Still Me (33 page)

In early '86, still trying to find a decent film project, I was looking through my bookshelves and came across a script called
Street Smart.
It had been sitting there for years; I couldn't even remember where it had come from. As I reread it I liked it immediately and wondered why I hadn't responded to it before. The lead character, Jonathan Fisher, is an amoral yuppie who fabricates a profile of a pimp in order to keep his job on the staff of a slick New York magazine. As he does research for the article, he crosses paths with a real pimp named Fast Black and soon finds himself drawn into a dangerous underworld. The script makes it clear that the smarmy young writer and the treacherous pimp are much alike but that the pimp is actually more honest.

I took the project to Cannon Films and was given a green light. Jerry Schatzberg, who had directed the gritty urban drama
Panic in Needle Park
with Al Pacino, was brought in to direct. The role of Fast Black was offered to Danny Glover; he liked the script but after
The Color Purple
didn't want to play another unsympathetic character. Jerry knew of a talented actor who had not yet gained the recognition he deserved and whose steady job at the time was playing Easy Reader on
The Electric Company.
At the first read-through I knew I would have to work very hard to keep up with him. This was my introduction to Morgan Freeman.

Because of the low budget of
Street Smart
, we had to shoot in Montreal, and the art department had to make it look like New York. When we worked on the street, all the signs in French were covered up and the prop people littered the sidewalks with newspapers and garbage. We did film in Harlem for three days, and I was amazed that this footage blended so well with the scenes shot in Canada.

I was not aware that Morgan was a grandfather. One evening as I was waiting to shoot a scene, he and his wife pulled up at the location in a big station wagon with a cute little girl sitting behind them in a baby seat. They had driven all the way from New York during his week off, typical American tourists on a summer vacation. I watched as he kissed them fondly and sent them off to their hotel. Then he disappeared into his trailer. A half hour later the grandfather was gone and out came the dangerous pimp, with the flashy clothes and gold-capped tooth. Even though I had worked with him for weeks, I was startled by the transformation. Later that night we shot a scene in which the pimp drags Jonathan Fisher into the bathroom of a Harlem restaurant, smashes his face into the sink, and puts a gun to his head. That kind of threat has been used in countless films without producing a real impact: the viewer knows that the star of the movie probably isn't about to be blown away. But Morgan could take a clichéd moment and make it real. As we shot the scene I actually felt he might kill me any second. No one was surprised when he was nominated for an Oscar and his career took off.

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the owners of Cannon Films, produced and financed
Street Smart
on the condition that I play Superman in at least one more sequel. They had bought the rights from Ilya Salkind and his father, Alexander, the financier, over dinner in Cannes the previous May. While we were filming in Montreal, the writers Larry Konner and Mark Rosenthal were busy churning out the script for
Superman IV.
The premise this time (based largely on input from me, I'm sorry to say) was that Superman would intervene in the nuclear arms race. Superman had been used as a morale booster for the troops in World War II. Now, when President Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and summit talks with Mikhail Gorbachev were at an impasse, I thought the character could be used effectively in the real world once again. Big mistake.

Morgan Freeman as a dangerous pimp in
Street Smart.

We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and
Superman IV
received no special consideration. For example, Konner and Rosenthal wrote a scene in which Superman lands on Forty-second Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in
Superman I
, we would actually have shot it on Forty-second Street. Dick Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere. Even if the story had been brilliant, I don't think that we could ever have lived up to the audience's expectations with this approach.

Often my work provided a welcome distraction from the complexities of my private life. Not this time. Not only was the film a mess but my relationship with Gae was deteriorating. In spite of the tremendous sorrow I felt about leaving the children behind, Gae and I could no longer keep up appearances. When the production ended in February 1987, I moved back to New York. Gae and the children remained in our house on Redctiffe Road.

The next few months were truly miserable. I came back to an empty apartment and an empty life. My friend Michael Stutz and I went to Barbados for a week, but even as I went scuba diving and met a number of available women, I couldn't lift myself out of my depression. I realized that what I needed wasn't a vacation but time to grieve.

Still trying to pull myself out of the depths, I went to Williamstown in the dead of winter and literally did something constructive: I met with a local architect and drew up plans to expand and improve the house. The builders started to work in the early spring. I was always amused that they had coffee and donuts at seven, but at about nine-thirty they switched to Budweiser. By the end of the day they had finished a couple of six-packs. I didn't mind, however, because even though they built my house with a slight buzz on, the framing was excellent and all the corners were square.

After Gae and I separated, time with the children was even more valuable.

My half brother Jeff moved in early in the spring and got a job as a Little League coach in Pittsfield. In the evenings we shared take-out food at a card table in the partly finished dining room. I flew to New York occasionally for meetings and picked up a few jobs to keep an income flowing. When I hosted a documentary about the future of aviation at the Smithsonian in Washington, I recorded my trip on video for Matthew and Alexandra. But they were unimpressed. Gae told me over the phone that the shots of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial had bored them. They watched for a while, then turned it off.

One of the clear indications that I was still deeply depressed was that I lost the willpower to make my own decisions. I had switched agents in the fall of '85 because I wasn't getting the roles I wanted. The first project my new agents at ICM had put together for me was the
Street Smart/Superman IV
deal, which turned out to be a disaster. Golan and Globus had spent no money on advertising and promoting
Street Smart
, so it quickly vanished from sight despite excellent reviews.
Superman IV
was simply a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career. Now I let my team of agents talk me into the third lead in
Switching Channels
, yet another remake of
The Front Page.
The movie would star Kathleen Turner and Michael Caine.

The newly completed Williamstown house.

I thought doing a comedy might cheer me up, and it had been great fun working with Michael on
Deathtrap.
In the 1940 version of the story,
His Girl Friday
, Ralph Bellamy is sincere but too square for Rosalind Russell. The idea this time was to make him a vain buffoon: a rich tycoon obsessed with clothes and the color of his hair. Thrown in for good measure was a fear of heights, which the creative team felt would be an amusing takeoff on my Superman image.

My big moment as Blaine Bingham III takes place in a glass elevator. When it gets stuck between floors in a shopping mall he has a major panic attack. Everyone assured me this would be hysterically funny. Before I knew what was happening, I had signed a contract and found myself on location in Toronto making a fool of myself. I had taken the job as a distraction from pain, which made it all the more difficult to be a light comedian at work every day. To make matters worse, after two weeks of filming with Kathleen, we learned that Michael Caine would not be able to join us. He was filming
Jaws IV
in the Bahamas, and the mechanical shark had broken down; the film was delayed indefinitely while they waited for new hydraulic parts to be sent from Ohio. Burt Reynolds was brought in to replace him. Unfortunately, he and Kathleen couldn't stand each other, so I had to take on the added burden of being a referee. Trying to be funny while dealing with personal problems and a tense atmosphere on the set was absolutely exhausting.

Gae's brother Jonathan lived in Toronto at the time, so when she brought Matthew and Al over during their spring vacation, they had a place to stay. The kids spent a few nights with me at the Sutton Place Hotel. They loved room service, playing in my trailer at work, and tossing a ball around in the park. But underneath I think they couldn't understand why their parents were in two different places in the same city. Part of me was tempted to put all the pieces back together again; it certainly would have been easier and more convenient. But every time I thought about doing that, I was stopped by the realization that ease and convenience can't be the basis of a permanent relationship. I knew that somehow I had to get through this difficult period, and I believed that in the long run we would all be the better for it. Later that year Gae and I worked out an amicable agreement that provided for joint custody of the children and financial security for the three of them. I'm extremely grateful that in the years since our separation we have never had a serious disagreement about any aspect of the children's upbringing.