by Alan Alda
I heard them call for quiet on the set.
I looked down at my boots for inspiration. Actors often say they don’t really know the character until they put on the shoes. The wardrobe master had told me these boots, scuffed gray with wear, were once worn by a real soldier. I wiggled my toes against the leather, soft with use. These boots must have been full of stories. They did make me feel as though I were in the army—but they didn’t make me feel I was Hawkeye.
Outside I heard, “Take one,” and the snap of the clapper board.
Any second now the director would call, “Action!” I put my hand on the doorknob. . . .
M*A*S*H would be a turning point in my life. My life would change when I stepped through this door—more than I could imagine as I stood there. But first, I had to get out of this damn shed. Look, I thought, how different am I from him? We’re all human, right? We all have these same impulses. . . .
“Action!”
No more time to think. Jump in, I told myself.
I opened the door and walked out across the compound. So far, I was still me. If I get all the way across this patch of dirt without transforming into him, I thought, I’m sunk. Jump, for God’s sake.
Extras playing nurses and aides were crisscrossing the compound. Ahead of me, a nurse’s path began to cross mine. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed her around the waist and pulled her over to me. She smiled and patted me on the cheek. All of a sudden, I was Hawkeye. Even before the shot was over, I was walking with a lighter step. Gee, I thought, that wasn’t so hard.
Clutching at a nurse was not a major artistic achievement, but it got me started on finding an answer to a question that had been nagging at me, even tormenting me, since I first began to act: How can I be so captured by my own imagination that I can truly connect both to the person I’m playing and to the person I’m playing with?
This is not a question that bothered me when I was living in Eden with the burlesque comics and straight men and talking women. They were performers, and as disciplined as they were, performing was a simpler thing than this mysterious transformation I hoped for now that would somehow bring me into contact with other people’s lives. I didn’t know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously, of course. I didn’t consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would give up his place at the center of the universe? Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you do things for them. Better to keep them at a distance, keep them on the other side of the footlights. Learn to juggle—learn to fall down in funny ways. Keep them as an audience where you can be in control. Keep the curtain up, keep the play going. It holds off judgment. See me up here? You love me, right? I’m the best, right? But if I wanted really to act, I was going to have to find the doorway to compassion, and that would be an even harder one to walk through than the door of the shed.
First days are almost always difficult. Going onstage for the first time in a play was usually for me a cycle of fear followed by exhilaration at taming the beast, the audience. Once I was out there, the stage felt like home, but for years while I was waiting for the play to begin on an opening night, just the sound of the audience on the other side of the curtain could make my heart race. They had the sound of a mob. And that sound could return me to the anxiety of the chubby little boy clutching his bat with moist hands as he waited to go onstage at the Hollywood Canteen.
But something simple happened that first day of M*A*S*H that made it easy for us: It got very cold. December in the mountains of Malibu can be uncomfortable, especially if you’re pretending it’s summer in Korea and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. We were freezing. So we made a fire in a large, rusty oil drum, and between shots we all stood around it, hugging one another. We’d met only a few days before, but the cold let us drop our inhibitions and throw our arms around one another. Without even trying, by the end of the week there was an unusual level of comfort and trust. And we kept on huddling when we moved to the sound stage. We drew up a circle of chairs and never left them between shots. At first, it was so we could go over our lines. Then, after a while, it was just to be together.
We ribbed one another; we told stories and looked for ways to make one another laugh. This wasn’t that hard, because like the characters we played, we had distinct personalities. Bill Christopher, who played Father Mulcahy, was studious, translating ancient Greek during his breaks. For one scene, he had to spend a long time at the bottom of a car in which about twelve nurses were piled on top of him. When he finally crawled out, someone asked him if he was all right, having spent two hours under all those women. “Yes, fine,” he said. “Fortunately, I had my copy of the Iliad with me.” When he joined the show, David Ogden Stiers could so disappear into the character of the aristocratic Winchester that audiences who have seen him since in movies probably don’t recognize him. He also could disappear into such elaborate practical jokes that sometimes they became the basis for stories on the show.
Between shots, McLean Stevenson would go off on riffs that were so bizarre, there was no way you could keep your knees from buckling. When Harry Morgan joined the show, he kept us laughing in a way only he could. He’d say something that had no discernible humor in it but was delivered with such deadpan sincerity, you were helpless. He’d see you getting pissed about something, look at you gravely, and say, “Give us a little kiss,” and you’d fall over.
Wayne Rogers’s little quirk was that he didn’t like to drive, and I’d give him a lift when we went out to location. My quirk was that on the way I would tell him my dreams and let him interpret them for me. No matter what he told me they meant, I believed him.
