The Woman in Black

by Erik Tarloff

  Now, Chance didn’t come right out and ask me for advice, but that was pretty clearly why he’d called. So when he finally stopped babbling—he’d been talking a mile a minute—I said, “Listen, Chance. Listen, hon. He’s a powerful man in this town. He isn’t talking through his hat. He’s in a position to do us a world of good.”

  And Chance sort of grunted and then he hung up without saying goodbye.

  Now I should tell you right here and now that I had—and continue to have—no idea about Chance’s sexual tastes. That certainly wasn’t anything we ever discussed. If it had emerged he was queer I wouldn’t have been shocked, but I can’t say I necessarily thought it was the case either. I had no opinion on the matter. And to be honest, I didn’t think it was relevant in this particular situation. People do all sorts of things that wouldn’t be their first choice if there are compelling reasons for it.

  But anyway, he hung up on me. And about a half-hour later, my doorbell rang. That was a shock. I didn’t expect any visitors, I was already in a housecoat and mules, my husband and I were preparing dinner in the kitchen. So I answered the door, and it was Chance, looking furious. Steam coming out of his ears, virtually. It was obvious this wasn’t the right time to suggest we wait and talk in the morning, so I led him into the little room at the back of the house Marty and I used as a study.

  “How could you put me in that position?” he said. Almost shouted. He was in a rage. No hello or anything.

  So I told him I didn’t know that that was the position he’d be in when I set up the meeting. So then he said, “But when I phoned you just now, you told me to go through with it.”

  I defended myself by denying I’d told him that. I’d just explained the situation because he needed to understand what might be at stake.

  Which didn’t placate him. “I thought you were an ethical person,” he said. “I can’t believe this.”

  Well, that stung. “It’s not like I like it,” I said. “But I am in the business, and this is how the business sometimes works. It’s been this way from the beginning. It’s nasty, but it’s the world we’re in.”

  “It’s not the world I’m in,” he said. “I’m an actor, not a whore. I sleep with people I want to sleep with. I don’t have sex hoping for a payoff.” And then he said, “And I thought you were my agent, Irma, I didn’t think you were my pimp. I’m honestly surprised at you.”

  Well, he was right, of course. I’d been looking out for his career, maybe, but I hadn’t been looking out for him. You get so inured to that kind of bullshit that you stop noticing how ugly it is, how dehumanizing and degrading. Treating artists like…like meat. I felt deeply mortified. So I steeled myself and apologized to him. Abjectly. And I was sincere, I honestly felt terrible, and I think he could see I was sincere. I didn’t know how this would turn out or how he’d react, in fact I initially thought he’d probably fire me—which I probably deserved, at least from one point of view—but he didn’t. We got past it.

  At the time, standing in the study with him, I felt a little desperate, so right then and there I suggested—almost begged him—to sit down for dinner with Marty and me, we had enough food, and Chance surprised me by accepting, and…well, we actually had a pretty pleasant meal, all things considered, and soon, after a few glasses of wine, we were even laughing about the whole incident. Chance started acting out the scene, and, you know, he was brilliant at that sort of stuff, he played both parts, the director and himself, to perfection, oily and sweaty and insinuating as the would-be seducer, timid and shy and virginal as himself, and he had Marty and me in stitches—and by the time he left he realized he had a great story to dine out on as long as he disguised the identity of the director.

  James Sterling (acting teacher)

  Gil Frasier brought Chance to my class the first time. It was the one in the evening…I was teaching several a day. After I was blacklisted I couldn’t work in pictures, so I had to really scramble to make a living. Ran myself ragged for a while, three or sometimes even four classes a day. Usually one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one after dinner. It was grueling work. When you teach something as intimate as acting, you have to make a huge emotional commitment to each student. You can’t just sit back and watch, you have to engage. It’s very personal, very active. When a class ended, I’d often find myself drenched in sweat. I’d have to take a nap before the next class started. And we started eating our dinners at a ridiculously early hour so that I wouldn’t have to expend all that emotional energy on a full stomach, and to give me time to get back to the little theater I was renting in Hollywood. My wife wasn’t thrilled about that, but she understood. My kids kind of liked it…they were always hungry anyway, so from their point of view, the earlier we ate the better.

  Gil had been studying with me for more than a year. A good student, an enthusiastic participant in class, and a fine solid actor. The kind of guy—he might not give you brilliance, there might not be any blazing moment of insight or illuminating display of emotion, but you could rely on him to give an honest, intelligent performance. He had a pretty good career over the years, and still works now and then—I see him occasionally in a TV drama or an indie film—but I’d say he deserved to be better known. One of those character guys who are indispensable to a good production even if you don’t pay much attention to them.

  He and Chance were friends.

  They were roommates? I didn’t know that.

  Anyway, he brought Chance along one night. Chance was curious, I guess, and I’m sure Gil told him good things about the class. He came in that first time just to observe. I had a policy in those days, people could sit in for a couple of classes for free before deciding whether they wanted to attend as a student. Many did. They liked what they saw. After watching for a while, there was this itch to participate, to be part of the action. What we were doing in those classes was exciting, it was hard to just sit on the sidelines and watch other people throw themselves into it.

