Crane (43 page)

I cringed. I have always disliked the phrase “in the business.” Hell, everybody in Los Angeles—pool cleaners, car wash attendants, bartenders, waiters, realtors—is just waiting to be discovered. Leslie’s estranged husband, Mark, was in the business—a producer of reality-based television programs. Everyone had a hand in. I was just a freelance hack. I immediately went on the defensive and became a wiseass. “We’re all in the business out here, aren’t we?”

Well, that was a conversation ender. After a few uncomfortable seconds, Leslie poked through the dead air and suggested we get together the following Wednesday. I recovered, dusting off the layer of inferiority that had settled on me, and enthusiastically exclaimed, “I’d love to meet you for dinner. Looking forward to it.”

The following week I sped north on Interstate 5 to Santa Clarita, the newer, more upscale version of the San Fernando Valley. I pulled my beige Mazda pickup truck into the driveway of Leslie’s rented house. My well-traveled Audi 5000 looked nicer but had become nerve-rackingly unreliable, and I didn’t want to have to call AAA on our first date. I sat in the driveway for a minute with the hope that tonight I could shed a skin and begin anew. I was a forty-four-year-old widower with a tortoiseshell cat named Nutmeg and nothing to lose.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” said Leslie as she opened the front door—cheerily, but with a touch of playful sarcasm that I admired. I also admired her shapely legs and her smart skirt. I rarely saw women contemporaries in anything but pants. This was already something new and exciting.

“I would have brought you flowers, but I don’t know you,” I said, drawing a laugh from her.

The petite Leslie introduced me to Jack the dog and took me on a
short tour of a well-worn living space. Jack was very happy to have a new creature to sniff.

“Where’s your daughter?”

Leslie explained that both Meagan and Jack went back and forth between their father and mother.

“Shall we go eat?” I asked.

We drove for hours, repeatedly checking in with hostess desks all over Santa Clarita. An hour wait here, ninety minutes there. In our relationship positions, estranged and postmortem, respectively, Leslie and I had both forgotten how important Valentine’s Day is to the eatery economy. We talked nonstop and easily broke the seal on the relaxation phase of our fresh encounter. Leslie’s sweetness and good nature made me want to forget all the recent years of hyper-gravity that had flattened my life. I wanted to feel good again, with something, someone, to look forward to.

Finally, we found an open table for two in the bar area of a TGI Fridays. Not exactly the culinary experience we had hoped for, but we didn’t care. After two hours we were hungry and wanted to continue our talkathon face-to-face. I asked Leslie to order for us—fried this and that, bar food, wine for her, and gin and tonic for me. We talked about Meagan, Kari, Mark, John Candy, marriage, cancer, death, “the business,” northern California, Connecticut, our families—all with a throw-it-to-the-wind ease and lack of restraint that was refreshing and emancipating. The skirt made sense. Leslie was, fundamentally, an East Coast woman who had never actually lived there. She had familial roots in Connecticut but had been born and raised in northern California. She had attended a San Diego college for a year but had left school to work and earn her own money. Initially, she had visions of becoming an agent. She got a job as a secretary to a talent manager based on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But after two years of selling performers like meat, she left and took work in television production, first as a production assistant, then as assistant director, stage manager, postproduction supervisor, and now switcher. She had assisted directors Marty Pasetta and Jeff Margolis on the fifty-ninth and sixty-first Academy Awards broadcasts. Leslie loved talking about people she encountered in “the business,” like her best friend, producer Suzy Friendly. We shared a shorthand as we regaled each other with the hoots and horrors of the business of show, emphasizing the excesses, egos, and outlandishness of the whole enterprise. We nodded with recognition as one of us made a point or got to the punch line of a story. I took
comfort in the familiarity of our separate but interlocking experiences around celebrities and film and television production.

Leslie placed laughter high on her daily list of things to do. She was attractive, with a conservative streak in her clothing and appearance. She was a mother raising an only child. She had a solid work ethic that drove her life. She couldn’t stand being dependent upon anyone, whether it was parents, husband, or friends.

