A Curious Mind (23 page)

He did another thing that caught my attention. As the pre-movie food was being served, President Bush got a tray for himself, put his food on it, and then sat down at a table all alone. He didn't seem to need his folks around him. That table filled up, of course. But I thought that was pretty impressive. President Bush stayed for the whole movie.

The only disappointing part of the evening had to do with a small gift I had for President Bush. I brought him a ball cap from the TV show
Friday Night Lights
. President Bush grew up in Odessa, Texas, of course, and I thought he would get a kick out of it.

So I was standing in line to go through security at the White House gate, and I was so excited about the hat, so I
showed it to the security officers. “The president is from Odessa, Texas, and I brought him this hat from
Friday Night Lights
as a gift,” I said, “I'm going to give it to him.”

I thought that would make everyone smile.

Boy was I wrong. They looked at me. They looked at the hat. They took the hat from me. They put it through a couple of different machines. A couple more people examined it, inside and out.

Then someone nodded and said to me, “You won't be handing the hat to the president. We'll give the hat to the president for you.”

I would have been better off not saying anything, and just wearing the hat into the White House on my own head.

I never saw the hat again. I did tell President Bush about it—and I hope at some point someone handed it to him.

In the early 1990s, I routinely tried to sit down with Michael Jackson. We would call his office a couple of times a year and ask for a meeting, invite him over. He wasn't interested.

Then, all of a sudden, he said yes. It wasn't clear why, although this was the period we were doing movies like
Parenthood
and
Kindergarten Cop
and
My Girl
, which were family-friendly, and I had heard that Jackson was interested in doing movies like that himself.

When the day arrived, his advance people came up to the office first. There was a lot of excitement—as you might imagine—and then Jackson appeared.

Jackson was already known at that point for those shy, slightly unusual gestures of his. But there was none of that. He seemed like a totally normal person—although he was wearing the gloves, the white gloves.

I was a Michael Jackson fan, of course—you couldn't follow music in America in the 1970s and 1980s and not be a fan of Michael Jackson. But I wasn't a crazed fan—so I wasn't particularly nervous. I respected Jackson, I thought he was an amazing talent.

He was about five feet nine inches tall—he was thin, but you could tell he was strong. He stepped into my office and sat down.

“What a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “This is great.”

He was acting normally, so I decided to treat him normally. I had the thought: I'm going to ask him to take off his gloves. Anyone normal coming in from outside would take off their gloves, right?

It could have been the end of the conversation right there.

But I didn't hesitate. I said, “Would you mind taking off your gloves?”

And he did. Simple as that. I thought, He took off the gloves—we're going to be okay.

Michael Jackson was clearly not much of a small-talk person. And to be honest, I didn't know exactly what to talk to him about. I certainly didn't want to bore him.

I asked, “How do you create music?”

And he immediately started to talk about how he creates music—how he composes it, how he performs it, all in a way that was almost scientific.

In fact, his whole manner transformed. When we first started talking, he had that high, slightly childish voice people know. But as soon as he started to talk about making music, even his voice changed, and he became another person—it was like a master class, like a professor from Julliard was talking. Melody, lyrics, what the mixing engineer does. It blew my mind.

We did talk a little bit about movies—Jackson had already done amazing videos, including the video for
Thriller
, which was directed by John Landis. It was a curiosity conversation with a touch of business about it.

Although I never met him again, there was nothing odd or uncomfortable about the hour we spent together. I came away with a very different impression of Michael Jackson. It made me feel like he wasn't so much a weird guy, or a collection of weird affectations—he was just someone who struggled with fame. The behavior was somehow environmental. I was so struck by the fact that I could talk to him like an adult, and he talked back like an adult.

I could ask him to take off the gloves, and he'd take off the gloves.

In some interesting ways, Andy Warhol had a lot in common with Michael Jackson. They both had a distinctive physical presence, a physical presence that each had consciously crafted for himself. They both did such impressive, influential work
that simply saying either name conjures a whole style, a whole era. And they were both considered mysterious, enigmatic, almost impenetrable.

I went to meet Andy Warhol in the early 1980s, when I was visiting New York City, during a period when I had gotten the chance to meet a lot of artists, including David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Salvador Dalí, and Roy Lichtenstein. By then, Andy Warhol had become an institution—he did the famous Campbell's soup can silk screens in 1962. I met him at his studio, The Factory. He was wearing his classic black turtleneck.

Two things were interesting to me about Warhol. The first is that he wasn't a brilliant technical artist—he didn't have the skills of, say, Roy Lichtenstein, and he wasn't trying to gain them. For him, the message of the art, the statement, was the most important thing.

And the second thing that was so striking when I met him in person was his absolute refusal to intellectualize his work. He almost didn't want to talk about it. He wasn't just understated. Every question brought the absolute simplest answer.

“Why did you do the portraits of Marilyn Monroe?” I asked.

“I like her,” Warhol said.

We were strolling through The Factory, and there were silk screens everywhere, both finished and in progress.

“Why would you do your art on silk screens?” I asked.

“So we can make many of them,” he said. Just like that—never an elaborate explanation.

Warhol had a reputation for being detached. During that visit to his studio, he was totally with me. He was a little trippy, in that sixties way. “Hey man, let's go over here,” he would say.

And he was a little hard to talk to. But he was easy to hang out with.

I was back in New York City just a few weeks later, and I returned for a second visit.

He told me, “I'm going to go out to Los Angeles and do a
Love Boat
episode.” I thought to myself, What's he talking about? Andy Warhol on
The Love Boat
—with Captain Stubing and Julie McCoy? I couldn't picture it. I thought he was kidding.

