I forgot a few people in my list of dead people I don't see anymore and one of them was Hervé Villechaise, most famous for a couple of roles, a James Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974, and Fantasy Island (1978-80's) where he co-starred with Ricardo "Rich Corinthian Leather" Montalban before quitting over wages. I was on the set once and Montalban and Hervé appeared to totally detest each other.
 

 
I met Hervé after meeting his ex-wife Anne, in Paris when I set up the Laserium in 1978. (I need to tell that whole story here soon.) They were both very good-hearted people, in different ways. Ann was motivated to finish school and become an RN. When I moved back to L.A., Anne was also living there and one day I got a call from a woman who identified herself as "the secretary of Mr. Villechaise". I was invited to Hervé's place out in the valley for parties. Each time, there seemed to be a mixture of typical Hollywood hangers-on but also some very cool, regular people. Hervé and I also cruised the bars a couple of times and I recall once pretending to not speak any English in one of those bars. When I later married, my wife and I went out there for dinner several times.
 
I was pretty shocked that Hervé took his own life, but not surprised after all. He was an artist, and I guess pretty confident in that area, but as an actor and a man, probably unsure of himself. He scowled at me once when in passing I used the expression "my boy" which it was common to use ironically among friends. I do know that he did a lot of good work for children out there until at the age of 50, he blew himself away.

When Eve taught French at UCLA, she had to tell the students they couldn't eat, drink or smoke during classes and they had to wear shoes and shirts. One of her students was the son of Sir Laurence Olivier.
 

 
"Larry" came to UCLA to address a film class of some kind. There is no doubt that at least 1,000 people on the campus would have given anything to meet him, let alone have an extended discussion with him.
 
It happened that Sir Laurence wanted to discuss his son's progress in Eve's class. Naturally, it would be uncool to give any details of this discussion or of the boy's work on the public Internetz, but I can share this short bit.
 
When Larry came to her office he asked Eve, "Do you know who I am?" and she replied, without sarcasm, and possibly too truthfully:
 
"Yes, I think my mother saw one of your movies."
 
Poor Larry.

I didn't work very long at Universal Studios, but in my short career there, one day stands out.
 
 
 
I was walking to the office from the huge parking lot when I saw a man in a cape (above) and a bunch of other people also in costume, all looking up at the towers. I recognized the caped one as Lorne Greene, the dad in Bonanza. (In those days Robert Blake used to always talk about the suits in the towers on the Tonight Show). I looked up to see what Lorne Greene et al were so interested in. It turns out a woman was threatening to jump - which apparently had somehow disrupted the shoot for Battlestar Galactica - unless she could talk to this woman:

 
 
So let's see, there's an actual distressed human being, so disturbed she is going to jump off the Universal Tower unless someone can get Wonder Woman to come up and talk to her. There are a bunch of people dressed as starship crew looking up at her. I'm walking through this to a workbench where the entire day is spent listening to people tell jokes about other local unions by number (the guys in #47 ...) and making phone calls to the Burbank Studios to see if there are other union job openings there.
 
I quit after something like two weeks of being paid for doing almost nothing for the union negotiated 34.67 hours each week. When I gave notice, the woman in charge of personnel said "Come with me." and starting walking at a fast pace down the hall. We entered an office with nothing but filing cabinets, dozens of them. "You see these files?" she said. She opened a drawer in one and rifling through the papers she continued: "Every one of these files is an application to work here and you want to quit after only a few days. You must be nuts!"
 
Working at Universal Studios was unforgettable, but I learned that there is a Hell and there are ways to lose your soul if such a thing exists. It leads me to my next anecdote about two couples: T., J., and the Hooker.

In 1978, Shirley MacLaine was working on a TV special called "Where Do  We Go from Here?", a musical look through US history (maybe inspired by the 1976 bi-centennial - God what would that have been like on  Twitter?) She was going to do a dance number to the music of one of  those marches like "Pomp and Circumstance" "Stars and Stripes Forever", with twirling batons, but  the idea was to do the batons with laser beams!
 
In the late seventies, I drove up the hill to Griffith Park  Observatory almost every night to perform two or three shows of Laserium. It seems hard to imagine today, but the sight of the laser on the curved planetarium ceiling was inspiring, awesome, wondrous because of the visual grain of the coherent Krypton laser beam. The bean was less than one watt in power, but that made a very bright light.

One night, while doing the Laserium, I heard a guy doing a number exactly like Mel Brooks "The Critic", where some smart ass makes comments throughout a movie. I thought the critic was pretty funny, one of Brook's better efforts. Anyway, I couldn't figure out what this was about, since I was busy actually doing the show. Turns out...
 
After the show, a couple in jeans walks back to the booth from way up in the front rows. It's Mel Brooks with Shirley MacLaine. Mel in jeans, feh, but man Shirley in jeans still had that "Irma La Douce" girlish adorability. In person, Brooks was exactly as he would be on  the Tonight Show, fast biting wit, a laugh a minute. Shirley was only slightly more reserved, with dark glasses - wait did she watch my  whole show in those?. I recall we chatted briefly about the choreography (not my work, but the possibilities she had just seen)  and what else was going on at the time. There were two women I've always wanted to meet: Shirley and Candice Bergen. One down, one to  go.
 
Doing a live show in Los Angeles for a long time was always special and interesting. We could expect to see celebrities regularly. That brings me to our chance meeting with Catherine Deneuve at a hardware store in the middle of nowhere. [someday]