Tom Arnold: The Mayor of Simpleton

Shooting Nine Months, in which he and Joan Cusack play the pals of unexpectedly pregnant Julianne Moore and Hugh Grant, was, to hear Arnold tell it, "all fun." Did he offer counsel to Grant, now that the press on the British charmer and his longtime amour Elizabeth Hurley have started to take an unkind spin? "The English press really began to turn on him the week before I did my last scene," Arnold recalls. "He was staying at a hotel and doing an interview with someone from a big magazine, and, since he'd been at this hotel for some time, he knew everybody. So, he talked to the journalist about the help as they were getting waited on, like, 'Oh, there's the Fatty Breather,' which is what he called this one person who was overweight and had to breathe a lot. And, like, 'Oh, there's the Serial Killer.' You know, just joking around."

Then, one of Britain's tabloids tracked down the actual Fatty Breather and gleefully announced that debonair Hugh Grant was dissing a guy suffering from lung cancer. "Hugh is new enough that he reads those tabloids. His girlfriend is in them a lot, it's like she's the queen of them. I thought the way [the papers] handled it was tongue-in-cheek, but Hugh was almost in tears. He wrote the people letters of apology, which is a great thing to do. He told me he was writing a letter to one of the tabloids to apologize or whatever, but I said, 'Don't do that, because your letter will be the next story. Otherwise, it will all go away.' But he went ahead and wrote a letter, and the papers said that his next movie is going to be called Four Weddings and a Grovel."

I'd heard that when Arnold needs counseling, he at times consults psychics. So, what's the deal? "I'm fortunate enough to be with a good psychic who sees people who are in the movie business," he declares. "She may know some of the answers to my questions just by contact with so many movie people, but everything she says, almost, is true. She comes here and tells me what's going on, she goes deeper and it's very positive. I've taken some of her advice and it's worked out. Like she has said, 'Read page 17 of the script you're going to do right now.' And there is a problem with that page and with that scene. So, I made a change in it," Arnold pauses, then adds, "Probably ruined the whole movie!" He laughs a manic, infectious laugh. "I've also gone down to Venice Beach psychics for fun and they pretend they don't know me and go, "Oh, you're in an ugly divorce. I feel that.' All they have to do is read the [National] Enquirer."

With all the good stuff happening to Arnold, the specter of his highly tabloid TV and news paper-worthy past still looms large, issues of penis size aside. Surely he could not have appreciated his ex doing a "Saturday Night Live" skit in which she warned "Madonna" not to get involved with "Arnold," portrayed by Chris Farley, because he was a scary, unsavory opportunist. Arnold is by now accustomed to being characterized as a kind of Cro-Magnon white trash Yoko Ono to the ex's trick-turning, trailer park John Lennon. "I like Yoko, that's the problem, I think she was good for John Lennon," he claims when I bring up the oft-repeated analogy.

"Anyway. I saw part of ['Saturday Night Live']. Chris Farley called me that week. He's a friend of mine and he's done impressions of me on the show going way back. We're pretty close. In fact, he's going to be the best man at my wedding. He said he was very upset with Lorne [Michaels, the show's producer], but that Roseanne was forcing Lorne to make him do it. I said, 'If it's funny, you've got to do it. If it's not funny, it's only bad for you.' And it wasn't funny. You could tell he didn't have his heart in it."

What about those TV bio movies, one on NBC, the other on Fox? "Everybody on Nine Months watched both of them. The day after the Fox one, they all laughed. Chris came in and said, 'I have seen many movies and that is by far the worst. Nobody in that movie will ever work again.' Somebody snuck me these scripts early and one of them ended with me slapping Roseanne. I said, 'If you do that, there will be a lawsuit because none of that shit happened.' They took that out. But that [movie] wasn't me and it wasn't her, it was so one-dimensional. Nobody could cap¬ture her, although she herself might be able to do it, because she's definitely more interesting than they portrayed her in those movies."

Arnold says that he had to toughen himself against the viciousness long before the TV movies, "Some people said just heinous things, because they thought, 'Well, we don't really need to care about him. He's not going to work again,' Like, there's a lot of people who think, 'Oh, he gets alimony. He gets all this money,' but there is no money at all. There was never any alimony. The house I've bought, everything I have, is from my own movie money made since the divorce. Even when my lawyers would say something about Roseanne, like, 'Let's do something about this,' meaning something she said or did, I'd say, 'I just never felt comfortable engaging with her because I'm grateful to her. I don't know that I would be sober if it wasn't for her. If I wasn't sober, I wouldn't have a career. I wouldn't have anything." When you truly love someone, it's impossible, in my mind, to go completely the other way."

How did it go partially the other way? "I did not get a divorce because of True Lies, but that brought it to a head. I don't think I could ever have succeeded if I had stayed in that marriage. And I did not get out of my marriage [in order] to succeed, because I had no idea. I didn't file for divorce. My biggest worry with her was that she was going to just go down and crash. And then, what would she do to herself? Like a lot of us, she has the feeling that she can't do it alone. The truth is, she can."

Yes, but was she deliberately trying to get him? "Two days before True Lies came out, there was a 300-page affidavit filed by her lawyers containing the worst things that you could imagine about me. She files this on the 13th, the movie opened huge on the 15th and, on the 17th, she called me and said, 'Please come back, please come back." I knew that was a bad idea. I said, 'Let's talk with a therapist." We actually did meet there and I said, 'We're way past the marriage stage. We've got to be friends and start over, because we've been friends for a long time.' But that's not possible. And I've accepted that, obviously, I'm also very grateful not to be in that mar¬riage anymore, because as painful as divorce is--and it's incredibly painful, as painful as losing a friend--it opened up, as far as my personal life, things that I never thought existed. She's not able to hurt me any worse than what has already happened."

What about those accusations that he was physically abusive? "I think you just have to consider the source," he insists. "I was a good husband and I never beat my wife. That stuff never happened. I know she tried, she tried everything she could to make it work and I tried everything I could to make it work. We had a lot of good times and it just didn't work. I'm grateful for a lot of things that did work. I worked very hard on the marriage, on the stepkids. When I got sober, got married within a month, had stepkids, I thought, 'Well, this is a gift from God. Here's a chance to be there for somebody besides yourself. Here's a chance to be of service to other people. It was very rewarding, as you can imagine. Sometimes, she says things that just..." Arnold breaks off, gesturing his hand in wordlessly articulate frustration, "I bite my tongue," he says, after a few beats.

Then, looking reflective, Arnold sighs and comments, "I was proud of her, of all of her success. She started from a trailer park and she did all this stuff herself before she even knew me. I was her biggest fan. I still vote for her in the Emmys."

Didn't the two of them spend money like shit through the proverbial tin horn? "You go shopping, you spend $100,000, there's no limit," he recalls, sounding somewhat nostalgic. "It always feels weird to me not to have to balance a checkbook. Or not have to have any idea what money you have on you. I've worked since I was nine. My parents didn't have money for college or for anything, so I went to work and paid my way. I used to work at the meat-packing plant, for God's sake. Then, I lost track of all that. I've heard people complain, 'You spent $30 million in one year," or 'You spent millions on this or that.' First of all, we never spent $30 million in one year. Second, we made the money and we had fun with it. We donated millions of dollars to things, gave away money. It was an interesting time and it was a lot of lessons learned, I'm sure. Would I do it again? No. But it was fun to do once. Now, though, I like to go into places and look at stuff myself, keep track of it, you know? Like Arnold [Schwarzenegger], who likes to shop. He shops a lot. That's his hobby."

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