The Woman in Black

by Erik Tarloff

  I’m no pro, I don’t pretend to be, but I’d done a lot of community theater, and I’d worked with kids in theater classes for years, and I’d never before seen anything to compare with this. It was as if Marcel Marceau had accidentally wandered into my classroom.

  At first, I was a little concerned that, no matter how amazing he was at mime, maybe he wouldn’t be so good verbally. He was so shy, and apparently so inarticulate—a mumbler—that my worries weren’t based on nothing. But another thing I did, I always had the kids recite poetry at our first class meeting. Again, mostly just to get them used to declaiming in front of other people. And once again, he simply blew me away. He read “My Last Duchess.” That Browning thing? It was his choice, by the way…I didn’t know he was a reader, but apparently he was. A secret reader. And it was a revelation. He was shattering. The speaker of the poem became this vivid, self-deluding monster oblivious to his own malevolence. It was hair-raising. And exhilarating. For me, it was almost like what people say it was like to see Brando in I Remember Mama.

  Haley Jackson (junior high school classmate)

  I was in Chance’s first play. You might say I got his career off to its start, ha ha. It was a little one-act, a two-hander as they say. Just Chance and me. We performed it at a school assembly one afternoon.

  I honestly can’t remember much about the play itself. Not the title, not the author, not the plot. But I do remember Chance and I had to kiss in it. That was a big deal in those days. Kissing wasn’t something kids took lightly. Lots of embarrassed giggling when we read the play and realized what it would entail, as you might imagine. Actual kissing! In front of people! And with permission! My gosh! And to do it with Chance Hardwick! What an opportunity! It was like a dream come true. When I was chosen for the girl part, all the other girls were really envious, I can tell you that. Giggly, as I said, and kind of scandalized, but just oozing jealousy. We all had a crush on Chance, you know. None of us had paid him much notice in the early grades, he was so quiet and retiring. But after we’d started to develop, it suddenly hit us he had everything a teenage girl might want in a boy: He was incredibly good-looking, he was painfully shy, he was kind of mysterious, he was a little sullen without being really mean. And no acne! He was perfect.

  I always half-hoped that our rehearsals—not the ones in front of Miss Campbell, of course, but when we rehearsed just the two of us, after school, at my house, which we did several times—I always half-hoped they would turn into make-out sessions. Because we had to practice the kiss so as not to bump noses or whatever, and it seemed possible that once that got started…well, you know. And it sort of did happen, once. We got a little carried away. I mean, we didn’t do it or anything, that possibility never entered my mind and maybe never entered Chance’s mind either. In those days, at least in our school, girls didn’t do it. Or even imagine doing it. We thought we were gonna save it for when we got married. Of course, when most of us got to college we abandoned that plan, but we kept to it through most of our teens. But anyway, Chance and I did do some heavy petting that one afternoon. Well, heavyish petting. I was too shy to hold up my end, if you get what I’m saying. But it was heaven all the same. Until my mom came home and found us. She wasn’t too happy about it.

  I’d hoped there would be a repeat, but there never was. I don’t know why. Maybe because my mom scared Chance so bad he was afraid to risk it.

  For the rest of my life, though, I’ve been able to brag that I starred in a play with Chance Hardwick, and that he and I made out one afternoon on my parents’ couch. So you could say my life hasn’t been completely wasted. [laughs]

  Helen Campbell

  At the end of the school year, we put on a real play. I mean, a week-long run, performances at night, parents came, kids came, even some locals who were just curious. We did Our Town. Not an especially original or interesting choice, I realize. But, heck, it’s a nice, simple play with nice, simple emotions, and everyone can relate to it, and back then it wasn’t quite the cliché it’s become. And anyway, it was hard to find plays we could cast. Basically we had to dragoon boys into our productions. They really didn’t want to participate, most of ’em. It wasn’t just that they preferred sports—our big end-of-school-year productions didn’t conflict, they were extracurricular—it was just, I don’t know, it wasn’t anything they were interested in. And they found performing like that embarrassing. It was amazing how these cocky, strutting boys would become awkward and shy and mumbly when they had to get up on stage, but that’s how it was. Still, we somehow managed to get the thing populated. We always did in the end. I think word may have gotten out that it was a good, unpressured way to spend time with girls. By age fourteen, that was becoming an issue for them.

