Crane (17 page)

M*A*S*H
star Alan Alda was everything my dad was not. He was an Emmy Award–winning actor on a popular program who expanded his career into writing and directing films. His career seemed to be heading down a road whose on-ramp wasn’t even on my dad’s map. It might have been easy for me to say, “Hey, Dad, be Alan Alda,” but the absence of structure and creative trust in anyone except himself constantly haunted him and held him back. My dad could think brilliantly, a kind of writing on his feet, but he didn’t possess the discipline to sit down and put the words on paper, to actually write a script. More important, he lacked the crucial ability to stand back and see the bigger picture and how he might fit into it. He was trapped staring into his own movieola, seeing one disconnected frame at a time.

17

Through 1972 Diane and I still dated and even slept together occasionally. I knew she was seeing other men; she knew I was seeing other women. Life was full of possibilities, but she and I still had a connection that didn’t exist with other people, at least as far as I was concerned.

One day Diane called me at my apartment. We were cordial, dancing around the heaviness of the recent past. I was anticipating an invitation to her latest school art show. I never expected an announcement that she was pregnant. I couldn’t say for sure that I was the father. Nor could Diane. But I was the one she came to for help. It meant Diane still trusted me. I was the beacon in the storm.

Most women knew someone who knew someone who could direct them to a sympathetic physician who would perform a clandestine abortion. We were still a year before
Roe v. Wade
. Diane made several phone calls and through her grapevine found a clinic in South Los Angeles. On a bright Southern California day, I drove her to a dingy, single-story structure that had the look of a temporary office set up on a construction site. The building, the street, the industrial neighborhood were washed out under the relentless sun. The place lacked the open, honest, and unabashed energy of the Free Clinic in Venice where Diane and I had gone in better days for her Pap smears.

Paperwork was signed, and a payment in the amount of $500 cash was made, which was the bulk of my ready capital. Diane was led away. The operation was to take place in a back room, of course. We were strangers in a strange land, in primal circumstances such as these two middle-class young adults had never experienced.

Waiting for Diane’s return, I thought of this moment as another big step in my education. I still felt responsible and cowardly for making our marriage disappear, but I was glad Diane had chosen me as her companion on this sordid adventure. My practical assistance—I had a car and an
apartment and some cash—eased the situation, yes, but, over and above that, Diane had chosen me to help, knowing not only that she could count on me to provide it but also that it would remain our secret. At least until now. Sitting in that illegal abortion clinic, a gloomy hallway separating me from the woman I still loved and respected, I didn’t care whether I was the father or not. I just wanted her to get through this somber affair and get the hell out of this place. Diane was not encouraged to stay for a long recovery period; after what seemed like only a few minutes, I helped her dress and supported her as she walked groggily to my car. I never wanted to see this part of town again. I was relieved to leave the clammy darkness behind us as I drove the sun-bleached streets to the one-bedroom apartment I was renting on Dorothy Street in Brentwood. I kept glancing over at Diane as she slept in the passenger seat to make sure she was alright. We’d decided she would retreat to my apartment for the weekend. No one was to know where she was.

It was Diane’s decision alone to abort. I was not consulted. Although we never discussed it, we both knew that motherhood and the pursuit of a career in art didn’t mix. At twenty-one, Diane had a greater love for making art than for this unborn child. Her ambition and her ego outweighed her maternal instincts at that point in her life. I would never be comfortable with the abortion, but ultimately it wasn’t my body; it wasn’t my decision. I helped someone I loved survive a scary, lonely, and very long weekend.

Diane and I would continue to see each other off and on, but now our shared history pulled us apart as much as it brought us together. We were traveling along different paths but—like Gatsby, who could always see the blinking green light at the end of Daisy’s dock—I knew Diane and I would have a connection forever.

18

In 1972 I was in my third and final year at USC. I was feeling confident that I wasn’t going to become GI Bob because the draft was winding down. It ended completely with the close of June 1973. I was still fascinated with film and filmmakers, but I was having problems with my other classes. Basically, I was underperforming in everything but my performing arts curriculum, and the notion that I still had to take a biology course or some kind of math class to graduate made me feel like I was back in high school.

FC Enterprises, my license plate frame business with Chris Fryer, was humming along, and Chris and I had made several road trips that were an important part of my self-discovery. We would get in the car and set out for college towns—Boulder, Colorado; Laramie, Wyoming; Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I was meeting new people and going to places I never dreamed of visiting. In a weird way I was mirroring my dad’s wanderings around the country doing his play. The big difference was that the closest I ever got to getting lucky on the road was chatting up a couple of lookers in the Burger Barn in Beaver, Utah. All Chris and I got, for all our Hollywood magic, were some flirty looks followed by an escort to the county line by four guys in need of some serious acne remediation in a souped-up Camaro. It was a little too reminiscent of
Easy Rider,
and I kept a keen eye in the rearview mirror for some toothless guys with a shotgun in a pickup truck.

What I did learn from these trips was how to deal with rejection, how to overcome objections, and how to walk cold into someone’s office and make a pitch, experiences that would help me later in life. But in those early lessons I was guided not by my dad but by Chris’s. David Fryer taught me how to pick up a phone and try to sell complete strangers something they had no idea they desperately needed. Attending the University of Dave was a very important part of my education.

So was spending days and days in a car with Chris as we planned how we were going to usher in the next new wave in American cinema. We analyzed films between Madison and Chicago. We tossed around screenplay ideas between Berkeley and Eugene. We made each other laugh till we cried. Our road trips were so much fun I would have done them without a purpose.

