An Improvised Life (8 page)

When it happened to me I continued to get work, but offers came less often, with scripts that I didn’t love, and with directors who did not enthrall me. This is a part of my past that I am not terribly proud of—my difficulty dealing with people in positions of authority, for whom I had no respect. If I was faced with a director who I thought was incompetent or cruel, I would become insufferable and I would not communicate. If he gave me an idea I didn’t like, I would dismiss it abruptly, often rudely.

This grandiose attitude of mine went on for a couple of years, during which time I was offered the lead in a film called
Popi
, a biting social satire about the plight of Puerto
Ricans in New York. It made a wonderful statement and, finally, I was getting a chance to play a rich and complex character, exactly the kind of material I wanted to do.

Halfway through the film we had to do a scene that involved the decapitation of a pigeon. It was an ugly and violent moment, but it wasn’t gratuitous; it had meaning in context of the film. In the scene the decapitated pigeon was going to be used to taunt my two children, and was meant to point up some of the barbarism that the kids were exposed to in their lives. Minutes before the scene was to be shot I asked the assistant director how they were going to film cutting the head off the pigeon. He said, “They’re just going to do it. They’re going to cut the head off the pigeon.”

I hit the roof. I ran over to the producers. “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. “You’re going to show how awful violence is by committing violence? What are you, crazy?” I threatened them, I screamed obscenities, and I ultimately bullied them into finding another method for depicting the scene, which they grudgingly did, unhappy about slowing down the schedule but more afraid of my anger and threats. It was a time in my life when I was unsure of how to handle my position in a film. I felt, sometimes too vehemently, that since I was in a position of at least some leadership I needed to champion the rights of the other people involved, and in this case even animals who were not in a position to speak for themselves. In
Popi
I had already taken it upon myself to make demands on behalf of some of the extras working on the film, and also some of the people from whom we’d
rented apartments in Spanish Harlem to use as sets, all of whom felt they’d been treated unfairly by the producers. The pigeon was the last straw.

After I cooled down and had a chance to think about what had taken place, I was struck by the several levels of irony contained in the event. Here was a scene devoted to pointing a finger at man’s barbarity, and in depicting it, by killing the pigeon, we were going to use the same cruel methods we were decrying in the script. But to add to the knot of ironies, to stop the producer’s callousness and cruelty I had flown into a bullying rage, adding my own brand of inhumanity to the mess we were concocting.

It felt like layer upon layer of confusion, and the incident resounded in me for a long time.

I sought clarity by visiting a trusted teacher. He knew me well—my easy ability to find outrage in the injustices of the world as well as in the shortcomings of others. He knew my sense of self-righteousness and my temper. At the moment of this visit I was also complaining about the lousy notes I was getting from a particular director, who I didn’t respect at all, and how I wasn’t following them. He heard my grievance and said, “It might be interesting to try to follow his directions. See what happens.”

His response shocked me. Why should I listen to the ideas of a director who was completely incompetent? His credits were nowhere as impressive as mine. I had major awards, what had he done? I didn’t understand why I was being instructed to follow the directions of someone who
was clearly not up to my exacting standards. But at that time I found it wise to abide by this trusted teacher’s instructions, whether I understood them or not. So for the rest of that film, in fact for several films after, I vowed to put my own ego aside and try every idea that a director would throw at me.

And interesting things started to happen. Often the idea was indeed terrible, and when I attempted to perform it to the best of my ability, it just didn’t work. But sometimes it did work. And my performance was better for it, and the film was improved. And the distinction between the good ideas and the bad ones was always clear.

Then other things started to happen that were even more important. First, as a result of my resolve to cooperate, my relationships with directors improved. I realized that a few of them had been afraid of me; this was no longer the case. We were now allies, and though I still might have reservations about their talent, they were colleagues with whom I could have a civilized and productive dialogue, and together we could steer the film in a direction that could excite us both. This was a lesson that stood me in good stead, both in my profession and in my personal life.

The lesson of the pigeon stayed with me as well.

I was about five years into therapy, and while my work with my doctor was tearing down walls in my emotional life, it was also opening a window into the wall that had separated my professional and personal lives. I had never thought of myself as a violent person, but now I was confronted
with the daunting task of recognizing that the inhumanity I was so eager to denounce in the
Popi
script was alive and well in me.

The realization ate at me, and I finally saw that I could no longer allow myself to feel this great self-congratulatory surge that I see in so many artists who have participated in a work that has some social value. I have seen the irony played out too often—the thinking is that since they have done something deeply significant and even courageous in “bringing this important message to the screen,” they are allowed some special license in their own behaviors, and I wonder how many acts of selfishness and mindlessness have been perpetrated on co-workers, family members, and employees to get the humanitarian message across, and how much money has been made in the process.

We live with the illusion that the ends are worth the means. That in art, the message in the final product will justify the lack of humanity that took place during the making of the work. In this period, for reasons I still don’t understand, I started to see the discrepancies not only in others but in myself as well, and I could no longer allow myself to get away with that kind of behavior. When I caught myself acting that way, and it was more often than I wanted to admit, it stayed with me and I suffered for it. My memory could no longer rub out the moments of cruelty and callousness I’d perpetrated on others because of some pursuit that seemed noble in my own mind, the ends being more important than the means, and what I discovered, finally, is
that there are no ends. What seem like ends are simply arbitrary signposts we put up for ourselves in order to make us comfortable, to give ourselves the illusion that we are finished with something. The blessing of the event with the pigeon was that it had rubbed my nose in my own complicity in this behavior, and I could no longer allow myself to get away with it.

