Jerry came to hear me sing at the Horn, and the deal was done that night in a chafed red pleather corner booth, thick with smoke and plans. My father hired him to write and direct an act for me that would attract Hollywood big shots and record companies. I knew he was the guy. What I didn’t know was that he would become the single most important influence on the way I think and create and perform, and the greatest gift my dad, or anyone, ever gave me.
Jerry was twenty years older than I, and two inches shorter than my pint-size five-foot-eight. His muscled, gym-rat upper body was perpetually stuffed into T-shirts sized for a teenager, in odd contrast to his spindly legs. He wore a curly, full beard and his hair may or may not have been streaked with a dash of purple or lime green. “It’s lypple green!” he would specify. His intelligent eyes were framed by round wire glasses, which, despite his attempt at a worked-out, punk-haired, über-now image, recalled a scrawny little Jewish boy, perpetually studying for his bar mitzvah.
Jerry taught me to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and see the world as art. On a stroll through Greenwich Village, he would point out the way the sunlight hurtled between two buildings and splashed against a widowed tree next to a stump, to create a thriving jagged shadow on the pavement. Or the incongruous beauty of a vigorously painted red wall as the backdrop for a street crazy peeing on the sidewalk. He introduced me to Tom Waits and Jean-Paul Goude and taught me how to make perfect sautéed mushrooms. He took me to the Horn of Plenty nightclub to see Cissy Houston, whose opening act was a hypnotist (I was the volunteer) and whose guest was her daughter, an eighteen-year-old, unknown Whitney, who sang “The Greatest Love of All.” He told me about the 1960s experimental theater movement in New York, describing a particularly fabulous production in someone’s West Village loft apartment in which the first act was a man carrying around a bag of dirt and carefully sprinkling it all over the furniture, and the second act was the same guy vacuuming it up.
Jerry thought everything was important, but he didn’t take anything very seriously.
He believed that singing is just storytelling and the opposite of trying to create a specific outcome, or, worse, trying to re-create a specific outcome. He made it clear that in stepping onstage, I had to surrender to the terrifying, dangerous process of preparing thoroughly and then releasing the preparation, like blowing a kiss, not knowing where it would land or what would happen. The biggest lesson he taught me—to which Bette was a testament—was that if you tell the truth onstage, you can do anything. Try anything. If you feel like standing on your head and it’s authentic, it will work.
My first show with him was called Sam Harris and Fries to Go! Fries to Go were my backup singers. Because of my youthful, corn-fed appearance, Jerry decided they should be old white ladies wearing flower-patterned housedresses, church hats and sensible shoes, as if they’d chaperoned me by bus from Oklahoma and their presence was the only condition under which my parents would let me leave. After numerous auditions, we realized that actual old white ladies couldn’t sing the ripping gospel parts we were creating, so we settled for young women who dressed like old ladies in flower-patterned housedresses, church hats, and sensible shoes.
With Jerry, I turned my soulful style into the theme of the little white boy from the sticks with the big black voice. The first song in the show said it all: “Bless My Soul, Mama, You Got to Know There’s Love in Them There Hills.” We rehearsed at a hole-in-the-wall space in East Los Angeles with decades-old, nasty stained carpeting and chipped, lead-loaded, mud-brown-painted walls. When Jerry and I rehearsed alone, we both moved pianos and chairs and speakers, but when anyone else was present, he would not allow me to touch a thing. Even in this hovel, I was the star and “stars should not be seen schlepping.”
My debut was in a dump of an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard called Gio’s. There was a tiny squibble of a listing in the Los Angeles Times announcing that I would play there for a month of weekends. It was my first mention in a major newspaper, and I felt as if I’d been knighted. The restaurant included a small, dreary room adjacent to the dining area with scarred wooden tables, a few dozen rickety cane-back chairs, and a tiny platform stage at one end. We brought in an entire band, the girls, and me—all costumed and choreographed and charted to the gills. There were only three small stage lights and no gels, so Jerry took red straws from the bar and lined them up in the barn-door frames for mood.
