HBOs My Dinner With Herv depicts the wildand tragiclife of TVs most infamous sidekick
IN 1993, SACHA GERVASI WAS IN THE NEWSROOM of Britain’s Daily Mail, surrounded by banks of TV sets. The freelance journalist, 26 at the time, was pitching ideas for stories to the paper’s Sunday magazine, You, when a familiar figure popped up on one of the screens: Hervé Villechaize, star of the kitschy ’70s TV series Fantasy Island. You know, Tattoo, the diminutive, white-suited sidekick to an identically dressed Ricardo Montalban. The one who shouted, “Da plane! Da plane!”
What happened to that fucking guy? Gervasi thought. Is he even alive? Some digging revealed that yes, he was. A cache of articles detailed Villechaize’s rise (beginning with the 1974 James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, playing Nick Nack) and spectacular fall: drinking, drugs, self-destructive meltdowns, a messy divorce, and lots and lots of women: “You Haven’t Lived Until You’ve Had a Naked, Chocolate-Covered Dwarf in the Shower With You,” read one National Enquirer headline. On paper, and otherwise, what writer could resist that story?
Villechaize on his own wasn’t worth a trip to Los Angeles, but Gervasi’s You editor agreed to run a short, “jokey” piece if he could find the time between interviewing the stars of Beverly Hills 90210, the biggest TV show at the time, and novelist Elmore Leonard. “The 90210 stars were not particularly memorable,” says Gervasi, and Leonard cancelled at the last minute. But Villechaize? “That interview changed my life.”
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\"I read about three scripts, and at the end of each there was a little twist, a little turn, [and] it was funny.\"
