In his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is always Judas who writes the biography.” What impressed me about the actor Eric Roberts, whose memoir, Runaway Train, comes out this week, was how willing he was to betray himself.
Eric and I worked together on the book throughout the dark days of the pandemic. Whenever our attention would drift, we’d keep ourselves in the game by conjuring up possible titles. Eric always came back to “How about ‘Julia Roberts’s Brother’?” I’m still not sure how much of a joke he meant it to be. It was Eric, after all, who was being groomed to be the movie star at a time when Julia was still more a product of Smyrna, Georgia, than of Malibu.
After some early acclaimed television roles, Eric’s big break came when he was cast in King of the Gypsies. In fact, the giant billboard on Sunset Boulevard advertising the film proclaimed, “It’s Almost His Time.” That was quickly followed by roles in The Pope of Greenwich Village, opposite Mickey Rourke, and the under-appreciated The Coca-Cola Kid, with Greta Scacchi.
Soon after, Pretty Woman changed the molecules of fame for all the Robertses. Eric seemed to float in and out of the penumbra of Julia’s star power, genuinely proud of his sister, while at the same time capable of becoming a stringent critic of her work as an actor.
It was Bob Fosse’s Star 80, however, that dramatically shifted how people perceived Eric, after his shattering portrayal of Paul Snider, the small-time promoter who brought Dorothy Stratten from behind a Dairy Queen counter in western Canada to the grottoes of the Playboy Mansion, to Hollywood, and to a murderous end. He grew so unnerved by portraying the weak, psychopathic Snider that on the day Star 80 wrapped, Eric drove to Westwood Cemetery, where Stratten is buried, and fell to his knees, weeping, and ripped up his SAG card in front of her grave.
After that movie, casting directors, and even people in the street, began giving Eric a wide berth. “I get the feeling women are avoiding me. Why is it?” he asked his friend the actor Christopher Walken, while the two men sauntered down Fifth Avenue.
“Because you’re a scary dude, Eric,” Walken replied.
Eric’s career was further derailed by an ocean of cocaine, followed by a car accident under the influence that almost cost him his life. The truth of the matter is Eric liked getting high. A soliloquy in the memoir about Eddie Bunker (who played Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs and wrote the screenplay for Runaway Train) shooting Eric up with heroin for the first time is worthy of William Burroughs’s Junkie, or Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. He speaks of it with a genuine passion, though they’re long-abandoned habits. Eric has been sober for decades. Now his addiction is to work.
Groomed for stardom, Eric has spent the last two decades as a journeyman player; his Web site described him as “ericrobertsactor.com.” He was supposed to be a movie star, but it didn’t quite work out that way, so he became an actor’s actor instead—one of the best we have, though his IMDB page reads more like a rap sheet, with scores of criminally bad movies to his name.
Spike Carter, a frequent Air Mail contributor, first alerted me to the fact that Eric was behind only India’s Brahmanandam in Guinness World Records for the most screen credits for a living actor. As of this writing, Eric has appeared in at least 750 television shows and films, although most of them would be better described as “movies.”
“I get the feeling women are avoiding me. Why is it?” he asked his friend the actor Christopher Walken. “Because you’re a scary dude, Eric,” Walken replied.
This staggering achievement was the impetus for my Vanity Fair profile of the actor, which appeared in 2018, and in turn led to my working on Eric’s memoir. When he was away filming—let’s say, somewhere in Madagascar but made to look like Metuchen, New Jersey—his wife, Eliza (a gifted actor in her own right, immortalized in John Landis’s National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978), and I would go digging on our own, looking for the buried artifacts of her husband’s life.
During our sessions—a cassette recorder whirring on a footstool between us, Eric’s cat prowling for a beam of sunlight along the couch—I often wondered, particularly at the beginning, how laundered his recollections were, as they didn’t always match up with the stories I’d heard when I was working on the article. Back then, I was building a ship in a bottle, but this—this was different. It was a real boat we were making; it had to get us someplace.
I was reminded of something I’d read in one of Georges Simenon’s books about his best-known creation, Inspector Maigret. “There was always a tough hour or two to get through,” Simenon wrote, where “he would question himself, wonder if he had been on the wrong track from the start, if it was all leading nowhere or, worse still, to some state of affairs utterly removed from the one he had imagined.”
That’s how I felt much of the time. But by the end I had learned a lot. I learned, for instance, that Eric gave one of the greatest performances of his career one night appearing on Broadway in Burn This while totally high. (On what he doesn’t remember.)
I learned that Eric wants to act in movies worthy of his gifts. He’s given his life to this work (while often screwing up the life part). But I learned that Eric just couldn’t get out of his own way. Quentin Tarantino, whose many kindnesses include jump-starting careers that had stalled out, tried to cast Eric in a clutch of his films, only to have Eric fuss at him about how his character should be played. “That’s not how I wrote it, Eric,” the director would invariably reply.
I learned that Eric loves his sisters, Julia and Lisa, despite all the dirt kicked up by the tabloids over the years. I was surprised by Eric’s tenderness toward his daughter, the actress Emma Roberts, even though she doesn’t speak to him. For Eric, that’s the real American Horror Story. I learned that the pain of it runs deep.
I was struck by Eric’s love for Eliza, his wife of 32 years. Though at times they reminded me of Nick and Nora Charles, Dashiell Hammett’s famous bantering couple in The Thin Man. I remember during one of our early meetings, Eric was in a particularly expansive mood. “I love my life like I love my wife,” he said. “But, Eric,” Eliza snapped back, “you hate your life!”
I don’t think she meant it, but I do think he credits her for saving his life, for giving him a purpose, a family, little wonder he dedicated his book “to Eliza, who picked up the pieces.”
Finally, I learned that we all fail the audition, when life is the movie.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