We were ready for the masses. There was no backstage, so I paced nervously in the alley outside the kitchen, surrounded by garbage cans puffing wet, rancid food smells, and a couple of illegal immigrant busboys on a smoke break. Jerry burst outside with excitement in his eyes and said, “Think of it as a rehearsal!”
“What do you mean? We’ve been rehearsing for weeks,” I said.
“The house is small.”
“How small?”
“Very small.”
“How very small?”
“No one is in the audience.”
I stood in a pool of some sort of leakage and took in the news.
“No one? Not one person? No one?” I begged.
“Sean is here,” Jerry offered with a positive grin.
Sean was Jerry’s lover/partner/appendage who had so much brain damage from the festival of drugs he had taken throughout his life that it was more like having half a person attend my show. He was missing important teeth. But you didn’t notice right away because his broomish mustache hung over most of his mouth and was always littered with remnants of his last meal. Not crumbs. Enough to qualify as leftovers. I loved Sean. He taught me about gardening and did a dead-on impersonation of a Shasta daisy, but he was hardly enough audience. Besides, he was photographing the show for my archives. Up to this point I didn’t have any archives so this would be my maiden archive. What a start.
I unstuck my shoes from the alleyway goop and bummed a smoke from one of the busboys. I hadn’t asked any friends to come, as I wanted a few performances under my belt before their scrutiny. Now I wished I had.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Well, we’re doing the show.”
“What do you mean, we’re doing the show? You’re not the one who has to play to nobody!”
“You are getting paid, not much, well, you’re losing money, but you are billed and you need to fulfill that promise . . . Think of it as another rehearsal.”
Gio’s was supposed to be the next step toward my destiny of stardom. I wanted to be famous. So famous that I would be vehemently hated by all the people I admired most. I wanted mobs of fans to remind me that I was not alone in the way I felt about myself. I wanted to complain that the tabloids were printing Lies! Lies! Lies! but I would know it was all true. Suddenly, as I was standing in a stinky alley outside an audience-less cheesy Italian restaurant, an avalanche of reality and doubt invaded my head and I feared that I would never reach my full potential because I was disillusioned about the potential of my full potential.
I did the show. Full-out. The manager of the restaurant didn’t even pop his head in to see if we were there. Midway through the first act (yes, there were two acts with an intermission), a slob of a drunk staggered in, slouched into an unsteady chair, sucked down most of a cigarette, and left. I played an entire comic monologue to the gray plume that continued to rise from the ashtray. Sean’s effortful cackle landed at all the punch lines. I looked to him for support and when he lowered the camera from his face, I saw from his mustache that he’d just had veal parmesan, a side of linguini with clam sauce, sautéed spinach with garlic, and a cannoli. It just made the whole thing all the more pathetic. At the end of the first act, Jerry switched off the three stage lights for a lackluster blackout and I returned to the alley for a costume change.
At the end of my first show, Jerry grabbed me and held me tight. He had tears in his eyes. He was kvelling. Fifteen minutes later, I was fired for singing too loudly. “People can’t digest their food in the next room with all that noise,” the manage
r explained. It would have been kinder to bring up that I hadn’t brought any business, but for some reason he wanted to make it personal.
• • •
Jerry and I began working in every awful club in Los Angeles. I am not a “club” person. I don’t do well with vomit-stained greenroom sofas and low-ceilinged rat holes that shouldn’t be seen in the daytime—call me a snob—but Jerry said we were building something and we needed places to fail. After two years, and with no Hollywood big shots pounding on my door, I needed a proper place to fail, and found a fifty-seat venue called Theatre/Theater, where I convinced the owner to let me play for six months. The show was called Sam Harris: Out of Control. Just as we were about to begin rehearsals, Jerry got a writing gig in New York that actually paid, and announced he was moving back, tossing me out of the nest but leaving me with a vision.