After four hours of nonstop conversation, Leslie said that she had to be on the
Drew Carey
set the next morning so, sadly, we had to curtail the evening. I didn’t have to be anywhere. My job was to feed Nutmeg, originally Kari’s cat, now my fourteen-year-old companion. I also had to try to get interview work. Leslie had a place to go. I didn’t. I was discomfited by what I felt was a big disparity in our working lives.

By the time our evening came to a close it was the day after Valentine’s Day. Restaurants everywhere had totaled their gross receipts. I drove back to Leslie’s calm suburban neighborhood. We walked to her front door, stood in the first silence of the evening, and looked at each other. We embraced and kissed, a short kiss with an undeclared promise of more. Jack barked as Leslie quietly closed the door behind her. Suddenly I was aware of the late-night winter chill. I got in my truck and gazed at Leslie’s house. I had just met a woman who I could tell was admired by coworkers, friends, and family. She had earned their trust, respect, and dedication through her goodness, honesty, and determination. She loved her daughter, her younger brothers, Michael and David, and her divorced parents. Family was everything to Leslie.

As much as we shared, there were dissimilarities: Leslie was married, though separated; I was single. She had a daughter; I had a cat. She had a real job in the morning; I dealt with the fantasy world of editors and publicists. She had a steady paycheck; I had no idea when my next check might arrive in the mail. She liked Seal; I liked the Beatles. She was seven years younger.

The Mazda’s engine turned over.

What if? What if this could work? What if Leslie is the next woman in my life? I knew one thing for sure—Leslie was someone I wanted to know.

43

The new millennium began with a hope of happiness and peace of mind and body, which for me was a one-way road out of the burg of death and sadness. Leslie was looking for a demarcation line from her unpleasant separation and subsequent divorce. She wanted a fresh start, too. Most important, she wasn’t going to raise Meagan in a shack-up situation. Leslie wanted the legitimacy of marriage to help build solidarity in our new family.

Leslie and I got married on July 15, 2000, after a four-year courtship. The low-key ceremony took place at the Westin Maui a couple of hundred feet from the Pacific Ocean and was well attended by family and friends from as far away as New Jersey and New York. Leslie and I exchanged rings during the simple ceremony—a slim, platinum band with six small baguette diamonds for her, a silver and platinum band for me. I thought of Kari and how we had purchased our plain rings at an Indian craft store. I shared cocktails with Leslie’s father and our stepfathers before the ceremony, the first and only time these dearly beloved were gathered together. Many attendees packaged the nuptials with their own vacations in Hawaii. We hired a saxophone player as entertainment and scrapped all the insipid pre- and postwedding photographs. I didn’t need anyone telling me to “have fun, smile!” I was on Maui, in love, getting married, and surrounded by friends and family.

Alas, we had to return to the mainland, to real life. Nutmeg had joined Kari in the great beyond, and Jack had stayed with Leslie’s ex as part of the divorce, so Leslie and I acquired a six-month-old German shepherd named Chloe from a rescue facility in Burbank, and Leslie,
Meagan, Chloe, and I settled into our new lives together behind a metaphorical white picket fence.

TV’s
E! True Hollywood Story
and A&E’s
Biography
were at their height of popularity at that time, and I took Meagan to the taping of an
E!
episode on John Candy in which I was to be one of the talking heads. I spoke with as much candor as a ten-second snippet would allow. I missed John on a daily basis and knew that had he been alive, he and his family would have been in Hawaii celebrating my nuptials.
E!
was also constantly rerunning a sordid hour episode about my dad, which contained an interview with my sister Karen. She had taped her segment at an unoccupied office down the hall from my dad’s studio at KNX Radio in Hollywood. Karen had told the off-camera interviewer: “Who could have done this? Why would they do this? Everyone loved my dad. … Once the condolence cards and flowers stopped coming, that’s when the sadness started and the realization of it all hit hard. … That wound will never completely heal for me. I suppose there’s really no way that it can.”

