by Erik Tarloff
“I saw what you just did,” I said. “I saw you take that record.”
“Huh? What record?”
It’s funny: For such a great actor, he wasn’t much of a liar. He sounded just about as guilty as he obviously was. “Come on, bud, don’t treat me like an idiot. I’m from around here, I’m not some out-of-towner sap. Now hand it over.” See, the thing is, since he wasn’t running away, I sort of felt like I might have the upper hand even though there was no reason for that to be the case. He still could have run, but for whatever reason, he didn’t. Guilt? Inexperience? He somehow was enjoying himself? Beats me. I went on, just, you know, improvising. “It’s store policy to prosecute shop lifters to the full extent of the law.” I made up that store policy on the spot, incidentally. “You could be in big trouble. But if you hand the record over right now, I’m willing to let it pass.”
I had no cards to play, not really, but he seemed a little cowed. He said, “Okay, okay,” and pulled the record out from under his coat. He looked a little sheepish. As he handed it up to me, he said, “It’s Sonny Stitt’s latest. I just had to have it. I’m a little short right now, I would have come back and paid for it eventually, honest I would have, but I couldn’t wait, I had to have it right away.” And then, as I took it from him, he went on, “Are you a Sonny Stitt fan?”
“I’m not really familiar with him.”
“Not familiar with Sonny Stitt? You’re kidding, right?”
“Is he a singer?”
Chance snorted. “No, he’s not a singer. You must be confusing him with Johnny Ray.” This was a dig at the kind of stuff I’d been playing in the store some of the other times he’d come in. “Sonny Stitt plays the saxophone, for your information. Alto and tenor. He isn’t some crappy pop singer, he’s a serious artist. A genius.”
“I don’t really listen to jazz much.”
See what he’d done? He had somehow suckered me into a conversation, almost a normal conversation, within seconds of my having caught him stealing. I sometimes wonder if it would have worked if he hadn’t been so handsome. Although he had plenty of charm to go with those looks. Those incredible eyes, that mischievous smile, that confiding manner. But if he’d been some old, dirty, toothless homeless guy who’d just boosted a record, would I have given him the time of day? Probably not, charm or no charm.
“Jazz is the great American music,” Chance said. He sounded almost indignant, like, how could I not like jazz? What was the matter with me? Pretty cheeky, to sound indignant right after being caught stealing. But he almost pulled it off. “It’s America’s major contribution to world culture! You can’t just say you don’t listen to it. You have to listen to it. Like, if you lived in Vienna a hundred years ago, you’d have to listen to Beethoven.”
“But I don’t like it.”
He recoiled. Humorously. You know, in an exaggerated way. And damn it, he made me laugh. “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. And then, more earnestly, he said, “It’s because you haven’t heard much of it, there simply can’t be any other reason. Tell you what: I’m a little short right now, I guess you’ve figured that out. Being an out-of-work actor can be rough on the pocketbook. But next time I get a paycheck, let me take you to one of the clubs around here. Okay? There’s a lot of great music happening in New York. You’ll hear what you’ve been missing. It’ll change your life.”
So that’s what I mean about “meeting cute.” I busted him for shoplifting and like two minutes later he was asking me for a date.
Leon Shriver
So I’m at the Actors Studio, doing scenes and improvs and digging into sense memories of family trauma and dental visits and unhooking some girl’s bra strap in high school, and Chance and I are still waiting tables at that little dive in the Village, on and off—sometimes they’d can us, then they’d find they were short-handed and rehire us—and then all of a sudden he gets lucky. Well, I’m not sure he saw it exactly that way. Not in the long run. He did at first. He got a job, and no actor scoffs at a job. Chance might have bitched about it, but he could also be a very practical guy. He wasn’t any prima donna, not when he couldn’t afford to be. Work, work, work, that was his credo back then, even if it was crap, because no actor ever thrives by going hungry, and no casting director ever notices you when you’re sitting home brooding about not working. Work leads to more work. And it’s an opportunity to practice your instrument.