My backup singers were now known as the International Pancakes and each had a character name and nationality: Leipi von Biesterfeldt—from Germany; Zorova Petrova—from Bulgaria; and Fiore Bellini di Vicci—from Italy. They wore black corsets and puffed taffeta skirts with picture hats and stilettos and lace gloves. Ann Marie, who played Leipi, made all of their costumes by hand with a budget of nothing and added some sparkle to what would be my look: a pair of 1940s dark teal, pleated trousers with a pencil-thin, pink pinstripe, a white cotton fake-front dickie covered by an oversize tuxedo tailcoat, and a pair of black high-top Converse sneakers. All but the tennis shoes were from thrift shops. Ann Marie sewed on a sad, slightly tattered silk gardenia to the lapel and sequin piping to the tails. I looked like Groucho Marx meets Magic Johnson, with a little Cher thrown in for good measure.
The set was inspired by Grace Jones. Jerry loved Grace Jones and she was a huge influence on both of us. It was easy to steal from her because no one would ever think of me as anything like her. She was statuesque and angular and dark black and enigmatic. I was more like Edith Piaf with baby fat and a mullet. Grace had one particular video that Jerry and I were mad for called “My Jamaican Guy,” in which her single set piece was a large black staircase. I lifted the idea outright, but decided my staircase would be multifunctional. It would have stairs that could flap up, individually, on hinges, so that I could open the show by emerging from the inside, bound in a straitjacket (which I had to special order from the Humane Restraint Company), as the Pancakes whispered from offstage: “I tried to warn you . . . I tried to warn you . . .”
The staircase would also be used in a number called “You Don’t Have to Be Nice to the People You Meet on the Way Up—If You Ain’t Coming Down,” in which the Pancakes crouched inside with their heads appearing to “sit” on the steps as I walked on top of them. It would be arch and bent and theatrical!
We rehearsed daily, but as our opening date approached I was still unable to find anyone who would affordably build the staircase. The best price I got was from the scene shop at my alma mater, UCLA. They wanted a thousand dollars! Inconceivably out of my budget. A hundred dollars was inconceivably out of my budget.
I called Jerry and said, “I don’t think I’m going to get the staircase.”
“You have to have the staircase.”
“It’s too expensive. Maybe I can just use a stepladder.”
“The whole show is about the staircase.”
“I thought the whole show was about me.”
“Of course it’s about you . . . but it’s really about the staircase.”
Ann Marie hooked me up with two young entrepreneurs who might loan me the money. She deposited me at a house in West Hollywood at two o’clock in the afternoon and fled suspiciously swiftly after minimal introductions. They were a couple, one being short and round and Jewish and the other tall and cut and German. The living room reflected their 1980s success: everything matched in airy pastels, offset by a glossy plastic round-cornered coffee table and a glass-front entertainment cabinet, with all the latest stereo and VHS equipment in view. Deco-framed Nagel prints hung on every wall.
They offered me noshes and a lot of drinks, and then sandwiched me between them on the kind of soft, low leather couch that’s easy to fall into but impossible to get out of without a crane. They lit and passed a joint, getting up close and very friendly, gushing about how they’d like to be a part of the show. Then one of them pushed play on the VHS machine and the bomp-chicka-bow-bow of ’80s porn blasted from the screen.
I called Jerry and told him I got the staircase. Just not how.
Out of Control opened and we began to attract a local following that Los Angeles magazine dubbed “Harrisites.” Talent scouts from a new television show called Star Search were looking for contestants and came to see me at Theatre/Theater. I was asked to audition and went to a production office in Hollywood where I sang for nine or ten people crammed into a room so tiny that I had to perform in the doorway with the piano in the hall. I sang “I Am Changing” from Dreamgirls and was promptly rejected. Too theatrical.
A few weeks later I got a call informing me that they’d reconsidered and wanted me on the fourth episode. I learned that two of the talent scouts had fought for me, saying I was different from the cookie-cutter wannabes, but knowing there was a very good chance I was a “what-not-to-be.”
I called Jerry and told him I would be on the show.
“Are they letting you sing what you want?” he asked.
“Yes, I get to choose my own material.”
“Good. Don’t let them dress you. Wear what you’ve been wearing,” he insisted.
