It seemed like the whole world was walking through the arrivals lounge of LAX that summer.
World-class amateur gymnasts, sprinters, discus throwers, pole vaulters, basketball players, weight lifters, show jumpers and their horses, swimmers, fencers, soccer players, synchronized swimmers, media from all around the globe, officials and sponsors and agents … oh, and one fifteen-year-old also-amateur tennis player from Canada, they all washed up in Los Angeles during the summer of 1984, though only one was doing a big geographic.
That was the year of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, a golden time of high sun and muscled excellence, of a hundred thousand people packed into the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl, where Mary Lou Retton needed a 10 to win the gymnastics all-around and nailed it, and where Carl Lewis won four gold medals by running really fast and jumping really far.
It was also the year I immigrated to the United States, a lost Canadian kid with a dick that didn’t seem to work, heading to Tinseltown to live with his father.
Back in Ottawa, before I’d left, a girl had tried to have sex with me, but I was so nervous that I drank six beers beforehand and couldn’t perform. By then I’d been drinking for a few years—it began soon after the time I gave my mother away to that lovely man, Keith.
And I do mean lovely. Keith lived for my mother. The only thing that is annoying about Keith is that he always takes my mother’s side. He is her protector. I can’t tell you how many times my mother has done something that I may have taken issue with and I’ve been told by Keith that it never happened. Some would call this gaslighting, others would call it gaslighting—it’s gaslighting. But my family was held together by one man, and that was Keith Morrison.
Anyway, back to my penis.
I failed to make the correlation between the booze and my private parts not working. And no one could know about this—no one. So, I was walking around the planet thinking sex was something for other people. For a long time; years. Sex sounded awfully fun, but it was not in my arsenal. This meant, in my mind and pants at least, that I was (con)genitally, impotent.
If I just go to Los Angeles, I’ll be happy.… That’s what I thought. Seriously—that’s what I thought a geographic, long before I even knew what a geographic was, would do for me. I fit right in with the muscled, hypertrained athletes also waiting at the baggage carousels. Weren’t we all just bringing some kind of crazy dream to this crazy city? If there were a hundred sprinters, and only three medals per discipline, how much saner could you say they were than me? In fact, I probably had a better chance of making it in my profession than they did in theirs—after all, my dad was an actor, and that’s what I wanted to be. All he had to do was help me push on doors already ajar, right? And so what if I came halfway down the pack—I might not get a medal either, but at least I’d get away from Ottawa and a dick that didn’t seem to want to work. And a family I wasn’t really a part of and on and on.
The initial plan for me had involved sports, too. My tennis had advanced to the point where we seriously considered me enrolling in Nick Bollettieri’s Tennis Academy in Florida. Bollettieri was the premier tennis coach—he helped Monica Seles, Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, and Venus and Serena Williams among many others—but once in LA, it quickly became apparent that I was going to be a perfectly solid club player, nothing more. I can remember enrolling in a satellite tournament, with my dad and my new family watching (he’d remarried to Debbie, a lovely woman, and the catch of the century, in 1980, and back then they had a very young daughter, Maria), and in my first match I didn’t win a single point.
The standard in Southern California was off the charts—when it’s seventy-two degrees every day, and there are tennis courts seemingly in every backyard and on every street corner, some kid from the icy wastes of Canada—where it’s subzero from December through March, if you’re lucky—is going to struggle to make an impact. It was kind of like being a really good hockey player in Burbank. And so it turned out: my dreams of being the next Jimmy Connors quickly faded when faced with whipped 100-mph serves coming from bronzed Californian gods who happened to be eleven years old and called Chad, but spelled with a capital D.
It was time to look for a new profession.
