Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (14 page)

You could not have a straight job with set hours if you wanted to become an actor. Auditions could be anytime and for however long it took. Same for rehearsals. That’s why many aspiring thespians wait tables, bartend, or have jobs with somewhat flexible hours. And that’s why Burton and his store became my “sponsor of the arts.” I might go on these out-of-town runs for a week or for three months, but when I came back Burton always welcomed me with open arms. He gave me enough of a salary to get groceries and keep my lights on in my apartment. My place was a ten-minute walk to work, close to the subway entrance, and the best setup I could’ve wanted. Burton was encouraging, and on top of it, we still talked about how we’d break into theater or cinema in big ways as we did in school. I didn’t have to drive a taxi or bus tables, thanks to Burton.

At this time Joe Papp became a big star in New York and in all of theater. He went from doing this neighborhood shit, going from doing
Hamlet
in underprivileged neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, the Lower East Side, or Alphabet City, to Elizabethan plays in the summertime in Central Park. Suddenly the mayor of New York gave him this amazing fucking building on Layette Street for a $1 a year. It was the former Astor Library converted by the city into a theater. He called it the Public Theater, and it is, to this day
the
most important laboratory for new plays and playwrights in all the country. That was Papp’s rent—a buck. So Joe Papp becomes the impresario who Burton and I had been talking about becoming ourselves. We saw it was possible for someone to culturally capture the imagination of the most important city in the world and then become somebody who physically changes the landscape of and how theater is talked about in that city. This only stoked our dream to a greater degree. It became like, “Here it is. This is the guy doing exactly what we’re talking about doing.” I am, in fact, still kindling this dream, as you’ll see when I talk about Wing and a Prayer.

The rebellion of the sixties transformed into the golden era of the seventies when incredible stuff was happening in theater and cinema. In 1972
The Godfather Part I
was released, and that, for my money, is the greatest movie ever made, for a variety of reasons. But the main reason is that, unlike the two
Godfather
movies that followed, which are perfectly great, this one had a historic, high-water-mark performance by one of the most significant figures in film history, Marlon Brando. He was always good, but there were three times when he was exceptional, when serious students of the art of acting like myself couldn’t begin to dissect and deconstruct how he did what he did because there was just too much magic involved. One of those three performances was Vito Corleone, in
The Godfather
.

The other films this magic came through was in
On the Waterfront
and
Streetcar.
Those are the three times when he really let loose. Having worked with Marlon and been up close and personal in the
little bit of time I had with him on the set of
The Island of Doctor Moreau
, I got a rare chance to really observe him. Like so many actors of my generation, I had such an obsession with the guy and such an incredible unquenchable thirst to get a glimmer of where that kind of genius comes from. But Marlon never wanted to talk about the craft. He talked about politics, about religion, about child rearing, but the unwritten law was that the minute you ever asked him a question about acting, you were excommunicated. And if you knew that unwritten law, you knew not to ever go there. And because that’s the only thing I ever gave a shit about, I just didn’t have much to interact with him about. So most of my time spent with him was in observance. And the one thing I was able to observe about him—and this is not just true of him but also of a couple of other geniuses—was the inexplicable need to never be pinned down.

If you ask any actor who lived after 1950, there’s Marlon, and then there’s everybody else. No one—
no one
—will disagree with that. A couple of the old-time guys might make fun of him because he mumbled and he scratched himself and he was self-indulgent. If they had studied him like I did, even they would have marveled at the depth he was able and willing to plumb. He bottled that magic in
The Godfather
, when Francis Ford Coppola made a perfect film from beginning to end, not just in terms of storytelling but also in cinematography, music, production design, and performances. Every single actor in that movie—most of whom were obscure, including Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard Castellano, Abe Vigoda (the guy who played “Fish” on the television show
Barney Miller
)—all became movie stars as a result of appearing in that one movie. That’s how much of a game-changer that film was. John Cazale, Lenny Montana, Al Lettieri, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire—every single actor who appeared in that movie did a different kind of work from what they had ever done before or would ever do again. So there was something; it was a promontory. It was like Mount Olympus in terms of what it achieved as a movie and the visceral way that it affects you from beginning to end. You
can never really put it into words because when you try to explain the story, the dynamic, and understand it intellectually, what is missing is the feeling that you get (or don’t get) when you watch it.

