Ham (15 page)

The set was inspired by Grace Jones. Jerry loved Grace Jones and she was a huge influence on both of us. It was easy to steal from her because no one would ever think of me as anything like her. She was statuesque and angular and dark black and enigmatic. I was more like Edith Piaf with baby fat and a mullet. Grace had one particular video that Jerry and I were mad for called “My Jamaican Guy,” in which her single set piece was a large black staircase. I lifted the idea outright, but decided my staircase would be multifunctional. It would have stairs that could flap up, individually, on hinges, so that I could open the show by emerging from the inside, bound in a straitjacket (which I had to special order from the Humane Restraint Company), as the Pancakes whispered from offstage: “I tried to warn you . . . I tried to warn you . . .”

The staircase would also be used in a number called “You Don't Have to Be Nice to the People You Meet on the Way Up—If You Ain't Coming Down,” in which the Pancakes crouched inside with their heads appearing to “sit” on the steps as I walked on top of them. It would be arch and bent and theatrical!

We rehearsed daily, but as our opening date approached I was still unable to find anyone who would affordably build the staircase. The best price I got was from the scene shop at my alma mater, UCLA. They wanted a thousand dollars! Inconceivably out of my budget. A hundred dollars was inconceivably out of my budget.

I called Jerry and said, “I don't think I'm going to get the staircase.”

“You have to have the staircase.”

“It's too expensive. Maybe I can just use a stepladder.”

“The whole show is about the staircase.”

“I thought the whole show was about me.”

“Of course it's about you . . . but it's really about the staircase.”

Ann Marie hooked me up with two young entrepreneurs who might loan me the money. She deposited me at a house in West Hollywood at two o'clock in the afternoon and fled suspiciously swiftly after minimal introductions. They were a couple, one being short and round and Jewish and the other tall and cut and German. The living room reflected their 1980s success: everything matched in airy pastels, offset by a glossy plastic round-cornered coffee table and a glass-front entertainment cabinet, with all the latest stereo and VHS equipment in view. Deco-framed Nagel prints hung on every wall.

They offered me noshes and a lot of drinks, and then sandwiched me between them on the kind of soft, low leather couch that's easy to fall into but impossible to get out of without a crane. They lit and passed a joint, getting up close and very friendly, gushing about how they'd like to be a part of the show. Then one of them pushed play on the VHS machine and the
bomp-chicka-bow-bow
of '80s porn blasted from the screen.

I called Jerry and told him I got the staircase. Just not how.

Out of Control
opened and we began to attract a local following that
Los Angeles
magazine dubbed “Harrisites.” Talent scouts from a new television show called
Star Search
were looking for contestants and came to see me at Theatre/Theater. I was asked to audition and went to a production office in Hollywood where I sang for nine or ten people crammed into a room so tiny that I had to perform in the doorway with the piano in the hall. I sang “I Am Changing” from
Dreamgirl
s and was promptly rejected. Too theatrical.

A few weeks later I got a call informing me that they'd reconsidered and wanted me on the fourth episode. I learned that two of the talent scouts had fought for me, saying I was different from the cookie-cutter wannabes, but knowing there was a very good chance I was a “what-not-to-be.”

I called Jerry and told him I would be on the show.

“Are they letting you sing what you want?” he asked.

“Yes, I get to choose my own material.”

“Good. Don't let them dress you. Wear what you've been wearing,” he insisted.

“My crappy thrift shop tails? But they have a whole fancy wardrobe department.”

“It's all about the crappy thrift shop tails.”

“I thought it was all about me.”

“Of course it's about you . . . but it's really about the crappy thrift shop tails.”

With Jerry's advice under my 1940s-narrow belt, I won the first show. And then the second. And then the third. During the day, I went to the TV studio for rehearsals, band prerecordings, and tapings, and at night I performed
Out of Control
for the “Harrisites.” A few weeks later, my episodes began to air and we had to stop doing
Out of Control
because the box office was just that.

Bigger things seemed on the horizon.

