Love Life (14 page)

The president of NBC was holding and wanted Kevin Falls and me on the line ASAP. Settling in to pick up the call, we hoped he was calling to congratulate us on a particular story line he had personally requested, which we had added into an episode in record time. But looking out the office’s windows at a stream of emergency crews rushing to the advancing inferno, even the eternal optimist knew the writing was on the wall.

“Sorry, guys, we’re pulling the show,” he said immediately, the moment we picked up. And that was that. After airing six episodes,
The Lyon’s Den
was done. Although not officially canceled. No one in television uses that phrase anymore. Shows aren’t canceled these days, they are “off the schedule” or “on hiatus” or “pulled.” It’s absurd because everyone knows when a show is dead no matter what new, feel-good, never-admit-a-failure buzz-speak you use. It’s like asking your vet, “Did my cat survive his operation?” and being told, “Well, his vital signs are currently on hiatus.”

Regardless, the studio that financed
The Lyon’s Den
for NBC wanted us to shoot our contractually obligated thirteen-episode order, even though they would never be aired. The theory was that money might still be made on DVDs or in foreign markets. This is a pretty rare occurrence and a real character builder. It is not easy to get it up for fourteen-hour days working on a canceled TV show.

All my life, and still today, I’ve pushed through negativity, setbacks, bad reviews, poor ratings and breaks going against me whenever I’ve had to. As the ominous signs piled up on
The Lyon’s Den
I herniated myself trying to find a silver lining. I worked to the final moment and hoped against hope that there might be a turnaround. I kept waiting for the trend to reverse. And I also never lost sight of the
fact that through hard work and God’s grace, I live a very blessed life. A failed TV show is the very definition of a first-world problem.

The cast and crew took the news as well as could be expected. We had become close, as one does when you are under fire. I shared with them a new lesson I had learned from my experiences on everything from successes like
Wayne’s World
and
The West Wing
to projects that didn’t work out: “Sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop something from being a hit and sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop something from being a flop.” The show-business gods cannot be manipulated. It is both the good news and bad news of our line of work.

But there was worse to come.

Shortly after our cancelation, my mother passed away at sixty-four, from her battle with breast cancer. It happened on a weekend; my wife, my brother Micah and I were with her till the end. I went to work Monday; my producing partners and the studio asked if I wanted time off, but the show would’ve shut down without me. I wrote my mother’s eulogy on the set between scenes. I would like to think she would’ve been proud of that.

All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve
The Lyon’s Den
kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one.

We laid my mother to rest under a shading oak on a sweltering afternoon in Santa Barbara. The turnout for her was huge and I was
overcome by the support of so many friends. When my sons spoke to the packed church at eight and ten years old, dressed in their tiny suits, it was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Back on the set, we still had a number of episodes to shoot and scripts to write. Since
The Lyon’s Den
was a “dead” show, no one from the network or studio was mandating our story lines. We had complete freedom. “What should we do with the remaining episodes? How should we end the series?” Kevin Falls asked me.

“Let’s go out strong. Let’s be daring. Let’s burn all the bridges,” I said.

So in the end, we built to a finale that
no one
would see coming. We decided to blow people’s minds. (Not that anyone would see it, unless they lived in some foreign hinterland where they air failed shows.) We decided that my character, the hero of
The Lyon’s Den
, would be revealed as a psychopathic schizophrenic who was, in fact, the murderer of his mentor. To their credit, when we shared this outrageous finale with the studio, they said, “Hey, whatever you guys want!”

So on the last day, we shot the last scene of the script. It took place in the law office’s big conference room late at night. I sat eating a steak as I invited my office rival, the future coach of
Friday Night Lights
, Kyle Chandler, to a final showdown. In it, he confronted me about secretly being on antipsychotic meds and my involvement in my mentor’s death. I walked toward him with a smile, blithely confessed to murder, then stabbed him to death with my steak knife. I then finished my meal, walked to the office balcony and committed suicide by throwing myself off. End of series.

For some reason, I’ve never seen these final episodes. Every once in a while I’ll get a fan letter from Slovakia or Azerbaijan from someone who has. “I saw the ending of
The Lyon’s Den
! Jesus Christ! It was insane! You must be crazy!” I usually write back, “No, the TV business is crazy, I’m just learning as I go.”

B
eing eighteen and a
freshly minted movie star, only a few years away from Dayton, Ohio, was a mixed bag. On one hand my life’s goal was coming into focus, but I was having to navigate some fast-moving waters in Hollywood. And, like any male eighteen-year-old, the most pressing developmental issue I had to face was sex and romance, and how they fit into my life.

I had my first crush in the first grade but got talked out of it by my friends who thought the girl was not up to their seven-year-old standards. By the time I was fifteen I had struggled through the challenge of my peers thinking I was a “theater fag” because I wanted to be an actor and finally found my first serious girlfriend. As my career began to really take off, that relationship began to end, a casualty of immaturity, jealousy and the first blush of fame. By the time my other friends were out of the house for the first time, I was on locations making movies or pounding the pavement in Hollywood, building my career in earnest. And like all young men, it was during those years that I
explored all I could about love, relationships, sex and the connections between the three. Of all the “personal discovery” journeys I’ve been on, this one was clearly the most fun.