Despite this swift reality check, I loved LA instantly. I loved the vastness of it, the possibilities of it, the opportunity to start anew—not to mention that the seventy-two degrees every day made a nice change from Ottawa. Plus, when I realized that tennis wasn’t going to be how I would make a living, and someone told me people actually get paid to act, I quickly changed career goals. This wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed; for a start, my dad was in show business, and I had a hunch that the attention would light me up like a Christmas tree. I had had a solid training at home; whenever there was tension, or I needed attention, I’d honed my skills at delivering a killer line. If I was performing well, everything was safe, and I was being taken care of. I might have been an unaccompanied minor, but when I got laughs, there was a whole audience—my mother, my siblings, the Murray brothers, kids in school—who would stand and applaud me. It also didn’t hurt that three weeks into my sophomore year at a very prestigious and expensive (thanks, Dad) new school, I was cast in the lead role of the high school play. That’s right ladies and gentlemen—you are looking at George Gibbs in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Acting came naturally to me. Why wouldn’t I want to pretend to be another person?
Jesus Christ …
I think my dad had sensed this was going to happen. After I was cast in Our Town, I raced home to share the big news and found a book lying on my bed called Acting with Style. The inscription inside read:
Another generation shot to hell. Love, Dad.
Acting was another one of my drugs. And it didn’t do the damage that alcohol was already starting to do. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to wake up after a night of drinking. Not on school days—it hadn’t escalated that far yet. But certainly, every weekend.
But first, I had to get a regular education.
I was the pale Canadian kid with a quick mouth, and there’s something about an outsider that piques the curiosity of teenagers—we seem exotic, especially if we have a Canadian accent and can name the entire roster of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Plus, my dad was the Old Spice guy; for years on their TVs, my schoolmates had seen Dad dressed as a sailor on shore leave—replete with peacoat and black sailor cap—slinging that iconic white bottle at clean-shaven bit actors while urging them to “Clean up your life with Old Spice!” It may not have been Shakespeare, but he was famous enough, and he was tall and handsome and very funny, and he was my dad.
Dad was also a drinker. Every evening he’d arrive home from whichever set he’d been on, or not been on, pour himself a healthy slug of vodka tonic, and announce, “This is the best thing that’s happened to me all day.”
He said this about a drink. Sitting next to his son on a couch in Los Angeles. Then he’d have four more and take the fifth to bed.
Dad taught me many good things, too. But he certainly taught me how to drink. It’s still no accident that my drink of choice was a double vodka tonic, and my thought every time was, This is the best thing that happened to me all day.
There was a difference, though—a big one. Without fail, next morning at seven Dad would be up, bright and breezy; he’d shower and apply his aftershave (never Old Spice), and head out to the bank or his agent or to set—he never missed a thing. Dad was the epitome of a functional drinker. I, on the other hand, was already struggling to wake up and causing whispers with those who drank around me.
I watched my father drink six vodka tonics and live a perfectly functional life, so, I figured it was possible. I figured I’d be able to do the same thing. But there was something lurking in my shadows and my genes, like a creepy beast in a dark place, something I had that my father did not, and it would be a decade before we knew what it was. Alcoholism, addiction—you call it what you want, I’ve chosen to call it a Big Terrible Thing.
But I was George Gibbs, too.
I don’t remember what my classmates thought of this newbie showing up with his pale skin and Canadian brogue, but I didn’t care. SparkNotes describes Gibbs as “an archetypal all-American boy. A local baseball star and the president of his senior class in high school, he also possesses innocence and sensitivity. He is a good son … [but for] George [to] stifle his emotions is difficult, if not impossible.”
So, pretty much dead-on, then.
At home, though, my dad had vodka all over the house. One afternoon, when he and Debbie were gone, I decided to take a big swig of vodka. As the warm spice of it jangled down my throat and innards, I felt that well-being, that ease, that sense that everything was going to be fine, I saw the clouds from my backyard in Ottawa and I figured I’d head out into LA, to walk in this bliss, this seventy-two-degree heaven, the star of the school play wandering like a drunk Odysseus through the star-studded streets. Clancy Sigal, writing for the London Observer about the 1984 LA Olympics, noted that whenever he visited the city, he sensed that he was “passing through a soft membrane that seals Los Angeles off from the real, painful world.” Here I was, too, slipping through that soft, vodka-softened membrane, into a place where there was no pain, where the world was both real, and not … and yet, as I turned a corner, something else hit me that had never occurred to me before—death, fear of death, questions like “Why are we all here?” “What’s the meaning of all this?” “What’s the point?” “How do we all arrive at this?” “What are human beings?” “What is air?” All these questions poured into my brain like a tidal wave.
