Crane (25 page)

There was an uncomfortable silence, so I continued. “My friend and I wrote a book about Jack Nicholson. We interviewed him a couple of times.”

“Oh, I like some of his films,” Kari said, breaking her silence.

“Yeah, Chris almost drove us off a cliff after our first interview session, we were so excited.” I punctuated the rest of the call with nervous laughter.

Kari said she had to complete a blueprint over the next couple of days, but the weekend would work for us to get together. She said she’d come to Venice and we could figure out what to do from there.

Late Saturday afternoon, after feeding Mies, I watched through the front window as an aged beige Volkswagen Bug parked on the one-way single-lane road opposite Carroll Canal. A slim woman wearing glasses, her dark hair longer than shoulder length, emerged from the car and focused her gaze on D. J. and Toby’s house. I ducked out of view and crawled into D. J.’s tight studio space, where a large, light-filled, vibrant canvas of two women in a swimming pool dominated the room. There was a knock at the front door. I counted to three, fixed a smile to my face, and approached the door.

“Hi, Kari.” I pronounced it
Carrie,
as in the Stephen King novel, with bubbling enthusiasm as I swung the door open. Several years later Kari decided to change the pronunciation of her name to
Kăr ee,
which she felt was more in keeping with her Scandinavian lineage.

“Bob?” She correctly pronounced my name.

“Come on in,” the consummate host said.

My immediate impression was that Kari was much younger than I—say, a college student—though it would be revealed later that we were only a year apart in age. She wore boots, tight jeans, and a colorful tie-dyed blouse. She didn’t possess the usual Rubensesque figure that I was accustomed to think of as my “type,” but she struck me as sexy, as if she could take off her glasses and shake out her thick hair and drop the librarian look at any moment. We shook hands, and I thought of my dad’s advice: always make physical contact with a woman as soon as possible.

Since Kari knew D. J. and Toby’s house well, I didn’t have to take her on a tour. She did ask to look at what D. J. was working on. As we studied the blitzkrieg of color on the canvas, I asked Kari whether she found time to do art. She did smallish pencil drawings that played off what she referred to as her “out of the mainstream” sense of humor. I told her I would love to see some of her work. I have always enjoyed quirky.

Kari said she had heard a good review on KCRW for a new documentary called
The Atomic Café
and had checked the
L.A. Times
to find it was playing at the nearby Fox Theatre on Lincoln Boulevard. The film was about nuclear war and the cold war scare of the ’60s when we were grade-schoolers practicing drop drills and learning to “duck and cover.” The film was well made, intercutting good news footage that took us back to a frightful time in our young lives.

Considering that Westwood was chock-full of movie theaters showing big studio films with big stars, this small, independent documentary was
an interesting choice for us to make on our first date, perhaps a good introduction to what our relationship would be—a mostly serious, art-infused life, with occasional doses of humor. Kari felt art and life were serious business. Kari wasn’t a flaky actress type or the next comedienne hopeful taking the stage at Laugh Your Ass Off on open-mike night.

We had a vegetarian dinner afterward, also a preview of things to come. We talked about everything—the Southern California art scene, her drawings and the juried shows her work had appeared in, my magazine work, traveling, friends, family. I found out Kari was involved in feminist issues—marches, writing pamphlets, the Women’s Building downtown—and that her art subtly commented on society’s ills. Kari had started her own landscape design business, competing in what was then a very male world. For her, being a landscape designer meant control, precision, tightness. I found that attractive at that time in my life because I needed structure. I wasn’t out of control, but I lacked my own plan. I was bouncing around, making a few dollars here and there, but I had no kind of blueprint for my future.

My first love, Diane, had gotten married in 1980 to a younger man involved in advertising. Then my best friend, Chris Fryer, had married a beautiful, globetrotting woman named Desly. My other longtime friend, Dave Diamond, had married a woman whose large family came from Utah. My cohorts were out in the world behaving like adults, working and sharing life with another person, paying rent, paying bills, trying to save money, putting a future together. This was big stuff to me. It was grown-up stuff. And yet here I was, a struggling freelance writer, still living at home with no major direction.

