Taking a break from "living the fast life," Pauly Shore conducts a tour of his haunted Hollywood Hills home, reveals how he lost his virginity, and explains that, basically, he's just "trash."
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There are a lot of reasons why it's difficult to have a relationship in this town," Pauly Shore tells me, sprawled across the living room sofa of his two-story, '20s-vintage. faux-Spanish raspberryhued hacienda perched low in the Hollywood Hills. "Girls, basically, run this town because they have the pussy. Especially the hot chicks. I can meet a girl at The Rainbow. Or a stewardess on a plane. A girl at one of my shows. But every one of them, like everyone in this town, wants something. Everyone wants to make it. They figure that if they go out with me, because I know everyone, they'll meet a bunch of different people that could kind of benefit them, get them where they want to go. I don't trust a lot of girls out here," he continues. "I could take a girl to a club and there could be fucking Tom Cruise, or somebody, and then she's with him for a while and then Daniel Day-Lewis" shows up and suddenly she's with him. It's like, nothing is good enough for any of them. I also don't trust a lot of my friends. You don't wanna introduce your girl to your friends because the second you stop going out with her, your friends are all over her. Or maybe they're all over her even when you're going out. People love to do things that are bad. It's no fun tossing and turning in bed at four o'clock in the morning thinking that your chick's out there getting fucked by Fabio."
Shore utters this little morality tale as we sip herbal tea and do what he calls "some post-movie chillin'," a reference to how we've met shortly after he finished making In the Army Now, a Disney summer comedy that presents Shore joining the army as a goof and winding up involved in Steven Seagalesque derring-do in a Middle Eastern desert.
If I didn't know Shore was a bachelor-about-town from the stories he tells, I could easily discern it from his house's interior-design scheme -- the arched doorways are tricked out with whorehouse beads, the bedroom has copper walls, and the furniture is from the now destroyed Dunes Hotel in Vegas. But I haven't dropped by just to hear his horror stories of the show-biz singles scene. I want to hear about his hoped-for transition from three years of MTV celebrity as the stoney, moronic geek of "Totally Pauly" to the stoney, moronic geek for movies like Encino Man and Son-in-Law. And stuff like whether he's jealous of Jim Carrey, his old stand-up comedy pal, who, after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, rakes in $7 million a movie. About his screwy upbringing as the son of comic Sammy Shore and Mitzi Shore, the latter the owner of the legendary The Comedy Store on Sunset, where little Pauly got to check out the young Robin Williams, Sam Kinison and others. About the wisdom of buying a house --even one that once served as a crash pad for deadbeats and struggling comics--on an earthquake fault line. And, amid plugs for his upcoming comedy album, about how he and Disney are talking about his directing a short movie and star ring with Goldie Hawn in a Graduate-type movie.
It turns out that up close, Shore is both more ambitious and more out there than one might guess. Barefoot, in a slept-in T-shirt and baggy pants, Shore runs his palms over his buzzed scalp -- a souvenir of his army movie -- and continues his plaint about how tough it is to have a relationship in Hollywood. "I left this girl at my house to go to a business lunch," he tells me, "and when I came back, she's all pissed off because she had gone through my entire stash of videotapes of me with hot chicks fucking around. I was fucking furious, but, I mean, you're caught on tape, you're guilty. I turned around and said, 'What the fuck are you doing looking through my tapes, anyway? If you don't like it, then you gotta bail.' I never really liked any of those chicks," he explains of the women on the tapes in question. "I wasn't really having sex with them. It was more like I was filming their breasts or they were just saying funny things."
Maybe, I suggest, he should tell me about the kind of women he's meeting these days. "Now, at a club or something, you're just gonna meet girls that you fuck," he replies. "You give them your number, they come over late, they blow you. You fuck them. Whatever. Girls are not gonna be attracted to me necessarily by my looks, but because I'm smart, nice, and sensitive to them. Ninety-nine percent of guys are assholes who treat women very mean. I'm not the average guy who goes to The Red Onion and smacks his chick for looking the wrong way. But I gotta say, I imagine it would be interesting to go out with a girl who had her shit together. I've never been boyfriend-girlfriend with someone that is as successful as me or more successful. Every girl that I have gone out with has come from a very similar background: all from shitty homes, who don't know what they want out of life. I keep 'em up, take care of 'em. Kind of a father figure, but these girls are so fucked up. And then, I'm stuck with this baggage on my shoulders."