“I'm going to act in an episode of
The Love Boat,
” Warhol said. I didn't realize he'd done those kinds of pop culture appearances before. He liked to surprise people. And he did it: He was on a
Love Boat
episode broadcast October 12, 1985, along with Milton Berle and Andy Griffith.

At that second meeting, Warhol said to me, “I didn't realize your partner is Ron Howard. He's Richie Cunningham!”

Warhol had an idea.

“I would love to take a picture of Ron Howard, and do two paintings—a before and an after. I want to take a picture of Ron Howard now, with his handlebar mustache, then I want to shave off the mustache, and I'll do another picture.

“Two of them. One with the mustache. One with no mustache. Before and after.”

I thought immediately of Warhol's dual portraits of Elvis. But I didn't
mention that. I told Warhol I would talk to Ron about it.

I got back to LA and I said to Ron, “Andy Warhol wants to do this thing with you. He wants to do portraits of Ron Howard, before and after. He wants to shave off your mustache.” I was pretty excited.

Ron wasn't excited, he was more baffled than anything. “You know, Brian, I don't really want to shave off my mustache,” he said. “It's part of my identity now. I'm trying to get out of that ‘American boy' identity.”

Okay. I could understand that. Kind of. Not everybody has Andy Warhol asking to do portraits of them, of course. But I also knew how important Ron Howard's grown-up identity was to him—how important it's been to all of us, in fact.

So that was the end of Ron Howard, Before and After. Or so I thought.

Many years later, our movie
Cry-Baby
opened. As had become our habit, Ron Howard and I went to the Westwood Avco theater in Los Angeles on opening night to gauge the popularity of
Cry-Baby
firsthand. The Avco was the theater where there had been lines around the block for
Splash
. That Friday, to see
Cry-Baby
, there were seven people in a theater for five hundred.

Ron and I went home, had a couple of bottles of red wine, and watched
Drugstore Cowboy
to soften the disappointment. Ron had to catch a red-eye flight from LAX back east, so around 10 p.m. he headed out to the airport.

Before he flew out, he called me. He was a little buzzy. He said, “Brian,
I want you to know, I just went in the men's room here at the airport and shaved off my mustache.”

And without thinking about it, I said, “Oh my God, you could have done that for Andy Warhol! Then we could have had two portraits of Ron Howard each worth fifty million.”

These days, of course, Ron's mustache—in fact his full beard—is back. Ron is an icon without a Warhol silk screen.

You probably know Jeff Koons's art. It's fun, it's outsized. He's done huge stainless steel sculptures in the shape of the balloon dogs that clowns make. He rendered an inflatable toy rabbit in the same vivid stainless steel, and it became so well-known that it was reproduced as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

To me, Koons's work is both exuberant and playful. It seems simple, too. But underneath is his rich understanding of history, of art theory.

I first met Jeff Koons twenty years ago, in the early 1990s. As with Warhol, I went to Koons's studio in New York. When you walk into his studio, knowing about the rabbit and the balloon dog, you think, I could do this. When you walk out after having spent a couple hours with Koons, you think, No one could duplicate what he's doing.

Although he worked on Wall Street as a commodities broker as a young man, Koons always wanted to be an artist. But he's not the kind of artist who bangs around his studio in blue jeans. He's
more apt to dress like one of the great directors of the forties or fifties—like George Cukor or Cecil B. DeMille. In slacks and a nice shirt, fashionable and elegant.

He's a study in contrasts. Vocally, he's not loud. But his art and his actions are loud. For instance, in 1991, he married for the first time—to the famous Italian porn actress La Cicciolina. Then they did art together—including pictures in which they both appear naked, or mostly naked.

Koons is an unpretentious man, but he's willing to do risky, even shocking things on behalf of his art. And unlike Warhol, Koons is happy to talk to you about the sources of his art as well as its intellectual principles and historical perspective translated into visual form.

His studio, where he was producing all this dramatic art, felt almost like an expensive, elaborate science laboratory. It was almost antiseptic. He was like the calculating genius, the scientist, thinking and creating.

I went to his studio a second time much more recently—it was in a different place, and it was like the first studio, the science lab, had been taken to a whole new level.

Later, when we started talking about art for the cover of
A Curious Mind
, I suddenly thought of Jeff Koons. What would his approach to curiosity be? What would his approach to a book cover be?

I didn't ask him directly—I passed word through a mutual friend that I would love for him to do a drawing for the book. Word came back that he would definitely do it.

A month later, in the summer of 2014, we met at the Aspen Ideas Festival and I said to him, “I'm so excited you're doing a piece of art for the book!”

He said, “Tell me about the book.”

I described the years of curiosity conversations, the people, the sense I have that I wouldn't have had anything like the kind of life I've had without curiosity. I told him that the point of the book is to inspire other people to see the simple power of curiosity to make their own lives better.

Koons's face lit up. “I understand,” he said. “I love that.”

And the drawing he did for the cover captures what we were talking about—a seemingly simple line drawing of a face that conveys exactly the joy, openheartedness, and excitement that being curious brings.

Perhaps the greatest boxing writer in modern America was Norman Mailer. He was a great writer about many things—Mailer won the National Book Award and two Pulitzers—and also a huge force in America's cultural landscape starting in the 1950s, when he cofounded
The Village Voice
.

When we started working on
Cinderella Man
, the boxing movie that we ultimately got to show to President Bush at the White House, I decided it would be fun and valuable to talk to Mailer about the boxer Jim Braddock and the role of boxing in Depression-era America.

I met Mailer in New York City in 2004. I let him pick the
place—he chose the Royalton Hotel, one of those famous old Midtown hotels that had once been elegant but was a little past its prime. (The Royalton has since been renovated.)