Nor, when I met Edward Everett Horton (I was his offstage dresser), had I even heard of all those great directors he’d worked with, whom I was so soon to revere (and in several cases, meet and befriend): Vidor, Sternberg, George Cukor,* Ernst Lubitsch* (five times!); and with Astaire and Rogers, Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Watching him from the wings every night, I learned how much you could get out of the smallest gesture if it was placed right. While holding someone at bay with a pistol, Horton at one point moved the wrist of his gun-hand very slightly and got a huge laugh. It was clearly his own moment, because he topped it by getting two more laughs with equally small hand gestures, plus a final “topper,” which was the biggest laugh of the bunch. He may have been holding a gun but it was the audience he had in the palm of his hand. Horton died fifteen years later; I still recall—having helped him out of his dress coat and into a smoking jacket every night—the sharp yet musky smell of his cologne.
Others over that summer included Richard Arlen (unasked questions about Howard Hawks,* Sternberg, William Wellman, Gary Cooper); ZaSu Pitts (worked with Erich von Stroheim three times, Leo McCarey,* Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford); Ilona Massey (the Marx Bros.). Veronica Lake got married for the second time during her days in Michigan—she was in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, shortly to become a favorite of mine. Ignorance may be bliss but you pay for it with recriminations.
My favorite role was in the seventh week, playing Signe Hasso’s teenage son in Edward Mabley’s comedy Glad Tidings. It was the juvenile lead and a terrific part to land while still an apprentice. And Signe—who, it would turn out, had also worked with Lubitsch, Cukor, Grant, C. B. DeMille, and Ronald Colman—gave me a still-treasured compliment when she said I got more laughs out of the role than anyone who had played it before, even on Broadway. She couldn’t have been warmer or more kind. One afternoon, we went for a long lovely ride in her convertible. Actually, I saw her a number of times over the years, first in New York when she was doing an off-Broadway show, then in Hollywood, but somehow always at gatherings when we couldn’t really speak. I rode uptown in a cab with her once soon after her beloved only son, also named Peter, had died in his twenties, over which she suffered terribly.
Signe, who was Swedish, was wonderful to have as my first mother in the theater, and not long before her death in 2002, I did phone her in Los Angeles a couple of times (I was back in N.Y.C. by then) and asked a few questions. “Cary was the most wonderful gentleman,” she told me, and “DeMille was very underrated—he was very good, really.” She adored Cukor, “a dear friend,” and Lubitsch, “of course, was the best,” acting out each part for every actor and “better than any of them. I used to tell him he was much better than me in my role as the French maid [in Heaven Can Wait, 1943].” Signe and I had planned to tape some of her reminiscences, but before we could she died suddenly in her eighty-fourth year.
Signe Hasso is the French maid who initiates teenager Dickie Moore (who grows up to be Don Ameche) into the mysteries of sex for Ernst Lubitsch’s penultimate classic, Heaven Can Wait (1943), a lovely human comedy, his first in color. Spring Byington and Charles Coburn are Dickie/Don’s disapproving mother and approving uncle. At the time, Moore was almost the same age as I was when twelve years later Signe played my mother onstage.
Another apprentice whom I met that summer advised me to study with Stella Adler, by then already legendary as an actress/star-teacher, and in the fall of 1955, having lied about my age (I said I was eighteen), I entered into the beginner class she taught. For the next four falls, winters and springs I took Stella’s classes in the afternoons after school. I was also briefly in the large cast of the Kurt Weill–Paul Green musical-drama Johnny Johnson, which Stella directed off-Broadway. Those four years with her were the solid foundation for all the directing and acting I would ever do.
During June–September, 1956–58, I continued working in summer theaters: in Stratford, Connecticut, as an apprentice extra, bit player and understudy at John Houseman’s American Shakespeare Festival (King John, Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew); and in Central Park at Joseph Papp’s original New York Shakespeare Festival (Othello, Twelfth Night), trying out Othello for a week in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. My favorite summer of acting in stock was at Falmouth, Massachusetts, where (turning 19) I had a really good time playing fine parts in Shaw’s Major Barbara (the stuffy son) and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (the Nazi-like main heavy), plus six comedy-part bits all in one farce (once, I followed myself on), using a different famous voice for each. After about the third entrance the audience figured out it was all the same actor and laughed every time I turned up.
