Ben Stein's Diary: Death of a Producer
Stein, Benjamin J.
"Ben Stein's Diary: Death of a Producer" by Benjamin J. Stein Death of a Producer Friday Back on the pitching trail. I am in a meeting in a building in Century City, talking to...
...Die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.' Can you believe that...
...I had dinner at Morton's with my funny friend B. and also with my airplane dealer friend Barron...
...Then came parts of an interview with Don...
...What's that...
...They want to be movie stars...
...It's really perfect that he's a lawyer at a big D.C...
...I like it," the woman said...
...How can anyone stay away from them...
...Don was grateful indeed, although now that I think of it, I am not at all sure that Don ever bought a script from me...
...We don't like to do period pieces because they tend to be too expensive...
...The woman took the names and thanked me...
...52 April T996 • The American Spectator I love that boy...
...It was Phil de Muth, a psychologist and writer who is the brother of Chris de Muth, head of the American Enterprise Institute...
...It's the memory of that repressive place called suburbia in the 1950's and 1960's," he said with a smile in his voice...
...The families had Buicks and Oldsmobiles, except for rakish Mr...
...He also wanted to be physically strong, a commonplace obsession with people who feel inwardly weak...
...He really thought he could look like a movie star in real life...
...Too many people here die of unnatural causes...
...I suspect he thinks I was being a pest from a silly, stupid older generation...
...Hollywood is largely for people who were extremely scarred in their childhoods and come here to escape, to be healed...
...I'm on the laptop—a Canon Notejet, same as Bill Buckley has—and also on the phone, talking to my colleague and friend, Howard Dickman, of Reader's Digest...
...He became not just a focused man, but obsessed...
...Damn it, we're about to die and you're counting the money in the swear jar...
...Gary said, "Jeffrey, I want to know how you get richThe American Spectator • April 9 9 6 53 er and richer, and more and more famous...
...Tommy came with me and listened to stories about the life of Richard Nixon, with whom he has become almost obsessed-to my great delight...
...B. looked at me blankly...
...When you've made a certain amount of money, you don't have to worry about money anymore," Don said, "and then you come up against something that's really scary: you...
...I had an intense talk with B., my ultra funny friend...
...Scull, who had a Studebaker Golden Hawk that he let me drive up and down the driveway— I still shiver over the time I came close to crashing it into another car...
...I thanked Jeffrey for making sure I was invited to the wake...
...When I was a kid, this cop, sort of like Dirty Harry, huge guy with tattoos all over him, busted me for stealing cars, and he took me aside and said, 'You're either going to be the smartest guy in San Quentin or you're going to get smart and do something you like with your life...
...The American Spectator . April 1996 BEN STEIN'S D I A R Y by Benjamin J. Stein Death of a Producer Friday Back on the pitching trail...
...He saw me and he said, 'Let's go out to my car for a couple of minutes.' He had some major lines of blow and I said, 'Don, how can you keep doing all this coke year after year?' and he said, 'Here's my strategy...
...I saw Jeffrey Katzenberg talking to Gary Nardino, the former head of Paramount TV, a giant player in TV at one time, and still a great and wealthy guy...
...I asked...
...The dining room and bar at Morton's had been cleared, and without the usual, familiar lineup of tables, the room lookedfar smaller...
...Lucky little me...
...I just cannot stand how cute he is...
...Yeah, but a lot of them think Don had a great life...
...I thought of how very many Hollywood producers have told me that they were car thieves when they were young...
...Who had more energy and discipline in your family...
...I asked...
...He had weight machines and little exercise gizmos in his office...
...I knew very well that Don was a drug user, but the idea that he might have been a dealer was a bad joke...
...What was Ito do...
...Next to me, Marilyn Katzenberg was sobbing...
...Yes, and when I think about 'Ozzie and Harriet,' I cry," I said, "because that was my dream of how life was supposed to be...
...Could we move it up to present day...
...But I have something else I want to invest in," he said...
...That's for your college...
...There were also photos of Don—Don lying on his side with fishing tackle, Don with Jerry and Tom Cruise, Don looking happy and chubby, Don looking unhappy and thin...
...Maybe the difference is that she and members of her family worked in them...
...I told them I was about to go to Morton's for a memorial for Don Simpson...
...That's eight-twenty-five," he said with a big grin...
