With marital lunacy behind him, a hit movie under his belt and Nine Months currently on the big screen, the ever-boyish but all-too-experienced Tom Arnold is launching his solo career. Here he gives us his story, hair transplants and all.
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"So, what's it like to be endowed with the most talked-about penis since John Wayne Bobbit's?" I ask Tom Arnold, who's just emerged from a midday shower all rosy pink and smelling of Irish Spring. We're ensconced in the capacious sitting room of his rented, three-story, Moorish-inflected Beverly Hills manse, a former pad of Elton John, Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen. Before me is a fireplace roughly the size of my living room, a big-screen TV roughly the size of my living room, even a wet bar roughly the size of my living room. The master of this establishment is, I learn fast, the town's most puckish, eager-to-please, engagingly kid-like 35-year-old, and today he's in fine form. In such rare form, in fact, that, unlike most actors, he doesn't even try to work the conversation around to plugging the imminent arrival of the Chris Columbus-directed baby-love farce Nine Months, in which he co-stars with Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Joan Cusack and Robin Williams.
But back to the question I've posed to Arnold. I've done so despite having been asked by Arnold's publicists to lay off mentioning She Who Must Not Be Mentioned--that mouthy, heavily surgically-enhanced ABC TV sitcom megastar who mercilessly skewered Arnold's wiener in print interviews, then charbroiled it during a "Saturday Night Live" hosting stint. As God is my witness, I never so much as uttered the name of this comedienne, who recently married her younger (and presumably bigger) ex-body-guard, Arnold is a lot less reticent than I.
"When we were married, she used to talk about how big it was." he says out of the side of his mouth. "Anyway, things change. And, like I say, even a 747 looks small when it lands in the Grand Canyon."
Rim shot. Arnold may spew the put-down like a rat-tat-tat punch line from a stand-up comic's act, but I'm guessing he's not feeling funny. He tells me that sexual sniper fire from his ex-love-muffin, with whom he engaged in many of this decade's most out-there shenanigans, comes as no surprise. "I did have in mind the thought, 'Hmm, if she really wanted to get evil, what would she say?' And I thought. 'I know what she would say.' And then she did. I thought it was pretty funny. It doesn't bother me. The L.A. Times was the first place I read it. I was at my fiancée's house and she read it and went, 'Ugh,' and I go, 'Yes, but you see how funny that is?' And she's like, 'Which part?" It embarrasses me when she reads some of the stuff that's printed about me, but most of it doesn't affect her that much. This thing, though, is very funny. It's very funny. It's funny."
Hmmm. Methinks the gentleman doth assent too much and I tell him so. "Yeah, but there's a lot worse things that she could have said," he replies. Like what, making an offer on a late-night talk show to pay for Arnold's penis enlargement surgery? "No, I'd be scared of doing that, the pain would be terrible." he says, wincing. Terrible pain, huh? So, when I ask him to just relax and take off the baseball cap he's wearing--I know he's been undergoing hair transplant surgeries, also terribly painful--he gets the point.
"The hair thing, well... The only reason I got a hair transplant, which is just starting to grow now, is that I'm 35 and I want to be acting when I'm 40 and have the same amount of hair. I mean, the less time you have to spend in the makeup chair, the better. I hate it when they have to use an airbrush to "draw on' your hair. But, you're right, it's very painful. They open you up ear to ear, cut off a piece of your scalp, show it to you, then sew that up, take out donor hair from the back of your head, where hair always grows, punch 300 to 400 holes in the top of your head and put in the one, two, sometimes four little hairs in each of the holes."
Jeesh, "I've had this done five times," Arnold continues. "After the surgery, they wrap your head in a turban overnight and it hurts like hell because you realize suddenly how everything you do is head-oriented. It's horrible. Your face swells. Once you start, though, you have to finish it. I'm getting one more scalp reduction, then a couple of transplants in the back. I don't want a bunch of hair, just some. Every few years, you go back and get some more done."
Didn't he used to sleep with someone who seemed to be getting addicted to plastic surgeries, the kind where, every few years, you have to go back and get some more done? The person in question once said she kept going to plastic surgeons to compete with an employee with whom she had accused Arnold of having an affair. Is he too a physical perfection junkie? "I don't really demand that and never have," Arnold insists.