Finally out of high school, I tried to get work in theater or in television. There were very few films made in New York at the time, and live dramatic TV was on its way out fast. I did bits on two of the last good ones: “Blast in Centralia No. 5” with Jason Robards, Jr., and Maureen Stapleton (directed by George Roy Hill for Seven Arts Playhouse), and “Fifty Grand,” out of Hemingway, with Ralph Meeker (directed by Sidney Lumet* for Kraft Television Theatre). Auditioned twice and was turned down twice for the Actors Studio, did leads in a couple of showcases off-Broadway (Tennessee Williams’ one-act Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen), and in Westport, Connecticut (a new play by Michael Hastings, Yes, and After). I hated auditioning, and found the process humiliating and not a fair way to judge talent. Often, I would eventually discover, the best actors were not necessarily good auditioners, and good auditioners were not necessarily always as good once they had the role, the audition sometimes being the best you were going to get. When I started directing, my casting sessions were usually long because I tried to give the actors as much time as possible. The necessity of auditioning, however, is what propelled me away from acting as my primary career.
In the late fall of 1958, I suggested to a group of five students I was hanging out with at Stella’s that I direct them in a scene from Clifford Odets’ Hollywood drama, The Big Knife. We rehearsed for a week or so and then they performed it with great success during one of Stella’s scene-classes. From this point on, my focus changed from acting to directing and by the end of the following year, in November 1959, I co-produced and directed an off-Broadway production of The Big Knife, which was a succès d’estime. I was twenty.
We had a good cast and everybody in it kept on working afterward, but the only one who became famous was Carroll O’Connor. I had cast him—it was only his second appearance in New York City, and his first leading role—as the movie-studio boss whose sanctimoniousness and hypocrisy were supposedly based largely on M-G-M’s Louis B. Mayer. Carroll was superb in the part, received great notices, got his first agent from it, soon went to Hollywood, and never looked back. Ironically, in the Robert Aldrich film of The Big Knife (1957), Rod Steiger had played the studio boss and, years later, Carroll took another Steiger movie-role when he did the popular TV series based on In the Heat of the Night.
There occurred with O’Connor, shortly before we opened, one of those defining moments for a director. I was giving performance-notes to the cast after a run-through. One of them was a direction I had already given Carroll—repeatedly—and found repeatedly not being sufficiently heeded, so I said, without looking up from the clipboard, “And Carroll is still speaking quite often with the cigar in his mouth.” I had pointed out earlier that his doing so made it difficult to understand the language, and that it was Clifford Odets, after all, whose brilliant idiosyncratic dialogue (as in the classic all-Odets-dialogued New York picture, Sweet Smell of Success) was perhaps the playwright’s most often noted and praised attribute. Carroll now said in deliberate, irritated tones, “There’s a lot more wrong with this production than my talking with the cigar in my mouth.” I didn’t look up. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, of course, but clearly I knew I had to respond quickly and decisively to the challenge or I could lose control of the entire cast. After what seemed like an eternity in the atmosphere of that
room, I said, keeping my head and voice down: “Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with this production.” I looked up at him: “And one of them is that you talk with the cigar in your mouth. So don’t do it anymore.” He said nothing and I went on with the notes; we never spoke of it again, and he generally kept the cigar out of his mouth during his lines. What most amused me personally when seeing his decade-long, myth-making Archie Bunker of All in the Family was how often he spoke with a cigar in his mouth.
We saw each other only twice more before his death in 2001; at a political gathering (described below) and at the 1972 Golden Globes gala, where he won his first award for All in the Family, and had the final word on our moment of friction. I was seated directly below the winners’ podium, having been nominated for directing and co-scripting The Last Picture Show. During Carroll’s acceptance speech, he told about his having gotten his first important role from a young New York director who was “an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and he’s seated right below me here tonight.” We hugged after the event, and spoke briefly. Not long after Carroll died, Iran into his one and only beloved wife Nancy, who told me that she and Carroll were so broke before The Big Knife that when I called him back to audition for a second time, Carroll was angry because they had to scrounge around and redeem pop-bottle deposits to make the subway fare.
