Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (4 page)

There certainly was plenty about our world that needed fixing. A few years after I’d graduated from college and had finally found work on Broadway, we were in the ice age of the cold war. The Soviet Union and the United States already had enough weapons aimed at each other to blow up several planets, yet they kept testing bigger and better ones. I helped form a tiny but industrious committee of theater people who hoped, just a little quixotically, to be helpful in bringing an end to nuclear testing. We would do this by collecting signatures from other Broadway actors on a petition. We were going to mail the petition to the leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union, who had the hotlines open—waiting to hear what Broadway actors had to say about nuclear arms. It was a gesture that was both entirely humanitarian and completely pointless, but at the time it felt satisfying.

I was acting in
Purlie Victorious,
a farcical, passionate romp written by Ossie Davis and starring Ossie and Ruby Dee. Ossie’s play put racial stereotypes onstage in order to lacerate them with gusto. I was playing Charley Cotchipee, the idealistic son of the plantation owner. I was twenty-five that year and just as callow as Charley. I went with my petition in hand and knocked on Ruby’s dressing room door, certain that she would sign and march with us the next week. I told her how we were going to get hundreds, maybe thousands, of signatures from theater artists and send them to the nuclear powers and stop the testing of nuclear weapons, which was a peril to humanity. My pitch was high-flown and feverish. As she listened, I saw a weariness come over her face. I was confused. Surely she agreed with what we were doing. I asked if she thought she’d be able to join us in a demonstration in Times Square.

“Oh, God, Alan,” she said gently, “I’ve been marching all my life.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my deeply felt cause would be one more lean on her good nature, already heavily weighted with them. I told her I understood and went down the hall to Beah Richards’s dressing room.

In
Purlie,
Beah played the woman who had raised Charley. As an actor, I was learning from her every night onstage, and I would have been glad if I
had
been raised by someone with her deep understanding of humanity. She was in her forties then, and in spite of the lack of opportunity for black actors, she had become extraordinarily good at her art. I truly admired her, and I wasn’t prepared for her reaction.

She listened until I finished talking, then said in a low tone that contained more concentrated fury than I had ever heard before, “I don’t care if they destroy themselves with these bombs. They’ve brought this on themselves. I don’t care if they vaporize one another and their eyes melt and run down their cheeks.”

I stood still, not knowing what to say. I loved this woman, and I knew she had affection for me, but I had inadvertently opened a wound, and I regretted it. This was a time when actual bombings were more real to her as a black woman than the mere threat of nuclear war could be to me. She had lived with the bombing of black churches in the South. It wasn’t hypothetical. People were dying.

Beah finally did come and walk with us. It was a cold winter night, and after the show, we gathered in Times Square and walked in a circle in the snow for about fifteen minutes. We had notified the press, but of course no one was there to watch us, and the circle of footprints we left in the snow melted away the next day along with any effect we might have had on anybody at all, other than ourselves.

Getting drunk on the desire to do something didn’t mean I was accomplishing anything, but that was something I didn’t understand until I saw someone else drink from that cup. A few months later, there was a large gathering of hundreds of people in Times Square, calling for a test ban treaty. I wasn’t able to go because Arlene was working and I stayed home with our children. But an actor friend had gone to Times Square and came to our apartment an hour later. He was shaking with adrenaline.

“You won’t believe this,” he said. “You won’t fucking believe this.” He was carrying his fifteen-month-old son, who looked confused and scared. “They charged us,” my friend said. “The police charged us. With horses! Can you believe that? We had children there.”

I asked him why he’d brought his child to a street demonstration. He said he wanted him to be part of a historic moment. Something he could be proud of when he grew up. “But there’s always a chance the cops will overreact,” I said. “Weren’t you putting him in danger?”

“I didn’t think they’d charge us with horses! Why would they do a thing like that?” He shook with anger and expressed amazement for another fifteen minutes.

We were all sincere and passionate, but I saw the difference between dabblers like us and a true force for change the day Martin Luther King came to the theater.
Purlie Victorious
was celebrating its hundredth performance, and he came down to the basement of the theater and had his picture taken with the cast. When I shook hands with him, the look in his eyes was unforgettable. There was an alertness I had never seen before in anyone’s eyes, almost a cold stare. There was a feeling of trauma about his gaze, of looking into the distance without seeing, yet you felt he could see through you. These eyes were ready for anything: victory, defeat, death, wherever his walk would take him. You could see how the focus in those eyes could lead marches that changed lives.

Meanwhile, I was still walking in circles, the way I had in Times Square that snowy night. In the little town in New Jersey where Arlene and I lived, we picketed an apartment house that discriminated against black people. It’s possible we shamed them into changing their policy, but I never knew for sure. We would turn out for demonstrations more in frustration than in hope. A year after King was assassinated, a call went out for a demonstration to mark the anniversary of his death. Those of us who had picketed together stood in silence with bowed heads in an intersection in downtown Hackensack, and then we sang “We Shall Overcome.” Again, there was no one in the street but us and a few cops who were assigned to keep the peace. There was no chance that the peace was in danger of being disturbed. The cops looked at their watches and glanced at one another, shaking their heads. As I looked over at them, I felt they were a little given to smirking. But on the way home, I thought it over. What were we achieving by standing on an empty street, holding hands and singing? All it did was make us feel good. I wondered if I was accomplishing anything or just playing in the street.

I got the answer to that a couple of years later, while I was having lunch with an old friend. Bert Convy had started in the theater around the same time I had. I had known him a long time, but he casually told me a story I hadn’t heard before, and it made me put down my fork and listen. A stillness came over me, the kind that hits you when you hear something that goes to the core of who you think you are. I had never thought of Bert as a political hero. He had played Perchik in
Fiddler on the Roof
; he had gone on to a career as an actor in films, a host of game shows, and an affable raconteur on the
Tonight
show. To most of us, he was a cheerful guy, skating nimbly over the surface of show business. But as he told me his story, I realized that in 1968 he had performed a small but dangerous act of courage.

