Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (21 page)

Needless to say, it was a big honor to finally be talking with Peter Brook, who was truly a god of mine and, indeed, any other theater actor of my generation. And it came as a result of what he saw in this movie, which I thought no one had noticed at all. So right away I was incredibly seduced. “Good,” he said and then suggested we go for a walk. He took me to a bookstore on the Lower East Side and bought me a copy of the
Mahabharata
, which, in its condensed version, was more than twelve hundred pages. He said, “This is a story that is really not meant to be read; it’s meant to be told verbally. But if you’re going to read it, this is the greatest adaptation there is. So start sinking your teeth into this, and if you are interested in continuing to talk about this, here’s all my information. We would love to have you in the troupe.”

I was looking at him and down at this giant fuckin’ book in my hands.

Then he said, “I know this is a big decision, so while you are making it I would like to invite you to immediately become a part of the group by joining the cast for the production of
La Tragedie de Carmen
that I’m about to open at Lincoln Center. You do this while you are pondering and, in the meanwhile, you get a taste of what it’s like to work with us.”

So perform I did in
Carmen
at Lincoln Center, and it was a dream come true. Lincoln Center is like the Yankee Stadium of New York culture. And I was doing it for the great Peter Brook. My first performance fell on a Friday night, exactly one week after Opal was due to deliver our first kid. And God bless my dear wife for having the decency to wait till I got my first performance under my belt, because the following morning Opal went into labor. Now Saturday is a two-show day on Broadway, a Saturday afternoon matinee followed by another show in the evening. Well, I had a clause in my contract that, as I was my wife’s Lamaze partner, if she went into labor, I was excused and could miss a performance. So I missed both the matinee and the evening show on Saturday. I did, however, enjoy a way better show: I watched my daughter Blake be born into the world, and the minute I held this precious child in my arms and she looked up into my eyes, I had an epiphany: I was not gonna go to France. I was gonna pursue a career in cinema in a more conventional way right here in the good ol’ US of A. And even though being invited to perform at Lincoln Theater by the inimitable Peter Brook was probably the greatest compliment that could ever have been paid to me, and even though I knew this invitation represented a major circle closing for me, still, I was certain destiny lay elsewhere. Yes, what Brook had embodied and what he had evolved into equated to pure artistry, never concerned about pandering for profit or appeasing the bottom-liners. And there was and still is something inside of me that yearns for something that pure, that innocent, that unfettered.

But at the end of the day it would have required almost the devotion of a monk, to be cloistered in a world where there are no
temporal limitations. Well . . . turns out I just ain’t that muthafucka; I just didn’t have
that
kind of devotion. Turns out all I wanted was to be a crass, commercial American actor who was going to make some fuckin’ money and give this fuckin’ kid a life I didn’t have.

When
Carmen
finished, Opal and I felt we had a decision to make. We had an eight-month-old baby, and we both realized that the opportunities available for a New York actor to actually make a living never seemed to have my name on ’em. If you were getting paid in the Apple, you were either doing soap operas or commercials or singing and dancing your ass off on the gay white way. So we packed a couple of bags and made our way out to Hollywood—Opal, me, and eight-month-old little Blake. We chose to stay at the Highland Gardens Hotel, which is this funky-ass little efficiency apartment/hotel famous for catering to actors, singers, dancers, and musicians. The reason I knew about it was because it was where Janis Joplin had overdosed. What more perfect way to be introduced to the seedy underbelly of Hollywood? But mainly we stayed there because it was a very transient kind of place, where one was free to either commit or not. You could stay a day, a week, or for years. It was a way for us to come check out Los Angeles without getting stuck in Los Angeles, because we both had a feeling that we might hate it. Which is also why we decided to hang onto our apartment in the Apple for the time being.

We had been there less than a week when my mom called. She found my brother. He was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. I guess she got suspicious when she couldn’t get him on the phone for days on end. So she went down to his pad in the Village to see what the problem was . . . fuck! What a nightmare.

I was on the next plane back to New York. I had no idea what to expect, but I knew it was gonna be ugly. I was terrified for my mom—whether she could handle a blow like this, having lost the first love of her life, my dad, at such a young age, and now this. The flight back to New York found my mind going faster than the plane. My brother, up until this last episode, had only experienced the manic side of this manic depression of his—that is, until this last one. This one found
him lower than low. I had spent all day every day for the last four months talking to him, counseling him, trying to get it into his head that there were beautiful things out there waiting for him. He was not to be reached. But even I, who had been through my own version of what he was going through, never, ever thought he had the resolve to take his own life. And then he waited until I left town to do it. Sadness doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling, and what I am still feeling.

One of the hardest parts of that moment was, aside from the profound loss of my hero, my brother, was there I was with a mom who desperately needed something to believe in and something to give her a reason to not give up. And I had this brand-new child and wife and this life that I’m just about to embark on. The decision as to whether to just kind of throw that plan out the window and come back to New York, to be the rock my mom could lean on, was one of the toughest I ever had to make. Ultimately, she made it a lot easier for me, as she’s always done when it comes down to me and the good of my career. She said, “No. There’s nothing that gets in the way of that. I’m fine. Besides, I have Irving”—her second husband and one of the sweetest most generous of men—“I’ll be good. I’ll be fine. You go back and do this thing. That’s what everyone would want.”

So after a period of a few weeks of mourning and putting my brother’s house in order and all of the things that bring the closure of the moment, I went back to the Highland Gardens to my wife and my now nine-month-old child. I started this insipid career march toward God knows what. But at least it was something I was going to commit to, even though we decided to go month-by-month, holding onto the apartment in New York because we were only going to commit to it just so far. We left the door open to come back. If LA was truly all the things we ever heard it was—vapid, one-dimensional, superficial, an idiot’s delight—there was only so much of it we were gonna tolerate. We would only stay if we saw some real signs that it was gonna be a sort of utopia for me, commercially.

