Prairie Tale (16 page)

There was good buzz around the project, whose cast included Emilio, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Mare Winningham, and Judd Nelson. We’d met Judd a couple of years before in New York, and I was sure he was going to be the next huge movie star. He was scary smart, brutally honest, and hilariously funny.

However, my favorite person on the picture was its brilliant director, Joel Schumacher, a wonderfully talented and entertaining man who was beginning an ascent that would make him one of Hollywood’s most successful and beloved filmmakers. He adored and, more than that, understood Rob, who would preen in his movie wardrobe (the school jacket, the hoodie sweatshirt, and the ribbed Henley T-shirt, as well as the high-top tennis shoes and mushed-down socks) and check himself out like Dorian Gray as he practiced the saxophone.

Joel referred to Rob affectionately as “the shameless creature.” I loved him for that brazenly honest and funny insight—because it was absolutely true. Rob was a shameless creature, whether he was admiring the highlights in his longish hair or listening to seashells.

He was a horny young man, as Tony Richardson once said, and he enjoyed the attention he got from girls who hounded him on the set at all hours. One day he was changing clothes in his dressing room with Emilio when, on a lark, he threw open the door and gave a full frontal flash to a crowd of delirious female admirers as he asked his wardrobe guy if he knew where his clothes were. Joel said they had to call the police to get the guys out of the trailer.

Nevertheless, we were going through one of the best times in our relationship. Joel welcomed me onto the set, and Rob had no qualms about having me there no matter what they were shooting. I watched the scene where Demi drives Rob home and he makes a move for her by dropping his keys in his sweatpants. They were shooting in an alley deep in Hollywood. Rob’s trailer was parked next to a church and above it was a neon sign that said, “Hollywood Is the Devil’s Toilet.” I thought that was brilliant. It reminded me of the scene in
Scarface
when Tony Montana sees the sign on the side of the blimp that says, “The World Is Yours.” At that moment, I felt the universe wink at me.

A
fter those set visits, I went off and did
Sylvester,
a coming-of-age story about a young Texas wrangler who tries to make a quick windfall on the back of her best bronco at a three-day eventing competition. It was considered a hot project. The director, Tim Hunter, had launched Matt Dillon’s career in
Tex,
and the writer, Carol Sobieski, had done
The Toy, Annie,
and
Honeysuckle Rose
. Before getting the role, I auditioned numerous times during a nationwide search for the quintessential teen actress to play this scrappy, horse-breaking Texan.

I was thrilled when I got the part. It was my first feature film, and it finally put me in the same club as some of the guys in our crowd who occasionally thumbed their noses at me for being on TV.

They weren’t the only ones. From what I understand now, the producers, Ray Stark and Marty Jurow, wanted me, but Tim Hunter was against hiring me in the lead role of his movie. I represented everything he didn’t want. I got that message at our first meeting when he sat me down and said, “So we have to change everything about you.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means you have to change everything about you,” he reiterated. “Your mannerisms. Your look. Everything…”

As he explained it, everything included cutting off all my hair, which I’d anticipated. I wanted to get as deeply under the skin of this character, Charlene—Charlie—Railsback, as I could. Then he laid a big bomb on me. He said he wanted me to do as much of my own riding as possible.

“Meaning?” I asked.

“I don’t want the majority of your stunts to be done by a double,” he said. “We will have doubles on standby, but I don’t want to use them if I can use you.”

I knew this director didn’t like me. His opinion came through clearly. But I had grown up around wranglers and tough guys, Michael Landon being the toughest. I didn’t let Tim get to me. I knew that pros sucked it up. I thought,
Pal, you’re going to like me by the time this fucking thing is over.
As it turned out, I don’t think he did.

For months, I trained six hours a day, five days a week, with Benita (Bunny) Allen, a riding expert who worked the crap out of me. My arms quivered as I lifted the saddle over my head twenty-five times, but I needed to be in incredible shape. The horse Tim picked as Sylvester was over seventeen hands high and towered over my five-foot-three frame. I looked like a pea on top of him—but a determined pea.