In one dream, I was acting in a scene on the show and the director had me say one of my lines while perched on top of an armoire. I told Wayne what a nightmare it was for me. “This is very important,” Wayne said. “Directors are always asking us to do these unbelievable things to make it easier to shoot. Your dream is telling you to resist them. Don’t give up reality. Don’t do an armoire.” From then on, we’d be rehearsing a scene and one of us would be asked to do something completely improbable for the convenience of the camera, and the other one would whisper, “Don’t do an armoire.”
When Wayne left the show, Mike Farrell took his place in the tent and as someone I confided in. We had a physical rivalry as well, competing to see who could learn to stand on his hands first. He had studied judo in the army, and as a pastime, every time I was called to the set, he would walk behind me and see if he could trip me and make me fall down.
The actors were resourceful, making the most of what was given them, and I admired them for it. Larry Gelbart had heard a story about Lenny Bruce that inspired a short scene involving a soldier who was trying to get out of the army by dressing as a woman. Jamie Farr was able to turn that sight gag into one of the most memorable characters on the show. Gary Burghoff, who had been in the original movie, had the ability to appear completely genuine and yet more innocent and naïve than he really was, which was something I had thought no actor could do. Loretta Swit and Larry Linville were able to play scenes of comic passion in so many ways that I wondered how they did it without repeating themselves. And Loretta never stopped looking for ways to make her character a three-dimensional person; by the end of the series, her character was known as Margaret instead of Hot Lips.
We made the most of everything because we knew that this was a chance we might never have again. We gave ourselves over to the work and to one another. We spent more time together than we did with our families, and we reached that point in closeness where you become aware of the other person’s imperfections as they become aware of yours, and you either stick it out with them or walk the other way. We stuck it out. And, often, we stayed in the chairs long after we had finished the shooting day to listen to one another’s heartfelt, sometimes bitter, gripes and looked for compromises. But mostly we made one another laugh. And it was the laughing, even more tha
n the compromises, that led to trust. This was good, because trust is where the gold is. It’s what lets you come out of the wings and go onstage.
I had learned a lot by watching, but now on M*A*S*H I had the most intense chance I’d ever had to learn by doing. In the hurried schedule of television, there was a blizzard of doing. A couple of dozen pages came at you every day, sometimes at the last minute. You had to learn them and find out what was under them, and sometimes it didn’t all come together until you were under the lights and the camera was turning. We were strict about saying the lines as written, but there was still a little of the thrill of improvisation.
As if this weren’t enough, I still wanted with all my heart to write and to direct. I followed the directors around, making notes on how they worked. When I was on an airplane, I spent my time writing. I was on airplanes a lot, because Arlene and I solved the problem of living in New Jersey while I worked in California by her flying out with our children to spend summers in Los Angeles and my flying home on weekends during the fall and winter when the children went back to school. Anytime I had two days off, I’d fly home. There was one week when I flew home three times. I got a lot of writing in, but each day blended into the next in a perpetual buzz of jet lag.
Finally, stimulated by the brilliance of Larry Gelbart’s writing, but a little awed by him as well, I got up the nerve to show him a few scenes I had written. He was always generous with new writers and encouraged me to come back when I had a story idea. The advantage for a young writer on a show like this is that you don’t have to create everything from scratch. Rich characters and the world they inhabit already exist. I made it even easier on myself by borrowing the structure for my first story from La Ronde. In my version, the object that’s passed from couple to couple is a pair of long johns during a cold spell in the Korean winter. It makes the rounds in a series of two-handed scenes of love, bartering, extortion, and losing at poker. As I was writing it, I began to have that feeling that writers get once in a while—a thrill that shoots through you and says, This is going to work. You don’t think it’s great or wonderful or brilliant, you just know it’s going to work. I jumped out of my chair and started dancing around the room.
By the time we were done I had written nineteen episodes for M*A*S*H and had helped rewrite some others. I was so excited to be writing I started pitching ideas for series to the networks. I wrote two or three pilots and even had a show on the air about a family. It was called We’ll Get By, although it didn’t quite get by and lasted only thirteen episodes. Those thirteen shows took six months of writing—all while I was working full-time on M*A*S*H. I had never had so many opportunities come my way, and now I was saying yes to way too much. I would come into my dressing room between shots as Hawkeye, lie down on the floor, and try to think up lines for We’ll Get By with Allan Katz and Don Reo, who were writing that series with me. Once, they had to wake me up because I had fallen asleep while I was talking. To stay awake, Katz and Reo and I would throw balled-up sheets of paper at one another or pitch lines while walking around the room on the backs of furniture without setting foot on the floor. Once during a Saturday session at my house, we got in the pool and tried a technique I don’t believe is used in most collaborations. We’d all duck under the water, and the rule was you couldn’t come up for air until you had thought up the next line of dialogue.
