An Improvised Life (7 page)

Offstage, this new identity as a known actor took some adjusting. And I didn’t have much time. It began immediately after the opening-night performance of
Enter Laughing
.

After the show, since there were no newspaper reviews to wait for at Sardi’s, a group of us—friends, family, and a few cast members—went across the street to a bar and had a couple of drinks while waiting for the television reviews.
The bartender flipped channels for us, and a split second after the reviews were broadcast, nearly all of them embarrassingly glowing, about eight people in the bar came rushing over with programs of the play for me to sign. Since they had programs, they had obviously been part of the audience, but they were waiting to see if I was someone whose signature was going to have any value!

It was my first view of the strange world of fandom, and with it came a moment of crystal-clear understanding. I realized that this sudden attention bestowed on me had little to do with affection for me or my work. Rather it had everything to do with people being connected to “someone of note,” and for the moment I was that person. It seemed to give them a sense of stature to be associated with a “celebrity,” someone who they perceived as having “done something.” And they weren’t even acting on their own perception. It was my acceptance by the media, a couple of three-minute reviews, that gave me stature, and their tenuous connection to me, by way of an autograph, now gave them some stature as well. It was a lesson I immediately understood, and it has stayed with me for all these years.

Although this idea of a “fan base” is part of the movie business, I really don’t get it. I don’t get the idea that actors think they can only do certain kinds of roles because they can’t disappoint their fans. I don’t get it when people say to me, about studio heads or producers, “They
love
you!” I recently asked one of my representatives not to tell me how much a casting director loved me. It’s fine to tell me they
like my work, but that has little to do with love. There’s a dangerous illusion, I think, in the perception that the fans love us. Love is a precious thing, and I want to save discussions about it for people I’ve at least met.

Over the years I’ve done some writing, mostly children’s books, but a couple of pieces for adults as well, and on occasion I’ve received letters from people who have read my work. Invariably they are notes of thanks and gratitude for my having given them something. But the world of show business is different. For some reason people who make movies are seen as public property. The impression is that in exchange for our celebrity we owe the fans something. They want our signature on 3-by-5 cards, and often not just one card but several. They want signatures on photographs, which they will sometimes provide, but often not, as if part of our job is to supply endless images of ourselves. There are requests for messages to loved ones on birthdays or anniversaries. There are endless questionnaires, both personal and professional. Over the past forty years I have had perhaps fifteen or twenty letters of thanks from people who feel that my work has in some way been a gift, and for these I am truly grateful. But those letters, although treasured, are few and far between. It’s as if what we do on screen or in the theater isn’t work at all but rather some fairytale imagined existence, and part of our job is to impart our secret and magical life to anyone who can get close enough to ask. No one seems to pay attention to how difficult a life it can be, and how many broken, fragmented
lives are connected to it, a sad fact that seems endemic to the world of show business. Add to this the fact that for a great many of us our work is a serious addiction, with all of the liabilities that accompany any dangerous addiction. Yet in our culture it can seem, to those looking on, that we are “only playing.” Only fooling around.

I’ve often felt that there could be a fun coffee-table book of exchanges between fans and celebrities. A few, which I’ve heard about from colleagues over the years, have been priceless. One of my favorite stories was one Eli Wallach told me years ago. He was in a Broadway show at the time, and one Sunday morning he was leaving Zabar’s loaded down with a couple of shopping bags filled with the usual New York Sunday-morning fare, when a lady grabbed him by the arm, stopping him cold and whipping him around. Holding him was a middle-aged woman staring at him intently, a big smile on her face. “I know you!” she said, wagging a finger. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,” she said, holding him captive in a vice-like grip. Eli loves attention, and is very good with people, so he waited patiently while she consulted the rolodex in her head of people he could have been. “Telly Savalas!” she finally blurted out. Eli said no. “Martin Balsam!” She yelled out the name as if she’d just won at bingo. Eli said no. “Peter Falk!” No, said Eli. “Efrem Zimbalist Jr.!” No. “Ben Gazzara!” No. Finally the woman gave up. “Who are you?” she demanded. “I’m Eli Wallach.” The woman clutched her heart; a beatific smile came over her face. “My favorite!” she said and walked away.

Tony Perkins told me about a time when he was sitting in the back of a cab—it was during a lull in his career—and saw the driver scrutinizing him in the rear-view mirror. After a while the cabbie, unable to contain himself, said, “Excuse me, but didn’t you used to be Tony Perkins?”

My favorite anecdote involving me took place years ago when I was on location, making a film. We’d stopped to shoot in Nashville for a couple of days, and one night a group of us went to dinner at what we heard was a good Italian restaurant. In the middle of the meal the maître d’ came over to me and said in a thick Italian accent, “I saw you in the movies last night.” “I don’t think you did,” I answered. I hadn’t done anything in a while, and nothing of mine was in theaters anywhere. “Yes I did,” he said again. “Last night I saw you in the movies.” “I don’t think so,” I said, wanting to get back to my dinner. “Nothing of mine is playing in town,” I told him and turned away. Not taking the hint, the maître d’ said, “I never forget a face. I saw you last night in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
.” “I wasn’t in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
,” I said, starting to get annoyed. “Yes you were,” insisted the maître d’. “Look,” I said, now a bit steamed. “I know what I was in and what I wasn’t in, and I wasn’t in
Diary of a Mad Housewife
.” “Yes you were,” the maître d’ repeated. “No I wasn’t!” I said, churning. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you where.” “Okay,” I said, giving in, and he went on: “I saw you sitting on the steps of the theater before the movie started. You were talking to a boy who was about twelve years old.” And he had me. I had
gone to see the movie the night before with my son Adam, and we had sat on the steps of the theater to talk for a few minutes before the film began. “You got me,” I said. “So what are you doing in town?” the maître d’ asked me, now that we were pals. “I’m a traveling salesman,” I said, “just passing through.”

