seized on an idea that was less commercial, came from a deeper place, and held more meaning for me personally. It arose out of two incidents from my past that I fused into one story.

  Remember my life-changing evening at the theater, seeing Star Wars with my mother’s boyfriend and his son? The son, Anthony, was younger than me by a few years, but he was a great kid. He got along with David Dennis and me, so we looked at him like a little brother of sorts. David and I lost touch with him over the years, until one day around 1989 I was hanging at Sal’s, the pizza shop where David worked, when we heard a rumor that Anthony was homeless and living in Central Park. Never one to miss skipping out on a responsibility in order to fuel a distracting curiosity, David exaggerated his concern for our friend and insisted his boss let him off from work and that I join him in looking for Anthony. I felt like I was in school all over again, enabling my hooky-playing buddy. We certainly never thought for a moment that what we heard about Anthony was true.

  One of the first places we “looked” was Sheep Meadow, because it housed a big encampment of hippie kids. We walked up to a girl and said, “We’re searching for a guy named Anthony; have you seen him?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him,” she said, and smacked this pile of clothing, which then stood up and revealed itself to be Anthony—a disheveled, out-of-sorts Anthony, who remembered us, but was definitely going through a personal low in his life.

  Whoa. It was true. We were taken aback, partly because this was the first place we’d stopped, but mostly because our larkish excursion had turned a corner into something we weren’t really prepared to face. Anthony seemed to be on something, and wouldn’t talk to us when we inquired as to his well-being. He asked for ten bucks, and I gave it to him, and told him if he needed anything else—a shower, change of clothes, whatever—to just ask. David and I walked home shell-shocked. For me, it was as if this charmed experience of mine—fame, money, living my dream—had been replaced by an alternate universe in which shit can go bad.

  The other incident that inspired the movie happened around the same time. David called me up one particularly cold New York day and said, “We’ve got to go to Coney Island.”

  David’s enthusiasm was often just enough to get me to say yes, but occasionally I had to prod. This was one of those times. “David, why do you want to go to Coney Island during the winter?”

  “We’re gonna ride the rides! The Cyclone, the Parachute Jump! The Wonder Wheel! All that stuff!”

  Not really an answer to the “winter” part, so I said, “I’m not sure it’s open.”

  “Sure it is,” he said. “It’s New York.”

  I wasn’t doing anything else, and logic wasn’t going to dissuade him, so I left a note for my girlfriend at the time saying simply, Went to Coney Island on a mission from God. Be back by five.

  We hopped on the D train and rode it all the way out to Coney Island, and, of course, it was closed.

  But we walked around anyway, and it struck me how this historic destination for amusement-seeking New Yorkers could seem so haunted and vaguely terrifying when devoid of humanity. It was an absolutely surreal experience, like being stuck between a glittering past and a devastated future.

  This feeling deepened for me when I realized later that David was going through some personal crises of which I wasn’t aware. I’d always known that David drank and used drugs from a very early age. Although I always like to say about our friendship—and believe I did, earlier in this very book—that I was his conscience and he was my reason to be naughty, I never indulged in the parts of David’s life that involved anything worse than raiding Mom’s liquor cabinet. David’s life had been hard: The operation he had at twelve to lengthen his shorter leg had worked in terms of preventing scoliosis, but it also left him in a state of fairly constant pain, so that by the time he was fourteen he was smoking cigarettes and weed and drinking heavily, and by sixteen he was using cocaine.

  It was never David’s wont to push anything on me. In fact, he and Artie—an enthusiastic coke user who could swill stunning amounts of beer—often claimed they weren’t high when they clearly were, going so far as to feign ignorance one day when a packet of coke fell out of David’s pocket. It was the full-on “how did that get there?” routine. They were oddly protective of my innocence. They wanted me to just be who I was, and I was fine with that. In many ways, David had a presence of mind stoned, drunk, or coked up that I didn’t possess cold sober.

  But over the years, as our lives diverged, the effect of all that self-medicating and the psychological problems underlying it were starting to show. I’m pretty sure David was high that day at Coney Island, for one thing, and as I would learn, the real reason he wanted to go to this usually cheerful place at so chilly a time of year was less about the weather outside than staving off whatever the gathering storms were inside him.

