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One of the pitfalls lying before a young actor in the theater is the love we have for stars. It borders on being dangerous to the adorer and the adoree.

Jeffrey Lynn, the Hollywood leading man who had appeared opposite Priscilla Lane, Claude Rains, and John Garfield in the much-cherished 1938
Four Daughters
and then in a spate of 1940s films, was to come to Memphis to do S. N. Behrman’s
The Second Man,
the one in which I played the overzealous butler.

Lynn’s opening-night performance was wonderful, and we were shocked to read the horrible notices the following day. When he arrived that night for the second performance, we figuratively tiptoed around his dressing room. I wondered how he could possibly go on.

After putting on my costume and makeup, I gave him a quiet, “Half-hour, Mr. Lynn.”

“Thank you,” he said smilingly, in the best chin-up manner I thought possible under the circumstances.

“Anything I can get you, Mr. Lynn?”

“Nothing, Jerry, and please call me Jeff. You’ve been calling me Jeff all week, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Jeff,” I said.

“Then don’t stop calling me Jeff now.”

“Okay, Jeff, fifteen minutes,” I said.

“Thank you, Jerry,” he replied. I was stunned by his ability even to function.

The ability to keep going is what this business is all about. I made a mental note to remember that.

“Okay, five minutes, Jeff,” I said a little later, sticking my head in. “And don’t let anything get to you; you were great last night,” I added.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, suddenly turning serious.

I stood silent.

“Get to me? Are you talking about reviews? What did they say about me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “They said … nothing.”

“What did they say? You’ve got to tell me.”

“Didn’t you read them?” I asked.

“No, I never read them.”

“Well, I do,” I said. “I’ve got to read them. I thought everybody reads them.”

“No,” he said, “I never read them. A lot of actors don’t read their notices.”

“Well, I can understand that,” I said, and I called out, “Places!”

“Not before you tell me what they said.”

“You can read them after the show.”

“No, tell me. Now that you’ve mentioned them, I’ve got to know. They were bad, weren’t they?”

“They weren’t good. Now you’ve got to go on, Jeff,” I said.

“What did they say?” he asked. “Don’t you understand? I have to know.”

“They said you were … I don’t know. Please,” I said, “I’ve got to
get ready. I do this bit in the second act. I’ve got to get my props together.”

“I want to talk to you later about the reviews,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “We’ll talk.”

I couldn’t understand an actor not reading reviews. Today I don’t read them either. I learn the bad news from “friends,” the same way Jeffrey Lynn learned.

Even at this early stage of the game I was landing some odd jobs on television. Back in New York, Alixe Gordin was the casting director for
Studio One,
a live one-hour Monday-night dramatic show produced by Westinghouse. Alixe had seen me in Sidney Kingsley’s
The World We Make and Men in White
at Equity Library Theater. She liked my work enough to cast me as a Japanese soldier guarding a rice paddy. The show was about the war between China and Japan in the 1930s.

Caucasian American actors were asked to play Asian roles. Sidney Lumet was the director, Olive Deering the star. Extra makeup artists were brought in the night of the show to make us look authentic. As show time drew near, the makeup people were busily sticking adhesive tape over our eyelids, to give us a somewhat Asian look, then covering them with Max Factor makeup. Of course, it would’ve been easier to cast Asian actors, but that pool went unexplored. My eyes went on without incident. I had no lines. Easy enough. I walked back and forth in a rice paddy. No close-ups. Olive, the star, had a major problem. The adhesive strips would not stick to her eyelids. As the stage manager started counting down to show time, Olive, on the set, shouted to Lumet, “Sidney, these lids are coming off, get a makeup person out here!”

Sidney shouted, “Get someone out there!”

Now we were a minute away from airtime. Olive started screaming, “They won’t stick, Sidney, these fucking lids won’t stay on!”

Ten-nine-eight-seven …

“Try!” Sidney implored.

“I can’t! I’m taking them off!” She ripped off her eyelids just as the show started. The music came up, and Olive Deering was the only one on the show looking like the girl next door.

