How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am Read online

  I ordered some kind of meat dish. When I tasted it, it was inedible—filled with fat and startlingly tough. I sent it back and ordered something else. This is actually the only time in my life I’ve felt compelled to do that. The man to my right asked what it was I sent back. I told him, and he said, “That’s what I ordered.” He had yet to receive his dinner.

  As I waited for my new dinner, the mother at the next table recognized me from an earlier movie I had done and began to pay me effusive compliments on my acting. This went on for a few minutes.

  The man to my right was served his dinner. After a moment, he said to me, “I don’t know how good an actor you are, but you sure know lousy food.”

  I Go to Washington

  In the midseventies to 1981 I made movies with a big ape, King Kong, a shrinking woman, Lily Tomlin (The Incredible Shrinking Woman), and Miss Piggy (The Great Muppet Caper).

  Ironically, around that same time I became friends with Donald Kendall, who was the CEO of Pepsico as well as the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, a conservative group that was formed to help business corporations. The two of us flew in his private plane to Washington.

  At that time, I was appearing regularly on television, mostly comedically but sometimes as a serious guest, and Don Kendall wanted me to meet members of the incoming Reagan administration and hopefully help get their points of view out there on television. I had a lot of meetings with different groups, and as they explained to me why they wanted to have fewer government programs, I cautioned them on the need for a safety net for the truly needy. I said that the first time someone committed suicide because they had nowhere to turn, it would be a real blow to their policies.

  I particularly remember a one-on-one meeting with a very bright young congressman named Newt Gingrich. I remember a phone conversation with Jack Kemp, who later ran for vice president. Congressman Kemp said to me, “I’m aware of what you’re doing, and keep it up.” I thanked him, even though I had no idea what he meant.

  More than one person followed me to the elevator after different meetings, saying no one is talking to us the way you are, and we appreciate the cautionary warnings.

  As Don Kendall and I were preparing to leave the capital, a man from one of the meetings came over to me and said, “I’d like to ask you a question.” I never wanted to run for office, but I felt I was about to be asked. The man said, “What’s it like to work with Miss Piggy?”

  The lesson? Watch out for delusions of grandeur.

  On the other hand, it’s actually been suggested by many people that I run for office. The problem is I refuse to ask people for money, and I don’t really travel. I want to help mankind as much as I can from home, or at least within the New York–Connecticut area.

  Co-ops

  Around the time my wife and I got married, we lived in a two-room apartment that I had lived in alone for about fifteen years. Herb Gardner once came over, looked around, gave me a look, and said, “I know a good lawyer who could get you out of here.” My wife gave me a similar look a couple of years later, so we bought a co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue.

  I hadn’t been trying to save money. I actually liked the place. It was on the twenty-second floor. It was quiet. There was a view of the Hudson River from the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the shower. I mean, what’ya want!?

  For anyone who lives outside the New York area, a co-op is a cooperatively owned building. Each tenant gets a specific number of shares according to the size of their apartment. Every co-op has a board composed of residents who are elected to serve the building’s interests. Before you can purchase an apartment in these buildings, you must present yourself before the board so they can determine your worthiness to live in their midst.

  We were interviewed by the board. My wife found it extremely unpleasant, and I found it riveting. When the eighty-something patrician chairman paced back and forth and said, “Your accountant refuses to verify your financial statement,” I said, “What? That’s the first call I’m going to make after this meeting!” When I called my accountant, he said, “An accountant can’t verify his own statement. Who are these people, anyway?!” Great question.

  We were accepted into the building, but I have to admit that I was surprised when the board invited me to join them. I had assumed that I wouldn’t be welcome in a role like that, because I came to the table with a certain amount of controversy. By that I mean I’m known to have strong opinions, and I’m often around people who don’t share them, but I’m a gentleman, so I don’t offer my opinion unless asked.

  Not surprisingly, after a few meetings another board member pointed at me and said accusingly, “He’d let anyone into the building!” He wasn’t far off. My position was that if you could afford it and the police weren’t looking for you, why not? On the other hand, some board members considered it a negative that an applicant “gets his clothes off the rack.” When I said, “I get my clothes off the rack,” they said, “We know.” Of course, some of the most disagreeable characters everywhere get their suits made.

  There are some co-ops in Manhattan, not ours, that will only accept dogs no heavier than fifteen pounds and no taller than twenty-one inches to the shoulder. If there’s a question, they’ll weigh and measure them, too. The rationale is, “You wouldn’t want to get on an elevator and have a Great Dane looking you in the eye, would you?” Not a bad point.

  Actually, I don’t remember any dogs in our building.

  The board also used something some called Fidelifacts to investigate applicants. One revealed that a man had been cited in the past for driving the wrong way down a one-way street, which the board chose to interpret as his having a drinking problem, and they were very vocal in not wanting to have anyone with a drinking problem live in the building. I believe it was my friend and fellow board member Gideon Rothschild who then said, “Where are rich people with drinking problems supposed to live?”

  Although I was viewed as too open to applicants, I was respected for my dedication to the job, surely evidenced by all my note taking. No one imagined they were notes for a play.

