An Improvised Life (2 page)

The first person I told was a regular on the show, a woman I had worked with for some time. She was a fine actress and a lovely person. “I have bad news,” I said to her, as gently as I could, trying to brace her. “So and so’s been fired.” The woman’s jaw fell open and she froze for a few seconds while she kept looking at me. Then she said, “Can you see the look on my face?” She pointed to her face and held the expression. I knew immediately what she was doing. She’d had a spontaneous reaction, but it was too good to just feel and let go, so she was taking note and filing it away for future reference. It might be useful later on, in some performance. She wanted me to notice it, too. I could see her checking my reaction to her now-frozen expression, paying careful attention to how much I was moved by it, which would let her know if the look was effective.

I fell into immediate despair. Not just for her, but for myself too, because I had done the same thing on countless occasions. It is a habit that now fills me with revulsion—a habit perhaps valuable for the actor, and for his craft, but not so good for the human being living inside.

From my earliest memory I had the strong sense that every character trait, every emotional condition possessed by the personalities I saw on screen, was accessible to me. In some deep place I always believed that what anyone else was feeling or doing, whether it be an act of heroism or cowardice or compassion or greed or villainy or anything in between, whatever the characters were going through emotionally was possible for me. I sensed that the entire range of emotions possessed by one human being was universal and available to everyone. Each of us had our own emphases and proclivities, but I intuitively believed that all of us were possessed of the entire spectrum of human feelings, and nothing that I’ve seen or felt since has convinced me otherwise.

Further, I had an instinct, even in those early days, that art was the direct injection of the artist’s experiences into the audience, and that this transfusion was the highest purpose of all the arts. I felt that the epiphanies I’d had as a result of seeing other people’s work, of exposure to other people’s imaginations, whether through their acting or
music or literature or painting, is what made the artists’ experiences my own. I knew that these emotional adventures, transmitted from other people’s triumphs or failures, were as real and tangible to me as a mathematical equation or a physics experiment. The artists’ mastery of their craft gave them an invisible hypodermic injection that when inserted into me made me more than what I was. I could feel their essence working in my blood, and I knew myself to be capable of all manner of great and courageous things as a result of the art I’d been exposed to. The problem with these feelings, induced through the art of others, was that as real as they were, they didn’t last. As I’d put down the book I was reading, or come out of the theater with my heart pounding and my imagination racing, there was no question that I could perform the same acts of transcendent courage or self-sacrifice that I saw and felt performed by the heroes whose lives I had become enmeshed in. But as the day wore on and my own daily activities and relationships came back into focus, the images and feelings inspired by whatever art form had riveted me would fade away and I’d be faced with my own fears and my own inadequacies. It was a deeply frustrating problem and one that I struggled with for years. What I realize now is that this is a good and healthy problem because it forces us, if we take the arts seriously, to constantly pit our own range of emotions and abilities against those behaviors that we can now feel are possible if we work on ourselves with patience and diligence.

At that time in my life I was unaware that I had any materials within me to work on. I had no sense that I myself was a work in progress, and that I was as malleable and formable as any character in a book or any piece of music or theatrical performance that I’d ever witnessed. It was an idea that had to wait many years for me to encounter consciously, and then many more years to embrace and work on. In short, at a very young age I’d become an addict. A film junkie. With all the dangers found in any other type of addiction. And like many addictions it pointed the way to something real and beautiful, but it also ran the risk of ruining my life.

CHAPTER TWO

My uncle Sandy was a fighter pilot during World War II. He flew a P-38, and between combat missions he wrote letters to my father saying, “If I make it through this war alive I’m going to buy a car and we’re all going to move to California.” Sandy made it through the war alive, came home with a chest full of medals, and immediately went out and bought a car.

I don’t remember any of the arrangements, how we got past my parents quitting their jobs, what happened with the furniture and all our belongings, how they found a place to move to, the many good-byes, all of which were a blur for me, but in what seemed like just days I found myself squashed in the back seat of a sedan with my mother and brother, Sandy up front driving, my dad acting as copilot, and all of us heading to a new life in California. Through another uncle, who had written songs for several major films, my father had an introduction to someone in
one of the film studios who could possibly help him to get work as a scene painter.

Consistent with a lot of my father’s luck, the job didn’t pan out. The week we arrived in Los Angeles a strike was called in the studios that lasted six months, and my father’s first and only opportunity in the movie business dried up, but I was in heaven. We were in L.A. The golden land. The place where all my dreams would come true. We were in the movie capital of the world and I knew I’d be discovered within ten minutes of arriving.

Our first home was in the hills directly above Hollywood Boulevard, and every day after school I’d hike down to that magic street in the hopes that something major and life-changing would happen to me. Once I saw Sidney Toler, the actor who’d played Charlie Chan, and another time I passed Charlie Ruggles striding briskly down the boulevard, dressed to the teeth. Other than knowing they were professionals, I barely knew who they were, and I wasn’t a fan of either actor, but seeing them in person, two honest-to-God, real-life movie stars, walking down the street just like ordinary people, thrilled me more than if I’d seen the president of the United States. There they were in three dimensions, real and tangible people. Their heads were no larger than mine, no matter how big they’d seemed in the movie theaters. It gave me hope.