...Their son and daughter, David and Betsy, were my special pals...
...At the table next to us, several powerful Hollywood friends of Don Simpson—along with the elegant,44 He tried diets, exercise, drugs, more drugs, still more drugs...
...Sally and mine was fair, and I'm not saying it wasn't, but just in general, I think they're a bad idea...
...Yes," she said, recognition slowly dawning...
...After I set down the phone, I thought about Harvey Road, where I grew up...
...We were among the first to arrive...
...They still think Don was someone to envy...
...All the kids had two parents...
...But then when you actually get out on the trail, actually get out with the other skiers and are gliding, however pitifully or well, along a trail, you feel pretty good...
...He was obsessed with not only making lots of money, but looking thin, muscular, handsome, and dashing, gangster style...
...We don't feel safe in the Pathfinder, and I am getting really scared...
...I wish we had never signed it...
...See that guy...
...Now, would it have to be a period piece, or could it be present day...
...He revealed to me for the first time that he is the father of a little 20-month old girl whose mother is a high official here...
...Tommy and his pal Alex rode in the back of the van with me...
...And look at the people here...
...I remember once when Don took me to a movie premiere," Staci said...
...Steve Tisch, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jim Wiatt of ICM, Jeffrey's sensitive-looking wife, Marilyn, and a woman I did not know sat with Don's erstwhile partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, going over a long list...
...Friday you cannot imagine what a beautiful day it is...
...They were mostly split levels...
...Top Gun...
...It was solid, absolutely sure-footed, a dream of a truck...
...They looked sad...
...And I guess Einstein has been dead for a long time...
...He made far too much money to even consider wasting his time and risking his freedom dealing drugs...
...Maybe that's wrong, too...
...Alan laughed and drank some ridiculously healthy thing...
...He complained, but that's exactly why there are parents: to make kids stop doingthings that are demonstrably and clearly harmful to them...
...A neighbor's son, now a famous lawyer in D.C., ripped me off when I had forgotten a pencil on the first day of seventh grade and made me buy one from him for twenty-five cents, about five times the going rate...
...No, I'm not kidding," he said...
...Plus, it gives you a reason to live...
...He said the piece named him, falsely, as a drug dealer...
...Good luck," I said...
...Some of them do...
...The snow is deep and powdery and on some paths, where I do my pitiful44 couldn't figure out how they knew my name until I realized that my name was on the side of the van I was riding in...
...Two days ago in Sandpoint, I got a call from Jerry Bruckheimer's assistant...
...Ron Meyer, the maddeningly healthy looking head of MCA, came over and said hello...
...The next morning, Don's on the phone around the clock telling me I have to apologize in writing to the agency guy or he's never going to speak to me and my career in this town is finished...
...I don't thinkany of them was, but they have it in their minds that a car thief is a good thing to be, so they make up that little bit of legend, and gradually they believe it...
...When my wife wanted to leave her law firm practice and work at a studio, Don was instrumental in getting her in the door at Paramount...
...From the first days I lived there, I knew every name of every family...
...Don wanted to look like a thin gangster...
...It's pretty easy to see why I stay here year after year...
...That's eight dollars for the swear jar," he said...
...David Begelman, dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds...
...That's what we're there for...
...The resort is packed...
...But he was rarely happy...
...firm now...
...Sometimes, it's pretty amazing to me that skiers travel long distances, spend fortunes on ski clothes, get all suited up, risk breaking a leg, all for a few tninutes gliding down a hill...
...By about eight, the room was densely packed...
...asked my pal, the airplane dealer, Barron Thomas...
...Come on," he said...
...I unpacked our mound of books, food, logs, and newspapers, and set about making myself chocolate chip cookies...
...I'll be there, and I'd like to bring a few people who were friends of Don's — especially my wife, because she used to be Don Simpson's lawyer," I said...
...Like Elvis...
...Jerry wants you to come to the memorial for Don Simpson," she said...
...Just friends of Don's," one woman said...
...At a studio...
...Maybe I should have said 'wake' and not `memorial.' " Just as I was walking out the door, the phone rang again...
...They were joined moments thereafter by Steve Tisch, who looked unnaturally cheerful...
...Staci and I walked through the room and saw the head of a very large talent agency...
...Then he pulls me aside and tells me he'll forgive me if I go with him on a jet to Hawaii in the morning...
