“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!
PAPIER-MÂCHÉ SAVES THE DAY
The life I had been living and loving was coming to an end. I was always going be their dad, but the kids were flapping their wings and leaving the nest and didn’t need me in the same way anymore. I had a turn being a movie star and television star and had prepared financially for the time when the parts and the money no longer came easily. So now I needed to figure out satisfying things to do with the leftover time, although I guess I had already decided what this new Daniel Stern’s life was going to look like. He was going to be an artist, a public servant, and a rancher.
I had only seen our new ranch just that one time, when the realtor took me around and I met the cattle rancher who owned it. Laure had gone up, met everyone, and took care of all the real estate closing stuff while I was consumed with Barbra’s Wedding and Regular Joe. She had made a deal with a local cowboy, Will, to lease the pastureland and run his cows on our property, not only giving us a little income but also having someone there every day to keep an eye on the place. Our lifelong fantasy of owning a farm in the country had come true on paper, but now we had to figure out what the reality of that actually was. When we finally got our first chance to go up there, it was like a movie. Specifically, City Slickers. We drove up with a bed, a table and chairs, and some food packed into our Chevy Suburban. (That’s another plug for a GMC car, and I want it known that I am wide open for an endorsement deal.) The drive was gorgeous and easy, and the land was just as beautiful as I remembered, maybe more so. We drove by the barn and the pump house and on up to the wood cabin, cruising by the cows and their adorable babies behind the fences. We unloaded the furniture, set up the kitchen and bedroom, and got the wood-burning stove going. It was simple and romantic and just as we had dreamed. We ventured out to see our land, heading up one of the dirt roads in the Suburban into the pastureland. I drove along the rutted road in four-wheel drive for half a mile or so when we got out to marvel at the feeling of being in such a perfectly natural setting, in the middle of nowhere, green hills surrounding this beautiful little valley. Laure hiked up one side while I strolled in the open pasture.
The sight of her on that mountainside is something I will never forget, but not because of how beautiful she was. It is the memory of those fifteen or twenty cows that suddenly appeared on the edge of the mountain above her. It didn’t make a lot of sense, because cows are nervous around people and aren’t really that curious. I didn’t start to feel uneasy until I looked up at the ridge of the opposite hill and saw another large group of cows congregating. What the fuck was going on? I had been around enough cows on those City Slickers films to know they are afraid of everything, completely non-aggressive animals. That’s how you herd them, by chasing them in the direction you want them to go. These cows looked different. They looked like they wanted to come after us. When another herd of fifteen or so came up the road and blocked our way back, I started to get a very, very bad feeling. Laure was about a hundred yards up the hill when I yelled to her to get back to the truck. At first, she poo-pooed me, saying I was being ridiculous. But she started to run once she noticed the cows moving in on us, slowly surrounding us like a pack of wolves. I hopped into the truck, which was facing the wrong way on the tiny dirt road, and performed a brilliant nine-point U-turn. But moving the truck only served to rev up the cows, and they went from walking toward us to running toward us. Laure was still ten yards from the truck and the cows were about to catch up with us, so I started driving, slowly, trying to get the cows blocking the road to back the fuck up. Laure still swears I was leaving her there, which I wasn’t, but she did have to jump into the truck while it was moving pretty quickly. Once I busted through the cows on the road, I drove a little faster, which only spurred them on, and suddenly Laure and I were in a fucking cattle stampede, our first time on the land! Does it get any more City Slickers than that? It was as surreal a moment as I have ever experienced. The cows were running close to the truck. One’s huge head was parallel with my driver’s window and another with Laure’s window, then dropped off as the terrain forced them away, only to be replaced by another stampeding cow. When we got to the gate in the fence, I got out and waved and yelled at them while Laure opened the gate and drove the truck through, then I scurried through and locked it behind us. We could not understand what the fuck happened until a few days later when we saw Will drive into the pasture in his Chevy Suburban, same color as ours, and unload bales of hay for the cows and their babies. We still laugh about that perfect beginning to our ranch life. We learned that we had so much to learn, and how fun it was going to be.
I loved doing chores up there and man, does it get hot in the summer. But I loved that too. I painted the whole house and worked with Will and his family when he branded the cows and gave them shots. He was an amazing rancher—fixing fences, birthing cows. Sometimes he rode his horse and sometimes he rode his Quad all-terrain vehicle. I bought a Quad and started shadowing him but also exploring the property on my own. I was probably the only Jew, the only Democrat, and the only actor within a hundred miles of the place, and I had never felt so at home. Ranching is about fixing problems with the tools that you have at hand, and I loved the practical creativity I discovered in myself. I learned how to take care of the plumbing, irrigation, fencing, retaining walls, landscaping, and pest control. I bought my first shotgun, pistol, and rifle and learned how to use them. There was no cell phone reception. Sometimes I had to climb the pole and jiggle the phone wires to make the landline work, which was just like the guy in the Green Acres TV show I watched as a kid. We bought a couple of recliners and looked out the window for hours at hawks flying, the pond glistening, the sun setting. Our neighbors were great and helpful and respectful of our privacy too. We had always hoped to have a place like this, but we never knew if the reality of it would match the fantasy. Now Laure and I began to discover that farm life was even more fulfilling than we could have ever dreamed.