I did a few TV shows. I played an attorney twice, once in the TV series
MacGruder and Loud
. I played a thug twice, once in the
Fall Guy
,
and for a TV show called
Split Image
, along with a few other small character roles. Everything indicated that Hollywood was every bit as terrible at figuring out what to do with this fall-through-the-cracks character actor as New York had been. Those first years were rough, and we barely scraped by. We survived from these bit parts and some inheritance dough my rich aunt left me, the one who took me to my first Broadway play,
Fiddler on the Roof
. We kept our expenses very low. We bought a cheap car, stayed in a cheap flat. We cut corners.

Then something happened toward the middle of the end of ’85 that kind of changed the conversation. I read an article that said my friend Jean-Jacques Annaud had signed on to direct the adaptation of this incredibly celebrated book,
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco. The book had been on the
New York Times
best-seller list so long it had broken records for the amount of consecutive weeks it had occupied first place. So there was this huge bidding war as to who was gonna be the guy to adapt the book into a film. It turned out that Jean-Jacques Annaud, who had done
Quest for Fire
, was most convincing both to the studios and to Umberto Eco, and little by little he was starting to put the pieces together to make this into a movie.

I went and bought the book and read it. The book was really hard to get into. It was almost like reading
Titus Andronicus
, in that it’s so dense with characters. It’s kind of a very obscure, very mysterious, fourteenth-century monastery world that had Franciscans and other Orders—to a Jew they all look alike! All told, it took me four attempts to get past the first one hundred pages. And then I finally got on a roll and started really getting into this mysterious world Eco was depicting, and it became one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. I noticed that there was a role in there of this hunchback, Salvatore, who spoke seven languages, but all in a jumble, not as if he was literate but more like he was too mentally challenged to understand there was a difference between one and the other, so he spoke every word of every language all at once, with a logic that was impenetrable. But he was part of this world that got swept into this order of outlaws within this strangely conflicted world of religious fervor.

The character grabbed me. He was this hunchback who was mentally challenged. He was ugly, deformed, distorted, and yet he was functional. Plus, he had an insatiable sexual appetite and was a coward of the highest order. He was this compendium of fascinating elements that made for an analysis and execution as an actor that would have been every bit akin to the fascinating challenge I had already enjoyed with Annaud in
Quest.
I became obsessed with the idea of trying to solve the puzzle that was Salvatore. It was like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to line up a series of divergent attributes and mold them into a piece of humanity that, even though you’d never seen anyone like him, seemed at once organic and natural. That very exercise was why
Quest for Fire
had been so satiating, and I imagined having that identical kind of rush creating the role of Salvatore in
Name of the Rose
.

So I reached out to Jean-Jacques, and he liked the idea of me playing the part but was very discouraging because he said the production was really complicated. There was a lot of politics involved, and he needed to put me on tape to get the approval of a whole lot of people for me to win the role. Meanwhile, I’m reading things saying Sean Connery had signed on, and F. Murray Abraham had signed on. This was beginning to become more and more of an obsession for me, to become a part of this thing, ’cuz it’s gonna be a real high-water mark for anybody involved.

I waited for Jean-Jacques to come to Los Angeles and then spent an afternoon with him doing improvisations in front of a video camera, trying to find some sort of essence that would lead people to believe I was the right guy to play Salvatore. We never really did. In fact, looking back on it, I think it was a pretty mediocre attempt. I don’t think I had a particularly good handle on the character yet. I don’t think Jean-Jacques even had a particularly good handle on what he was looking for in the character yet. We both had this unbelievable desire to see me get it, but that was pretty much the end of it. This one event that would have been the signpost I desperately was seeking, this signal that it was right to keep going, was slipping through my fingers. Fuck! Now what?

(CHAPTER 12)

Name of the Rose

Sure enough, a few months went by and I read in the paper that the role of Salvatore was awarded to Franco Franchi, who was sort of like the Red Skelton of Italy and a beloved TV personality. He was a comedian who had his own variety show. He did a lot of voices and invented a lot of characters. So I said,
Okay. Congrats Mr. F. You can’t win ’em all. This was not meant to be mine
, and all that other bullshit one tells oneself when trying to play down a pretty big disappointment. So I went on with my life.

One night Opal and I . . . well, without going into too much detail, I ended up on the couch in the living room. At about five in the morning the phone rang. I fumble for it in the dark, dropping it several times. Finally: “Um, hello?” I could tell from the interference on the line that it’s definitely not a local call.

“Hello. I’m looking for Ron Perlman. Hello. Hello?”

I was groggy, fucking half-asleep. Not half-asleep—fully asleep. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Anna Gross, and I’m calling from Germany. I’m calling to offer Ron Perlman . . . is this Ron?”

I said, “Keep talking.”

She said, “Well, I’m calling at the behest of Jean-Jacques Annaud to offer Ron the role of Salvatore in
Name of the Rose
.”

“Come on! Who is this . . . really?”

“I know you think that this is probably a joke. And I’m well aware of the fact that it’s five o’clock in the morning where you are. I know this sounds too weird to be true, because I also know you know that we started production on this movie three weeks ago. But nevertheless, we are offering you the role of Salvatore in
Name of the Rose
, and the reason why we need to cut to the chase and stop with this scintillating repartee right now is because you need to be on a plane at eleven o’clock this morning if you’re going to do this role. Now once again, is this Ron?”

“Okay, enough. Who the fuck is this?”