R253

I hit another low point in my acting career in 1980, when Neil Simon and Herb Ross hired me to perform in a play called I Oughta Be in Pictures. I first met Ross at a restaurant. I was having dinner alone when he invited me over to his table and told me he was going to direct a play. Would I consider being in it? He was pleasant enough. I liked the title of the play, and when he told me what it was about—a down-on-his-luck guy who was a writer in the movies—I said I’d do it. I was already leaning in that direction because I had a good relationship with Neil Simon, who wrote the play.

I signed on for a good salary and a percentage, but when we started rehearsals, Ross turned out to be the most disagreeable man I had ever met. He was very dictatorial, with a mean streak that he loosed on everyone in the cast. I was a favorite lightning rod for Ross’s nastiness because he and I disagreed about how I should play my character. He’d tell me what he wanted, and I’d listen and nod, and then I’d turn around and play the part the way I thought it ought to be played. I knew what I was doing. I wanted the character to have the energy and drive that only comes from a New York background. I knew what this guy was like. He was like me: angry, aggressive, and fighting to get out of the mess he was in.

Meanwhile, Neil Simon was rewriting lines like crazy. If the problem with the play was the way I was portraying my character, then why was Neil spending so much time rewriting the script? The material obviously wasn’t working, and it wasn’t my fault. But try telling Ross that. He took being abusive to a new level. In rehearsal, he’d turn to me and say, “Don’t you know how to do this? After all those years in the movies, you’d think you’d know how to make an exit.”

At the end of rehearsal, I’d go out to the parking lot and get into my car, but I didn’t want to go home because things with Penny had hit rock bottom. I had no place else to go, so I drove to a downtown parking garage and slept in my Trans Am, which is no easy thing to do. Where were my friends? I didn’t know. At the time I was so depressed that it didn’t seem like I had any friends at all. I was living life in the lower depths. It was terrible. I told myself there was light at the end of the tunnel, but I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it.

We opened in Los Angeles, and despite constant rewrites that forced me to keep relearning my lines, I could tell from the audience’s reaction that I had done a terrific job. The next stop for the play after our run in LA was Broadway, and I was looking forward to that. Then one evening the propman, who was a friend, called me over. He said, “I overheard Herb Ross talking with Neil backstage, and Herb said, ‘We’ll get rid of him,’ and Neil said, ‘Who will we get?’ and Herb said, ‘Maybe Walter Matthau.’” Well, there was no one else in the play whom Walter could have replaced except me. “You know this for a fact?” I said. “That’s what I heard him say.”

At that very moment I was taking a break, halfway through the evening performance. I thought for a moment. I was being double-teamed. Neil wanted me out because I had negotiated a percentage, and Ross, the fucker, wanted me out because he had no control over me. I might have handled this news with more resilience if my marriage hadn’t been disintegrating and if I wasn’t sleeping fitfully in my car every night. But I just didn’t have much bounce at the time. Between the rewrites, the abuse, and the rejections, I had finally had had it.

When my cue came, I went out onto the stage and played a scene where my girlfriend and I are nasty to each other. My part ended with a tirade, which closed with the line “You’re a mean kid, and I don’t know why.” I ad-libbed an additional “Fuck you,” and then I walked off the stage before I was supposed to, and out of the play. I went up to my dressing room, picked up my little bag, and walked out to my car. I got in, fired it up, and drove off. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Boy, did I feel good. Fuck ’em.