I think getting my hands dirty at the ranch made me want to get my hands dirty back in Malibu too, because I had a dream one night that would change my life forever. I was in my kindergarten class and my teacher, Miss Burton, was showing me how to do papier-mâché—taking strips of paper, sinking them into the mixture of flour and warm water, sliding the paper through your fingers to get off the excess liquid, and then laying the paper onto a bowl to make a mask. It was such a sweet dream. I loved that teacher, and the art felt so fun, warm, and creative. The next morning, I got some flour, a bucket of water, and the Los Angeles Times and went out to the garage. I got some chicken wire and made a big ball and started laying papier-mâché on it, and by the end of the day, I had a huge, funny-looking head. The next day I painted it. Then, I made a body out of irrigation pipe, covered it in my old clothes and shoes, and stuffed it with newspaper. When I attached the huge papier-mâché head to it, it was bigger than me and made me laugh. And it made Laure laugh too. So I made another one, and then another one after that. I loved creating art when I was a kid, but I had forgotten about it in the chaos of my life, marriage, family, and career. I had been putting all my creative energy into acting, directing, and writing, but all of those projects need funding and other people. This papier-mâché dream had awakened me to a whole new direction to channel my creativity, which I could control completely and would always give me work to do, because I am a man who needs to work.
Although there was plenty of work to do for the Boys & Girls Club. We were expanding by the day and our foundation needed as much attention as Laure and I could give it—fundraising, overseeing the board and the staff, and trying to lay the groundwork for a strong future that didn’t require us to run or manage it. Mel Gibson and I did another gala fundraising show for the celebrities in Malibu. It was incredibly successful, but kind of obscene in the amount of ego and money that filled up the banquet tent. Where else could you have Kenny G performing an annoying breathing trick of playing a single note indefinitely on his sax, and then get a bidding war going among the audience to get him to stop? We made ten thousand dollars on that alone. But I was getting a little tired of being the pitch man for the Malibu Foundation. I believed in building and sustaining something so vital to the community, but the begging for money by throwing parties and golf tournaments was starting to wear me down.
Even though I was living in a wonderful bubble, I was still very aware of how ugly the real world had gotten. Bush and Cheney had led us into an unnecessary war, and their Mission Accomplished theatrics disgusted me. Henry got a job on John Kerry’s campaign and of course, being Henry, became friends with Senator Kerry’s daughter. He introduced me to the family, and I ended up not only campaigning for Kerry, but shooting a great little film that his daughter directed. Senator Kerry would have been an incredible president, but he was not a great public speaker. He and I met on two occasions, for me to give him “acting advice” on how to loosen up and be more emotional in front of the camera to fight back against the Swift boat lies that Bush was encouraging. The poor man had so many bigger things on his mind than to listen to my advice, but he was very kind and receptive. He was such a humble and funny person, and how America picked Bush again is beyond my comprehension. I thought there wasn’t much I could do about any of it except stay informed, work for change, give money, and raise my voice. But there was one thing I hadn’t thought of.
I got a fan letter one day from Captain Sandra Chavez, stationed in Baghdad, Iraq, asking if I could send her an autographed picture for her celebrity wall. She also mentioned in passing if I would ever consider coming over on a USO tour. The USO, I thought—is that still around? The last I heard of it, Bob Hope was doing shows for the troops in Vietnam. Anyway, how the hell would an anti-war activist go to the war zone and talk to soldiers without the subject of how fucking stupid and reckless the war is coming up? That didn’t seem like a real morale booster. But I certainly couldn’t pretend like I believed in this “holy war” Bush was forcing on the world. Also, I didn’t have “an act” or anything I could fit into a USO show, so what would I do there? I wrote back to Captain Chavez, asking her a lot of questions, along with an autographed picture. I was also trying to get some on-the-ground reconnaissance about security there because the General in Charge of the T.N.T.D. Branch of my brain (Try Not To Die) was demanding a lot of information about entering an active war zone. Captain Chavez replied, excited I was considering it. She made a compelling case on what it would mean to her and the troops for me to make the trip. She said I would not be expected to perform and told me about the USO Handshake Tour, where I could go to different bases, say hello to the soldiers, take pictures, and sign autographs. Yes, it was a dangerous place but there would be tight security around me and their record of protecting USO folks was perfect so far. She said she understood my anti-war stance but this had nothing to do with that—there were people of all political opinions fighting the war. This was about assuring the people serving in Iraq that Americans back home remembered them and respected their sacrifice, especially around the holidays. She told me how much they loved my movies, especially Home Alone, and if I were to make the effort to go there and say “Merry Christmas” to them, it would mean more than I could imagine. I talked it over with Laure, and she was as moved as I was. For all those reasons, as well as my need to see what was going on with my own eyes, I said yes.
