Wertham insisted I go. In fact, he stated, it was to be a prerequisite if I wished to continue treatment.
And so I halfheartedly followed Philip what’s his name back to the theater on Fourteenth and Sixth Avenue. Philip, as it turned out, was Philip Deacon, a teacher at the Living Theatre and a highly regarded off-Broadway director. The theater was on the cutting edge, at the forefront of all avant-garde theater in the country. They were doing Ionesco and William Carlos Williams. The Living Theatre was dynamic and experimental.
“The best way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of the circumstances given to you. And as you develop your technique, you come to believe in what you’re doing and trust it because you re-create it emotionally.” I was intrigued. Inside the theater, a class was under way. I sat next to Philip, and we both watched as the director onstage worked with a handful of aspiring talents. He invited me to come onstage.
I walked up and stood in front of him. He wanted me to perform an improvisation, a performance without a script. I could do whatever I wanted.
“Okay, here is your dilemma,” the director told me. “You’re carrying a very heavy suitcase across the desert. The reason the suitcase is so heavy is that inside the suitcase is a fortune of stolen money. You have to make a decision. Should you drop the suitcase and make it out of the desert alive? Or do you decide to lug the suitcase through the arid heat and see if you can survive? Got it?”
“I guess . . . ,” I said.
“Action!” the director called, and like that, I was left there alone on the stage, forced to perform the scene. I was uncomfortable. I was in front of a small crowd of strangers. I had nothing to do but fully commit myself to the emotional choices swirling through my mind.
When I had finished, I looked around. The entire class was standing and clapping. I could see smiles on all their faces. I had made them happy. I had done something extraordinary, and it felt so natural. The applause alone was intoxicating. I knew from that moment that my life would never be the same. With this approval, achieved for the first time, and on my own, I’d found my calling—with a little help from Dr. Wertham and Philip Deacon. Introductions to people who can help you are critical, but knowing how to handle them properly can change your life.
Hunger Is the Best Chef
I found an apartment a few blocks away from the United Nations, on Forty-Eighth Street. The apartment was tiny. And infested. We’d turn on the lights and the rooms would positively quiver. I moved in with John Phillip Law, a fellow acting student, and the rent was forty dollars each. He was tall, about six foot five, with blond hair. He would go on to play Pygar, the blind angel in Barbarella, which became a cult film only a few years later.
We suffered together. We were always broke, which also meant we were always hungry. On Saturday afternoons, I revived Mr. Schwartz, and Law and I ventured off into the city to fend the pangs of hunger away. We’d shave, dress up, and head across town to swanky hotels like the Waldorf Astoria. We’d follow the signs to the bar mitzvahs—GOTTLIEB MEZZANINE LEVY FLOOR 6—and mingle with the guests like we belonged. After all, we were actors. Part of the role was stuffing ourselves with blintzes, lox, and whatever else we could grab.
As starving artists, we felt entitled to help ourselves. The arts should be supported, we believed, by local businesses like the supermarket—whether they knew they were supporting the arts or not. John had a long black duster for a coat. His girlfriend at the time, Susan Myers, was very handy. She converted that long black coat of his into a shopping cart for us. On the inside, she sewed elastic straps, then sewed those straps to bags inside the coat. Very nicely organized, I must say. We’d go the market, pretending to shop, stuffing packages of short ribs, pork chops, and quartered chickens inside his coat. Back at the house, as dumpy as it was, we had a small patch of a backyard with a lone, straggly tree, a patch of weeds, and a rusted hibachi. Lighting up the charcoal, we’d have barbecue parties, cooking up our stolen food for our fellow actors.
We never got caught. We must have stolen half a cow and a coop of chickens. Of course it was wrong. I knew that. But we were hungry. And it was undeniable: Those feasts, illicit as they were, always tasted delicious.
Play Nice with Others
Dustin Hoffman and I never got along. That’s putting it mildly. In truth, Dusty, as we called him back then, was my nemesis. When I was acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York and performing in theater, Dusty and I were always competing for parts. We were both on the smaller side, both Jewish, a bit swarthy, and there were only so many roles that we could be cast in and play. We also had such different personalities. He was serious and somber, a student of the craft. I took acting seriously as well, but not the way he did. I was more lighthearted. I enjoyed the camaraderie of many friends inside and outside the theater; I was more socially oriented than Dustin.
We were on the road together. We had been cast in A Cook for Mr. General. I had traveled a bit on the summer stock circuit, supporting theater greats like Martha Scott, Orson Bean, and Julia Meade (who later went on to sell refrigerators in television commercials). I had trekked to the Ogunquit Playhouse in Kennebunkport, Maine, and the Dennis Theater in Cape Cod. But these theaters were nothing in comparison to the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia, by far the largest and most ornate stage I had yet to appear on. This was a pre-Broadway run, during which a production was tried out and fine-tuned before making its way to the Great White Way. The cast included Roland Winters—famous for playing Charlie Chan—Bill Travers, and Dustin Hoffman. Among many others. And me.
