by Alan Alda
But at least I knew what my next job was. As the run was coming to a close, I had been practicing throwing a football backstage with the stagehands because I was getting ready to do a movie about football, called Paper Lion, another part I was totally unqualified for. I was going to play George Plimpton, who had researched a book about the Detroit Lions by becoming a member of the team. My only experience with this game had been football practice in high school for two weeks. My mother, seeing I was going to be seriously killed by my teammates, put an end to it by telling the school that my orthodontist had forbidden me to play. I was embarrassed that I was avoiding getting tackled with a note from my dentist, but before long the embarrassment, along with the purple splotch on my hip, faded.
Now I was going to be on the field with actual Detroit Lions, who felt that hitting people was a calling from God. In one scene, eleven of them piled on top of me, and when I finally got up, I had been kicked in the ankle so many times, my left foot was asleep, and it stayed that way for half an hour. I learned to throw a football fifty yards, but every time I did it, I had to ice my elbow all through the night to be able to work again the next day.
Plimpton had also boxed once with Archie Moore, so I had to play a scene where I boxed with Sugar Ray Robinson. Sugar Ray was an extremely kind and gentle person. He spent the morning patiently showing me how to throw a punch and how to bob and weave to avoid his punches. Then we spent the afternoon filming a fake fight in the ring. I immediately forgot everything he had taught me that morning and stepped into his left hand. I felt the blunt pain as blood started pouring out of my nose. Sugar Ray was upset and blamed himself, but I had walked into the stone wall of his left all on my own.
I tried to throw myself into everything I did, but my aim wasn’t always that good. There was too much I needed to learn. I was still on a knife edge between talent and skill, between a willingness to take chances and an ability to make the chance pay off. Sometimes the chances I took were bizarre.
I went to the Bahamas to shoot a movie with Blythe Danner and the Canadian actor Heath Lamberts. The director decided the script should be put aside and that the film should be totally improvised. A friend of mine, Chuck Rapoport, had written the script, and I knew what it felt like to have even a word of what you’ve written changed, but I was so in love with improvising that I went along with it and we completely mangled Chuck’s script. This would become another movie shot from a cannon, straight into obscurity.
One night during the shoot, intoxicated with improvising and cheap cognac, Heath and I went to a nightclub where a few dozen sailors were sitting at tables, bored, drunk, and noisy in several different languages. We were in Freeport, where ships docked from all over the world. I looked at the sailors and the small, empty stage. I looked at Heath.
“Why don’t we put on a show?” I said.
“A show? How can we do that? None of these guys speaks English.”
“We’ll do it in gibberish. They’ll all think it’s a language they don’t know.”
The logic of this, along with the buzz from the cognac, appealed to Heath. We got up onstage and introduced ourselves in complete gibberish. The sailors understood that a show was starting and gave us polite applause. We began improvising a sketch that made no sense whatever, in gibberish or any other language. There were scattered laughs, which encouraged us. I introduced the next act, which, through elaborate gestures, they understood would be a belly dancer. Heath came out wearing some silk scarves he had found backstage and began dancing. He was pretty good, and the veil over his face made him look like a kind of plump, virginal seductress.
The sailors, not realizing they were watching a guy, started getting rowdy—whooping and whistling. A couple of them reached over their tables, trying to grab at his veils.
The more he twirled and wiggled, the more excited they got. Then he took a bow, taking the veil off his face, and their excitement turned to fury. They felt we had insulted them because we had let them become aroused by a man. Several of them got up and started for the stage. Smiling and bowing, we backed off the stage with all deliberate speed. We left the club, as I remember, through a window in the men’s room, just as if we were Hope and Crosby in The Road to Freeport.
I hadn’t seen my mother in a couple of years, partly because we lived in New Jersey and she lived in Los Angeles and partly because I was avoiding her, hardly even talking to her on the phone. I couldn’t handle the anger I felt at hearing her scrambled reality. I couldn’t go near the dark place in which she lived. It was a black hole I was afraid I’d never escape.
On a trip to California to act in a movie called The Moonshine War, I stopped off to visit her. She was in a rented apartment in Glendale. She lived in darkness. Bedsheets covered the windows. Outside her apartment was a bright California afternoon, but I had to strain to see her in the shadows. Physically, she had changed. She still had wide red lips painted on her face, but her once blond hair was thin now and colored orange. She was obese, dressed in a muumuu that covered her like a tent. There were piles of junk everywhere. She lived like someone with her belongings in a shopping cart, their meaning and value known only to her. She smiled nervously when I came in but looked at me suspiciously and listened for the threat in everything I had to say. As we talked, I realized that even this hovel was more than she could handle. Although I had been sending her money, she hadn’t known how to manage it, and now she was about to be evicted. I felt guilty and panicky. I had to rescue her from this, but in three days I had to be working in another city.
I left her apartment and found a real estate broker who handled houses in Burbank, where my grandmother had lived. Homes were less expensive there, and I thought she might find some comfort in a familiar town. I was shown a house that was clean and airy and, with no time for bargaining, agreed to the asking price, which was about half of what I’d be getting paid to do the movie. Then I went to a department store and in three hours bought a houseful of inexpensive furniture. I arranged for her to be moved and flew up to Stockton. A few days later, she called me.