The USO is an amazing organization, devoted to keeping alive the human connection of our warriors and our citizens, a way for both the soldier and the person from “back home” to say a love-filled “thank you” to each other and give a ray of understanding to the madness of war. My Handshake Tour was set for December 18–26, 2003. I would fly to Baghdad and then to various bases throughout Iraq, depending on the security situation at the time. I was allowed to bring another person with me and asked Henry if he wanted to be my assistant, and he jumped at the chance. This seemed like an incredible teaching opportunity to take him to see the reality of war. “You want to be in politics? Well, let’s see what war is really like.”
I had to wait a couple of months to ship out, and at first, it felt great. Saying “I’m going to Iraq” held a power I hadn’t felt before, a certain street-cred that comes with actually putting your ass on the line. I even started getting calls to appear on cable news shows but declined. As departure day got closer, my knees started to turn to Jell-O and the reality of what I had agreed to became terrifying. George Bush had predicted we would be met with parades and flowers for “freeing” Iraq but had no real plan for how to occupy an entire country after chasing away Saddam Hussein. Reading the paper every day about improvised explosive device explosions killing our soldiers, bombings throughout the country, helicopters being shot down, and all of the other horrors of war brought a real personal panic now, not just a political one. I was mad at myself, questioning my motives for going into this chaos, and guilt-ridden that I would be risking my son’s life as well. I got the smallest taste of what it is like for a family to have a member “go off to war,” and it is traumatizing. To be brave is not only to face your fears but to stare them down, and force optimism to overwhelm your pessimism, if for no other reason than to help your family stay strong.
My mission was to be a bridge between our soldiers and citizens, and I would be there at Christmastime, so it seemed appropriate to bring the gifts of love and laughter along with me. I reached out to the schools in Malibu, and they had the kids write letters and holiday cards to the soldiers for me to give out. And I reached out to my funny friends—Crystal, Cheech, Gibson, and Reiser—for some jokes to tell in case I needed to be entertaining at some point. I was still wrestling with my courage and feared my comedy act would be less Bob Hope and more Bob Hopeless.
“Hey everybody, I don’t know what the fuck we are doing here, there’s no way we can win, and we are all going to die. Good night!” Here are a couple of the best of the jokes my friends gave me:
“What’s so special about the stealth bomber? They say it flies in undetected, bombs, and then flies away. Hell, I’ve been doing that my whole life.”
“I was really nervous about coming to a war zone, but the captain was very supportive. He promised to keep a supply of my blood type on hand, even if he had to kill the chicken himself.”
“How do you know when it’s bedtime at the Neverland Ranch? When the big hand is on the little hand.”
Five days before we were supposed to leave, Saddam Hussein was captured in a “spider hole” on a farm somewhere near Tikrit, Iraq. The still-terrified part of me wondered, “Does this mean I don’t have to go? I mean we got him, what do they need me for? I’m just going to be in the way of them packing their bags to get the fuck home.” But there was no turning back, and so I embraced my role of ambassador. When I picked up letters from schools, I realized how much people were investing me with their messages of love and thanks, and that felt great. Laure and Ella and I read the letters and cried at the kids sending letters of love, thanks, hope, news, humility, commitment, and honor. I read a letter from a high schooler that started with, “What is bravery?” and it made me tremble. The day came to leave. The letters took up a whole duffle bag and a half, and the football I thought was necessary ate up some prime suitcase real estate too, so I did not have room for too many clothes, but that was okay. I was cautiously optimistic that we were going to survive. They would never let anything happen to a celeb, not even Bob Hopeless. Real soldiers and their loved ones have been saying goodbye since the beginning of the time, and I got a small taste of those countless heartbreaks. The lead-up to leaving is a slow-motion goodbye, but the goodbye itself is so short. You have to make your body walk away. Legs moving feet, one in front of the other, taking you toward chaos and the unknown.
I flew to London and then to Kuwait, in first-class filled with drunken men in robes. I was met by Tracy, who was my USO escort for the trip. The airport access road was lined with soldiers posted every twenty yards on both sides, and when we got to the Marriott Hotel where we were staying, it was surrounded by tanks and barbed wire. It turned out that the Marriott was the home of the International Arab Conference. The presidents and sheiks of at least twelve large Arab countries were staying in the same building as us. The king of Jordan was there. All roads within two hundred yards of the hotel were blocked off to any car that didn’t have a particular piece of paper that we didn’t have. I was carrying two enormous duffel bags, my backpack, winter coat, and camera bag. Dragging the hopes and underwear of Malibu, Tracy and I made our way through the guns, dogs, ID checks, baggage screening, personal screening, and intrusive wand screening, into the lobby, which was another world completely. The lobby was filled with more robes. Damn, that is a good look! And so comfortable! Tracy took me to the twelfth floor to meet the butler.
“Butler?” I said.
“The twelfth floor has a butler. He will run your bath, unpack your clothes, whatever you need.”
