An Improvised Life (4 page)

When Benjamin finished telling us the story we sat silently for a while, silent and enthralled. Afterward, on the trip home I thought about what had happened. This moment, this tiny moment in the play, so moving to Benjamin when he had seen it some forty years earlier, had now deeply affected a group of acting students six thousand miles and two generations away from where it had taken place—the work of an extra in a huge production riddled with extras. It had been a passing moment in a play about something else. It had lasted perhaps fifteen seconds of stage time. Not one word had been spoken and yet the work of this extra had crossed seas, mountains, countries, languages, and decades, to be shared by us in an acting class and moving us as deeply as if it had just happened.

I have rarely had such a sense of the power of this strange profession I am in.

CHAPTER FOUR

One day, sometime in 1954, out of nowhere I received a long-distance call from John Bennes. The year before, he and I had been in a terrible production of
The Merchant of Venice
. We became friends and then he disappeared off the face of the Earth.

“Where the hell are you?” I yelled over the phone.

“Vermont,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I got a scholarship to Bennington College here.”

“Isn’t that a girls’ school?” I asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Well done!” I said.

“You want to come? I can recommend you.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Just show up. I can get you an interview with the guy who does the interviews.”

“How did you get a scholarship to a girls’ school, or should I ask?” I said.

“They keep four guys on campus to act in the plays. You can take classes, get credits, and graduate. Among other things,” he replied.

“I’m broke,” I said. “What’s it going to cost me?”

“Zip,” John replied. “You get room, board, tuition, and maid service.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

With a change of clothes, a loaf of bread, half a pound of cheese, and a salami, I said some good-byes, put my entire savings—all twenty dollars of it—in my jeans, and started hitch-hiking to Vermont. When I got hungry I stopped at railroad trestles, cut up some cheese, salami, and bread with a pocket knife, and stared down at the tracks. If it rained, I’d find a car, crawl under it, and take a nap. At the time it all felt very romantic and European. I look back at it now with my heart in my mouth.

It took about a week to get to Bennington. By the time I arrived, my friend Bennes had left. I think he got a job in a play somewhere but I never found out. Once on campus, I brushed the road off my leather jacket, walked into the administration office, and told them my business. To my relief I learned that my interview was still on the schedule. They directed me to the home of Howard Nemerov, who was the head of the English Department and soon to be poet laureate of the United States. The news didn’t make me particularly comfortable; this was starting to feel way out of my league. I walked to Nemerov’s home, wandering past pristine New England cottages that comprised most of the campus,
feeling like an extra in a Judy Garland movie. I found the place and knocked on the door. Nemerov opened it, invited me in, sat me down, and proceeded to question me about theater, film, and literature while immediately plying me with numerous martinis, the first I’d ever had. To my delight, they made me very happy and reasonably articulate. They seemed to have the same effect on him. The professor and I proceeded to get plastered together, and got along famously. So famously, in fact, that he accepted me into the college without even bothering to ask for my Los Angeles City College transcripts, which, fortunately for me, had not yet arrived. The transcripts didn’t get to Bennington for another two weeks. Once they did come, they were read by the admissions people with considerable dismay, but it was too late to get rid of me. I was Nemerov’s guy. The professor and I were old drinking buddies by then, and the die had been cast. Through a series of accidents and miracles, I was now one of the drama guys.

I was happy to leave L.A. City College. I didn’t like the kind of work they were doing there. It felt stagy and artificial. The actors were all pre-Brando types, talking at the tops of their lungs, trying to impress each other, and mostly demonstrating their talents in the hallways rather than on the stage. The professors were people who hadn’t made it in the profession and were busy using the students as their captive audience, posturing and enunciating as if their lives depended on it. Our job was to applaud their performances. I had turned sullen and incommunicative, and didn’t fit in at
all. There or anywhere else for that matter. A friend of mine who’d been with me at L.A. City College told me that years later, after I’d had some success, it was said about me, “We didn’t understand him then, and we don’t understand him now.” Their reaction delighted me to no end.

At Bennington there were plenty of sullen, maladjusted types like me, and I fit right in. Also, there were martinis galore, whenever I stretched out my arm. It was a glorious two years and would have made a good premise for a sit-com. I met a lot of rich co-eds, did a lot of acting, and drank a lot of martinis. My parents were going through a very difficult financial time, and to cover my expenses they sent me, believe it or not, a dollar a month, which, at the time—with room, food, and tuition all covered by the school—was all I seemed to need.

There were two professors in the drama department, and both of them had a profound effect on me, but for very different reasons. One was Larry Arrick, an intense, brilliant, young aspiring director who pushed me further along in the direction that Benjamin had been taking me. The other, after directing me as Bill Walker in a production of
Major Barbara
, criticized my work by saying it was too improvisational. He wanted me to pin down the part precisely, without any variations. He gave me a poor grade on the performance, and his assessment really annoyed me. I had worked hard on the part, and felt happy with what I was doing. He had no problem with my core interpretation of the role, and admitted that the central idea remained
consistent from performance to performance. His criticism was related to embellishments that I needed to change each night, depending on what was taking place at the moment. I told him that this was the way I wanted to play the part, that my choices were intentional, and this was the way I wanted to approach my work.

