Love Life (10 page)

I want to live up to my heroes. It’s well-known that there’s always someone better than you are: more talented, more famous, richer, smarter, better looking. Someone is always doing something better than you are and being better rewarded for it. There isn’t a person on earth who isn’t part of this 99 percent in some fashion. But I never feel envy; I’m not resentful or jealous. I don’t begrudge the elite. I worship at the altar of the elite. These are not folks to vilify or use as political fodder. For me, these are the North Stars to be used as guides to the places I still hope to go. They are my inspiration.

It would be great to live in a culture where a genius like George Lucas doesn’t have to inoculate himself against criticism of his making a huge profit selling
Star Wars
to Disney by announcing he is “giving most of it away” to charity. It’s not our business what he does with the rewards of his genius, whether it’s four dollars or four billion dollars. What matters is: He came from nowhere, no one handed him anything and by the power of his mind he built an empire that brought joy to millions. He has earned the right to answer to no one.

I am an unabashed fan of earned, deserved success.

Sure, when I read
Jerry Maguire
I thought, “I would kill in that role!” But to see my old pal Tom Cruise in the scene where he goes from being “the master of the living room” to the naked vulnerability of “you complete me” makes me want to weep, not out of envy, but because
he is a man fulfilling his potential.
When someone is blessed with “their moment” and crushes it, it’s deeply moving for me. Seeing Catherine Zeta-Jones in
Chicago
revealing herself as a world-class song-and-dance woman or discovering a new face like Christophe Waltz asking, “Are you harboring enemies of the state?” in
Inglourious Basterds
turns me back into that little boy who fell in love with the movies. And in today’s jaded, bottom-line-minded world, I’m grateful for it.

One of my wife Sheryl’s big movies as a makeup artist was
Glengarry Glen Ross
, starring her client Al Pacino. I came east to visit her and sat one day in the shadows to watch. All the lions of the screen were there: Al, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Alan Arkin. But the scene to be filmed that day was one where their characters were all to be schooled by a young interloper from the head office, to be played by my friend Alec Baldwin. Now, Alec can carry his own water, and he had plenty of experience and success coming into this day, but I don’t care who you are, if you are doing a three-page monologue where it is incumbent on you to outshine a murderers’ row like that group, there are no guarantees.

I chatted with Sheryl, had espresso with Al and then pulled up to an apple box in the shadows to watch Alec shoot the big scene.

What I witnessed was one of the largest beat-downs an actor has ever delivered. Alec’s “always be closing” sequence in
Glengarry Glen Ross
would become iconic. The writing was breathtaking and the right actor was there at the right time; he had only to execute, and he did. I had hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

Al and the greats seemed appropriately stunned, although no one overtly noted the ass-kicking Alec had just delivered. (Although I thought I noticed one of them doing a less-than-perfect job of covering his professional jealousy. And it shows in that actor’s performance in the scene.)

The writing and the acting on that day continue to inspire me. My line of work, like most jobs I’m sure, can sometimes be demoralizing, maybe even a little boring. But whenever I’m feeling “over it,” that maybe I’ve been at this for too long and it’s all a little bloodless, I know what to do. I go to YouTube and type in “Alec Baldwin, always be closing speech.” And I’m fifteen again, in love with movies, with acting and feeling the full throttle of my abilities and passion to use them. I’m ready to walk through walls again.

When I was approached by Ridley Scott’s company to play JFK in
Killing Kennedy
, one of the reasons I said yes was my hunch that playing one of my heroes would be a deep source of inspiration. And I was right. All of the weeks spent dissecting his famous voice, the endless hours watching obscure archival footage, hoping to find a clue to his character, a toehold to climb over the barrier of his almost impenetrable iconography and find the mortal man inside, was sheer bliss. It was humbling and exhilarating to be given the opportunity to bring him back to life for a brief, shining moment. And I didn’t want to screw it up.

There is nowhere to hide when you are playing Kennedy in a movie called
Killing Kennedy
based on the bestseller of the same name that will be plastered on every billboard, nine stories high in Times Square, marketed throughout the world and shown in one hundred seventy countries. If you are bad in the role, a lot of folks will know about it. I guess I’m practical enough to be aware of that but experienced enough to forget about it. Big stakes don’t mean you develop or play a role any differently. It’s impossible to play “a martyred hero.” But it
is
possible to play a man.

I looked for the human details. I found he wore reading glasses but hated being photographed in them. He nervously took them in and out of his breast pocket, which is why you often could barely see his scrunched-down pocket square. I wore his cologne (Jockey Club) and I figured out his very particular body language and distinctive walk. I learned to flout the fashion police by buttoning
both
buttons on my two-button suits, like he always did. Like a vampire, I sucked every ounce of obscure (obvious traits aren’t really useful) info out of the public record and into the building of my interpretation of the man I have admired for so long.

That the performance was well received and that
Killing Kennedy
was a ratings success is obviously gratifying. Ironically, it also earned me a Best Actor nomination from my peers in the Screen Actors Guild alongside Sheryl’s old client, Al Pacino. But what I think about going forward isn’t the results, however positive. What inspires me is that I can still be moved by the mysterious and ultimately unknowable process of discovering a character. In my fourth decade of doing this, I can, sometimes, if the circumstances are right, get that giddy, awestruck, trembly feeling as an actor when the lightbulb goes on and I have an “Aha!” moment. It keeps me wanting to stay at it.

