Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (15 page)

“I’m not sure,” she said, again with the coquette routine.

To which I said, “Yes you are. You’re goin’ out with me. Like on a date ’n shit!”

Our first date went pretty good, if ya know what I mean. Her name was Opal Stone, and she’s now been by my side for thirty-eight years.
Gave me two of the coolest kids in the universe. Opal Stone from Montego Bay, Jamaica. The most beautiful girl I ever saw. Still is!

More or less around the same time my courtship was going on I got my other break when I went to an open call at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, one of the true groundbreaking avant-garde symbols of the times that were a-changin’. The guy directing the play was Tom O’Horgan, who was already a legend in New York, having directed
Hair
,
Lenny
, and
Jesus Christ, Superstar
, so this was definitely a cut above the average bill of fare that had been my steady diet. Plus, this was to be the North American premiere of a play by Fernando Arrabal, a renegade Spanish expressionist writer of note known for his anarchistic ravings.

Tom O’Horgan was the force behind one of the most experimental and controversial theatrical experiences of the day, emblematic of the tearing down of all the old traditional edifices. He did this play on the Lower East Side that had people getting naked, glorifying the drug culture, the hippie movement, and free love and singing about the Age of Aquarius. That play was
Hair
, which eventually made its way to Broadway, setting box office records. So now Tom was stepping back to his roots, coming back to the East Village, the original scene of the crime, to mount this insane work of theater of the absurd. The play was
The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
.

It just finished a run at the National Theater in England that starred Anthony Hopkins as the emperor and Jim Dale as the architect. It got checkered reviews and was deemed a bit too experimental, but a lot of eyes were on O’Horgan to see whether he could put this one in his magical bottle and shake out another hit. There were probably a few hundred people there auditioning for two parts, as it was a two-character play. After I did my audition in the morning I was pulled aside and asked to come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon there were fifty of us auditioning. After that, I was asked to wait around for a final callback to take place that evening—it was down to about twenty of us.

The next day I got a call that I got cast as the emperor, the same role Hopkins had played. There were actually four actors hired due to
the fact that the play was simply too arduous for one cast to carry, so responsibilities would be split into two rotating casts. Now it was simply a matter of seeing what chemistry led to which pairing. And even though we’re supposed to be alternating with one another and nobody’s really any better than anybody else, as we get closer and closer to the opening I realize that the other guy is the A guy and I’m B. He was slated to do the first performances, the first preview, and the first opening night, whereas I was going to do the second preview and the second night after opening.

It was a very long, really overly written, very verbose play that took about three and a half hours to perform with only two characters. No matter how fucking interesting it is, it’s a play that was fucking difficult to keep an audience engaged in and was really begging for them to lose their train of thought. And sure enough, the A cast goes on for the first preview. My partner, Lazaro Perez, who was the B architect, and I were in the audience, and we’re watching this thing, and it’s a fucking disaster. It runs like four hours and twenty minutes, and you could tell that there are the rumblings of an all-out rebellion happening in the theater—nobody wants to be there, nobody can believe their eyes; it’s just bad taste and horribly executed.

Apparently shortly after that there was a big pow-wow, and the powers decided to hold off this North American premier for a few more days. That opening night can make or break a play because it’s reviewed by the
New York Times
and every other important periodical, and, as I said, everyone was expecting magic from O’Horgan. So the heat was most definitely on. Finally we get word that Laz and I are now slated to do another preview before the official world premiere. I was aware that Laz didn’t have a whole lotta faith in me, ’cuz all the while he thought he should be on the A team, with the winners. And frankly, who could blame him? But after the debacle of the first preview nobody knew what the fuck to think.

As coincidence would have it, one night while I’m out walkin’ my dog in the Village, I happen to run into Laz. I could see he was really uneasy about doing a play that had already proved to be problematic and,
worse, with the wild-card partner that was me. I said, “You don’t know me really good, and I don’t know you really good, but fuck it . . . let me go buy a bottle of wine and we go over to my place and hang out?”

So we go over to my apartment, and after we chill for awhile I tell him I know how to make this play work.

“Nobody can make this fuckin’ thing work,” he said.

“I know how to make the play work, but you got to stay with me, you got to trust me, and you’ve got to stick with me.”

“Why would I do that? What the fuck are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go so fast, nobody’s gonna know what hit ’em! The problem with this play—it’s verbal diarrhea. But if we do it fast enough, the audience will never have a chance to catch up, and we’ll have them. It’s the only fuckin’ way.”

“I guess, man. What else is there? I’ll follow you. I’ll do whatever you want. What choice do I have?”

With Laz following my lead and keeping up with me, we turned what took four hours and twenty minutes a few nights ago into a running time of about two hours and thirty minutes, and doing so by following the same script, not cutting one word. We went like fuckin’ crazy men! We got a standing ovation at the end because we never gave the audience a minute to realize what a piece of overblown shit they were watching.

Afterward Ellen Stuart, the head of La MaMa, comes to the dressing room and makes the announcement that now Ron and Laz are going to be the A team and are going to do the opening night—critics’ night. The world premiere, baby! The day before the opening they bring in the playwright. Fernando meets with me and Laz and gives us about an hour’s worth of cuts.

I said to him, “Fernando, did you just come up with these cuts?”

“No,” he said in his thick Castilian accent, “I’ve had these cuts for the last ten years.”

“Were you always meaning to give these to us?”

“Yes, I was always going to give them to you. But I just wanted to hear my masterpiece one last time as I lovingly wrote it!”

I wanted to fucking kill him.