...It occurred to me that Marilyn and Tova were the only women in the room who looked genuinely stricken...
...Alan Greisman strolled in, looking very hip in various tones of black...
...I guess he was wildly unhappy, period...
...I want to savor them, store them up, think right this moment how much I will miss them when they're gone, appreciate them...
...By a miracle of the kind that God often throws my way, shortly west of Coeur d'Alene, the snow stopped completely...
...But otherwise I really like it," she assured me, and said we'd be in touch...
...No, it's not that," Nardino said...
...and after his plastic surgery," Staci said...
...If he knew how right I am, he would never even go back to New York for his clothes...
...Then they ran the video again...
...In a line that's a classic, my sister once summed up Harvey Road, Silver Spring, Maryland, circa 1953-1959...
...cross country skiing, it's absolutely virgin...
...We talked about that for a while...
...This is the biggest mistake of your whole life," I told him...
...He looked sort of intense, as if he were about to make another billion dollars somewhere...
...Years later, when the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, for which I wrote a column, was about to print a major expose about Hollywood drug dealing, Don called and asked me to help him...
...Intercut were pictures of Don with friends, Don bopping to music at a dubbing session, Don with his friends' kids, Don with his helicopter skiing buddies, excerpts from trade stories about how much business Simpson-Bruckheimer movies did...
...He was a totally lonely, unhappy guy...
...Jeffrey didn't want you to come," Steve Tisch joked...
...Today, as I was getting ready to go, my parents called from Washington...
...He stopped to talk to me about economic growth and how important it was that the GOP understand that...
...By the time we got to Coeur d'Alene, we could not see more than a few feet...
...Sort of like how you feel after you stop hitting your head against a wall...
...Maybe I should just go back to the Edgewater and stay there until tomorrow...
...I'd like to see the movie star who devotes a lot of time to pleasing a man...
...I remembered those factories as picturesque...
...Yes, you do," I said...
...I don't remember in that whole time ever having an invitation to a party...
...It's a World War II story," I said...
...We're looking for pictures where there is a woman lead, doing something brave and dangerous, hopefully with a role for another woman who also does brave things," she said...
...When we got to the nice curbside check-in at the Spokane Airport, it was dry and fine...
...He might have just been passing through...
...World War II has been over for a long time...
...Don telling me that just a few days before he died...
...He had a limo come and pick me up, and there were a lot of Don's buddies there, and that guy, the head of the agency, asked me to guess how old he was...
...Don Simpson, fabulously successful producer of such giant hits as Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Crimson Tide, and Days o fThunder, had been found dead in a bathroom of his 26-room mansion in Bel-Air...
...Exactly," I said...
...In fact, the more powerful he became, the more unhappy he seemed...
...Mommy took her dogs, ancient, doddering Martha, who has the bad habit of relieving herself in the back seat, and frisky, playful Susie, who likes to throw up when the car gets going fast...
...The average American middle-aged male has one friend, and that's his wife...
...Tommy looked at me blithely...
...I mean, you would think he had just gone on a cruise to see how happy and on top of it he looks...
...she asked...
...This has been the most beautiful winter I can recall...
...Mobbed...
...If I could be sure I wasn't going to be beaten by some overeager policeman, I think I would start going with Operation Rescue...
...I get up at 5:30 and work out for an hour and a half every day...
...The street was about half Jewish when we moved in and became more so as the years passed...
...After the clip, I saw a major movie star come in, looking very harassed...
...Plus, the woman Nazi is being chased by a woman from the government who is sort of thrust into the unfamiliar role of FBI agent...
...Alas, like me, he had a tendency to gain weight...
...Who might you be...
...As I listened to my little black radio on the kitchen counter next to the window that faces the Pacific, I heard an amazing story...
...No, and I keep going until ii:3o," he said, "and then I'm back at it at 5:30 the next morning...
...It rarely works out that way...
...Here he is when he looked like himself, and here he is when he had his cheeks done and his eyes and his whole face lifted...
...Well, it's actually based on a book I wrote called The Manhattan Gambit, and it's set in 1943...
...Well, why do people come to Hollywood...
...Love is for other people," he said, or words like that...
...The sky is a deep blue...
...It's a memorial...
...Don threw a 26th birthday party for me at Mr...
...Then there was Wallis Annenberg, heiress to the TV Guide fortune, who was extremely friendly indeed...
