Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Tom Arnold: TOM Arnold is grinning, wringing wet in bright red lifeguard shorts, with a few "Baywatch" women surrounding him and a thick Cuban cigar in his mouth.
Just call him
Mr. Nice Guy
After hard lessons from failed
marriages and addictions, he's
ready to settle downBy Tim Ryan
Star-BulletinThe actor, writer, comedian, star of films, television and tabloids -- at least during his tumultuous marriage to Roseanne Barr -- is his own "yes man" during this afternoon's filming of a "Baywatch Hawaii" episode at Makaha beach. It seems no matter what anyone asks of his image Arnold's talk is all "yes," "sure buddy," "of course" and "certainly."
During his two days of filming an episode entitled "The Cage," several "Baywatch" crew members said Arnold was "a dream to work with."
In "The Cage," Arnold plays an overzealous father who wants to impress the son he sees only a couple times a year. Arnold's character aspires to be a lifeguard so he pretty much moves into actor Jason Momoa's lifeguard tower, following Jason everywhere. Eventually, Arnold attempts a rescue of his own, and Jason ends up rescuing him and the drowning victim.
"I like doing good fun things and this part touched me," said Arnold, who earlier this year appeared in two episodes of Fox's family series "Get Real."
Arnold, 41, is pretty much the same guy off camera that he is on: off the wall -- remember his ugly American character in "Nine Months"? -- quick with a quip, and candid about his feelings, shortcomings, mistakes and dreams. The Ottumwa, Iowa native emphasized how "lucky I am" several times.
"When I was a kid I dreamed about being famous so people would like me, so everyone in my town would like me, all the kids in my school would like me, because I wasn't the greatest athlete.
"I mean I aspired to be the class clown," said Arnold, who worked in a meat packing plant until he was 22.
One night after work at the meat packing plant, Arnold and few friends drank several beers then decided to streak through a convalescent home. They were arrested and Arnold was fired.
"It bothered me more
until I got sober," he said.
"Now I think most of the
tabloid stories about me
are just funny."
Wanting to attend university and having no money, Arnold developed a publicity stunt in which for pledges he would walk 21 miles wearing only underwear and shoes in the middle of an Iowa winter. He made $2,500.
While attending college Arnold started doing stand-up routines at a local comedy club and after several months moved to Minneapolis to try his routines in the big city.
Barr also was performing, with Arnold opening for her; the pair became friends. Arnold was traveling with Barr and opening for her at other clubs when she got tapped for her television show. She asked Arnold to join her as a writer.
When he and Roseanne split after three years of marriage in 1994, Arnold was fired from her sitcom. Soon, his own CBS show was canceled.
"I didn't know if I would ever recover, if people would accept me on my own," he said. "I watched people on TV saying my career was dead. I was embarrassed and ashamed of the whole public airing of our problems, but I also felt calm because I knew no matter how bad it was now, it was better than what I had gone through six months earlier."
At the time of the divorce, Arnold had just completed "True Lies" with Arnold Schwarzennegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, but didn't know how the film would be received.
As it turned out, "the reports of my professional death were highly exaggerated," Arnold now says gleefully of the career boost the film gave him. "In Hollywood, if people think you have talent, then they think you must be a nice guy. That hypocrisy worked for me but I am a nice guy."
This upcoming season Arnold says he will will star, produce and write a series for Sony Television; reprise his role in "True Lies II"; and star with Steven Seagal in Joel Silver's "Exit Wounds." Arnold plays a newspaper reporter who meets Seagal in an anger-management class.
"I'm an angry reporter, imagine that," Arnold says.
"In a perfect world I would do movies all the time, but I learned after 'True Lies' and 'Nine Months' that if you do films one after another people get sick of you."He's made peace with the tabloids that followed him relentlessly during his Roseanne period. The coverage detailed his failing marriage and his drug and alcohol abuse.
"It bothered me more until I got sober," he said. "Now I think most of the tabloid stories about me are just funny."
Last Christmas, during Arnold's annual visit to the Four Seasons Resort on Maui, a tabloid photographer caught a picture of the actor without his shirt. The caption read: "Beached Whale."
"It was true," said Arnold, who is looking trimmer these days. "I put the picture on my refrigerator as inspiration to get into shape."
Arnold says he loves to eat, and admits to having an addictive personality that has required cocaine and around-the-clock work.
"I tried for three years just to drink a little beer but I couldn't do one thing and not everything else," he said. "I used do cocaine and stay up five days straight when I was writing 'Roseanne.'
"I lied to everyone about what I was doing ... When Roseanne caught me with drugs I said it belonged to someone else, the maids, even her kids."
Arnold entered rehab "to get my gal and job back." When a week later he felt better, he decided to stay clean and sober. Arnold and Barr married a month later.
"I would have done anything to make that woman laugh," he said. "I had one fan and it was her."
Told about recent reports that Barr will pose nude for a national magazine, Arnold the comedian explains why he won't take a peek.
"There's an old Iowa saying: Why buy the cow if you know the milk is sour."
A year after that divorce, Arnold remarried but divorced 18 months later.
"She was young (14 years Arnold's junior), blond, from the Midwest, never had lived alone before, and wanted to be a school teacher," he said. "We all want someone to look up to you. It turned out we had different goals."
Arnold does want to start a family. "I think I want it for all the right reasons," he said. "No matter how good a day I have, when I go home at night I'm alone, no one to share that with. No kid to say, 'Hi daddy, I missed you.' My close friends all have that and they're happy. It's the right time."
Click for online
calendars and events.