Today, with the number of television reality talent shows springing up like medical marijuana clinics in Los Angeles, it's a different, slicker animal. On
Star Search,
there were no coaches or stylists or mentors—we were on our own. The judges changed each week, so it was never about them. There was an innocence about the show that revealed raw, often hokey entertainment. I was definitely raw and hokey. But I meant every word and every note. I found a formula in which I sang an emotional ballad, put a key change after the bridge, held out a long note, and finished big. Today, if you line up the recordings of my performances one after another, you'll see that they're all the same arrangement in the same key. Yet 25 million people a week couldn't get enough.

After sixteen appearances, I won the title of “Grand Champion,” which is the same title awarded to winners of the American Kennel Club dog show. Suddenly, fame kissed me, or, rather, stuck its tongue down my throat. I was an answer on
Jeopardy!:
“Who is Sam Harris?” I was impersonated by Dana Carvey on
Saturday Night Live
and I was jabbed on MTV's
Beavis and Butthead
. But having fought so hard to claim my individuality and fearing it would be stripped away, my ego wouldn't allow me to be led by people smarter than I, with more experience. And pretty much
everyone
was smarter than I, with more experience.

Jerry was the only guide I would follow. He hated
Star Search.
He was beyond happy for my new success and knew that it gave us the opportunity to play large venues, but he was afraid that since I'd won the hearts of Middle America, I would sell out to a common denominator and become too commercial and homogenous. Jerry wanted me to be an artiste!

On a January afternoon, Sam Riddle, the producer of
Star Search,
took me to lunch and asked, “How would you like to play Carnegie Hall?” I lost it on the spot.

The event was announced and sold out in three hours. Thanks to the growing number of Harrisites, we could have played for weeks. Jerry came back to Los Angeles and we went to work. The International Pancakes would be making their Carnegie debut as well, and this was our chance to show America the Sam beyond the two-minute, money-note power ballads.

We wrote, arranged, and rehearsed nonstop. Jerry had Bette pop in now and then to offer ideas and a little confidence bolstering. We used the same cheap costumes Ann Marie had sewn for the fifty-seat gig, only my dickie-tuxedo shirt was upgraded, with white and translucent sequins, like shiny scales, now making me look like a combination of Groucho Marx, Magic Johnson, and a flounder.

Jerry, the girls, and I arrived at JFK and piled into a waiting giant black stretch. When the legendary twinkling skyline appeared to us from the Triborough Bridge, we knew it had been lit just for us. As we neared Times Square en route to our midtown hotel, I opened the enormous sunroof and the girls and I stood, squeezing our upper bodies through the portal, and waved like grand marshals in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. We yelled to Times Square, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and a few New Yorkers actually yelled back, “Practice! Practice!”

The next day, I entered the stage door for rehearsal with the reverence that some might feel entering the Vatican. I was shown to my three-room suite with a Steinway in the corner of the guest area and a little window that looked out over the audience. At a break during rehearsal, Jerry left me alone on the empty stage and told me to take in all the ghosts: Gershwin, Bernstein, Callas, Ellington, Garland, Holiday. I was next. I did a time-step in my Chuck Taylors and could hear the sound of rubber taps pinging back from the tiers of seats that would soon be filled.

Flowers arrived by the truckload and were endlessly lined along the hallway outside my dressing room. The old stage doorman, who had been a fixture since the late 1950s, said it was the most flowers he'd seen since Judy Garland in 1961. Jesus Christ.

As it got closer to showtime, I began searching through the arrangements. Some of them were from friends and family, most were from people I didn't know—supportive TV viewers who saw me as the American dream, and celebrities whom I'd never met. But none of them were from the guy I was dating in Los Angeles. His name was Stephen and he was an entertainment lawyer and I was planning on spending the rest of my life with him. We would be a historic team like Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, which he didn't know yet but would find out soon enough.