  The idea that this needed to be written about had quickly taken hold once I realized that my fellow board members were actually serious about the preposterous concerns raised in our meetings. There were some who felt that the rather elderly doormen should be standing at attention at all times. One board member was certain flowers were being stolen from the arrangement in the lobby and became obsessed with rooting out the supposed thief.

  I never witnessed any anti-Semitism in my building, but I know it exists in some exclusive buildings and clubs all over America. A relative in Kansas City was a guest in a private club recently, and someone called out, “What is this, Jew night?” When my Jewish father-in-law was dying with esophageal cancer, I asked his gentile doctor on the phone what had caused the disease. He said, “Eating too much lox.” Lox is smoked salmon, which Jewish people particularly seem to enjoy. I took it as an anti-Semitic joke that I’ll never forget.

  A friend of mine recently bought an apartment on Fifth Avenue and was told he couldn’t have a welcome mat outside his door. They allowed him to have his welcome mat inside his apartment.

  After we sold our apartment and moved to Connecticut, I began to put on readings of the play I had written about the co-op board. After one of the readings, a former colleague of mine from the board came up to me and said, “Your apartment has tripled in value.” I could have said, “So has my house,” but I let him have his moment. What does it hurt?

  Midnight Run

  When people approach me to talk about a movie, it’s almost always Midnight Run. The real force behind that movie was Martin Brest, who earlier had directed Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy. It was Martin Brest who got Robert DeNiro. It was Martin Brest who got the whole cast, including me, who was the tough sell! I did the movie Isthar a year before Midnight Run. Isthar is a movie I like, but it was not a hit, to put it mildly.

  Para
mount Pictures, the studio that was to finance Midnight Run, wanted Cher for my role. You can’t make this up!

  Martin Brest didn’t want Cher. He wanted me, but Paramount wouldn’t make it with me, so Martin Brest went to Universal Studios, who said they would.

  I had never met Robert DeNiro or Martin Brest when I walked into a hotel room in New York City and spent the next several hours auditioning. Bob and I read the script for Marty. We improvised on the script. I believe there were two such sessions. I may have spent as much as ten hours auditioning with Marty and Bob. Then Marty called me from an airplane. The connection wasn’t good, but I gathered he wanted me to come to Los Angeles and audition some more. I asked him what it was he wanted to see that he hadn’t seen. The line broke up when he answered, and I chose not to pursue the question.

  Instead, I called my agent and told him to tell the studio that I wasn’t sure we could agree on a fee, and I named a figure something like four times higher than I’d ever been paid. It worked. Marty Brest called me and said, “If I say you have the part, would you do it for less?” I said, “Absolutely.” I give Marty a lot of credit for understanding and respecting that I felt I had auditioned enough.

  Marty Brest had no limits on the demands he would make of everyone, which was no problem at all for DeNiro and me, but it was for the cinematographer. In the middle of the movie he decided to quit and of course take his enormous crew with him. I remember walking by Marty as he was talking to the cinematographer in the lobby of a motel in Globe, Arizona. Evidently, Marty felt the cinematographer hadn’t given him a good enough reason why he was leaving, and I heard Marty say, “Look, we’re making a great movie here, and if you don’t want to be part of it we’re going to make a great movie anyway.” Marty brought in a new cinematographer with a whole new crew.

  Neither Bob nor I had ever seen anything like that before, and I, of course, being the talker between the two of us, said to him, “Let’s stay out of this, whatever it is, and just concentrate on our responsibilities.” We did.

  The screenwriter of the movie didn’t travel, so sometimes there would be only an outline of a scene, and we’d have to make it up. I remember sitting in a boxcar with Bob who, in the story, was furious with me, and yet the challenge of the scene was that by the end he had to kind of like me. I was handcuffed to something, and I just started to say things to try to amuse DeNiro. It didn’t work.

  Marty came over and whispered in my ear, “I love you. I think you’re great, but this is not working. You’ve got to come up with something else.” I thought for a moment and then asked Bob, “Have you ever had sex with an animal?” That brought his head up, and he stared at me. I then said something like, “I’m asking, because I saw you eyeing one of those chickens on that Indian reservation where we were working.” That did it. DeNiro started laughing, and we fulfilled what the scene needed. I credit Marty Brest with continuingly challenging me. At one point Marty told me that DeNiro had come to him and said, “Ya know, Chuck really is getting on my nerves.” Marty said, “Great!”

  I think he’s a magnificent director who never really got the credit he deserved for that outstanding picture.

  CNBC

  In the midnineties, I stopped doing movies so I could be a stay-at-home dad for my son, who was entering first grade.

  I began to develop a syndicated show with King World, the people then responsible for Oprah, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy among others, and now Dr. Phil as well.

  I knew Michael King through my friend John Gabriel. I knew Roger King, the major honcho, because he once joined Dabney Coleman and me when he saw us having dinner together. Roger left his table and sat with us. As the evening was winding down, he offered Dabney and me four thousand dollars a piece if we would fly with him in his private jet to Las Vegas. I think he said four thousand knowing he’d easily go to five. We chose not to go. Looking back, just as with Julie Christie that night who wanted Warren and me to join her and a friend and go somewhere, I’m sorry we didn’t. Of course, my biggest mistake in this area was not going on that safari with Johnny Carson.

