by Erik Tarloff
Kendell Fowler (actress)
A lot of people forget—or maybe never even realized, never made the connection—that Chance Hardwick was a regular for a time on The Proud and the Bold. It’s not something he mentioned in interviews after he became famous in Hollywood. Now, he didn’t have a hugely long run with us, but he left a mark. We did the show live, it was all very on-the-fly and high-pressure, rehearse in the morning, air it in the afternoon, maybe do a rehearsal afterward for the following day if the pages were ready. So I hadn’t met Chance yet when he showed up for rehearsals and make-up Monday morning. I’d read the day’s sides of course, I knew the Lance Foster character was going to make his first appearance, but I had no idea who was going to play him. And the part as written…well, it could have been played by any sort of type, Lance could have been some nebbishy nothing, some hairy gnome, really any type at all, so I wasn’t prepared for the Adonis who showed up on the floor that day.
I wanted to like him. We were a happy set, generally speaking, and there was a pretty good atmosphere on the show. People were friendly, and we were welcoming to newcomers and even day players. I give a lot of the credit to Don—Don Barlow—he was a nice guy himself, and in addition he believed a happy set was an efficient set, so even though he was dealing with all these temperamental types and under really enormous pressure, he kept things on a nice even keel. Even if you screwed up, forgot your lines or your blocking or whatever, he would be pleasant and encouraging after we wrapped. “It happens,” he might say, or “Nobody’s perfect,” or whatever. “Try to do better tomorrow. Give somebody else a chance to be the fuck-up next time.” Some little joke to make you feel safe. You know, doing the show live like that, it’s a high-wire act. You’re going to lose your balance occasionally. And keeping the atmosphere on the set light-hearted and collegial, it actually made for fewer slips. We were all less stressed, less taut, more relaxed about performing. And mutually supportive. If, say, somebody went up and we could see it was happening, we’d improvise a line that fed the actor his line. Stuff like that.
But you want to know about Chance. Right. Okay, so he came on that first morning, and right away there’s agita. He wasn’t nasty, I don’t mean to suggest that, but he was obviously unhappy with the show and uncomfortable being on it. He was such an actor, you know what I mean? We had a job to do—we weren’t the Moscow Art Theater, we weren’t putting on The Cherry Orchard every afternoon—we were making a disposable artifact for housewives and old ladies. Nobody on the show thought this was high art or the pinnacle of our careers, we all aspired—or had aspired once upon a time, those of us who had already given up—to something higher. But this was a job, and a job isn’t something to be sneezed at in this profession. There are lots of hungry actors out there. And the show had its purpose, not to save the world or illuminate the human condition, just to provide some diversion for people who liked that sort of thing. So we mainly needed to get on with it and not take ourselves too seriously.
But from the very first day, Hardwick was all, “Why am I doing this?” and “What’s my objective?” and all those tiresome Method questions. And it was pretty obvious he heartily disliked the scripts, which didn’t exactly endear him to the writers. “People don’t talk like this!” he’d say. “This dialogue is awful!” He’d suggest line changes, new language…it was annoying, it wasted time, it was…it was like, for the rest of us, “Who the hell cares?” You know? Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong—I’m willing to admit he probably was right more often than he was wrong—but so what? Was there a single person watching who would care, or would even notice?
Now, it’s only fair to add that it wasn’t all prima donna stuff. Not in that limited sense that it was always about him. Like once or twice he’d even say to Don, “This line of mine, this attitude, wouldn’t it be better coming from Kendell? Wouldn’t that be more in character?” Actually offering me a line or even a whole speech that was originally written for his character. Unheard of! It showed a certain integrity, or that might be one way of looking at it. But it also meant that the time when we could be doing something else, something useful, was spent discussing shit that honestly wasn’t worth the effort. And forcing me to memorize new lines, which never came easy to me.
Don was very patient with him. Infinitely patient with his shit. Seemed to have taken a liking to him. He was willing to have these long conversations, accept suggestions, smooth things over between Chance and the writers or Chance and the other actors. But most of us got fed up with him pretty damn fast. He wasn’t really making the show better, he was just making the process worse.
Robert Bluestone (actor)
You’ve talked to Kendell? Yeah, I thought so. [laughs] Chance really got under her skin. Drove her nuts. [laughs] Lots of muttering under her breath, lots of eye rolling between scenes. And I can’t deny the guy could be a pain, especially during rehearsals. Slowed things down, argued endlessly.
And the writers hated him, hated him even worse than Kendell did. The poor writers were grinding out five scripts a week, it was a really brutal schedule, probably harder on the writers than anyone else connected with the show, and here’s this young pisher comes along and says their work is crap. Which it often was, mind you. Not always, sometimes they’d come up with a scene that was kind of funny or kind of poignant, or a story line that had some vague resemblance to real life. But come on…five scripts a week, big dramatic buttons at the end of every half-hour, new story lines every couple weeks…of course the shows were often dumb. It wasn’t the writers’ fault—it was the whole enterprise.