I was just rounding a fucking corner!
The drink, and that walk, opened a chasm in me that’s still there. I was so troubled; I was an extremely screwed up guy. The questions cascaded like alcohol into a glass; all I’d done was what Sigal had done—I had arrived in Los Angeles, along with gymnasts and sprinters and horses and writers and actors and wannabes and has-beens and Old Spice actors, and now, a great void had opened up beneath me. I was standing at the edge of great pit of fire, like “The Pit of Hell” in the Karakum Desert of central Turkmenistan. The drink, and that walk, had created a thinker, a seeker, but not some soft-focus, Buddhist crap—one who was on the edge of a deep crater of flames, haunted by the lack of answers, by being unaccompanied, by wanting love but being terrified of abandonment, by wanting excitement, but being unable to appreciate it, by a dick that didn’t work. I was face-to-face with the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell, a fifteen-year-old boy brought up close to the face of eschatology, so close he could smell the vodka on its breath.
Years later, my father, too, would take his own meaningful walk: he had had a bad night on the drink where he fell through some bushes or something, and he talked to Debbie about it the following morning and she said, “Is this the way you want to live your life?” And he said, no—then he went for a walk and quit drinking and hasn’t had a drop since.
Excuse me? You went for a walk and quit drinking? I have spent upward of $7 million trying to get sober. I have been to six thousand AA meetings. (Not an exaggeration, more an educated guess.) I’ve been to rehab fifteen times. I’ve been in a mental institution, gone to therapy twice a week for thirty years, been to death’s door. And you went for a fucking walk?
I’ll tell you where you can take a walk.
But my dad can’t write a play, star on Friends, help the helpless. And he doesn’t have $7 million to spend on anything. Life has its trade-offs, I suppose.
This begs the question—would I trade places with him?
Why don’t we get to that one later?
On the jukebox, I’d put a few dimes in and play “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush over and over; sometimes I’d slip in “Mainstreet” by Bob Seger, or “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles. One of the reasons we loved the 101 Coffee Shop was because they kept the jukebox up-to-date; plus, it felt like old Hollywood in there, with its caramel-colored leather booths and the sense that at any moment someone super famous might walk in—you know, to pretend that fame didn’t change anything.
By 1986, I was pretty sure fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet. I needed it. It was the only thing that would fix me. I was certain of it. Living in LA you would occasionally bump into a celebrity, or you’d see Billy Crystal at the Improv, make note of Nicolas Cage in the next booth, and I just knew they had no problems—in fact, all their problems had been washed away. They were famous.
I’d been auditioning steadily and had even gotten a gig or two—most notably, in the first season of Charles in Charge. I played Ed, a preppy, plaid-sweater-and-tie-wearing square who confidently intoned his one main line: “My father’s a Princeton man, and a surgeon—I’d like to follow in his footsteps!” But it was work, and TV, and without much more thought I found that I was already skipping school to hang out in diners with girls who liked my accent and my quick patter and my budding TV career and my ability to listen to them. Thanks to my training back in Canada, I knew I was able to listen to and help women in crisis. (If you’re a woman and you are in duress and you sing a song about it, I will listen to it over and over and over.) So there I was, in the 101 Coffee Shop, holding court with a gaggle of young women, quick with a line and a smirk and a willing ear; I’d ditched the preppy, Charles in Charge look as soon as I’d left the Universal lot in Studio City and was dressed like any cool teen in the mid-1980s: denim jacket over a plaid shirt, or probably wearing a Kinks T-shirt before going home to listen to Air Supply.
When you’re nearly sixteen, days seem endless, especially when you’re charming a bunch of young women in a greasy spoon in Hollywood. I must have been really on that day, too, because as I joked around, a middle-aged guy walked past the booth and put a note on a napkin in front of me on the table and walked away and right out the door. The girls all stopped chattering; I looked at the guy’s back as he left, then did a prototype of Chandler’s double take, getting more laughs.
“Well, read it!” one of the girls said.
I carefully picked up the note as though it were covered in poison, and slowly opened it. In spidery handwriting it said,
I want you to be in my next movie. Please give me a call at this number.… William Richert.