  I cast Chance in the role of stage manager, which was kind of a no-brainer. He had the presence, he had the charisma, he had the chops. And he was so good, I did something I’d never done before and have never done since. See, I was in a community theater group, we did amateur theatricals, it was a lot of fun even though our work wasn’t anything to write home about. Some of us believed we were better than we actually were, but we weren’t. Anyway, I went to the guy in charge of the thing—a fellow with the glorified title of “company manager”—and told him he ought to include Chance in our company. It was all grown-ups, so this was sort of unprecedented, but I had no doubt he would be a great addition. He’d probably be the best actor in our group from day one.

  I had to pester the guy before he gave in. He wasn’t inclined to pay me any heed, even though I taught theater and should have been expected to know something about it. Which I did, by the way. I’d wanted to be an actress as a girl, and it was tough to realize I just didn’t have the talent. But along the way I’d done my share of studying and reading, I knew a lot of plays, I knew a lot about acting theory. And I could damn well recognize talent when I saw it.

  When I mentioned the possibility to Chance, he pretty much jumped at it. I’m sure there are people around here who’ll tell you how shy he was, what a loner he was, how closed off and private he was. Well, it’s a bunch of malarkey. If you met him halfway, he was as open and voluble as any teenager you might want to meet. He had a great laugh, and he was even willing to confide some of his feelings in you. More than many teenagers in that regard, in fact. At a certain point I thought of him as being as much a friend as a student.

  Well, Dick finally let Chance audition, and while his age made it difficult for him to be part of our company—he couldn’t play our contemporaries, for goodness sake, the age difference was too obvious, so we could only use him when the play called for an adolescent—but Dick had to admit the kid was really good. He didn’t want to admit how good, because then he would have lost face, he would have had to concede I was right. I think he always felt competitive with me, so disagreements like this often became little power struggles. But he admitted Chance was good enough to act with us.

  And then…well, I’m a little reluctant to talk about this. Aside from being embarrassing to some people who are still alive, there might even be legal jeopardy involved. But, well, you can imagine, this beautiful boy, all these grown-ups around. Grown-ups who looked at him and responded with pure appetite. Some of the men as well as some of the women, I’m sorry to report. And I’m not going to say much more than that on this particular subject, but suffice it to say I believe Chance lost his virginity the summer he joined our repertory company.

  And you know, I know about his fan clubs, and I read about that woman in black who’s always laying flowers on his grave, and I think about how, even before he was famous, before he was even grown up, the level of lust he inspired in people, and I have a sense of what they mean by the phrase “animal magnetism.” Chance had it. He simply had it. In addition to his good looks. It was something else, something extra. And completely involuntary. It wasn’t something he exercised. I don’t believe he was even aware of it back then. And looking back, I suppose
I wasn’t immune to it either, although I certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of acting on it. I was his teacher, after all. You don’t do that kind of thing.

  Derek Stephens (actor in Downtown Players)

  Chance was a bit of a disturbing element in our little theater troupe. So young and so beautiful. When he joined, it was like an injection of pure energy.

  See, up to then, we were just a group of hobbyists, basically. I mean, it was like a club more than a professional company. Everyone had a day job, or no job at all. I was manager at the bank, Helen taught school, Dick Dolphy owned one of the cafés downtown, Amy McCandless was a waitress there, and so on. We had fun putting on plays, and because there wasn’t any real theater in the area, people came to see us. No serious competition except for the one movie theater. For live performance, we were the only game in town. So we obviously didn’t have to set our sights very high. I don’t mean to suggest we were bad, just that we weren’t especially slick.