“My crappy thrift shop tails? But they have a whole fancy wardrobe department.”
“It’s all about the crappy thrift shop tails.”
“I thought it was all about me.”
“Of course it’s about you . . . but it’s really about the crappy thrift shop tails.”
With Jerry’s advice under my 1940s-narrow belt, I won the first show. And then the second. And then the third. During the day, I went to the TV studio for rehearsals, band prerecordings, and tapings, and at night I performed Out of Control for the “Harrisites.” A few weeks later, my episodes began to air and we had to stop doing Out of Control because the box office was just that.
Bigger things seemed on the horizon.
Today, with the number of television reality talent shows springing up like medical marijuana clinics in Los Angeles, it’s a different, slicker animal. On Star Search, there were no coaches or stylists or mentors—we were on our own. The judges changed each week, so it was never about them. There was an innocence about the show that revealed raw, often hokey entertainment. I was definitely raw and hokey. But I meant every word and every note. I found a formula in which I sang an emotional ballad, put a key change after the bridge, held out a long note, and finished big. Today, if you line up the recordings of my performances one after another, you’ll see that they’re all the same arrangement in the same key. Yet 25 million people a week couldn’t get enough.
After sixteen appearances, I won the title of “Grand Champion,” which is the same title awarded to winners of the American Kennel Club dog show. Suddenly, fame kissed me, or, rather, stuck its tongue down my throat. I was an answer on Jeopardy!: “Who is Sam Harris?” I was impersonated by Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live and I was jabbed on MTV’s Beavis and Butthead. But having fought so hard to claim my individuality and fearing it would be stripped away, my ego wouldn’t allow me to be led by people smarter than I, with more experience. And pretty much everyone was smarter than I, with more experience.
Jerry was the only guide I would follow. He hated Star Search. He was beyond happy for my new success and knew that it gave us the opportunity to play large venues, but he was afraid that since I’d won the hearts of Middle America, I would sell out to a common denominator and become too commercial and homogenous. Jerry wanted me to be an artiste!
On a January afternoon, Sam Riddle, the producer of Star Search, took me to lunch and asked, “How would you like to play Carnegie Hall?” I lost it on the spot. r />
The event was announced and sold out in three hours. Thanks to the growing number of Harrisites, we could have played for weeks. Jerry came back to Los Angeles and we went to work. The International Pancakes would be making their Carnegie debut as well, and this was our chance to show America the Sam beyond the two-minute, money-note power ballads.
We wrote, arranged, and rehearsed nonstop. Jerry had Bette pop in now and then to offer ideas and a little confidence bolstering. We used the same cheap costumes Ann Marie had sewn for the fifty-seat gig, only my dickie-tuxedo shirt was upgraded, with white and translucent sequins, like shiny scales, now making me look like a combination of Groucho Marx, Magic Johnson, and a flounder.
Jerry, the girls, and I arrived at JFK and piled into a waiting giant black stretch. When the legendary twinkling skyline appeared to us from the Triborough Bridge, we knew it had been lit just for us. As we neared Times Square en route to our midtown hotel, I opened the enormous sunroof and the girls and I stood, squeezing our upper bodies through the portal, and waved like grand marshals in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We yelled to Times Square, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and a few New Yorkers actually yelled back, “Practice! Practice!”
The next day, I entered the stage door for rehearsal with the reverence that some might feel entering the Vatican. I was shown to my three-room suite with a Steinway in the corner of the guest area and a little window that looked out over the audience. At a break during rehearsal, Jerry left me alone on the empty stage and told me to take in all the ghosts: Gershwin, Bernstein, Callas, Ellington, Garland, Holiday. I was next. I did a time-step in my Chuck Taylors and could hear the sound of rubber taps pinging back from the tiers of seats that would soon be filled.
Flowers arrived by the truckload and were endlessly lined along the hallway outside my dressing room. The old stage doorman, who had been a fixture since the late 1950s, said it was the most flowers he’d seen since Judy Garland in 1961. Jesus Christ.