Robert Pastorelli is an elusive target. “He’s in town,” says his publicist about a proposed interview. “We’ll put you together with him very soon.”
Weeks pass. “Oh, Bobby went to New York to do a play,” his publicist says. “He’ll be back any day now.”
Months pass. “He’s back, but he’s finishing up a film,” says his publicist. “We’ll do it as soon as he’s through.”
Fifteen months later, the publicist calls: “He’s going to be in the office. Noon Monday.”
Noon Monday: Pastorelli is 20 minutes late, then 30, then 45. Then he arrives-“I got lost in Beverly Hills,” he says. “It makes me crazy when I get lost.”
Pastorelli is dressed about like his Murphy Brown character-painter-nanny Eldin Bernecky-might be: jeans, with a casual patterned shirt over a sleeveless T-shirt. “I’ve been dressing like this since I was 15 back in South Edison, N.J.,” he says.
In his New Jersey-New York accent, Pastorelli notes that it’s his 39th birthday this very day-“Most people in this business don’t give out their ages; doesn’t matter to me.”
A lot of conventional things don’t matter to Pastorelli, and haven’t since the night of his 19th birthday, back in New Jersey, when he was in a car wreck that almost killed him. Sitting in his publicist’s office, just he and a reporter, the actor recalls: “There were five cars involved in the accident.” Then he sings to a Beatles melody: “That was 20 years ago today . . . Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. . . .”
What happened to him in the wreck? “Oh, punctured lung, ruptured spleen. Kidney pushed up into my back. Internal bleeding. Lacerations all over. I was beat up. They gave me last rites.” Casually, he volunteers: “I had an out-of-body experience.”
As in hovering over the hospital room? “Sure. Oh, it’s amazing. Watching yourself. I watched my father start to pass out. Nurses caught him falling. I saw ’em give me last rites. I watched nurses wait for me to become conscious and come out of shock so they could operate on me; otherwise, I’d die. They didn’t want to open me up while I was in shock ’cause your heart will stop.
“It was the most unbelievable feeling in the world, watching all that. I felt like I had already signed my checkout form. There was a certain bliss to it,” he remembers. “Except when I think about seeing the pain in that room, the pain my father and mother were going through. The next thing I knew, I had woken up. Somebody was moaning. Real loud. And when I woke up, it was me moaning.
“The people in the room confirmed later that these things had happened. My father sinking to his knees, the nurses, the priest, all of it. Yeah, I was on my way out, but it was too soon.”
It took him several months to recover. In retrospect, Pastorelli says: “The whole experience changed the way I live my life. All of a sudden, I looked at everything differently.”
In South Edison, his father sold insurance and his mother was a homemaker. Pastorelli, in his own words, “just barely squeezed” through high school. He figures that without the life-changing accident experience, he would have “made sure to get a good-paying job, maybe in some sort of factory, and keep an eye on that pension fund and try to work up to being foreman. Which is fine, I don’t look down upon that. But it just wasn’t for me.”
Pointing to his heart, he adds: “My piece of the rock is in here. I wanted the peace of knowing I was going to pursue my dreams.”
His three fantasy jobs growing up were being a rock star, being a boxer or being an actor. The only possibility was acting. He went to New York to study at the Actors’ Studio and then the Performing Arts Gallery, while surviving as a janitor and tending bar. “I was a good bartender-I could dish out the bull-but what I wanted to sell was my acting.”
After a lot of off-Broadway roles, one performance sold “big agents who I still have to this day,” and next thing he knew he was in Hollywood, with a guest shot on “Barney Miller.” That was 1982, and although Pastorelli never meant to stay in L.A., he started making a living with roles on such series as “Cagney & Lacey” and “Hill Street Blues”-“I was always a holdup man or somebody getting into trouble.”
It was a guest role on “My Sister Sam,” however, that was to lead Pastorelli into becoming a TV star. That sitcom was produced by Diane English, who mentioned to Pastorelli that “she had a new series in the works that might have a part for me,” he recalls. “She thought there’d be this woman who was an anchorperson and she’d have a security guard or chauffeur or something. But you hear producers speculate all the time about things that never happen. I’m just a blue-collar actor who goes where the jobs are.”
Lo and behold, English was serious, and she decided that Eldin Bernecky would be a house painter with an artistic vision who never leaves. “He moves to a different rhythm,” Pastorelli says of the character, an altruistic domestic Da Vinci who once gave away a million dollars he made from a painting. “Eldin is such a `big’ character, I underplay him, if anything.
“The character hasn’t evolved so much as merely adapted to changing circumstances,” Pastorelli says-especially with the arrival of Murphy’s baby Avery. Says Pastorelli: “You see a different Murphy when she’s at home than at work. When Murphy closes the door behind her at home, she usually drops the Murphy Brown professional mask, especially now that she’s got a child. Eldin loves her as a dear friend and helps to flatten out the lumps in her emotional wallpaper.”
Candice Bergen, who stars as Murphy, didn’t know what to make of Pastorelli when the series started in 1988. “I was a little rough around the edges to her,” the actor says. “She’s from Beverly Hills, and I’m a Lower East Side of New York guy. She talks about going trick or treating as a kid at Jimmy Stewart’s and Fred Astaire’s houses. How many people can relate to that? But there was never a real tenseness between us, and we’ve grown to be very close.”
Pastorelli’s nonstop work pattern continued this hiatus with reshooting portions of the recent Bruce Willis release “Striking Distance”; starring in an off-Broadway play called “Cosmo’s in Love”; filming a TV-movie for the spring season, “The Yarn Princess,” with Jean Smart; playing Jesus Christ in a Showtime comedy special (“Sex, Shock and Censorship in the ’90s”) starring Shelley Long, and appearing in “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” (opens Dec. 10) with Whoopi Goldberg. And he can be seen in the CBS movie of the week “Robin Cook’s Harmful Intent” Dec. 14.
The previous role that people like to talk to him about was the mule skinner in Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves.” “I thought I liked to work,” Pastorelli says. “I went fishing with Kevin, real nice guy. But we’re out in the boat and he’s making notes on the script. I’d say, `Why don’t you relax a while?’ And he’d say, `Robert, you know what we’re doing here, don’t you?’ I’d say, `No, what?’ He’d say, `the Best Picture of the year.’ “
Pastorelli’s current good fortune translates materially into two vintage ’61 Cadillacs and homes in L.A. and New York. For his parents back in New Jersey, he bought a new Cadillac and is looking for a home for them at the beach. His nieces might be transferred to private schools. He has a girlfriend, though it’s not clear how serious the relationship is. “I’ve always had a girlfriend,” he says. “I’ve always enjoyed the company of women.”
What about starting a family of his own? “Sure. Eventually. You can’t go looking for it to happen, though. I never know when I’m going to say yes or no to anything. The one thing I do know about life is that you never know.”