By the time I left for the shoot, I had boy hair, a flat chest, and big biceps. My thighs were black-and-blue from that damn horse, and I had calluses on the insides of my knees and all over my hands. There wasn’t an ounce of femininity left in me. I cried to Rob, “I’m a boy!” He was sweet about it, though. “It’s okay, Bunny-Mouse,” he said. “I think you look cute. I still love you.”

I lost whatever vanity was left once I got to Marfa, where I spent the next few months shooting
Sylvester
. Actually, we stayed in Alpine, Texas, where there was one streetlight and one motel. I got to stay in the motel owner’s swanky apartment behind the front desk. I called it the Norman Bates Suite. I’d wanted Rob to come with and help settle me in because I knew it was going to be a rough shoot. I was right, too. Unfortunately, he was learning to play hockey for his next movie,
Youngblood
, and then was off to Toronto.

As soon as I arrived in Marfa, I started to butt heads with Tim Hunter. Though I was playing a Texan, he didn’t want me to sound like a Texan. There are five dialects in the giant state of Texas, and he wouldn’t let me have a hint of any of them. My sanity was saved by my leading guy, Michael Schoeffling from
16 Candles,
and my leading man, Richard Farnsworth, who was unflappable. He’d been around. Nothing ruffled him, which was a good lesson for me.

It seemed to me that I could never do enough to please Tim, and on top of that, my horse hated me. As much as the director didn’t want me in the movie, my horse wanted to be in it less. There were eight different horses, one for bucking, one for jumping, one for falling, and so on. But the main one, which I rode most often, was a monster. He nearly killed me one day. I was supposed to ride him straight away from the camera, into a field. Suddenly he took the bit in his mouth, stretched his neck out, and bolted for the trees at a full run with me on his back.

There was nothing I could do. Behind me, I could hear the head wrangler, Corky Randall, screaming, “Motherfucker! Someone get a horse!”

But the catch horse wasn’t able to catch up. From some remote corner of my brain, I remembered a safety talk that Benita had given me. I dropped one rein, grabbed the other with both hands, and pulled the horse’s nose into my knees. Suddenly he crow-hopped around and around. I stayed on him until he stopped, then jumped off and walked in a daze back to the crew. Grown men, seasoned cowboys, stared at me with their mouths agape.

Farnsworth was the only one sort of grinning, as if to say, “’Atta girl, you can handle anything.” In reality, he said, “That’s bullshit! It’s bullshit they made you ride that dumb animal. Everyone knows that horse is a dink.”

I walked into my trailer, sat on the sofa, and sobbed. My whole body was trembling. I remember watching my hands shake uncontrollably as I tried to drink water. Then there was a knock on the door. I opened it and saw Bunny holding Sylvester by the bridle. The horse was covered in sweat. She told me she punched him in the face a couple times. “Sylvester says he’s sorry,” she said.

I looked that horse straight in his big, seemingly remorseful eyes and said, “You better be sorry, you bastard, because I’m not going through that again.”

I
got back on him and he tried his funny business two more times over the rest of the shoot, once when I was riding with Farnsworth and another time when we were doing dressage moves in an arena. Every day was hard and scary. We worked terribly long hours, but on the weekends, we partied our brains out. Our caterer had access to a private jet, and he would fly in the best food from L.A., as well as the best cocaine.

Still, the nights were extremely lonely. I rescued a kitten and named him Sylvester. He became my constant companion and I’d have him for the next fifteen years. He would ride to work on Richard’s shoulder, curled up in a little ball. It was such a cute sight: this big, old, rough cowboy with a little kitten sleeping next to his ear.

