Crane (29 page)

One small perk of writing for
Playboy
was being on the magazine’s comp list. When the mail arrived one day, I immediately noticed the distinctive black cellophane that hardly camouflaged each monthly issue. I ripped it apart like some human Fido, and when I saw Teri Garr’s name on the contents page, I journeyed through the silky paper with trepidation. Would the photograph page facing the interview be blank? Or would it depict Garr destroying a poster of our leader, Comrade Hefner? I arrived
at “20Q.” What I saw shook me to my toes. A dripping-wet Garr stood in all her naked glory, exposing all but the nasty bits while coquettishly smiling from behind a shower curtain in an old-fashioned bathtub. Just a few months earlier, she had berated me about what a dreadful enterprise
Playboy
was, proclaiming Hefner to be the enemy. And now here she was, gracing those very pages not with a conservative headshot but a full-blown attempt at foldout fame, a photograph by Bonnie Schiffman that must have passed muster with Hef.

In what I would call a full-circle event, I interviewed television star Mariska Hargitay. Decades earlier, my dad had interviewed Mariska’s mother, Jayne Mansfield, at her Beverly Hills estate. Now I was meeting Hargitay in the cozy confines of the Mercer Kitchen in New York City’s Soho District. There we sat, the two of us, children of long-gone celebrities (one killed in a horrific automobile accident, the other murdered), and I showed her a photograph of my dad, pant legs rolled up, bare feet in a heart-shaped swimming pool, sticking a KNX radio microphone in the face of a bikini-clad Mansfield. The photo represented an era when Hollywood was a carefree, never-ending search for fun and frivolity. That opening connection was a good icebreaker and led to a fun and enjoyable interview.

The best of all possible scenarios for me was traveling to a film location shoot, doing my “20 Questions” interview with someone I really wanted to spend time with, meeting filmmakers I admired as a bonus, staying at a first-class hotel, discovering a new restaurant in town, and at the end of all that fun having
Playboy
send me a check. A perfect example of that was going to Vancouver, talking to Ashley Judd, meeting director Bruce Beresford, staying at the Sutton Place Hotel, enjoying an Asian fusion dinner, and then getting $3,500 for my troubles.

Those troubles included what happened on the set. I walked onto the location. I saw Ashley. She saw me. Our eyes locked.

“Mr. Crane,” she said, extending her hand.

“Ms. Judd,” I responded with my best ad-lib.

She grabbed two director’s chairs and positioned them right in the middle of the set, with the crew working around us. With our knees touching, I faced the comely actress and the interview began. Her devotion to her craft, her stamina reminiscent of the energizer bunny, and her fearlessness were rapidly apparent. She told me she had been shooting a chase scene on foot all evening and her long khaki pants kept getting
dirty, which was why wardrobe maintained a dozen backups nearby. Director and crew were about to film another take, so Judd excused herself and promptly dropped trou in front of me and everyone else, so we could continue talking and not keep Beresford waiting. I noted both her dedication to her job and the more interesting fact that she was not wearing any underwear.

As a dedicated journalist reacting to the moment, I followed with an improvised line of questioning. “What’s so bad about underwear?”

“It’s uncomfortable. My mother remarked in public that I don’t wear underwear, and it’s followed me ever since.”

For the next ninety minutes, Judd filmed, answered questions with razor-sharp wit, and changed her khakis over and over. I probably should’ve asked Rezek for hazard pay.

John Candy had so many fans at
Playboy
headquarters that even though he’d appeared in the magazine several times Rezek still threw me an assignment for a Candy solo “20 Questions” interview. John and Steve Martin were shooting interior scenes for John Hughes’s
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
at the MGM Studios in Culver City just minutes from 40 Acres, the former home of Stalag 13. John had invited me out to the old lot to watch some filming and make arrangements for our upcoming “20Q.” I was a big Steve Martin fan and also was intrigued to observe writer-director Hughes in action. As I sauntered around the MGM lot, passing soundstages that had seen the glory days of Hollywood stars like Tracy and Hepburn, Gable and Lombard and had housed sets from film works like
Wizard of Oz
and
Gone with the Wind
as well as television stalwarts like
Combat!
and
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
I rounded a corner and spied a large man in complete devil regalia—horns, red cape and tights, red makeup—having a smoke outside the soundstage. This image of John Candy is forever burned into my brain. John was waiting for the blinking red light at the stage door signifying that filming was in progress to turn off. Studio employees walked by, some yelping with glee when they recognized John.

“Hey, Satan, how’s it going?” called out a passing grip from another production.

John saw me suppressing a laugh. “Could you have caught me on a worse day?” he asked sheepishly.

“No, you look good. Very natural.” I was laughing out loud now.

I followed John onto the stage, where they were filming the scene in
which he drives the wrong way between two eighteen-wheelers. In the scene Martin looks over at Candy as they are about to meet their maker, and John appears to him as a devil. The shot would be on the screen for fewer than three seconds, but it took hours to film. I was enthralled watching Hughes, Candy, and Martin work, but the process is mind-numbingly boring to most detached observers.

During a break, I met both Martin and Hughes. This was one of the few times John ever introduced me. Steve remarked, “I recognize that name.” That was the extent of our interaction. Hughes was in the process of consuming his fifteenth cup of coffee and twenty-fifth cigarette of the day. He was the author of the screenplay, but he behaved on set as if the whole thing was being made up as they went along. He also gave Kubrick a run for the title of “exposed film king,” tweaking each take with a note to his costars as if the scene were the most important in the film, not just three seconds’ worth.

