I couldn’t believe I was working with so many talented and accomplished actors who had always been part of my fantasy life. Gil, my character, wasn’t in many scenes in the play, so I worked double duty taking notes for Harold Clurman, who was all grown up by the fourth grade. He’d wear a full suit and wingtip shoes to these rehearsals in the desert and masterfully handle the talent in the room. The male lead was Ralph Meeker, who had headlined a number of major films, including Kiss Me Deadly, and played a struggling car salesman. The female lead was Shelley Winters, already a big star. She’d come from the Midwest, changed her name from Shirley Schrift, and played a mother grappling emotionally with her son. I played Gil, a dope pusher, far down in the credits.
I spent hours watching and studying these wonderful actors, trying to learn all I could and absorb their tips and wisdom. I had the talent, I felt. I just needed experience and a break.
Shelley was a yenta. Oh, what a yenta Shelley could be. But as an actor, she had tremendous emotional range. She could really turn on the tears.
To Harold Clurman, this wasn’t a good thing. He wasn’t buying it. Crying so hard—and so easily—felt fake, he said. It lacked emotion, didn’t feel real.
“Shelley, it will be more impactful to play against crying,” he told her. “Try and keep the tears in. Try to hold them back.” He was brilliant. Seeing her on the stage struggling not to cry was so much more impactful. He said it to Winters, but I kept that note for myself: Less is more.
After the performances, we spilled out into Phoenix, walking through the doors of Durant’s, the famous steakhouse known for its martinis and waiters in red tuxedo vests. The story goes that Jack Durant, the owner, had fled from Las Vegas after working as a pit boss for Bugsy Siegel at the Flamingo Hotel. After Bugsy was gunned down in Beverly Hills, Durant opened his doors here and came up with a midwestern marketing gimmick featuring forty-eight-ounce porterhouse steaks. Finish one, get your name on the wall.
It was lively on Central Avenue. The Playboy Club had opened a new location nearby, and to get inside the lair you needed a secret key that opened a secret elevator.
I never got a key. But I did have my adventures. Like the night I was propositioned for an orgy by an extra. She took me to a home outside of town where a massive gang bang was supposed to be going down.
I arrived and saw the crowd: retirees in leisure suits. I went back to my hotel immediately. I was chicken. This was too much. On the way into the hotel, I saw Rallie, a Phoenix socialite. I must have looked a little shaken up, so she did wonders to calm me down. What a memorable night we had, with the perfect ending: both of us on top of her mink coat on my hotel room’s floor.
• • •
Shelley Winters was kind of a mess. She was never put together; she reminded me of my aunts who had come to visit us from the city carrying their plastic bags of dried fruit. The heels of her sneakers had all been run down, and she came off as half gypsy, half elderly bubbe. When we went out to dinner one night, someone accosted her for wearing her ratty gym sneakers.
“I’m a star. I can wear whatever the fuck I want to wear,” she said, rather loudly.
Shelley was so grating and unpredictable that there were few in the cast who wanted to spend time with her. I didn’t mind. I knew that to get anywhere in my career I would need the help of people like her. And, honestly? I became her friend, in spite of her brashness. When nobody else wanted to play tennis with her, I would.
I stepped in and hit an easy forehand her way.
“Oye!” she shrieked, shanking the ball into the fence.
I hit her another light backhand. Again came the cry, and I watched her chase after the ball, stumbling over her chubby legs.
“Aiiich,” she shrieked again, hitting another ball into the air and off the court.
Once I was winded from chasing all the errant balls around, we stopped to relax. A bench was next to the court, and we sat there together. The run of Natural Affection was almost over, and soon the cast would be off to their next jobs. Except me, of course, who didn’t have a next job. As usual.
Shelley was going back to Hollywood. She’d been picked to play the female lead in Lolita, based on the Nabokov novel. It was an incredible opportunity. Nabokov himself had written the screenplay, and Stanley Kubrick was chosen as the director. Shelley would be nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress.
“What are you going to do, Jono?” she asked me.
I didn’t really have any plans, other than returning to New York and making the rounds again. Henry Fonda would later tell me that on the first day of any new job he would already be worried about what he’d do when it came to an end. Would he be out of work? Would the job he was on be the last one he ever did? That’s just the reality of an actor’s life. In the early days of my career, the average income of all Screen Actors Guild members was less than three thousand dollars per year. Being out of work brought with it the usual self-doubts, which always fluttered about in the corners of my mind. The ongoing rejection could take its toll on one’s confidence and ability to go forward with that much-talked-about “best foot.” It was a withering assault, and the constant battle was very personal, unlike that in almost any other field or endeavor. If a salesman’s products are not accepted, it’s not necessarily he who is getting rejected. I mean, it could be. But it could also be his products. But an actor’s product is himself—his sensitivity, his talent, his looks, his very being. It takes a strong belief in oneself to continue after constant rejection and long periods of time out of work.
“No plans,” I replied.
We sat quietly for a moment.
“You know,” I offered cautiously, “I’ve never been to California.” I hoped she’d pick it up from there.
She did. She liked me.
Hollywood was a good place for a young actor at my level, she said.