But the kitten wasn’t enough company for me. With Rob in Toronto, I began an on-set romance with the third AD, Frank Capra III (FC3). Though it wasn’t intentional, I got a taste of what Rob went through on
The Hotel New Hampshire,
and he got a taste of what I experienced on the other end. He would call and I wouldn’t be in my room. Marfa is famous as the place where
Giant
was filmed, and for the Marfa lights, these unexplained bursts of light that can be spotted off Route 67. They appear to bounce through the nighttime sky like giant glowing basketballs. A lot of our weekend parties were based around going to watch the ghost lights and getting obliterated. Rob sensed the distance I was putting between us as I spent time with Frank. He wrote me a letter from Toronto, saying he didn’t believe I was out all night looking at some stupid Marfa lights, and he warned that what I was doing was dangerous to us.

Even rereading his heartfelt words—“I hope you’ll give me a chance”—as I did often, didn’t deter me. I was lonely, scared, and by myself, which was, I discovered, not a good place for me. I didn’t do
alone
well. Performing the stunts, risking my safety, knowing the director disliked me, and just living every day on the edge got to me, and I spiraled downward quickly. I had no clue how needy I was, how I needed a man to fill me up. I still hadn’t acknowledged in an emotional sense that my father was actually dead. As a result, if I found myself in a needy place, as I did in Marfa, I would climb into someone else’s lap, like a kitten craving affection.

Then we moved locations to Lexington and Rob was able to visit, which ended my fling with FC3. I left as soon as filming ended and joined Rob in Toronto, where we argued and nitpicked at each other until he confronted me about my behavior in Marfa. Sobbing, I confessed, apologized, and begged his forgiveness. He also apologized for not having been available to me when I needed him.

With the Sturm und Drang behind us, we fell into the cozy lockstep of lovers. I’d planned to stay for a week and ended up there a month before I returned to L.A. for postproduction. The PR campaign kicked off when I became the youngest actor to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Afterward, I celebrated with my family and Rob at the old Brown Derby restaurant, where we devoured their famous cobb salad and grapefruit cake.

Sylvester
’s opening coincided with the release of Rebecca De Mornay’s picture
The Slugger’s Wife,
so I crossed paths with her and Tom Cruise in different cities as we did a press junket across the country. To help with PR, my mother and Uncle Ray hired top Hollywood publicist Warren Cowan, who soon thereafter became the great love of my mother’s life and, years later, my stepdad.

Ironically, I missed walking the red carpet for my own premiere at the Equestrian Center because I was on the road doing PR. My mother dressed my sister Sara in a full equestrian outfit for the event, including jodhpurs, boots, vest, and helmet, and later showed me photos of her and Warren with various stars who’d attended.

Openings in other cities were planned, but they were canceled one by one as the reviews came in. Despite all the publicity efforts, I started to realize the movie was going to be a disaster, or, as Rob and I used to say, a whistling, screaming bomb. Indeed, you could hear
Sylvester
dropping from the sky.

And so it was. I wasn’t particularly shattered. I didn’t feel like my career was pinned on that one project. Aside from all the hard work that had gone into it, I was disappointed because I wanted to be able to say to Rob and the other guys whose movies were big hits that I was also in the club. I wanted to go, me too!

But I was realistic about my work. I had much more ego invested in my actual life.

T
he tabloids only focused on breakups and bad news, so they were nowhere to be found when I took my mother on her first trip to Europe. It was their loss. They missed a good story—and a mostly good time.

We went with friends of my mother’s who were on a buying trip for their clothing store, with stops in London, Paris, Milan, Rome, Florence, and Venice. Even though she wasn’t paying the bill, my mom insisted on sharing a room with me to save money. She also prohibited me from calling home (again, it was the cost). As a result, I spent a lot of time talking to Rob from house phones in hotel lobbies.