When you can no longer be moved and inspired by greatness (or worse, don’t know it when you see it), it’s time to pack it up. If you can’t marvel at the beauty of Yosemite Valley or of K. D. Lang and Roy Orbison singing “Crying,” if you aren’t humbled by the west wall of the Lincoln Memorial, aren’t buckled by the language of his second inaugural inscribed there, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” you are already dead. When the color guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or the tones of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello no longer speak to you, you can no longer be reached.

There is always something new to be discovered; every year brings a crop of new moments to inspire. Tastes can’t remain complacent, eyes need to stay on the horizon. I hope I will always have moments where I can fall in love with new world order—Sacha Baron Cohen creating
Borat
or the rise of EDM.

I feel like I’ve scored a few points of my own over the years and will continue to do so, but I can only dream of approaching the transcendent moments of my fellow actors. Of George Scott in
Patton
: “God help me, I do love it so.” Streep in
Out of Africa
(off camera, in
voice-over
no less!): “He was not ours, he was not mine.” Of Redford in
The Natural
: “I love this game.” Of Bill Holden in
Network
: “Because I’m closer to the end than I am to the beginning.” Of Streisand when
she first sees Hubbell in
The Way We Were
. Of Ray Liotta in
Goodfellas
: “I’m not going to jail, Karen! Ya know who goes to jail . . . ?” Of the greatest of all time, Paul Newman, in his closing argument in
The Verdict
. Of Daniel Day-Lewis abandoning his boy in
There Will Be Blood
and Demi’s single tear in
Ghost
.

Most of us, the 99 percent of us, will never, ever, even come close. But my heroes keep me wanting to try.

A
s I remember it,
my first taste of alcohol came at the hands of my father, somewhere around the age of five. I’m confident on the timing, as he and my mom were no longer in the same rooms beyond that age. But I can clearly see them, in our living room on Aberdeen Avenue in Dayton, setting up for what was probably a fondue party. I was ready for bed in my feetsy pajamas, baby blue, with a teddy bear logo. I probably wanted a sip of whatever it was Dad was holding. I’m fairly positive I knew it wasn’t a “pop,” as we called soda, or a glass of milk with ice, which was the drink we usually shared on hot summer nights watching the lightning bugs from the screened-in porch.

It was beer, probably Stroh’s, as a few years later, that brand would become my favorite. In a move that I’ve come to know says so many things about my temperament, I didn’t gingerly explore this new beverage with a dainty sip; I took a full swig. I practically chugged it. Although today I know why, then I did not. I remember it tasting both terrible and amazing. Then I vomited all over our living room floor.

I wonder if my dad remembers any of this. I wonder, too, if maybe this faded moment is similar to the kinds I have now with my own sons, where they are convinced of a story’s veracity while I am not. Sometimes my boys tell me tales of our times together when they were small and I have no idea what they are talking about. Sometimes vice versa. It makes me appreciate that we all have our own points of view, dissimilar abilities to see facts clearly and unique personal narratives. And that in the end, one’s personal reality is the only one that ever really matters. I remember my last taste of alcohol as well. It was sometime around four
A.M.
on May 10, 1990.

This is what happened in between, and what is happening now.

Teenage drinking is the bane of my existence. All of them do it, I did to excess and in the living rooms of Europe, it’s sanctioned. Everyone copes with underage drinking differently; our societal standards are all over the road. Any college freshman will tell you that it is common knowledge which bars enforce the drinking age and which ones do not. Some parents let their teens drink from time to time; some are as shocked by that concept as they are when their kids get caught doing it in secret anyway. It all seems like a complicated math problem that everyone solves differently, with answers that don’t match, most of them being flat-out wrong. Having a sip of beer at five didn’t make me abuse booze later in life. Not drinking until you are of legal age doesn’t guarantee you won’t become a drunk. A drinking career seems to be formed by a mysterious combination of genetics, personality, environment and mind-set.

What is not shrouded in mystery is the fact that I’m an alcoholic. I believe I was one at the fondue party on Aberdeen Avenue. The big, brave gulp of beer? The “See, I can take it!” attention seeking? The early signs were there, as they always are.

When I was fifteen a bunch of pals and I hid out in a friend’s basement
with a bottle of gin. Only one of us had to be dragged home by his dad. Me. Everyone else got appropriately wasted; I, on the other hand, was an early believer in the adage that if two swigs were perfect, four would be fantastic!

There was also the time when my pals and I road-tripped to San Diego to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. We piled into my friend Josh’s decrepit late-sixties muscle car gone bad, complete with a terribly painted black racing stripe. We shacked up at a shoddy cut-rate motel and broke out the beer. The next thing I knew we were climbing in and out of the windows to the pool area like monkeys. I think we put some furniture in the deep end.

The teen status symbol of the day was a new brand of red-white-and-blue sunglasses called Vuarnets. They were expensive and only the cool, rich kids had them at our high school. Obviously, we wanted them too. In our stupor, someone (not me) came up with the brilliant idea to try to “lift” a pair.

“Yeah, let’s dooo it!”

“For sure! Let’s go!!”

“Raaaagh!” went the call of the drunk, young and stupid. We were all in a lather.

But the next thing I knew, it was me, not any of my buds, hightailing it out of the Big 5 sporting goods store with the damn glasses! Fleeing the scene, I ran directly in front of a police car waiting at a light. I might have gone unnoticed but for the salesman chasing me with a baseball bat.

Later, in the pokey, I concocted a convoluted story about being “forced” to nab the glasses by a threatening stranger. (It made perfect sense to me at the time.) A police sketch artist was brought in.