Kari represented a framework—she had steady work that she was good at, and she knew what she was doing. She introduced me to the world of plants and all things flora. Kari was also a fine artist with a wacky, understated sense of humor who would draw a half chicken/half cat posing seductively. The sum of these parts was pretty attractive to me. Not to mention she was a handsome woman with an air of elegance in her understated manner. She was my polar opposite.

Back at Carroll Canal, we said goodnight with a quick, businesslike kiss. Kari got in her Bug and proceeded to back into a telephone pole. We both pretended she hadn’t as she pulled away into the night. I was intrigued by Kari, but it was hard to reconcile this new multidimensional woman with what I saw as my dismal living situation. Kari seemed to have
everything going in the right direction. What could I possibly offer her? To wait a week was a less than gentlemanly thing to do, but I did eventually call her again, and we started going out.

Kari never got to meet my dad, of course, but she took notice of the showbiz factor in my family, however slight, which was new to her. Ultimately, like Chuck, Kari paid little attention to the film and television business and was, perhaps, even repelled by it. But like Diane and I, Kari and I enjoyed going to films. We liked live theater as well.

Kari also took me to art galleries, juried shows, and museums on a major scale. That was still a foreign world that I found interesting and mysterious. My first impression of Kari had been that of a college student, and indeed she behaved as if she were a student with a zealous, constant craving for information. I found that challenging and attractive. A friendly competition was in the air between us, but much of the time Kari’s outward confidence dictated it had to be her way or the 405 back to Mom’s.

Kari was renting a tumbledown house in Canoga Park built in the ’60s that was fronted, ironically, with a browned-out, weed-infested lawn. We’d been dating for several months when Kari, whose roommate was vacating her digs, put the offer out for me to move in with her. I felt as if I were standing at the end of a long pier staring at the vast ocean. Kari presented me with a life-altering choice: turn around and run back to the safety of Mom and Chuck’s or, as my friends had done, take a chance and leap into the unfathomable depths. I jumped with glee.

After our first week of cohabitation, it dawned on me that this was the first time I had gone to bed and woken up with a woman for more than one weekend at a stretch. There was a gentle learning curve, a daily sorting out of what was important from what wasn’t in our relationship; how to keep the relationship fresh; and, most important, how to maintain a sense of humor. Kari was the straight man for the most part while I offered up goofiness and tried to lessen the everyday pull of gravity. My dad, the great philosopher, often said when it came to relationships, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

I learned to prioritize in our early days together, concentrating on stepping out of myself and taking care of another person. Living with Kari was my first time experiencing that daily life wasn’t all about me—my goals, my work, my pleasure. I offered my thoughts, opinions, and assistance to a person who had learned early in her life that she was on her own. Kari’s parents were divorced. She felt her father was weak and
removed as a parent, and her mother behaved as if she were Kari’s younger sister.

Respect became part of my new daily bread as well as liking and loving. This was an everyday relationship. The small stuff fell by the wayside and a bigger picture loomed: caring about someone, taking care of her, trusting her, putting our two heads together to come up with decisions. This was very new stuff for me.

Money decisions rose rapidly to the surface. Things got serious at times because day-to-day survival was often tricky. Kari got steady work as a landscape designer because she was creative, talented, and cheap. She worked on her own, a one-person business. But she never knew when the next job would be coming or where it would be, the same scenario for me as a freelancer. So, as in many relationships, money matters took precedence, like when we had to get Kari a newer car because her work took her on the road all across Southern California. For Master Bobby, it wasn’t 100 percent playtime anymore, as my relationship with Diane had been: a steady diet of film, music, and art. The biggest financial difficulty Diane and I ever had was scraping together some cash for dinner and a movie. Now, for the first time, someone was depending on me to produce an income to help with monthly rent and put gasoline in the cars and food on the table.