So as a matter of policy he went to almost every open casting call in town. And kept striking out. He said to me, “They’re not gonna discourage me, Leon. A pretty face like mine, somebody’s got to want me sooner or later. I’m gonna wear those fuckers down.” So he just went out and pitched himself. Parts he was perfect for and parts where the whole thing was ridiculous. I mean, hell, he was no more modest about his talent than about his looks. He figured he could be anything a script called for, could play old men and pimply adolescents and probably one of the witches in Macbeth if it had come to that. He never put a limit on what he could do. So he just girded himself for battle and went out every day. And absorbed all the punishment actors are used to receiving. Like, you know how Hitchcock once said “actors are cattle?” Well, that was right on the money. It’s no accident casting calls are called cattle calls in the business.
But then, one day, Chance read for a continuing role on a soap—three weeks guaranteed, with an option to renew—and even though the corridor outside the producer’s office was lined with good-looking guys in their twenties sitting on the floor waiting for their turn to read, guys who to any superficial observer were indistinguishable from Chance, this time his ship came in. The kid brother of one of the principals, newly released from prison and come back to town under a cloud of suspicion. Lovable but menacing. A sweet misunderstood loner or a serial killer? To be determined. It was a part he could play in his sleep.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
So Chance didn’t come into the store for a couple of weeks after I’d caught him trying to steal that LP. Could he have been embarrassed? Or maybe he was waiting for the right moment. And then one afternoon he turned up. All smiles. “Hey!” he said. “How you been?” Like we were old pals. Like he’d just come back from his junior year abroad.
I was a little wary. The guy was a proven thief, after all. “Yeah, hi,” I said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How’d you like Riker’s?”
Twisted smile. “Not even close, honey. But I have been kind of busy. Auditioning and things.”
“You still claim you’re an actor?” See, I hadn’t believed him when he’d said it before. It’s such an easy thing to say. Every waiter, every courier, every schmo in New York and LA says he’s either an actor or a writer or both. What makes someone an out-of-work actor rather than just a schmendrick who’s out of work? And as I said, he had the appearance of a street person. Usually smelled like one too. So I was a little skeptical. Although, to be fair, he had cleaned up pretty good on this particular day. He didn’t look nearly so scuzzy. And he smelled like Zest soap, which was at least a small step up.
“You think I was bullshitting you?” he said. Looking kind of hurt. “Not at all. In fact, smarty pants, I just got cast in something. You can catch me on your TV machine starting next week.” Big smile.
So this was a surprise. I said, “Really? You’re gonna be on TV? Or is this just more bull?”
“No bull. The Proud and the Bold. Weekday afternoons at two thirty p.m., channel seven. My part starts next Monday.”
“Well…gee. Congrats.” I still wasn’t sure he was telling the truth or not.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Is it a big part?”
“That’s not a question you should ever ask an actor. But, yeah, it’s actually a pretty big part.”
“Not that there are any small parts, just small actors.”
“There you go.”
“Well, okay, congra
ts again.”
“Yeah, thanks again. But listen, the truth is, I didn’t come here to tell you about that. I came here today for two completely different reasons.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Well, one of them is, now that I’m drawing a salary and all, I want to buy that damned Sonny Stitt album. With real money. Out of my own pocket.”
I couldn’t help smiling when he said that. “That’s fine,” I said. “Go grab one. I’m sure you don’t need my assistance finding it.”
Which got that one-sided grin out of him again, the one that later became almost his trademark. “Okay, okay.”
As he started toward the back of the store, I said, “You said there were two reasons. What’s the other one?”
He turned to look back at me over his shoulder. “Oh, to invite you to come out with me tonight. Clark Terry’s playing at the Vanguard. He’s really good. We could get some dinner, you can finally see what you’ve been missing.”
“Uh huh. Who’s paying?”
He laughed out loud at that. “Why, me, of course. I’m a working actor, for Christ’s sake.”