Now, I had an eighteen-page monologue right in the middle of this thing where the other character leaves the stage and it’s just me for eighteen pages. You know how hard it is to memorize eighteen single-spaced pages? And it had to be performed like a magic act so the audience would never catch on that what they were watching wasn’t all that good. Well, once again, if you did it fast enough, the audience wouldn’t know what hit ’em.

So we opened. We get amazing reviews. We get a bona fide rave review from Clive Barnes, the number-one reviewer for the
New York Times
. He wrote a half-page homage to these unknowns Ron Perlman, Lazaro Perez, and Tom O’Horgan. Barnes compares it to the Anthony Hopkins production and discusses why Hopkins’s emperor fell short while mine didn’t.

The play became the next “in thing,” and all the artistic hipsters of New York came flooding in to see it. For the first time in the history of my life I felt like I was in something that people wanted to see, and one of the reasons they wanted to see it was because of what I was doing. That was the beginning of literally everything: it got me calls from about four or five New York agents. It got me my very first trip to Europe, as Laz and I were asked to tour the play all over Holland, Belgium, and Germany. From that play I got my first agent, was able to join the actor’s equity union, and was finally fuckin’ able to have bragging rights to having done a production in New York that made a little bit of noise. Easy Street—am I right, baby?!

Like I said, while all this is going down, I’m fuckin’ head-over-heels in fuckin’ love. Opal and I began to cohabitate about three months after our Valentine’s dinner. We got a place together over on Twelfth Street, just off Eighth Avenue, which, believe it or not, we managed to hold onto for thirty-six years. Opal had come up to New York from Jamaica when she was about five. So she always had identified herself as a New Yorker. In the early going I kept waiting for her to tell me she had had enough of the bohemian lifestyle, that she was gonna go back
to the 175 dudes that were constantly circling her, most of whom were like heavyweight New York sports stars.

But we both genuinely enjoyed spending time in each other’s company, and this click was immediate; it happened from that first dinner date when we stopped playing games and let our pretenses down. She ended up being a really good old lady for a guy like me. It was very, very clear I could have gone through life with nothing. There was nothing to indicate that I was ever going to be successful financially as an actor. And she made no pretenses that she didn’t know this was so deeply entrenched in my DNA that it was something I was going to have to pursue, good or bad, whatever it brought. She was game. She seemed to be ready to go all the way and take whatever came, and this was also something that always remained somewhat of a surprise to me. When
The Emperor and the Architect
went on the tour of Europe, which took me away for about two months, she was exactly the same when I came home. That was the first time I realized she was capable of being the same chick when I came home as when I left. Nothing changed; she didn’t feel threatened by me being gone. She kind of almost felt relieved that I got a chance to flex my muscles as an actor and go out and discover new lands, conquer new domains. And it’s been the same ever since.

After I returned from Europe I wanted to find an agent with clout. I then got a very intriguing message from a Richard Astor, an agent with some very well-known clients. He wanted to meet to talk about the idea of working together. I went up to his office in Midtown, in the Forties, and, never having been inside of an agent’s building before, there was a kind of mystical aura to the entire event. Astor was this very elegant homosexual, the gayest of the gayest men I’ve ever met, with this Tennessee Williams and William F. Buckley combined kind of wit.

We’re sitting in his office when he leans back in his high-back swivel chair and says, “I have a piece of very bad news for you.”

“Um, you asked me to come here. We just met. Why would you want to ruin a perfect, unformed relationship?”

Astor said, “I think it’s rather important for you to understand this, and what I’m about to say I don’t say with any joy at all, but you should resign yourself to the notion that you’re not going to get any work until you’re forty.”

I was twenty-six at the time. “Wait a minute.”

“I’m not done yet,” he said. “You’re not going to even begin to get any work until you’re forty, but you’re not going to hit your stride until you’re almost fifty.”

I’m sitting there, dumbfounded. “Why do you say that?”

“Your aura. There is nothing youthful about your talents or your style of working or your aura as an artist. What you do doesn’t fit into this young frame of yours, so you’re going to have to wait until you’re completely mature and become a middle-aged man before your talent catches up with your persona and your persona catches up with your talent.”

I felt like I was sitting in front of a fuckin’ oracle. I said, “That’s the most depressing thing you could’ve possibly said to me.”

I stand, and he asks, “Do you want to sign with me or not?”

“Why would I want to sign with you? You’re telling me right now you can’t get me a fuckin’ job for fourteen years.”

“Well, there’s always a possibility. I’m really good at what I do. If I were you, I’d sign with me and we’ll take our chances.”

So I signed, but as time went by, nothing changed. I was really not getting any good auditions. Occasionally he would get me into meetings with movers and shakers in Manhattan, but it never led to anything. Ultimately I said to Richard, “Look, you very well may be right in your prediction, but I don’t have time to wait. The way you’re representing me seems to be as if you’re absolutely set on this notion of yours that all I’m doing right now is marinating. I really need to work and need money to feed myself.”

I then signed with these two beautiful ladies, older ladies who fuckin’ adored me, Pat Baldwin and Shirley Scully. They seemed to be really, really fan girls; they seemed like family, always rooting for me to do well. It was irresistible to not be a part of their world, and we
ate dinners together, partied together, went on vacation together—we really became close, and they became like adopted aunts.

But they too kept running into problems getting me work. It’s so much easier on everybody if you’re a recognizable type, so they were constantly trying to figure out how to market me. Casting directors would say we heard Perlman can act, but does he play teachers? Does he play accountants? Can he be a cop? Or is he a better gangster?

Here I was, this guy who was basing everything on this chameleon-like approach to acting in which I can play whatever you cast me as, when people preferred to plug me in as an entity, a specific type, a niche. I started to wonder,
Holy shit, this motherfucker Richard Astor—as farfetched as it was—he might be fuckin’ right
.