When our Big Knife leading man (in his late thirties) announced his decision to do a Hollywood television film, I was so exhausted from the year-plus I had spent raising the money and then casting, directing, opening, advertising, promoting, I was simply too tired to look for, and direct all over again, a replacement in that crucial role for only the last two weeks of our run. I decided to play it myself. Orson Welles had done old men while in his teens, why couldn’t I do fortyish at twentyish? This self-casting was generally deplored by the ensemble, but I ignored their objections, grayed my hair and played the doomed Charlie Castle for sixteen well-attended performances off-Broadway on Manhattan’s East 30th Street, happily doing the role originated on Broadway by John Garfield, filmed with Jack Palance, directed on the Paris stage by Jean Renoir starring Daniel Gélin, and imagined by Odets himself when he wrote it (he told me) as Cary Grant. I loved every second of acting it, and the applause was as good as ever. I especially remember Carroll O’Connor’s energy, precision, truth, and star-assurance; acting with him was easy because he gave you everything fully.
In the summer of 1961, I was the artistic director for a ten-week season of stock at the Phoenicia Playhouse in Phoenicia, in upstate New York, not far from Woodstock and Kingston (where I was born and lived for about three months). I also supervised the casting, chose several of the plays, directed four of them and acted in a couple. My own productions were the Moss Hart–George S. Kaufman Hollywood satire, Once in a Lifetime, Odets’ rarely revived domestic drama Rocket to the Moon, Tennessee Williams’ poetic allegory Camino Real, and Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit, Ten Little Indians. Most of the actors and a couple of the directors who were just starting out with us that summer subsequently have had long careers: George Morfogen (who already was one of my closest friends), Anthony Zerbe, James Tolkin, Joanna Miles; directors Glenn Jordan, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, (actor-teacher) William Hickey; our costume designer was Polly Platt (who would become a prominent production designer and producer, my wife for eight years, and the mother of my two daughters). In 1964 (having started writing for Esquire magazine two years before), I directed and produced an ill-fated off-Broadway production of Once in a Lifetime; financial circumstances killed us, and within six months of its closing, I had moved to Los Angeles, where I lived and worked for most of the next thirty-two years.
Despite my career as a journalist, and my subsequent success as a film director, my roots obviously had been as an actor, although I acted infrequently after moving to California, yet most memorably: playing a lead role of the young director in my own first film as a director, Targets (1968), featuring a few scenes of me with Boris Karloff; acting a lead as another young film director, with Orson Welles directing and John Huston as an aging veteran filmmaker, in Welles’ legendary last picture, The Other Side of the Wind (1970–1976), finally perhaps to be shown in 2005; playing a bit as myself with Gena Rowlands in the last scene of John Cassavetes’ beautiful backstage drama, Opening Night (1977); acting the government-heavy opposite Ben Gazzara in Singapore for my own film version of Paul Theroux’s novel, Saint Jack (1979); and, most famously, as the somewhat square but decent psychiatrist to psychiatrist Lorraine Bracco in David Chase’s epoch-making HBO series, The Sopranos (1999–2005).
During my years directing pictures, I’ve been blessed with some magnificent casts and quite a few superb actors. Among these are many whom I was fortunate enough to introduce to the public in either their movie debut or their first notable role on the big screen: Sandy Baron, Timothy Bottoms, Eileen Brennan, Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Ellen Burstyn, Anthony Clark, Laura Dern, Burton Gilliam, John Hillerman, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Tatum O’Neal, Randy Quaid, John Ritter, Cybill Shepherd, Eric Stoltz, and others. Apart from those who have a chapter of their own, I was also lucky to work with a number of illustrious, gifted, and in some cases, mythic stars (which is yet another book or two).