It’s a strange life. But I’m in a good place in it. I’m a character actor. I don’t get mobbed; I can go anywhere and not feel as if my privacy is going to be intruded on. When I am approached in public these days it’s most often by people who have liked something I’ve done, and the exchanges tend to be fun and respectful. And once in a while I’m given a better seat on an airplane.

CHAPTER EIGHT

During the year at Second City in New York, and then throughout my run in
Enter Laughing
, even though everything was going exceedingly well professionally I had no life outside the theater. For all the good I did anyone I could have been hung up in a closet somewhere. In one memorable week three different people suggested that I should go into analysis. It was a wake-up call and I listened.

I had no idea what to expect from analysis. I didn’t know anyone who’d ever experienced it. During the first month I told the doctor a dream I had.

“It was terrible,” I said. “My brother Bob fell into a bear pit and the bars around the cage were too high for me to get in and save him. My poor brother. He was killed by the bears.”

“Who threw him in the bear pit?” the doctor said.

“Not me,” I answered.

“No?” the doctor asked. “Who had the dream?”

It was as if I’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four. I had the dream. There was someone inside. There was something going on within me that caused things to happen, things that I generated, in my personal life as well as my professional life. I had an identity. For my first thirty years I had marveled at my own acts as if they were created by some external power, as if I were a bystander to my own behavior. In spite of all the analysis I had done on characters I’d been playing, I had never given a thought to my own internal life, or whether I even had one. Like many people I saw myself as a force of nature that I had almost no control over, as an innocent bystander to my own life. With this one comment from my doctor, and my ability to recognize its implications, self-discovery became a second obsession.

There was a lot of work to do, plenty of bad behavior to get over. Having called myself an “artist” since I was five, I had a lot of examples to re-examine. “Well,” I’d say to myself, “Beethoven was a boor, but look what he gave to the world.” Or, “Mozart was irresponsible and childish, so what? Who would have him any other way? He was charming! He was mysterious! He made generations of people happy!” Excuse after excuse to be antisocial or selfish. The history books might forgive me, I thought at the time, while I was fantasizing my obituary, but I could no longer forgive myself for my inadequacies. They began to eat at me. And it started to become clear to me that I was alive in the present moment, and only then. Not in reviews,
not in photographs, not in my interviews or my imagined biographies, but right there in the moments that I drew breath and my heart was beating. The rest was ephemeral nonsense.

I stayed in
Enter Laughing
for a year. After my contract ended I went back to Second City for two months and then back on Broadway again to be in Murray Schisgal’s wonderful three-character play
Luv
, along with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. It too was a hit, and I remained in it for a year.

At the end of my commitment to
Luv
, I had my first screen test. It was for the part of a submarine officer in
The Russians Are Coming
. I told Norman Jewison, the director, that I’d do a screen test, but only if I could improvise it. He said okay, and I did the screen test, improvising several scenes, working off Norman who stayed behind the camera. I got the part and we did the film.

One of the things that attracted me to the project was its strong social statement. We were smack in the middle of the cold war at the time, and the film had the audacious message that Russians were human beings, pretty much like us. It sounds inane now, but at that moment in our history the Soviet Union was so demonized that making a movie that challenged that view was actually a pretty courageous thing to do. I think most of us in the cast were in accord with that mission, and it helped us bond as a group.

We very much expected a backlash of some kind, but to our amazement and delight, when the film came out, it
was as if the whole country breathed a sigh of relief. The relief was reflected in the reviews, and in the way people approached us—there was no backlash at all. It turned out that most of the country seemed to feel the same way we did, and hadn’t had the courage to come out and say it.

Norman spoiled me for most of the directors who I worked with after him. He loved actors and had no difficulty showing his appreciation for good work. He was also passionate about the script and its statement, and unlike most directors, who lock themselves and a few cronies in the screening room to look at dailies, Norman showed his dailies in the local movie theater and he invited the entire town. People would show up with their dogs, their babies, their grandparents, the halt and the lame, and every couple of weeks Norman would have to stand up in his seat and yell to the assembled town, “People, I’m going to have to ask you to leave your babies and dogs at home, because we can’t hear the sound track!” Everyone would comply for a few days and then he’d have to make the speech again.

During shooting, at the end of a scene Norman would sometimes let the camera keep rolling to see what would happen. In my zeal I just kept going until I heard him say “cut,” and as a result there is some improvisation in the film that had little to do with my desire to add to the material; I just didn’t want to make any mistakes. I didn’t hear anyone say “cut,” so I kept talking. I was desperate to do everything right.

From the beginning, film felt like the medium I had been waiting for. There was none of the terrible pressure of working in front of an audience and none of the endless grind of a long run. We’d work on a scene until it felt right and then go on to the next one. Making movies was the answer to my prayers.

It lasted half a decade. For about five years I had a pretty successful run of films; then, for no reason I could determine, my career took a dip. This is not an infrequent occurrence in an actor’s life. No matter how smoothly things are going, the tide comes in, the tide goes out. It’s not pleasant, and it tends to feels personal. And if you’re not careful, it’s easy to start blaming people for it.