In Paris, my mother and I were walking up the Champs-Elysées when I spied Jodie Foster on a movie set. I said hello, and she invited me to hang out with her that night at her flat. “We’ll do something,” she said. After a week of nonstop togetherness with my mother and her friends, whom we nicknamed Stinko and Poo Poo Foot (at every restaurant, he ordered a veal dish called Stinko, and she kept stepping in dog poop), I accepted immediately, and with a sense of relief bordering on desperation that could have easily scared Jodie into reconsidering her offer. Fortunately, she didn’t.

Jodie and I had a delicious dinner at a neighborhood café and then hung out at her place. I spent the night there after we realized it had gotten very late. When I went back to the hotel the next morning I saw my mother waiting for me with a concerned expression on her face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Melissa, I have to ask you something,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you a lesbian?”

I scrunched up my face, puzzled by her query.

“No,” I said. “Why do you suddenly think I’m a lesbian?”

“Well, you know what they say about Jodie.”

“Ma, she’s a friend of mine,” I said. “And I don’t care what she is. That’s really immaterial. She’s a wonderful person.”

“I just wondered,” she said.

“I spent the night at her house. Big deal. That doesn’t make me a lesbian. I’m a very heterosexual woman. In fact, maybe too heterosexual.”

Our laughter was short-lived. Not to sound like a spoiled brat, but I was nearly out of my mind by the time we got to Venice. Aside from craving my own space and conversation with friends my own age, I couldn’t smoke around my mother and it was driving me crazy. (I was forty-one when I finally gave up cigarettes, and in all that time I never once lit up around her.)

At any rate, Little Miss Can’t Do Anything on Her Own decided to leave a few days early. I schlepped my luggage and all the crap I’d bought across Europe and found my way from our hotel, through the canals, and to the airport and caught a flight to New York, where I fell into Rob’s arms and spent the next three weeks as a raving heterosexual.

When I got home, my mom told me about a cute girl she had met at Warren’s PR firm, Rogers & Cowan. She was Robert Wagner’s daughter, Katie. My mom thought we would make great friends. Knowing I didn’t have many close girlfriends, she suggested I give her a call. I sloughed off her recommendation just because it came from her. At almost twenty-one years old, I didn’t want my mother picking my friends or making play dates for me.

A few days later, though, I found myself with tickets to a Genesis concert and no one to go with me. Rob was out of town, Emilio didn’t want to go because Peter Gabriel had left the band and Emilio insisted that Genesis wasn’t Genesis without Peter. Rob’s brother, Chad, my backup date, was busy. I thought what the hell, and I called Rogers & Cowan and got Katie on the phone.

“I don’t know you and you don’t know me,” I said. “But I have great seats for a Genesis concert tonight. I also have a limo. Want to go?”

She said yes and from that moment forward we were joined at the hip. We were the same astrological sign, Taurus, born just three days apart. She shopped the way I did, with gusto and power. We favored Fred Segal and the boutiques on Sunset Plaza, where her mom had a store. We would go to New York for three-day shopping sprees at the B stores—Barney’s, Bendel’s, and Bergdorf’s. Best of all, she didn’t go gaga over Rob, as had some previous girlfriends. She was unfazed by him.

I adored her father, an amazing man who was exactly the way you would think he would be. At her house, we would come in late from a night of partying, find her dad in the kitchen, and sit with him till four in the morning as he told the most mesmerizing stories about everyone in Hollywood. This was twenty years before he had published his own memoir, and the stories about his affair with Barbara Stanwyck and his life with Natalie Wood, as well as Katie’s mom were still private and precious.

By the time I met Katie, I had figured out L.A.’s late-night scene and knew the hot restaurants, clubs, and exclusive haunts. Celebrity was the best ticket in town. Whether I was with Rob or Katie or the three of us were out together, the door at the private back entrance of any club would open and we would be ushered directly into the VIP area, or the VVIP area if they had one. Air kisses and drinks followed.

On Friday nights, we went to Helena’s, a dinner club in an industrial part of Silverlake that stood out only for the Rolls-Royces, Ferraris, and Mercedes parked in front. There wasn’t any sign. You had to know where it was, and then to get in you had to know its owner, Helena Kallianiotes, a former belly dancer turned actress who opened the place as a hangout for her famous friends.