“But I’d need an agent, for sure, and I don’t have one.” Again, I hoped she’d pick up the hint.
Again, she did.
“Well, I’ll introduce you to Herb Brenner.”
Shelley may have been loud and outrageous, but she had a heart of gold, at her core a caring and sensitive person. She was influential in helping out a lot of actors. I’m glad I was one of them. I would later appear with her on Broadway in The Night of the Iguana, a play by Tennessee Williams. I know she had something to do with that too. It seemed like all my classes, studies, rejections, and roles were finally paying off. All that fetching of balls and trying to make Shelley look good on the court probably hadn’t hurt either.
“He’s a big agent,” she remarked offhandedly.
Everyone knew the name Herb Brenner. He was a top agent at Music Corporation of America, or MCA, it was called, a powerhouse of an agency run by Lew Wasserman, a Hollywood legend who’d represented American household names like Bette Davis and Ronald Reagan.
All of a sudden, shrieking Shelley Winters had become a part of the fabric of my career. Even my own understanding of myself, perhaps as delusional as that was, had changed. Now I was an actor, with some prospects and a direct connection inside a premier Hollywood agency. I had a plan. What could stop me?
“I can make you a star, Jono, if you play your cards right,” Shelley said.
She had given me a gift. And once I got back to the East Coast, I decided to take her up on her offer out west and seek my fortune with my new contact, even if it was only one. After all, it was Herb Brenner. But as I strategized my move to La-La Land, Shelley’s parting words stuck with me: “If you play your cards right.” What did Shelley mean? I’d soon find out.
ACT II
I drove the ’65 Ford diesel pickup toward the Dos Equis commercial audition, down the California coast, a place of extraordinary natural beauty. A vast place, one that offered a chance for extraordinary success and failure (more of the latter). I was reminded of how I loathed the status symb
ols of the industry and the fads of tony neighborhoods. Even staying in the Sycamore Canyon Campground, which was closer to Oxnard than to the studios of Century City, was a kind of badge of pride for me. I’d come to dislike the Hollywood elite, a shifting cabal of players who kept the power and budgets to themselves and chose directors and actors not on their talents but on the crude and unfair game of who was hot.
Of course, my animus toward the system was personal. I had fought so hard to break through to stardom over a forty-year career, and while I came to befriend some of the biggest stars, I never joined their ranks. My fate was different. For years, I tried to reconcile my close calls—there were many. So close to success, so often, only to have that dream disintegrate into disappointment. So much rejection, so much loss, takes its toll on a guy.
But the drive was also a reminder of what I had gained in a lifetime devoted to making it in Hollywood. As I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, I was reminded of all my friends, acquaintances, lovers, even mobsters, cops, and mistresses, who had earned their rightful places in my memory. Hollywood was a land of illusion, for sure. But there had been so many moments—good and bad—that were so real.
It was hard not to reflect on how far I had come on drives like this. In fact, it was a drive like this that had brought me to Hollywood in the first place.
The Best Time to Go for Broke Is When You’re Already Broke
Since I was living below the poverty line, I figured driving across the country to Los Angeles would be the most prudent and economical thing to do. Luckily, I already had a place to stay when I arrived: Walter Koenig, an actor friend best known for playing the role of Chekov in Star Trek, invited me to crash with him. I purchased a VW Bug, the most affordable car in America. And with its many thousands of already accrued miles, it was even more affordable.
At the time, so many students and young folks like myself were escaping the harsh realities of the moment—Vietnam, race riots, the rise of corporations—and driving aimlessly around the country to explore backwater towns, crash music festivals, and experiment on communes, but I was on a different mission: I wanted to connect with Herb Brenner, Shelley Winters’s agent. I was anxious to meet him and get my movie career going.
I had planned the trip out west in the timeliest and most affordable manner. By my calculations, I could make it across the country, all three thousand or so miles, in three full days. And by keeping my cheap little Bug moving all the time, driving through the night, I wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel room. I soon realized I couldn’t make the entire trip myself in that fashion, so I put in an ad at the Screen Actors Guild, looking for another actor to help me make the trip.
I prayed my companion would be a comely, busty redhead. Robert Porter, the fellow wayward actor who answered my ad, was certainly none of those things. He tossed his things into the back of the Beetle. So much for the bed, I thought.
Robert was a good enough guy who looked like James Dean and said very little as we filled up with gas and drove on out. I packed just the essentials: a toiletry kit, a few changes of clothes, and the only formal attire to my name: a navy blue suit and black Oxford shoes. I’d worn the suit on so many auditions. I could use it for casting calls in Hollywood too, I figured.
It didn’t take long for Robert and me to get into a rhythm. We’d split the shifts in four- to five-hour segments. Him at the wheel, me asleep in the back amid our stuff, and vice versa. The first day, we passed the refinement plants and farms of New Jersey and crossed over into Pennsylvania, with its coal-mining plants and steel mills. Four hours on. Four hours asleep. When the weather was warm, we could spread out in the back, sticking a leg outside the window.
