Free By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir by Tom Sizemore

already a bigwig at Miramax and who had gone to Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where we were shooting, with John F. Kennedy Jr. Now, my family was completely obsessed with the Kennedys, so when someone told me that Randy was friends with John, I didn’t believe it. I asked Randy and he said it was true, then offered to call him to prove it. So he called up John-John and handed the phone to me. That’s when I heard this voice that was unmistakably his say, “I understand you don’t actually believe I’m Randy’s friend. Well, I’ll prove it to you because I’m going to be on the set tomorrow, doing a scene where I play the guitar and have one line.”
    I guess John-John did a play at Brown, and his mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, came to see it, but she told him afterward, “I do not approve of you doing this because it is not a serious pursuit—in the memory of your father and your uncle Bobby, I don’t want you to go through your public life as a pretender.” But he agreed to take this tiny, one-line role in the movie not only because he was friends with Randy but also because his girlfriend at the time, Christina Haag, was in it.
    When John got to the set, I was standing at an elevator by myself wearing my costume, which was a pair of overalls because I played a guy who restores cars. I heard a banging noise getting closer down the hall behind me and as I turned around I said, “Who’s the cripple?” And there was John-John, hobbling up on crutches because he’d hurt his leg in a skiing accident and had just had knee surgery. He had a big smile on his face and said, “Are you referring to me? That’s not very nice, Tom.”
    It blew my mind, first, that it was him, and second, that he knew my name. I was sort of speechless but he just added, “You should be careful before you go around shouting things like that; one day you might say it to an actual cripple and that might be uncomfortable.” I just stood there, nodding sort of dumbly. I had pressed the button on the elevator, but no light went on so I just assumed it was broken, but then John reached out with his crutch and pressed it and the light suddenly flicked on. I remember thinking, “He’s so magnetic that he has the ability to make broken elevators work.” He was extremely nice and we became good friends.
    When he reached his arm out with his crutch, it was the most built arm I’d ever seen, and I thought to myself, “I want my arm to look like that.” He told me that he didn’t much go to the gym. “I go to the gym to use the steam room,” he said. “New York City’s my gym.” He explainedthat he’d Rollerblade or skateboard to Central Park and then play football or Frisbee there and do chin-ups on buildings that he passed where they were doing construction. It sounds silly, but that really inspired me, and I started doing a workout routine where I throw a football against a wall outside; it’s a routine I keep up to this day.
    Randy came over and said, “What’d I tell you? Now do you believe me?” and the three of us just laughed. John shot the scene where he played guitar and then later he watched me do a scene. And we actually hung out a little after that: I played football with him in Central Park a few times and went out to dinner with him and his friends. One night he invited me out with people who were involved in his magazine, George . I felt uncomfortable, because I didn’t really fit in or know what they were talking about, and he just suddenly said to everyone, “Hey, let’s stop talking about George because it’s got to be boring for Tom.” He was that kind of a guy: he was very compassionate and had the sort of presence that naturally made people want to follow. I have to admit that meeting and befriending him was incredibly exciting. It might sound ridiculous but it was one of the best things that happened to me when I first started out as an actor. I was devastated when he died; he was a