Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me... (27 page)

Bregman got involved in some tax shelter/cattle scheme and invested lots of his clients' funds in the deal. Bregman was attractive and smart, and I don't think he had any evil intent here; however, some deals work, and some are losers. This one turned out to be a scam, unbeknownst at the outset to Marty. But while the clients lost lots of money, Marty lined his pockets with the commissions he got for putting his clients into the deal. “No bloody fair,” I whined, and pulled Liza away from his management. It was easy to do because Liza was upset at the loss of her money. So was Streisand, and she, too, left Bregman. In return Bregman took Al away from me, which he was easily able to do.

The whole mess left me wondering how much Al knew and how much money he lost. He wasn't yet as high up in the earning ranks as Liza and Barbra, both of whom lost tens of thousands. Had I kept my mouth shut and left Liza with Bregman, I could have maintained my representation of Al; I would have been able to continue talking for him, and looking for material on his behalf. But there was no integrity in my not informing Liza. Besides, it went right along with the slimy way Begelman did business, which might have been to let Marty fast-talk his way out of it, promising to get it back in the next investment, and so on. I owed it to Li to speak up. However, I believe that, had I thought about it more, I might have found a better way to handle this mess. There was a compromise in there somewhere. I couldn't see it then. Everything was so black-and-white to me. It was a good object lesson. Moving on!

The rumors about the sale of the company that year turned out to be true. The new owner, Marvin Josephson, also came from the agency world and was very successful, but he wasn't anyone I knew. I had followed the Fields plan, which was to keep my head down and not bother about what other agents were doing. Meanwhile, all my associates knew Josephson but me. I was uncomfortable. I had grown up with F&D. In a way Freddie was my surrogate father. I didn't want a new environment. I didn't want even to give it a chance. Besides that, having lost Redford and Pacino, I would now have to prove myself all over again, build a new client list, and maybe even take a cut in salary. Who knows? I did a lot of speculating. Of course there was still Liza, at the pinnacle of her career. Liza! Yes! I decided on a new life plan: Liza and I would go into business together.

*   *   *

In spite of cracks that were now showing up on the well-paved road to Liza's fame, I thought everything would be okay. I looked at my Liza, the brilliant and lovely young woman who, upon winning the Oscar for
Cabaret
, showed up a day later in my office with a basket of flowers three feet high. She needed help to put the huge arrangement on my desk, and then came the best part. She handed me a card that said, “We did it.”

I truly cared about Liza, and I believed in her. Although I knew that her voice was not as good as her mother's or Barbra's, she worked hard, very hard, to win over audiences, and her quirkiness, her please-love-me desperation seduced them wherever we went. She was a good actress, and a great entertainer. I had enough confidence in her ability and in my own to imagine that together we could build a successful independent production company of our own. I believed that I knew how to turn her great success into greater profitability, how to make the deals work for her, how to make it all happen for the both of us. And if we worked closely together, I thought I could keep her straight. Boy, was I wrong!

It would start with a simple three- or four-picture deal tied to one of the studios. It would give her a chance to develop her own scripts, ones she could star in and maybe one she could produce for someone else. Of course the films would have to be successful for the escalations in the contract to work, as well as for the options to be picked up. There were deals like that going all the way back to Bette Davis, and there is no question that this kind of deal was available to Liza. It was an easy setup for me, and worth taking a chance on.

I imagined creating musicals utilizing the talents of Li's buddies Fred Ebb, John Kander, and Marvin Hamlisch; I imagined developing dramatic vehicles with good writers and directors, scripts that would exploit Liza's specific strengths. I spoke to Li about it with great enthusiasm. She got excited, too, and agreed that it was the way to go. And so, after fifteen years, I resigned from CMA. I told my new boss, Marvin Josephson, that I would be gone in less than two weeks. I told my lawyer to prepare an agreement with Liza. I had one foot out the door, and I was very excited about the future, truly looking forward to a new kind of professional independence. That's when I got the call.

