"A Tree Grows In Hollywood"

First person by Bill Pullman

Born and raised in upstate New York, the star of Zero Effect knows how to bring the best of rural living to the big city.

For six years, I’ve been living on a cul-de-sac in the old part of Hollywood, where you don’t find celebrities much anymore. Last fall, some neighbors and I said, "Let’s have a block party." I volunteered to sponsor go-cart races, so I got four mechanic’s creepers (the things you lie on to work under a car), and we stuck racecar flags around and set up microphones. An hour before the party, I thought, This is a dumb idea, no one’s going to come. But everyone did come—timidly at first—and it was a great mix. The next week, I found several notes in my mailbox saying the neighborhood felt transformed. Some people had lived there for 30 years and had met their current neighbors for the first time. It made me wonder if part of the impulse came from a need to connect in a small-town way—as my family did.

My father grew up in Brooklyn, but he fell in love with the Adirondacks when he went there for summer camp. So after medical school in Rochester, New York, he drove south until he found a city in which to practice—Hornell, in New York State’s southern tier.

Hornell’s big moment was in the 1940s, when its locomotive shop was the pride of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad. But by 1954, the Erie had switched from steam to diesel power. Hornell had lost one-third of its population by the 1970s. I remember thinking, Are we still a city? Someone said, "Well, we’re a big town." They defined that as a town with at least one elevator—the hospital had one, so we qualified (I borrowed from that try-hard-even-if-you’re-small attitude when naming my film company Big Town Productions).

Rural towns aren’t always idyllic. It’s easy to feel trapped and be aware of social hypocrisy. But my father’s patients would drop off Christmas presents; we’d find fresh fish wrapped in newspaper outside our door. Widows and widowers were invited for holiday dinners. There was an idea of accepting everyone; there was no sense of exclusion.

There was also an undercurrent of desperation about the town’s sagging image. They put up booster signs with slogans like "It’s Swell in Hornell." As teenagers we mocked it. Yet it made me sensitive to the town’s identity crisis: How does an underdog pull itself up? I’ve always related to that—in Hornell you had to create a positive self-image no matter how others saw you.

Oddly, I’ve been brought into a conflict the town is facing now. A pharmacy chain is threatening to demolish four historic houses near the one I grew up in to build a drive-thru superstore. The money they’re offering is beyond anyone’s expectations, yet the town could cannibalize its heritage and never quite recover. I’m on the side of the preservationists—but whichever faction prevails, I trust the town has enough character to be able to heal the wounds.

The area has always had character-building opportunities. As a kid, I worked on a dairy farm every summer. And my parents bought a tree farm (which we still run) outside town in 1953, the year I was born. For about $1,000 they got 200 acres, and we planted hundreds of pine and fir seedlings.

I have my own agrarian indulgence now—two and a half acres in Hollywood where I’ve planted over 50 varieties of fruit trees. I’ve got grapefruits, tangerines, plums, peaches, apricots, kumquats, limes, lemons, oranges, mulberries, apples, walnuts, quince, cherimoyas, and black and white sapotes.

People say there are no seasons in LA. But with fruit trees, you’re very aware of the year passing. In spring, when the loquats come in, I love to watch my kids stand under the tree and munch on them. It’s a constant pleasure to see them get past the bumps and spots on the fruit to realize it’s as good as—or better than—store-bought. Like the struggles of a small town, the bruises and imperfections remind you that nature is challenging. And if you can embrace it all, you’ll be the richer for it.

In Style Magazine