  My idea for the syndicated show at King World was to have a group of humorous people sit around and discuss whatever—variations of which have been done in the years since, some successful, some not.

  The fellows at King World kept suggesting I have more “elements.” I came up with the idea of taking a crew to a stable near Central Park in New York, where I was told there was a horse who could type. We were going to put a typewriter under a horse’s hoof. He would then bring his hoof down and, of course, smash the typewriter, and I would be outraged at my producer who had given me the information on the horse’s typing ability.

  Right around then I got an offer to replace Tom Snyder on CNBC—he was leaving to do a show following David Letterman on CBS. The King brothers graciously let me accept it and didn’t ask for any compensation.

  Several years later I called Roger King on behalf of a friend of mine, and again he was friendly and gracious. About a month after I called him, I read in the paper that he had died suddenly. I’m sorry I never got to know him better, as I understand he was one of a kind.

  I first met Tom Snyder when I was a regular guest on his Tomorrow Show in the eighties. One week he was scheduled to go to Egypt to interview Anwar Sadat. The producer, Roger Ailes, suggested I guest host for the week. The Sadat interview fell through, but Tom graciously let me host for the week, anyway.

  Tom Snyder was always terrific to me—never competitive, always supportive, and a great audience. That’s why I cringe every time I think of something I said to him on the phone when he took a call from me on the air shortly before I began my show in his time slot. I said I was concerned because there was no studio audience, and if by chance I said something amusing, there would only be silence. I then added, “You don’t have to worry about that, because you laugh at your own jokes.”

  There was silence for a second and then we moved on, as though I hadn’t said something incredibly rude.

  In the last years of his life, Tom and I would talk on the phone, and he sounded the same as he always did—vibrant, high energy, a big personality. Tom had worked for years in radio, and when I started doing commentary on CBS radio I suggested to him that he consider doing a radio show again. He was ill, but I knew he could do it from home. He seemed agreeable, so I made a few calls, but before anything could happen he phoned and said he’d thought more about it and decided he didn’t want to do it.

  We never discussed his illness, but clearly that had something to do with it, although you’d never know that from listening to him on the phone.

  I consider that line about Tom laughing at his own jokes one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. The lesson I took away from it is that I who consciously always try to make people feel better am perfectly capable of unknowingly being hurtful. It makes me more vigilant of my own behavior. The problem is we’re not aware when we’re making mistakes, otherwise we wouldn’t make them.

  I’ve unknowingly behaved inappropriately since then, but my rudeness toward Tom still bothers me. May he rest in peace.

  When I first came on CNBC at ten o’clock I was supposed to be “the dessert” following Geraldo Rivera, who did nightly panel discussions about the O.J. Simpson case. One day I got a call from an executive at CNBC telling me that the head of the network, Roger Ailes, wanted me to know that Geraldo got a very high rating. He gave me the number. I got a very low rating, and he gave me the number, and the show following mine, which was all about sex, got a very high number. My guest was a person in show business, not the most famous you can imagine. I asked what Roger wanted me to do. He said, “He just wants you to have that information.” I said, “Well, if I were covering the O.J. Simpson trial or doing shows about sex, I would have a high rating as well.” There was a silence, and the fellow on the other end of the phone said, “Roger just wanted you to know.” Clearly a polite warning.

  Since for me doing shows about sex
was out of the question, I began to cover the O.J. Simpson case and soon was getting ratings comparable to Geraldo’s. I had now entered the world of lawyers, but it was not my first experience.

  That went back about ten years earlier when I was supposed to be doing a movie with a female star, and I was working on the script with the writer for months. At the last moment, the female star withdrew from the picture and the producers decided not to go forward with another actress. If they had called me and given me some explanation, I probably would have let it go at that, but since I had been working on the script with the writer for months for no salary, I decided to sue them, even though there wasn’t a signed contract, which in the movie business isn’t that unusual. This was the first and only time I brought a suit. I’ve never been sued.

  My lawyers warned me that the attorney for the other side was a real killer. I remember lying in bed in Los Angeles the night before he was to take my deposition and wondering what he could possibly say to me, since I felt I was completely in the right and had worked so long on the script. I imagined him digging out bad reviews from my past and reading them to me, but I’m always prepared for any kind of a confrontation, so even though it was nerve-racking, part of me looked forward to it.

  When I entered the room to be deposed, all the lawyers and the producers were sitting there. I looked at their lawyer, and he was a most imposing figure, muscular, big, and very smart-looking. He asked with disdain who wasI, anyway, to claim that I had worked on the script with the writer! He said, “Are you even a member of the Writers Guild?” He obviously hadn’t done his homework. I said, “I am.” He sneered at me and asked, “Under what circumstances did you enter the Writers Guild?” I said, “When the Twentieth Century Fox movie studio asked me to write the screenplay of Woody Allen’s hit Broadway show Play It Again, Sam. He stared at me a moment and said, with some amusement, “Strike my question.”