“I’m not going to say anything.”

“You better fucking not, or we will sue you!”

“I’m not going to say anything! And stop saying you’re going to sue me.”

“Don’t you tell your agent, Les Moonves, or anybody else because we have a lot of money riding on this and I will sue you if you fuck this up!” I left that meeting very shaken and surprised at how it went down. The number of times he brought up suing me was crazy, no matter how many times I told him I was not going to say anything to anyone. This was obviously way before the MeToo movement started helping people call out sexual harassment on the set, so I just curled up in a ball and shut my mouth. (Interestingly, both Brett and Jeremy have been caught up in MeToo revelations, both publicly accused of sexual harassment in the last few years, as has Les Moonves, the head of CBS.) A few days before CBS was going to announce whether our show had been picked up, I got a phone call from one of the executive producers. I picked up the phone and he immediately started yelling.

“Did you call Les Moonves? Did you call Les Moonves and tell him you didn’t want to do the show?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Did you call Les Moonves and tell him you didn’t want to do the show? Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t do that. I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Les Moonves said you called him and told him you don’t want to do the show!”

“I didn’t call Les Moonves. Why would he say that?”

“He said you called him in New York.”

“How the fuck would I call him in New York? I have no idea how to call Les Moonves and never would call him anyway. So Les Moonves is lying.”

This stopped the producer’s ranting at me.

“Well then what the fuck is going on?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’ll call you back.”

I hung up in shock, blindsided and with no idea what was happening. The producer called back.

“Les said he didn’t speak to you, but you left him a message at his hotel that said you don’t want to do the show.”

“A message? I left him a message at his hotel? In my voice?”

“No. A message with the operator.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I didn’t leave him a message. Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Because you don’t want to do the show.”

“Yes, I do. Look, I have no idea what’s going on here or who left a message at Les Moonves’s hotel, but it was not me. Have Les call me and I will tell him that I didn’t leave any message and somebody is fucking around here, and I do want to do the show.”

A little while later, Les Moonves called and I explained to him that I did not call him or leave him a message.

“I didn’t think it was you. It was weird to get this message in my box.”

“Very weird. I don’t know what is going on, but I hope you pick up our show.”

“We’ll see. I like the show but, honestly, right now it is on the bubble.”

We said a very nice goodbye and I called the producer back and told him that the conversation went well, we cleared up that bizarre incident, and that the show was in the running. But my level of paranoia kicked into overdrive. Who the fuck left a message for Les Moonves with my name on it?

The day came for the announcement and Partners did not get picked up. I was disappointed because I thought it was a good show and good part, and I was hoping the Brett and Jeremy situation would get cleared up once we got a commitment for the series and went into production. But those feelings of disappointment quickly changed into terror when I got a call from my agent saying that Columbia Television was suing me for twenty-five million dollars for sabotaging the show. The next day there was an article in the LA Times with my fucking picture next to it saying the same thing, along with the accusation that I had called Les Moonves and told him not to pick up the show. Twenty-five million?! If you added everything I had in the world, it would come to about six million, so I didn’t know where I was going to come up with the extra nineteen million! They were going to wipe me out, everything. Our house and our savings were at risk, along with my reputation. I had no idea what to do. My new agent at ICM was absolutely no help, afraid and wanting to stay on the good side of Columbia Television—fucking wimp. All of a sudden, I had to find a lawyer, which I knew nothing about. I hooked up with a tough and smart litigator who thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and he was not only going to fight them tooth and nail but countersue them as well. He put together a case, getting phone records to prove there was no phone call or message from me, getting Les Moonves to give a deposition to testify about his phone call with me, and developing his countersuit against Columbia, claiming they were defaming my character and trying to blame me for the financial loss they suffered when the show didn’t get picked up. It was good to have someone fighting for me, but Jesus, it was so expensive! I had to pay for his time at hundreds of dollars an hour, his assistant’s time, photocopying, parking, and who knows what else. It felt like I was going to end up owing the lawyer twenty-five million dollars before it was over. I started to experience anxiety like I have never felt, bad enough that I got a prescription for Xanax (which didn’t do much of anything). Plus, they wanted me to hire a publicist so I could get my story out in the press and defend myself and my reputation. But that would be another huge expense, and I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. I just wanted it to go away. So I called my old friend Joe Roth and asked him how to make it stop. He said, “You need a rabbi.”