So that’s how our relationship got started. I wasn’t sure I should say yes to him, but I did anyway. One of those impulse things. I liked the ping-pong rhythm of our conversation, that might actually have had more to do with it than his looks.
And PS, I hated the jazz. God, what a racket! Squawk squawk squawk. But I fell in love with Chance, so I guess you could say the evening was a wash. And of course I lied to him about hating the jazz. Didn’t want to disappoint him.
Don Barlow (director)
We cast Chance for The Proud and the Bold. There was some controversy about it in the production offices. Some people thought he wasn’t quite menacing enough. You know, we wanted to keep the character’s true nature a mystery to the audience for a while. Hell, it was a mystery to the writers. [laughs] They hadn’t figured out what they were going to do with him. It partly depended on how he went over with viewers. He could be the sensitive, misunderstood loner who was wrongly convicted and who ends up saving the day, or he could be a serial killer. I think the writers were inspired by Shadow of a Doubt or Suspicion or one of those. We were keeping our options open, and as a result the actor had to convey both possibilities at once. For a process actor, something like that can present serious problems. When Chance had questions about his motivation, when he asked me for guidance, as happened more than once, I had to say to him, “Beats the shit out of me.”
Which made it a huge acting challenge for him. Actors, especially actors who work from the inside out, need to know what their characters are trying to achieve in every scene. That’s the way they build a performance. But with Chance’s character, he was trying to achieve either one or the other of two totally contradictory things, and we couldn’t tell him which one was right.
It was like the poor guy’d been thrown into the middle of a pool without having been given any swimming lessons. And listen, on the one hand, some of the staff didn’t want to hire him in the first place because he struck them as too sweet, and he was aware of that and had to work against that impression. And on the other hand, we’d put him in this terrible position of not knowing whether he was supposed to be sweet but confused, or sly, malevolent, and nuts. Quite a quandary.
But once the camera started to roll, any misgivings anyone had disappeared. Chance could be damned menacing, but always with that winsome, ingratiating little crooked smile. And charming in a kind of insinuating, unsettling way. It was a beautifully modulated performance, honestly. Straddling all the possibilities, giving nothing away, leaving all options open. He complained about the position we’d put him in, complained to me, complained to the producers. He wasn’t a prima donna about it, he wasn’t a Michael Dorsey, but he had legitimate questions. “How can I give an honest performance if I don’t know what my character knows?” Not many day players in a soap opera would be so concerned about artistic truth—[laughs]—but Chance was never less than conscientious about his work. And we couldn’t really help him. “Just do the best you can” was the upshot of what all of us advised. He had to rely on craft. Although I think he worked out some elaborate notion of having a divided consciousness so that his character didn’t know the truth either. If you look at old kinescopes—a few have survived, terrible quality—you can see it in his eyes in some of his close-ups, this anxious confusion. But I’m just guessing, really. At a certain point, he must have given up on us, because he quit talking about his process. But whatever he came up with, it worked.
And the camera simply loved him. And it wasn’t just the camera that loved him. The fan mail started pouring in from the first day. If you want objective proof of star quality, that was it right there. One appearance on an afternoon soap and the letters started arriving by the carload. “He’s innocent, he just has to be!” A lot of them said things like that. Others even proposed marriage.
And of course that meant his character was innocent. Because now we wanted to keep him. He was a hit. We wanted him to be a regular on the show. We offered him a contract. His agent at the time was some fly-by-night stumble bum who couldn’t have negotiated his way out of a paper bag, but Chance didn’t need someone to drive a hard bargain for him. We wanted him. We made a generous offer.
Leon Shriver
I might be wrong about this, a typical actor thinking he’s the most important thing in the show no matter what the credits might say, but it always seemed to me that a big turning point for Chance was when I got the second lead in Medicine Man. A real Broadway show. I’d been struggling, just like Chance, working at the Actors Studio, going on auditions, getting a few call-backs but no parts other than a couple of commercials, and then, suddenly, the tide seemed to have turned. A good role in what promised to be a successful play. Established writer, established director, a real star heading the cast.