“What does it say?” another girl said.
“It says, ‘Could you be more handsome and talented?’” I said, deadpan.
“No,” the first girl said, “it does not!”
The tenor of her disbelief caused another round of laughter as I said, “Oh, thanks very much,” but once the laughter died down, I said, “It says, ‘I want you to be in my next movie. Please give me a call at this number. William Richert.’”
One of the girls said, “Well, that sounds legitimate.…”
“Right?” I said. “This movie is going to be shot in the back of a windowless van.”
At home that evening, I asked my dad what to do. He was on his third vodka tonic—there was just enough cogency left in his tank to get a useful answer. By now, he was starting to get a little frustrated by the fact that my career was beginning to percolate; he wasn’t jealous, but he was aware that I was younger than he was, and that the road was rising to meet me, and that if I played my cards right, I might have a better career than the one he was having. That said, he never showed anything but support—there was no “Great Santini” going on here. My dad was my hero, and he was proud of me.
“Well, Matty,” he said, “can’t hurt to call.”
But whatever my dad said, I knew I’d call that number. I’d known it when I first read the note. This was Hollywood, after all—that’s supposed to be how it happens, right?
It turned out that William Richert didn’t want to make a movie in the back of a van.
Richert had been watching me perform for the girls that day in the 101 and had seen enough of The Matthew Perry Show to want to cast me in a movie he was making based on his novel A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. The novel and the movie are set in Chicago in the early 1960s; Reardon is a teenager who is being forced to go to business school when all he really wants to do is get enough money to buy a plane ticket to Hawaii, where his girlfriend lives. I was to play Reardon’s best friend, Fred Roberts, who, like Ed in Charles in Charge, was well-off and a bit snobby, and suffered from chronic virginity. (I could relate.) I ditched the preppy look once again, as Fred was to be dressed in a gray felt flat cap and leather jacket over a dress shirt and tie, oh, and black leather gloves. In the movie, the character of Reardon sleeps with my girlfriend, but that’s OK, because playing Reardon would be someone it would be a privilege to be cheated on by.
The list of geniuses who were ahead of their time is too long to detail here—suffice to say, near the top of any such list should be my costar in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, River Phoenix. This movie was my first job, and I’m acutely aware it would be a better story if the movie was a huge hit, but all that really matters is that I learned how to make a film, and I got to know River, who personified beauty in every way. There was an aura around that guy. But he made you feel too comfortable to even be jealous of him. Stand by Me had just come out—which he excelled in—and when you walked into a room with him, his charisma was such that you instantly became part of the furniture.
The movie was shot in Chicago, so there I was, just turning seventeen years old, and heading to the Windy City, sans parents, sans anything, once again an unaccompanied minor, but this time it felt like freedom, like what I was born to do. I had never been so excited in my life. It was in Chicago, and on this movie, and with River Phoenix, that I fell deeply in love with acting—and the cherry on top of this deeply magical time was that River and I became firm friends. He and I drank beer and shot pool on North Rush Street (The Color of Money had just come out, and pool was the thing to do). We had a per diem; we flirted with girls, though that’s as far as it went for me because, well, you know.
River was a beautiful man, inside and out—too beautiful for this world, it turned out. It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down. Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us? River was a better actor than me; I was funnier. But I certainly held my own in our scenes—no small feat, when I look back decades later. But more important, River just looked at the world in a different way than we all did, and that made him fascinating, and charismatic, and, yes, beautiful, but not in a Gap ad kinda way (though he was that, too)—in a there-is-no-one-else-in-the-world-like-him kind of way. Not to mention he was rocketing to stardom, yet you would never know it.
And somewhere in all that magic, River Phoenix and I managed to shoot a movie together.
Later, River would say that he wasn’t happy with his performance in Jimmy Reardon, claiming he hadn’t been the right person for the role. But to me he was the right person for every role. He could do anything. I remember seeing him in the movie Sneakers—he was making choices no one else would make. Not to mention holding his own with legends like Robert Redford and the wonderful Sidney Poitier. (If you haven’t seen it, you should—it’s highly entertaining.)