“A rabbi?”

“Someone to talk to both sides and help come to a solution. They are pissed at you, and you are pissed at them. You need a rabbi to help you find an ending.”

Joe engaged his personal lawyer, a powerful man with connections to Columbia Television, and came back with a solution. If I gave them back the money they paid me for the show, they would drop the lawsuit. My lawyer advised me not to take it, that we would definitely win, and they knew that and that is why they were offering this. If it was just about right and wrong and there hadn’t been so much money at stake, I would have loved to have seen justice in the matter, have the Los Angeles Times print a retraction and rewind the clock. But I couldn’t afford that risk, financially or emotionally, and I was relieved to get out of the situation with the same money I started with. But the damage was done, and that bullshit would follow me around for years. I still have no idea what happened or why, and I was stung that no one stood up for me when the accusations were so clearly false. I wish I had been braver about standing up for the people who were sexually harassed on the show and had asked for my help. I should have made a bigger stink about that part of the story, which got washed away in all of the other controversy, but I had no idea how to fight that fight by myself. Thank God for the MeToo movement. And Fuck Brett Rather, Fuck Jeremy Piven, Fuck Les Moonves, and Fuck that top-level executive at Columbia!

Luckily, I had an incredible life to fall back into. We had finally raised enough money to launch Boys & Girls Club of Malibu. Allan Young helped us find a great executive director who knew the programs Boys & Girls Clubs had and had experience in hiring staff. Soon the double-wide trailers were loaded onto huge tractor trailers and driven to the Malibu school campus blacktop, where they were met by a hundred of our fellow community members, there to use their skills to help build this community center for their children. Carpenters built a deck around the buildings, electricians and plumbers hooked up their systems, carpet was laid, walls were painted—it makes me cry with joy to remember that building being put together by all of us. Mel was there hammering nails, Laure and Robyn overseeing everything and feeding people. The school administrators helped to put the fencing in, giving up a piece of their territory because they knew our club would provide things for the kids that the school alone couldn’t. And when the doors finally opened, the kids flocked in—getting homework help, playing sports, learning leadership skills, organizing trips, meeting kids from other clubs, and all the incredible experiences Boys & Girls Clubs around the world offer. I was and still am so proud to be a part of the Boys & Girls Club family.

I was forty-two when Henry got into Harvard and flew away and out of our lives. Our nest was emptying, and we could see how quickly it would go by with Sophie and Ella too. But it was good to have him living his dream, and it gave us more time to focus on the girls. Driver’s licenses and jobs, sports, and more homework than I could even comprehend. Sophie tried her best at school, but her focus was on her friends and her music. Ella was now dealing with the trials and tribulations that young girls put each other through, but she never lost her positivity and love of learning. And Laure was running the show—getting the kids off to school and activities, running the house, taking care of our money, working full time as president of Malibu Foundation for Youth and Families, and then ending the day by making dinner for all of us. A force of nature.

My work in Media Literacy, Arts in Education, and Boys & Girls Club brought me into contact with politicians (you know, the people who actually control the purse strings). I found myself in a private meeting with John McCain, pitching the importance of Media Literacy. David Foster had a fundraiser for Al Gore, who we spent some personal time with. He was a brilliant man one-on-one, but he was a fucking lox as a public speaker. I joined Maria Shriver’s committee, fundraising for Arts in Education, while I continued teaching my class at the high school. I was still coaching Ella’s basketball team and loving the community, but Malibu had begun to change. The retired neighbors next door moved, and the new people tore down the little house and built a little mansion in its place. The hardware store at Point Dume closed and was replaced by something far less necessary. Laure and I spent more time in rich people’s houses, wooing them to donate to the Malibu Foundation or join the board, but I felt myself losing touch with the very community I was dedicating my service to.

