B000FC0RL0 EBOK (20 page)

One day I thought I could cheer my mother up, so I drove her to the Alvin to show her my picture outside the theater with other cast members of the show, my first Broadway show. As we approached the Alvin, I glanced back at my mother, who was seated in the rear of the ‘47 Plymouth that had been loaned to my parents by my Uncle Oiza.

“I want you to see something,” I said as I pulled up in front of the theater. Among the many pictures out front was a huge cutout of myself and Portia Nelson. We were dressed in white, and stood in front of a time machine. Portia was singing a song about the day we would visit the moon. The handle of the time machine in the background protruded at an angle which made it appear that I had a giant erection—a photographic accident, only noticeable when anyone looked two or three times. Nonetheless, this picture had found its way to the 52nd Street marquee. It was the proof that I had made it to Broadway.

It was the afternoon; that night I’d be working in the show. The electric lightbulbs spelling
ALVIN
extended vertically over the marquee.

“I thought you might like to see the theater I’m playing,” I said.

She said nothing.

“It’s the same theater I took you to to see Shirley Booth in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. Remember?

“Mom,” I said. “You want to see my dressing room? That window up there. Next to the ‘
A
’ in
ALVIN
.”

She looked. There was a long silence.

“That’s my picture,” I said, pointing to the huge cutout.

At that instant I thought it would comfort her to know that her son had made it to the big time, Broadway.

She looked for a moment and said, “Big deal. Take me home.”

A few weeks later my mother died at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. My father was at work paying hospital bills. I had just stepped out
into the hall to get some water. While I was outside, she slipped away. Anne was at her bedside when she passed.

My Uncle Abe and Uncle Charlie arranged to have my mother buried in the Frampol Society Plot in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens.

Ten days later, Jack Landau asked if I would replace someone in
The Clandestine Marriage
at the Provincetown Playhouse. I had to get back to work. I would play opposite Frederick Warriner, a brilliant character actor whom I greatly admired. Fred was especially wonderful playing fops. He must have had some emotional pipeline to the Restoration period. I was in awe of his work.

Fred, Janice Rule, Farley Granger, Blanche Yurka, Larry Gates, and I were later cast in Chinese roles in
The Carefree Tree,
a drama by Aldyth Morris at the Phoenix. I played a property man. Some makeup experts were brought in to put Oriental faces on each one of us. It normally took two hours—the most painful part of the job. I wondered if anyone in the Phoenix audience who was Chinese would take offense. Fred Warriner, being the true artist, always did his own makeup.

Just before one Saturday matinee, Fred had a grand idea. “Why don’t we all go down to Chinatown and eat dinner at Wo Ping’s between performances?”

Farley Granger said, “What about the makeup? We’ll never get back in time to put it back on.”

Fred said, “My friends at Wo Ping’s would understand if we came down and had the makeup on.”

We all agreed. Why not? After the matinee we all piled into a couple of cabs and traveled down to Mott Street. We gathered outside Wo Ping’s in our theatrical Chinese makeup, exaggerated eyes, and high cheekbones. As is the case in New York, people took no notice. Fred led us in.

“They know me here,” he said.

We entered, and the look on the maitre d’s face told me immediately that this incident could affect Chinese-American relations for a long time. The restaurant’s owner took us to a table way in the back, where we ordered one from group A, one from group B, etc. Eating with the makeup on almost did us in, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

At the close of the Phoenix season I was taken on as an actor in the first season of the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut.

I had had an audition with John Burrell at the Theater Guild. The
Guild’s huge baronial interior on New York’s West 53rd Street was subsumed in oak.
Oak is English,
my inner voice kept whispering.
You’re Jewish. You don’t belong in this forest.

Burrell, dressed in tweed, sat at a table with some other people.

I bounced in on sneakers. It was my way of telling myself not to be intimidated.

“I hear you’re a very funny man,” Mr. Burrell said.

I suddenly felt at ease.

“We’d like you to play Trinculo in
The Tempest,
Publius and the Second Citizen in
Julius Caesar,
” Burrell said. “We’ve got Raymond Massey doing Brutus, Jack Palance as Cassius, Chris Plummer as Mark Antony, Fritz Weaver as Casca, and Hurd Hatfield is Caesar. Roddy McDowall is Ariel in
The Tempest
. Are you interested?”