“This is the most unhappy day of my life,” she said. I was dumbfounded. Why? I had just moved her out of a dark hole. “Why didn’t you sign the house over to me?” she asked, hurt and angry. Sign it over to her? She couldn’t even manage to pay the rent on the hovel. How could she handle ownership of a house?
“You could take it away from me any time you want,” she said. “How can you do this to me?”
She still thought I wanted to push her out of the plane. I tried to reason with her, but my anger and frustration were not a good match for her madness. I realized with a burn of embarrassment that my impulse to rescue her was one part actual rescue and one part a wish for gratitude. I had to settle, grudgingly, for simply doing the right thing.
After the shoot was done, I went back to our small town. My life was changing. It wasn’t the same as when I was starting out and could say yes to everything. Now I had something to lose, and in spite of my resolve under the shroud in Boston, I was hesitant in my decisions. Nothing seemed good enough. I was turning things down because they weren’t classy enough.
I stayed home more and more. I was playing tennis with friends, playing softball with my children, teaching our oldest daughter, Eve, how to count in base six using the new math. I was trying to write—sometimes sinking into narcissistic despair at the frigid whiteness of the blank page. But I wasn’t acting. I had gone from saying yes to everything to saying yes to practically nothing. Instead of leaping into the unknown, I was inert. After a year and a half of turning things down, my caution had turned me into a stuffed dog.
I took another walk around our town. You’re an actor. You’ve got to act, I thought. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’ve got to jump in. No matter what comes up next. Take it and make the best of it.
Could I do this? Would I actually take the next thing that came along, no matter what it was?
A few weeks later, I was sent a script for
a movie that was going to be shot in Utah State Prison, using real inmates as extras and actors in smaller parts. I thought it was a good script, and in any case, I was going to stick to the deal I had made with myself.
I got on a plane and headed for prison.
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My first appearance in a newspaper.
Learning to pretend, age two.
Early uniforms. Upper left: On active duty with Aunt Betty in Wilmington. Lower right: While I’m on patrol in the alley behind the burlesque theater in Toronto, Mom and Dad stop by.
Mom, Dad, and Beetlepuss Lewis—doing a bit in a hotel room. Every snapshot was a chance to think up a sketch. The fur coat seems to indicate that we were out of burlesque by now and on the road in vaudeville.
There’s a war on and I’m back in uniform.I was in the second grade, going to military school.One Saturday, we spenta few hours on the boardwalk by the ocean, taking publicity shots. About a week later, I came down with polio.
I remember hooking my feet under my dad’s ankles when we took this picture. I adored him. This was after polio, and I was swimming eight hours a day then. The dog, a replacement for Rhapsody, was called Coffee because of his blond hair. I was told we got him from one of the Andrews Sisters. She was probably glad to have given him away. He kept biting people. We gave him away, too, and as far as I know, he was never stuffed.
In a publicity shot, my dad teaches me all about baseball. There’s a certain lack of interest on my part. I may be finding out that there are no naked ladies in baseball.
I was about fifteen. My dad was in Guys and Dolls, and for some reason we were having our picture taken in a travel agency. My dad grabbed the palm tree off the counter and said, “Okay, we’ll be dreaming about traveling to the tropics.” Every shot was still a chance to write a story.
I was a sixteen-year-old apprentice in summer stock, acting in White Cargo with Rose LaRose, who was known mainly as a stripper in burlesque. She was playing a native seductress who, with her sexual shenanigans, drives a man so crazy he has to be carried off the island, a mental wreck. I come in to replace him, and she comes around the corner, topless, and says the immortal line: “I am Tondalayo.” As she walks toward me, clearly intending to make me her next victim, the curtain comes down. But, even though the play would be over, Rose always continued walking toward me, giving me a big, lusty, naked hug, just to see me blush. The other actor in the play did fine. I was the one who went crazy.
Arlene, on tour in Germany just before we met, and below, clowning for my camera with my hat and coat, just after we had our first daughter. I wore this coat during my year in Europe and for the first six years of our marriage, until it was frayed and droopy. But I still wouldn’t give it up. It was a Burberry, and I was sure that English people wore them until they fell apart completely. Arlene helped me get over this misconception by giving it away so I’d have to buy a new one.
Our daughters, Eve, Beatrice, and Elizabeth in Hyannisport.
Alfie the clown eats a pickle. My dressing up as Alfie and jumping around in front of gas stations kept us alive for a while so that we could eat more than pickles ourselves.
In my twenties, I finally got to act with Sam Levene in a musical about the Yiddish theater called Café Crown. I was a dentist from Buffalo and he was a waiter from Budapest. My father had just opened in What Makes Sammy Run? and we would be playing on Broadway at the same time. The reviews for my father’s show were mixed. Sam was brilliant, but he was not what you would call a softie. When we rehearsed this scene, he took almost an hour figuring out one little piece of business. I got bored and fell asleep. When Sam saw me nodding, he yelled in that big voice of his, “Alda, wake up! Your father’s show is a flop!” As it turned out, though, Sammy ran for 540 performances and we closed after three.
