Love Life (18 page)

After giving up some of my salary to close Sizemore’s deal, I also got him with my business manager. I kept a protective eye out in all areas I could. I didn’t pry into things that weren’t my business and hoped that my proximity would be a steadying influence if the time came.

The time came.

I had noticed Tom sweating unseasonably, noticed he was wearing mirrored sunglasses almost nonstop, noticed dilated eyes and a change in personality. Tom was, and is, capable of being very charming and always liked to tell stories, usually about Robert De Niro. There wasn’t a conversation that Tom couldn’t work “Bobby” De Niro into.

“Bobby got me this shirt.”

“Bobby wanted to adopt me,” etc.

I love eccentric actors and their stories, but when Tom told me that he played walk-on football at Notre Dame for a single play, I
knew something was awry. And despite his increasing tardiness to the set (never a good sign), he was always great in his scenes. Even if he sweated through an entire wardrobe before lunch to do it.

But as luck would have it, when I finally got the dark, intense script I’d been pushing for, with Tom at the center, he lost it. And lost it big-time.

My cell phone went off in the middle of the night. It was Tom. He was crying, screaming and wailing in a way that sounded inhuman. He hadn’t said a word and already I was scared.

“AAAAAARGGH! AAAAAARRRRRHH!” he shrieked.

“Tom! Tom! What’s going on?”

“Whaaaaaah! Grrraaaah!”

“Tom! Stop it! What’s happening?! Are you okay?!” I yelled into the phone.

“My— My— My girlfriend’s dead! AAAAWWWGH! Oh God, she’s deaaaaad!!” he sobbed.

“What!! Jesus Christ, Tom, what?!” I said, trying to get a grip on what was happening.

“They— They— They cut off her head! AAAAAARRRGGH! Oh God, it’s inside of a Dumpster! Waaaaaah!”

“Wait a minute, Tom. Stop. Slow down.”

“They hacked. They hacked. They hacked up my poor girlfriend! They took her head. It’s in a Dumpster. The downtown Dumpster!! AAAGGNNPH!!”

It went on like this for minutes before he got around to telling me what the call was
really
about.

“And— And— And— I can’t come in to shoot today ’cause I’m looking for her torso! Aagh, Rob, she has no torso!!”

There was more screaming and then the line went dead.

My wife rolled over and looked at the clock, which read three forty-five
A.M.

“Who was that, honey?”

“Oh, it was Tom Sizemore calling to say he won’t be coming to work.”

That morning, when he was indeed a no-show, we were forced to shoot without him. After a long day of scrambling to shoot out of order, I tracked Tom down, threw him in my Suburban and drove him to a drug rehab. I didn’t know what the fallout would be, but Tom needed help, and fast. Whatever would happen next would happen tomorrow, after all. One day at a time.

We shot the script I had such high hopes for anyway. We promoted a very inexperienced actor to handle Tom’s part, which was reduced so dramatically that it had none of the dark power we had intended. The episode was a mess. The chance to change the course of the show was lost.

The powers that be were supportive and gracious. Tom kept his job even though he would be in a thirty-day rehab. But his workload was reduced to almost nothing, throwing the writing staff for a loop from which we never recovered. Now, with both Amy Adams and effectively Tom Sizemore gone, there were two times fewer storytelling opportunities, not to mention two fewer irreplaceable actors.

Dr. Vegas
could not be revived and it died on the table. Found in its system at the time of death were good people with good intentions, a lack of a common creative point of view, bland writing, inconsistent acting and an element of cheese that was simply too strong to kill with conventional medicine.

Tom Sizemore would bounce in and out of rehab. I would visit and listen as he told his wild stories, wearing a do-rag, hiding behind those mirrored aviators. Ultimately, he was a man who simply could not or would not get honest with himself. Folks who can’t almost never get sober. But I pray his day will come. And I will be there for him when it does.

Maybe I’m in denial, but I don’t believe in “flops.” You try something and it may not work. You try something and this time it might. You never know, and you have no choice other than to keep trying. The only time you flop is when you don’t learn something.

I don’t eat wish sandwiches anymore. Today, when I read a script, I assume it will
never
get better, that there will be no changes to anything on the page. Just like how I try to judge people by what they actually say and do and not by what I know they have the
potential
to do.

There are signs and gifts everywhere, particularly in setbacks, but you need to keep your eyes peeled. They come wrapped in missed opportunities, in unfulfilled promises and lost jobs. They come born out of disappointments you never saw coming and also in those you should have. But they bring you better things and take you to where you were
meant
to go. Like my son Johnowen in Little League, you’ve gotta run hard on the base paths. All roads lead to Rome. Our setbacks bring us forward; we wander in the wilderness so the road can bring us home.

W
hen my brother Chad
and I would visit our grandparents, which we did often and for long periods of time, we would sometimes talk our grandpa into the drive-in or “a show,” as he called movies, at Sidney, Ohio’s gorgeous 1920s-era movie palace. He would only attend movies that had “a moral.” In the early seventies, although that era is now considered the last golden age of movies, Grandpa hadn’t been to a movie, unless shanghaied by his grandkids, since
Dr. Zhivago
.