Alixe Gordin called me again some time later. “I’ve got a small role for you in a show with Margaret Sullavan,” she said. “It’s five lines.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

The story was written by Paul Crabtree, a Syracuse grad who’d cast
me in my first Equity show opposite Burgess Meredith, at Sawyer Falk’s prompting.

Margaret Sullavan played a nun who learned to fly an airplane during World War Two. During rehearsals, Miss Sullavan was having difficulty learning her lines. I, being an actor who was in love with Hollywood, if only through the silver screen, actually had a crush on her. I remembered seeing her in the MGM movies
The Mortal Storm
and
The Shop Around the Corner
. On a lunch break when everyone else had split, Miss Sullavan sat on a chair in the empty hall with a script on her lap going over her lines.

“Can I cue you?” I asked meekly.

“No thank you,” she said, “I’ll be all right.”

“I’m here if you need me,” I said. And I took off.

As the week went on, it appeared she was still having trouble with the words.

On the afternoon of the show, the cast went out for lunch. When we returned, she was nowhere in sight. After a while, it was apparent she was not going to be there for the show that night. Margaret Sullavan had disappeared. David Susskind, the producer, tried in vain to get one of the other actresses to go on in the role. So that night, a kinescope of a previous
Studio One
show went on instead.

Some time later it came out that during the lunch break on the day of the show, while Miss Sullavan was on the set, someone in the control booth remarked, “When will that bitch learn her lines!” The microphone key was open and she heard it on the floor.

Later, I learned that Margaret Sullavan was losing her hearing. The full story is better told by her daughter Brooke Hayward in her memoir,
Haywire
.

I
n the spring of 1953 life took another twist. I was walking on West 40th Street in Manhattan when I bumped into Anne Meara, whom I hadn’t seen since we were in Longley’s absconding with silverware.

“I want you to meet my father,” she said. “He works in this building right here.” I’d met a lot of girls, for better or worse, but none had asked me to meet her father.

We walked into the offices of the American Radiator Company, across from the New York Public Library. How did she get me here? You meet a girl in the theater, you don’t need to meet her father.

“This is Big Ed,” Anne said, introducing me. “He’s the stock-transfer agent for the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company. They make the church seat toilet seat. My father calls it ‘the best seat in the house.’”

I was with the daughter of a man whose company made toilet seats. I was getting a lot of background, considering I’d just met Anne a couple of weeks back.

“Jerry’s an actor,” Anne said, introducing me to Big Ed, who at that moment was talking to another big man with a handsome Irish face and the deepest of blue eyes.

“Are you in any show right now, Jerry?” Big Ed asked, breaking away momentarily. I suddenly felt he knew me.

“No, not right now.”

“This is Tom Brennan,” Anne’s father said. “Tom, this is Jerry—what’s your last name?”

“Stiller,” I said.

Tom Brennan was close to Ed’s age. He seemed in perfect condition, as if he skipped rope all day at the New York Athletic Club.

“Tom’s with Robert Hall Clothes,” Ed said.

An Irishman in the clothing business. It struck me as funny. They went back to talking. My presence seemed to animate them. They were each six inches taller than me—the kind of guys you’d one day remember seeing at the bar at Toots Shor’s, the tough Irish who survived the streets of New York and made it in business or politics.

Was I just one of the many strays whom Anne, a young actress also trying to make it in New York, introduced every so often to her father to prove that she was a good girl who didn’t fool around? I could feel them looking through me. In my mind I could hear, “What the hell is she doing with a guy like that? He’s three inches shorter than she is. He’s got to be Jewish. They’re all Jewish in show business. Is she sleeping with him?”

“How about some lunch?” Ed said. “Tom’s leaving.”

“We’ve got to be going too,” Anne said. “We’ve got some appointments.”

“Keep making the rounds,” Ed said to us, “and maybe we can all have lunch someday.”

“Okay, Pop. So long, Uncle Tom,” Anne said, as she and I headed for Broadway.

She’s just legitimized our relationship with her father, I figured. I felt a little uneasy, as if I’d just become a member of her family. She never asked permission. There was nothing wrong with it, except that I felt a bit now as if I was under some kind of surveillance. God, what if I tried to sleep with her? This meeting could be a kind of warning, I thought. A deterrent.

