I'm Not Dead... Yet! (34 page)

The irony of this film was that I was still struggling with the sadness and guilt surrounding Vivienne’s death. So I wrote and directed a comedy, a film that dealt with… life—and dedicated the film to Vivienne.

Lyric is adorable onscreen and off. The end credits are played over a scene with her in the bathtub that is priceless. (As a 4-year-old, she had a screen test with Martin Short and Nick Nolte, before we left for S.C. But seeing how the film’s director treated her on set, I turned it down. We would not make that mistake; Lyric would have her childhood and make her own decisions about work when she was a grownup.)

I’m so proud of Karla DeVito, who gave the best performance in the film and got great reviews. The film is flawed; that’s my fault. But it has some of the best work I’ve ever been associated with in my entire career. Because of our limited post production schedule, I made errors that didn’t nurture the film, and even today I kick myself because
Modern Love
was the first film to show baby-boomers going through marriage and parenthood; funny and poignant—kinda like life.

Karla and I went to New York to promote
Modern Love
. We were ten minutes from going on the
CBS Morning Show
with Harry Smith when we received a phone call from Karla’s Aunt Marilyn that Uncle Bob was in an accident. His truck had been sideswiped by a car. Shaken but still conscious, Bob had no signs of a life-threatening injury. “He was joking with the paramedics…”

Taken to the nearest E.R., the attending physician believed he may have internal bleeding, but said the hospital ‘wasn’t equipped to handle that kind of trauma.’ Bob again joked with the paramedics as they placed him back into the ambulance. He was taken to three different hospitals over a five-hour period before they found a facility capable of dealing with the injuries Bob had sustained, only now Bob wasn’t joking.

It was too late to save his life—he died en route of internal bleeding because of human ineptitude. As Uncle Bob, second father to Karla and her brothers, World War II bomber pilot, and captain for United Airlines with a flawless safety record would say, “It’s pilot error.”

I loved Bob. I was a private pilot too and we dreamed of building a plane together. Whenever I fly, I see him in the clouds…

So how do we avoid pilot error?
Knowledge.
Properly trained individuals, making the right decisions, taking responsibility for the ‘flight plan’—that might have saved Bob’s life.

Vivienne and Bob’s stories are sobering examples of man’s incompetence engendering death.
If there is anything to learn here, it is to
be a vocal advocate.
Speak up until your questions are answered to your satisfaction.
Save
the people you love.

As soon as we returned to USC,
we began rehearsals for an event starring Karla singing the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. (The previous year, Karla had given a sold-out show,
Karla At The Koger
.) Featuring a 50 piece orchestra at the acoustically perfect 2500-seat Koger Center, this show was a celebration for President George H.W. Bush, Michael Eisner, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, who were receiving honorary degrees. (I guess their mothers cried too.)

Sam Ellis flew in from New York to produce the event, my father Jerry Segal conceived the running order and dialogue and helped direct, and the talented Kevin Farrell orchestrated and conducted. My MFA student, Stan Brown (who has one of the greatest voices I have ever heard, and later starred with us in
Open Heart)
was a featured singer in the group of talented students cast as ensemble members. USC’s Dance Department and Black Gospel Choir joined in some of the numbers, and I sang masked as
The Phantom of the Opera
.

Performing nearly two dozen songs, Karla brought the house down. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sarah Brightman came backstage singing Karla’s praises. Michael Eisner echoed their enthusiasm: “It would cost me a million dollars to put on a show of this quality at Disney World.”

Despite events such as this which brought positive national attention to the University, there was growing resentment toward the perceived ‘extravagances’ of Dr. Holderman.

When a reporter ambushed me with a phone call during dinner asking what I thought about Dr. Holderman, and I praised his accomplishments, the headline the next day read: “Benson Supports Spending.” (This on the day President Bush arrived in Columbia to receive his honorary degree.) The newspaper had piled me into some of the scandalous problems with the University. We received hundreds of letters of support from the community we had grown to love—and a death threat.

But on the day our
home
became front page news, when they went so far as to show a picture of where we lived—address and all—I felt
The State
Newspaper put my wife and our child in physical danger. I called a moving company and said, “We’re moving today. You want the job?”

We departed South Carolina faster than you can say, ‘I went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail.’

If not for the timing of the move, I would never have been able to respond to the phone call: “Robby, do you want to audition for the part of Beast in Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast
?”

“Give me a second to think about it.”

A half second later: “YES!”