...We've made this little video about Don and some of the movies that he and I made, and about Don's life, and I think we'll show it now," he said, or pretty close...
...she asked enthusiastically...
...It was that simple," she said...
...1 lovely manager of Morton's, Pam Morton—were planning a wake for Don...
...We had a good laugh about the wording of certain parts of the headline in People about his former wife, Sally Field...
...These days go quickly, just like my days on Harvey Road...
...It occurred to me that this was probably the exact thought that went through paunchy Don Simpson's mind again and again...
...Life is personal, and not political or even artistic, as Wlady says, and Don was my friend...
...There are floodwaters over part of my beloved Sequoia restaurant in Georgetown, Washington, D.C...
...He's not only incredibly disciplined, but amazingly self-effacing...
...It's hard for me to think of many people in Hollywood who know what love is...
...Jerry definitely does...
...So the Jews like my mother and father The American Spectator • April 1996 51 built their own little neighborhoods...
...Tommy and Alex hysterically wanted to run alongside the van, but they couldn't because the doors were locked and there was a sign on the doors that they would break if they opened the doors...
...He always greeted me very cheerfully when he saw me at Morton's or on the lot...
...Alaska Airlines was only about an hour late, which is about par for them even in totally dry weather...
...BENJAMIN J. STEIN is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Hollywood and Malibu...
...I absolutely have to get reconnected with the Right to Life folks...
...There were doctors, lawyers, small businessmen...
...That's boring...
...I want to buy a monkey," he said...
...Sincerely, et cetera.' And Don was so happy he sent me a huge basket of flowers, and from then on, every year he sent me flowers and every New Year's he sent me a big basket with a ham and a turkey and a lot of liquor and flowers...
...It's a major self-inflicted wound to be really unhappy with how you look, and Don picked at that scab endlessly...
...It's the difference between night and day...
...I told him I wouldn't go...
...This is a strange video for someone who basically killed himself from drug abuse," Staci said...
...Then behind us was Theodore Forstmann...
...If there was a party, everyone was invited...
...Flashdance...
...Do you take a nap during the day...
...At that time, the better neighborhoods in D.C...
...It's better to be lucky than to be good," Jeffrey said...
...Then, when you're finished, you feel really good...
...The lairds of the manor were the Sculls, scions of noble families from Philadelphia and Maryland...
...There were no divorces on Harvey Road, no alcoholics, no wife beaters...
...Later, I did my stint as Grand Marshal of the Winter Carnival...
...I don't want to talk about me...
...A list of people who he sent that basket to...
...I don't like prenuptial agreements," Greisman said...
...Do you work out every day...
...He's a sort of jet-setting guy, well connected on the New York party circuit...
...The thing about these pictures is that they show Don before4 4 thought of how very many Hollywood producers have told me that they were car thieves when they were young...
...I loved the part about how she was now 'free of the need to please a man,"' I said...
...He looked better before he had the surgery...
...I prevailed upon Mary Anne Dolan, the editor of the Herald, to rethink it...
...I called to tell Alex, who had been a lawyer on many of his movies...
...Anyway, some days when I cannot sleep, I imagine being back on Harvey Road...
...By coincidence, she went to high school not far from where I went to law school...
...I was driven around a few blocks of Sandpoint while people waved at me and said, "Hi, Ben...
...We remembered the Housatonic River-although, for some reason, she remembered it as dirty and forbidding, lined with ancient rusting factories...
...He was always trying to get me to arm wrestle him to show how strong he was...
...I'd like for you to sell it," he said, "and give me the money...
...I keep seeing on TV that rain and snow are "pounding" the east and Midwest...
...But there was also my friend and picaresque role model, Carl Bernstein, my next door neighbor, who was a lively, irreverent rogue, and in every home there were kids my age...
...What did you do...
...Tova Laiter hugged her in a particularly touching way...
...There were monitors all around, on which a handsome photo of Don, looking rakish in very dark glasses, was steadily displayed...
...I would have thought they would do it at a church or maybe a temple...
...At a restaurant...
...04 54 April 19 9 6 The American Spectator...
...The legend helps them to believe that they're tough...
...In the fall and winter, there were pickup football games...
...It's also cold as hell, and there is a wind...
...In the summer, pickup baseball and basketball...
...Then there was another clip...
...Live fast...