The solemnity of the process aside, the trio worked well together and produced what would turn out to be my favorite John Candy film. John was much funnier off camera than most of the kings and queens of humor I was meeting and interviewing. He enjoyed a good time while being self-deprecating and making light of public situations where he was often the object of worship. He completely understood the Fellini Excursion thing, recognizing that much of show business was silly and unimportant.

After completing work on
Planes, Trains and Automobiles,
John was going to spend a few weeks at his farm north of Toronto. He was going to be flying from L.A. to Toronto on Air Canada, and I managed to coerce
Playboy
into purchasing a first-class ticket for me to accompany him. That gave me five hours of downtime with John, and I took full advantage of it. He was my captive interviewee, and I was happily his captive audience. In between bites of hors d’oeuvres and flowing rum and Cokes, John gave me one of the funniest Q&A’s ever.

“For what food product would you consider being a spokesman?” I asked.

“Brussels sprouts,” was John’s reply. “Sure, they give you gas, but they’re good for you. Nobody pushes Brussels sprouts. They’re forgotten.”

“How do you juggle being a father and a party monster?”

“You’ve got to teach your kids when they’re young. Show them how to mix that drink and work that blender. How to keep things real cool on ice. Keep that fridge stocked. How to use a credit card.”

That was the shortest five-hour flight I ever took.

28

After three years paying the reduced apartment rent, thanks to Chuck, and scraping together some savings, Kari and I approached our bank’s loan officer with the intent of chasing the American Dream. We were going to purchase our first home. Suits behind desks scrutinized the assets and salaries of these two questionable, freelancing, high-risk citizens as if we were trying to obtain papers to travel out of East Germany during the cold war. My mom and Chuck pushed the Sisyphean down payment over the top when they loaned us some money to complete the $30,000 down on a fourteen-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, 1951-built bungalow five minutes from our apartment in a section of Van Nuys where the sidewalks were engraved with a 1926 date of pour.

Our home to be had simple front and back yards with lawns that would become Kari’s open-air landscaping laboratory. I was thirty-five, married, with a house and a cat. Just a few years earlier, I could never have imagined putting enough money together to leave my mom and Chuck’s house, let alone being married or owning a home. I hadn’t ever even considered not being a lifelong renter and not being involved in sporadic, infatuated relationships of no real consequence. Instead, I now had the empowering feeling that I was not little Bobby anymore. Grown-ups owned stuff, and Kari and I owned a house just like my mom and Chuck did, or my dad and Patti had. I felt as though I had entered the mature arena, and while I may have had bad seats, I was in and I could appreciate what the ticket holders had achieved to get here. I will always have Kari to thank for that.

In the first year of our pride of ownership, Kari and I went room by room ripping out the remnants of the Segals, the old couple who had previously kept the key to our castle. Green carpet—gone. Natural wood floors exposed, sanded, and polyurethaned. Light fixtures resembling a 1890s San Francisco bordello—gone. New, hip, track and bare metallic
lighting, in. Bathroom fixtures and toilets from a Romanian prison—gone. American Standard and Kohler, in. But the most revolutionary change came to the grounds of our kingdom. Front and back lawns—gone. Kari had an aversion to water-sucking sod and set about transforming our yard into a lush and wild mosaic of lantana, Mexican and aromatic sage, rosemary, statice, and several crepe myrtle trees. There was society garlic and tall wild grasses whose gold and maroon heads waved seductively in the wind. A flagstone walkway wove through the greenery, replacing a straight concrete approach to the front door. Kari’s laboratory was distinctive. When you rounded the corner of our sedate little cul-de-sac you saw mirror-image rows of manicured suburban sprawl with the kaleidoscopic exception, halfway down the block, of the oasis that was the botanical riot of our yard. Hummingbirds zoomed, butterflies flitted, and bees worked the never-ending parade of blooms industriously, their pollen sacs filled to bursting. Our yard was tinglingly alive.

Kari and I enjoyed being a married couple, faced with daily decisions, working together, solving problems, making love, feeding the cat, working in our garden, reading the newspaper. Together. And while we did not inhabit a million-dollar piece of art in Venice or a trendy loft downtown, it was our world and it was almost perfect.

One hot summer San Fernando Valley night, Kari woke me up and said, “Feel this.” I thought, “Fun, mischievous bedroom games on a sultry night.” She had awakened out of a dream in which she’d visited James Garner in the hospital. We loved James Garner. I don’t know whether “Rockford” had put his hand on her breast, but something woke her out of that hospital-room dream. I put my hand on her left breast and felt a small, well-defined lump. If life is one big roller coaster ride, we had chugged to the top of the first big hill and were about to plunge headlong into a stomach-churning descent. We didn’t sleep the rest of that night.

Because all this was pre-Internet and pre–cell phone, Kari and I, working from our two landline telephones in our spare bedrooms cum offices, took turns contacting anyone we knew in the medical field or who could connect us to someone who could connect us to someone with knowledge, an opinion or, at the very least, another telephone number in an attempt to find the appropriate doctor. Sometimes while Kari was talking to someone about the lump I would sneak down the hallway to peek at her as she struggled to maintain her businesslike demeanor in this new
medical whirlpool. It was especially challenging to Kari because this was about her body and for the first time she didn’t have control over her own life. How could she have a lump in her breast? Yes, it was probably just a benign cyst that we were hyperventilating over. Benign. The word
cancer
was never mentioned by either of us. Kari was a physically active, dietconscious, hard-working thirty-five-year-old woman who didn’t have time to deal with lumps, cysts, or any other time wasters. She only had time for making yards look beautiful; creating odd, whimsical art; overseeing her mother’s erratic life; and loving, being frustrated with, and guiding her malleable husband.