  So Chance came a couple of times, and then he signed up. I think for both him and Gil the expense wasn’t negligible. Neither of them was working much at the time. I didn’t charge a hell of a lot, but even that small amount was a large amount if you weren’t earning anything.

  Students sometimes brought monologues or scenes in to class and we’d work on those, but my basic teaching technique was to work with improvisation. Not free-form, not just get up there and start winging it. That would be too unstructured to be useful. I wanted to teach focus and concentration along with the free exercise of imagination. So instead, I’d give them written-out scripts, only with some of the lines of dialogue missing. And they’d have to improvise those missing lines, fill in the blanks as it were. And my rule was, their improvised lines couldn’t directly address the overt substance of the scene. They had to talk about something else, something apparently unrelated that might reveal subtext, might show us what the characters were thinking and feeling. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, believe me. Some quite good actors weren’t good at it at all, some were mind-blowingly great. But even the ones who weren’t good at it…their acting definitely benefited from the exercise anyway. Because it didn’t just teach them how to improvise. It helped teach them to act.

  The first time Chance performed in class, it was a monologue, not an improv. Something from The Tempest. And it was very good. We worked with it line by line, the whole class pitching in and asking about why he’d made this choice or that, commenting on possible alternatives. He had trouble answering—he worked intuitively, his process wasn’t intellectual—but he wasn’t especially defensive about the suggestions. And everybody agreed it was an excellent piece of work. We had some questions, we had some criticisms, but there was no doubting the fellow had a lot of talent.

  But the next time he got up, it was to do one of the improv scenes. The set-up was a blind date, a first date between a guy and a gal that had been arranged by some mutual friends.
And the written dialogue was pretty realistic, the way people would behave on a first date when they don’t know each other at all and feel a little exposed about needing to be set up with each other. Awkward, but putting their best foot forward. Expressing curiosity about one another even if they weren’t especially interested. We’d done that scene in class lots of times.

  So after the first few written exchanges, the boy’s script has a blank…an indication he should improvise. And Chance said, “What’s that weird smell?”

  Well, that was startling. Nobody had ever gone quite that far afield with an improvised line. And then he edged away from her in this very gingerly way, as if…you see, the way I interpreted it, his character didn’t want to be rude, didn’t want the girl to feel insulted, it was a subtle, almost invisible sidling away, but it was as if the smell was so unpleasant he needed to get some distance from her. And the girl—I don’t recall which one it was, and that should give you some idea of what made that particular class memorable—the girl just stared at him. Because she was supposed to improvise something back, but his line flummoxed her completely. She moved a little closer to him—I don’t even think she was aware she was doing it—and he sidled away again, and because she hadn’t come up with a line, he went on, “Oh, that’s right, Chuck told me you just had an operation.”

  So at that point the whole class laughed. No doubt because it was so unexpected as well as so socially unacceptable, they assumed Chance must have intended it comically. But his affect was totally earnest, puzzled and troubled if anything. And the girl recovered enough to say—see, in improv you’re never supposed to contradict anything any other actor has said, you have to accept it and build on it—she said, “Yeah, they released me from the hospital last night.”

  Not exactly a brilliant comeback, it didn’t take us anywhere new, but at least she said something. And Chance said, “They did? Usually when someone smells like that they keep them overnight for observation.”

  And at that point they were back into the written script. And it went on like that, with Chance, whenever it was his turn to improvise, throwing out the most bizarre, out-of-left-field lines. The poor girl couldn’t keep up, that I do remember, and also looked offended at some of Chance’s choices, as if he was insulting her personally, as if he was putting her down, not acting a character.

  When they were done I did what I always did, which is throw the class open to discussion, ask the students for reactions. And the initial response was pretty hostile. Some people said he’d been mean, some accused him of not taking the class seriously. Others wondered if he’d had any idea what he was doing or was just desperately free-associating. Finally his pal Gil spoke up, not offering an opinion, but saying, “Tell us what you think, Jim. What were your feelings about it?” Maybe he asked just because the mood was turning ugly, and he wanted to take some of the pressure off his buddy.

  So people seemed shocked when I said, “I thought it was dazzling.” I even heard a few gasps. I think they expected me to be much rougher on him, partly because they had no idea of what he’d been aiming for and figured I didn’t either, and also because I was capable of being pretty harsh when I felt students weren’t working at their peak. And also, to be honest, I was ordinarily pretty chary with praise. People shouldn’t come to class expecting to be complimented, they should come hoping to learn. But I thought this was an astonishing performance, especially considering it was Chance’s very first time up, and it deserved to be recognized as such.

