Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (9 page)

My new agents were thrilled because
Murphy Brown
was at that time a top sitcom and a great way to end my long dry spell they had stuck with me through. I had actually been recommended to them by the New York William Morris agent who had initially signed me. He told me that William Morris was too big and that I’d be better off at a smaller agency, known in the industry as a “boutique agency.”

After expecting to be shunned from any off-stage contact with the reported icy cold regulars of
Murphy Brown
, I was pleasantly surprised to find they were very open to me. Only the show’s star, Candice Bergen, didn’t really fraternize during breaks at rehearsals. She’d usually rush off to her trailer, followed by her assistant, who would hand her the set’s cordless phone (this was the pre-cellular era), as a way for her to ward off all around her.

Part of me still felt like a fan who had been let in off the street, a feeling I think I conveyed a little too much when I met Joe Regalbuto before rehearsing our scene together. I excitedly complimented him on his cameo film work of the early eighties, including playing the pedophile murderer in
The Star Chamber
. I couldn’t tell if he found my familiarity with his résumé flattering or frightening.

One of the perks of being on these shows is getting to invite friends, agents, or prospective girlfriends to tapings. A production assistant informed me that I was only allotted two tickets for the Friday night taping.
Murphy Brown
was a hot ticket. They didn’t have to bus in half-medicated audience members and shove Hershey bars in their mouths to keep them awake for the long tapings.

I decided to pass on the tickets. After three years in Los Angeles, I didn’t have many friends in town who would sit in the bleachers to support me. Most of my contacts were embittered, jaded comics. I could understand how frustrating it would be to watch four hours of something you’re not in, if not much else is going on in your career. And at the time there weren’t any promising potential dates, especially not someone who I would feel comfortable having sit through a lengthy taping for my few minutes onstage.

I opened up about this to Grant Shaud, who played Miles Silverberg, the high-strung neurotic producer of “FYI.”

“People think it should be easy for me to get a nice woman because I’ve been on TV a few times, but it’s not.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, shaking his head.

I was happy for the empathy, but also taken aback. I would have rather he said, “You’ve only done a few guest spots on TV. Wait till you’re a regular on a hit show like me. That’s when the women start pouring in!”

Not that I wasn’t trying to meet a woman on that set. I’d try to interact with the writer’s assistants, stand-ins, script supervisors, and other female crew, eyeing their left hand for rings. I tried to strike up a conversation with one ringless cute production assistant at the craft service table.

“This is a nice set. You like working here?” I asked.

“Yes, it is nice.” She smiled politely, but moved on to her co-workers.

I sadly watched them laughing, trading inside jokes and playfully catching up with each other. This is the perennial plight of the guest star that was only beginning to dawn on me. If I had the luxury of being there week after week, I could slowly build up a flirting familiarity with one of them. But I was only there for the week and feared I was coming off like an overeager puppy let out of its kennel.

As on most shows, the crew was very nice, but I knew there was no great point in palling up to me. It’s like war, where you don’t want to get too close to someone because they might get picked off. And in the guest star’s case, your fate is already a foregone conclusion: they knew I’d be gone at the end of the week.

I was nervous about the taping because I didn’t have any jokes—just a repeated mantra. But Regalbuto’s frustration with my do-or-die resistance ended up being better than any canned one-liners, and the audience loved it. After the episode aired several weeks later, I experienced something new. The next day I showed up at my usual breakfast place, Charlie’s in Hollywood’s Farmers Market, and the owner, Charlie, was a changed woman. Instead of her usual faceless grunting preparing my one egg over well and rye toast, she seemed overjoyed to see me.

“I can’t believe I saw you on
Murphy Brown
!” she exclaimed. “You’re always sitting here alone with your head down like something’s wrong. I didn’t know you were an actor. I guess things
are
okay, then.”

It was my first TV recognition. I had arrived. Of course, it would have felt a little better had it not sounded like Charlie clearly imagined that I was a refugee from some halfway house
in the area.