The movie we made would eventually tank at the box office, but it didn’t matter. We’d been somewhere beautiful and magical, even if it was just North Rush Street in freezing Chicago. And it was the best experience of my life—I knew it, too. My work was done in about three weeks, but they (probably River, actually) liked me so much that they kept me on the movie till the end. Things didn’t get better than this.
One night, alone in my tiny room at the Tremont hotel, as things were drawing to a close, I knelt down and said to the universe: “Don’t you ever forget this.”
And I have not.
But magic never lasts; whatever holes you’re filling seem to keep opening back up. (It’s like Whac-A-Mole.) Maybe it was because I was always trying to fill a spiritual hole with a material thing.… I don’t know. Either way, when it came to the last day of shooting, I sat on my bed in my Chicago hotel room and cried. I sobbed and sobbed because I knew even then I would never again have an experience like that—my first movie, far from home, free to flirt and drink and hang out with a brilliant young man like River Phoenix.
I would sob again seven years later on Halloween 1993, when River died in front of the Viper Room in West Hollywood. (I heard the screaming from my apartment; went back to bed; woke up to the news.) After his passing, his mom wrote, in reference to drug use, “the spirits of [River’s] generation are being worn down,” and by then, I was drinking every night. But it would be years before I understood exactly what she meant.
With Jimmy Reardon in the can, I flew back to LA from Chicago and returned to planet Earth in the form of high school. I was still auditioning for tons of things but wasn’t getting much traction. I was booking mostly comedy stuff, and I ended up guest starring on just about everything. My grades still sucked, though. I graduated with a 2.0 average, exactly. All that I asked for my graduation was that my mother and father both attend, which they kindly did. The incredibly awkward dinner that followed seemed only to underline the fact that the child they shared was destined to be uncomfortable as a default, even though he was also usually the funniest person in the room. But that night at dinner I was only the third funniest, and the third most beautiful. At least a childhood dream of them being together had come true, if for one night only, and even then, if only in embarrassing silences and barbs passed back and forth like some angry cosmic joint.
I am grateful to my parents for attending that dinner—it was an incredibly kind and completely unnecessary thing for them to do. But it crystallized something for me that I had not anticipated. It was right that they weren’t together. They were not to be. They were correct to be apart. They both subsequently found the person they were meant to be with. And I am incredibly happy for both of them. Matty no longer needed to make the wish that his parents would be together.
It would be decades before they were in the same room together again. And then, for a very different reason.
The acting roles, and the quick mind and mouth, and the friendship with River, and the denim jacket over plaid shirt all combined to help me land a beautiful girlfriend named Tricia Fisher. (Eddie Fisher and Connie Stevens’s daughter—that’s right, Carrie Fisher’s half sister. This girl was no stranger to charm.)
The rhyming poetry of her name alone should have made her irresistible—plus, I was eighteen now, and was pretty sure everything worked, except when I was in the company of another human being. I carried impotence around with me like a great ugly secret, like I carried around everything else. Accordingly, as my relationship with Tricia Fisher deepened, thoughts naturally turned to a physical consummation, but I announced confidently that like a Roman Catholic, I wanted to wait—not many eighteen-year-old males say that, by the way, nor should they. This, of course, caught her interest. When she pressed me on why, I said something about “commitment” or “the future” or “the state of the planet” or “my career,” anything, in fact, to avoid telling her that I was softer than the caramel-colored booths at the 101 Coffee Shop when push came to shove. And I couldn’t let push come to shove or my secret would be out.
My firmness, at least in my conviction to wait, lasted two months. But dams burst, and the make-out sessions that didn’t lead anywhere were beginning to cause us both to hyperventilate. Tricia Fisher made up her mind.
“Matty,” she said, “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s go.”
She took my hand and led me to the bed in my tiny studio apartment in Westwood.
I was horrified, and also excited, though I was still haunted by an inner dialogue of fear:
—Maybe this time, and with someone I care deeply for, my previous inabilities will dissolve.… Dissolve—bad word.
—Should I have a stiff drink beforehand? Well, stiff’s the problem, pal.