On opening night, Jack Nicholson gave Anjelica Huston a baby elephant. Goldie Hawn turned forty there. Sean Penn and Madonna used it as a haven from paparazzi. Beatty held court at a favorite table. So did Michael Douglas. It was quite a pickup joint. Then Helena started poetry night, which was hilarious. Ally and Judd got up and read poems they had written. I never had the balls to try.

One night, I was at Spago for dinner with Rob, Andrew McCarthy, and Rob’s agent, Michael Black (one of the most viciously funny men in Hollywood, and one of my favorite people). At the time, Wolfgang Puck’s gourmet pizzeria on the Sunset Strip was Hollywood’s nighttime commissary. Being there was like an A-list party with surprise guests. Indeed, as Wolfgang brought over special appetizer pizzas, I heard someone scream, “Michael!”

It was kind of amazing how the familiar voice pierced the dense hum of conversation from all the way across the restaurant. I turned and saw Liza Minnelli flying over to our table. She kissed Michael, sat down between Andrew and me, ordered a greyhound, and stepped into our little party as if she’d been there from the start.

Then Michael Jackson walked in. He came straight to our table and sat down just as dinner was served. Wolfgang kept sending over food, and everyone talked—except for Michael Jackson. Other than his kiss-kiss with Liza, he didn’t say a word. Nothing.

We finished dinner and were nearly through dessert when we began talking about what to do next and where we should go. Ideas were tossed around. All the options were nixed and everyone ran out of ideas at the same time. The table fell silent. And that’s when Michael finally spoke the only words he would say the entire evening.

“You can come to my house,” he said. “I got a llama.”

The already strange evening got stranger when Liza suggested going to Sammy’s. I thought she was talking about a club I’d never heard of. She laughed at me (“You’re so silly,” she said) and explained she meant Sammy Davis Jr.’s house. Andrew, Michael Black, Rob, Liza, and I bid good-bye to Michael Jackson, who didn’t want to go, and caravanned to Sammy’s house in Beverly Hills, where I’d learn Sammy was friends with my grandfather (surprise, surprise) and see a wigless Liza (the woman had six hairs on her head!). Eventually we ended the night at Michael Black’s apartment, where suddenly Andrew and Liza started making out. That was it for me. I said to Rob, “What is Android (our nickname for him) doing?” Rob said he didn’t have a clue, but agreed with me that it was definitely time for us to get the heck out of there. So we said our good-byes and drove home laughing uncontrollably as we recounted the crazy events of the evening.

Life was terribly fun. It was still basically pre-AIDS, back when it was only just whispered about as that gay cancer, and things were still fairly wild and permissive. We were in the midst of the Reagan era, and those of us earning good paychecks were not being overly taxed in any way, shape, or form, so people had oodles of money to toss around. There was the sense that all of us were at one of the great parties in human history.

It is important to note that around this time my brother, Jonathan, completely cut himself off from the family. He turned eighteen and simply disappeared. Though he would turn up a couple of times over several years, I have only seen him three times in the last two decades. Surprisingly, I am at peace with it. Though my heart does ache for my mother: I would learn later on what it means to let go of a son.

R
ob and I wanted to work together. After years of looking for a project, we thought we found it when, in September 1985, he was cast in
About Last Night
and I was asked to do a screen test with him. Ed Zwick, who was directing this dark-humored relationship story based on the David Mamet play
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
, set up the test in New York. Though I heard the test was strong, Demi Moore got the job. Ed was honest and straightforward with me about his decision.

“Casting is casting,” he said, “and the studio wants what the studio wants, and beyond all that, just look at the two of them. Even you have to admit they look good together.” I gotta admit, they did.