Over the next few days several other people also recognized and complimented me. It felt good, but it only lasted about two weeks and then I was just another guy alone with my head down again. At the end of the season, I was invited by the show to attend the annual wrap party. It was not only the first time I had been granted such insider status, but also the first time I had ever been on a show that was still on the air at the end of the season.

One of the sound stages on the Warner Brothers lot had been transformed into a huge banquet hall. When I called to tell my friend Joel, he was really excited. Back during filming, he had been quite disappointed with the show when I told him that
Murphy Brown
didn’t have fancy catering on the set. He told me I should complain to them that the guests got better food on
Amen
, but I had different priorities. The caterer for the party was kind enough to give me a menu of the heavenly delicacies so I could go to a pay phone and call Joel at the video store he worked at.

“Chilean sea bass with papaya salsa: snow white, full-flavored from the coast of Chile, perfectly grilled and served with juicy papayas, mild green chilies, and special seasoning.”

Joel moaned, “Oh, God.”

“Italian stuffed mushrooms filled with homemade spicy Italian sausage.”

“Oh, man. That’s so good.”

“Chilled extra large shrimp, slowly marinated in a lemon pepper sauce, with fresh sage leaves, served on an elegant bed of red-leafed Radicchio Di Treviso.”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

I felt like Ratso Rizzo in
Midnight Cowboy
, underdressed at this formal event, practically stuffing shrimp into my pockets to take home for later. I mostly interacted with the other guest star players from that season. That’s usually the way it is on most sets: regulars hang with the regulars, guests with the guests, one-day players with one-day players, and extras with extras. I said “Hi, Gabby” to a fellow actor I had worked with on my episode. “It’s not Gabby, it’s Gibby!” he firmly corrected me. An actor who played a tough landlord in our episode was with his young son. He kept boasting, “I will not permit him to be an actor! He has no choice. He will not live the life that I do.” The actor who played a government auditor kept telling me about all the shows he had done and listed dozens of producers who had loved his work.

Out of all the delicious foods, desserts, and beverages, we all seemed to be interested in the same thing: the buffet of hope. We scampered around the soundstage looking for Diane English, the other top producers, and anyone else highly regarded by the show, desiring those tasty morsels of encouragement that our involvement with them would continue far beyond that night.

And I got fed well. All the cast members told me what a great job I had done, including Candice Bergen who was much friendlier and less intimidating without her cordless phone pressed against the side of her face. Diane English said she was leaving
Murphy Brown
to develop other shows. She suggested I could possibly fit into one of them. This was exactly the kind of dessert I was craving. But even though I did end up auditioning for a guest star role in her next show
Love & War,
I didn’t get it. I also auditioned for regular roles on some of her other short-lived shows,
Double Rush
and
The Louie Anderson Show
, without success.

11

Vinnie & Bobby

R
emember
Vinnie & Bobby
, a spin-off of a spin-off of
Married… with Children
? I bet you don’t. And I bet Matt LeBlanc, who starred in it before going on to
Friends
, most likely has forgotten it too, or would like to. But I remember it fondly. It was my longest guest star stint to date; five weeks in a row of work. Out of loyalty to the show’s producers, Fox had given the show a seven-episode commitment; yet its only discernible idea was to have female viewers ogle its two male leads.

Vinnie & Bobby
were two Chicago construction workers, played by LeBlanc, who was then twenty-four, and another good-looking actor named Robert Torti. Their characters were very stupid and yet irresistible to the ladies. I was brought in for the third episode, after the producers had juggled different guest actors to be
Vinnie & Bobby’s
other weird coworkers.

