Edward Ernest Reinhold Jr.
Nicknamed “Judge” by his lawyer father, this veteran funnyman says comic timing is a first cousin to musical ability. It’s other veterans he’s concerned about now: returning warriors struggling to fit back into society.
Judge Reinhold — most famous for riding shotgun in Eddie Murphy’s smash Beverly Hills Cop franchise — has never been in the military. Not one member of his family has been drafted. Yet he felt called to duty back in September 2009 when he read the following headline in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “Rise in troop suicides spurs prevention call.”
Recently, in a meeting room at North Little Rock’s Eugene J. Towbin Healthcare Center (formerly Fort Roots), Reinhold solemnly pulled that clipping out of a manila folder. The edges are irregular and frayed and the paper’s taken on that ocher patina of age, but it still serves to evince his righteousness. There are passages highlighted and “Important!” scrawled on the top.
The U.S. Army’s suicide rate in 2008 exceeded any year on record, the story says — 128 confirmed suicides and 15 suspected suicides, or a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers. (Just a year earlier it was 11.6 per 100,000.)
“I was shocked,” he said. “That people were coming home, and the war wasn’t over. And the more I read about it the more I learned these were people that had distinguished themselves. They weren’t people with previous mental problems.”
The swelling hasn’t gone down with the sunsetting of major operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s up. Last year 182 soldiers took their own lives. Many of them are job-related because servicemen and women have training and skills that don’t always translate to noncombat situations. They have trouble providing for their families and spiral into depression — which breaks Reinhold’s heart.
“I feel that I’ve enlisted to help fight the war after the war,” he said.
He has teamed up with retired Col. Mike Ross, former commander of the Arkansas National Guard’s 39th Infantry, to find a solution. They met when Reinhold called the suicide prevention hot line and asked what he could do. He was eventually put in touch with Ross and attended a few of his community organizing events. One day, to
Ross’ surprise, Reinhold was the only person who showed up.
“He and I were sitting there talking and I said, ‘OK, why are you still here? I usually run people off … because this problem is too big,’” Ross said. “You’re trying to figure, a guy of his stature, why is he getting involved, and you find after you visit with him for a while that he’s really tied to it. He gets it. He said he and [his wife] Amy lived the Beverly Hills lifestyle for so many years, and they’ve moved back here now, and they want to do something for the community.”
Their plan is simple. It starts with plans to organize a community center for veterans, a neutral place where they can gather, with access to resources like counseling, child care, a washer and dryer — and a safe place to unpack their emotional baggage, should they choose to.
“It’s through the bond of shared experience in an environment they feel is theirs that allows them to express what they saw, what they did and how they feel about both,” Reinhold says.
HALF AND HALF
Reinhold is not an Arkansan, but he married one several years ago.
The Little Rock native, Amy Miller, caught Reinhold’s attention across a crowded room in Los Angeles. She was in town to help a friend with a new baby, and he knew she wasn’t a regular in this group of people.
“I went gaga,” he said. “She was kind of aloof because I don’t think she knew a lot of people, and I didn’t have the nerve to actually speak to her, but I kept trying to walk into her eye line to see if maybe I would get ‘the look back.’ I didn’t.”
He never did. Then she started to leave and he felt compelled to take action.
“I couldn’t not see her again. This was the girl I had to not let go,” he said. “But technically, I stalked her. Legally, it was stalking.”
She got into a Ford SUV with Texas tags and he climbed in his car and followed her, wondering, “How far is this going to go? Is she going to get on the interstate?”
He caught up to her, and stopped next to her at a red light. She saw him.
“And I feel my face burn,” he said. ‘‘What a dork!’’
“What’s he going to do?” Amy thought, “Roll down the window and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”
“When you find out that this is happening, you’re at a crossroads, and you choose — either consciously or unconsciously — whether to turn your back on these people or to somehow find a way to help them.”
Amy had noticed him at the party but was too absorbed in other things to show her interest. After Reinhold’s embarrassing red light moment, he formed a new plan.
“What I did figure out is if I booked it back to the party and ingratiated myself with the girl I knew slightly who had the baby” — he describes it like a movie scene — “cut-to — ‘I just have to tell you, that’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. … ’”
They were married six months later. It has been 13 years, and Reinhold jokes it’s like their 50th by Hollywood standards, where anniversaries are measured in dog years. Today, they divide their time between Los Angeles, Santa Fe, N.M., and Little Rock. Last winter, their daughter was born, making them take these trips a lot more deliberately — not unlike the painstakingly sober emissaries from PricewaterhouseCoopers who deliver the envelopes on Oscar night. (Reinhold has never been nominated.)
Though “typical days” do not exist in the entertainment industry — “It’s all a cavalcade of lunacy,” Reinhold says, “adapt or die” — when he’s not focused on helping veterans, he busies himself with producing film projects, shopping his memoir, Confessions of a Hollywood Dork, around to potential publishers, and preparing for his starring role in the stage production of Harvey, which opens at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, Kan., in late January.
He’s an aging figure in an industry that prizes youth over experience. And — all The Santa Clause trilogy jokes aside — maybe he was always a little too cerebral for Hollywood. Remember that time in 2003, when he was cast in a WB sitcom called The O’Keefes, about a geeky, culturally ignorant family whose homeschooled children were thrust into public school? Or the CW show Easy Money, a black comedy about loan sharks he said had a Coen brothers sensibility?
