Soon after I got into the business, Lew Wasserman asked me to come work for him at MCA. "Jerry, we're friends, we go back," he said. "It's only right that you should make pictures with us."

"I already have a deal," I told him. "It's a big deal. You don't want my deal."

"Don't tell me what I want," he said.

"Okay, you want to make a deal? Fine. Good. Bring your lawyer over to my house and we'll make a deal."

I went back to MCA with Lenny Goldberg, my partner in those years. It was coming full circle. I started as an assistant at MCA and returned with the big contract. My first day, I went to eat at the commissary. I was sitting with my corned beef and cream soda, and here came Lew, smiling. He sat at my table. He said, "Jerry, I can't tell you how happy it makes me that you're back." We talked about this and that, then, as he got up, he turned and said, "Oh, and Jerry. Do me one favor. Stay off the WATS line!"

Family

The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger.

When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don't deserve any of this!

I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, "Screw it. That's over. I'm done."

No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh.

Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again. I already had my son, Michael, but Jane wanted a baby. As we could not have a child of our own, for reasons I won't go into, we decided to adopt. By this time, Jane's career had taken a backseat to my own. It seems as if she planned it this way all along, though she calls it a natural progression. Jane brought me to LA, introduced me to the key people, made her world my world, set me up, mentored and loved me. Then, when my career took off, she let herself drift from the public eye, did fewer shows, made fewer records, and so forth, and not because she was forced to-there were plenty of offers and opportunities. Though she was, in fact, as beautiful and talented and in demand as she had ever been, she was simply tired of that life. She had become a star at such a young age, had been famous for so long, that she was over it. She wanted another life. She wanted to be a mother.

We pursued a standard adoption, wrote letters, filled out forms. We did not care if it was a boy or a girl. We just wanted a baby. It was many months before we found her in Florida. We learned all about the birth mother, her background, her history, her due date. We tracked it so carefully it felt, at times, as if Jane herself were expecting. Then, when the mother was about seven months pregnant, we got a phone call in the middle of the night-it's over, you will not be getting the baby. It's impossible to explain how hard this hit us. It felt as if there had been a miscarriage, as if we had lost the baby. It was terrible. Jane went into a deep funk. I remember going to see the lawyers and losing it, throwing a stack of papers in the air and shouting, "You bastards, you can't do this to a person! You're killing Jane."

Then, late one night, while we were sitting in the house, moping, wondering what to do next, the phone rang. It was the lawyer. Something had changed. We had the baby. Incredible. She was three days old and would arrive by plane in the morning. I called the manager of Saks Fifth Avenue. He opened the store for us in the middle of the night. (I must have promised him something.) I remember wandering the empty rooms, filling a basket with tiny clothes, Beverly Hills bathed in moonlight out the windows.

We went to LAX at 7.00 A.M. My doctor insisted on coming with us. He wanted to examine the baby before we took possession, "Just to make sure she's healthy, Jerry."

"There really is no point," I told him. "I'm taking this baby no matter what. This is my baby."

"Just hang back," he said. "I don't want you near that baby till I've had a look."

A nurse came off the plane with the bundle. I took the baby from her before the doctor could get close. As I reached for the baby-this was Julie, my oldest daughter, who is wonderful, beautiful, and now thirty-five-my back went out, which is one of the reasons I remember the day so vividly. (My life can be divided into segments: days when I am standing straight, and days when my back has gone out.) The doctor hurried over. "Come on," he said. "Let me just have a look before you go home with that baby."

"This is my baby," I told him.

"Fine," he said, "let me look at your baby."

Luckily, the baby had ten fingers and ten toes and was perfect in every other respect, as I was keeping her no matter what the doctor had to say.

Then we went home. Jane was happy, and I was happy. It was a good time.

A few years later, Jane decided she wanted another baby.

I was against this at first. Not because I did not want another baby, but because I did not want to go through that again, the lawyers and papers and chance of losing the kid at the end, reliving the tumult and heartbreak.

"I'm sorry," I told Jane. "I just can't do it."

Around this time, I hosted a fund-raiser in Las Vegas for the Catholic Charities of Nevada. This was in honor of Frank Sinatra's mother, who, not long before, had been killed in a plane crash while traveling to see Frank perform. A dozen top artists sang at this benefit, including Sinatra himself. There must have been a thousand people in the room. I was seated with an innocuous little guy named Tom Miller, the director of the charities. We started talking.

He said, "I understand you have an adopted child."

"That's true," I told him.

"How old is your child?" he asked.

"She's going to be two," I said.

"Wouldn't you like to adopt another child?" he asked.

"Yes, I would," I said, "but it's impossible to adopt children."

"It's not impossible," he said. "And to prove it's not impossible, I am going to get you a child."