Human condition. That’s what made this movie one of the greatest events in cinematic history, because the movie got that on film. It comes from Brando’s unbelievable performance and his transformation into Vito Corleone. He captured, as the patriarch of his mob family, a range of emotions—vulnerability, ruthlessness, and intense loyalty, sense of family, of being responsible for the greater good, of moral compass. All these things wrapped up in one character that was also so Italian that you could believe he landed on Ellis Island and pulled himself up by his bootstraps from nothing with only a kind of sense of direction.

The seventies were an extremely exciting period for movies because the work of Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, to name a few, came as close as we had in decades to producing a new golden era in cinema. It was if they had absorbed what was magical about the first forty years of movies, starting in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. These guys were spewing back in a lens what was paved for them by the John Fords, the George Stevenses, the George Cukors, the Preston Sturgesses, the Frank Capras, the Alfred Hitchcocks. What Brando and Elia Kazan did in
On the Waterfront
can be marked as a departure point in the entire way storytelling is done on film. Yes, there’s plot; yes, there’s story; yes, there’s a lot of the other things that all movies had. But there’s one thing that no other movie had prior to that: this kind of neighborhood behavioral, very primal feel that you get as a result of what the actors were trying to do. Brando, Clift, and Dean were America’s answer to Constantin Stanislavski’s famed “method acting.” Kazan showed you in living black and white and, every once in a while, in living color how much deeper storytelling can go.

As good as the seventies were—my absolute favorite era in movie history—truly the golden age of cinema was the thirties and forties. Then it was simple storytelling and big personalities. Those filmmakers
surrounded themselves with authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Odets, and Earnest Lehman—the greatest writers in film history were doing their thing in the thirties and forties. That was an exploration of the human condition in all of its grandeur. In spades. And it was looked at from every angle and in such a way that, even as they were incredibly entertaining, they were also so much more. Those movies were instructive: every single thing I learned about what kind of man I wanted to be didn’t come from going to school or from hanging out in the neighborhood; a lot of it came from watching the way Bogie handled the situation, the way Duke walked through some trouble, the look that overcame Gary Cooper as he made a decision, how Tyrone Power figured his way out of a situation, what kind of crap Clark Gable had on his heels when he wanted to charm his way in and out of stuff. Watching those movies taught me that kind of character-building shit.

But as much grandeur as that era engendered—and I could go on and on—the personalities were truly fucking stellar. We had Gable, Tracy, Cagney, Cary, Eddie G., Bogey, the Coop, Jimmy Stewart, and the Duke . . . and the women: Myrna Loy, Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Hepburn, Crawford, and, of course, Bette Davis, who, in my opinion, was probably the greatest actress of all time, pound-for-pound. The personalities were vast and magnetic and compelling and so much larger than life that you just couldn’t take your eyes off of them. So when you meld amazing writing with these kinds of personalities, told through the lens of these incredible auteurs, you have a study of the human condition as important a chronicle as any other.

