A Life in Parts

by Bryan Cranston

  I began to recognize other voices in the hall. I stood up, but immediately felt sharp pains streak through my body: my legs, arms, neck, back, head—everywhere. I’d been holding myself so tightly that I was cramping. I breathed through the pain and made my way to the door to listen.

  The police were in the hall. Her vitriol was now distress. I heard two strains I had never heard in her voice before: defeat and surrender.

  The police took her away without ever knocking on my door. A couple of neighbors had called about the disturbance and told the NYPD that she was not a tenant. That was all the police needed to remove her from the premises as a trespasser. The last thing I heard from Ava as the elevator door was closing was a deep, mournful wailing, like a mortally wounded animal.

  Nothing happened in that apartment, but everything had changed. I understood clearly, without question, that I was capable of taking a life. I understood that given the right pressures and circumstances, I was capable of anything. I think that’s true of all of us.

  I understood the fragility of everything we think is solid and true. That was humbling. It shook me to my core.

  I never saw Ava again.

  When I heard many years later that she had died, I hoped she had eventually found some peace.

  Bystander

  Those with the means to flee Manhattan had fled. The rest of us were miserably sweating out the heavily oppressive August humidity and heat. I was more miserable than most. A week earlier, I’d stopped by a salad bar to pick up a healthy lunch, and I’d also picked up a parasite—a tapeworm. I was taking antibiotics to kill the microscopic beast, but after a week of severe stomach cramps, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to live, either. I couldn’t venture too far from a toilet. Fortunately my doctor’s office was around the corner from my apartment.

  My doctor was Dr. Constantine Generales. I was equally comforted by his name and proximity—near my apartment, directly across the street from the famous Dakota apartment building. As I was approaching the corner on Seventy-First to head north on Central Park West, I heard a loud BANG!—the nasty sound of metal and glass, instantly recognizable as a car crash. Instinctually, I ran to the corner. A woman was pointing. I saw a man lying just street-side of the row of parked cars. I was the first one to him. He looked up at me with panic in his eyes. I muttered, “It’s okay,” though I had no idea whether it was going to be okay. It didn’t look good. Shattered glass was everywhere. His body was severely mangled. He obviously had broken bones. Blood was spilling out from under him. I yelled back to the woman to go inside and call 911. Stunned, she hesitated, and I yelled the instruction again. She fled toward the building’s lobby.

  I checked to see if the man was still breathing. He was. He had dark hair. He was in his late thirties, older than me, but not by much. I cradled his head in my hands to keep it off the asphalt. I looked down and noticed my hands were covered in blood. I looked up and spotted another bystander in the street directing oncoming traffic away from us. The injured man was staring directly at me, pleading with his eyes for help. I started to feel woozy—my stomach condition, the excessive heat, the blood on my hands, and this stranger looking to me to save his life. A large crowd was gathering. “Did someone call an ambulance?” I yelled.

  A doorman shouted, “It’s on the way!”

  The man was now starting to convulse. His color was disappearing. I was losing him. “It’s all right. You’re going to be all right. The ambulance is almost here.” I yelled to no one in particular, “Did anyone see the car that hit him?” A quick scan of the bystanders indicated the answer was no. “Did it stop?” Again, no one responded. I guess it didn’t matter at that moment. I was just searching for answers.

  All of a sudden someone’s hands were replacing my own on the wounded man’s head. I felt another person help me up. I turned to see that paramedics were there and assisting both of us. I was escorted to the sidewalk and asked if I felt okay. I probably answered yes, though I had no idea how I was. I remember the paramedic touching my hands a lot. Later I realized he must have been trying to wipe off the man’s blood.

  I was now reduced to a spectator myself, which struck me as unfair. I was cast aside to watch like every other pedestrian. An odd feeling. I’d made a connection with the man. I had been his caretaker. I needed to stay involved. Also, I needed to find the driver and make him see what he had done.

  I turned to the doorman and asked if he saw what happened. “No,” he said, “I was inside. I heard the noise and came out. I just can’t believe he’d do that.”

  “What do you mean? Do what?”