Careerwise, I was laying low. Partners took it out of me, and I was happy to ignore show business and get back on the plan of living a life of creative and financial freedom. But then I got a call that Les Moonves wanted to meet with me. At his office at CBS, he told me how sorry he was about how things happened with Partners and reiterated that I didn’t have anything to do with the show not getting picked up. He apologized for not being able to speak out in my defense, but that Columbia Television executive was determined to sue me, and CBS did a lot of business with them, and that was just the way things worked. He also said that he still believed in me and thought I could be a big star on television, and that he wanted to make Community Center. He was going to introduce me to some great TV producers who could help me develop the show, and then we would make the pilot. My jaw was on the floor. I was so thankful, relieved, elated, dumbfounded, and humbled. And creatively, I had just had a rocket lit under my ass. I was going to do my show! Un-Fuck Les Moonves! (And then Re-Fuck Les Moonves for his horrible sexual attacks on the women he tried to grope in that very office!)

My (new) agent made an incredible deal—more money than I made on Partners, and I was the executive producer/writer/ creator/star, so it was my ship to steer. My first brilliant move was to connect with Mindy Schultheis and Michael Hanel, two novice producers. They knew what made good television right off the bat and have been producing great shows ever since. They were so funny, supportive, and smart. We hired great actors to play Henry, Sophie, Lenny, and Chicki, and shot the pilot on locations all around LA. It was an amazing feeling seeing it all come to life, these words that I had written, a story I had made up, now being acted out and filmed. The editing went great, the music clicked, and we turned it in to CBS. Within a couple of weeks, I got the call to fly to New York because they were going to announce that the show, now called Danny, had been picked up for a twelve-episode series commitment! I was on top of the world that I was going to get to run my own television show. This show was an artistic and personal expression of where I was in my life, with my community center and my kids, and now I was going to get a chance to tell the stories I wanted to. We hired a writing staff, pitching and shaping stories, and eventually writing scripts. We built huge sets on a soundstage. I hired a great crew and great directors. When we finally started shooting, the machine went into overdrive and my responsibilities were mind-boggling. Writing future shows, casting upcoming shows, shooting current shows, editing the shows we’d shot, and scoring the shows we’d edited, all while acting in every scene. I have never been so fully engaged in an artistic endeavor as the four months we spent making those episodes. They were stories taken right out of my life—teaching Henry to drive, Sophie managing the mean girls, struggling with government bureaucracy at the community center, dealing with my dad getting older—so I lived and breathed every frame of film on every episode. Our premiere on CBS was scheduled for September 18, 2001, and I was set to go on every talk show they could book to get the word out about the show. We were in the middle of shooting our eighth episode on September 11th. We had a late call that day, so I was sleeping when Laure woke me up and turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit the second tower at the World Trade Center. We watched and cried and were terrified. But I had to leave for work. When the crew got there, we were all in a daze and just gathered around the TV and radio to follow what the fuck was going on. One of the crew had a relative who worked in the towers, and he couldn’t get in touch with them. We tried to focus to shoot some scenes, but it was impossible. I cried my eyes out in my dressing room. Even though the studio wanted us to keep shooting, we decided to call it a day. We came back the next day to keep shooting the shows, but the air had definitely gone out of the balloon. The network preempted all television shows with wall-to-wall coverage of 9/11 for weeks. They rescheduled our premiere a week or two later but no one, including me, felt like watching a new TV comedy, and the show tanked. We were still shooting when we got the call that they were pulling the plug on the show after only airing one episode. The cast and crew had an incredible party that night, all of us drunk out of our minds. As I left, I got pulled over by a cop. Three cars, filled with my crew members, pulled up and surrounded us, pleading with the officer to let me go. And he did.

I was exhausted and relieved in some way that the show was over. I had had the greatest artistic experience I could ever imagine, spending millions of other people’s dollars on my vision of my story, employing hundreds of people and making dear friends for life. The fact that it didn’t have a long run on television doesn’t change any of that.