—Maybe it won’t be as hard as I feared. Not as hard? Matty, stop doing that.…
Before this brief dialogue could turn into a threepenny opera, Tricia had disrobed both of us and pulled us into bed. I distinctly remember the foothills of lovemaking as pure bliss, but like a neophyte mountaineer, I feared that beyond a certain base camp, no amount of oxygen would help me get any higher. And so it proved to be. How else to put it?—I just couldn’t get that thing to work right. I thought of everything, spinning complex, erotic images through my addled brain, hoping to land on something—one thing, that’s all it will take!—that would firm up my commitment to future bliss. Nothing worked; nothing. Horrified yet again, I forsook the loving arms of Tricia Fisher and padded my slim, naked body over to a chair in the apartment. (It was like you could bend me in half if you wanted to.) I sat there, soft, and sad, my two hands cupped over my lap like a nun’s during Vespers, doing my best to cover my embarrassment and maybe a tear or two.
Tricia Fisher was once again having none of it.
“Matty!” she said. “What the hell is going on? Don’t you find me attractive?”
“Oh, no, of course I find you attractive!” I said. The physical issues were bad enough, but worse, I could feel an escalating sense of abandonment slipping in through the windows of that room. What if Tricia left me? What if I wasn’t enough, like I always wasn’t enough? What if I was destined to be unaccompanied again?
I was desperate; I really liked her; and I really wanted to believe that love could save me.
There was only one thing to do. I had to tell her everything.
“Tricia,” I said, “back when I was in Ottawa, I was so nervous about making out with a girl that I drank six beers.…” I left nothing out; told Tricia the whole, shameful tale, and I ended by admitting that I was impotent, and always would be, that it was no use, there was nothing to be done, that my desire for her could never be matched by anything solid, anything worthy of the name. But I was desperate for her not to abandon me, too, so if there was anything I could do to keep her, all she had to do was ask and on and on and on I went, burbling like a little river in the spring.
Dear Tricia Fisher—she let me babble on and on, as I tried my best to convince her that no matter how beautiful she was—and she was very beautiful indeed—it didn’t matter: I was destined to repeat that night in Ottawa for the rest of my days.
Eventually, I wound down, and took a deep breath. Tricia said very calmly, very simply, “Come with me. That’s never going to happen again.”
With that, she walked over to me, took my hand, led me back to bed, laid me down, and sure enough … sheer glory, for two whole minutes! That night, by the dint of a miraculous universe and the ministrations of a beautiful young woman who deserved better, I finally first misplaced my virginity then lost it altogether, and impotence has not been part of my vocabulary since, just as she promised it wouldn’t be. Everything about me—at least physically—works just fine.
And how, pray tell, did you manage to pay such a debt, Mr. Perry, such an onerous debt to the woman who saved your life in one of the most meaningful ways imaginable?
Why, good reader, I paid that debt to Tricia by sleeping with almost every woman in Southern California.
(On one such date back then, with another eighteen-year-old, at one point the woman stopped dinner and said, “Let’s go back to your house and have sex.”
Sex still being relatively new to me I agreed right away. We went to my apartment and as we crossed the threshold, she stopped me and said, “Wait wait wait! I can’t do this! You have to take me home.”
Which of course I did.
The following day, I felt bothered by what had happened, and already in therapy, I shared the story with my therapist.
“I’m going to tell you a story and it’s going to help you,” he said. “When a woman comes over to your place, and she takes her shoes off, you are going to get laid. If she leaves them on, you won’t.”
I was eighteen then; I am fifty-two now; and he has been right 100 percent of the time. There have been times I’ve cheated a little and left a pair of shoes at my doorstep as a kind of hint that this is where the shoes go. But that therapist’s insight has been correct every single time—if a woman keeps her shoes on, it’s a make-out session at best.)
Years later, Tricia and I would date again, while Friends was at its peak. She didn’t abandon me, but old fears crept up, and I ended the relationship. I only wish I could truly feel that she didn’t abandon me, truly believe that. Maybe things would be better. Maybe vodka tonic wouldn’t have become my drink of choice.
Maybe everything would be different. Or maybe, not.
But to Tricia, and those after her, I thank you. And to all the women that I left, simply because I was afraid that they were going to leave me, I deeply apologize from the bottom of my heart. If I only knew then, what I know now.…