Carlos Yeaggy passed away last week. He was an extraordinary human being, and a very good friend of mine.
The very first day I met the man, in an NBC make-up room in 1984, he made me feel like his brother. He was a make-up artist whose reputation for excellence preceded him. When I asked him how the name Carlos fit with the name Yeaggy, he laid out the bones of his story - how a little boy from Guatemala had seen his life explode, and found himself being sent to live with relatives in Los Angeles, where he ended up going to Beverly Hills High School. There, he had been humbled by baseball, was exalted by music, football, track, and weight-lifting (with a 465 lb squat to his credit) and had struggled to make a place for himself as an artist, which truly he had become, once he got those brushes in his hand. He had found love and respect, he had fathered a remarkable daughter, of whom he spoke constantly, and of whom it was obvious he was passionately proud. He had suffered the same kind of setbacks we all do, felt them more deeply than most of us perhaps, but persevered, and as I soon began to learn, he had become, along the way, not only a master of the human face, but of the human heart as well - a master of the art of friendship.
In the early months of shooting Santa Barbara, we used to start at 6:00 a.m.and shoot till midnight or beyond every single day. We never had enough time to learn our lines, but were supposed to be doing good work anyway. People were getting fired. I lost a lot of weight without trying, and had started to have heart palpitations on a fairly
regular basis. There was a hospital across the street from the studio and I began to obsess on the potential irony of having a heart attack and dying so close to it. I knew if word got out that this was going on, I might be "relieved" of my role, and might never again be "insurable" as an actor, and would therefore be finished in the game, just when things were beginning to get interesting. I kept the situation a secret, but it got worse. Finally it came to me: "I can put it on 'Los. He'll cover me." I went to him, explained what was up, and asked him to never assume I was sleeping if he saw me taking a "nap" in some unlikely place. He asked me if I'd had my ticker checked out. I said I had, and that there was nothing I could do short of quitting, since the whole thing was due to stress. He nodded and said, "I've got your back." And for weeks, I'd notice him peeking around corners at me, following me into the prop room if I'd been hanging out there a while, poking his head into my dressing room after his gentle knock, then darting back out again. Time (and the thoroughness with which he fulfilled his promise) calmed me down; the palpitations stopped; and I was able to go to him one day and release him from his burden. He just smiled.
When I blew out my right quadriceps muscle the following year (this sounds like the plot of a medical show) he was uniquely disinclined to offer any sympathy. Instead, he explained that it was time to get serious about bicycling, which was, of course, truly perfect advice. Eight weeks later, once I had finished my basic rehab, he told me he was going to pick me up at home on Saturday morning and educate me about bikes. "It's too soon," I grumbled. "Bullshit, I'll pick you up." And he did. He took me to several bicycle stores, then back to the one I liked best, where he walked me through the process of selecting the cool-looking but reasonably priced bike best suited for my status as a beginner with great potential (his description of me to the sales guy), got me outfitted with the right accessories, and had me on the road the next day. It was the beginning of my recovery, one I no doubt would have found a way to achieve on my own, but 'Los wanted to make sure. Six months later we were riding in a fifty-mile race in Mexico, my leg (and my spirits) up and running. As our mutual friend and ex-boss Jill Phelps puts it - he was as vigilant about the details of his friendships as he was about the details of his art.
In the Eagles' song, "Hotel California," the words of the first verse Don Henley sings are:
On a dark desert highway / Cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas / Rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance / I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
Carlos loved those words. One afternoon in the late eighties, many years after he had first heard them, he came rushing into my dressing room with his new Walkman on his head, a very excited look on his face. It was the first time he'd heard "Hotel California" on a CD. "You've got to listen to this," he said, in that loud way people talk when they're inside earphones. "I've already heard it," I said. "No, you haven't. Trust me," he said. "'Los," I said, and I was a little annoyed, "I just got called to the stage, I'll listen to it later." In one graceful move he popped the earphones off his head and put them on mine. "Listen," he said.