  All right, all right, we were pretty bad, I admit it. But it was also a case of…see, we’d been in operation for six or seven years by this time, and a certain, I guess you might call it lethargy was starting to take over. A certain routine. A kind of “who cares?” attitude. Our audiences weren’t particularly discerning. They seemed to prefer the non-adventurous fare. Safe stuff. Whenever we tried something modern or modestly experimental, we tended to have a hard time filling the house. Ditto with Shakespeare, by the way. So it was becoming a challenge to take ourselves at all seriously. And now, all of a sudden, having this beautiful young boy join us and then discovering how talented he was, well, it just made all of us try to up our game. It was like a shot of pure adrenaline.

  By the way, I don’t believe Chance was entirely unaware of the effect he was having on everybody. He was a bit of a minx, truth be told. Looking at you with those deep, soulful eyes of his. And not everybody shared my scruples. My lips are sealed otherwise. I’m just saying the poor boy was plunged into a sexual maelstrom. He may have had some minimal notion of what was happening—he knew and he didn’t know is how I’d describe the situation—but I doubt he had the tools to navigate it. He was still a child, and his sense of his own erotic power was doubtless rather inchoate. I’m sure he enjoyed the effect he was having, and was willing to use it—he could be a seductive little rascal—but I don’t think he had the vaguest idea how destabilizing it could prove to be in the grown-up world. Not at first at least.

  I’m thinking especially of the period during our production of Tea and Sympathy, the first play we did after he’d been added to the company. We chose the play specifically to make use of his being in the group, we figured we might as well find a piece with a good solid part for someone that age. But you can probably see how fraught the situation might become with a play like that. Especially if the actors take their work home with them, as the old saying goes. Well, one thing led to another. Beyond that, I’m not uttering a word. Least said, soonest mended, as another old saying goes.

  Amy McCandless (actor in Downtown Players)

  I played Laura Reynolds in our production of Tea and Sympathy. Chance was Tom.

  Have you talked to Derek? I know he loves to gossip. I don’t know what he’s told you, but I’m sure it was tawdry. That’s Derek for you. Behind that refined exterior, that gentleman banker manner, there’s a mean little snake. Besides, I think he was jealous of my relationship with Chance. I don’t mean to imply anything unnatural by the way. Everyone in the company was crazy about Chance, everyone wanted to be his friend. He had that kind of charisma. Just drew you right in.

  But the thing is, there was gossip about Chance and me, even at the time, and I’m not saying Derek started it because I don’t know that, but I have no doubt he was happy to pass it along to all and sundry. And it’s utter nonsense. Chance and I grew very close during the rehearsals and the run of the play. I don’t deny it. If anything I’m proud of it. I think I played an important role in his life at that time. He needed a grown-up he could talk to. But there was never anything…improper about it, or carnal. He was just a kid. Fourteen years old. A beautiful boy, of course, a Caravaggio youth, but it would have been impossible for me to think about him that way. Chance and I, we had a friendship for sure, and I guess it was a friendship that kind of mirrored or reflected the relationship in the play in some ways. But goodness gracious, not what happens at the final curtain! That would never have occurred to me. Or if it ever did, I would have dismissed it from my mind immediately. He confided in me, and I did care about him deeply, and I felt a responsibility for him because he needed someone to feel a responsibility for him. His mom was kind of an absent figure in his life, and his aunt cared deeply about him—I think she adored him—but she wasn’t the sort of person who could fathom what was going on inside such a beautiful, delicate soul.

  He was a terrific listener too, by the way. When you talked to him, you felt the totality of his being was paying close attention to the totality of yours. It was a two-way street, this friendship between him and me. Not some act of emotional charity on my part. That’s what I’m trying to convey.

  He was such a sensitive child, such a troubled child, with such a complicated situation at home, and of course he had an extraordinary talent, which is a burden as well as a blessing. He had a hard time connecting with his peers. His talent—his whole artistic temperament—was deeply isolating. Maybe that’s always the case, I don’t know.