TOO MUCH OFA GOOD THING

The writing bug bit me hard. Creating Danny and seeing it come to life made me want to get Barbra’s Wedding produced. I wanted Steppenwolf Theatre to do it. Everything they do is so well-done and smart. But Steppenwolf produces very challenging theater, and I think my play was a little too Neil Simon-y for them, so they decided not to do it. But in a lucky twist, the head dramaturge at Steppenwolf, who was a fan of my play, got a new job at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. She showed the play to the artistic director, and they decided to produce it in May 2002. I was in shock, having just been given another incredible gift from the Gods of Show Business. A first-class production at a first-class theater of the play I wrote sitting in my underwear in Malibu. Unbelievable. We hired a terrific New York director, got John Pankow and Julie White, two brilliant Broadway regulars, to play Jerry and Molly, and got to work designing the set and getting ready for rehearsals.

But before we got into rehearsals, I was offered a TV show for ABC called Regular Joe. The script was really funny, written by the creator of King of Queens, and even though I didn’t need the money, the deal was even crazier than the other shows, one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars per episode. With that kind of bread on the table, it was a great chance to pad the old bank account before my luck ran out, and I would have to have been a fool to say no. Regular Joe was a traditional sitcom in front of a live audience, and I played Joe, a regular guy with a wife and teenagers and a job running a hardware store. Doing a sitcom is kind of like acting in a play or a film, and it was a learning curve as an actor to figure out who I was performing for—the audience or the camera (the answer is the camera). The people were great, the actors were terrific. We rehearsed for a week and then performed in front of a live studio audience. The filming went well, although it felt strange when we did a second or third take that the audience laughed at the same jokes over and over again, even though they just heard them five minutes ago. They knew they were also performers in the sitcom, playing the role of the laugh-track audience perfectly. It was a very easy gig, especially since I was just acting and not involved in the writing or producing, and when it was done, I went off to Philadelphia to begin my new job—playwright.

I loved the process of rehearsals. My job was to sit in the theater, watching the actors and director create each moment of the play. Blocking the action, learning the lines, practicing their props, and the millions of details it takes to put on a play. If a moment wasn’t working, I was there to explain the intention of it, to listen to what the problem was, and make adjustments. They challenged me to make the play as great as it could be, transforming it from ideas on a page into a living, breathing, dynamic piece of theater. I rewrote sections of the play every night. I have always loved being the actor who helps the playwright find his play, but I did not understand the importance of the actor’s contribution until I was the playwright. Goddamn, that was a hell of an artistic experience for me. Laure and the girls came and loved it. Henry came down from Harvard, and my parents came up from Chevy Chase. The play opened to rave reviews. New York producers came down to see it, and before I knew it, I had a deal to bring the play to the prestigious off-Broadway theater, The Westside Theater. Broadway producers called The Dodgers would be producing the play, with the renowned Manhattan Theatre Club coproducing and adding it to their season. Might be the proudest I have ever been—the dyslexic high school dropout was now a fucking New York playwright.

At the same time, ABC picked up Regular Joe as a mid-season replacement, which was fantastic. Six more episodes at that salary was a lot of extra cake, and the writing and part were really good. And there was satisfaction in getting a show on network television again. It meant I still had value in that marketplace. Since it was a mid-season show, it wouldn’t start shooting until January 2003. That gave me six months of no pressure from my agents to look for acting work because I was unavailable, and I could focus on Barbra’s Wedding. I learned a lot about the play by watching the audience reaction in Philly and made more adjustments before it opened in New York. I was excited for the work and the free time to be at home. The only hiccup was I was starting to lose my mind.

Part of it was politics. By this point, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were beating the drums of war, questioning people’s patriotism, keeping the country on edge with color-coded “terror alerts,” and trying to divert attention away from their massive failure to protect the country from the horrific attack on September 11th. The obvious lies they were fabricating about the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were printed on the front page of the New York Times, the Democrats shook in fear of being called “unpatriotic” if they voted against the war, and I was consumed by the ugly turn our country was taking. (Please watch Stephen Colbert’s legendary speech at The White House Correspondent’s Dinner, in which he scathingly ridiculed both the White House and the correspondents for being so dangerously bad at their jobs. It was a brave act of speaking truth to power, an act of patriotic heroism, and a ray of hope in that moment of crisis. I salute you, sir!) There were still many questions about the Bush family letting the Bin Laden family leave the country, as well as the physics and science that contradicted the official storyline of 9/11. But it wasn’t just politics. Malibu itself was making me crazier by the day. Our peaceful little oasis being destroyed one McMansion at a time, their owners more entitled by the minute. My heart broke with every jackhammer blast. Our whole family had devoted itself to making Malibu the best community it could be, giving our time and energy to help keep the small-town integrity that we loved. But I could see the writing on the wall. Malibu was being bought up by a bunch of fucking assholes that I didn’t want to live near or be associated with.