“So Tom Brennan is your uncle?”

“No, he’s my father’s best friend, and he just got fired. He wanted to hit his ex-boss, and Dad talked him out of it. Tom used to box,” Anne said.

Yeah, oranges,
I thought. A joke I couldn’t use at this moment.

“Your father’s a big guy,” I said.

“He’s five-eleven.”

“He seems much taller,” I said.

“That’s because he talks loud. He’s got a punctured eardrum. It kept him from going overseas in the First World War.”

History seemed to be pouring out as we approached Broadway.

“I hate making rounds,” Anne said.

“I love making rounds,” I said, suddenly feeling superior to her.

There were, I thought, two breeds of actors among the unknowns who tramped the streets looking for work: those who could knock on a door, and those who couldn’t. Those who couldn’t, no matter how talented, seemed destined for obscurity. I couldn’t understand what it was that stopped any actor from saying, “I’m looking for work.”

“What do you do all day?” I asked her.

“Sleep mostly,” she said.

“How do you pay the rent?”

“I get jobs. I worked at Best & Co. for three days. I got fired for not being helpful to some woman who complained. I was an usher at the Trans-Lux newsreel theater.”

“Didn’t that drive you crazy?”

“It never got boring. They changed the newsreels every day. They caught me smoking a cigarette and fired me. I ushered at the Shubert, the second balcony. You know how steep that is?” she asked with a laugh. “I finally turned in my flashlight because I got so dizzy. It was so high you could get a nosebleed. I worked for an answering service, too. I took messages for Cliff Robertson,” she said.

The list went on.
She’s funny,
I thought.
Maybe we could do an act.

“I ushered at the
Ballet de Paris
at the Hellinger. I’d come in early and watch Roland Petit warm up every night. The last job I had was testing detergent in a research laboratory. You had to dip each hand in a different detergent. One was harsh and made it red, the other was soft. See, this hand is still red.”

“Yeah,” I said, unable to see the red. “How do you pay the rent?” I asked again.

“I’ve got two roommates … I got to run,” Anne said.

“So do I.”

“See you again sometime.”

She disappeared into the Times Square crowd. I headed uptown to my room on West 89th Street, which I had moved into. It was on the top floor of a brownstone, with just enough space for a single bed, a dresser, a table, and a floor lamp. It had a small bathroom. The skylight was the best feature. The landlord said Gershwin had lived in this room. I could see Gershwin writing
Porgy and Bess
on that very table. But I could also
feel the loneliness for the first time in my life. I never thought I would experience it. I was alone in New York. Except for the army and college, I’d lived here all my life. I always thought the city was mine. It was, when I could dream. But it was different now. I was out of the army, out of school, out of work. I was shifting from dream to reality. I could no longer fantasize to Gordon Jenkins’s musical tribute to New York City,
Manhattan Towers
. I was no longer living at home, telling my parents, “Someday I’m going to …” This was someday. It had arrived and I was empty. I had nothing except what was in my head.

Alone in the room, I thought of this girl I’d met. She liked me. I’d never met a woman who just liked me. There didn’t seem to be any game-playing. What had happened that day was so spontaneous. I didn’t trust it. What else would I have done today if I hadn’t run into her? Does everything in life follow a plan? This girl had no plans. Nothing could really happen for her, I thought, as I dozed and finally fell asleep.

Several days later I was sitting at the Cromwell drugstore, sipping coffee.

Anne came over to sit with me. “I’m in a play!” she said. “I play a bird, an egret. We open down in the Village at the Theatre de Lys.”

“What play?” I asked.

She was laughing, alive, excited. “
Which Way Is Home?
Three one-acts.” She seemed to be telling everyone at the Cromwell.

“That’s wonderful, great,” I said, trying to match her enthusiasm. “Who’s in it?”

“Nobody famous. Jerry Anspacher. An Irish actor, Milo O’Shea. It’s the Touring Players. Peg Murray is the producer. It’s Off-Broadway, and I play this bird. Will you come to see me?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“John, John,” she said, hugging an actor named John Marley. “John, I’m in a show.”

“Great,” Marley said.