  * * *

  While Richard and I were holed up in our crappy hotel room selling Pompatus at the Cannes Film Festival, my mind kept coming back to these incidents. In looking for a way to process them, Richard
and I wrote a movie called (unsurprisingly) Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God: Be Back by Five, about two guys—local neighborhood dudes—who hear that an old friend is homeless and head for the eerily abandoned New York tourist destination to find him. I wasn’t thinking about making something with box-office juju. I just wanted to use art to process these equally strange experiences of mine, in the hopes that maybe others might feel some kinship toward it. Richard wanted to direct it, and it was low-budget enough that I could put up half the money.

  And where was that money going to come from? Doing something I didn’t want to do.

  If you suddenly got an image of me in front of a dry cleaner’s on a very friendly West Hollywood street (see pages 76–77), let me stop you right there. I don’t mean that. Get your mind out of the gutter. My eyes are up here. I’m referring to an acting job I didn’t want to do, but that paid me a lot.

  Ten years before, I had an idealistic view of the compensatory aspects of acting professionally. The last big movie offer I got after the career firebombing that was 1987 was a hotly hyped project called Young Men with Unlimited Capital, a fact-based movie about the two twenty-something business types who created Woodstock and got swept up in the world of rock and roll. The deal was for me, Ralph Macchio, and Robert Downey Jr., and the pay was going to be really good. So my manager made the deal. Then Macchio pulled out, followed by Downey, and the movie fell apart.

  My deal was pay-or-play, however. During a phone call, I asked manager Marty, “What does that mean?”

  He said, “It means, even though they’re not going to make the movie, they still have to pay you your salary.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. (I know, I know. Stop gasping.)

  “Well, it’s how it’s done.”

  I wasn’t finished. “Is there anything to be gained by not taking the money?” If Marty’s eyes were popping out of his head at the possible loss of a substantial sum of money, considering his cut, his voice didn’t betray it. “Because I don’t do these things for the money. I want to make the movie. I don’t want to screw over these people who are offering me money to be in their movie. They’re already hurting anyway since it fell apart.”

  Marty’s voice was calm and only mildly schooling. “No, Jon, they’re paying for your time commitment, because you’re a valuable part of this. This is the way business is done. They’re used to it. They knew it was pay-or-play, they agreed to it, and now they’ve got to pay you off. There will be no hard feelings, I promise.”

  And he was right. Honestly, these studio suits don’t even respect you unless you’re willing to bend them over and give them a good financial rogering, because it helps them accept you as a valuable commodity if you treat them like you’re a valuable commodity. “Fuck you; give me my money,” is no different to them from, “Nice doing business with you.”

  But I felt guilt about it. Still do. I always come to whatever I’m doing from the mind-set of an artist. And yet around the time Richard and I were trying to get Coney Island made in 1997, I decided to put those ideals away to make art happen, and it felt weird. I had been offered a pilot for a sitcom created by Chuck Lorre, who would later make Two and a Half Men but at that time was known as the guy behind Grace Under Fire and Cybill. I would play an IRS auditor asked by his brother, played by Jim Belushi, to run a nightclub left to us by our dead father. I liked Chuck, I liked Belushi, but I didn’t think the character—an uncomplicated nebbish—would be fun, so I turned it down.

  That’s when I learned that the sexiest word you can say in Hollywood is no.

  First they offered me more money. Second, they offered me even more money. Third, they offered me even more more money. I’ve had only a few calls from Marty where he’s giggling. This was one. The amounts increased until it was so much money I realized, I can finance Coney Island with this. It was a thirteen-episode commitment, and I’d get paid even if it didn’t go past the pilot stage. But I kept saying no. It reached the point where the read-through for the pilot was on a Monday at noon, and when noon passed, they offered me more money.

  At twelve thirty p.m. that Monday, I finally said yes, at which point they said, “Great! Get over to the 20th Century Fox lot now, because you’ve got a read-through to do.”

  By the time I got there, everybody had been waiting an hour and a half. But Belushi strolled over, said, “Hee-e-e-e-e-y!” then picked me up, flung me over his shoulder, and carried me to the table, where he promptly dropped me into my chair. Rounds of, “All right!” and, “Yeaaah!” and, “This is gonna be great!” filled the air as we settled in, but it had gotten so hot in the studio that the AC had to be turned on, huge AC vents that happened to be directly above the table where we were doing the read-through.

  The noise of frosty air coursing out of this machine to blanket us was, to put it mildly, deafening. It was so loud that the actors had to shout their lines above the air conditioner just to be heard, the barking sameness of everyone’s delivery effectively killing every joke. Meanwhile, panicked PAs frantically tried to figure out how to shut off the AC. What ensued was the single most disastrous read-through I’ve ever been a part of, with nary a laugh to be had.

