We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives (24 page)

At the same time, I did not find L.A. especially alluring. I liked the weather and I liked the palm trees. I liked Fatburger on La Cienega and looking at the Walk of Stars on Hollywood Boulevard. I liked the nice ocean, and I liked the hills dotted
with interesting houses. For the most part, though, to like L.A. you had to like driving. And I’m a lousy driver.

What I did like, of course, was listening to music in my car. “Hollywood Swinging” was the great L.A. anthem of the day. That was Kool and the Gang singing about wanting to get into a band and becoming a bad piano-playin’ man. Me in a nutshell. The other anthem was recorded by a Southern California backup band turned into soul stars by writer/producer Norman Whitfield. Rose Royce’s “Car Wash” provided the fuel that kept me tooling around in the smog, looking in vain for the center of a centerless city.

But how many car washes can you get in one week?

Shooting the show itself wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped. The scripts were lackluster, and the chemistry among cast members never really kicked in. Let’s face it: I’d gone from the hippest to the squarest. The highlight of my time in Hollywood was shopping for eyeglasses.

Lear’s costume gal said I needed a hip pair of glasses. She thought it went with my character as a musician in the Hereafter band. I’d never looked at glasses as a fashion item, but when in Rome, baby. The costume gal took me to Optique Boutique.

“Elton John buys his frames here,” said the optician, “and I have a pair we just made up for him.”

“I gotta see ’em,” I said.

The optician pulled out a pair of dramatic square frames done in pure-as-the-driven-snow white. I loved them. I also loved Elton’s music—Elton’s songs, Elton’s sound, and Elton’s soulful piano playing. Why not wear Elton’s glasses?

“Will I look like a copycat?” I asked the costume gal.

“These frames look like they were made for you,” she said.

“Even if they were made for Elton?”

“They were made for Elton with you in mind, Paul. Besides, Elton’s off touring Australia. By the time he gets back to the U.S.A., he’ll be sporting new frames.”

“I’ll take them,” I told the optician.

For better or worse, that’s how the Shaffer eyeglass frame obsession began: in blind tribute to Elton John. And I was fine with that.

The name
Hereafter
was changed to
A Year at the Top
, but it wasn’t a year at the top. It was a year in the middle. It wasn’t awful and it wasn’t great. After shooting four shows, though, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be the next
I Love Lucy
.

Nonetheless, I had to concentrate on the job at hand.
A Year at the Top
was shot on the KTTV lot where Lear’s famous productions, like
All in the Family, Maude, One Day at a Time
, and
The Jeffersons
, were all taped.

If our show became famous it was only famous as Lear’s first flop.

Flop or not, I’d wander over to the
One Day at a Time
set, where I met Valerie Bertinelli. She and I had a few fun dates. Enchanting personality. She was sixteen, I was twenty-seven, but, as R. Kelly would say, who’s counting? I also met Valerie’s friend and costar Mackenzie Phillips, whose dad was the Mamas and Papas’ John Phillips, a man of great wit and musical talent whose trademark vocal arrangements—think of “California Dreamin’”—were exquisite.

One evening, after Mackenzie and I had helped out at a charity event, we went to Roy’s on Sunset, an uber-hip hangout for Hollywood movers and shakers in the seventies. If you knew
Mackenzie well, by the way, you called her “Laura,” her real name. Mackenzie, her middle name, was given to her in tribute to Scott Mackenzie, for whom Papa John wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).”

Anyway, we get to Roy’s, and Roy turns out to be a former music agent, Roy Silver. Given my fascination with fast-talking New York Jews, I’m pleased to meet Roy, and Roy is pleased to meet me because he knows about my connection to Lear and Kirshner. When I introduce Roy to Mackenzie, he’s ecstatic.

“I held your father in my arms,” he tells Mackenzie, “so people wouldn’t see that he was vomiting all over himself.”

Nice, Roy
, I say to myself.

“Come to the bar, kid,” he continues, “and I’ll tell you more stories about your dad.”

Mackenzie whispers to me, “Everywhere I go in this town, someone has another horror story about my father. I can’t take it.”

So we’re at the bar. Mackenzie wants to get away—and I want to help her—but Roy’s already deep into his next story.

“Funny story about your dad,” he says. “We’re in San Francisco. It’s me, John, Scott Mackenzie, and Mama Cass. We’re at the Fairmont, about to be served lunch, when the hotel manager comes up to us and says, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave.’

“‘What are you talking about!’ I say. ‘Who has to leave?’ “‘Your entire party.’

“‘Why?’ I ask.

“‘Because we have discovered an inordinately large accumulation of chicken bones in Miss Cass’s room. The bones are everywhere—in the bed, under the bed, on the couch, under the couch. The walls are smeared with mayonnaise and mustard. The
sheets and towels are covered with ketchup. I’m asking your party to leave right now.

“I turn to John and say, ‘John…where am I going to go with this?’”

Where am I going to go with this?
I repeat to myself, thinking,
What a punch line!

“Isn’t that funny, Mackenzie,” Roy now asks. “Isn’t your father a scream?”