  The doorman muttered a name I don’t remember and raised his chin at the man in the street. “He lives in the building. I heard he was sick . . . but I never thought he would kill himself.”

  No one saw a vehicle hit him—because there was none. For the first time I noticed the car that was parked right next to the man lying in the street. Its entire roof and windshield were smashed in—from above. How could I have not seen that before? I just assumed the glass came from the phantom vehicle, the vehicle that had threatened the life of this man whom I had come to know intimately, and yet never knew at all. I looked skyward at the building behind us on the southwest corner of Seventy-First and CPW. It was tall, maybe twenty stories.

  “He lived up on fourteen,” the doorman said.

  Everything completely shifted at that moment. When I thought this man had been hit by a car I was eager to help, concerned about his life. When I realized that he was committing suicide, I felt that he had lied to me. Of course he hadn’t, but it felt that way. I was angry. I’d held him and told him that he’d be all right—his pleading gaze searched for reassurance, and I gave it. The few moments we shared together were powerful. Bonding. Or so I’d thought. Now I didn’t know what to think. I felt somehow victimized as well as traumatized.

  I was becoming nauseated. I didn’t want to pass out there. I had to see my doctor. As I turned to go I saw a flash of something white in the street. I was dehydrated and dizzy, but the movement drew my attention. A clean white sheet was being draped over the man in the street.

  It had been only a few months since I’d been curled up in a ball while Ava banged on my door. How easily I could have killed her. How close I’d come. For me, the madness soon passed into memory. But this man had acted on his.

  What a sight I must have been when I appeared at my doctor’s office, covered in sweat, traces of blood on my hands and face. A nurse took care of me, and I got an ice pack for my head and an IV bag full of electrolytes.

  An hour later, I returned to the scene. I needed to see it. A small patch of darkened blood had seeped into the asphalt, the only evidence that something profound had transpired on this spot. Another car had parked where the damaged car had been. Cabs honked, families strolled. I stood there like a statue, weak, shaky, poisoned, questioning. I recalled that across the street from my doctor’s office, a block away from where the man had jumped, was the Dakota, a grand old residential building, where an assassin had murdered John Lennon just a few years earlier.

  I looked at the blood. I felt how tenuous the boundary is between life and its opposite. I felt how limited our span is, and how easily squandered. And I felt the need to embrace life. Put my arms around it.

  Doug Donovan

  Loving premiered in the summer of 1983 as a two-hour prime-time movie, featuring film actors Lloyd Bridges and Geraldine Page. The ads showed pictures of many cast members and asked: Who’s the victim and who’s the murderer? Out of a large cast, it was pretty easy to deduce who were the one-and-done characters: the stars. Bridges and Page weren’t going to go on to do the series; they were bait to attract viewers and get them hooked on the world of the show: the blue-collar Donovan family and the blue-blooded Alden clan.

  We started work in the dead of winter 1983. I was one of the last actors hired on the show, and I remember feeling so damn lucky. I wasn’t Clerk or Cop #3. I had a name and a job and relationship
s. And I was working with some of my heroes. Commanding Geraldine Page, whom I loved in Hondo and Summer and Smoke and Sweet Bird of Youth. And I’d grown up watching Lloyd Bridges as US Navy frogman Mike Nelson on Sea Hunt.

  He was so generous. If it was raining, Lloyd would get everyone lunch at the studio. I remember thinking: WOW. That’s a good guy. I barely had enough money to buy myself lunch, so a free meal made a difference.

  Some actors complained about mild inconveniences like early start times, and I remember Lloyd said: Better than digging a ditch. That left an impression on me. He was the star, and he was appreciative. I remember thinking: That’s how I want to be. And indeed I was grateful to be there, and it wasn’t digging a ditch. After all the restaurant jobs, the security-guard detail, Great Expectations, loading trucks at Roadway (HIGH AND TIGHT!), and all the derisive comments (You’re an actor? What restaurant do you work in?), I thought: I’m here.

  Being hired on Loving as a series regular was the breakthrough in my career. I’d just turned twenty-six years old, and I was a working actor. To this day, that remains my proudest professional accomplishment.

