“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
–The Eagles
In 1982, on writing business, I drove to Hollywood, and the old neighborhood north of Sunset where I once lived. A mutual acquaintance introduced me to Garry Williams, a struggling actor and playwright. He lived with two other Hoosier actors in a Hollywood apartment. Gary Busig was a tall, talented guy who would break through with roles in Jack Nicholson (The Border) and Matthew Broderick (Wargames) movies, but stopped acting around 2001, according to an online movie source. One of his last projects was writing, directing and starting in the play Jesus Starts Over. He also starred in a Charlie’s Angels episode with Cheryl Ladd. (Trivia: Coming back from filming a TV show in Baltimore, I flew first class nest to Ladd and her then husband David who couldn’t have been nicer during our mutual cross-country flight to Los Angeles).
The other actor’s career never got started.
I brought along my Russian wolfhound Cap’n Ahab. He escaped in a beeline when one of the roommates took out the garbage. We all split up to search the streets of Hollywood until one of us discovered him fine dining in a trash can.
Williams and I walked along Sunset, slipping into the Larry Edmonds Bookstore, a favorite of mine because it stocked screen scripts and plays and no one kicked you out when you were broke and needed a good story more than you needed food. There, in the aisles, Williams and I discussed mutual dreams, the terrors of creativity, and the real or imagined moral failings of agents, producers and publishers.
Writers who find kindred souls seem to always have other writer friends that they want each other to meet. I found a phone and called David Harrison III, a freelance writer and unpublished screenplay writer, and arranged a meeting spot.
Harrison and I shared this in common. We’d both been homeless in California until each of our writing skills brought us rent money. He-in silk shirts and flamboyant saddle shoes-was the kind of editor who was booster and friend to his authors. He never seemed embarrassed when I wore my broken sneakers and Goodwill castoff clothing to the parties of his hip friends such as British rocker John Mayall, parking my battered vehicle alongside glittering Prussian roadsters. When we were both low on cash, which was often, the only meal in a day we sometimes ate were plates of bar food at Hamburger Hamlet in Century City. We’d sit with a twizzle stick in a glass of water and nod “no” when a waitress tried to hand us a menu for food we couldn’t pay for.
For my birthday in ’78, he invited his Heartbreaker buddies from Tom Petty’s band to liven up the party he threw for me, and I was amazed to find that party chronicled in a Hollywood gossip column the next week. When I played softball for Rhino Records’ softball team and hit a home run to defeat the “Happy Days” team, he led the cheering. (I got a couple hits off Henry Winkler in a second game that we lost). When I had to take a plane to Florida to play baseball for a Montreal farm club on a magazine assignment in 1981, he drove me to the airport and pounded his fist in my glove to pump me up. On the day my first wife left for good with my older son, he stuck with me until he saw my despair subside into mere sorrow.
Williams and I drove over to Melrose Avenue in Garry’s oil-reeking old station wagon to meet Harrison at a then-happening sad cafe. There we jabbered through the night.
Today, I often replay that evening in my mind. It’s a rare thing when you introduce friend to friend and all clicks. We talked about the wonder of words and shared laughter over our collective ineptitude in school. Williams and Harrison had quit college, but I’d overcome expulsion from high school to get a masters degree in English, thinking I’d need something to fall back on should my dream of writing somehow vaporize.
Physically, we three were different. Unlike me, the ugly duckling of the trio, Williams had Jimmy Stewart-type looks, and Harrison-dark and stylish-was even handsomer, dating starlets such as actress and Berlin lead singer Terri Nunn.
One night in January ’79, on a segment called “The Pickup Truck Journalist,” I appeared on Tom Snyder’s late night show. Harrison and Nunn came to my room at the Sheraton to calm my jumpiness, then accompanied me to the studio’s Green Room.
The taping went perfectly, and Snyder was an affable host. He and producer Andy Friendly even poured us vodka tonics after the show. High as sky divers, we “borrowed” the limo, and even convinced a passing beauty (who had a Ray Fosse audition in the morning) to climb into the limo as we passed a champagne bottle back and forth. On a whim, we drove to a makeout spot high over Mulholland Drive and knocked on the windows of parked cars, shouting “Where’s my daughter?” Then, accompanied by some of the couples we had startled, we drove back to my hotel room to watch the taped show. Upbeat as always, David cheered my performance as if it were better than it really was.
That was then and this is now. My serious work seldom has much to do with Hollywood save for my books being optioned or made into a TV movie. Williams abandoned acting for playwriting and screenwriting, coming back to Indiana to write out of a farmhouse and commute to California and London. I’m thrilled for his success.
But Harrison failed altogether. His romance with Nunn ended right after my Tom Snyder appearance.
Tom Snyder and guest Hank Nuwer, 1978
One December, not too many years after our Melrose night of partying, he walked along Venice Boulevard toward a beach where he once loved to earn his tan. A comedian I knew saw Harrison on David’s last day of life, and was startled to see that the once-fastidious Harrison now unshaven and gaunt.
A demon must have stepped toward death with Harrison, convincing him to inhale a bullet on that beach. The day after a mutual friend called me in Indiana with the horrific news pf his suicide, I went for the mail and saw my last letter to him returned. His suicide left his friends with memory and grief. All he left his family was a knee-high pile of unproduced screenplays.
The Hudson Bay Company used to issue metal “Safe Passage” tokens to trappers venturing into the lands of natives. I used to have one and wish I’d given it to David. I still have the cowboy silver buckle he gave me for when I rode a bull in a future rodeo. He died before I could tell him I’d been in a rodeo.
Every now and then, I vow to go back to Los Angeles to drop a rose on the beach where Harrison died. It is a pilgrimage that I have too long put off to celebrate the memory of my friend, a creative and loving spirit that Hollywood chewed up, spat out, annihilated. But with me now living in Alaska and sometimes in Poland and Indiana, that’s unlikely. I’ve lost track of both Williams and Busig, too, as our lives went in different directions.
There may be only one certainty in life. You never know when you’ll make a friend, but you always know when you’ve lost one.
–Hank Nuwer, published 1992 in Arts Indiana magazine. Updated 2024
Actors Gary Busig and Cheryl Ladd