That year, in frustration over events they couldn’t control, people were increasingly taking to the streets. Sometimes, frustrated themselves and occasionally goaded, the cops didn’t just stand around looking at their watches. Bert was there in Chicago the night they exploded. He had been working in the presidential campaign and had been sent as a delegate from New York to the Democratic convention. From his hotel room, he could see the anger growing in the street below. The crowd and the cops took turns surging toward each other, and at one point the cops began attacking the crowd with their clubs. The only escape for some demonstrators was through the doors of the hotel and into the lobby. The cops chased after them into the building, grabbing some and dragging them back into the street and into police wagons. Some demonstrators managed to make it upstairs, where Bert and other delegates let them into their rooms. Several of the young men had faces streaming with blood that Bert and his friends sopped up with hotel towels. They watched through the windows at the mayhem in the street below and saw the police getting ready to enter the hotel again. Within minutes, the police were banging on doors, demanding entry. They burst into Bert’s room, started hitting the demonstrators, and pulled them, some by the hair, out of the room.

Bert was angry and upset at the violence and what he felt was unlawful entry into his room. Having seen the kids roughed up in the hotel, he was afraid of what would happen to them at the station house. He got on the phone and found out where they were being taken. He put on his jacket and tie and went downstairs, threading his way through a violent crowd, and headed for the police station. The jacket and tie were a form of dressing for the part. When he got to the station, he identified himself as the lawyer for the demonstrators and demanded their release. The police wanted to know what law firm he was with. He said he was a lawyer from New York and wasn’t going to wait until morning to verify the fact that he was a lawyer; they had violated the civil rights of his clients, and he wanted them released immediately. The audacity of his demands and the authority he was able to summon as an actor put enough pressure on the police that night for Bert to get seventeen people released.

When Bert finished his story, which he told simply and without self-aggrandizement, I was moved by his courage. Having just seen people beaten by the police, he had walked into a station house and pretended he was an officer of the court. He could have been thrown in jail himself. Years later, Bert died of a brain tumor after a long and humbling illness, and I thought that the legacy he left behind was not the lighthearted performances that many people knew him for, but the instantaneous bravery he had shown that night. Without thinking, he had stepped into danger to help people he knew nothing about, except that they were in trouble. I had done what I could in those days, but compared with Bert, I felt I
had
been at play in the streets.

I wanted to point the kids at Emerson toward something that could stir them to meaningful action, and I guess to point myself in the same direction.

It seems to me that your life will have meaning when you can give meaning to it. And not until then. Because no one else will give meaning to your life. There isn’t a job or a title or a degree that has meaning in itself. The world will go stumbling on without you no matter how high your office. And there isn’t any liquor that will give meaning to your life, or any drug, or any type of sexual congress, either. Not for long, anyway.

I’d like to suggest to you, just in case you haven’t done it lately, that this would be a good time to find out what your values are, and then figure out how you’re going to be able to live by them. Knowing what you care about and then devoting yourself to it is just about the only way you’re going to be able to have a sense of purpose in your life.

There was a day in my youth when I suddenly realized I had values. I had been acting on Broadway in
The Apple Tree
for a few months when my agent urged me to leave the show long enough to shoot a movie called
The Extraordinary Seaman.
I was still in my twenties, but I had clear ideas about what I thought was good material, and I thought this script was terrible. But my agent insisted; it would be good for my career, she said.

I couldn’t understand how being in a lousy movie would be a career booster, and besides, the producer of
The Apple Tree
wanted fifty thousand dollars to let me out of the play for the three months it would take to shoot this pathetic thing.

“That was what Richard Burton paid to get out of
Camelot
in order to do
Cleopatra,
” I told my agent. “Richard
Burton.
People actually knew who he was.” Arlene and I had nothing in the bank, and we would have to go into debt to make the payment.

This, I’m sorry to say, was not the moment where I found out I had values. I borrowed money to make a movie I didn’t believe in. When I got back to New York, though, my agent called and said excitedly that she’d found a way to wipe out the debt. She had lined up a cigarette commercial that would pay me exactly fifty thousand dollars. This was when the values kicked in.

“No. Thanks,” I said, “I’m not interested.”

She was shocked. Why would I turn down fifty thousand dollars when I was exactly fifty thousand in debt?

“Well,” I said, “because I don’t want to take money so people can get cancer.”

She thought that was a strange line of reasoning. I wasn’t giving people cancer—I was collecting fifty thousand for a day’s work. To be fair, this was a time when cigarettes were advertised on television and the surgeon general’s warning was not yet on the package. If you wanted, you could tell yourself you were simply in step with everyone else. But in reality, we all knew cigarettes were killers. I said no again and hung up.

When I got off the phone, I realized that there were some things I valued more than others. And because of that, there was nothing hard about the choice. I hadn’t faced down the Chicago police and made them hand over the bloody kids, the way Bert had. I had simply said “no thanks” to poisoning people. But I was acting, finally, on what I had suggested to the mayor of Burbank: that the people who can change things are right in this room. I realized, though, that finding out what you value isn’t always that easy.

It can be surprising when you try to rank your values. Ask yourself what’s the most important thing in the world to you. Your family? Your work? Your money? Your country? Getting to heaven? Sex? Dope? (Thanks, but I don’t need a show of hands on this.)

When you come up with an answer to that…ask yourself how much time you actually spend on your number one value and how much time you spend on what you thought was number five…or number ten. What, in fact, is the thing you value most?