I enrolled in junior high and found that miraculously there was a course called
acting
in the curriculum. It was taught by a warm, wonderful woman named Mrs. Lewis,
who enjoyed her students and loved the process of putting on plays. We felt safe with her, and we all took chances, and had a terrific time. I felt nurtured and cared for and appreciated in school for perhaps the first time in my life. Her class was virtually the only thing I remember from junior high.

In high school things weren’t as promising. The drama teacher was a failed actor with a lantern jaw and long grey hair. He looked like a cliché from a third-rate Shakespearean touring company, which is exactly what he’d been. His primary activity was telling us endless stories of his triumphs in little theaters around the country. Back then, we were properly impressed. The one comment I can remember his making about my work, probably casual on his part, seared me like a branding iron. “You might end up being a comedian,” he said, “but you’ll never be an actor.” His remark was tossed off, something he probably forgot the minute he said it, but now fifty years later it still lives with me. Without his help or encouragement I auditioned for all the school plays and got leads in every one. There was also a course in radio broadcasting taught by a wonderful woman named Lucy Assadorian. She was a tiny, immaculately dressed, beautiful woman who was worshipped by every boy in the class. With her encouragement, along with the radio plays we put on in her class and the stage plays I was cast in, I managed to survive high school.

Throughout the entire four years, I don’t believe I ever opened a work of nonfiction. I cut every possible class to
hang out in the theater, forging the names of teachers and my parents whenever I had to. The teachers used to say to me on a regular basis, “Alan, you could do
so much
for this school if you put your mind to it.” I didn’t want to put my mind to it. I didn’t want to do anything for the school. It wasn’t doing much for me and I thought it only fair to reciprocate. How I graduated remains a mystery.

Chorus was of some interest to me. So was a class in ceramics run by a Miss Beatty, a wonderfully imaginative, eccentric, and completely unappreciated woman who at one point literally chased me around her studio with a glaze pot in an attempt to have me at least
try
to work with the stuff. I refused. All of my ceramics remained rough terra cotta. I also remember one history teacher, Mr. Engles, a thoroughly decent man with a passion for history so great that he allowed us to approach the subject from any vantage point that made sense to us, and in any form that we could identify with. In his classroom I wrote my first play. It was on the topic of slavery in the United States. I think I got an
A
. Probably the only grade above a
C
I received in my four years there.

High school consistently made me feel as if I were in prison, but being in plays sustained me. I lived for the rehearsals and performances. It was the only arena in which I felt that I had any identity and any purpose. As I write this it seems strange to think that for so many years my sense of comfort and identity was secured only when I was being someone else, but I think this is true of many actors.
My own unformed personality found grounding and shape in the words and actions of the characters in the scripts, and I would turn into the characters during rehearsals and stay within them until long after the plays had finished their runs.

It was around this time that I began to study guitar. Like most of my hobbies, playing the guitar began as an attempt to keep my mind off acting, and gave me something to occupy my mind when I didn’t have a part in a play. I worked hard at the guitar, and soon got good enough to perform at functions around L.A. I masqueraded as a folk singer, but I was a maverick within the folk scene because folk music wasn’t a particular passion of mine. I was more interested in jazz, but wasn’t disciplined enough to learn jazz guitar.

At that time there was a singer who’d become very popular in folk circles, a big, impressive black woman with a huge voice and commanding presence who wowed audiences throughout Los Angeles. We’d often be on the same bill together and I was never comfortable listening to her. I could never understand her success. She sang the music of her people, spirituals and blues, and some gospel, but what she was doing never worked for me. There was something about her that I found annoying, and I couldn’t figure out what it was until a couple of years later when I heard Mahalia Jackson and it all clicked. This woman on the folk circuit was singing the pain of her people, the pain of being black, the pain of her life, and I suppose she struck the same false note in me that was struck by my mother’s friend in
the living room, when I was eight. Mahalia Jackson on the other hand made me cry. “What was the difference between this woman on the circuit and Mahalia Jackson?” I asked myself, and I struggled with this question for weeks until I finally realized that Mahalia Jackson’s singing was a joyful
release
from the pain of her life. Her pain and suffering were present in her singing, there was no way for her to escape; in every note she sang it was clear that she’d had a huge burden to carry, but she was singing to rise above it. Singing to liberate herself from her pain and to share the joy of the music with anyone who cared to listen. The woman on the folk circuit was simply singing her pain. In doing so she was inflicting it on me, making me feel as if I owed her something, and that it was somehow my job to alleviate her suffering. I wanted to be like Mahalia Jackson.

In those days I thought that my feelings about other people’s performances were objective. I felt there was a component to an actor’s work that went beyond taste and personal preference. I still feel that way in part, although I also recognize that there is a time when people are ready for certain emotional experiences and not for others. There have been times in my life when I’ve dismissed certain works of art as being stupid or boring, only to find a couple of decades later that I was not mature enough at the time to appreciate them. It’s hard to admit we don’t understand something. I am still amazed, for example, at someone’s being afraid of Beethoven. I’ve known people who can’t listen to his music because it’s too emotionally arousing or overwhelming
for them. But for me, Beethoven’s music was for decades almost as crucial as eating or drinking. His work was a prod into a life of courage, a life embraced totally with all its pain and all its challenges, and for many years I felt that I almost couldn’t live without his music. Had I been afraid of what Beethoven’s music evoked in me I think that fact alone would have given me reason to listen to it, to try and decipher my fears and attempt to understand and get beyond them.