It was a week packed with incident, let's put it that way.
It began with Matthew Perry, the Canadian actor who plays the waspish Chandler Bing on Friends, signing a deal that would give him and his co-stars a stunning $750,000 (U.S.) per episode, plus profit-sharing. It continued with Perry's mysterious hospitalization for a stomach ailment, and was quickly followed by a spectacular crash in which Perry and his Porsche tore the porch clean off someone's house in Hollywood.
Then the whispers went around. Perry was in need of a liver transplant -- an allegedly cured drug addiction had simply asked too much of the beleaguered organ.
All in all, it was the whole paradox of Hollywood encapsulated: It makes you mega-rich and then damages you in ways you couldn't even have fathomed when you were poor and ordinary.
Perry's stepfather, the former Canadian TV anchor Keith Morrison, said the transplant story was nonsense and an invention of the supermarket tabloids. "You know how these things are. Somebody gets a germ of something and turns it into a fabulous story [that's]blown way out of proportion."
Speaking of blowing things out of proportion, Morrison was speaking from the offices of NBC's Dateline, the news show still notorious for being so keen to report in 1992 on trucks that tended to explode in collisions that it primed the trucks with explosives.
Three years ago, Perry, now 30, was the thinnest member of an ensemble cast that, after its runaway success in 1995, regularly made headlines for its bony, hollow-cheeked emaciation. Viewers and critics deplored the lollipop-look (big head, stick bodies) of the previously normal women but never mentioned the obvious illness of Perry, a formerly healthy tennis-playing type who now resembled a letter opener.
It would have been very bad PR.
NBC, the corporation that cherishes its handful of hit sitcoms like tiny offsprings, takes enormous pains to emphasize the wholesome "Friend-liness" of the cast. Are they dating each other? No, because they all like each other too darned much to risk love, is how the publicists' story line runs. They're all pretty, happy young people, and the Hollywood pressure to keep them looking that way must have been intense.
Perry was addicted to Vicodin, a painkiller he began taking after wisdom-tooth surgery and a subsequent skiing injury. He initially blamed his weight loss on the stress of simultaneously working on Friends and on his first big movie, Fools Rush In, but after people wondered aloud about a possible "wasting disease," he admitted his addiction and went to the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota for a cure.
Vicodin, a white lozenge that is a sort of poor man's morphine, produces euphoria, but rapidly less of it as the body quickly gets used to the acetaminophen/codeine drug. Perry, who lost at least 35 pounds, but who now appears bloated on the show, must have been taking very large quantities. Appetite suppression is only one of the acetaminophen/codeine drug's side effects. It produces irritability and itchy skin. It is hard on the stomach, other digestive organs and the liver.
Perry knows what drug overuse does. The first movie he appeared in, 1988's A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, starred River Phoenix, whom Perry remembers as a health-obsessed teenager who'd drink alfalfa juice and nag Perry about the animal fat in French fries. Phoenix was to die young of a drug overdose.
Until the drug addiction, Perry's entire life had looked like perfection. The handsome son of handsome parents -- Suzanne Perry (a former aide to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) and the actor John Bennett Perry (the face of Old Spice in 1960s commercials) -- he was raised in Ottawa as a child of privilege. When he was 10, a divorced Suzanne Perry married the extremely handsome Morrison and had four more winsome children, Caitlin, Emily, Willy and Madeline, whom Perry calls "the cutest people on the face of the planet" and who "worship" him (his mother's words).
Perry's dream was to be a star, at tennis or at movies, and he moved to L.A. at 15 to be one of the two. He had been a young Canadian tennis champion but when he realized he wouldn't make it in tennis -- being prone to temper tantrums and also not quite talented enough -- he decided to be an actor. It all sounds laughably easy but of course it wasn't.
The Perrys were divorced when he was a year old. He saw little of his father. "He'd call up and say, 'I'm getting killed on Mannix this Thursday. Look for me,' " which sounds more amusing in retrospect than perhaps it was.
Acting in a school play at Ashbury College, an expensive private school in Ottawa, gave Perry the beginnings of a career. It was a comic western and he played Rackem, the fastest gun in the West, in The Life and Death of Sneaky Fitch. "Of all my childhood memories, doing that play was the greatest one. I just absolutely loved it."