At the half hour call, instead of preparing for the biggest night of my life, I was tearing through the flowers like a madman and the hallway looked like a gardener had gone on a psychotic mowing rampage. But there was nothing from Stephen. It occurred to me that Jerry had hidden the flowers to sufficiently freak me out and give me an edge for the show. It would be just like him to try to make me vulnerable so that I went on
in need.
I pushed him up against the dressing room door, put my nose to his, and growled, “Where. Are. My. Flowers?!”

I went on in need.

The show was otherworldly for me. And a bit jarring for the audience at times, especially the part where I pulled a gun out of my tailcoat breast pocket at the end of “God Bless the Child” and shot myself in the head. Then the Pancakes entered in Pierrot costumes and masks, holding bouquets of colored balloons on long strings, and we sang a song about being committed to a mental institution.

The audience was
farmisht,
as Jerry would say. But they were willing.

After “Over the Rainbow,” they rushed the stage and I exited to find Jerry in the wings, jumping up and down. I knew I was going back out for an encore, but he said, “Let 'em beg.” He pushed me by the shoulders down the hall and, in our euphoria, we somehow walked
out
of the stage door and onto Fifty-Sixth Street. The door slammed behind us, jarring us into reality. I turned the brass knob to get back in. Locked! We rattled. We banged. We screamed. Nothing.

The crowd was chanting inside and I was trapped outside! After several minutes of kicking and shrieking, the old stage doorman, who'd been watching from the wings, came to look for us and heard our desperate calls.

I ran back to the stage and as I was about to go on, Jerry stopped me and said, solemnly, “I really didn't take the flowers. Stephen didn't send any. He didn't send any flowers, Sam.”

Jerry knew what he was doing. And I knew what he was doing. And he knew that I knew that he knew what he was doing. But it still worked. My encore was the Janis Joplin song “Cry Baby”—all about being treated like shit and still remaining a doormat, and I'd practically had the word “welcome” tattooed on my chest when it came to relationships. I gave the performance of my life and ended in a melodramatic puddle on the floor at its finish.

After the show my mother and brother and closest friends, who had flown in from everywhere, came to my dressing room. I realized my father was missing, and my mom told me he thought it was too crowded backstage. I left my guests and, after a lengthy search, found him smoking in a hidden alleyway, where he could tell me that I had done good without the distraction of other compliments.

A downtown hotspot hosted an after-party and I barely slept before being interviewed on the
Today
show, and then rushed to the airport to get back to Hollywood in time to shoot a variety television series—all in twenty-four hours. I was already feeling like the overextended, poor-me, piece-of-meat, nobody-suffers-like-Sam-does lonely star who is used up. I'd been rehearsing that role since I was twelve and I was finally getting to play it, complete with episodes of secluding myself in the bathroom only to emerge hours later smelling of Jack Daniel's and Cheez Whiz.

Jerry loved and played into the drama, but he was mostly protective. He stayed with me in Los Angeles to write my first concert tour show while I finished my first album. One Sunday morning, I ambled into the kitchen for coffee and found Jerry sitting in the breakfast nook reading the
Los Angeles Times.
I sat next to him and flipped through the Calendar section. I'd had a feature article the Sunday before and I was eager to see if there were any comments from readers.

The “Letters to the Editor” page was curiously missing.

“Where's the rest of the paper?” I asked.

“I don't know what you mean,” Jerry mumbled, his face buried in the sports section, which I'd never seen him read.

“Part of the paper is missing.”

“I didn't notice.”

I was disheveled and morning puffy, but I jumped into my clothes, still pooled on my bedroom floor from the previous night, and headed to the corner market called World's Finest Meats. They weren't the world's finest meats. They weren't even the block's finest meats. In fact, no one was quite sure what animals their finest meats came from. But they also sold sundries and newspapers, so I ventured in and began leafing through the
Times.

“Hey!” came a voice from in front of the world's finest meat counter. “Hey!! Sam Harris, is that you?”

I looked up to see an African-American of Amazonian proportions and questionable gender, wearing a yellow tube top and a pair of capri pants that wouldn't capri on anyone shorter than six-foot-two.