Interested?

“Yes,” I said, practically leaping out of my Keds.

“Do you have an agent?” Burrell asked.

I didn’t, but I said I could get one. They laughed. Suddenly everyone started talking in front of me as if I weren’t in the room.

“He’s wonderful,” someone said.

“Marvelously funny,” another said, giggling.

“Just what we need.”

They were congratulating themselves on some marvelous find. The job was cinched.

My first day of rehearsal for
Julius Caesar
was at the ANTA Playhouse in New York City. Anne was in Norwalk, Connecticut, on tour with Uta Hagen and her husband, Herbert Berghof, in
Cyprienne
. For some time Anne and I, Steve McQueen, William Hickey, Zohra Lampert, Olga Belin, Shelley Berman, and Jules Munshin had been taking classes with Uta, the best acting teacher in New York. The Berghofs were notorious for their unbridled loyalty to their students. They actually hired them to perform in plays they were starring in; Uta Hagen does that to this day. It is an umbilical relationship that many of us have found difficult to sever. That summer Anne and I barely saw one another, both of us working, a perfect marriage.

On the day of the first
Julius Caesar
rehearsal, Anne called from Norwalk, asking if I could pick up Letty Ferrer, Uta and José Ferrer’s ten-year-old daughter, at Grand Central Terminal at 9:45
A.M.
I said okay,
knowing my rehearsal at the ANTA wasn’t to start until 10:30
A.M.
The train was delayed. I waited till Letty appeared, and put her in a cab. I arrived seven minutes late for rehearsal. The director, a pillar of the Old Vic, had already introduced himself to the company. My tardiness was greeted with a derisive, “My, my, my, what have we here?”—the English inflection cutting through the theater like a knife.

“What, no apology?” he declared.

Silence. I remembered
The Browning Version,
a Michael Redgrave movie in which schoolmaster Redgrave punishes a pupil in front of the kid’s classmates for a minor infraction. This director’s chastising me publicly made me hold back any apology. You apologize for doing something wrong, and I’d done nothing wrong—he was just making an example of me. This could go on all season, Jerry Stiller as his little whipping boy.

“In England, we apologize,” he continued.

I wanted to say, “Guilty with an explanation, Your Honor,” but I would have come across as a smart-ass.

I stood dumbfounded at his display, then said, “I had to pick up Letty Ferrer at Grand Central, and the train was late.” I resorted to dropping the name Ferrer, and this seemed to satisfy him.

Sitting with the cast, I listened to his preamble about American actors being new to Shakespeare. Wally Matthews, whom I roomed with in Stratford, told me this attitude goes back to the American Revolution. They still think we’re part of the Colonies.

In
Julius Caesar,
Jack Klugman and I played the First and Second Citizens. We were Brooklyn versions of Elizabethan rustics. Raymond Massey, cast as Brutus, was famous for his brilliant pre-war Broadway and Hollywood portrayals of Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Massey continuously joked about his being typecast in movies as the Great Emancipator. He said, “Of course now they’ll say I’m playing Abe Lincoln in Rome.”

At the first preview of the show, the temperature at Stratford rose into the high 90s. Robert Fletcher’s costumes were giving us problems. I, as Publius, the oldest of the conspirators, was to enter with the other conspirators from beneath the stage. Our long velvet gowns weighed a ton and trailed far behind us. On cue, we started up a narrow spiral staircase to kill Caesar. Tripping over our gowns, I could hear my fellow actors cursing in iambic pentameter, attempting to keep in character. Directly in
front of me was Raymond Massey. As Mr. Massey reached the top step he tripped and started to fall backwards. I shoved my hands against his shoulders to stop him, then pointed to a box in the theater and said, “Ray, that’s where Lincoln got it.” He broke up. When the scene ended, I apologized. Mr. Massey, in magnanimous fashion, said, “Jerry, it’s okay. And thanks. I could’ve hurt myself. Besides, it wasn’t like I was about to do the Gettysburg Address.”