  Rehearsals started, and everybody’s game face was on. Plus, a sterling cast was assembled, including Polly Draper, and the legendary Abe Vigoda and Tom Poston. That was all great. But all the while I kept feeling weird, because I’d taken the gig for the money. I just could not engage. I never felt good about it. When audience night arrived for the pilot, all the executives were there, agents, friends, family. Pilot-filming night can feel like an opening night on Broadway, and this one was thick with excitement.

  When a glitch in editing meant that an outdoor scene we’d prefilmed on a big downtown street wasn’t ready, Belushi got all amped and said, “Let’s fuckin’ do this!” We just performed it again for the audience, and they went nuts. They loved the rest of the show, too, and were on their feet at the end.

  I looked around and thought, This is going to be a success.

  Then I thought, Oh, shit.

  None of it felt real or organic or good to me. I dreaded its getting picked up. Here I was, still looking for a hit show after a few tries, but what I came to understand was, what I wanted was a job my heart was in. This wasn’t it.

  Then, like a balloon being pricked, suddenly the network decided Polly Draper wasn’t right, and when further casting searches proved fruitless, they threw up their hands and didn’t go ahead with the pilot.

  To which I said, “Thank Christ,” took my chunk of money, called Richard and said, “We’re golden,” and hotfooted it back to New York.

  Coney Island came together after a few hiccups that may or may not be familiar to people who toil in independent film. First, a funding source’s promised money didn’t arrive, which meant I had to front the entire cost of completing principal photography, and once that was finished, we’d run the risk of being stuck with a bunch of great stuff on film, but no money to put it together into a movie.

  Second was a nail-biter that we didn’t see coming. We had cast Ione Skye of Say Anything fame as our female lead just a few days after she had moved to New York City. It was a coup to land her on such a microbudgeted film, especially since I considered that Cameron Crowe film without a doubt the best teen romance of the eighties. We’d notified her agent what days that we’d need her for shooting, but the night before her first day, he called me around ten p.m. to inform me, basically, “We don’t know where she is.”

  Turns out, she was still in the middle of her move, and her agent couldn’t reach her to give her the call time. He had phoned her old place, and even her mother—but no one knew where she was. She’d had a phone installed at her new place, but stunningly, nobody actually knew the number. He assured me that he had left her messages and that she’d get back to him.

  So we were on location the next morning, in the middle of
Rockaway Beach, with a hundred extras who were working for free, and no leading lady.

  I’m on my cell phone, pacing back and forth, calling everyone I can possibly think of, and her agent is saying to me, “Look, if you have to hire another actress, I understand.”

  He understands!? Where were we going to get somebody? She’s already an hour late and we’re supposed to be shooting! I’m not very good at yelling at people, but I’m getting pretty heated with this guy. So I call another agent and line up the availability of the actress who was our second choice. We’re moments away from hiring her. At this point I’ve got two calls going at once: I’m begging one agent to make a deal on one, and screaming at Ione’s agent on the other—when a guy walks by with no ear. I’m shouting in the middle of Rockaway Beach and there’s a man on the promenade with absolutely nothing but a hole in the side of his head.

  Richard spotted him, then turned to me solemnly and said, “I wept that I had no cell phone, and then I met a man who had no ear.”

  I burst out laughing, and as I doubled over there came a shout: “We’ve got her!”

  Turns out that a resourceful production coordinator had taken it upon herself to check at Ione’s brother’s apartment, and sure enough, there she was, sleeping on the sofa. She had no idea we were looking for her. The coordinator drove Ione to the location, she slipped into her wardrobe, and the production continued as though this mishegoss never happened. I shudder to think that had no-ear guy not stopped me cold, I’d’ve booked that other actress and never gotten to make a movie with Ione Skye.

  Once principal photography was finished, I had to wait till I got a few more jobs, just to make enough to get the film out of postproduction. Our final snafu was when a sound-editing house in Hollywood that we hired on the cheap went into bankruptcy, trapping our film behind closed office doors. Our reconnaissance of the sound house had revealed only a mildly vigilant receptionist between us and our film elements. Once again, Richard sweetly volunteered to sleep with her to regain our stuff. It turned out to be unnecessary, though; in the end Richard only had to distract her while I pretended to use the bathroom but in fact made off with our finished edits.