This was around the time Chance was doing that daytime soap. And it’s kind of ironic, because when he first got that part, I envied the hell out of him. But then I got my shot at Broadway. And that seemed to upend everything. For him as well as for me.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
So it turned out to be a heck of a time in life to start dating a guy. In his life, I mean. When I agreed to that first date, he was a down-and-out record thief with clothes no second-hand store would touch and who on his best day smelled like cheap soap. I definitely felt that saying yes to him was an act of mercy. And then everything changed. It was maybe on our third date. Second or third. We hadn’t slept together yet, so it was early, definitely. I think we’d been to a movie—it took some doing, but I’d talked him out of taking me to another jazz club—and we were at some little joint in Little Italy, checkered table clothes, candles in Chianti bottles on the table, the whole cornball shot, it was like Lady and the Tramp, and we were sharing a pizza. He was still such a newbie to New York that he regarded pizza as exotic fare. [laughs] I’m not kidding! Remember, this was a long time ago, pizza hadn’t entered the Middle American bloodstream yet, not the way it would in a few years’ time—at that point it was almost like what sushi would be in the seventies, at least if you didn’t come from some place with ethnic neighborhoods, and…wait, where was I? I’ve lost the thread. Remembering this stuff, it all comes flooding back, sort of overwhelms me just thinking about it. Haven’t given any of these things a moment’s thought in a long, long time.
Oh yeah, thanks. Right. Okay, so we were eating this pizza—I was showing him how to fold the slice over and eat it with his hands—and he was analyzing the performances in the movie we’d just seen. And that was actually interesting, his manner could get a little pedantic sometimes, a little lecturey, but what he had to say was real sharp and insightful, and because so much of it was new to me I always learned a lot when he started explaining acting to me like that—so that was going on, and I think we were drinking wine, which was also a novelty for him; he
was still mostly a beer kind of guy at that point in his life, he let me do the ordering, but drinking wine and eating pizza made him feel frightfully sophisticated. And anyway, suddenly this kid came up to us, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen or so, and she asked Chance if he was Lance Foster—that was his character’s name on the soap—and could she have his autograph?
That was kind of funny and kind of exciting, that first time. He still felt anonymous, I think, and as for me, even though I’d seen the soap—I made sure to check on that first Monday to see if he’d been telling the truth—but even though I knew he was an actor on TV by now, I still mostly thought of him as the bum who’d stolen a record from our store. It takes a little bit of time to make a big mental switch like that. So I wasn’t intimidated or impressed by him or anything. Not yet. I didn’t consider the situation special, I hadn’t shifted gears in that way, he was just a guy I’d flirted with who’d asked me out under bizarre circumstances. And then this teenager asked him for his autograph and…and…well, you know. Suddenly you realize you’re in a different world from the one you thought you were in.
But at the time, that night, we both laughed at how amazing it was, and Chance was sweet to the girl and signed an autograph and chatted with her a little. Introduced her to me, invited her to sit down for a minute, even offered to buy her a Coke, which she declined. She was obviously nervous and excited, and he tried to put her at her ease. It was as much a novelty for him as for her, after all.
But what neither of us realized that night, this is how innocent we both were, is that this was going to become a regular occurrence. It just seemed like a funny kind-of-charming one-off. But we were quickly disabused of that notion. Within a week or so, we couldn’t go out in public very easily anymore. People would spot him, they’d make a fuss, they’d crowd him, they’d want an autograph or to talk about the show—they took the show very seriously, I have to say, and didn’t seem to make much distinction between the show and real life, kept assuring him they knew he was innocent and stuff like that—and he’d be torn between his natural good manners and simple gratitude on one side, and a powerful desire to get the hell out of there on the other. And I suppose to protect me too, since a lot of the girls who came up to him would kind of maneuver me or even push me aside to get to him. It could get ugly real fast.