The seventies was when all these guys were coming up, such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, George Roy Hill, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Pacino, and De Niro. All of these guys were born of the seventies, and it’s as important a period in cinema as there ever was. But the jewel in the crown was and always will be
The Godfather Part I
. The other thing about the
Godfather
was an identity awareness I got from being a New Yorker that I didn’t find in Minneapolis. I saw the
Godfather
while still out there, and it became another reason why I
had to come home. I went on to pay to see that movie about twenty times—I just couldn’t get enough of it. It captured that unhypocritical aspect I discussed. Here was a New York crime family who was doing, in reality, bad shit, and yet we cheered for them. I always identified with Italians. I actually went on record before, in some interview, describing myself as an Italian mistakenly born as a Jew. While I was growing up most of the kids I didn’t know thought I was an Italian from the way I carried myself. That’s why I begged for the role in
Drive
, in which I played a Jew who is parading as an Italian gangster. That was fuckin’ fun. I want to live in Italy some day. I want to die there and be buried there. I want to spend my final years there because that place is the embodiment of the fact that everything is corrupt. But with the Italians, they’re not trying to hide anything—it’s blatant; it’s just part of a deal. Even marriage is built in with a mistress. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to marry you because you’re beautiful, and I love you and I will take care of and provide for you fuckin’ forever, but there’s gonna be a deal on the side.
Kapeesh
?” That kind of antithesis of hypocrisy—even if I don’t agree with it or if I do—resonates with me. I’d rather get that kind of muthafuckin’ truth than the typical two-faced, agenda-driven bullshit-type of people you mostly gotta deal with.

But that was New York, with all this great stuff happening in theater and cinema. It kept me on the long lines at cattle calls, stomping my feet to keep warm and eating a candy bar as my fuckin’ lunch. It got me to show up for audition after audition, acting in whatever play that would have me, never stopping, because I wanted to be in. I wanted to contribute to this great art that was being made right in front of me. It finally happened though, three years later, when I got my first lucky break.

(CHAPTER 7)

Just Good Enough to Not Get Paid

After nearly three years of acting for free in Off-Off Broadway shows, toward the end of 1975 and in the beginning 1976 two events occurred that pretty much changed everything. The first happened at Burton’s store. One day in late autumn two girls walk into the store—both attractive, but one killer attractive. Like hamina, hamina attractive. “Need any help?” I went right into my best Gable-kind of charm. But it was probably more like Pepé Le Pew, with my over-the-top eagerness.

“No, we’re just browsing,” she said, but even that standard answer—to me anyway—seemed to have an irresistible coquettishness to it. Well, after about five minutes of scintillatingly awkward small talk, the killa chick zeroed in on one of my favorite pair of earrings. I gave her the price, she said she’d take them, and we finalized the sale. Then, just as they were walking out the door, that same hottie turned and asked, as if an afterthought, “By the way, are you hiring right now?”

“Are you asking for yourself?” I shot back.

“Yeah, maybe just something part time.”

I didn’t wait a second, forgetting I had no authority to hire anyone. “How soon can you start?”

“Oh, anytime really.” She had the warmest, most delicious half-smile I’d ever laid eyes on.

“How ’bout tomorrow? Can you come in the morning, say eleven o’clock?”

“That’s fine. See you tomorrow.” And off she went. A moment of sheer and unabashed reverie was suddenly and decidedly replaced by the sobering realization of,
Holy shit, I just hired someone
, when I was the lowliest employee in the joint. I immediately turned to Burton, who was looking at me like I just escaped from some nuthouse.

“I just fucked up, right?”

“Yeah, you did, but . . . it’s cool. I’ll fire her tomorrow night. Meaning ya got one day to close the fuckin’ deal.”

I couldn’t wait for eleven o’clock the next morning to come. This was, far and away,
the
most beautiful girl I’d ever laid eyes on. The next morning came, as did my fantasy paramour. We spent the next seven hours replacing attempts at nonchalantness with quibbling and jabbing. Yes, love was definitely in the air. At quittin’ time I looked up at Burton with my saddest puppy dog eyes, silently begging him
not
to fire her. He complied; the governor had granted a stay.

This little courting dance went on for about four months—quibbling, jabbing, getting her time in my life miraculously extended, all much to Burton’s chagrin but with the tacit resignation that only a best friend could muster. Four months—that’s how long it took me to man up and ask this chick on a proper date. With February 14 fast approaching, I realized if I let one more holiday go by I’m DOA. So I screw up my courage, throw back some Binaca, and blurt out, “Whuddya doin’ Valentine’s Day?”