CHAPTER NINE

After about five years of intense work with my therapist, I began to feel that analysis had its limitations. It helped me get rid of some fears, and it opened my eyes to an interior life, but I was starting to come up against things for which Freud didn’t seem to have answers, or even any interest. I started having deep and significant breakthroughs that took me into other realities. I had several dramatic experiences that suggested strongly the possibility of other lives, which were disconcerting to say the least, but were as tangible and transforming as anything I’d ever experienced, and my doctor, who was a good and responsible man, couldn’t help me with what I was discovering. In addition, when confronting him with issues that didn’t seem to be solvable, he’d come back with “Well, that’s the human condition,” or some statement that was the equivalent of “Well, I never promised you a rose garden.” This idea infuriated me. The suggestion that the best we could hope for in our personal lives was settling for endless disappointment
and mediocrity sounded like a cop-out. He might not have promised me a rose garden, but there were people out there who had rose gardens, and I wanted one. Occasionally I’d meet people and see a look in their eyes that told me they’d achieved some sort of peace and joy, some ability to relax into themselves, and it made me feel hungry and envious. If it was possible for someone else, it was possible for me.

Shortly after finishing the filming of
Catch-22
I began reading a lot of Eastern philosophy, Buddhist and Vedantic, mostly, and I also started meditating. The transformations that took place from these new levels of awareness were dramatic, sometimes frightening, often disorienting, and changed me so much that within a couple of years I began not to recognize myself. There was a great shift in my philosophy and belief systems, but the intellectual aspects of the changes were only interesting sidelights compared to the fundamental changes that took place within me, tangible, physical changes in my body along with a deeper awareness of the world within and around me.

For example, there was an occasion about three years into my early work with my first meditation teacher when I woke up in the middle of the night feeling as if my heart had exploded. I had never had any concern about my heart, never had any pathology, but I was sure I was having a heart attack. For some reason, instead of calling a doctor I called my teacher and asked him if I should rush to a hospital. Instead of pointing me to the nearest emergency room,
he congratulated me. “Your heart has opened,” he said. “It’s a great blessing. Relax and enjoy it.”

Now I don’t recommend that everyone who feels their heart “explode” follow this advice—but in my case, at that moment, and given my new awareness of mind and body, I relaxed into the sensation and within half an hour the explosive feelings in my chest subsided, yet for many months afterward I felt out of balance.

There was a new heat in the middle of my chest, and my center of gravity went through a shift; even my posture changed. I was living in a new place inside my body and it took a long time to adjust to what was feeling like a new me.

I had read a lot of material in mystical literature on the seven vortexes in our bodies, and learned that a good part of our work is to awaken these vortexes, but reading about them was like reading science fiction, interesting conceptually, but who the hell knew if it was true? There was no way to verify any of it. Before the heart episode I had no place to put any of that exciting but far-out information. Now I did, but it required that I rethink who I was because the new sensations in my chest were insisting that I react in new ways to almost all the situations in my life. It also meant that to a certain extent I needed to re-examine my acting technique.

There was an actor named Michael Chekhov, popular in the 1930s, who had also been an acting teacher of some reputation. He had stumbled onto the theory of these psychic centers, these vortexes, intuitively I suppose, and he used
this idea as part of his teaching method. His idea was that each of us is locked up in certain parts of our bodies and open in others, and that most of us are focused in one particular spot. People with energy focused in their lower back would feel and act a certain way, their emotional lives reflecting this specific weight and concentration. People who are focused in their throats would behave in another way. People in their hearts, yet another. Playing with this idea, thinking of myself as being weighted or having more life in one specific area of my body, immediately gave me a completely different sense of who I was, emotionally as well as in essence. In imitating people, which I’d done since I was a kid, I realized that I’d been using Chekhov’s method intuitively for most of my life. Now with my heart having exploded open and being forced to live more fully in that area, I realized for the first time that this place within me had been closed all my life. Now I was thrust into feeling myself in a new way.

At first it was disconcerting and frightening. The heart, from a metaphysical standpoint, is just what you would expect it to be, a place of love and connection and vulnerability. Somewhere along the line I had shut it down, for my own reasons, and I didn’t particularly enjoy this new vulnerability, not to mention its effect on my instincts about a character I might be playing.

The new sensations threw me for a loop. It took many months to readjust to the new me, and once I did, a new opening took place somewhere else in my system that would require seeing myself in yet another light, and once again this
would force me into adjusting to a new physical center of gravity. This has continued to happen right up to the present. Not as dramatically as that first experience with the heart, but dramatically enough so that my sense of myself as an entity, an energy field, has become fluid rather than fixed. Our energetic perception of ourselves is as profound a statement of who we are as anything else about us, and each time these energy fields go through a transmutation, a shift, we have to re-examine ourselves. We feel differently, within ourselves and in our relationship to the outside world. And when we feel differently we behave differently, and when we behave differently, as actors, we have to change our techniques, our approaches to our work, the places we work from.

When I did
Catch-22
, I worked with Tony Perkins, who was a delightful, kind, and literate man. For some reason the moment he appeared before a camera things became painful for him. Just before the word “action,” Tony would unfailingly say, “Oh God, where did I go wrong.” It was the place he worked from. He needed, for whatever reason, a sense of shame, or discomfort, or self-judgment that took him to the place he felt he needed to act from.

When I worked with Jack Lemmon on
Glengarry Glen Ross
, Jack would say before every single take, “It’s magic time!” That was the place he worked from. It was what propelled him into his acting place.