Since I know that he once had on his shoulders, among other places, the curvy, bosomy, adult-video performer Savannah, I ask Shore, "What's the deal with movie actors going out with porn stars?" "Do you know Charlie Sheen?" he asks. "Well, the reason Charlie Sheen liked going out with Ginger Lynn was because it was like dating himself: trash. He's trash. I'm trash. Guys are attracted to girls that are in porn. It's like a sickness, you know? See, guys just like to fuck and get sucked off by hot chicks. It's a phase that I went through and I guess he went through, too."
Shore suddenly hollers, "Grease! Grease!" --his nickname for his housemate, Bobby, an outgoing, burly guy --and when he walks in, Shore asks, "Do you have those little stand-ups of me and Savannah?" Grease is back in seconds, setting on the coffee table before us an array of six-inch-high cutout photos of Shore and Savannah, showing off their tans in various stages of undress. "We took those in Hawaii, like, two, three years ago," Shore recalls. "Aren't they cute? We just had a good time. My whole thing back then was, and is, that I really don't care what you do for a living, so long as you're cool. I'm less that way now, because I have more respect for myself than back then. I guess all this stuff with women relates to stuff with my mom. Me and my mom are very similar."
Even around Hollywood, Shore's mother, Mitzi Shore, the owner of L.A.'s The Comedy Store, is legendary: an eccentric, tough-minded entrepreneur who is, arguably, better rid of her wild ex-husband, a comic who peaked when he warmed up audiences for Elvis Presley. "My mom has gone with all comics," the son explains. "They're all guys that really don't have their shit together. She keeps them up. Like Steve Landesberg in the early years, Argus Hamilton, Danny Stone--just total fucking losers, capital fucking A. Like, this guy was into coke, that other was . . . well, you know what I mean.
The last time Shore was interviewed for Movieline, he was still living with his mother. What has moving out done for him? "One good thing about not living with her anymore is not having to listen to her say, 'Where are you going?' or, 'Why are you leaving me?' And that was just when I went out on the road. Of course, not having to sneak in when I come home--that's good, too. Also, I don't have to borrow her porno tapes anymore because now I've got my own-- although she had pretty cool ones like Behind the Green Door. See," he says, gesturing to the house, "this is my mom's place that I just bought from her. She's got a lot of different properties and instead of me just buying somewhere else, we kept it in the family."
This is just as good a time as any to get Shore to show me his bedroom and on the way upstairs, he directs my eye to the jaw-dropping carpeting that runs the hallway and stairs. As if he had to. "I call it 'porno leopard,'" Shore says of the floor covering that even Jayne Mansfield might have found outre. "You can tell bimbos have walked on it, right? We had this interior designer to help color-coordinate the house. I forget her name, but she took me to Jeff Goldblum's house because she wanted me to see her work. He was out of town and she had a key, so we went into this one room that was covered in this carpet. I said, 'That's fucking perfect.' And I got what was left over from his job."
Shore sings a little tah-dah! on entering the bedroom. And well he might: the walls are bright copper, which match the basin and tub fixtures in the adjacent bathroom. The bed-- "No, that's not a waterbed," Shore assures me -- could accommodate a threeway. "Can you believe I probably haven't had one party in this house?" he wails. Well, no, especially when he mentions that it's in this room he keeps his famous black book. "It's a book of numbers that I have of girls all over America," he explains. "Girls all over this town, too. With notes, like, 'big tits,' 'hot ass,' 'nasty,' 'hummers,' you know. Stuff like that. I can't show you, but there's no celebrities in it. I haven't shtupped any. But when it comes to Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets, yeah."
Oh, now I see why peeking out here and there among his trademark flowing scarves and grungy sneakers are well-thumbed copies of Penthouse and Playboy; I'm guessing that Shore uses them to order out of, sort of like I do with J. Crew catalogs. "Whenever I have a party or my friend has a party, you just go through the book and-- bam! People expect me to be this guy who drinks, takes bong hits all the time and goes out and screws everyone. And I am that guy." After a beat, he adds, "Just not today."