Kari and I were a team taking on the world, losing our self-centered personalities, working toward common goals. I felt as if I were finally growing up, putting my trust and faith in another person and behaving like an adult. Kari, though a year younger than I, was already a grown-up, serious, dedicated to her designs, art, and life. With Diane, it had all been about laughter and the pursuit of happiness. Kari’s sense of humor was sporadic, unexpectedly careening from the sedate to the wonderfully silly. We would laugh together at
Late Night with David Letterman, SCTV,
and Monty Python, but laughter wasn’t priority one. I didn’t see this alteration with Kari as a bad thing.

I pitched a set-visit piece to editor Irv Letofsky at the
L.A. Times
’s “Sunday Calendar.” Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis were writing, directing, and starring as the McKenzie brothers in the MGM film
Strange Brew.
Riding the crest of their monstrously successful comedy album, they took a Cheech and Chong–like path to the movies. Kari and I spent a few days in Toronto visiting a former psychiatric hospital where they were filming. I jotted notes and interviewed Thomas and Moranis in their trailers
between setups. The coup for me was meeting and interviewing Max Von Sydow, who took a supporting role in the film because his children were avid
SCTV
fans, loved the Bob and Doug McKenzie characters, and threatened to disown him as a father if he declined the role.

The highlight of anything I ever did involving show business was watching Kari’s face explode with delight and awe as she shook hands with the towering Von Sydow. This wasn’t some comedic mug; this was Ingmar Bergman’s leading man. This was as important a moment for Kari as meeting Fred Astaire had been for Diane. When Von Sydow was called by the assistant director back to the set for rehearsal, the elated Kari returned to her stoic self.

Letofsky liked the piece and gave it three pages in the all-important “Sunday Calendar” section. I had grown up reading the calendar, anxiously waiting for and then devouring the film reviews and articles by Charles Champlin and Kevin Thomas. To join their ranks with my own article gave me a real sense of fulfillment. Thomas, Moranis, and MGM were pleased with the press attention, Kari met Max Von Sydow, and I was in the
Los Angeles Times.

After we’d resided in Canoga Park for six months, an apartment became available at Chuck’s twelve-unit, single-story, ’50s-style complex in a leafy section of Van Nuys. The wood floors, fireplace, patio, pool, and the huge savings in rent closed the deal for us. We could save money and live in a villagelike environment where Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg had been visitors decades earlier. We now shared our second place together, but the first that was uniquely ours.

This was a huge commitment, at least on my part. We had been together approximately a year. The word
marriage
kept finding its way into our conversations. Internally, I had kicked and screamed for years against growing up even as my best friends, Fryer and Diamond, had transformed their lives and embraced adulthood. Their former selves had receded, and their commitment to a new life shocked, scared, and impressed the hell out of me. I was thirty-one years old, and I wanted to emulate my closest pals, and Kari was the right person to do it with. I got serious about everything. I figured I had to act seriously to be serious about initiating change and growth. Marriage was the next logical step.

Kari and I tied the knot on June 25, 1983. We produced our own event as if we were the first two people ever to marry. For a location we chose the El Encanto Hotel in the green hills above Santa Barbara. The
hotel was an alluring collection of 1920s bungalows set amid lush foliage. The El Encanto had hosted hundreds of weddings and I’m sure a multitude of midafternoon honeymoons. It had an old Hollywood feel, and I could easily imagine the glamorous set ensconced there for the weekend.

Fifty friends and family made the seventy-five-minute drive from Los Angeles and gathered by the fishpond surrounded by an arbored courtyard as we exchanged our nonsectarian vows. Kari wore a smart white lace dress—no train—and I sported a tan three-piece suit. We found our simply designed rings—reminding me of twisted metal rope now—for under $100 at a Native American shop in Burbank. Our guests looked on under a lightly falling mist as Kari and I exchanged those rings and a few humble words of devotion. We nervously looked into each other’s eyes, understanding that we were not the couple made in heaven but looking forward to linking our disparate talents and problems and trying to create a new identity together. We trusted that the sum of our whole was greater than our individual parts. We would work with each other’s weaknesses and try to turn them into strengths. We were scared, but the idea of change for me was exhilarating. I was the ultimate design project for Kari, a young Frankenstein’s monster with thinning hair, and she was the monster’s bride, a challenging, self-reliant force that never totally trusted men.