The cast was all put up in a hotel by the theater. It was amazing to enter a paid-for hotel room each day after rehearsal, considering what I had been through in the past few years: the ongoing auditions, the turndowns, the rejections. But here I was, now a professional actor on Broadway—well, almost. Unlike other plays, where I’d appear in throwaway parts, I even had a line. I’d rehearsed in front of a mirror, in my mind. “All I did was tap him on the shoulder,” I was to say.
Before opening night, I received a telegram at the hotel. It was from my father.
“Twenty-three, a man,” he wrote me. “What a wonderful age to be, beginning a career with the promise of real success, handsome, intelligent, outgoing personality, adored—what more could I want? To make people happy or sad—what a wonderful place to be.”
A Cook for Mr. General was a comedy. Set in the South Pacific, the plot centered on a military rehab center and a ragtag group of mental misfits stuck there and was similar in spirit to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Bill Travers, a British actor and the lead, spent most of the play in a colored bonnet, knitting a scarf. Roland Winters played a general suffering from an ulcer. One patient was convinced he was Jesus Christ. Another answered the morning roll call by crowing like a rooster.
I played Sullivan, a soldier, with my single, cherished line. And Dusty played Ridzinski, another misfit soldier. We had been cast onstage and lined up according to height. Army style. I was the second shortest next to Hoffman.
We laughed together only once. In one performance, Roland Winters, the general, was berating all the soldiers for being the degenerate, shell-shocked screw-ups we were. Winters had his back to the audience, and as he was screaming in our faces, the saliva flying, a booger appeared in Winters’s nose. And the more he worked himself up into a rage, the bigger the booger got. I struggled to keep in character, starting to smirk. Dusty chortled next to me uncontrollably. Winters was playing furious, but he was also furious with us. He laced into us more seriously, but the angrier he got, the farther the booger descended from his nose, now dangling just above his lip. We just couldn’t control ourselves. We burst out laughing, ruining his scene. They dropped the curtain prematurely.
“You little fucks!” Winters screamed, trying to grab us backstage. We were chased around the stage by Charlie Chan.
Prep
roduction lasted two weeks—long enough for me and Dusty to truly irritate each other as we vied for stage presence. One afternoon, a few of us went to lunch at the Harvey House, a restaurant in downtown Philadelphia that was known to cater to mobsters. We sat there across from each other, rubbing each other the wrong way like we always did. Finally, I snapped. I leaned over the table and pointed my finger at him.
“I know why you don’t like me,” I bellowed.
He sat there, dumbfounded.
“Because I’m going to make it and you’re not,” I stated definitively, and I stood up and left the restaurant.
I didn’t return to that lunch. But over the next forty years, I would have those words to eat. Dusty, the serious one, went on to become one of the greatest actors of my generation, and rightfully so. He wasn’t afraid to step out of the box and find new roles for himself, roles that allowed him to demonstrate his extraordinary ability as an actor. He broke the mold and grew as an artist.
The play closed on Broadway prematurely. Once again, I was out of work.
I proceeded to struggle for bit parts but was pushed along by teachers at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I was soon in front of Elia Kazan, a legend in American drama, and one of my favorite directors.
“He’s all wrong,” Elia Kazan told David Pressman, my teacher, who’d brought me along to meet the great director of On the Waterfront, my favorite American film. I never even had a chance to read for the part. And just like that, not even thirty minutes later, I was back out on the street.
Years later, I did an improvisation with Kazan himself, and I guess I was “all right” that time, because he hired me for voice-over bits in his biographical film America America. But at that moment, missing my one shot with my favorite director, I was just wondering how I would ever make it as an actor.
Don’t Put It in Writing
I called her Wind Nymph. I kept her letters for all these years, but we really shared only a few nights together. But through her words and correspondence, I fell hopelessly in love. At night, I would hold her envelopes, waiting to open them alone in the apartment that we had rented on Central Park South and where we had planned to spend the rest of our lives together. She wrote:
I must have read your letter ten times already. Late last night, I found myself saying “Hello out there” over and over again; and knew then forever the full poignant meaning of that phrase. I went to your letter as I would have gone to your arms . . .
How delightfully sweet. Okay, how corny. But it was new love, passionate and free of judgment.
Wind Nymph was magical. We first met during rehearsals. The studio was on the Lower East Side, in downtown New York, and around the corner from Ratner’s, the deli where my father would often take me for fresh onion rolls, pickles, and pastrami. I’d returned, and with a good part. I’d moved into doing TV and was cast in Focus, a major television production developed by NBC, directed by Fielder Cook, and written by Arthur Miller, the great playwright and another of my heroes. Miller came by the set, but I rarely had the chance to spend much time with him. At the studio, he was all business: tall, dark glasses, an intellectual.
The story of Focus was a story of anti-Semitism, and I played a heavy. My job was to intimidate the Jews. I laughed off the irony and channeled my inner Fritzy.
