My Mother Was Nuts (31 page)

We had a whole season of games to film, though I can think of only one time when the girls actually played a full game. We were at the Rockford stadium, and while waiting for the fireworks, I said let them play. Some didn’t know all the rules, like how to tag up on a fly ball. One of the best parts about being on a film full of girls, as opposed to guys, was that while waiting for the crew to set up the lighting, we went shopping. Tom’s wife, Rita, was always willing to go on the hunt for quilts. I also got into collecting duck decoys. I furnished an entire house with all the cabinets and chairs I bought.

I knew Tom aced the “there’s no crying in baseball” scene he had with Evelyn. His timing and delivery were impeccable throughout, like the gem when he gets booted from the game for asking the ump if “anyone’s ever told you that you look like a penis with a little hat on?” He nailed the entire movie. The whole picture was full of riches—too full, in fact. I cut a hilarious monologue Lovitz had early in the movie about having once saved Babe Ruth’s life. The scene with
the team owners was shortened and turned into a newsreel. Marla’s wedding was also cut down.

And those are just some of the examples. These characters took on lives of their own. As such, it seemed like we were in Evansville for much longer than we were. We were still shooting there over my birthday in October. I remember because my brother arranged for a plane to fly over the location trailing a sign that said Happy Birthday, Penny. The first time it was a fun surprise. On the third pass, I was like,
Okay, thank you, good-bye
. After fifteen minutes, I was yelling at him to get the fuck out of here. It was enough. I had to shoot.

And I still had to go to Cooperstown.

League
ends with the women reuniting forty years later at the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Hall is located in Cooperstown, New York, a small, inviting town with an early-twentieth-century atmosphere and the perfect backdrop for a museum for America’s pastime. None of us had been there before. We took tours and thought it was a fantastic memorial to the game’s greatest players and epic moments.

But the tribute to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was disappointing. “Insignificant” is a better description. When it came to thinking in cinematic terms, Miroslav simply called it “ugly.” As a result, we took over a room and decorated it ourselves, making it look more like a genuine shrine to the pioneering women who inspired the movie.

For the actual reunion, I asked our casting director, Ellen Lewis, to bring in a few professional actresses that looked similar to Geena, Rosie, and Mo. But I also used the real AAGPBL veterans. They were why we had made, and indeed were able to make, the movie in the first place. We all felt their spirit—and we heard about the fun they’d really had.

There wasn’t a dry eye on the set when actor Mark Holton, playing Evelyn’s grown-up son, Stilwell, said, “My mom always said it was the best time of her life.” But what you don’t see in that scene is how long everything took and how behind schedule we were. I had a contingent
of AAGPBL ladies who were heading back to Florida early the next morning and I didn’t want them to be delayed.

I called them together and explained they could go back to the hotel for the night and I’d shoot the rest without them, or they could stick around. It was their choice. But they had to know we were going to shoot late, possibly through the night. They exchanged looks. Then Pepper Davis stepped forward and, speaking for the group, said, “That’s okay, Penny. We’ll consider it a doubleheader.”

That still gets me.

As usual, I had an extremely long first assemblage. I threw four teams of editors on it and showed a first cut to my brother, Randy Newman, and a few others I trusted. I hired Hans Zimmer to write the score. On paper, an English-German guy who didn’t know shit about baseball was an odd choice. But he was a night person like me. From his work on
Driving Miss Daisy
, I knew he could do Americana, and he did a wonderful job.

I also had a song from Carole King for the end credits, but Madonna wanted to do her own song, “This Used to Be My Playground,” which worked in that spot. I hadn’t let Madonna start the singing in the Peaches song earlier in the movie. I didn’t want to exploit her. So this gave fans something they had expected.

My finished cut failed to impress the studio president, Mark Canton. He asked why I ended on the old ladies.

“Why not end on Geena, Tom, and Lori?” he asked.

“Because that ain’t the end of the movie,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “These are old ladies.”

Test screenings proved me right. The numbers kept going up as we snuck it in various theaters. When I complained to Mike Ovitz, he said, “You don’t have to worry. You have final cut.” Up till then, I didn’t know that I wielded such power. Who had time to wield?

Confirmation that my instincts were right came from two authorities, two of the highest that I knew. The first was the public. Despite what I considered a terrible premiere screening at the Academy Theater
(the theater has no vibe; Tom and I left the moment it finished, skipping the party), the movie opened in June 1992 to positive reviews and a box office that climbed through the summer. Tom and I were promoting it at the film festivals in Deauville and Venice. We were in Venice when it reached $100 million, my second film to hit that milestone. We celebrated with an enormous cake.

Steven Spielberg paid me the biggest compliment. He asked how I had composed the end of the movie. It’s a pretty big deal when Steven asks, “How’d you do that?” He was intrigued when I said that I used the real women. “They’re who I did the movie for,” I said. “They’re who I wanted to honor.” He asked if I would mind if he used that type of ending in his next film,
Schindler’s List
. I said, “Of course not. You’re entitled.”

And the truth was, it didn’t belong to me. In the same way that the end of Steven’s movie belonged to the survivors, mine belonged to all the women who had played the game.

Penny, Gregory Hines, and Mark Wahlberg on the set of 1994’s
Renaissance Man
“Renaissance Man” © 1994 Cinergi Pictures Entertainment, Inc., & Cinergi Productions, N.V
.

A
T THE END OF
League
, Tracy revealed some familiar-sounding news: She was pregnant and engaged. I handled the news and preparations well, and I thought I mediated well when the two of them began to fight about whether to live in New York, where he was from, or L.A., where she had her life. My solution? I bought a second apartment in New York. It was a floor below mine.