Pointing my attention toward a framed painting hanging on the wall, a primitively hip affair, he offers, "My sister designed that. She's into channeling aliens and shit. She just gave it to me. The rest of the decor me and my mom, you know, just kind of talked about and worked out. She's got a weird sense of humor." What was it like growing up in such a family? "My mother drove an old hearse limo that was really embarrassing," he recalls. "I had curly hair, a skateboard, and a mole right there on my cheek. I was always different, too weird. So, when I got transferred to Beverly Hills High, I told my mom, 'I want to be called Paul.' I just wanted to be normal. So I wore Top-Siders, Polo shirt sand wanted to go to bar mitzvahs and shit. I got rid of the mole, too." To prove it, he displays a framed picture of himself, just post-mole and transcendentally nerdy, pointing out the obvious: "A very sad, lonely kid, hey?"
But seeing the picture sparks a memory of a sad, lonely kid's first sexual encounter. "An old friend, Mike Messex, Donovan Leitch and I were at Florentine Gardens. Dono was like, in the corner dancing or something, but Mike was with this really hot younger girl, Sarah, or something. I was with her friend: huge, blonde, titties, slutty. Just kind of a pig, you know? We went back to Sarah's house in the Valley in Mike's Datsun and Mike, who was older than me, didn't know this was my first time. So, me and the fat girl went into the maid's room . . . well, I'd never felt a wet pussy before. It was so bizarre! The second I touched her vagina, I came, then ran, yelling to Mike, 'Dude, let's get out of here!'"
I spot another framed item, a photo of Shore hanging with Jim Carrey, who stands jaybird naked except for a sock over his willy as if he's showing he's got what it takes to be a Red Hot Chili Pepper. I can't help asking Shore how he felt seeing his pal shoot up to the heady $7 million stratosphere with just one film. Shore says, uncharacteristically choosy about his words, "That whole thing ... well, Jim is very talented and a great guy, a really nice guy. Seven million? I called my manager screaming when I read that and said, 'What the fuck is that?' But if I was getting seven million now, what would I have to look forward to?"
As we head downstairs, he tells me that he's not sure of the house's lineage prior to his mother's buying it. Having grown up a Hollywood kid, though, he knows the cachet of such trivia and offers, "The house I grew up in belonged to Dorothy Lamour. We got her mail all the time. Isn't she dead or what? Anyway, you want to know about this house. Well, this table has been here forever and these couches and stuff, too. The place was basically a crash pad for comics that didn't pay rent to my mom. It was always kind of trashed. Yakov Smirnoff lived here. Dice, too. Kinison used to do coke here and throw chairs off that balcony right there.
"It's haunted by ghosts of dead comedians," Shore adds. "We think Skip Stephenson and Ollie Joe Prater. When you're upstairs sleeping, you can hear footsteps and doors slamming and we can't put fruit out on the dining room table because something sucks the life right out of it. Rebecca Schaeffer's ghost was here playing with the other spirits, too, because she followed Grease from her old apartment that a friend of his rented. One girlfriend of mine didn't like to be alone in the house because she went downstairs to get some water and she heard footsteps on the floorboards of this room.
"You gotta see this," Shore announces, leading me to his basement, which is enlivened by ring-a-ding-ding era Sinatra-style couches, chairs, a bar and wall sconces salvaged from the Dunes, that legendary Vegas hotel. "Can you believe they were going to throw out this stuff before they blew up the Dunes, man? I'm getting a bumper pool setup for that space right over there, but it hasn't been delivered yet." Aside from the Vegas-abilia, the basement sports a gleaming, state-of-the-art gym and workout setup where Shore slimmed and buffed for shirtless scenes in In the Army Now. "I got to make out twice on camera," he enthuses, "with Lori Petty and also with --fuck, what's her name?--she plays my girlfriend. Lori and I are friends in real life, but I'm not attracted to her sexually and she's not attracted to me sexually. Anyway, I have my shirt off and I'm kissing her and stuff. I mean, it's a step forward."
And where does forward lead Shore? "I'm still young and I wanna still be doing this in 10, 15 years," he says, urgently, when we're back in the living room. "MTV was a great, once-in-a-life-time thing that was like schooling, getting comfortable on camera, creating my own style. But the critics never got it and MTV is a limited audience: Middle America, not New York and L.A. America digs me. You know, you can puke all over yourself, walk with one leg, tie a banana peel around your head and be on MTV and kids think it's cool. It's really sad. But I don't wanna be seen on MTV anymore, except as a star who is interviewed, just like Eddie Murphy or Christian Slater or Tom Hanks."