One night, after finishing a pilot for something that never made it on the air, I was so excited to have it over with, I went into the editing room with a bottle of champagne from which I kept taking celebratory swigs. A few hours later, I was in my fatigues, acting on the M*A*S*H set. By chance, it was a scene in which Hawkeye has a miserable hangover, which was lucky because that’s exactly what the actor playing him had. At one point, I left the Swamp and walked over to the huge cyclorama painted with mountains and threw up on Korea. Reflecting on this barrage of writing and producing I was doing outside our own show, Larry turned to Gene and said, “We’ve created a monster.”
But they were generous to the monster. They were letting me learn to direct, too. Gene Reynolds was an exceptionally good director, and I didn’t want to let him down when I directed for the first time. His advice was simple: “Don’t forget to count the shots on your shot list.” That implied I’d better have a shot list, and it had better not go on forever. The first story I was given to direct ended in a camp picnic that needed eighty extras and three cameras to shoot. The final scene was a tug-of-war in which half of us got pulled into a mudhole. We’d be able to do it only once before the sun went down. And we just made it. As the scene ended, I dragged the last person out of the mud and we walked off to the tents while the sun dipped behind the mountain, giving us an automatic fade to black and an end to the episode.
That night, I was at the airport on my way back to New Jersey, and as I walked down the long sidewalk to my terminal, I remembered my day, shot by shot. For the first time, I had been able to tell a story on film. My step quickened and I began to skip, with long strides, like a kid. “I can do it!” I kept saying. “I can do it!”
None of these little voyages of discovery would have been possible for me or for any of us if we weren’t floating on the frothy sea of Gelbart’s writing. The words we spoke on M*A*S*H, especially when Larry wrote them, were like poetry of the funny bone. We’d all been trained in the theater, and we never changed a line without asking permission. If in rehearsal the scene failed to take off, Larry would come right over on his bicycle, take out his wrench, and reach into the speech to tighten a word here or knock a phrase sideways there, and pretty soon it was sailing again. One day, Wayne and I were out on location in the mountains and we were going over our lines together. Wayne stopped me in the middle of a speech. “Why do you suppose you say that?” he asked me.
I looked at the script. “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense, does it.”
The line made no sense at all. We couldn’t call Larry and ask him what it meant because this was before cell phones and the studio hadn’t wanted to spend money on putting in a phone line for us in the mountains. We decided that this bit of dialogue was simply an example of Gelbart’s wit at such a high level that we didn’t get it, and I said it the way it was written. The next day at the rushes, I was sitting next to Larry when the scene came on screen. He turned to me, appalled. He looked stricken, even hurt.
“Why did you say that?” he asked me.
“Why did I say it? It’s what you wrote.”
“That was a typo!”
“Ah,” I said. “A typo. I thought it . . . you know . . . meant something.” The next day, we reshot the scene. And not long after that, they put in a phone.
I hated it when they called us a sitcom. We were a comedy, sometimes a drama, but we always told a story with strong characters and often explored a theme that had something to do with people’s lives. We began the show during the Vietnam War, and some people felt it was really about that war. I know Vietnam was certainly on Larry’s mind when he wrote the pilot, but I thought of the show as about all war, and especially about Korea. We certainly tried to be as accurate as possible about the Korean War and the state of medicine at the time. Larry and Gene and Burt Metcalfe, who took over producing the show when they left, all spent hundreds of hours interviewing doctors and nurses who had lived through the actual MASH experience in Korea. All of us who wrote for the show would sift through these transcripts looking for any scrap of a story or insight into their lives that would give our script authenticity. Sometimes whole stories could be written from a chance remark by a nurse. Sometimes an interview would give us one memorable line, like when the surgeon told how moving it had been to be operating in such cold conditions that steam would rise out of their patients’ open bodies and sometimes the doctors would warm their hands over them.
There were more emotional demands made by the show than any sitcom would ask of you. One day, as we were finishing up an episode, I was handed a script for the following week. I
read through it, and when I got to a scene toward the end, I put down the script and stared into space. The scene started with joking and laughter, and then suddenly, without warning, the character broke down crying. It was the thing I both dreaded and hungered after. How was I going to do this?
In the scene, I had to tell about a childhood boating accident in which a younger brother (called Harry or something) almost died. And that memory was supposed to trigger a cathartic breakdown. How? What was Harry to me or me to Harry? The night before we shot, I asked the director to stay late on the set with me while I looked for things that would get me worked up about this imaginary little brother. I thought about various dead dogs in my life; fantasy plane crashes in which friends and family die horrible deaths. Nothing. Hours passed.
Finally, at midnight, I pictured the physical layout of the imaginary accident in detail: the sound of the water against the boat, the dripping oars, the coiled mooring rope. When I saw cracked green paint on the inside of the boat, for some reason it triggered emotion in me, and it did it time after time. I had no idea why this happened, but I was relieved, and we quit for the night.