by Alan Alda
The next day, when I saw the cracked green paint in my imagination, I burst into tears. I was immensely satisfied with myself. At last, I thought—Hecuba! I had always thought that if I could do this, I would finally be an actor.
Not quite. Crying, and doing it copiously, may have been my holy grail, but it turns out that some things are even harder. Conveying a lot by doing little is much harder. We always do more than we need to. I’ve heard of a director who was so frustrated with an overactive actor, he threw up his hands and yelled, “Don’t just do something—stand there!”
I wasn’t at the end of my search for Hecuba. I was only just beginning. As the years went by on M*A*S*H, I was surprised by how much more there was to learn.
Like concentration. The M*A*S*H set was the place to learn it; it was a collection of anticoncentration hurdles. First there was the problem of time. Like a pilot going a thousand miles an hour, you had to learn to be precise but quick. Burt Metcalfe and I once wrote the entire second act of an episode during a long dinner in an Italian restaurant—and it turned out to be one we were proud of.
Then there was the sound stage itself. The show had not been expected to be a hit, and we’d been put in Stage Nine, one of the oldest and smallest sound stages on the lot. It was drafty and cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer. Exhausted from fourteen-hour days, we took naps on the cots in the tents between scenes—until we realized the cots had fleas.
Gary Burghoff had asked for a place where we could escape the hubbub of the sound stage and go over our lines together, so the carpenters knocked together a little shed for us. When Mike Farrell wasn’t tripping me, we relaxed there between shots, playing chess. We shared the shed with stacks of bedpans and bloody dummies that were used on stretchers during triage. After a while, the place seemed a little depressing, so I had fresh flowers delivered every week. But apparently we shared the shed with more than dummies. Every night the mice would come in, eat the chrysanthemums, and pee on our chessboard.
Sometimes the lights were so hot in the tiny plywood set for the colonel’s office that they ate up all the oxygen. After twelve hours in there, we had Silly Putty for brains. Giggling would break out like a contagious disease. Everything seemed funny, especially anyone’s attempt to be serious. We staggered against the walls in uncontrollable fits of laughter. Directors hate giggling fits, and they sit there, solemnly immune to the hilarity, which of course is even funnier to those infected with it. I think we all felt, though, that this little bit of anarchy was helpful to the show in the long run. There’s something about sharing the helplessness of a laughing jag that brings you closer together. From that first week in the mountains, standing in a group hug around the fiery oil drum, we knew the value of relating, of being focused on one another. And relating, really listening, was at the heart of what made us an ensemble.
At first, onstage and in life, I didn’t really know what relating was. And listening was more a kind of waiting than anything else. I talk and then you talk. And then I listen for when I get to talk again. But relating, I came to understand, happens not just while I’m talking; it also happens while you’re talking, and in between.
During rehearsals for The Apple Tree, Mike Nichols got frustrated as Barbara Harris and I played a scene, and he yelled out something from the darkened house I would never forget: “You kids think relating is the icing on the cake. It isn’t. It’s the cake.” I never forgot it, but it was years before I understood what it meant.
When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here’s what I have to say; how shall I say it? On M*A*S*H, I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It’s almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don’t have to figure out how you’ll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.
The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too.
Sitting in our circle of chairs, I became closer to these people than I ever had with other actors.
As time went on, our concentration took a strange shape. In the beginning, we were quiet and attentive before every shot. After three or four years, though, someone observing us would have thought we had no sense of discipline. We were telling stories and laughing while the crew was lighting the set. Then, called in to do the scene, we’d still be kidding, and loudly. Somewhere in our heads, we knew where we were in the process, but on the surface it wasn’t always apparent. The assistant director would call for quiet and the noise level would go down a few decibels, but not many. The third assistant on the camera would hold the clapper board up to the lens and announce the scene number. You could sometimes still hear us talking. The director would call action, and maybe we were quiet. There was at least one scene where we didn’t quiet down until just before the first line of dialogue. This sounds unforgivably chaotic, but it wasn’t. For us, it was a way of working. The energy we had off camera carried straight through into the dialogue, without a break.
There were many things that made the show work: the writing; the skill of the actors and directors; the power of knowing that real people lived through these stories. But this feeling of being a group, sometimes an apparently disruptive group, and the connectedness, the energy, that came from it, was vital. It transformed us; it kept us fresh and glad to be there. I had never been as comfortable working with actors since the days I had acted with the person I knew best—my father.
After a few seasons on M*A*S*H, I heard that my father had been asked to do an episode with us. I could see the excitement in his face, and I felt the same excitement. We hadn’t acted together for a long time. He was playing a surgeon with a drinking problem, and the script called for a confrontation about his drinking at the end of the show. Just before we shot the scene, I found him sitting alone in the Swamp going over his lines, and I asked if he wanted to run the scene with me. He said sure and we started trading lines, but halfway through, I stopped.
“What?” he said.