For the first time, I was hired for my looks, or more accurately, my physique. Back in 1992, when this show had its brief summer run, I was thirty pounds thinner than I am now-6’1” and 135 pounds. And I’m sure that’s why they ended up keeping me for five episodes. I was a sight gag who appeared to be even thinner when they dressed me in tank tops and sandwiched me between two obese construction workers, played by John Pinette and Ron Taylor, who both probably weighed in at close to 360 each. They used me as a sort of living “Mr. Bill” doll. The two big guys would smash into me or sit on me along with other gags that consisted of me being thrown to the side or leaping headfirst into something.

On the set, LeBlanc had a ball-breaking, locker-room mentality. On several occasions, he’d put his hand around my puny arm and ask if I’d been working out. And he’d repeatedly ask in a mocking way in front of everyone how my jaw was after I had to ice it when one of the huge guys accidentally elbowed me in the face during a rehearsal. But later, he’d ask again how I was doing, and I could see that he really meant it. One time there was a stunt where I had to dive over a group of people and land in the outstretched arms of the big guys. He insisted on doing it first to show me that it was perfectly safe.

But my being tossed around like a rag doll was a small fraction of
Vinnie & Bobby
, a show that was really about how these two characters were the studs the world had never seen. The best way to describe the mood on the set was that it was like the Chippendales. The live audience was packed with adolescent girls who screamed at the top of their lungs any time the studs did anything remotely physical. Just their entrances set the crowd into hysterical woohooing, wolf-whistling, and crying. You can just imagine what happened when one referred to his beautiful hair or made an innuendo suggesting that he might take off an article of clothing. Bobby had his signature seduction piece referred to as “the full Bobby experience.” He’d gyrate his hips and point his fingers in the air à la Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
.

I had joked that since the screaming crowd was such a large part of the show, there should be a camera on them, so they could cut to their reactions. No other sitcom had ever so blatantly broken their reality like that. Someone on the set, for a nanosecond, actually thought that might be a good idea.

The writing was so minimal that a few episodes ended up being shorter than the required twenty-two minutes, so to stretch them out, they had us construction workers just sing at the end. We sang “Ruby Baby” and “Get a Job” to finalize two episodes. I think Matt thought they were cool. Robert Torti came from the Broadway musical
Starlight Express
and he loved to sing. I was embarrassed. The director gave us a note, “Now everyone, really try to sing—except for Fred.” They knew I couldn’t hold a note.

The wrap party for
Vinnie & Bobby
was at a video arcade. All guests were handed a roll of quarters to go crazy. Pinball was my favorite. There are other games where you can figure out their pattern and lick them. Not so with pinball. I love the mixture of random luck and quick reflexes. I had finally achieved multi-ball on one of my old favorites, “Firepower,” when one of the writers came over and gave me the mixed news.

“You know, if the show’s picked up, you’re going to be a regular.”

I had already gotten a hint of this from one of the producers but any excitement lasted less than a second.

“But you also know that that’s moot,” he added. “This show is deader than any show has ever been.”

I knew that too. I can’t recall anyone involved with
Vinnie & Bobby
who thought it could land anywhere on Fox’s fall schedule. It was dreadfully bad. In 1995, a television book entitled
Bad TV: The Very Best of the Very Worst
was published. Not surprisingly,
Vinnie & Bobby
found a prominent spot. I have a video of my episodes and find it to be actually entertaining in a demented way. LeBlanc was just glad that the contract he had signed was going to pay him for thirteen episodes, when the show only went seven. He told me that when the check came he was going to buy himself another motorcycle. Bikes were his passion.

After
Vinnie & Bobby,
I went from my record five consecutive weeks of working in a row, to another seven months of unemployment, when I found myself at a horrendous cattle call commercial audition. A small waiting room was littered with actors all vying for a shot at some regional ad. The actors were making the same lame jokes you hear on every one of these calls: “Everyone, go home! I got the part! No need for you guys to read for it!” I have no recollection of how the audition went or even what it was for. But I do remember as I was leaving seeing Matt LeBlanc walk in and sign his name on what had to be a fourth piece of paper, each having over twenty-five names on it.