For our whole marriage, Laure and I dreamed about getting a farm in the country. We rented cabins in Woodstock as soon as we had a couple of extra bucks and almost bought the house there. We bought the house in Moss Beach. We looked at property every time I went on location in Lake Tahoe, Colorado, Utah, or Montana—always doing the equation of how much the farm would cost, how much land we could get, how much time it would take to get there, and how often we would use it, and always coming up with no good answer. We wanted a big piece of land with water on it, but the only thing like that near LA was in Santa Barbara or Ojai, and we couldn’t afford more than a few acres of land there. Besides, they seemed like they had already been taken over by the same privileged class of people that were currently taking over Malibu. The places we could afford were all so far away that we would have to take a plane or drive for twelve hours to get there. There were places out in the desert, but that was not the kind of living that appealed to us. The dream of the farm in the country was getting further away just when it was turning from a dream into a necessity. I felt more and more like I needed to escape, but I had nowhere to go. By now I had a computer, and one day I was looking at Ojai real estate online, and a house with four hundred acres was for sale for one point eight million. I did a double take because in Ojai (a) there was never a piece of land that big for sale and (b) if there was, it would cost about ten million or more. I looked at the ad more closely, and it was for a ranch in Tulare County, not Ojai. I had never heard of Tulare County and was astonished to see that it was about a three-hour drive from Malibu, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. I called the owner, made an appointment, and Laure, the girls, and I drove up there. It was an easy drive up through Bakersfield up to the Sierra Mountains. The owners had us for lunch and the place was amazing, jaw-droppingly beautiful, drenched in fall colors. It had a grape vineyard, a part of the Tule River running through it, an historic battlefield on the property, huge trees, and steep mountain trails. I had no idea how big four hundred acres was. It’s big! The house was tiny, both in size and in scale. I barely fit through the doorways. It must have been an old hotel of some kind, because there was a row of motel rooms on the property, down a little gravel road, which was absolutely charming. The girls fell asleep on the ride home and Laure and I drove back that night, living the dream we had envisioned on our honeymoon, when we saw a farm in Pennsylvania and said one day we would have some kids asleep in the back seat and a farm of our own.

That house was too expensive for us because we didn’t want to go into debt or take money out of the nest egg we were living off of. But within a couple of months, I came upon an ad for a nearby ranch, 350 acres for six hundred thirty-five thousand dollars. How could this be? It was a third of the price of the other place for almost the same amount of land. Between the money I made on Danny and the money I was going to make on Regular Joe, if this place was decent, I could afford it. I drove up and met the realtor. He took me around the property in his truck. I had absolutely no sense of direction and didn’t know where on the property we were, but it was the most beautiful ranch I had ever seen. It was a beef cattle ranch, with mountains and meadows and barns and dirt roads, tucked down a long driveway off a small road. The house was a thousand-square-foot cabin with a porch and a fenced-in backyard, to keep the cows out and the dogs in. The realtor was an old cowboy who said he loved this ranch and that “it had a lot of character.” He took me into the house to meet the owner, a heavyset cowboy in overalls, sitting at a typewriter at the table in the tiny living room/ kitchen area. He told me his wife was sick and they needed to sell. The ranch had been in their family for generations (the creek that ran through it was named after their family), and it hurt like hell for them to give it up. He told me about his cattle operation, the water rights, and the neighbors. He had already broken off 145 acres and the original house and sold it to the family that lived there now, and he couldn’t break up the original ranch anymore. I asked him if it got hot in the summer. He said, “Oh, about seventy-eight degrees.” I thought I’d found paradise until he added, “That’s what I keep the air conditioning at in the summer. Outside it gets up to about 105.”