Mackenzie tries to smile but can’t. Mercifully, Roy leaves us alone to enjoy our drinks, but ten minutes don’t pass before he’s back.

“This just happened last week,” he says. “You know Giorgio Moroder, of course.”

I nod. I don’t know him, but I know of him. He’s the Italian arranger who produced, among other smashes, Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” complete with the sounds of confected orgasm.

Roy goes on: “So Giorgio’s in here munching on barbecue spareribs—my recipe—and he waves me over and says, ‘Roy. I have track. Hit track. But I need singer. You know singer?’

“‘Giorgio, baby,’ I say, ‘this is Hollywood. Every waitress in this place is an ASW (actress/singer/whatever).’

“So I wave the nearest waitress over to our table and say, ‘Giorgio, meet Dora. Dora’s a dynamite singer.’

“‘You be at studio tomorrow at 10 a.m.,’ says Giorgio, ‘we cut hit record.’

“Natch, Dora’s smiling from ear to ear. The more I think about it, though, the more I can see Dora having a Donna Summer—sized hit, and all because of me. So before she quits for the night, I call Dora over and say, ‘Look, honey, I put this deal together for you. I got you Giorgio. I gotta have ten percent.’

“Dora looks me in the eye, and immediately says, ‘Five.’ Even the waitresses are cutting my nuts off here in Hollywood, Paul, even the fuckin’ waitresses.”

Hollywood is always merging the old and the new. It honors both, sometimes worships both, even as it simultaneously destroys both. By that I mean the old guys can come back when you least expect it, like Mickey Rooney coming back to appear on
A Year at the Top
. Mickey loved telling jokes: “Guy says, ‘When I die, bury me in a copper coffin.’ ‘How come?’ ‘It’ll help my arthritis.’” First time I heard it, I fell over. Eighth time it wasn’t so funny. Mickey had big ideas. The Mickey Rooney Starbecue, for example, featuring the Judy Chili Burger and the Andy Hardy Sloppy Joe. Corny jokes and Starbecues aside, when Mickey appeared, everyone on the set was in awe:
We’re working with the great Mickey Rooney
. When he didn’t work out—hardly anyone did on that show—no one remembered that he had been there only the day before. Same thing with the new guys—me and Scardino and Greg Evigan, the three musicians who sold our souls to the devil/agent. Here one day, gone the next.

As you will soon see, the devil got his due; the show didn’t last. Before my sitcom career was over, though, I had accumulated enough Hollywood stories to last me the rest of my life. That alone made the trip worthwhile.

My favorite Tinseltown story has a poignancy that touched my heart. I was there when it happened. A. J. Antoon, a Tony-winning Broadway director who had done a TV version of
Much Ado About Nothing
, was brought in by Norman Lear to direct the
Hereafter
pilot. A.J. wanted all of us, especially Norman, to see his Shakespeare. A screening was arranged.

When I arrived, I saw that the only others in attendance were two secretaries from the office and Woody Kling, an old-school writer for Milton Berle who had written our pilot. It was clear that Lear wasn’t going to show.

Disappointed but undaunted, A.J. proudly introduced his version of Shakespeare, telling us to be on the lookout for certain key elements of his direction. The lights were dimmed, the film rolled, and we settled back to watch.

Five minutes into the ninety-minute production, Woody Kling jumped up, grabbed his suitcase, and leaned over to A.J.

“Beautiful, A.J.,” said Woody. “I gotta run.”

When I think of my time in the City of Angels, I think of that line. In that single moment, I saw it; I understood Hollywood and its cold-blooded warmth.

“Beautiful, A.J., I gotta run.”

Hollywood could get you down. When I was especially down, when the smog of the city and the lack of sizzle coming off our show had us all convinced that we were going nowhere fast, I’d take a break. One day I was strolling around the lot, munching on a burrito and thinking to myself,
What the hell am I doing here? I could be cutting disco records in New York
. Then I saw it. Was it an apparition? Was it real? It couldn’t be. But yes, it was. It passed me by like a parade. Four overweight stagehands were wheeling what I recognized to be the
Soul Train
mirror ball. They were transporting it to the stage where the show was taped. I chased after the ball like a Hollywood agent chases after his commission.
My God
, I thought,
Soul Train tapes here!

Imagine the joy that washed over my heart when I learned that the guest for today’s show was none other than the Love
Man, Mr. Barry White. I was inches away from the Maestro as host Don Cornelius began the interview. Barry had just released a new album,
Sheet Music
. The interview focused on the pun implicit in the title. Both men spoke so softly that I had to put my ear right up against the speaker to make out their words.

“We’re here with the Man,” said Don in his deep bottom baritone. “The Man, the Maestro.”

“Well, thank you very much, Don,” said Barry in a baritone several octaves deeper than Don’s. Man, it was dueling baritones
sotto voce
.

“Why call it
Sheet Music
, BW?” asked Don, his honey-dripped voice plunging even lower.

“Well, Don, let me break it down to you, brother. You see there are two kinds of sheet music. There’s the sheet music we use to write the songs that lead to romance. And then there’s the sheet music we play when we feel love and share love and make love between the sheets. Talkin’ ’bout the silken sheets of love.”