In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, I have been acting more and more, usually in cameo roles, and often playing a movie director. It’s called typecasting. To my eternal regret, I was unable to do a classic when Sydney Pollock kindly offered it to me—the director (Dabney Coleman did it) in Tootsie.
The Stars Party
The truth is that the acting life (especially in the movies) has a number of occupational hazards, high among them the emotional fallout from the repeated extraordinary closeness—of family-like proportions (known as production)—being summarily ended, most people rarely seen again. And so a sense of loss (or its ghost) pervades most phases of the actual work. The beautiful English author Rumer Godden once worked on a screen adaptation of a book of hers with Jean Renoir—to me (and to many others), the finest film director of the western world. Their collaboration, The River, shot entirely in India, is noted by all as one of his greatest triumphs. In a memoir (A House with Four Rooms), Godden ended her long and loving section on the making of that picture with this:
When a film is over it is over. There seems to be an unwritten code that, when crew and actors part, you let them go. Maybe you will see them again in perhaps another film—as I have several times; then you pick up the threads where you left off but, meanwhile, you do not seek to keep contact. This sounds heartless but it is sense. How can professionals remember everyone they meet on a film?
It is hard though for people outside the stage and film world to understand. They are often hurt by it. “We thought Renoir liked us,” said the wife of the manager of the jute press in which we had filmed, and said it in bitterness. She felt they had been “used”—as they had. “We thought he liked us.” They had sent Christmas cards, which were not reciprocated.
“We did. He does.” Which was true or would have been true if Jean had been reminded of them, but when the cards came he was probably in Italy or Mexico. “The River?” he would have said. “That’s over long ago.”
For actors, this sort of seesaw life leads to a somewhat bigger than natural need to unwind after a day’s or week’s or three months’ intensive work.
Also, a lot of the moviemaking process is so boring for actors—the lighting usually takes a long time and repetitions of scenes from many angles, often necessitated by directorial uncertainty—that they often feel obliged to bust out for a night on the town. Or some awards presentation or special tribute (see below). Usually there’s not much to do in Los Angeles at night: it’s an early-rising company town. In the mid-1960s when I first got to Hollywood, an evening at a club called Whisky A Go Go was the place to be in California, or practically in the entire civilized world. By now, of course, much of the earth’s nightlife is essentially the same experience as the one I had in 1965.
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The Whisky had opened January 15, 1964, and at that moment was the hottest club in America. Jack Paar’s Tonight show (Paar was before Johnny Carson and after Steve Allen) covered it and ABC-TV did a documentary on it, Johnny Rivers’ records (he was singing there) were selling, and Whisky’s four owners were doing fine. They had the furtive look of men who knew they were riding a wave, their eyes darting about, nervous to make it now because they might never get this kind of chance again.
But then, right then, everybody came. You’d see Loretta Young, and Jack Palance and his wife, Shelley Winters, Laurence Harvey, Sal Mineo. Fred Astaire came around one week. So did Bob Hope and Dean Martin. And the Beatles. They caused a riot on top of the usual one. Pierre Salinger (JFK’s press secretary) was in one night. That blonde dancing wildly in the middle of the floor, a big black bow in her hair, that was Mamie Van Doren. Johnny Rivers was going with her at the time. And at the next booth were four of NASA’s astronauts. That one in the middle was David Scott, who was rumored to be going to the moon (and did).
And the beatniks from Venice came (under some new moniker), and the arty crowd from UCLA and the hippies from New York and the squares from all over and the has-beens who wanted to be in on the action, and the in-crowd because they wanted to stay that way. There was a fellow with hair down to the middle of his back. And another with his hair cut like Shakespeare’s. Quite a few mixed couples. Girls in the tightest possible Capri pants and high heels. Girls barefoot and covered with makeup. And boys covered with makeup. Men with beards and sunglasses. On the balcony, leaning against a pole, stood a surly young male prop in a goatee, staring down at the dance floor. He didn’t move all night. No one could move much, the dancing mainly being various sexual gyrations, and the noise so deafening that conversations were not possible. In three cages suspended from the ceiling, three scantily-dressed young women moved about suggestively but with little excitement.
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