Also at this time, like the cyclical cicadas crawling out from the ground after a decade of dormancy, Patti and her son, Scotty, now thirty, emerged
into the ether via the Internet. They started a website that offered the more squalid aspects of my dad’s biography: crime scene photos, autopsy reports, and (drum roll, please) their real little moneymaker: fifty disturbing, XXX-rated photographs and videos from my dad’s private archive of sexual liaisons involving him and various women—all for a monthly subscription fee of $19.95. The site also offered T-shirts with a black-and-white image of Patti’s husband and Scotty’s father in flagrante delicto with a consenting female. I felt more shame from that hideous money-grab website than from anything my dad had ever done in his private life.

Patti reeked of hypocrisy. She had professed to be the angelic wife who had had to sue my dad for divorce in 1977 because he allegedly showed pornography to their six-year-old son, Scotty. As a result of her accusations my dad was ordered by the court to seek psychiatric help. Patti leaked the information to the press, which seriously harmed my dad’s reputation and his ability to secure employment. And, now, here was Patti, with her overexposed son, selling the products of my dad’s wayward hobby on the Internet. Online, Patti denied any responsibility, claiming, “Scott owns it [the website]. I have nothing to do with it.”

When I scanned the site I yelled out loud, which made Chloe, lying by my feet, sit up and bark. I screamed at the computer, “Who supplied Scotty with the images?” Patti told the press and her newly christened Yahoo Groups chat room that “she had millions of feet of film and video showing what a great father and husband he [my dad] was.” Why, then, did she and Scotty decide to offer only my dad’s sexual home movies to the world? Did those lurid black-and-white images of his sexual misconduct represent the loving memory of my dad Patti wanted to share with all comers who had a couple of sawbucks to blow? Why was there no G-rated footage for the paying customers? My dad’s videotapes didn’t involve hidden cameras or malicious intent. It was all done in the open between consenting adults. And now Patti was exploiting my dad’s personal pastime, ego trip, or addiction, whatever it was, with a public and press that would unleash the final blows onto an already chastised, satirized, and bloated corpse. I don’t believe my dad was ever on such an ego trip that he would have wanted to share this material with his fans worldwide. That was never his purpose. Patti was the wife of record, the executrix, the guard at the gate. She could have made any of several decisions regarding the tapes: keep ’em, burn ’em, lock ’em up in a safe deposit box in Switzerland. Instead she elected to share the tawdry images with the
world, or at least a world that was willing to pay for them. Perhaps it was her final retaliation against her estranged husband. Patti always liked getting in the last dig.

Scotty claimed 5.6 million hits in the first week of the website that he and his mother created. He said, “I think if my father were alive, he’d be running the site himself.” Comments like this only pointed up the chasm between my dad’s two families. Scotty told the
Seattle Times,
“I’m protecting his [Dad’s] image.” Karen told the press scribes that Scotty was “the slime of the earth. … If there’s a buck to be made, Scotty will go for it.”

Patti and Scotty had gone through my dad’s two jumbo life insurance policies of about $400,000 each, plus the proceeds from the sale of the Tilden Avenue house, nearly a million bucks, and the yearly receipts from the nonstop television replays of
Hogan’s Heroes.
I guess they felt it was time to tap into the online cash cow booting up before them—the Web afforded Patti and her acolyte Scotty new opportunities.

Patti claimed she and my dad had reconciled in late April 1978. I found that amusing since I was living with my dad in Westwood at the time, and he was in the process of buying a home for himself in Sherman Oaks. Patti acknowledged the new home that my dad was going to move into upon his return from Arizona, but she falsely asserted that both their names were on the deed. Scotty chimed in with “They [Patti and Dad] were not separated or divorced; they were together.” Patti claimed that my dad invited me to Scottsdale to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday, but that I was so upset with their reconciliation I passed on the invitation. There was no such invitation. He was working, and I was transcribing a magazine interview on a deadline. According to my dad’s divorce attorney, William Goldstein, the couple was so far apart there was absolutely no going back. My dad had told Chuck about the changes he wanted to make in his life, which included jettisoning Patti and “his pal” John Carpenter. I believed him. Patti told her website readers that she and I had wept in each other’s arms after the murder. In fact, days after his death the sum total of her expressed emotion was her icy statement, “Your father’s lifestyle caught up with him” while making a mental inventory of my dad’s and my apartment.