So yeah, he could be a real pain in the ass. But on the other hand, you had to make allowances. He was very young, very green, and very, very serious. He wanted to do his best. He cared. By comparison, the rest of us were just cynical old routiniers. And he wasn’t mean or selfish about it, he was actually quite generous as a performer. Playing scenes with him was a pleasure, as a matter of fact. He listened, you know? Listened and reacted. Knew his lines, knew your lines, was totally in the moment when the camera started to roll. Met your eyes, plumbed them, revealed his own emotions. Real emotions, no indicating. Working with him was like playing ping pong with someone who’s better than you are. It ups your game.
Which may have been what irked Kendell so much, frankly. Don’t tell her I said so, but it was pretty obvious he was acting on a different level from the rest of us. It wasn’t just that he cared—ridiculously, given the context, but he did care—it was that he delivered.
But I have a theory about him. See, if you grow up on the Upper East Side, say, or in some big city, someplace sophisticated, someplace with museums and theaters and concert halls, and let’s say your parents are educated people, then high culture is just part of the air you’ve breathed all your life. You know it, you value it, but you also kind of take it for granted. Your interest in it doesn’t have the force of a religious conversion. It just is. But if you come from a small town in the Midwest, if your background is pretty provincial, if you don’t encounter all this stuff until you’re in college, or even later maybe, then it takes on a different coloration, it plays a different role in your life, it seems magical, it becomes…it’s the most important thing in the world. Central. Crucial. An organizing principle. And you consider yourself a missionary, partly because you assume most of the world is like the place you came from.
To my mind, Chance simply burned with all this new stuff he’d just discovered precisely because he’d just discovered it. He burned with it to the exclusion of all other considerations. Acting especially, acting most of all, acting and theater. But also jazz…he could go on for hours about Bird and Dizzy and all those bebop guys. He worshipped them. And painting—he’d apparently become friends with some gallery owners down in SoHo, he’d started to haunt the Met and MoMa—and all this stuff was new to him. He was consumed by it…like that Gershwin song, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” You know that song
? [sings] “Now I know how Columbus felt/Discovering a new world.”
It’s like, you discover it all for yourself for the first time, and you start to feel like you’re the first one it’s ever happened to. Same thing happens the first time you fall in love, right? You may know better, but that’s what it feels like. And you can’t imagine not making it the most important thing in your life.
I mean…this is a crazy example, but there’s a novel by a Canadian writer named Simon Gray, it’s called Simple People. And the protagonist is this very naïve guy. And in one scene he finally, belatedly, loses his virginity. And he’s over the moon about how great the experience was. And he’s so enthusiastic about what’s just happened, he says to the woman he’s had sex with, “Why don’t people do this all the time?” And she says, “They do.”
I think high culture was kind of like that for Chance.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
The thing I’ve come to realize about Chance is that he was basically an unhappy person. Maybe even clinically depressive. I don’t mean just unhappy with me, or with that show he was on, or with New York. I think it was a permanent state for him. When I read about his death, and that was years after I’d last seen him, I thought right away it might be a suicide. He was a very troubled guy. It’s part of what made him so appealing…you wanted to take care of him. You felt he needed to be cared for.
David Bayer (acquaintance)
I’d occasionally see him at Julius’s. I mean, I think it was him. Jeez, I always just assumed it was him, that’s why I contacted you, but…I mean, it must have been him, the resemblance was too striking for it not to have been, although…I mean, it sure as hell looked exactly like the guy on the soap. But it’s also true this guy had a mustache, and I don’t know that Hardwick ever had facial hair. Although it could have been fake, that’s another possibility. A little disguise. And he always came in wearing a fedora, which wasn’t quite as unfashionable then as it would be now, men still wore hats, but still, you mostly didn’t wear something like that indoors. So I’m thinking it probably was him, and maybe he thought he could go to gay bars incognito.
We’d nod hello, maybe say good evening. I’d say something, he’d mumble something back. That’s about as far as it went. He’d come in around 11:00 p.m., midnight, have a drink or two, and leave. I never saw him leave with anybody. I don’t think he came in to trick, just to absorb some of the atmosphere. Maybe to reassure himself that gay bars, a gay community, actually exist, demonstrate to himself he wasn’t the only queer on the planet. Like maybe where he came from nobody knew about that stuff. Don’t get me wrong, wherever you came from fags walked among you, but they kept their identity secret. It was a secret society.
Well, whoever he was, Hardwick or a lookalike, he kept to himself. But like I say, I’m pretty sure it was him. He’d sidle in kind of late, sit alone at the last seat at the bar, keep his head down and his hat on, sip his drink for a half-hour or so, sidle out again. His whole demeanor, his posture, his bearing, everything, said, “Ne touchez pas.” So of course people left him alone. You’ve got to respect someone’s privacy, even out in public. No one asks for autographs in a gay bar.
Leon Shriver
Medicine Man—my can’t-miss, sure-to-be-a-hit Broadway show—closed after six performances. Brooks Atkinson hated the play. I mean really hated it. Wrote a venomous notice. A classic of the genre. Now, as it happens, he loved me—gave me a positively glowing review—but also said I was the only good thing in a horrible mishmash and my performance alone wasn’t enough to redeem a miserable evening.