...I have to tell you this one amazing statistic I came across this afternoon in an article," he said...
...She was stunned...
...From the 1980's...
...Not at all...
...It looks as if everyone in the Northwestern U.S...
...Thursday Here I am at the Edgewater in Sandpoint...
...I offered my condolences to Jerry Bruckheimer and he accepted them with a certain becoming gravity...
...I'm at the Schweitzer Mountain Ski Resort outside Sandpoint...
...I was a very poor baseball player, but a neighbor, Gene Daumit, took pity on me and taught me to hit much better...
...I just drove by them on my way to Vassar to visit my future bride...
...They're my heroes...
...Did that stop Tommy...
...What child ever thinks he's going to grow up and be 51...
...They don't know...
...Well, it has to be set in World War II," I said...
...What a lonely guy...
...B. lives in New York, and as far as I can tell, has almost nothing to do with the child...
...Why...
...Love scenes never look right...
...He went out of the theater for a really long time, and I went looking for him...
...Every afternoon, there was play in the neighborhood...
...Think of how you would have felt as a child if your father ignored you...
...That might be the bottom line on what's going on in Hollywood right now: the love scenes never look as if the lovers mean it...
...One friend...
...I had to yank his little arm away and throw him back into his seat...
...On the plane, Tommy said to me, "Daddy, did you say I had stock in Coca-Cola...
...Goes berserk...
...Dangerous Minds...
...Someone had a party, and the doors were open to everyone on the street...
...They make really cute pets...
...I was the one who insisted that you had to come...
...Later that night, after a modest dinner of leftovers, the Steins caravanned out to our ramshackle house in Malibu...
...How about this: a woman Nazi sympathizer and spy helps a Nazi POW break out of prison and go across the country to kidnap Albert Einstein and make him help with the Nazi atom bomb project, which is much farther along than anyone thought...
...I am in a meeting in a building in Century City, talking to a kind woman about ideas for TV movies...
...Some day, I would love to write a book about Harvey Road...
...I see...
...Just as Staci told me that, there was movement at the front of the room near the bar, as Jerry Bruckheimer took the microphone...
...He was probably the most sweet-natured person I ever met in my childhood...
...Why are these people so thin and fit...
...A major snowstorm is blowing across North Idaho...
...he said, again with his light touch of irony...
...Don should have known Hollywood well enough to know that there are no real life movie stars, but he didn't...
...There were about forty houses on Harvey Road and its offshoot, Greyrock Road...
...is here today...
...From now on, I'm not going to compare myself with anyone else...
...I know how happy Don would have been that so many of his friends came by," he said, or words to that effect...
...I saw him in a room laying out lines of coke, with two girls lying on the floor next to him sniffing it up...
...Monday This is terrifying...
...Staci started to complain about the prenuptial agreement that her fiancé wanted her to sign...
...We're discussing suburban life and how much certain of the intellectualoids hate it...
...I'm trudging around, occasionally gliding a few feet, with my lovely instructor, Jacqui...
...It's at Morton's at seven Monday night...
...You know, on my street in Connecticut," Howard said, "there were no divorces ever that I can remember...
...They always do," I said...
...I suspect that's some kind of code for his liking Steve Forbes, but I'm not sure...
...If the Spokane Airport were closed, I would have driven this scary drive for nothing...
...From the 1980's," the other one said...
...On all the monitors, glittering images appeared of hit Simpson-Bruckheimer pictures...
...Don used to tell me that she gave him the most sex of any star he ever worked with," Staci said...
...Apparently he died on the toilet...
...It was a dead end street off Dale Drive in Silver Spring, abutting a magnificent park called Sligo Creek...
...Hmmm," the woman in the office said...
...Most of the houses were three bedrooms with a rec room downstairs...
...I was totally freaked, and when I noticed that in addition to everything else, Tommy had opened his door and then not closed it properly, I started swearing a blue streak...
...I mean, I can see the sun reflecting off the ocean thirty miles from my house in town, and it's dazzling...
...I was first introduced to him by Michael Ovitz...
...Or else a hedgehog...
...Staci, one of the women who had been in Don's life, and a longtime pal of mine, a stunning Italianate beauty, walked over to the bar and had the first of a long series of Mai-Tais...
...Don was never married...
...were off limits to Jews...
...I couldn't figure out how they knew my name until I realized that my name was on the side of the van I was riding in...