During the early 1970s the two of us had also become great observers of the ascendant star of Jack Nicholson.
Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces,
and
Carnal Knowledge
were big, important films, at least to us. Jack represented an honesty, an abandon that I had seen elsewhere only in old Marlon Brando films. Nicholson crying in front of his paralyzed father in
Five Easy Pieces
was a landmark moment for me. It was a shocking and spellbinding scene. How could you be a man and allow yourself to show emotion like that in front of millions of people? I was stunned by it, but I felt nothing but admiration. Ultimately I wanted to be like that character. I wanted to be that honest and open with other people. That particular scene spoke to me about my relationship with my dad, because except when I was a really young kid I could never cry in front of him. I wouldn’t allow myself to be that exposed. Seeing Nicholson do that was a revelation.

The semester after the release of
Five Easy Pieces
Chris and I took a class at USC called The Film Heroes of the ’30s and ’60s taught by screenwriter Steven Karpf, and we had the idea of teaming up to interview Jack Nicholson as the “antihero” for the ages. It never occurred to us that a couple of tyros from Tarzana and USC film school might not be able to talk to Jack Nicholson for their class project. We just didn’t know any better. Hell, we’d been told no by curmudgeonly gift shop buyers in college bookstores all over this great land, but we still managed to sell them license frames. So even though we’d heard the word
no
umpteen times, it just hadn’t made that much of an impression. We weren’t deterred by the word. We weren’t put off by the word. We just stepped around it, coming at the target from a different direction.

I had seen Jack once on a film panel at USC, and at that point in his career he was a great supporter of film, foreign cinema, and up-and-coming filmmakers. He’d been to the Cannes Film Festival with his directorial debut,
Drive, He Said,
but he was still accessible enough that he could be persuaded to make an appearance at a college. This was well before the curtain of opportunity closed for nobodies to get near Jack Nicholson.

Talking to Jack Nicholson was remarkably easy. Through a family connection of Chris’s we got what turned out to be Jack’s home phone number, though we didn’t know it at the time. I dialed it, and damned if the guy himself didn’t answer the phone on the second ring. I knew who it was, but I still asked for Mr. Nicholson just to be polite. He asked, “Who’s calling?” and I introduced myself and launched into my pitch for an interview. To our incredible surprise and elation, Jack Nicholson agreed to sit down with us and talk film. It was absolutely unreal. Chris and I were bouncing off the walls.

Jack invited us up to his house on Mulholland Drive. To illustrate how different the world was in 1972, there was no gate on the driveway—the same driveway Jack shared with his next-door neighbor, Marlon Brando. We rolled up to the open front door and were escorted into the two-story ranch house as Michelle Phillips, Jack’s girlfriend at the time, passed us in the foyer. Chris and I exchanged looks, trying to be cool, as we stepped down into the living room. We were in a different world.
There was a large, plush, brown suede couch opposite the wall of windows that overlooked Franklin Canyon and Los Angeles. The house was comfortable, lived-in. I felt pretty much at ease even though I was about to meet one of my film heroes. Jack came down the stairs wearing a navy blue bathrobe with a bat pin on the lapel. He might have just gotten out of bed, although it was well past lunchtime. As I discovered over the next several hours spent talking about film, Jack’s upcoming projects, his past experiences, and the future of cinema, Jack wasn’t wearing anything under that robe as he inadvertently flashed me several times.

After finally switching off the tape recorder, we took a few commemorative photos—for our benefit, not Jack’s—and left the house on cloud 99. We were so juiced that Chris almost killed us, spinning out his Porsche on a Mulholland curve and doing a 360 into a cloud of dust. We came to a stop between a telephone pole and the edge of a cliff. As the dust settled we could hear our pounding hearts, and then laughed like lunatics. Needless to say, we got As in that class.

Serendipitously, after that first interview, Chris and I, separately and together, began bumping into Jack around L.A. I saw him at a Rolling Stones concert, and we exchanged pleasantries. My date, Barbara Stephens, who had been my government teacher at Taft High School, was suitably impressed. Chris ran into Jack at an antiwar/pro-McGovern rally at UCLA. Jack was always where the action was.

Because these chance meetings made us think we were becoming pals, we did the only logical thing—we decided to write a book about our new best friend. There had never been a book about Jack Nicholson, and we felt it was high time and that we were just the guys to do it. Frankly, in 1972 the name Jack Nicholson wasn’t yet on the American public’s radar screen. On more than one occasion when I mentioned the idea I was told, “Gee, Bobby, I didn’t know you were that interested in golf.”

Before proceeding we called Jack and asked his permission. Amazingly, he gave us the thumb’s up, though to this day I think he felt nothing would ever come of it and he was merely humoring a couple of twenty-year-old film nuts. Chris and I immediately drew up a list of all the people who had worked with Jack whom we were interested in talking to. Everyone from Roger Corman, Bruce Dern, Ann-Margret, and Monte Hellman to Mike Nichols, Robert Evans, Bob Rafelson, and Dennis Hopper was on that list. Then we started making phone calls. A million phone calls to agents, publicists, assistants, anyone with a connection, and
if my cold-calling experience ever came in handy, this was the time. Sometimes we failed to secure the subject in question because of time constraints, distance, or just an abiding orneriness, but most of the time when we said Jack had okayed the project those restraints fell away.

Chris and I then spent over two years interviewing writers, actors, directors, and producers, and we even managed to get Jack to sit down for a second long interview. We drove sixteen hours nonstop from L.A. to Taos, New Mexico, to interview Dennis Hopper when we got the call that he had a small opening in his schedule to talk to us. His assistant, Ed Gaultney, met us at the Dennis Hopper Art Gallery in Taos when we raggedly came in off the road. He offered us what he described as “primo grass,” but we were really looking for authentic New Mexican cooking, which we found at La Fonda in downtown Taos, where we immediately fell under the spell of homemade sopapillas.