The odd thing is, even though I was in a huge flop, I sort of had the feeling I was on my way. And Chance had a similar reaction. He took me out to dinner the night after the show closed and told me that with the review the Times had given me, fuck the play, I was going to be in demand. And he was right. I think he was probably jealous, but he was also being a good guy, bucking me up. And I got cast in another show within the month. And when that happened, he said to me, “See? I told you.” And he also said, “You know, it’s lucky for you that you’re a good guy. Because otherwise I’d really hate your guts.”
And I said, “You’re one to talk. You’re in a successful TV show, you’re making real money, you don’t have to worry about when you’ll get your next shot, you don’t have to go out for auditions all the time and pray for a call-back. You’re set.”
He rolled his eyes. “Have you seen the show, Leon? Have you seen the show?” I admitted I had. “And you think highly of it, is that what you’re telling me?” Well, I had to concede I didn’t regard it as possessing superlative artistic value. “So tell me: Would you be happy doing that five days a week every week, and seeing those five days a week stretch out past the horizon?”
Well, he had me there.
Eppy Bronstein (widow of agent)
Murray adored Chance. Even when he first showed up at Murray’s office, when he didn’t have a pot to pee in, Murray took a shine to him. This must have been real soon after he first got to New York. Another cockeyed kid from the boonies hoping to make it in show business. But Murray liked his face, liked his all-American manner. Just had a good feeling about him, you know? Thought he probably had talent. No professional credits to speak of, but Murray could tell there was something special about the boy. I remember he came home that night and said, “I think I just signed the next Montgomery Clift.” I asked him what the fellow had been in, and he said, “Nothing yet. But I got an instinct.”
Signing him was a real act of faith. I mean, besides that instinct, Murray had absolutely nothing to go on, no reason to take a chance on…on Chance. [laughs] But Murray was like that anyway. Even when he wasn’t enthusiastic about a talent, the way he was with Chance, he still was more inclined to take somebody on than turn him down. He used to say, “This is a crazy business, it’s like playing the slots, you never know what machine’s going to come up cherries. Might as well spread your bets and increase your odds.” Forgetting that it was also a way to increase your losses.
But aside from that, he mostly just had a special feeling for Chance. See, Murray and me, we had two daughters. Murray loved ’em to death, both of ’em equally, totally doted on ’em, but I think he always wanted a son too. And that didn’t happen and I think it was an ongoing disappointment to him. So a young guy like Chance coming under Murray’s wing…that meant something to him. Meant the world to him. Touched his heart, not just his wallet.
Ellie Greenfield Lerner
The one thing Chance and I never discussed was the nature of our relationship. We probably should have—I mean, looking back, it’s amazing to me we never did—but I was too shy to ask him about how he felt, and he was either too shy himself or too self-protective to volunteer anything. Maybe he was out of touch with his feelings, or maybe he just didn’t feel that much. But we never used the “L word.” By which I don’t mean “lesbian!” [laughs] You know the word I mean. I was too young, too intimidated, and maybe too much in love myself to dare, and much too nervous about how he might answer to ask him anything of that nature directly.
Now, as far as I know, he wasn’t seeing anyone else during the months we were together, and I definitely wasn’t. I don’t even know if that would have been against the rules since we never talked about the rules. But it’s my impression we were both monogamous during that time. Although, now that I think of it, who knows what he was up to? If you fall in love with the silent type, you can’t expect them to tell you anything. So I just kind of assumed we were going steady. I guess I assumed all sorts of things, and maybe, as the saying goes, I was just making an ass of you and me.
Maybe this was a hint, though. A straw in the wind. My parents were eager to meet him and I wanted him to get to know my folks. My mom and dad offered us a standing invitation to come to Sunday dinner in Hempstead. My father—this was typical of his humor, by the way—said, “You really should bring him around.
We’ll give him a taste of Jew food.” But Chance never wanted to go, always made up some excuse why it wasn’t feasible. He had to learn lines for the coming week, he was tired, he had an early Monday call…whatever. So we never made it up there. As far as my folks were concerned, Chance was just a rumor. My mother started watching his show every afternoon out of a sort of weird sense of maternal loyalty, but they never met him.
But on this monogamy question, the thing is, Chance and I were seeing so much of each other, I don’t know how, between me and The Proud and the Bold, he would have had time for anything or anyone else. He had long days, and we got together most nights. Usually at my place. I’d make him dinner or he’d bring some take-out. And a bottle of wine. He’d developed a taste for the stuff. Yeah, we usually stayed in. Going out was kind of a rarity. Partly because he was usually exhausted after a full day of rehearsing and shooting, he just wanted to kick off his shoes and relax, and also because, as I said, it was hard to go out without being mobbed by fans. Mostly older ladies. Not exclusively, but they made up the bulk of his fan base, so it wasn’t exactly threatening to me, not in the sense that someone might steal him away—it was just an annoyance.