“Maybe if you did it like this . . . ,” I said, and I gave him a different reading. This wasn’t one of the shows I was directing. I was stepping in where I shouldn’t have, but he let me.
“Okay,” he said, smiling. “You’re directing me, huh?”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s just an idea.” But I was directing him. I was still doing it. I still wouldn’t let up on him. I couldn’t figure out why I had this rivalry with him. Maybe I wanted to play Oedipus for more reasons than I knew.
No matter what progress I made in my work, no matter how smart I thought I was, in many ways I was still an adolescent boy with a father I needed to best. When was I going to accept where I came from and who I was? He had been both my inspiration and the one I locked horns with. Acting with him could be like floating on air—but coming offstage could be a hard landing.
The summer after Arlene and I were married, I worked with him in a tour of summer-stock theaters. When we played a scene head-to-head, our eyes locked and we were each playing with someone we knew as well as you can know anyone. We tossed the ball back and forth freely and casually. We were playmates.
But then we’d walk offstage and we were father and son again. I was rebellious, and he was controlling. We’d get into our cars to travel to the next town, and he’d want me to follow behind him for the whole two-hundred-mile trip. Silently, I’d get in my car and slam the door. “I’m a married man,” I would say to Arlene, “and he’s afraid I can’t f
ind my way to Cleveland.” I would throw the car in gear and follow him grudgingly—relishing the grudge.
When we worked together on M*A*S*H for the second time, I finally dealt with my feelings about this. I wrote a show for him in which his character, Borelli, is so controlling that it drives Hawkeye crazy. It gave us a chance to play out the tensions between us as other people. I wrote a scene for my brother, Tony, that let him lose his patience at the squabbling between the two surgeons we played; so there were three generations of us hashing it out. My father loved it. He even had an idea for the resolution of the story. “What do you think of this?” he said, his eyes glowing. “Hawkeye and Borelli are both hurt when the aid station is shelled. They have to do surgery, and one of them can only use his right hand and the other can only use his left. They each become the other’s hand.”
I didn’t tell him, but the idea sounded corny to me, too much like the neat ending of a Tin Pan Alley song or a burlesque sketch. But for once I didn’t hold myself above him; I decided not to be so precious about my elevated taste, and I wrote his ending into the script.
It wasn’t until we were actually shooting the scene, sewing a stitch with one hand each—two men having to work together in spite of themselves—that I realized what my father had given us to play. Like the two characters, we were working hand in hand—and it had taken a few wounds to get us there. It was as though the scene were a wish on his part and a gentle nudge to us both, delivered through the medium of play. I felt his shoulder against mine; my father’s arms entwined with mine. We tossed the scene back and forth between us, and over our masks our eyes locked and we were playmates again.
A few years later, he went into the hospital for a quadruple bypass. As I sat in a small waiting room, it was taking him a long time to come out of the anesthesia. I went into the ICU and spoke to him, hoping he could understand me. His surgeon was beside me, watching me talk to my father’s sleeping body. “He’s very deep,” he said.
I didn’t understand what this meant, and I went on talking reassuringly to my father. “You’ll be fine, Dad.”
The doctor said again, “He’s very deep.” Then I realized he was telling me my father was in a coma. I was angry at the euphemism. Why hadn’t anyone said the word coma?
My father stayed comatose for days. When he woke up, he couldn’t walk and he couldn’t speak or read. He’d had a stroke on the operating table.
This was someone who loved language. The day I was born, he wrote a poem that was published in a New York newspaper. In it, he compared the death of King George V eight days earlier to the birth of his new son: one life passing, another taking its place. All his life, he was always at work writing something—a screenplay, a lyric, a novel.
And now he couldn’t speak.
We got him into a rehabilitation center, but his brain was no longer wired the way it had been. Now he rolled wildly in bed, tearing at the sheets with his teeth like a trapped animal. He was unable to tolerate therapy for more than a few minutes at a time, and unless he could last for fifteen minutes, they said, they would have to release him. “He’s plateaued,” they told me. Plateaued. Where did they get these fucking euphemisms? I began to work with him, improvising bits of therapy. Because he was comfortable with me, he could last for fifteen minutes with my version of the therapy, so I worked with him every day, trying to get him to tolerate a slightly longer session. He was aphasic and it was hard for him to speak, so I tried to trick him into speaking. As we walked slowly down a corridor, I pointed out the window and said, “Dad, quick . . . what’s that?”
“Tree!” he said.
“What’s that?”
“House!”
If he thought about a word and tried to say it, he couldn’t; he could say the word only if he didn’t try. It was a kind of caring without caring. After a few weeks of this, he was able to tolerate therapy for a full half hour, and they let him stay in rehab.
After a few months, he could move slowly and talk haltingly. But he was another person. When I visited, he stood at attention in the doorway, like a little boy playing soldier. And once he asked me, one syllable at a time, if I could write a movie for the two of us to act in. I told him I was working on it.
About two years later, he went into a decline and never came out.