It was a phone call from a man whose name I had only ever heard just in passing: Mickey Rudin, a powerful entertainment attorney in Los Angeles who was known as Frank Sinatra's mouthpiece. It was he who answered the questions about Sinatra's gambling interests and underworld acquaintances. In dispatching me, he was nothing if not totally direct; brutal is more like it: “Liza will no longer require your services!” And he hung up. It took him fifteen seconds to relieve me of everything it had taken me fifteen years to build. I started to get nauseous, thought I would throw up, and the hand holding the phone shook so hard I almost dropped it. I hadn't made a single response. He didn't give me time to make one. I sat there staring for a long time, not moving—not
able
to move. My body temperature dropped, like in the old days with Judy. My hands were freezing. I couldn't focus. I couldn't make myself move. I just sat there. I was in shock.

And where was Liza? Nowhere to be found! I knew she was in California. She had a new love in her life: Desi Arnaz, Jr. She was spending a lot of time with him and his family. I can't recall ever meeting him, and I had had no inkling he would have such an impact on me. I didn't know how to reach him. I called Li's father and all the people we knew in common; I left word for her all over the West Coast, but there was no return call. Liza knew how to disappear when she wanted to, and she never did it better than in the few months following my firing. Did she know that I was now out of work, that I was jobless, divorced, and supporting two children? My physical shock lasted less than an hour. The shock to my psyche lasted more than a year.

For days I was too depressed to move. My children, who were five and six, had no patience for that. I had to give up self-pity to play with them. How could Mommy be home and not play? They wouldn't allow me to feel sorry for myself. But then, self-pity hasn't ever been my trip. When I started to come around, I instinctively knew I couldn't win a battle with Rudin. Thinking like an agent, trying to estimate where I would come out if I took him on, I figured I'd be the one with the short straw, because I understood that Rudin could not have made that phone call if Liza had not given him the authority to do so. And, of course, hiding out was Li's usual response to such circumstances.

Banging around in my brain was what Freddie had taught me years before when he first instructed me: “Agents, lawyers, and accountants—they're only just advisers. The client is the principal. The client is the only one that makes the decisions.” Rudin was a wealthy attorney with unlimited resources and a reputation for being nasty. I would have had to hire legal counsel, and, at best, my grounds were questionable. I hadn't yet signed a contract with Liza for the new company. I felt I had an oral agreement, but then it was Liza's word against mine. I was bleeding. I licked my wounds and talked to nobody.

Worse, once I was gone from the agency, it was okay for Liza to stay there. Josephson changed the call letters from CMA to ICM, and it continued to be Liza's professional home. Had I crawled back to get myself a paycheck, I would have had to face the humiliation of no longer representing her. How calculating of Rudin! It was beyond cruel.

Hardest to accept was that none of this could have gone down if Liza hadn't wanted it to. I kept repeating this to myself like a mantra: It was Li's decision. But while my head knew this was true, my heart didn't want it to be. We had won the Triple Crown. And for this I was fired, summarily dismissed, a disgrace in the company? What heinous crime could my associates imagine I'd committed? Had Liza really considered all the ramifications of her decision? Did she even know what happened? Probably not. She was as self-absorbed as any other star. She was busy being in love again. Somehow I was able to keep moving, but not able to let go of my denial—that it was Liza who did this to me in the nastiest way.

For a time rumors about Liza beat a path to my door. There was no avoiding them. Everyone I knew in show business was anxious to tell me whatever he or she knew. Mostly I heard how Mickey was going to make Liza rich. She was already rich, but maybe she wanted a lot more. Her mother, after all, had died broke. That had to be pretty scary. If that in fact was Rudin's promise, he made good on it. He kept Liza touring all the time. It's easy for me to say he should have used her success as a launching pad to further her film career. That wasn't, however, what he was capable of. He wasn't about to turn his back on his practice in order to harangue literary agents to find appropriate material for her. He put Liza in the hands of inexperienced agents who weren't capable or connected. They weren't film packagers trained by Freddie Fields; they were merely order takers. What they
could
do was follow Mickey's bidding, and that was to keep her on the road. They wanted to keep Mickey happy. After all, he also represented Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. If they did a good job for him, might they now get into the Sinatra business?