These days Reinhold (the “Judge” nickname came from his father, a lawyer) — born in Delaware but raised in Virginia — stays away from Los Angeles as much as possible, preferring to participate from a distance.
‘A HOLLYWOOD DORK’
He says movie studios, which made roughly 100 movies a year in his day, are now more interested in global appeal, opting to release 10 big films a year to cut down on pirating and to appeal to the planet’s largest demographic, “which they call derisively 13- to 24-year-old male mouth-breathers.”
Fewer actors are required for such films. A single marquee name is sufficient. Yet, so crucial is that star power whole projects get scrapped without it, he says.
But that creates an opportunity for savvy independent filmmakers.
“The studios have become less concerned with the American public, and the American public wants more challenging fare,” he said, adding that services like Xfinity On Demand and Netflix still need new content. “So, if you make a good independent movie, you’re more likely to get a deal. It was harder before to get a release.”
He has seen the movie industry change drastically in the years since his first theatrical movie role in 1981’s Stripes. Since the days when he might be called up to fill the role of Kevin Bacon or Dennis Quaid if they weren’t available. Since the day he had to follow Robin Williams’ smashing audition for Mork & Mindy.
“I’m waiting in the outer office, and I’m hearing gales of laughter, so much so I said, ‘Oh, somebody’s telling a private joke.’ … Anyway, the door flies open and this guy with really long, frizzy hair and wearing his rainbow suspenders and everything comes out. And I walk in and they’re wiping away tears and laughing, and asking, ‘ What’s your name again?’ And I do this robotic, ‘Hello, Mindy. My name is Mork.’ And I hear, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’”
Maybe that Mork & Mindy loss was for the best. Reinhold has always been more of a straight man, which he says also demands comedic timing.
“Because it’s reactive. I’m reacting off of them. My career … with these Beverly Hills Cop movies is that. I’m reacting off of Eddie, constantly, and it does have to have timing to it,” he said.
He theorizes that the best comedic timing is usually found among people with musical ability.
“I think there’s some kind of connection rhythmically,” he says. “There’s exceptions, but for the most part Eddie’s incredibly musical. Steve Martin, of course. Jack Lemmon was an amazing pianist.” Reinhold is a whistler. “He’s like a crooner whistler,” Amy says.
“I have the distinction of being the only host on SNL to whistle his monologue,” he says.
The story behind that “peak one-night stand” on Saturday Night Live in 1988 is featured prominently in his memoir, which he has finished writing and is shopping to publishers. The success of Billy Crystal’s new book, Still Foolin’ Em, makes him optimistic.
“It’s awkward. I’m socially a little awkward,” he admits. “What the book is, it’s a comic memoir, and it shows me trying to be cool and not be dorky and the results of that. I didn’t even mean for there to be a theme because they’re just separate experiences, but after you read it, you say, ‘Oh, this is somebody who’s come to accept who they are.’”
BACK TO BASIC TRAINING
For a man who starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who became a Seinfeld- ian archetype — the “Close Talker,” which he has made his email handle — he’s not so different from some other 50-somev
thing Little Rock man. He’s a husband and father who, in an irregular career, is always angling for the next project.
He uses his connections locally and within the entertainment industry to further his work — both creative and charitable.
French Hill, chief executive officer of Delta Trust & Bank, who has served as an adviser to Reinhold on film and nonprofit projects, has seen Reinhold’s compassionate nature firsthand.
“As an actor, Judge Reinhold has made Americans laugh for decades,” Hill said. “But it is his big heart and gift of caring for his community that makes me proud of his continued exceptional work on stage and screen.”
And it’s that caring spirit that has Reinhold returning to Ross and his veterans. He recounts Ross’ devastation when five soldiers under his command committed suicide within a year of returning from Iraq, and how he couldn’t ignore this problem.
“When you find out that this is happening, you’re at a crossroads, and you choose — either consciously or unconsciously — whether to turn your back on these people or to somehow find a way to help them,” he said.
Ross hopes to benefit veterans by being more “proactive than reactive.”
“The way the programs are set up right now,” Reinhold explains, “they wait until everyone’s at rock bottom and, then try to rescue them, and the cost is 10 times what it is to be proactive and help them adjust on the front end.”
A community center would also allow members of the community to contribute in their areas of expertise.
Reinhold said El Dorado and Little Rock are being considered as locations for centers.
“Ideally, the center will be in a repurposed existing structure that will serve as a gathering place for both veterans who need to talk and veterans who are there to listen. The centers will help assist soldiers in their reintegration back into everyday life — from information about available jobs to an integration of resources that are now scattered throughout the state.’’
“Right now we’re still into the concept-building, and the awareness is what we’re trying to focus on. The need for it. We don’t want to jump out there and do something without it being deliberate. Not just throwing things up against the wall to see if it sticks. … We are looking to use private donations and also going to look into grant-writing to get funding from different sources,” Ross said.
“So, this veterans community center would give people very specific ways to help,” Reinhold said. “Say you have a furniture store, you can donate a couch. Maybe you’re a lawyer who wants to dedicate some time once every few weeks to have a breakout session on legal counseling or financial planning or marriage counseling. It’s a way for people to contribute.” The hotline for veterans contemplating harming themselves or others is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Veterans Crisis Line, (800) 273-8255.