  I went on to talk about how people feel on first dates, how self-conscious they are about themselves, their appearance and their behavior, how unnatural and ill-at-ease they are, and underneath, perhaps even unbeknownst to themselves, how judgmental they are about the other person, wondering if the date is worth the anxiety they’re putting themselves through, whether it’s worth the effort and maybe even worth the expense. Plus how they feel, especially if things don’t seem to be going too well, how they feel a little angry, and maybe the anger’s directed at themselves but often at the other person too, and they might suppress it, but it’s still there. “I think Chance was totally in touch with all those emotions, the self-consciousness and the self-loathing and the hostility and the anxiety, and was externalizing them, turning them into a theatrical reality.” Then I turned to him, up on the stage, and asked, “Is that what you were thinking?”

  And he gave me that famous lopsided smile and said, “Maybe something along those lines. Insofar as I was thinking.”

  So right from the start I knew he was special. And he kept coming to my classes, even after he’d become a star. And in interviews, he was always very generous about what he learned in my class.

  Sir Trevor Bliss (director)

  I fell into filmmaking more or less by hazard. I daresay that’s how it often worked in my generation. No one thought of filmmaking as a profession in those days, you see. Back then, no child in Britain—I imagine no child anywhere—dreamt of becoming a cinema director when he grew up. We didn’t even realize there was such a thing.

  But after my stint in the RAF—I’d had a pretty good war as such things go, a bit of excitement, only a few brushes with serious danger—which isn’t to say I wasn’t scared to death every waking moment, but the fear was rarely justified by the facts on the ground, or, to be more precise, in the air—certainly I was relatively safe compared to the chaps who faced genuine life-threatening jeopardy on a daily basis—but in any case, after the war, and after a couple of years at Swansea University, which I left without taking a degree, I found myself…well, first, I should say that while serving I’d been assigned to do aerial photography and reconnaissance over Germany, often as a follow-up to bombing missions, in order to survey and assess the effectiveness of each raid, so I definitely knew my way around cameras and things. I’d continued with photography at Swansea. And so after I’d left Wales and returned to London, after a few weeks there penniless and utterly confused about what to do with my life, I found my way, through some friends I’d made in the service, to the Documentary Division of the BBC, where I learned the ins and outs of motion picture camera work. I stayed for a bit, and then landed a position at Pinewood Studios, first as a cameraman, and then, having earned a measure of trust, I was allowed to try my hand at directing a few things.

  And because they were rather well-received, more work followed, and then Hollywood expressed an interest, and that seemed like quite an attractive proposition after the privations of the war years and post-war rationing and so on, so I popped over to California for a rather long period. I never took American citizenship, although [laughs] I did take an American wife, and soon had two American children as well. Legally speaking they’re both nationalities, they carry both American and British passports, but no one who meets them would mistake them for English. My parents, when they finally met their grandkids on a visit we made one Christmas, were loath to acknowledge my paternity.

  [laughs]

  And I also acquired an American partner. After I’d made a couple of films as a hired gun, so to say, I decided I’d really prefer more creative control over the work I was doing, and teamed up with a bloke named Saul Lindauer, and we formed a production company. Saul was more on the producing end, I was responsible for the directing side of things. But to be fair to Saul, we both played a creative role at the development stage of any given project. He had sound story sense and made exceedingly valuable contributions in our initial discussions with the writers. So I don’t mean to suggest he was simply the finance fellow. But once filming got underway, he generally stayed away from the set.

  We had a project in development at United Artists, a good one, we entertained high hopes for it, we’d optioned a quite distinguished war novel—there were so many good ones, weren’t there?—the Second World War, whatever else it was, turned out to be a boon to American literature, so many of those returning GIs had been through hell and had gripping tales to tell. We wer
e too late with Mailer and Jones and Shaw, or in one case were simply outbid, but we managed to option Chuck Leveret’s Plains and Hills before anyone else could get their hands on it. It was a good novel, rather Hemingway-esque, but if you’re going to be–esque that’s not a bad–esque to be, particularly if you’re writing about combat.

  Saul managed to round up the financing without too much difficulty—it was what Hollywood calls “a prestige property”—and we began casting it, and we were going to go with Orson Bean for the younger brother, he was just beginning to make a reputation in New York, mostly in comedy, but he was a good, versatile actor, and we were going to bring him out. But then he got named in front of HUAC, and that was that. It was a terrible period, those blacklist days. Many careers and reputations were utterly destroyed. Orson wasn’t destroyed, thankfully, he managed to bounce back in theater, where the blacklist didn’t have the same degree of sway, and he ended up doing fine for himself. But casting him in a movie at the time was out of the question. And from what I understand—not that it should matter—he wasn’t even a Communist at all. But once you say something like that, as people often do these days, you’re almost conceding the government’s right to examine people’s conscience, you’re simply criticizing them for doing sloppy work, and that isn’t a position I’m comfortable taking. The entire operation was corrupt from its inception. That’s why I never took American citizenship, and why I ultimately returned to Britain, although admittedly my divorce had something to do with that latter decision as well. But I’d been considering naturalization for a time, it had seemed like a sensible step, and now it no longer seemed like anything I’d want to do. Britain never had anything resembling a McCarthyite episode, you see, and that was enough for me to keep my nationality and my passport.