...He would move right next to the little girl and never leave...
...I knew I shouldn't have, but I was just out of my mind with fear...
...Well, that's what Don said...
...In the back of the room, Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson's erstwhile partner, stood talking to Jeffrey Katzenberg and Jeffrey's wife, Marilyn...
...Despite all that, I am going to miss Don a lot...
...I'm not sure he was even having dinner here...
...For some reason, probably because we were both interested in the stock market, Don and I became friends...
...I used to talk to him all night long when he was coked up...
...Don was a maniac, but in many ways he had been a good friend to us...
...But here in L.A., it's balmy and clear, with a slight breeze...
...Maybe it's natural here to die unnaturally just as it's natural here to live unnaturally...
...It's my duty to remember these moments with my boy...
...And long before that, Sarai Ribicoff, daughter of my father's college roommate, killed by gunshot in a robbery in Venice Beach...
...Hitler, too...
...Isn't that what real estate agents always tell you —that rooms look smaller without furniture...
...He blithely opened the door anyway...
...Farther on, I saw two beautiful young women eating smoked salmon at a table...
...I mean how come you get so rich and famous and you never gain any weight...
...Chow...
...It sort of gives you a license to leave...
...Then last year there was Charlie Minor, the rock producer shot by a jealous ex-lover...
...Well, it's sort of a wake," I said...
...Well, I didn't want my career to be over," Staci said...
...W. I hereby apologize for saying your hair was receding...
...Morton's is a temple," my mother said...
...I think it just tells each side that they can get out of the marriage any time they want to, and that's not good...
...He exercised and worked out and struggled to be powerful not only with a checkbook but with his biceps...
...I asked...
...You know, the last time I saw Don was here, just a few weeks ago...
...It's better than money, better than fame...
...No matter 50 April 1996 •The American Spectator how rich he was, he was still wildly unhappy at how he looked...
...Still, he was friendly, even after he became a major star...
...The GMC Yukon that I was provided for the Winter Carnival was much preferable...
...She later denied that my pleas had anything to do with it, but in any event, the story did not run...
...Jeffrey does...
...They were built during and right after the Korean War...
...And they were screening his movie...
...There were only a few bad incidents: a family named Kennedy had friends over, and one of them once called me a kike, when I was probably nine, long before I had any idea what it meant...
...Ours was custom built, but most were built by a builder named Platt...
...I demanded...
...Anyway, he's dead now...
...This explains all too much about Jeffrey...
...Fathers who miss it are missing the exact essence of life...
...How horrible, huh...
...Starts screaming about how he's never been so insulted in his life...
...Your mother or your father...
...You are missing the defining moments of human life...
...That's the problem...
...I don't believe it," I said...
...Maybe that, too, comes out in today's movies...
...For an hour and a half," Jeffrey said...
...It was an unusually interesting evening...
...I hope you're kidding," I said...
...At the next table, Marvin Davis held court with Sidney Poitier...
...my father asked...
...Monday What a gorgeous day...
...Just mention 'Ozzie and Harriet' and you can see them grind their teeth," says Howard...
...Tommy and I felt safe in the Yukon...
...Beverly Hills Cop...
...It's amazing but true that the model for behavior in Hollywood is not looking happy or respectable or kind or smart, but acting and looking like a gangster...
...Right," the first one echoed...
...So I sent him a fax: `Dear Mr...
...He had a list...
...It's got four-wheel drive but it's light, and it's blowing all over the highway...
...You see what a glamorous family we are...
...I said, 'Well, you're in great shape, but your hair is receding, so I would guess you're in your forties.' "The guy throws a complete fit...
...He tried diets, exercise, drugs, more drugs, still more drugs...
...Do you think they get it...
...44 Alan Greisman strolled in, looking very hip in various tones of black...
...It's incredibly important for you, but it's even more important for her...
...Think of what it will mean to that girl to have her father there to hold her hand and just be there talking to her, feeding her, carrying her around...
...As if that explained everything, as if the 1980's were a morally free time zone when you could do anything you felt like doing...
...He said in the video that maybe he would never know what love is...
...We're in our little Nissan Pathfinder...
...The moment, this moment when Tommy is a sweet child, when my parents are lively and at the peak of their wit, when Alex is still a beauty and I still get asked for autographs —savor the moment...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
