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“Yes,” I said.

“I have a message,” he said. “Your agent is trying to reach you.”

He had gone on channel 16 on the shortwave radio and found me. I took a boat back to Tortola, then caught a bus into town, where I picked up a script he had FedExed. It stank. Before I left town, though, I saw a gorgeous home on the water and inquired with a local Realtor about its availability. He called me back ten years later and said it was for sale.

I passed. It was too late. Real estate is mostly about location, but like so many other things in life, it’s also about timing.

Cloris Leachman is a gifted actress, but she is an even more outstanding character away from the camera. I don’t recommend smoking cigarettes around her, though, as I did when we worked on the movie Breakfast with Les and Bess. Based on Lee Kalcheim’s off-Broadway play about a husband and wife who host a radio talk show from their apartment near Central Park, the film shot in Toronto, and almost from the time Michelle and I arrived, Cloris was on my case about the way I ate, drank, and of course smoked.

“I’m trying to quit,” I told her.

“What’s the problem?” she asked testily.

“I’m addicted,” I said.

She grabbed my cigarettes and tossed them into the trash.

“There goes your addiction,” she said.

If only it had been that easy. Our dressing rooms were at opposite ends of the building where we shot, but if I lit up, I would hear her scream from down the hallway, “I smell cigarette smoke.” Moments later, whether she was dressed or wearing a robe, she stomped into my dressing room and took the cigarette out of my mouth. When we had lunch together, she ordered for me. One day she told the waiter to bring me a baked potato, no butter, stuffed with vegetables. Another time she picked out all the croutons from my salad.

“The croutons, too?” I asked.

“They’re bad for you,” she said.

I never got to eat anything I wanted. Michelle, who had known Cloris for years, was thoroughly amused, and since she smoked, too, the two of us frequently found ourselves hiding from her. We felt like a couple of teenagers sneaking a smoke. You had to have a sense of humor around Cloris. She was a very free spirit, with many quirks, all of them endearing once you dialed in to her frequency.

She was also one of those actresses who worked from “business”—carefully contrived mannerisms intended to bring her character more fully alive. In other words, she made a life for her character, from the inside out, and worked off that palette of traits and idiosyncrasies. If her character liked tea, she’d want to make tea, then drink it in a scene. She added fifty little things that weren’t in the script. She drove the director out of his gourd; at one point he threatened to walk off the set, exclaiming, “I can’t take it anymore.”

But eventually he calmed down and understood, and you know what? Cloris was right. An actor has to do something as she stands there and talks. Her character needs a life. Cloris understood that, had her method, and that’s what made her so good.

Later, Cloris was happy to hear that I had given up cigarettes. I did not tell her why. I did not want to hear her say, I told you so. She would have had every right to say it, too.

Our movie aired in April 1985, but about six months before, I’d suddenly developed a problem in my neck—actually, a spur that caused pain in my arm. I had to undergo a minor operation. Prior to surgery, I went into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for X-rays. As I left, a radiologist stopped me. A small, slight man from India, he spoke with a mellifluous accent that made his invitation to step back into the examining room sound almost benign.

But it wasn’t.

“Do you see those spots?” he asked after putting my X-rays against a light panel so I could see my lungs.

“Yes,” I said.

“Em-va-zema,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“These are spots from em-va-zema.”

He shook his head as if it was weighted with the melancholy of a future only he could see. But I could see it, too. I pictured my father lying