But they were in L.A. at the beginning of October when Tracy went into labor. She was in what I considered one of her hippie-dippy phases, insisting on a home birth, and so she was in the bedroom with her midwife when I arrived at night after getting a call that it was time. My ex-husband Mickey was in the living room with Dan, and we had a warm reunion. He was remarried for the third time and excited about becoming a grandparent.

He and Dan made small talk and were oblivious to the panic I saw on the midwife’s face when we peeked into the room for an update. Her expression caused me to step straight into the action and hold Tracy down. “Look at me,” I said. The problem was that the baby coming out of her, a boy they named Spencer, weighed eleven
pounds, seven ounces. I told Tracy that he came out asking for the car keys.

Two weeks later I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. Carrie and I had one of our joint parties and the world showed up. After starting them in 1981, these parties had become major events. We alternated between our homes. No invitations went out; everyone received a phone call telling them the date and time. A few days later, we would receive calls from people asking if they could come.

Most guests were longtime friends like Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, and Robin Williams. New people, like Ben Affleck and Nicole Kidman, were added every year. One year David Bowie and Iman crashed. The food was a big draw. Carrie’s housekeeper, Gloria, and her mother’s longtime housekeeper, Mary, made fried chicken, meatloaf, mac and cheese, and other Southern staples. Barbra Streisand wanted to hire them for a party. Carrie wouldn’t let her.

Albert Brooks once cracked, “If a bomb went off at one of their parties, Anson Williams would have a career.” That’s what the scene looked like at my fiftieth. My brother’s wife, Barbara, still talks about introducing herself to Al Pacino, De Niro, and Pesci, who were huddled in a corner. As soon as they found out she was a nurse, they began asking her about their aches and pains. Pesci raised his arm and said, “When I do this, it hurts. What does that mean?”

Jerry Belson had gone home early that night with ulcer pains. But he called around 3 a.m. I was still up, getting the stragglers to go home.

“Penny, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t even know if you should know.”

“Jerry, what?”

“I saw Gregory Peck stealing
tchotchkes
,” he said. “I didn’t know if I should tell you.”

I knew he was joking and had called to find out what he had missed. He also knew that I’d be up at that hour. Despite reaching
middle age, I felt as energetic as I did twenty years earlier. If necessary, I could go all night, and sometimes I did. After fixing up a house for Tracy in L.A.—she and Dan split soon after—I went to New York where I now owned two apartments. It was December, and I made the rounds of friends getting ready for the holidays. One night I went to a play with Greenhut, and afterward we went to a party Ronald Perelman was having for his then-wife Claudia Cohen. It was her birthday, and he was celebrating at the Paramount Hotel. When Greenhut and I walked in, Marvin Hamlisch was playing the piano. As soon as he spotted me, Marvin switched songs midverse and sang, “We flew to the sky with tears in our eyes …”

It was a song he had written for my group in camp. I immediately joined in. The funny thing was, another woman at the party had also gone to camp with us and she began to sing, too. Ronald hadn’t gone to camp, but he had grown up in Philadelphia and knew a number of the girls I knew from camp. It was a small world. We enjoyed comparing notes.

Ronald and I clicked. Like me, he was a little quirky, but fun, smart, and loyal. He liked to travel. I guess this was what I’d call my CEO period. I was friendly with Paul Allen, David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Ronald. All of them had private jets. It was nice. You just don’t meet many people who call you up and say, “Come with me to Germany tomorrow. We’ll go on the jet. I want to look at a yacht.” Another time Ron invited me to London for a Paul McCartney concert. I took the Concorde, thinking we were going to a rock show. It turned out to be one of Sir Paul’s early classical symphonies. We ate dinner with Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. That’s the way Ronald rolled.

In early 1993, I tried to develop various projects, including
The Nature of Enchantment
, a moving story about a traumatized child growing up. I also worked on a script called
The Boys of Neptune
, a portrait of four men in their mid- to late forties who return to the Jersey
Shore and take the same lifeguard jobs they’d had as teenagers. The studios weren’t interested.

One day Sara Colleton, a producer I knew from Fox, sent me
Renaissance Man
, explaining it was based on a true story. Written by her friend Jim Burnstein, a professor at the University of Michigan, it was about an unemployed single dad named Bill Rago who gets a job with the Army teaching recruits struggling with their class work in basic training.

As the story had gone down in real life, the recruits had to pass their high school equivalency as part of basic training. But the new Army required a high school diploma. So the story sort of went in the crapper. But we made it about the accomplishment of learning, in particular discovering and performing Shakespeare. Rago loved the Bard; his students had never heard of him—or much of anything else that came from a book. They were known on the base as “double D’s”—dumb as dog shit. As he said in the first classroom scene, “I’ve never taught before, and you’ve never thought before. So good luck to all of us.”

I didn’t think
Renaissance Man
was a blockbuster (and I didn’t know about the blockbuster part of the business, anyway), but I liked its message.
Renaissance Man
was a nice story about a guy who turned his life around as he helped kids. I knew that if I did my job, people would leave the theater feeling a little better—or, in the words of my mother, they’d leave feeling entertained—and that’s what I was into.

The first reading at my house was an A-list evening with Leo Di-Caprio, Keanu Reeves, the Wayans brothers, and Courtney Vance among those who traded their talents and a couple hours of their time to help me to explore the script in exchange for a nice dinner. Danny DeVito wanted the lead, and I liked the idea of working with him. I had once played myself in an episode of
Taxi
where Danny’s character, Louie De Palma, and I both wanted the same apartment. After signing on, he said, “Put wood in the budget.”