Wind Nymph played a nurse. She was an incredible spirit but a terrible actress. We fell for each other during the first break. We were inseparable. She was living in Los Angeles, trying to work her way into film, and had to fly back the next day. She also had a boyfriend. Charles was his name.
We crammed in a full relationship in twenty-four hours. We walked in Central Park, the night filled with the warmth of the coming spring, stardust on our shoulders. I got lost in the constellations of her freckles. She was so sensual and curious and all knowing. When I first saw her on the set, she was always reading something or other. Walking with her, then stopping on park benches to listen, I listened to her read Henry Miller, the great novelist whose books Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer had been censored and banned for their evocative prose. My favorites were some of his passages in the book Sexus.
What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up . . . I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.
I didn’t want Wind Nymph to leave. But she did. She went back to LA. I reread Henry Miller to bring us closer.
She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us and we in each other’s arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
I couldn’t wait to tell my father about her. I went to see him and Uncle Herbie, boasting that I had discovered the most beautiful, wonderful woman on earth. My Wind Nymph! I told them all about our plans to live together—here in New York, with her in Los Angeles—a perfect arrangement for us to pursue our acting careers and a life with each other.
Her letters arrived often:
Memories of you surround me. I wish so terribly that I could get into my little car and drive fast to where you would be waiting. I am filled with such regrets!
My responses were equally gag-worthy:
I saw you last night, briefly. The fire caressing your hair as you turned in sleep like a lamb tasting the first days of spring. Do you still snore, I wonder? So sweetly—I imagine—like wind whispering through forests of lilacs.
This was getting serious. I started looking for an apartment for us. The quicker I could secure us a place to stay, the faster I could perhaps convince Wind Nymph to come live with me in New York. Finally, after several days, I stumbled on the most charming one-bedroom on Central Park West. Old wooden floors, tall windows, and best of all, what I craved the most and what city apartments seldom had: a fireplace. I put down the deposit and wrote to her immediately. She didn’t miss a beat:
Late last night before turning out the light I snuggled deep in my covers and opened it to read once again, that I might go to sleep with some semblance of serenity . . .
I moved into our place. I went out to find roles, immersed myself in acting classes and rehearsals, and came back every night, almost expecting to find her waiting for me in front of the fireplace, but instead I sat in the empty space and reread her letters. Every month, she sent me a check for her share of the rent, and to keep her warmth in the apartment, I always placed a fresh bouquet of flowers in the vase on top of the mantel, a reminder of her and the life we’d soon share.
Like clockwork, the next letter arrived. Wind Nymph! I’d hustle up the stairs of the brownstone and shut the door to share this moment with her. What did she have for me this time?
Just to lie and stroke the worries from your forehead; to feel the length of my body next to yours; to feel the complete commitment of self unto another human being as or more important to you than you.
I hung onto every word of every letter, convinced in my naïveté that she was a deep intellectual, and responded with equally pretentious and sappy letters. But for all the written declarations of love and adoration, her actions spoke otherwise:
You see, I’ve got an absolutely fiendish sense of ambition, and though my intellect tells me it ’taint so important as other things, like immediate travel to you, I know it would insist on coming right along too and haunting me for the step I didn’t climb, or the ones I lost.
I tried my best to be empathetic, while longing passionately for her. I had faith in Wind Nymph. The letters kept coming, but soon the rent checks that she sent to keep our place stopped. I would later learn the truth: While she was writing letters to me, she had developed a relationship with another actor. In the California breeze, my Wind Nymph was g
one. I still have the letters.
Sometimes, Opportunity Knocking Sounds a Lot Like Bad Tennis
I remember the night-blooming jasmines, the honeysuckle of the desert, and the dust off desolate streets. When I first arrived in Phoenix, in February 1962, the city was nothing like the sprawling metropolis it is now. There were only a series of squat buildings and the main drag, Central Avenue. The big news in town was the arrival of a pair of neon golden arches that belonged to a new hamburger company called McDonald’s, among the first locations in the country. The desert itself was breathtaking, the air dry and hot, and I can still see the clay, terra-cotta-colored dunes, and scrubby, cactus-covered flats.
I had been out West only in my mind. Until now, I knew only what had been shown to me by the fearless Roy Rogers, another hero of my youth, who taught me how to handle a vicious rattlesnake by removing his sidearm and blowing the serpent’s head off. I was impressed.
In Phoenix, scanning the shrubs and dark corners for other snakes, I reported for rehearsal at the Sombrero Playhouse, a nationally recognized theater financed by a cabal of Phoenix’s wealthy philanthropists and a group who had agreed to fund an early run of Natural Affection, a play by William Inge. Inge was already an American legend for his plays Come Back, Little Sheba and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and the film Splendor in the Grass. The director of the production was Harold Clurman, a heavy in New York theater circles, especially for his devotion to method acting and for forming the Group Theatre. His wife was Stella Adler, the famous acting coach, and after meeting Clurman in New York, I was truly lucky to get an audition and be cast in the play.
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