Mickey did package Liza with Sinatra. Frank and Liza in Atlantic City! It made lots of money, but in my opinion it was a crime. It didn't mean a thing for her career. The longer she stayed out on the road, the more the Hollywood interest in her diminished. Her movie life went into the toilet. It was a giant missed opportunity. Mickey Rudin made her richer than she then was while lining his own pockets in the process. And while on the road, where permissiveness and bad behavior are as commonplace as tacky hotel rooms, it was rumored that most of Liza's earnings were going right up her nose.

It was at least a year before I got a call from her. I'm not sure why it came, and I didn't ask. I simply accepted the invitation she offered to lunch. We spent an empty hour and a half on inconsequential small talk. Though it may be hard to believe, hardest of all for me to believe, I still hadn't completely processed what had happened, hadn't yet located my anger, and I wasn't prepared to join any issues with her. And it wouldn't have mattered. Liza doesn't confront issues. She has always passed the buck to someone working for her. I understood that. I taught her how to do this during all the years when I was pleased to be the “heavy.” Had I had the presence to open a real discussion with her, she might have sent me back to Mickey Rudin. But I didn't, and she didn't. Instead she treated me like an old friend, hugging me when she saw me, jollying me. “It's
so
good to see you. How
are
you?” It was bullshit.

Finally at the end of the meal, it having accomplished nothing toward personal redemption, I decided to look at the luncheon as an opportunity to find a softer way back into her life. I told her I wanted to write a screenplay for her based on one of her songs, a piece of special material Fred Ebb had written for her entitled “Liza with a Z” about her name, which was continually misspelled and mispronounced. The idea just popped into my head. She was delighted. Maybe she saw it as a way out of guilt. I have no idea if she had any.

I was winging it, but as a result of my ad-lib, I got myself a deal at United Artists. In the script I conceived, the misspelling leads to all kinds of other complications. The script was a piece of crap, and when I turned it in, that was the end of it. I considered the payment my severance for fifteen years of work. Now that we were “friends” again, I got a Christmas card with a small gift for the next five years.

*   *   *

It was while doing a benefit concert at Radio City in 1990 that something telling happened. She phoned from backstage as she was about to go on to say that her good friend Halston had died, and that she was in terrible pain. She was sobbing and couldn't get herself together. “What should I do, Stevie? Tell me what to do. I'm hurting so much. I can't stand the pain.” I found the nicest possible way to tell her that the show must go on, and made some suggestions for honoring her friend after. Why me? Why had she called me instead of all her other powerful friends? Because I had been the most stable person in her life. We both knew that.

In 1991, when she was appearing there again with a new act, I arranged a pair of tickets and took my Jenny, now twenty-two, to the show. We went to the greenroom after the show, and when Liza entered she gushed over us, ignoring everyone else there, including Baryshnikov.

Perhaps the continuous touring, the endless concerts, Halston's death and, most of all, her increasing addictions sent her into the tailspin that prompted the next call, about a year later. She was now in the kind of pain that was beyond her endurance. She said she couldn't get out of bed for days at a time. She told me that she had trouble differentiating colors. Everything hurt. She was so totally lost that her voice barely resonated.

My heart hurt for her. I never got over feeling sorry for her, but she needed more help than I could give. I urged her to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and encouraged her to make a permanent commitment to it. She did that, and was open in the press about seeking rehabilitation. At her request I even attended a few meetings with her. But during this period her career went further into the dumpster. At this point we were in totally different places. She was suffering, and I was back on my feet. When she got back on her own, perhaps I could help her once more with work.

I thought the remedy for her career might be found in television. In the eighties important careers were being made on TV. With the assistance of Jim Watters, the former entertainment editor at
Life
and
Time
magazines, and a good friend of mine and Liza's, I developed a comedy series idea that was, at least in my opinion, salable. Liza had a wonderful sense of comic timing. If she showed any interest in the idea, Jim and I would secure the best writers, the best show runner, the best of everything needed to support her.