Yeah, we all have secrets … or at least stuff from our past that we’d never tell our mommies. Richard’s no different. (Don’t bother asking him about the time he was abducted by aliens because he’s never told a soul about it and won’t tell you either.) However, Richard’s pretty much an open book about almost everything else, so here are a few things that won’t get him into too much trouble:
1. Richard is an Anglophile to his core. When he lived in America, he took as many holidays as possible in England. Then, when he got rich and famous (yeah, right!), for several years he started spending 6 months at a time there. Finally, he got to permanently move to England! Now, as if the fantasy of being a resident of the UK isn’t thrilling enough for him, he lives in a 400+-year-old cottage in the English countryside (complete with a live-in ghost!). “It was built around the same time the Pilgrims were sailing to America in the 1600s,” he says with a dreamy smile.
2. Richard’s first published book, BUT DARLING, I’M YOUR AUNTIE MAME, was a 15-years-in-the-making labour of love. As Richard held a full-time job at The Walt Disney Studios during that period, he only had nights/weekends and holidays to write and research his much-loved subject. It was a major coup for him when Mame composer Jerry Herman offered to write the introduction for the book, and the legendary star Angela Lansbury gave him a blurb for the cover!
3. Richard is still gaga for the long-dead Karen Carpenter (he very often still has dreams about her and even attended her funeral). Actually, you probably do know this about him. Everyone Richard has ever met knows this (much to their cross-eyed boredom)! Richard still harbours a bit of resentment toward a former colleague at Carnation Company in Los Angeles who first told him about Karen’s death that miserably sad afternoon. “Mary Williams was a deplorable woman who very openly pretty much despised me and took enormous pleasure in tormenting me at work,” Richard remembers. “That horrible day, I returned from my lunch break, and Mary literally and loudly sang out the tragic news, ‘Oh, Richard … Karen Carpenter died.’ I’ve never forgotten that despicable act of meanness. But then, it was coming from a pitiful woman whose credit score was so low that her life’s sole ambition was to qualify for an American Express Gold credit card. Ha! Seriously, that was her pathetic little dream. I hope she got what she deserved. Oh, and the credit card, too.”
4. STORIES TO READ ALOUD was the title of the very first book that Richard ever purchased with his own (birthday) money. He was 6-years-old at the time but clearly remembers buying this book in a supermarket. Yes, a rack in a supermarket! "It swivelled," Richard says. “My grandmother sent me $5.00 for my birthday—a lot for a little boy at that time—and I was told I could spend it on anything I wanted. I wanted a book. Even then, I was fond of written stories.”
5. Richard’s all-time favourite song is Long Ago and Far Away, from the old Rita Hayworth/Gene Kelly movie musical Cover Girl. He says that he first saw the movie and heard the song in the early 1980s when he was dating “The Blob” (a term of not much endearment), who illegally owned a lot of pirated 16mm-print films (this was before the ubiquity of VHS cassettes!).
"Long Ago and Far Away is such a dreamy and romantic song,” Richard says. “Although I fell out of love with The Blob (Was I ever in love? No, not really.) I will always cherish this song.”
6. Regrets. One of Richard’s career regrets is that, when interviewing comedienne Carol Burnett for a feature article several years ago, he didn’t tell her how much she’d meant to him over the course of her career. “I didn’t want to act like the fan I really was,” Richard says. “Instead of trying to be all professional and above-it-all, I wish I’d reminded her of the first time we met, which was at a party at Bob Mackie’s home when I was very new to Hollywood. I wish I had told her that I remember that evening and how she was everything that ever I imagined and had hoped she would be: a very lovely and classy lady. Oh, the missed opportunities!”
7. Richard thinks that he’s too generous. He says, “Throughout my life, I’ve picked up 99.9% of restaurant meal bills when dining with chums. Most of my American friends don’t even bother to offer to pay when we're out because they just assume it’s on me. I don't regret it, but I’ve spent a lot of money giving American friends airline tickets to visit me in England and British chums to come to see me in America. I think I was probably buying their affection." (D’ya think? Duh!) Now, he figures that if anyone wants to see him badly enough, they’ll find a way to finance the journey on their own.
8. Bully bosses are everywhere, and it annoys Richard that, throughout his career, he's found it nearly impossible to stand up to them. He remembers one particular bully boss at The Walt Disney Studios, where he worked for 30 years. This particular mean bully did everything in her considerable power to make everyone’s life miserable (particularly her revolving door of frightened assistants). One day, Richard misspelt Steven Spielberg’s first name (he knew better but somehow wrote it as Stephen) in a draft press release that was never seen by anyone other than Ms Mean Bully Boss and would have been corrected before it had gone beyond this very early draft stage. Ms Mean Bully Boss, acting as if the planet had somehow jumped off its axis and the world had come crashing to a horrific end, made a big to-do about it, and Richard didn’t have the guts to remind Ms Mean Bully Boss that she’d misspelt his (very simple) last name on the memo berating him for misspelling “Steven.” Ms Mean Bully Boss made everyone’s life hell, which is why Richard finally threw up his hands and said, “Who needs it!” and left Hollywood altogether. Richard says that his creative way of getting even with Ms Mean Bully Boss was to write a novella (still unpublished, alas) in which a wretched character, based on said Mean Bully Boss, gets eaten alive by a horde of hungry eyeballs. Yes, eyeballs! “That’ll take care of her,” Richard laughs like an evil scientist.
9. One of the biggest thrills of Richard’s entire life was being invited to Doris Day’s 91st birthday party and meeting the legend herself. She was his first musical love and he remembers, “My very darling friend Jackie Joseph, who starred on television with Doris on The Doris Day Show, invited me to Carmel, where Doris’ fans gathered each year to celebrate her birthday. Doris was not expected to attend the dinner.
Each year she sent her regrets and stayed home. But on this occasion, as we were all sitting down for our meal, the room suddenly erupted, and people were literally screaming as if there was a fire: ‘She’s here! She’s here!!!’ This turned out to be the one and only time that Doris Day joined her fans for their annual celebration, and I actually got to meet her. I was in tears.” (Richard snapped this picture on that memorable evening.)
10. The writer that Richard would most like to emulate is Mark Morford, who wrote the Notes & Errata column for the San Francisco Chronicle back in the early 2000s. “I so very much admired how he expressed his thoughts and opinions with massive run-on sentences,” Richard says. “I think he’s a yoga master now, but as a writer, he was brave, which got him into a bit (maybe a lot) of trouble.”
11. Richard was a ghostwriter. Yep! For a time, after he left The Walt Disney Company, he ghosted a monthly food column for a famous chef in a national online newspaper. “That was a really fun experience,” Richard says. “The chef guy was super nice, and, although he got all the credit, I got the bucks.” Thankfully, Richard has an underdeveloped ego and would rather see $$$ in his checking account than his name on his writing.
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