  I surprised myself by how prepared I was for this break. What I lacked in formal education I had gained through hard work, through paying attention. I’d worked as an extra, making thirty bucks a day, but I wasn’t there for the thirty bucks. I was there to learn the dynamics, the protocol, the jargon of the set. Acting for film and TV has a technical component. You need to know your stuff. What does the gaffer do? What happens when an actor doesn’t hit his mark? A “mark” is a little piece of tape they set for you on the floor. Setting a mark ensures that the actor correctly executes the blocking he has worked out with his director and other actors. The camera team bases its work around the marks that have been set. Let’s say an actor does a take that’s all there. He cries, he laughs, he kills, he hits all the emotional notes. If he didn’t hit his mark, it was worthless. He wasn’t lit properly. Or he was out of focus. That’s not the cameraman’s fault. It’s on the actor. If the actor screwed it up, that means wasted time, wasted energy, wasted money. I didn’t want to be that guy.

  I knew it was important for the actor to speak loudly enough so the sound could pick up what he was saying but softly enough to maintain intimacy if intimacy was required. Even though cameras and equipment and people surrounded you, if the scene called for you to be alone with your girlfriend, say, making out on a park bench, you had to find a way to speak in just the right pitch. Private but detectable.

  I knew that, on camera, when you walk into a room in your own home, you must know where the light switch is. You can’t need to look. Or else it’s a lie, which is like giving the audience a pinch of poison.

  When you tell a story, you have to take liberties. You compress time. You create composite characters. You jump years ahead or flash back. Art is not life. But if your character has a longtime girlfriend and you’re tentative or formal with her, touching her as if she’s someone you just met? Another pinch. The audience might not be consciously aware of these little pinches, but if you keep doling them out, they’re reaching for the remote, or they’re walking out of the theater. They’re sick of the poison. They don’t want any more. They’re done.

  They might not even realize they’re responding to inauthenticity or sloppiness in storytelling. It’s not the audience’s job to articulate the reasons. It’s their job to feel.

  I’m curious from an acting standpoint, so I’ve never walked out. On anything. I’m always learning something. If an actor is false, I’m looking to see what is making him false and whether he knows it. Is it lack of talent or focus? Does he not believe in his character? Maybe he’s judging his character and that’s seeping into his performance. If the play or the movie is horrible, is there someone who stands out from the mess? I’m interested from a professional point of view. But I don’t expect general audiences to stay with something that’s not true. All that matters where the audience is concerned is: Did it work? Were they moved?

  I learned this in dribs and drabs in the parts I’d done leading up to Loving, but it all started to click once I was working day in and day out on the show. People sometimes say: You honed your craft on a soap opera? Absolutely. I did.

  I was Doug Donovan, the son of a large Irish Catholic clan and a professor at the local university. Doug was a nice guy, a good guy. There was one instance, however, when I found out my fiancée, Merrill Vocheck (played by Patricia Kalember), was fooling around on me. That broke up our relationship. Upset in the aftermath, I snapped at my mother, played by Teri Keane. Teri loved it. It gave her something to react to. After I snapped, she was stung. She poured herself some coffee and waited a beat. Then remorse flashed across my face. I saw that I’d hurt her. And the audience could tell I wanted to say I was sorry. Teri let it sit, let it calm down—like a mom.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Doug?” she said.

  I calmly said, “I don’t.” We didn’t change any of the dialogue, just the way we approached it. Honestly.

  “Cut, cut!” The producers insisted I say it nicely, kindly, like Doug.

  “But it’s more interesting this way, more real,” I argued.

  “But the audience won’t like you,” the director said. “Doug is supposed to be likeable.”

  “They’ll like me,” I said. “They’ll like me more if the character is honest and relatable—much more than if I’m saccharine sweet all the time. No one is sweet all the time. Doug is not perfect.”

  In the end, I did it their way. I didn’t yet have the clout or the courage to stick with my instincts in the face of an authority saying: “Do it this way.” I didn’t want to get fired.