Jack Klugman, Rex Everhart, and myself were New York types, throwbacks to Will Kemp, the legendary Elizabethan clown. We spoke for the masses. Klugman, as the First Citizen in
Julius Caesar,
shpritzing all over Chris Plummer—with a lot of “whereforths” and “forsooths”—was sowing the seeds of his masterpiece Oscar Madison in TV’s
The Odd Couple
. Nobody questioned our New York accents. Anyway, all eyes were on Christopher Plummer and Fritz Weaver, whose performances were establishing them as future stars.

As Publius, the oldest and most decrepit of the conspirators who assassinate Caesar and live to walk away untouched, I took two minutes to leave the scene of the dastardly crime.

That first season at Stratford was some kind of debacle. The dream of having American movie stars performing Shakespeare did not make it with the public or the critics, who had a field day swiping at John Houseman’s Hollywood upstarts. No
rachmones
. No pity.

In
The Tempest,
starring Mr. Massey as Prospero, Palance as Caliban, and Roddy as Ariel, I played a jester named Trinculo. My onstage relationship with Jack Palance was rocky. He had already played the black hat in
Shane
.

As Trinculo, the fool, I discover Caliban on the beach of a mystical island called Ilyria. My monologue had me poking fun at this strange creature that was not man, beast, or fish. At one point in the scene I mimic Caliban—but I was actually doing an impression of Jack. It must have hit a nerve because he asked me to stop doing it. When I continued, he got angry. I realized that if I did it again Jack could possibly pick me up bodily and hurl me into the orchestra pit. Don’t screw around with the black hat, I figured. I don’t remember the English director standing up for me.

Professor and Mrs. Falk saw the show. They were following my career. Despite a nice mention of me by Brooks Atkinson in
The New York Times,
Mr. Falk was not overwhelmed by my performance. Some weeks later I received the following letter:

Syracuse, New York

October 3, 1955

Mr. Jerry Stiller

135 W. 67th St.
New York, New York

Dear Jerry:

I owe you something of an explanation and an apology for not having come back to see you when I was at Stratford for
The Tempest.
Mrs. Falk, Francy, and I went up on one of those package deals that Alex Cohen was running: transportation by bus, “a delicious turkey dinner,” and tickets for the theater. In consequence, we had to leave when the bus pulled out immediately after the performance. As it turned out, the whole expedition took ten hours as it was. And for your sake, I regret to say that I do not think the performance was worth that amount of time nor the $30 or so that I expended on it. I was totally disinclined to go back the next night for
Julius Caesar,
as we had planned
.

I found
The Tempest
to be indescribably bad. As I told many people beforehand, the kind of stage which was built into that elegant theater would make any performance of Shakespeare a difficult proposition, but the wise guys from [Lawrence] Langner on down think they know all the answers. So as it turned out, the staging was wrong, the setting was extremely bad in design and poorly used even for what it was. The acting, for a company that yearns to be called the American Shakespeare Festival, was frightful in the extreme. Massey never could read Shakespeare and never will be able to, no matter how long he tries. After seeing him, I retitled the play
Abe Lincoln in Bermuda.
All the rest, including the “Ariel,” were bad in my book…. Above and beyond all, nobody concerned with the management and directing seemed to have the faintest concept about the play, neither its style nor its theatricality.

As for you: I felt that you were the best actor on the stage. But I must say in all candor that I felt you were terribly miscast. Your performance was the only vital and exhilarating part of the entire proceedings, but it couldn’t possibly be Trinculo. I was proud of you for what you did, but I felt unhappy that your abilities were not put to better purpose.

I saw Norris Houghton the night I was at Stratford, and from the conversation that we exchanged, I would imagine he was of similar
mind about the performance. In any case I’m sure he saw the value in your work, as is quite evident in his bringing you back into his production [at the Phoenix]. Also I think that this [Stratford] has been a definite step up for you: It brought you to the attention of a great many people, and the words of praise given to you in
The New York Times
will undoubtedly be of great value …
.

Ever yours,

Sawyer Falk

The New York Times,
Wednesday, August 3, 1955

Theater: “The Tempest”