My grandfather was the kind of man I didn’t totally understand in my youth. Born dirt-poor in a family of eight in rural Ohio, he dropped out of school and set out on his own when the family couldn’t feed him. He was in the eighth grade. He would become a butcher, a grocer and eventually the owner of the Spot restaurant for almost fifty years. It stands to this day, serving the best hamburger and old-fashioned cream pie you will find under one roof. Despite his lack of education, Grandpa was a leader of the business community
and the first person in Shelby County to drive a Cadillac, which he replaced every year. He was a Nixon supporter with no time for hippies, a churchgoing Methodist and a scratch golfer with seven holes in one to his credit. He loved fishing and cigars and let me sit on his lap while he smoked them, even as we drove in the fast lane of I–75. He traveled to every World Series with a group of guys and, like so many in the seventies, started a jogging club that met every Sunday before church, until most of the members dropped dead from heart attacks anyway. He was also married to the same woman for fifty years. His tough, unyielding will and commitment were hard to get my arms around as a young boy but unendingly inspirational to me as a young man.

Upon his death in 1991 I discovered among his belongings an award from Rotary for perfect attendance over
five
decades.
Newly sober at the time, I could barely get it together to get to a few AA meetings with consistency, even when I knew they were saving my life! But Grandpa’s half a century of commitment to business and his wife became a road map for me moving forward as I rebuilt my life from the ground up. I don’t know if I will be able to live with his level of integrity and consistency, but I know I’m lucky to have been left with his example. I also know that getting to fifty years of anything is actually more simple than it sounds: You do it one day at a time.

My grandfather was also unapologetically patriotic. When I was a boy, I never understood his flag on the lapel, given that the whole country was watching our president go down in deserved flames courtesy of the Watergate hearings. Additionally, my parents and certainly everyone of their generation were virulently anti–Vietnam War and therefore antigovernment by proxy. My grandpa seemed to me to be holding on to some vision of America that was being debunked nightly on the news, and it made me wonder what he saw that I didn’t.

Ironically, as I grew into a man and began to see our world through my own eyes and experience, I began to drift toward a love of country that I first recognized in him. In Hollywood, where everyone’s respect for the president is contingent on what party he comes from, I found myself, like my grandpa, swimming against the tide of popular sentiment. Well before I did a show about it, I was convinced of the inherent goodness of the majority of the men and women who served our country, Republican or Democrat. I read memoirs by ex-presidents, followed the ebb and flow of their administrations. As it did with Grandpa, something about the history of America spoke to me on a very deep level. And I never knew why. Until recently.

I was always envious of families who were well steeped in ancestral lore. Mine wasn’t. We had no stories of relatives long gone who did great or even interesting things. But I was curious about our family’s past, so when a television documentary series offered to put a team of genealogists on the case, I said yes.

For a year and a half they followed every strand of my family and dug and researched wherever it led them. If, at the end, they found nothing interesting or entertaining, they would move on to another public figure who might have more compelling forefathers.

They looked at every branch of my father’s line first. Then they turned to my mother’s. At some point they began following her father, my grandpa. That led them to John Christopher East—my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. The closest connection I had to him was my grandpa’s mother, the ancient and puppet-show-loving Bessie Mae East, in her walk-up apartment, where she would put a kerchief on her hand and perform plays for me. John Christopher, it turned out, started her line in this country, which then flowed through Bessie to Grandpa, to my mother and then to me.

As I learned his story I began to understand both my grandfather and myself through the events of his life. Events I never could
have imagined that explain so much about how I feel about so many things.

John Christopher East was born in 1754 in tiny Fürstenhagen, Germany. Filming the documentary, I stood in the chapel where he was baptized and read the original church records of my family’s births, marriages and deaths from the late 1500s. Remarkably, I was able to visit the house where he was born, with tile and Formica covering its six-hundred-year-old beams.

Fürstenhagen lies in the region called Hesse-Kassel, a former principality of the many German states that existed until their unification. For almost a hundred years before Christopher East’s birth, it was mandatory that all able-bodied young men leave their mothers, girlfriends, wives and all they’d ever known to be conscripted, often against their will, to fight as paid soldiers throughout the world. The boys from Hesse-Kassel were state of the art, infamous and feared in spite of the fact that many of them had no will or desire to fight in the first place. Named for the area they hailed from, they became known as Hessians.

Even today, the phrase “Hessian soldier” brings to mind images of large, powerful, resplendently uniformed, cold-blooded mercenary killers. One of the most frightening characters in American literature is a Hessian soldier, the Headless Horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” But the reality was that many a teenage boy was press-ganged into service or killed on the spot if he dared to desert. While the families at home did receive a decent payment for the services of their sons, it was the state, led by Landgrave Frederick the Second, that reaped the lion’s share of cash paid out from foreign armies looking to bring in the best of the best. So much for the “Age of Enlightenment.”

In the early spring of 1776, East joined the other boys of his village
(forgive me if I call them “boys”; Christopher Eastor Oeste, as he was called in German, would’ve been around the same age as my son Matthew . . . ) on a march that would eventually lead them through the thawing countryside to a flotilla of awaiting boats. They were told they were traveling across the great ocean to America, where they would help defend the colonists against savage Indians. Obviously, the reality would be very different.

One of Christopher East’s shipmates, nineteen-year-old Johannes Reuber, kept a detailed journal that survives to this day. I read from it at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. It tells a vivid tale of a voyage gone badly. A crossing that should have taken weeks instead took almost four months, as their ship languished in the middle of the Atlantic waiting for wind. Like all kids everywhere, the boys would ask their superiors, “Are we there yet?” The Hessian high command would answer by laughing in their faces. These officers were men of business and ran the boat accordingly. When their youngest conscript, a fifteen-year-old who was the ship’s mascot, was washed overboard, there was no thought of stopping to save him. The diary contains a harrowing scene of the crowded deck as they all watched the pleading boy flail as the ship sailed onward.