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adding to the air of chaos. When
Busey is around, anything can
happen and probably will. Best to
just give yourself over to it.
Search his name on YouTube
and countless videos pop up with
titles like “When Busey Attacks”
and “Crazy, Incoherent Gary Busey
Red Carpet Footage.” He’s had to
atone repeatedly for past behavior,
like the time he grabbed Jennifer
Garner in an unwelcome embrace
at the 2008 Oscars — a move that
would have landed him in much
hotter water in the #MeToo era.
“We’re working on it,” Jake says
with a sigh.
Understandably, Busey’s career
has suffered. These days he
may be known less for his turns
in iconic action hits — Lethal
Weap on, Point Break, Under Siege
— than for his sendup of himself
as a gibberish-spouting weirdo
on HBO’s Entourage (and in the
2015 Entourage movie). “Gary
was awesome, probably my most
interesting guest star,” recalls
Entourage creator Doug Ellin,
adding that Busey insisted on
ad-libbing his lines. “We didn’t do
a lot of improv on the show. But
Gary showed up and said, ‘I won’t
give you the words, I’ll give you the
truth.’ We went with it.”
Since then, Busey has been
relegated mainly to cameos in
projects like Sharknado mov-
ies. But this fall, he’ll star in the
new off-Broadway musical Only
Human. He plays “The Boss” —
basically God in a corporatized
version of heaven. Observing the
photo shoot today is one of the
show’s producers, who admits
Busey has been struggling to
remember his lines. Nonetheless,
he’s confident the star will be
stage-ready for his Oct. 8 bow.
Jake has a hard time with
what’s become of his father and
his father’s career. “The fact that
there’s an entire generation of
people who don’t know the man
he was before the accident — this
incredibly talented actor, this
force of nature — it’s just hard,”
he says. Busey’s erratic reputation
has even impacted his son’s work
prospects: “The same Busey name
that helped me 30 years ago has
become a scorpion’s tail because
it’s associated with insanity.” Jeff
Bridges, who worked alongside
Busey in a string of early-’70s
movies including Thunderbolt
and Lightfoot, considers him “my
brother — we’re very connected.”
Busey’s accident, which fell on
Bridges’ 39th birthday, has made
him “more Gary Busey-ish than
ever,” Bridges adds. “It’s remark-
able how he’s thrived considering
what happened.”
Acting was a fallback plan for
Busey: The goal had always been
to make it as a rock star. In the
late 1960s, Busey, who was raised
in Tulsa, “came out to California
from Oklahoma State University
with a four-piece band called The
Rubber Band,” he explains. He
had a list of 10 names, the last of
which was Buddy Resnik, a music
manager who was impressed
with the band’s covers of BeachBoys and Beatles songs. (Busey
sang and played the drums.) They
started playing “little gigs in the
Valley” and recorded an album for
Epic Records. Around then, Busey
met an acting teacher who taught
him camera and cold-reading
technique. “I started landing jobs
right away: boom, boom, boom.”
His early credits were the kinds
of TV Westerns lovingly re-cre-
ated in Quentin Tarantino’s Once
Upon a Time in Hollywood. At first
he was cast as a day player with
no lines. He’d walk around the
set introducing himself to all the
departments, learning as much
as he could. “I was working on a
show called The High Chaparral,
and I was supposed to hit the star,
Leif Erickson, in the face with
a big stick while he was sleep-
ing,” he says. When the director
called “action,” Busey purposely
cast a shadow over Erickson’s
face, requiring retakes. It was a
risky strategy, but it paid off. “I’d
go from one day with no lines to
working three days with seven
lines. I didn’t do it to rebel, I did it
to survive.”
Like Cliff Booth, Brad Pitt’s rug-
ged stuntman in Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood, Busey, who played
college football, threw himself
into stunts and stunt driving:
He sped a Camaro with three
Panavision cameras strapped to
its hood up to 140 mph in 1976’s
The Gumball Rally. That same year,
Barbra Streisand was casting her
remake of A Star Is Born and, spot-
ting Busey on TV, thought he’d be
perfect to play the road manager
to Kris Kristofferson’s rock star.
The day Busey met withStreisand, the two drove in his
van from the Warner Bros. lot to
see Leon Russell at his house in
the Hollywood Hills — Busey was
playing drums for the rock legend
and Streisand had always wanted
to meet him. Later that afternoon,
Streisand sang one of Russell’s
tunes, “This Masquerade,” as
Russell accompanied her on
piano. “It wasn’t recorded,” Busey
recalls. “That would have been
a monumental classic forever.
But that’s the way art works:
Sometimes it comes through just
to let you taste it and see it. But
you can’t keep it.”
Jake was 4 at the time and
beginning to develop the aware-
ness that his childhood was
atypical — “backstages, movie
premieres, recording studios
and tour buses,” he says. “Willie
Nelson, Little Feat, Fleetwood
Mac and Leon Russell were over
on any given night. Nick Nolte was
a close pal. Our house in Malibu
was home of the afterparty.” He
remembers being awakened from
his sleep at 11 and asked to play
drums on a group jam. It wasn’t
unusual for Busey — deter-
mined to earn a reputation as the
“hardest-partying guy in town,”
Jake says — to stumble home in
the early-morning hours and pass
out for two to three days straight,
then disappear again for days.
Whatever normalcy Jake found, he
adds, was thanks to his mother,
Judy, whom Busey married in 1968
and divorced in 1990.
The family’s fortunes changed
with The Buddy Holly Story.
Busey credits the part to Joyce
Selznick, niece of Gone With the1“SOMETIMES ART COMES THROUGH JUST
TO LET YOU TASTE IT AND SEE IT.
BUT YOU CAN’T KEEP IT.”