Pardon? Does Shore actually see himself as another Hanks, an astoundingly deft comic who's always charmed audiences by playing smarter than thou, not dumber? "I wanna develop and get better, go where Tom Hanks is," Shore insists. "I've had his career so far. I mean, he did Bachelor Party and Splash, kind of goofy, broad things and now he's being known as this dramatic actor. I want to do dramatic stuff. I want to do a romantic comedy, play an attorney, someone who works in an office, has a relationship. See, I've always had an evolution in mind although, obviously, no one believes it yet. The MTV character kind of exploded and Disney, seeing that, wrote a character in Encino Man that was the exact same guy as I was on TV. Then, in Son-in-Law, I was less that character. So, finally, In the Army Now is me with all the covers off: short hair, dressing like everybody else, being vulnerable, sweet and underdog-ish. I think audiences will crack up because instead of Van Damme or Stallone at war with Libya, blowing up the Libyan base, it's me being heroic and in charge, holding the fucking gun and leading the pack."
What if his core troop of Paulyists don't care to follow him in his evolution and he fails to convince new recruits? "Then I'll be in trouble," he answers, grimly, as if staring straight into Pee-weeville. Instead, Shore says he's hoping that the road will lead to his being teamed with top actresses. "[Disney studio executive] Danny Halsted came up with this really cool idea for me to kind of, like, remake The Graduate with me, like, and Goldie Hawn. Which I think would be pretty funny. And it would give me a chance to do romantic things." Who else would he like to be paired with, on-screen or off? "Sharon Stone," he declares. "I'd like to munch her pussy. I like Uma Thurman, too, because she's kind of dark, nasty and shrewd. Who is Patricia Arquette going out with now? Because I love her. When I was a kid, I used to go to The Odyssey and she was always there. She used to have a crush on me but she was too weird. Now, she's my style. Demi Moore is so fucking hot, but she's got three kids, so I don't know. I love 'em, man. I love 'em all."
Shore points to the living room table on which sits a script for his next flick, Jury Duty, which he likens to a comic 12 Angry Men; that table, too, he mentions, is the very spot at which he laid down his new album, Pink Diggely-Diggely. Since the album's still being edited, I accept his enthusiastic offer to perform an excerpt. He lolls back his head and starts moaning, in porno-movie fashion, '"Oh, yeah, YEAH! Mmmmm, yeah. Suck my balls ...squeeze' em ...oh yeah! ...I'm gonna come! I gonna come! Oh, my God, suck it! SUCK IT!' and then you hear, a big swallow, then I go, 'So, how was it?' and you hear a guy go, 'Oh, it was cool, man.' It's so unexpected because it was a guy that gave me head. Again, it's moving me in another direction."
Well, if he ever moves in the direction, as he swears he wants to, that takes him toward a wife, kids, and Volvo, he's certainly got a house large enough for it. "It's pretty retarded to have a house on the fault line, right?" he asks, rhetorically. "But we're here to party, man. It's cool, very Hollywood, to have an old Spanish house in the Hollywood Hills. We're living the fast life out here, right in the hub of it. You just fucking do it at high energy, you know? Hey, my twenties were fucking amazing, but I can also get behind having a family and being like a normal guy. You know, 'Honey, I'm gonna go do a movie,' and she totally understands. I met Tom Hanks on a plane and he's got the kids, the wife, the whole beautiful thing. I know I'm a good person. I know I deserve that. I figure that God will bring the right girl into my life when the time comes."
But, being a resourceful guy, Shore has devised Plan B, a little something to tide him over. He tells me, "I've been thinking about starting a little farm down in San Diego, a place to keep up girls that I think have a look, have talent. There'd be horses, an aerobics instructor, an acting coach, and these girls would stop off for a month, basically, on their way to Hollywood. I'd teach them the dos and don'ts of Hollywood and how to be themselves as humans. Something similar to a Hugh Hefner-type thing, but more of a management thing because I'd take a percentage off what they make. I've been around for a while and, 10 years from now, I'll know that much more. And plus, it will give me, like, a chance to meet girls."
Why not? He can call the ranch "Pauly's Pieces" and, if he still doesn't find the woman of his dreams among its guests, he can always sell the idea to Aaron Spelling. I smell TV series, don't you?
Stephen Rebello is a regular contributor to Movieline