He admits he was a horrible student, already working on the sarcastic style that is the hallmark of his TV character. "Could that teacher be any meaner?" was the kind of thing he would say in Grade 5. When Perry first read Chandler's lines in the first Friends script, he recognized himself. "The part of Chandler leapt off the page, shook my hand, and said, 'This is you, man,' " he told an interviewer.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that has been the sticking point in Perry's life and in the lives of so many other television sitcom actors. (Perry did four failed ones before he hit it big, Second Chance, Boys Will Be Boys, Sydney and Home Free, their titles as bland as, well, Friends.)
James Burrows, the director of the first Friends episode, explained it to the cast, Perry recalls. "He told us it was like a radio play. We wondered for a minute if this was good. Then he said it was what he had been doing with Cheers, year after year. He meant that Friends is strong, character-driven comedy with distinctive voices."
Is that what Burrows meant? There are two ways an actor can look at this:
1) He was hired to play a one-note character that may even be himself, and he is thus a hack. 2) If the vehicle chances to be a hit, he will be a multimillionaire, buy a $3.5-million (U.S.) house, own two Porsches, one of which was a Christmas gift from the studio, have "people" (a manager/publicist/agent entourage to accompany him to interviews), be photographed for InStyle magazine looking lost in a house he has not yet had his people buy furniture for and earn millions making movies, all of which happened to Perry.
Naturally, he will choose 2), but 1) will nag at him, causing the addendum to 2) to be things like addictions and sudden hospitalizations.
Perry says the lousy parts of stardom are only 12 per cent and he loves the other 88 per cent. But they're still 12 per cent.
Like all the other Friends cast members, Perry has appeared in movies. A TV star has to try movies because TV people always feel second-rate, but he knows the odds are against him. Perry used to sit at home watching Mad About You and feeling bitter, yet when he did the impossible and became a huge TV star at a young age, it wasn't good enough. The pressure was still on.
When a TV actor's movies aren't huge hits -- Fools Rush In and Three to Tango were sweet nothings; The Whole Nine Yards quickly faded -- he knows he will be accused of having replayed his TV character, which was written as a one-note, as Burrows had said.
Perry is hired to do a Chandler Bing again and thus play himself again: Smart yet insecure, basically decent yet sarcastic. That is his persona in the endless interviews he is expected to give, yet when he cracks a sitcom-type joke, it is reported straight. One harmless line about his Spanish-speaking co-star Salma Hayek ( Fools Rush In) not getting a knock-knock joke and he comes off as a racist jerk, which he is not.
And the interviews are deadly: "When will Matthew Perry find the right girl/hit it big on the dating scene?" and "Are you guys on Friends still friends?" His answers are funny and self-deprecating: "A few years ago, my friends and I were so uncomfortable going up to women in bars that we came up with this idea where we'd pay each other $20 to go up to someone and say anything. [My line was]'Hi, I'm completely filled with fruit and cheese.' "
But they sound like answers from a sitcom. It must be tiring having to churn them out.
Perry is a nice person, as everyone who has ever been interviewed about him will attest. So when he allows an Entertainment Weekly reporter to follow him around for three days, he likes the guy so much that he thinks he might actually have made a friend. "I was ready to give this guy my phone number and maybe we'd go to a Kings game together or something," Perry told another reporter later. "Then this guy writes a mean, slanted story, and I don't get it. The guy was so nice to me, and I thought I could enjoy hanging out with this guy. It's so bizarre."
Perry sounds sincerely hurt and he doesn't leaven it with Bing remarks either.
When Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs (about disaffected single Microsoft employees living together for convenience) was produced on tape, Matthew Perry did the reading. It was perfect casting.
Coupland's characters are witty, angst-ridden young people. They're almost sitcom types, but they suffer terribly and are only healed when they encounter the one thing that will never show up on a sitcom without killing it: Sincerity.
Perry did a fine reading. He is good when he doesn't play Chandler, but will he ever get the chance?
First things first, of course. He has to get over the Big Week in Hollywood, the one where he almost ended up like James Dean, a handsome corpse in a great car. After that, it's up to him.