David Caruso: The Red Menace

David Caruso became a public punching bag after he quit NYPD Blue to pursue movie stardom only to deliver two bleeding turkeys. Now, back on TV and making movies as well, he's willing to talk about the rejection that humbled him, the reality check that helped bring him back, and the credit he deserves for blazing a path for George Clooney.

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Word on the street is that David Caruso is a changed man. No shit, Sherlock. How could anyone who plummeted to earth so shortly after takeoff have survived as anything other than a changed man? It was only three short years ago that the nervy, searching, something-going-on-in-the-eyes star of NYPD Blue blew off prime-time TV and announced to the world that he would now be a movie star. As unlikely looking a heartthrob as he was, Caruso had gotten plenty of encouragement for his hubris.

Moviemakers had put him on speed dial, his name was mentioned for hot projects such as Smoke and Devil in a Blue Dress, and even Broadway was looking to bankroll him (in On the Waterfront, the very role that solidified young Brando as a movie contender). In truth, Caruso hardly needed encouragement. His full-blown self-esteem had led him to throw tantrums on the set of his show, to squabble openly with costar Dennis Franz, and to ask for a princely $100,000 per episode. He seemed to be working overtime at pissing off the press and supplying them with fuel and matches to burn him--including dumping his live-in girlfriend of six years for a cuter, younger, more attractive partner. When he snagged a lead role in Kiss of Death, just the sort of De Niro-esque noir project he'd always imagined himself in, he acted like he had already taken home the Oscar and he never so much as glanced back at the small screen that made him. Then Kiss of Death tanked. The next one, Jade, tanked, too. The whole world seemed to do a collective, sneering, nah, nah, na nah nah. Who wouldn't be changed after all that ecstasy and agony?

After two years of laying low, Caruso appears to be staging a comeback. On TV. He's producing and starring in a new CBS series, Michael Hayes, in which he plays a tough, crusading New York federal prosecutor, He's also busy in film projects, although they're much smaller than his earlier films. There's Cold Around the Heart, a thriller in which he stars as an escaped convict on the run opposite Kelly Lynch, and B_ody Count_, in which he dares to reunite with his Jade cohort Linda , Fiorentino. You may have just seen him in Gold Coast opposite Marg Helgenberger in an Elmore Leonard adaptation on Showtime. Who can say whether Caruso will pull off his Lazarus act? But he's gotten himself back to work, and there's always been something about him that ms one not to count him out just yet.

When I connect with Caruso in one of L.A.'s park-and-puff-a-stogie lounges to down some mineral water--neither of us smokes; we're here for the quiet--it strikes me right off that this is a later-model Caruso: seasoned, slightly frayed around the emotional edges. The actor is nicely dressed down in a black linen shirt, jeans, and walking shoes with no socks, and it works well with his steely blue eyes, the grin that switches on and off like a neon sign, and his weedy, strawberry blond hair.

Since Caruso himself has never been the type of person to pussyfoot around, I get straight to business: "Just how big an asshole were you?" I ask him. He nods at the question, figuring it was coming, and answers, "OK, cool. An asshole? Hmm. Yeah, I think so. I think so. There were times on the show when I lost my cool. I'd been around the business for a long time. I'd worked very hard to amass whatever credibility I had. When I got NYPD Blue I knew we were doing something special. I wanted people to watch and be excited by it, and they did and they were. But I squeezed it too hard. When you start your day at 6:30 a.m., and you're reaching for intense quality and you're doing important scenes at 9:00 p.m.--this is not a good excuse for what I did, but there's a level of exhaustion that's hard for people to understand."

Wait a second here. Am I hearing him blame his toxic temper on sleep deprivation? "I'm saying there were times when I was exhausted and I wasn't getting the take and was furious with myself, and [losing my temper] would help me get back to the performance. I'd been on feature films where people did things all the time to get themselves up for a scene. Doing TV was virgin territory for me. I didn't understand my responsibility as the leader on the show. It was scary for people. They were traumatized. I was being naive..."

Caruso breaks off, apparently trancing out on some memory, then comes back to earth, sighs and reflects, "When people have an expectation of you, and you let them down or you show yourself to be human, to be breakable, it can lead you to a place of, 'He's an asshole.' If I'm guilty of anything, it's probably that it all meant too much to me. I didn't know how to temper that."

In fact, Caruso would have me understand, he really wasn't all that bad. "I really wish that I had misbehaved," he says, "I wish it was all a little more substantial, that I had taken it even further, because then maybe I would have had a little fun with it." Meaning, if the damage was already done, why didn't he run with it? "Maybe I should clarify that. If we were to go back and actually look at the two or three [bad] incidents that took place, you would go, That's it?'"

We both take a sip of water. Suddenly, Caruso points my attention out the window. "Man, you don't want miss this," he says, staring with the wolfish grin of a born player as a pair of impossibly long stems precede the rest of a flashy show pony on the way out of an exotic car. As Caruso sits there grinning at the girl, I can't help but think of Jimmy Smits, who all the girls are now grinning at. When Caruso left NYPD Blue and Smits stepped in, the ratings actually went up. It's gotta sting--doesn't it? Caruso lets loose a weary sigh and says, "I have to say, Jimmy Smits's character is certainly equal, if not more interesting, and he has the right sensibility with Dennis Franz.

"It's easy to look back in hindsight," Caruso continues, shifting the subject, "because now, what's the big deal? Everybody's crossing over from TV to movies. Schedules are worked to accommodate doing features. I wanted to stay with the show and do movies when they were offered to me." But, Caruso obviously believes, it took his pioneering to make the transit back and forth from big and small screen possible. "George Clooney has openly admitted that what I did made it easier for him, "Caruso continues. "Those people look at me as an example of, 'Well, I don't need to draw that kind of fire by leaving my television show.' Now it doesn't have to be an either/or situation. I was the first one through the gate like an X-l rocket, and the first couple of those don't necessarily work, but then they get the bugs out and it becomes the stealth fighter. I'm kind of the X-l rocket, and George is the stealth fighter."

Once the X-l had rocketed out of television, the problems were hardly over. Kiss of Death was a Richard Price-scripted action noir that understandably looked good going in, but proved the beginning of new difficulties. "I chose to do it because I wanted to work with great people--Sam Jackson, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport and Nic Cage, who went on to win the Oscar [for Leaving Las Vegas]." Caruso explains that Kiss of Death was a disappointment not because it wasn't good, but because he, the star, carried with him a bad rep connected with leaving the series.

"There was a take on me in the press that I was overreaching my boundaries, that I was doing movies for the wrong reason. That affects how you see the movie. People were rooting against it. You get buried under this kind of rubble. When I went into movies, the focus should have been on the movies, because that's where the value is, as opposed to 'He left the show. He's a bad guy, a greedy show business rat.'"

While Kiss of Death could have been confused in the planning stages as a reasonable project, Caruso's second big chance, the Joe Eszterhas-scripted/William Friedkin-directed Jade comes with no apparent excuses. It was a bad film almost by design. When I tell Caruso this, he says, "Cool. OK, man. But we took a version of the movie to the Venice Film Festival and got a fantastic response. We came away really excited because we were onto something. Then we came back to Hollywood and there were these elaborate discussions, these tests for audience reaction. We ended up releasing a version of the picture I feel had been victimized by the testing.

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