  Also, that’s just daytime television. When you’re on the relentless pace of a soap opera, it’s tough to take the time to be thoughtful. Got the shot? Good. Move on. Efficiency is everything. You can’t debate the integrity of a character or the truth of a moment.

  In another episode, the Donovan family gathered for dinner. In the middle of a scene, Lauren-Marie Taylor, who played my sister, knocked over a glass of milk by mistake. Napkins came out. We all moved to wipe it up. “Cut!”

  “Cut? Why did you cut? The milk spilled. Milk spills! That’s what happens in houses.”

  “Nope,” they said, “clean it up. Let’s do it over again.”

  “Can’t we just have a real moment and react to it?”

  “No, because how do you get back onto the script?”

  “We’ll get back on. Trust the actors to figure it out. We’ll get back on script. And you’ll have an honest moment. The audience will feel that.”

  Eh. Honesty was a luxury.

  On Loving, I had to memorize up to thirty pages of a script each day, often four days a week. With 120 pages of dialogue to absorb, it was incredibly difficult to match quality with quantity. It would have been so easy, so utterly defensible to coast. But my fellow actors and I fought to elevate the material, to bring nuance and humanity to our performances. That’s why I felt no shame in being on a soap opera. Truly, I felt proud. I still do.

  Friend

  James Kiberd, a barrel-chested, artistic, sensitive guy with an adventurous soul, played my older brother Mike on Loving. He introduced me to an acting workshop led by the venerable teacher Warren Robertson. The class was esoteric. Odd. We’d do these exercises: You’re an animal. Make a noise. Moo. I tried to be open to it. It’s like that great song from A Chorus Line: Be a table. Be a sports car. Ice cream cone. Okay so I’m an ice cream cone. I’m melting in the heat. I’m a puppy. Yip, yip. I’m roaring like a lion. We’d start the class lying on the floor, and then we’d writhe around and paw at each other like animals. Certainly there were skeptics and those who dismissed it or who would only roar halfheartedly. But I thought: I’m here. Either I dive in or I leave. I’m a sizzling pancake on a stove. I’m that pancake. Every part of me.

  We’d get into scene work, and Warren’s philosophy was: drill down on a scene for months an
d months and polish it to perfection. Almost every week for six months, we’d work on the same scene. I got weary of that and left after about a year. I learned some things from the class, but I felt strongly there was value in letting the imperfection of the work be okay. Wallace Stevens wrote, “The imperfect is our paradise.” Something about burnishing that same scene for months on end didn’t jibe with my instincts as an actor. I didn’t want to drill away every shred of spontaneity and freshness. I wanted to leave room for discovery.

  I remember I was doing a scene from a play about artist Amedeo Modigliani. I wanted to know what it was to paint something. James told me to come over to his place and paint. What do I paint? I don’t know. Just paint. I took the 7 train over to his loft in Long Island City. He set up all kinds of paper for me. I did a painting, and I didn’t like it and threw it away. And then I did another one. And another, and another. I slept and ate at his place and showered and painted and became totally engrossed. I was learning how to get under a character’s skin.

  James introduced me to art and getting into the process of it and being creative. He also taught me the value of an enriching friendship. I came to understand through him what author Marianne Williamson meant when she said something like: If people don’t enhance your life, you have to get rid of them. That may sound harsh, but after Ava and the Suicide Man, I started to feel an urgency and wanted to surround myself with people who lifted me up. James did, and he taught me a lot. And he was fun. He would try anything. He was risk-oriented. He indulged. Sometimes too much.

  One time the cast of Loving was at a party at the Grand Hyatt. ABC network brass were there, all of our bosses. James was drinking up a storm. He was staring piercingly at the legendary Agnes Nixon, the creator of Loving, like a madman. He asked her to dance and she gave him her hand. He danced feverishly, and at one point, he took his shirt off and wrapped her up in a bear hug. That was all for Agnes, but James was just getting started. He strode up to an amplifier and started humping it. “Bryan, Bryan, feel this,” he said. “Vibrations.” I was thinking: He’s going to get fired.