Saturday, February 17, 2018

Bob de Niro, Meryl, and I

After tiring of the rock star's life in my early 30s, I did the sensible thing, and decided to become a movie star instead. I enrolled in an acting class, and found that I was awful at acting, but do you suppose I allowed that to slow me down any more than my inability to sing or play a musical instrument had kept me from aspiring to rock stardom? Then, a few months later, I figured out The Trick. If you go on stage as yourself pretending to be someone else (that is, the person you’re portraying), you’ll be stiff and inhibited, an embarrassment to yourself and a disappointment to your audience. What you have to learn to do is leave yourself in the dressing room, and go on stage as your character. Learning to do this turned out to be easier than to play sixteenth-notes with my bass drum foot. 

It wasn’t long before I was one of the most in-demand young actors in town, even though I didn’t have what is known in the trade as a head shot — a glossy 8 by 10 photograph in which I was unrecognisably more handsome than in real life. One afternoon at a busy photocopy place in West Hollywood I found myself behind a frumpy woman of maybe 50 in the slow-moving queue. Noticing the photograph of a gorgeous young woman she had in hand, Imagining it might flatter her (one gets half her genes from Mama), I asked if the GYW were her daughter. If looks could kill! “No,” she replied icily, “it’s me.” 

Through my friend Edy Williams, the faded starlet and exhibitionist known for making a spectacle of herself every year outside the Oscars, I got an agent, who in about a week had my phone ringing off the hook. The first role I was offered was in nothing less than Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. The casting director wanted me to play Chub, the autistic, morbidly obese love child of President Lincoln and Sally Hemmings, earlier the secret girlfriend of Thomas Jefferson. But the role would require me to gain a great deal of weight. Being vain, and having endured the agony of pudginess at age eight, when my parents had to buy me special “husky” jeans, I demurred. Ultimately, Bob de Niro, still puffy from Raging Bull, got the part, and in fact was nominated for Best Weight Gain at the following year’s Oscars, outside which Edy, by now in her waning 50s, and not recognisable as the leering, Raquel Welch-maned brunette temptress in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, wore a dog and a form-fitting transparent gown made of hardened Vaseline.

I was also asked to co-star with Meryl Streep in Snip, the 2006 musical biopic about Lorena Bobbitt. I had been an avid fan of Meryl’s work since her performance in A Hard Day's Night decades before, but was iffy doing naked sex scenes with her, or, even worse, with her body double, who wasn’t exactly Edy Williams. Eventually, they were able to persuade Tom Cruise to take the part. Though I am far from comfortable with his, or anyone else’s, being a Scientologist, I had to agree that Tommy was wonderful in the role. 

Only three years ago, I had another chance to act with Meryl, in the little-seen Ricki and The Flash, about a middle-aged woman who refuses to relinquish her own dreams of rock stardom even though they embarrass her grown children and accountant. I was going to play the gorgeous, much younger fan with whom Meryl-as-Ricki cheated on her boyfriend, played by Rick Springfield. Once again, though, I was iffy about the love scenes, especially after learning they would be three-ways, with Rick included. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’d felt a kinship with Rick since learning that he was a fellow depression sufferer, and had pleasant memories of an elevator ride in the famous and iconic Capitol [Records] Tower in around 1973, when I shared the elevator with two sniffling under-assistant West Coast promotion man types. Rick Springfield was newly signed to Capitol. The shorter of my fellow passengers marvelled, “You know, I think Rick’s prettier than any woman at Capitol.” To which the larger, to my great delight, responded, “Not prettier than [Name Withheld],” my girlfriend, who was a Capitol publicist at the time. 

They didn’t know who I was. But of course sometimes I don’t know who I am.

Eventually, after playing Agememnon, son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope of Mycenae, brother of Menelaus, and husband of Clytemnestra, in Pixar's animated 1998 version of The Iliad, I became one of Hollywood's most in-demand voice actors. I preferred voice work because I was never asked either to gain or lose weight, and could turn up at the studio in the tracksuits I'd taken to wearing after noting how good many of Tony's minions looked in them in The Sopranos
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