"You marry someone, with the way they look and stuff, that's her life and so you've got to accept that. I'm not exactly Fabio, so as far as her changing, I never ever wanted her to do anything like that. I always went when she had any surgery done. She was getting a face-lift one time, so I went in and the doctor showed me a picture of her face with the skin completely pulled off the skull. I felt like killing him. I think a person gets addicted to things like [plastic] surgery, just like tattoos or anything else. You can say it's about pleasing someone else, but it's really about not being happy with yourself on the inside. A lot of that stuff is a quick fix. But it never turns out quite like you want it to." Downing a belt of mineral water, he says, yocking it up, "Hey, I'm getting married. I don't need to have hair or penis surgery."
Suddenly, Arnold goes all earnest and, with an appealing semblance of vulnerability, seems to change the subject, "Well, this may sound really stupid, but Sharon Stone--big, giant star sex goddess right now, right?--well, I saw her movie with Sylvester Stallone and they both looked really good and I liked the movie, but I think it would be interesting to see her in a movie where she was with someone like me. I don't only want to do comedies, you know. I think it would be good for her career. And people may actually feel sorry for her after that. I just think it's lime that I was with one of those big female stars. And who's bigger?"
Ah, so we haven't changed the subject. Sharon Stone is being credited as inspiration for a hair transplant. Well, then, might the prospect of sharing the screen with Stone induce Arnold to submit his male member to length and girth enhancement? Shooting his crotch a quick look, Arnold shakes his head no, grins and assures me, in man-to-man tones, "I'm fine. It works. Everything's going well."
Actually, everything is going well for Arnold. In the past few years, he has reinvented the public perception of himself from moderately talented TV megastar fucker to sought-after big-screen commodity. He disarmed skeptics (including me) in True Lies, playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's pal, and followed up by doing the buddy trip again in Nine Months. He's next due in Big Bully, in which two school-yard enemies, now grown-ups, even up the score, and then The Stupids, Carpool and maybe Highway Patrol. On the personal side, he's scheduled to move onto a Malibu Hills ranch spread big enough to accommodate his horses, his motorcycles and his soon-to-be new bride, a lovely 21-year-old future schoolteacher, who, he says with obvious glee, shows "absolutely no interest in show business."
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."
As Arnold and I are talking, we can hear his fiancée chatting as she makes dinner. Several personal assistants fly about the house doing their employer's bidding. And then there are the telephones--which Arnold had ordered turned off in our sector of the house--that keep ringing. He bolts up, picks up a receiver and bellows, loud enough to reach the third level of the house through sheer lung power, "Todd, there's a phone ringing that we can hear down here and it pisses the writer off. He's going to leave if you don't fix it. I want it shut off. Thank you."
He sits down, huffing, not without amusement at his own exertion of boss-man potency, not without delight in having laid the blame on me. "Sometimes I feel like every day I have to explain the simplest things. Like, the maid doesn't wind the clock and it stops. My God, how many times do I have to tell her to wind the one fucking clock that needs winding in the house? I saw this guy on '60 Minutes' who had this head injury and every second was new to him, so he'd go, 'Hi, how are you?' then, a second later, say, 'Hi, how are you?' The world was new to him every second. That's how I think my staff is sometimes."
All the while Arnold talks, his knees jangle, feet fidget, hands gesticulate as if his body were controlled by the strings of a psycho puppeteer. He notices me noticing and explains, "I was born hyperactive. I was on Ritalin when I was a kid. I have attention deficit hyperactive disorder. It's really hard reading scripts because words start moving around. I feel my heart start pounding real fast. With scripts, I start ad-libbing or else I read very slow, I'm getting better at focusing on things because I'm calmer than I used to be. But, physically, I'm always going to have twitches. I've had five years' sobriety since this past December. When I was 30 I'd been sober for about six months and a doctor prescribed Ritalin again. I thought one day as I was taking Ritalin, 'Hell, man, if I can take Ritalin, I can do coke.' But nothing like that works."