And, of course, I was swept away instantly by the profound sense of actually being INSIDE an amazing piece of music, playing at a very loud volume. The band kicked in one by one in that wonderful chord cycle of the introduction, and as the cycle came to its peak, Carlos put his hand on my arm and stared intently into my face, as if to say "Here it comes." The music jerked to a stop, rested for a beat, Henley hit the low tom twice ......... BOOM.........BOOM......... GUITARS, and he started to sing. "Did you HEAR that?" Carlos shouted. "Total silence! That was TOTAL SILENCE! Awesome! Did you hear it!" And yeah, slightly dazed, I had to admit that there was indeed a moment of silence before that tom kicked in, and yeah, no doubt about it, it WAS flat-out TOTAL AWESOME silence, the kind that's only possible in a digital vacuum and that I, thanks to my friend's TOTAL insistence, now had GOOSEBUMPS all over my body as I wandered away down the hall trying to remember my lines......... Today, all these years later, I don't remember what those lines were, or even what the scene was about, but I remember the transcendent feeling of truly HEARING that song like it was yesterday. 'Los understood what really mattered in this world.
One of the quintessential images he leaves is the mental picture of him standing behind his make-up chair, applying the calm strength of his hands to the back, or shoulders, or face, of someone he cared about, and wanted to make feel better with his touch. And how many times have I seen him, on the stage, put his arms around an actor or an actress who had just taken a difficult risk in their work, or stand quietly beside them as they were about to. He nourished himself in this kind of giving. As he nourished his friends. As one would nourish one's family. My wife Leslie says simply - when Carlos loved you, he was utterly unabashed about it.
At a service in his honor last weekend, his friends were graced with a lovely poem his daughter wrote to him, wherein she called him "the best father in the world." Also that day, we heard thoughts and prayers and anecdotes about him from literally dozens of people with whom he had worked and played in his life. People from his childhood, people from the various shows he worked on, many of whom had no connection to one another except for a shared appreciation of Carlos Yeaggy. It was astonishing, really, to hear the repeated examples of his kindness, wisdom and generosity that mirror the few stories I've told here myself. There was the friend who lived in San Francisco and tried to beg off when 'Los, knowing the guy was going to be alone for Christmas, invited him to come on down to L.A. and chase the Holiday blues away. When the friend declined, using a lack of transportation as an excuse, 'Los simply got in his car, drove seven hours, picked him up and drove him back to L.A., where a fine holiday spirit was thereafter enjoyed by all. With a friend like that, a man could conquer the world, or better yet, learn to love his fellow man.
He understood that it all came down to family. The sense of that followed him around like a smell. He told stories at the slightest provocation. I used to feel like I knew as much about his uncles and aunts as I knew about some of my own. More than anything else, and especially after I became a father myself, he loved to brag (and I mean
BRAG) about Alex, his daugther - about her accomplishments, her beauty, how wise beyond her years she was. How funny she was. How hip. How soulful. Knowing her, I understood that he was telling the truth. I also knew that he might as well have been talking about himself. And that he actively tried to cast people in their own personal best-case versions of themselves; that he WANTED to think highly of his fellow humans; that he kind of DARED you not to be as cool as he would describe you as being; that he had an amazing knack for planting little seeds of possibility in people's heads; that he had the world's greatest set of excuses when he'd show up late, or not at all, for a Saturday morning bicycle ride. And that he was also one heck of a lot of fun to go out drinking with on a Friday night. Or any other night, for that matter. It's no accident that what I know of the worm at the bottom of the mescal bottle, I learned with 'Los. He wanted to go deep, get connected, and stay there. He wanted to feel what his friends were feeling. And he chased that - the best way he knew how.
Because it's not easy to make a journey as long as the one described by Carlos' life. It can leave you feeling like you've inherited an itch that you can never quite figure out how to scratch. Years ago he told me that once during high school, while having dinner in the Beverly Hills mansion of one of his schoolmates' parents, he had had a vivid recollection of what it felt like, as a boy, to have mud squishing up between his toes, and that it had freaked him out. Childhood roots in another language and another culture had to stretch a long, long way to ground and nourish the man he eventually became. It's arguable that human beings were not designed to make such lengthy psychic leaps. But fate dictated that he was one human being who would have to do it, who would be challenged to reinvent himself, from the inside out, in the space of a very few tumultuous years. He pulled it off. And that he did so with his sense of fun, his sense of style, and his great sense of compassion so firmly intact, has always seemed to me to be nothing short of heroic.
I never had a conversation on the phone with him that ended without him saying, "I love you." He was a living lesson in the importance of that simple act of grace, but it's only one of the many gifts he left me. I'm giving thanks for all of them tonight, and hoping he's raving it up with the angels.
Till the next time,
APS - The photo above was taken in Paris (note the Eiffel Tower in the background) and shows the typical working dynamic of the day - 'Los and I screwing around while Marcy dutifully studies her script in preparation for the next scene........ ;-)