I wanted to speak at his funeral; I wanted to put into words who he had been—as a father and as an actor—but I didn’t know if I could. Some of the best things about him couldn’t be put in words: the performer’s energy, the willingness to please, the frank gladness at contact with the audience. And how could I put into words the rude ambivalence I felt toward him, the way I had held myself above him for so long, in spite of his unconditional acceptance of me, the gentleness of his manner? None of that could be said in words.
I got up in the chapel, walked to the front of the room, and looked at the people who had come to remember him. I said a few simple things about his kindness, the sweetness of the man, and then I just dropped the words and I did him. I walked over to the side of the chapel and showed the people who had gathered to remember him how he used to make his entrance onto the vaudeville stage: the banana curve, the hand on his rib cage. And as I did this, my ambivalence evaporated. They smiled and chuckled in recognition, and he was there for a moment. For a moment, the performer and the actor came together in me, without conflict or judgment. I didn’t just accept him, I was him. It brought him back. I could see him, smell him, love him; I could accept him as he was. And I could accept how much of him was in me. In my imagination, he was in the room with me. And for a moment so was Hecuba.
chapter 15
FAMOUS WOMEN I HAVE KISSED
I notice I haven’t mentioned many famous people in this book yet. Except for Beetlepuss Lewis and Bela Lugosi, there are few inside stories about the rich and famous. And damn little sex, too. A book of this kind is expected to have something hot in it, so I’ve tried to recall some of the famous women I have kissed. I’m sure there are more, but certainly that list would include Jacqueline Bisset, Carol Burnett, Ellen Burstyn, Blythe Danner, Jane Fonda,* Teri Garr, Veronica Hamel, Barbara Harris, Madeline Kahn, Shelley Long, Rita Moreno, Michelle Pfeiffer, Diana Sands, Meryl Streep, Loretta Swit, Marlo Thomas, and Cicely Tyson.
Jane Fonda gets an asterisk because at the last minute, even though the script called for a kiss, she would only shake hands. We were playing a good-bye scene in California Suite between two people who had recently divorced, so I understood her not wanting to kiss the guy. I did kiss all the others, on the lips and with fervor. I kissed Veronica Hamel while we were half-naked in a shower stall in an apartment in Toronto. Arlene came home early, looked in at us, and said, “Alan, what time are we having dinner?” We were shooting a scene from a movie at the time, and there was a full crew crowded into the bathroom with us, but I think this shows Arlene’s complete sangfroid about movie kisses.
They were all movie kisses, but a movie kiss, even though you’re thinking about other things at the time—like Which one of us talks first when this is over?—is still a kiss. And Arlene always took this part of my work in stride.
What I can’t completely understand is most other people’s fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?
What I can’t understand, in other words, is fame. It would have been good if I had understood it better when it happened to me, because I found it hard to adjust to.
After M*A*S*H was on the air for a few months, my life shifted. People started pulling me by the arm and pointing at me. “Hey, Ray, look at this.” I was “this.” A beefy guy in a restaurant called me over to his table, and then, as he shook my hand, he involuntarily pulled me to him so hard that I fell across the table. I began to realize that som
e people are not in their right minds when they meet famous people. I wasn’t when I met Liv Ullmann. I said hello and started thumping, heart first, like a rabbit. We were standing in the parking lot behind a Chinese restaurant, and a friend introduced us. The exhaust fan of the kitchen was blowing the combined smells of fried oil and chicken fat over us, but I sensed we were in a field of waving grain, awash with the aroma of new-mown hay, as I watched her face for signs of the characters she had played. Gradually, as we talked, I came to my senses. She’s an actor, I thought. Like you. She’s a person, just like you.
I came to see how it can happen to all of us. Each of us has someone we’ve seen on a screen in a darkened room—a screen we scan, possibly, with the same part of our brain we use for dreaming—and when that person magically steps out of our dreams and into reality, we can become disoriented. We’re not much different from the four-year-old boy who came up to me in a restaurant and stared at me for a full minute and then said, “How did you get out of the TV?”
Even some adults seemed to think that because I was on their television screen, I truly had special powers. I began receiving letters from people on the verge of suicide, asking me for help—help they felt for some reason I was qualified to give them. I wanted to answer these letters before the people carried out their acts of despair, but after I struggled with what I should say in answer to the first letter I received, I realized I had taken a week. That was too long. At a certain point, even the right words might be useless. I couldn’t take that long with every letter. Finally, I wrote a draft of a note that could be tailored to anyone who wrote me in desperation, and I checked it with a friend who was a psychoanalyst. In each letter, I included the number of the local suicide prevention clinic. I tried to make the letter seem personal and genuine, hoping they wouldn’t choose a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but each time I sent out one of these letters, and there were a number of them, I felt strange. This is what getting famous does to you, I thought. You wind up sending suicidal people form letters. It was an attempt to reach them before it was too late, but I felt as though I were writing the kind of letter they were getting in the same batch of mail that said, “You may already have won a million dollars.”