Time moves on but Barbara Hershey's doing good and John Heard, they're all people working. I know there were a couple of kids in that movie who I used who have been in other movies since Beaches.

[Beaches] is a pretty picture and I just liked having somebody like Bette [Mudler] who can be flying in the big comedy scenes and have her do more like a realistic part.

I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing.

For Joey Bishop, always was kind of the lost soul, so I did a traffic joke.

People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.

[The movie Beaches] was really about how women fight. Women fight, say terrible things to each other and an hour later they make up and go shopping. I think they got the better idea of how it should be done.

I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.