I didn’t pay much attention to the country passing us by, so many urban centers converted to ghettos with the industrialization of the North, the migration of so many from the South. The news we listened to on the car radio painted a picture of a nation ripped apart at the seams, and we heard stories of riots and prison uprisings, killings, and the rumblings of a draft for the war in Vietnam. I did not want to fight. This was the wrong war. I was more at ease in the bohemian lifestyle.
In Oklahoma, I heard over the radio that the director who had seen me in the film Act One and was willing to give me Hollywood introductions had won an Emmy. It was a blast of positive news. The stars were aligning; my contemporaries were rising in status; naturally, I figured, they’d be able to help elevate me too. Emboldened by the positive response, we never stopped for long. Soon we crossed the Oklahoma border and then continued on down the Mother Road, America’s Main Street, the historic Route 66. We passed through Amarillo on the way through the Texas panhandle, new motels sprouting up alongside the highway, their vacancy signs illuminating our passage and the long, lonely stretches in the deserts of New Mexico, hours of mesas and old mining towns, listening to the Beach Boys, dreaming of our new promised land.
I preferred driving the night shift, careening through the darkness under the brilliant stars of the desert. I loved looking up and getting lost in the emptiness of it all, the extreme quiet of night. Here, my mind was left to roam freely, imagining my heroes—Montgomery Clift, Sir Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Richard Attenborough, these extraordinary talents, masters of their craft, famous the world over. They too had followed their path to stardom and emerged wealthy and known. I could be up there too—if I played my cards right—whatever that meant.
The first winks of daylight were like the opening of an eye, the first blinks on earth, and reminders of those dawn fishing trips I had taken with my father. Now that I was on my own, these sunrises across the deserts were my own new memories. I enjoyed them even more because they were mine. Learning to embrace the silence of the dawn, listening to its secrets, and beginning to understand them was another sign that I had become my own man, and part of that realization was the unshakable reality that my destiny was my own. My life was actually happening. I had made a choice—to move west—and it was frightening. Had I made the right choice or the wrong choice? Were they both the same?
We barely made it into town. We battled some headwinds in the final push to Los Angeles and burned out the engine. I dropped off my travel companion—never saw him again—and limped the car to Koenig’s apartment.
The apartment on Serrano Street was tiny, a cramped wing of a stucco cottage that was located between East Hollywood and Slumsville. He hadn’t cleaned the place in honor of my arrival. In fact, I don’t think he’d even wiped down the counters since he moved in years before. He was a heady intellectual, buried in scripts and books, and very involved with the Angels, a prestigious company of actors. He never bothered to clean the hair out of the sink or remove the fingernail clippings from the coffee table—or the kitchen table. He greeted me and then escorted me to my sleeping quarters: the couch. He’d picked it up from the curb, no doubt. And no, it hadn’t been reupholstered. Or cleaned. I mummified myself in a sheet to keep the bugs away and slept with my shoes on for additional protection.
That’s not to say I wasn’t immensely grateful for his hospitality. We shared a lot of memories and a great friendship that spanned from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York to LA. His role on Star Trek and his success were much deserved and truly could not have happened to a nicer guy.
For my first night, Koenig took me out. We went out on the Sunset Strip, the essence and pulsing heart of the Hollywood I had come to conquer, the portal of action. I had now opened the door and walked through its primary hub: the Whiskey a Go Go, or the Whiskey, for short. The Whiskey was the spot for music and hijinks in Los Angeles, a place where anyone could make it, they said, and nobody went home alone. The owner was a crooked cop with over-the-top taste.
The house band was the Doors, led by poetic wild man Jim Morrison. It was where the Byrds got big and everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Marilyn Monroe could be found amid the anonymous throngs.
I walked inside and was blo
wn away. Suspended in two cages hanging from the ceiling were a pair of go-go dancers hovering over a cloud of marijuana smoke. The crowd was good-looking. The guys were muscular, the girls all tanned. Great dancing. Sexy dancing. Everybody was loaded and doing the monkey and the chicken. I knew it. I had made it. As Woody Allen famously said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” And I had. Now all I needed to do was focus on the other twenty percent, whatever that was.
I was to find out it was a lot harder than driving across the country in a clown car.
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Get Used to It
I looked up Herb Brenner to make an appointment. I called the office and waited for this gatekeeper of fame to call me back.
“Mr. Brenner is not in. Who may I say is calling?” the secretary said.
I dropped Shelley Winters’s name, left my number, and went out to explore Los Angeles. The city, I found, was a fairy tale of sensuality. I loved the way the palm trees towered over me and I could hear the clatter of their fronds, smell the warm odor of orange blossoms, and hear the splatter of fountains. And the women, so beautiful, walking around in their flat Capezio shoes.
The sunny days passed and started to blend into one another. A week passed. What had happened to Herb Brenner? Was he ever going to call me back? I tried the office again, left another message. Maybe he was on vacation? Should I swing by? The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe the nerve of this guy. Shelley Winters was a big star. How about some attention, Herb?
Eventually, he called. I jumped into my blue suit and Oxfords and went to meet him at his office.
“Welcome to Hollywood,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“What’s with the suit? Actors don’t wear suits on the West Coast. They wear T-shirts.”
“Well, this is my first week here.”
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