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While the camera was turning, I always had the crazy idea that I couldn’t get hurt because it was all make-believe. This was what I looked like moments before our nine-year-old daughter saw me slide down the hood of the car and crumple into a heap on the road. She managed to avoid running me over, and I was fine. But you’ll have to read her book someday, if she writes one, to see how being an actor’s daughter affected her.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
Not as brave as it looks. They needed a shot of me skydiving for Paper Lion, and I figured I could fake it by jumping off a high diving board, which was scary enough. Arlene took this test shot and added the clouds in the darkroom.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
After M*A*S*H hit, it became clear that fame turned you into a kind of cartoon character that people could write about as if there weren’t a real person behind the name. I didn’t realize when I posed for Arlene’s camera what a good image this picture would be of that state of dislocated identity.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
There were hundreds of people from the press on our set as we shot the last scene for M*A*S*H. Knowing it was the end, and knowing we were being watched as we brought this part of our lives to a close, made it almost impossible to concentrate, and we had to do many takes. Finally, we got the shot, the assistant director called a wrap, and we were caught in the glare of the journalists’ strobe flashes and the news cameras’ video lights. Naïvely, I had thought our last shot would be a quiet moment together. Instead, we were saying goodbye in Macy’s window.
COMPOSITE PHOTO REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF MICHAEL GINSBURG
Seventeen years after I had impersonated him in a cabaret, and long after he had left us, JFK and I appeared together in a tricked-up photo that was used as a prop for The Seduction of Joe Tynan. I played a senator, opposite Meryl Streep. It was my first script to be turned into a movie, and her first leading part in a film.
REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF MICHAEL GINSBURG
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
Back in New Jersey with our daughters, around the time M*A*S*H went on the air. From the time they were little, Arlene and I would often conduct family conferences around a picnic table like this. Everyone would get to challenge our decisions and argue her case. Then there would usually be an explanation from us that we were not a democracy. But listening, I think, made us enlightened despots.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
Day twelve of two new lives. The curtain came down on a Broadway matinee of Jake’s Women. We took our bows and then I stopped the applause. “Something happened this morning,” I told the audience, “that I’m going to remember all my life. I thought I’d tell you what it is, so you can remember it all your life, too. My daughter just gave birth to our first grandchild, a little girl.” The audience applauded, good-naturedly. And then a woman in the first row, clearly a New Yorker, spoke up as if we were having a private conversation. “So . . . ? What else? What’s her name? How much does she weigh?” Her name was Emilia, the first of seven grandchildren. After Emilia, our daughters came up with Scott, Jake, Isabel, Olivia, Eleanor, and Matteo. I became obsessed with them, making toys out of cardboard boxes, teaching them magic tricks, making robots, figuring out how to drop an egg two stories without breaking it. (We suspended the egg on rubber bands in a box, and the egg lived.) Then I would stay up late, building websites to entertain them. They were a happy new obsession. And who could blame you for loving your grandchildren? I had found the perfect way to go nuts while staying under the radar.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
Bea visits me on the set of M*A*S*H, dressing up in Radar’s outfit.
PHOTO BY ARLENE ALDA
Thirty years later, at about the same age, Bea’s daughter Emi visits our house and we tap dance together in the garage.
Across the desk from Liev Schreiber in Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. When we first moved into the theater, I thought I heard Liev going over his lines in the dressing room upstairs from mine. But then he knocked on my door and came in. “Can you hear that?” he said. The dialogue was
coming from two stagehands arguing in the alley. They were using Mamet’s exact rhythms and the same four-letter words for punctuation. It was an inspiring confirmation of Mamet’s incredible ear. We stayed by the window, soaking up the music of their speech, until the argument was over. We were both nominated for a Tony, but Liev won and I didn’t. As you can see, though, I’m still young; I have plenty of time to win a Tony.
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chapter 13
MY LIFE IN PRISON
I landed in Salt Lake City in a big basin of salt surrounded by towering mountains. I wanted to learn as much as I could about prison life, so I had arrived in time to see a show put on by the inmates inside the prison walls.
I got to Utah State Prison after dark and went through two or three checkpoints before I could get into the auditorium. It was packed. Who are all these people? I wondered. Relatives? People from a Mormon town with no other entertainment? The show turned out to be an evening of dreadful morbidity. Someone sang, “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.” Then there was a comedy sketch in which we saw shadows cast against a white sheet while an inmate pretended to take sausages out of another inmate’s belly. Maybe this was prison humor, but I found it depressing, and I left at the intermission. When I got to my car, though, I found that the parking lot was locked until after the show, and so was the door back into the auditorium. For some reason, it was surprising to me that you couldn’t come and go as you like. I sat in the car and listened to the radio while I thought about the job ahead of me. I’d be playing a college professor who, enraged because his wife and child have been run over by a reckless driver, slams the driver against his car, killing him accidentally. The young professor goes to jail, and we see prison through the eyes of an ordinary citizen. I looked through the car window at the hulking cement building, and I hoped we’d be able to show the place as it really was.