  Of course, we all noticed the talent right away. From the first rehearsal. He blew us all off the stage. Just doing a scene with him—and this is a fourteen year old boy we’re talking about!—just being on stage with him was an education in the art of acting. We all learned a lot simply by watching him work. It’s as if he’d somehow intuited Stanislavski without ever having been taught. I’m pretty sure he hadn’t read An Actor Prepares yet. The technical stuff came later. He just kind of made up the Method on his own.

  And to give you some idea of how incredible his talent was, how able he was to utterly transform himself, he and I once did a scene from Richard III. Just as an exercise. The company never did any Shakespeare, we knew there was no audience for it around here, our people would have stayed away in droves. But Chance was eager to give it a try. He thought it was important to have some familiarity with the classics, to be comfortable with the verse and the diction and the artifice. So we picked the scene where Richard woos Lady Anne. And here’s the thing: He made himself look ugly! I don’t just mean he contorted his body, although he did that too. I mean his features became grotesque. I can’t to this day explain to you how he managed that. It wasn’t make-up or anything. We were in my apartment, it was all very informal, he wasn’t wearing any makeup. He just…he worked from the inside out, always. That was his way. And somehow he found something inside himself that turned this beautiful boy into a monster. It was almost scary.

  And he loved being in our little troupe. He didn’t have many friends his own age, but we all more or less adopted him as part of our little theater family. He was a great sport about being a member. When there were props to be moved, sets to be built or painted, lighting to be adjusted, anything like that, you could count on him to help out, to do whatever was required. There was no hierarchy in the Downtown Players. We all pitched in. And Chance pitched in more than anyone.

  When I read about his death however many years later it was, I was heartbroken. I hadn’t seen him for several years, but I always felt connected. We exchanged letters from time to time, and he always sent me cards for Christmas and presents on my birthday. We never lost touch completely. So it came as a complete shock. I was devastated.

  Tell me, do you think it was, like they sort of hint, a suicide? Or was it a plain old everyday drowning accident? Do you have any idea? I guess in those situations, one never knows for sure. Not unless there’s a note or something, and I gather there wasn’t.

  Joel Weingott

  After that summ
er at camp, it was a challenge to keep the friendship going. We lived over a thousand miles away from each other, and at that age, a lot is happening to you. You’re changing on a daily basis, so there’s a real danger of growing apart just in the ordinary course of events. But we did keep up a correspondence. People find it hard to believe that Chance was much of a letter writer, since he had a reputation for being, you know, sullen, or taciturn. And incommunicative too, barely articulate. Maybe he was like that with other people, but he was never that way with me. And he was terrific in terms of holding up his share of the correspondence. Always answered my letters promptly, and he wrote great letters himself. Funny and wry and personal. Full of sardonic observations about the people around him and the shit he was going through at school and at home and so on. Can I say “shit?” Well, feel free to substitute the word “stuff” if you need to.

  The summer after the summer we were both at camp, he invited me to come visit him for a couple of weeks. And maybe I was a little apprehensive about it, because God only knows what I’d be getting myself into, but I missed spending time with him, so I said yes. He was living with his aunt and uncle at the time. I guess there were tensions with his stepfather or something, so he wasn’t living at home, but the Bennetts were very welcoming, or tried to be. At least his aunt was. His uncle Earl wasn’t mean, I don’t mean to suggest that, but he didn’t seem to know what to make of me, so he pretty much kept his distance. Grunt a good morning and a hello and a good night and that was about it. I’d sometimes catch him sort of staring at me like I was some sort of alien life form. Same kind of shit I used to get from the guys at camp. His aunt Mary, she didn’t know what to make of me either, but she made more of an effort. Sometimes it was sort of laughable, like she bought frozen bagels for my breakfast to make me feel at home, that sort of thing. But it was well-intentioned. And when I laughed about it, she laughed too. She understood that she’d been flailing about and that I could see she’d been flailing about. And she understood I appreciated the attempt. So the laughter broke the tension.