Helping matters greatly was the time line: It was pre-AIDS and before the lessons of recreational drug use taught us that cocaine was not an appropriate status symbol. It was also in the time before everyone had a cell phone with a camera attached, before the Internet and Facebook and a culture where everyone simply
has
to post every photo of every party they attend. Although there was the
National Enquirer
and
Star
(then a true tabloid and not a celeb-photo book), there was no TMZ or Radar, no Perez Hilton or any of today’s myriad of pay-for-play gossip sites. There were no armies of paparazzi staked out in my beloved Malibu or on Rodeo Drive or at LAX or any of the cool restaurants or clubs. There were no “Stars Are Just Like Us!”/“Baby Bump Watch!” banal and reductive celeb editorializations in the “straight” media. It wouldn’t have been tolerated, either by the public or on the streets at the clubs or restaurants. But then again, the cover boys of that era were Beatty, Newman and Redford. Instead of couples from
Dancing with the Stars
, we had Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston. It was a
totally
different era in terms of what we valued. The net effect was this: We were more innocent and trusting, and there was actually some privacy and decorum, but with plenty of room to get wild, if the opportunity arose.

It was also before the two events that irreparably damaged one of the great bastions of the sexual revolution, the Playboy Mansion. Internet porn killed the business model and reality TV killed the Bunnies. With the possible exception of becoming a Laker Girl (today also devoid of its status), back then, if you were a gorgeous, marginally talented young woman, becoming a Bunny was one of your only shots at fame. Not anymore. Today, if you are willing to eat bugs or throw a chair at your best friend or mother, you can star in a reality TV series.

The Playboy Mansion of the early to mideighties was a thing to behold. Sure, even as a nineteen-year-old, I knew it was on a slide from its heyday. But to have been there in the seventies when Hef was young, the pill was new and James Caan
lived
there
would have been too much to handle. I barely survived my first-time visit as it was!

An invitation to come to the mansion for movie night was a tough ticket to get. You couldn’t buy your way in; you couldn’t use connections or a publicist or any Hollywood lever pulling. Invitations came directly from Hugh Hefner, and he cast his parties very carefully in those days. In his magazine, the
Playboy
interview was
the
most insightful, dangerous, prestigious and coveted profile in all media, so there was a patina of intellectual exclusiveness almost as strong as the sexual undercurrent associated with Hef’s gatherings. The crowd could vary from screenwriting geniuses like Robert Towne and Buck Henry to star athletes like Magic Johnson. It goes without saying that you would also see the absolute top tier of beautiful and usually available women that LA had to offer. That they were comprised of the top lookers of a wide range of American cities effectively made them among the most stunning groups of women in the country.

I had just finished
The Outsiders
when I got a call from “Mr. Hefner’s” office inviting me to a Super Bowl party. I was specifically told that I could not bring a guest and I was required (for reasons I never understood) to provide my driver’s license number and a description of the car I would be driving.

I was the envy of all my pals. My friends from my school days in Malibu always enjoyed the collateral of my new life in the movies, but the
Playboy Mansion
! Are you kidding me?! We had visions of God only knows what streaming through our heads. Of course they were bummed that they couldn’t come with me.

“I will go it alone,” I said solemnly.

On game day I arrived at the mansion’s massive gates on Charing
Cross Road in Holmby Hills, an even more exclusive area than Beverly Hills, if you can imagine. Sitting in my first car, a white Mazda 626, I waited to be let in. After a moment, I heard a voice.

“Can I help you?”

I rolled down my window and looked around; no one was there. Very strange.

“Hello! Can I help you?” it said again, and I realized it was coming from inside of a giant granite rock. Looking closer, I discovered a speaker chiseled into its face.

“Oh, hi. I’m Rob Lowe. I’m here for the Super Bowl party,” I said, trying to seem nonchalant.

The gates swung open.

I drove up the long, winding driveway to a large house that looked like Wayne Manor from
Batman
. The motor court was filled with Porsches, Mercedes and a lime-green Ferrari. I hadn’t set foot inside and already I was feeling “less than.”

This wasn’t a new sensation for me, because until I got famous, I hadn’t had a great romantic career. I always loved girls, even in grade school. That did me no favors with the guys, who thought girls were lame, or with the girls, who clearly thought I was some moony-eyed dweeb. Then in middle school I had the misfortune of having the dream of being an actor, which, again, the guys hated and gave me no juice with the girls, who were only interested in the volleyball players and surfers. By the time high school rolled around, like any kid of that age, my sexual self-image was cast. I was not in the cool set, and no “it” girl would give me the time of day; I wasn’t an abject loser—I had a few girls who liked me fine—but I was clearly never going to play in the big leagues, like many of the guys strutting around the high school quad.