We left South Carolina so quickly
that when we arrived in Los Angeles, the moving company had packed our garbage cans—with all of our garbage still in them.

I was just in time to audition for ‘Beast’ in
Beauty and the Beast
. The audition was almost a set-up for me. I read the pages of dialogue and my immediate take on Beast was to treat him as a three-dimensional character, not a cartoon character. To me, Beast was as real as any part I had played in a live action film or a Broadway show.

My first audition was recorded on, of all things, a Sony Walkman. As a musician, I had branched out into recording engineer and loved to play with sound. When I saw the Sony Walkman I knew it had a little condenser microphone in it, and if I were to get too loud, the automatic compressor and built-in limiter would ‘squash’ the voice—and there would be very little dynamic range to the performance. I did a quick assessment and wondered how many people who had come in to audition for the part were making that error: playing the Beast with overwhelming decibels, compressing the vocal waveforms. I decided to give the Beast ‘range.’ Because of my microphone technique, and an understanding of who I wanted Beast to be, they kept asking me to come back and read different dialogue. After my fifth audition, Jeffrey Katzenberg said the part was mine.

Beauty and the Beast
was
so refreshingly fun and inventively creative to work on that I couldn’t wait to try new approaches to every line of dialogue. Don Hahn is one of the best creative producers I have ever worked with. The two young directors, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, were fantastic and their enthusiasm was contagious. I not only was allowed to improvise, but they encouraged it.
It never entered my mind that I was playing an animated creature. I understood the torment that Beast was going through: he felt ugly; had a horrible opinion of himself, and had a trigger-temper. Those are things that, if done right, are the perfect ingredients for comedy. Painful and pathetic comedy—but honest. The kind of comedy I understood.

In the
feature
world of Disney animation, the actors always recorded their dialogue alone in a big studio, with only a microphone and the faint images of the producers, writers, directors and engineer through a double-paned set of acoustic glass. Paige O’Hara and I became good friends; it was her idea that for certain very intimate scenes, such as when Beast is dying, we record
together
. We were able to play these scenes with an honest conviction that is often absent in the voice-over world.

What a voice! Even my Broadway/rock goddess wife was thrilled to hear the breathtaking sound of Belle come from the heart and soul of Paige O’Hara. It was because of Paige that Beast sang in “Something There.” She explained to Ashman and Menken that I had made records and sang in Broadway musicals.

We were all sent to New York, and just like every Broadway show, each song was recorded live with the orchestra. We sang our song(s) once—twice at most. Paige and I were standing side-by-side when Angela Lansbury sang “Beauty and the Beast.” It was a moment in time I will never forget. Something very ‘Disney-esque’ happened: it was
magical
.

The success of this film was the culmination of a team effort but I must say, the honors go to the animators—and for me (Beast), that’s Glen Keane—and to Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. This was the perfect example of a crew who ‘cared’. And the final results (every frame) of the film represent that sentiment.

During my time promoting
Beauty and the Beast
, I finally got the chance to show off the lower end of my voice. I have a freaky range as a singer and I can easily sing the lowest male part in any opera—but I can also sing along with Freddy Mercury (if only I could
sound
like Freddy Mercury). Because my singing voice was so low I developed a falsetto to reach the high notes. It amused me that some journalists questioned my soft-spoken voice and kept pushing me about ‘voice enhancement’—I’d just wait for the perfect moment and then go ‘Beast’ on them! It was fun to roar (without compression) during the interviews and see their expressions change, along with their opinions, so quickly!

Karla, Lyric and I were flown down to Disney World where I would do press. At the time, Karla was pregnant with Zephyr, so when we signed our names in the cement, we also wrote: ‘Baby on the way’ in the lower right hand corner.

What a cool thing it was to revisit that spot years later, for another publicity tour, and bring ‘the baby on the way’ (Zephyr) with us.

And Lyric, too.

When
Beauty and the Beast
won the Golden Globe Award for Best Film (Comedy or Musical) and received six Academy Award nominations in 1992, I was again asked to be a presenter.

Just days after Zephyr was born, I chose to stay home cuddled up with Karla and watch it on TV like the rest of the world. I still got to do the honors—without putting on the dreaded tuxedo: Paige O’Hara and I prerecorded Beast and Belle, and the great Disney team animated our presentation
.

I began to write like a fiend
(
Betrayal of the Dove
and many more), direct anything (
Kids Incorporated
and other ‘boot camp’ TV directing jobs), and do more voice work (
Prince Valiant,
Exo-Squad,
etc.).