The professor didn’t have any interest in my approach or my needs, and his disapproval became a turning point for me. I had always been good about taking criticism from directors, but not this time. This man was so far from understanding what I was about that he actually helped me define what kind of an actor I wanted to be—needed to be. The thought of doing something exactly the same way, over and over again, felt like the death of any kind of creativity. I didn’t know where my work was headed, but I knew that it couldn’t be where this teacher was pointing.

The scholarship lasted a couple of years, during which time I tried to apply myself to academic work, but it was too late. My inadequate skills at writing papers, even of thinking linearly, caught up with me, and I either quit or got kicked out depending on who you talk to. It was probably a combination of both. What didn’t help matters was that on the spur of the moment I had married a music and dance student at the college, Jeremy Yaffe. She was eighteen, I was twenty-one; the school was not pleased. We left the college and headed to New York without a thought in our heads of what would happen next. Within a couple of weeks, we found out that Jeremy was pregnant.

Floundering in New York with a pregnant wife to care for, I tried looking for acting work to no avail. I wanted desperately to be responsible. I even attempted a few real jobs, the kinds of jobs grown-ups do, but I couldn’t do them. I remember one that consisted of sitting in a dimly lit room with a large herd of people—a set designed by Terry Gilliam—a nightmare place with automatons sitting silently at desks, checking numbers written on endless small slips of paper. I sat there for about three hours, checking my numbers, warding off a panic attack, but finally breaking into a cold sweat. I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, then went to the overseer and told him I had to go to the bathroom. He said okay, and I ran down about ten flights of stairs and never looked back, leaving an expensive sports jacket in my wake as well as a huge pile of unchecked numbers.

I couldn’t do jobs. I was constitutionally unable to devote myself to anything outside the arts, pregnant wife or no pregnant wife. As a stopgap, just to pay for food, I connected with a group of young folk singers, with Erik Darling on banjo and Bob Carey on guitar. They were looking for an additional voice and I thought, “Why the hell not?” It would be a way of earning a few bucks on weekends, while looking for acting work. The group was called The Tarriers, from the Irish folksong “Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill.”
Tarrier
means worker. We were often referred to as “The Terriers,” but we didn’t care much.

To our own immense surprise we started getting decent jobs, and quickly landed a recording contract. We put out a
couple of hit songs, and for a couple of years I traveled with them around the United States and Canada, and through much of Europe. The money was good enough that Jeremy and our son Adam, who was now nearly one year old, could join me on most of our travels, Adam many nights sleeping in a hotel bathtub with a blanket for a lining. We were young; we’d never been to Europe before, and for a while it was a great adventure. And in my naïveté I thought singing in a successful group would be an entrée into the theater. But of course no such thing happened.

One day, after a whirlwind tour of Switzerland and Germany, we were in the middle of a show at the legendary Olympia theater in Paris. I looked down at myself with a guitar strapped around my neck, a checked shirt opened practically to the navel, black satin pants shining away, and I said, “What the hell is this? Who am I?” Everything felt strange and surreal. I missed acting. I missed having a home. After the show I told the other guys that I’d be leaving after the few weeks that remained of the tour.

The tour over, Jeremy, Adam, and I returned to the States and I went back to looking for acting work in New York. None came. After many months I was offered a job in an off-Broadway play. I was hired because they needed a lute player. I’d never seen a lute in my life, but it had six strings, like a guitar, which I thought was close enough. I tuned it as best I could, sang an old English folk song to the director, and got the job. I had about six lines in the play and earned more money than anyone else in the cast because the
musicians’ union paid better than Actors’ Equity. The cast’s retribution was that I was shunned from all backstage conversations about acting, since I was a lowly musician. The play had a very good run, well over a year, at which point I put away my lute and tunic and went back to being an unemployed actor, now with a wife and son to look after.

Some months later I got a call from the husband of a friend of mine from Bennington. His name was David Shepherd and he was forming an improvisational group to play for the summer at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis. I auditioned for him, got a place in the troupe of four, moved Jeremy and Adam out to St. Louis, and spent a few months working professionally at my craft for the first time in my life. It was hard work because I wasn’t initially adept at improvisation. I wasn’t loose enough or facile enough.

Sometime during the summer, a man named Paul Sills came down from Chicago to see the group. One night, after the show, he approached me and said if I ever wanted a job in Chicago I should look him up. I thanked him profusely but inwardly said, “Fat chance. I’m not going to bury myself in Chicago for a hundred dollars a week. I’m going to have a career in New York.”

In the middle of the summer Jeremy informed me she was pregnant again. We returned to New York, me once again without a job and with no prospects. Finally, the insecurity of our life became too much for Jeremy, and within months of the birth of our second son, Matthew, she took the children and left.

I held out in New York for another year, deeply missing my family, praying for something to present itself; nothing did. In a state of complete despair I called this man Sills to see if the job in Chicago was still available.

Making that call was like phoning in my own obituary. Taking this job would absolutely end my chances of doing anything major in either New York or Los Angeles. In no way did I think it could lead back to theater, or film. Chicago had no theatrical importance in those days; this felt like a death sentence for my career.

But another part of me said, “What have I got to lose? Nothing’s happening here; I’m giving up a myth. At least I’ll be working at my craft for the first time in my life. I’ll be eating, and I’ll be able to send money to Jeremy and help out with the kids.”

I called Sills and said I was ready to come to Chicago if the job was still open. He said it was, so once again I packed up and headed out of town toward an uncertain future. The name of the hole-in-the-wall theater was Second City, and within six months we were getting national attention. That was fifty years ago, and Second City is still going strong.