Rob soothed my sore feelings by taking me to see Bruce Springs-teen, who was on the last leg of his monumental Born in the U.S.A. tour, and then he went off to Chicago to make
About Last Night
. I visited a couple times before starting my next project, the TV movie
Choices,
which explored the issues surrounding abortion. The picture shot in Montreal with Jacqueline Bisset and George C. Scott, who was every bit the intimidating, ferocious, opinionated, unbelievably talented George C. of legend. For whatever reason, though, we took a shine to each other instantly. Somehow he would know when I was walking by his trailer. He would lean out the door and say, “Kid, come here.”

The first time that happened, I entered tentatively.

“Hi. What’s up?”

“Have a drink with me,” he said.

“George, it’s the middle of the day,” I said. “You’re working. So am I.”

“Oh, what’s wrong with you, you pussy,” he said. “Have a drink with me.”

I hesitated for a minute and then thought to myself,
How many times in my life is the opportunity gonna present itself?
He poured a couple of Bloody Marys, and from then on, that became our thing. He was hilarious—and apparently very thirsty.

George was a completely no-nonsense guy. He didn’t like all the petty bullshit that was often part of the acting scene, and I think we hit it off because he saw the same no-BS attitude in me. One day we were covering a scene with Jackie, who was a lovely woman and ungodly beautiful. As much as I struggled with my own looks, it dawned on me that being so beautiful must be a huge mind-fuck. You know that inevitably it will go away. And if that’s all you’re known for, you’re screwed.

Jackie didn’t fall into that one-dimensional category, but she took extraspecial care when it came to her looks. As she got ready for this scene, she had someone behind her with a mirror and someone in front of her with a mirror so she could check her hair from all angles. She had her own stylist, too. George and I were off camera, watching and waiting as she brushed her hair. Suddenly he put his face next to my ear and, in a gravelly voice I can still hear today, he said, “If I ever hear that you’re standing on some film set with a bunch of mirrors around your head, I will come there and I will fuck you up.”

“Really, Mr. Scott?” I asked.

“Yes, I will,” he replied. “I promise.”

“Then I guarantee I will never, ever do that,” I said.

“Good.” He laughed. “We’ll drink to that later.”

George played my father, a retired judge, who objected when my character got pregnant and wanted an abortion. Then, in an unexpected twist, he had to decide whether he wanted to be a father again at his age when his wife (Jackie) announced she, too, was carrying a child. The movie was actually pretty controversial for its time. Our most dramatic scene was when I told him that I wanted to terminate my pregnancy. He was supposed to roar, “No abortion,” and then we were to have a heated father-daughter argument.

We rehearsed it several times, trying to keep something in reserve for the close-ups. Then we shot the master, and after I delivered the big news, George turned to me, crossed his arms, and stepped forward so that he was looking down his nose at me. His gaze was an intense fire ready to explode in my face. But rather than yell, as I expected him to do, he harnessed that rage and passion and instead calmly and slowly said, “No. Abortion.”

It was like getting bitch-slapped across the face by George S. Patton. Startled, I totally went up. I forgot everything I was supposed to say. After a long pause, he asked, “Are you going to say your line?” I shook my head no.

“I can’t do it, you Pattoned me!” I said in a meek, embarrassed voice.

I was relieved when he laughed. I assumed I wasn’t the first actor who’d been handcuffed by his prodigious talent.

Looking back, I realize there was often someone on a project who was a sort of father figure to me, whether it was Mike, Dick Farnsworth, or George, and I loved hearing George call me kid. Later, whenever our paths would cross or if he saw my mom, he’d ask, “How’s the kid? What’s going on with the kid?”

In turn, I was able to boast to Rob and the guys that you haven’t lived until you’ve gotten absolutely plowed with George C. Scott—something none of them, despite their movie-star stature, could say. I also told another story that wouldn’t have happened to any of them. At the end of
Choices,
we went to New York City to shoot some exterior scenes. One night I took a few people from the crew out to a club, either Limelight or Area, and I was in the VVIP area when Andy Warhol sidled up to me.