He gave me the paper he had typed up, which was his calculations for the price—what the average acre cost, how much it had cost him to put up the cabin, etc.—and the total was six hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. He said, “I won’t take one penny more and I won’t take one penny less.” I told him I understood. He said, “If you want this ranch, I’ll need to meet your wife first. And I will need you to both promise that you will take your responsibility to this land seriously, keep its character and respect its history.” I can still remember that moment so clearly, and I have taken my oath to him seriously ever since. I called Laure on the way home and told her excitedly, “I found it! At long last, we are going to have our own ranch. A 350-acre cattle ranch!” Laure drove up the next week and, of course, impressed the owner to no end. A forgotten part of Laure was about to emerge and change the course of our lives once again. Laure’s family history is of California farmers, going all the way back to the late 1800s. Laure’s grandparents owned a walnut farm in Northern California, so she knew in her bones how to talk about water, weather, markets, and everything else that goes into ranching and farming. She is so sophisticated and yet it turns out she was completely at home in the middle of California ranch country. The owner and his wife both shed a tear that day, sad to be saying goodbye to their family ranch, but knowing they were passing the torch to very capable hands.

The Westside Theatre had a show close and became available, so Barbra’s Wedding was now starting rehearsal for its New York debut on January 13. That also happened to be the first day of rehearsal for the first episode of Regular Joe. I couldn’t believe it. Two hugely important pieces of work that needed my full attention, both happening at the exact same time. It was frustrating to have it all happening at once, but both shows had strict opening dates and lots of money riding on them, so I just had to suck it up for a couple of months. The producers of the play rented the community theater in Malibu for two weeks and bent the rehearsal schedule around my TV schedule. I had done a lot of work on Barbra’s Wedding and loved watching the actors and director bring it to life again, investing it with pain, laughs, and a physicality that took it to a whole other level. In the meantime, Regular Joe had been entirely revamped. The actor who played my father had been replaced by the sublime Judd Hirsch and, after many attempts to find someone to replace the actress who played my wife, they gave up and made my character a widower. The scripts were funny, and the shows went great. I got two weeks off from the show and went to back to New York to attend the technical and final rehearsals and the first week of previews.

I don’t think I have ever felt so overloaded in my life as I was those weeks in New York. As if it weren’t enough having my NY playwriting debut and my ABC TV sitcom happening at the exact same time, we also took possession of our brand-new cattle ranch that week. A twenty-year dream come true, and I was too busy with these other amazing experiences to be there. If ever there was a case of an embarrassment of riches, this was it. And yet, there was a dark cloud hanging over the whole thing, and my memories always include that sickening feeling. Bush and Cheney pulled out all the stops for military action at the United Nations, trying to get other countries to support their proposed war. The weeks I was in New York for those final rehearsals were the same weeks that Colin Powell held up his phony anthrax vial, that the UN inspectors testified that they had done exhaustive searches and found absolutely no WMDs, and that people all over the world took to the streets to protest the needless conflict the Bush administration was forcing on the world. Henry came down from Harvard to stay with me for a few days and we went to the huge rally outside the UN. Such a helpless feeling, knowing our country’s corrupt and inept leaders were willfully ignoring the facts and the truth and tarnishing America’s reputation.

I went back home, finished shooting the last episodes of Regular Joe, and then hightailed it back to New York for final previews and opening night of Barbra’s Wedding. I did a bunch of press for both but was also competing with coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War. The play opened on March 5 to great audience reaction and great reviews. The play ran for six months, which was a very solid run, and was published by Samuel French, the flagship publisher of plays. The Iraq War began on March 20. It got terrible reviews and ran for over twenty years. Regular Joe premiered on March 28 and was canceled within a month, because who the fuck would want to watch a new sitcom about a regular Joe at his hardware store when the networks filled the airwaves with the sensational wartime footage the Bush administration provided. It made much better television. George Bush had now fucked the country over in ways that would change history. He was too arrogant to take security warnings seriously before 9/11, letting his guard down for the worst attack ever on our country. He lied his way into an illegal war, destroying our credibility, our morals, and our economy. And because of the chaos these events created in the media, he destroyed the chances of both Danny and Regular Joe becoming successful TV shows, thereby depriving the world of all of those sweet stories-that-could-have-been. I far as I was concerned, this was war!