How does he view himself deep down? He thinks about this one, then says, "I don't know if it's because I'm insane or not, but sometimes I'm driving in my car, daydreaming, and I hear some¬thing on the radio and try to put my life to the song, usually something that's pretty rocking. My theme song should be 'The Mayor of Simpleton' by XTC, which I've listened to about 1,000 times. It kind of explains who I am. I have aspirations to be mayor, and yet, what am I the mayor of"? Although I do consider myself to be smart, I realize how stupid I am every day. I hear words I've never heard before being used by everybody. I don't have the time to look them up because I'm working, then I forget them and they come up again. Out here, people know things about traveling, favorite places, cigars. A guy gave me a cigar that I know was expensive, saying, 'Here, this is a so-and-so cigar,' and I didn't know what to say because I don't know what that means. I thought, "Should I take up cigar smoking? Do I have lime to learn to smoke cigars'?' And you've got to learn, because cigars are expensive. Arnold has this thing once a month and invites me down all the time and I've smoked maybe four cigars with him, I don't have time to learn that. I want to learn how to play golf, which is something I'd rather choose than cigars, probably."
Arnold excuses himself for a bathroom break, and when he returns, I tell him how I've heard that he staunchly advocates urinating in public. Does he care to recall his most soul-satisfying experience, whizzing alfresco? "Well, of course, it's always satisfy¬ing," he reminds, "but there was an episode outside of a movie studio that was called Orion, It was after an afternoon screening of She-Devil. Roseanne was very unhappy with the movie. And I had to, you know... and, well, let's say everything worked out just right."
He stops short of filling in the specifics, such as whether, as I have heard, he let fly on the steel-belted radials of the car owned by a certain executive. He will allow that the experience proved "very, very satisfying," but adds, trying to sound serious, "These days, of course, it doesn't seem as amusing."
These days, of course, he's cleaned up his act, involving himself with vastly different-sounding marriage material. "I'm really looking forward to getting married," he says. "Basically, my goal is to have Julie [Champnella] worship me the way Kathie Lee worships Frank Gifford. Julie idolizes Kathie Lee and I say, 'Just watch the way she is about Frank,' because she just goes on and on about him. The perfect marriage is: you respect each other, you're absolutely best friends, you're totally honest with each other and you still have the hots for each other. I need to know that somebody feels that way about me because there's only one person in the world you have sex with, if it's the perfect situation, and that's your wife.'"
Is show business tough on relationships? "People come up to you and say, 'I like you,' 'Maybe I can give you a massage,' 'Maybe we can get together and talk sometime, I'm available.' I've had people say a lot of different things. A good device to protect yourself is being loud and funny, because then you kind of take the sexuality out of everything. I've gotten hit on a couple of times and was always shocked and honored, frankly. And I always hate to let people down, maybe because of my past, when I got turned down so many times in my life. I'm like, 'I just can't hurt this person this way.' What you don't ever want to say to your wife is, 'Hey, listen, I know I can get laid because people like me. You don't like me.' Say anything but that."
Since Arnold seems so happy with his fiancée, I can't resist the impulse to ask him whether, in less happy times, he ever, say, phoned an adult line? Or maybe just Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends for advice on love matters? "I've never called any of the hot lines," he claims, "and I would be scared to do it by myself. The porn line thing just doesn't seem to work in my mind, the idea of just thinking about somebody, talking dirty to somebody without actually seeing them. I may want to get those new phones that transmit pictures on them, though. But the psychic thing? I'm afraid they'll know who I am by recognizing my voice. Sometimes I call the operator for information and she knows who I am. I ordered Playboy magazine by phone and had to give my name and credit card information, and I could hear the woman who took my order telling everybody in the place. Then she said, 'Do you want your free copy of this video called 'Sex Something-Or-Other?' So I thought, 'Well, do I say "no"?' But by that time I felt, I'm not going to let appearances affect my viewing pleasure, so I said, 'OK, yeah.' I haven't seen it yet, though, because your goal on something like that is to get the love of your life to watch it with you. So far, it doesn't seem to be something she's interested in."
And when Arnold and Julie raise little offspring, are there particular traits of his that he hopes they won't inherit? "I hope they're not alcoholics," Arnold says, straight off. "Julie has a little bit of that in her family and I have that in everybody. I hope they're not hyperactive, although it's helped me a lot in the way my mind works. I hope they're not fat. And, it's not like I'm Madonna or some superstar, but my kids are going to have to deal with, like, 'You're Tom Arnold's son.' I've seen that can be tough on celebrities kids. But I'm as famous as I want to be."
We've both got to bolt, Arnold has a business meeting with one of his next prospective directors, I've got to get home to check out again those Tom and what's-her-name bio movies. "You know, I'm in this business to be successful," he says in conclusion, "and, if I could continue to do work like I'm doing for a while, that's great. But no matter what happens from here on in, I've succeeded."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Val Kilmer for the June Movieline.