"Why?"
"It's my mother," I said. "Believe me. It's not a good idea."
"Come on, Jerry, she'll enjoy herself."
Falk and Avildsen kidded me into it.
So I went over and said, "Mom, do you want to be in the scene, you could be an extra."
"No," she said. "I'm no actress."
"Okay," I said, "understood." And I walked away.
A minute later, she called me back.
"What is it, Ma?
"Jerry," she said, "if you need me, I'll do it."
(She was a real Jewish mother.)
I said, "No, no, it's okay."
She said, "Just look at you. I can tell you need me. Fine. I'll do it. But I don't have a dress, look at what I'm wearing. And my hair…"
I said, "Ma, I got a wardrobe truck, I got hairdressers, I got makeup people. You'll be fine."
"Oh, you're going to do all that?"
Yes.
She said, "All right, I'll do it for you."
So she goes in, is treated like a queen, like she's Julia Roberts or Marilyn Monroe. The hairdresser, the makeup people, they're all working on her. Now comes time for her scene. She comes out in the background and is supposed to walk out the door. So Avildsen says to me, "Why don't you direct it? It's your mother."
I said, "No, don't be crazy."
He said, "What do you have to do? Say 'action'? Say 'cut'? Everything is set up, don't worry. It'll be fun for her."
I said, "Okay, okay."
Then: "Action!"
My mother and Tom Courtenay start walking. She's supposed to go from here to there. But as she passes, she turns to Courtenay and says, "I don't like that piece of jewelry."
I yelled, "Cut! Cut! Cut!"
I said, "Ma, what are you doing? There's no lines. You just walk."
"Well that's stupid," she said. "If your father was showing some jewelry to somebody and she didn't like it, she'd tell him."
"Well, in this case, you don't tell him anything," I said. "You just walk."
"It's stupid," she told me. "I wouldn't do it that way."
"But it's not about you, Ma. It's about Peter Falk."
Meanwhile, Peter Falk and John Avildsen, and all the Teamsters, are standing around, watching me, laughing their asses off.
So I went back, and said, "Okay, let's do it again. Action."
She started walking, then, just as she passed the camera, she turned, looked right into the lens, and smiled like a bandit.
"Cut! Cut! Cut!"
"What's the matter now?" she asked.
I said, "Ma, you're embarrassing me."
I'm talking quietly because I don't want everybody to hear. They are all looking, and they know I'm screwed. No way I'm getting out of this without pain.
I said, "Ma, listen to me, please. I feel like I'm back in sixth grade. You're killing me. I'm supposed to be in charge and you're making me a child. My mother, standing on the set, telling me I'm stupid, telling me what to do. You can't do that."
She said, "Well, it doesn't make sense."
I said, "Ma, do me a favor, please? Just walk from there to there. Don't look at the camera, don't say anything, just walk."
"Fine," she said, "I was doing this for you but it's not right.
We finally finished. I was exhausted. It took all day. We got back to the hotel. Jane said, "You know, you should invite your mom to the dailies."
"No, not a good idea."
"Oh, come on," said Jane. "Let her see herself. It will be a thrill."
So I called. "Ma, do you want to watch the dailies in the morning?"
"What's dailies?"
"It's everything we shot today," I told her. "We take a look at it. Your film will be on the screen. You want to see it?"
"You want me to come to dailies?" she said. "No. I don't want to see myself, I don't care about that, it's silly."
I said, "Okay, good night."
Hung up.
A minute later, the phone rang. "All right, if you need me to come, I'll come," she said. "And I can see that you need me."
She brought my father. Peter Falk found out and he came, too. Same with John Avildsen, Tom Courtenay, and Charlie Durning-they were all there. My mother was sitting next to me. When she came on screen, she yelled out, "I look great!"
In the end, she loved it, mostly because she got residual checks from the film-$3, $27, $41-for years and years.
Leaving on a Jet Plane
By 1977, John Denver was the biggest star in the world. This was no accident. It was, in fact, the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign to package and sell him, as I had packaged and sold weekend getaways in the window of the Sachs Men's Shop in Fairbanks. I tried everything with John, sold him in every way I knew how. One year, for example, he was late with an album, had missed a deadline for Christmas, which infuriated the executives at RCA. They wanted their record or their money. It was John's ass. "Jerry," he said, "what can we do?"
"Don't worry," I told him. "We'll fix it."
I designed an album cover, pasted it on envelopes, and sent it to record stores. You bought the envelope, which could be traded for the album, making you an inside player, an investor in Denver 's career. It was a gimmick that worked. The envelopes sold like mad-a perfect gift for the John Denver fan in your life. The record went gold before it even existed. I went to RCA and said, "Look, you've had your Christmas, now where's our money?"
And yet, for various reasons, John began to lose his bearings. It's a danger of success: You're a kid, and want only to be heard; then you are heard, by everybody, all the time, but your thought is, either, "Well, yeah, great, but now what?" or "Yes, they hear me, but it's not the real me, not the voice I have in my head, or the person I want to be."
There were portents and signs. John started talking about ditching his glasses, his earnest and trustworthy glasses. He wanted to change his hair, too, which would be like Nike ditching its swoop. His hair and his glasses were known and loved everywhere on earth. Probably even the Bushmen of Africa could hum a few bars of "Rocky Mountain High." Then, coming off the huge success of Oh, God!, which set him up for a major career in film, I developed a follow-up, An Officer and a Gentleman, which John turned down. He said it was a B movie, and not good enough for him with its seedy backdrop of desolate airstrips and Panhandle bars. Of course, An Officer and a Gentleman was not only a great film, but also the movie that really launched the career of Richard Gere.
Much of this confusion had to do with problems in his own life, ways in which, so it seemed to him, everything was coming apart. First of all, his marriage had ended. He had split with Annie, who wasn't just his childhood sweetheart, but his muse. Much of his desire for her, the chase and courtship, could be heard, sublimated, in his best songs. The end of the marriage was the end of his life, the first life he lived from the time he left home. Then his father died. He had trouble with his father, but they had been close at the end. These losses hit him hard. In fact, the only person left from his old life was me. Which explains a lot. The man was trying to reinvent himself, start again by forgetting. This is when I began to hear rumors: John is upset. John is unhappy. John wants to leave you.
I discounted these, because, I mean, look what we had done together: in the ten years since I found him, this obscure, underpaid nightclub singer had become one of the biggest stars in the world, with hit records and shows and a big movie career before him, and money pouring in. But I did not realize how troubled he was, how insecure, and how badly he ached to be free. This was my friend, the executor of my will, the caretaker of my (God forbid) orphaned children, yet I knew nothing about him. That you know a person, does not mean you know a person.