And this was all in ten days.
I ARRIVED BACK IN Michigan full of big-city culture, with a summer job at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in my back pocket, and right away things got rolling. I earned my Equity card and appeared in play after play after play, and I started making some real, honest-to-goodness money. Meanwhile, my wife, Betsy, was getting politicized; she’d helped organize a nurses’ union at the hospital where she worked. Our worlds were radically different: she was involved and altruistic, and I was insulated in the fantasy world of the theater. We were still very much in love, but it’s possible that she looked at me as somebody who was more self-indulgent than he should’ve been. It might not have been the best time to leave her in Detroit and go down to Cleveland to work on my Shakespearean chops, but I had to follow the work.
Rather than room with other actors in Ohio, I rented my own apartment in the hopes that Betsy would come and join me for a few weeks later in the season. Since I was on my own, I immersed myself in the work and drew from my ADA training and discipline. When Betsy did finally come down for a visit and saw how hard I was working, and how serious I was about my profession, it finally dawned on her that this might be our life together: me in a different city every couple of months, focusing the majority of my energy on my craft. I think she wondered then if that kind of life would make her happy.
After an exhilarating season in Cleveland, it was back to Michigan, where I continued my studies and was invited to join the repertory company at the Meadow Brook Theatre. I also became a member of the faculty and taught an adjunct class in stage combat and period technique, where I demonstrated how to properly faint (it goes knees, hips, elbows), throw a convincing punch (it’s all in the eyes), and how to remain butch while wearing a wig and mincing about in tights and high heels (don’t ask). I was busy, but I was also hungry, and I wanted more.
Toward the end of the season—a season in which I thought I’d gone above and beyond the call of duty, professionally speaking, at one point playing six different roles in a single play—I was promised a crack at the lead role in our final show, The Glass Menagerie. I coveted that role, probably more than any other role in my short career. The part ended up going to the director’s boy toy, some actor from Lincoln Center, and I felt entirely betrayed. I had no idea (or maybe I’d chosen not to believe) that politics were involved in this sort of thing. I always thought of the theater as a pure place. Wrong. Lesson learned. I graduated ADA with honors, and it was time to move on.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, I went back to Cleveland to do some more Shakespeare, but I stumbled into a couple of other projects, most notably the musical Godspell. It was a huge hit, standing room only. I played Judas, and people noticed. Especially the girls.
Soon after the show opened, there was a party in Cleveland to celebrate the release of the Godspell soundtrack, and even though we weren’t on the album, the principals in our cast were invited. In true record industry fashion, some … shall we say, ladies of the evening were invited, all of whom were available to Jesus and his disciples at no charge. These working girls looked like the Supremes. I’d never been with a Motown diva and I succumbed. I mean, how many times do you get the opportunity to do a Supreme?
For the first time, I had groupies. I met more than one novice nun from a local convent who wanted to sacrifice her virginity to Judas. Turns out even nuns want the bad boy. Once I mentioned during a radio interview that I liked Michelob, and the next night a couple young ladies left three cases of beer on my doorstep. There were flowers and love letters and poems and drawings. It was stardom on a small scale—pretty heady stuff, which I embraced, most notably the hedonistic side … all while my wife was up in Michigan.
Betsy and I had fallen in love in high school and married young, but now we were in our midtwenties, and we weren’t anything like the people we were when we first met, so when she met me in Cleveland, things felt a bit off-kilter. But the love was still there, so when I was invited to join Godspell off-Broadway, I turned it down, opting instead to return to Michigan for another season at Meadow Brook. I was still smarting from The Glass Menagerie disappointment and wasn’t happy with the season in general, but I sucked it up, did three plays, taught a few classes, and tried my best to salvage my marriage.
One night I was doing some channel surfing, and I happened across a movie called Boxcar Bertha. Boxcar was Martin Scorsese’s directorial debut, starred Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, and was produced by Hollywood’s most savvy schlockmeister, Roger Corman. It was a good enough film, but what I noticed were the closing credits: it seemed as though half the crew and a few bit players had been my compadres back at Cal State and at Théâtre Intime.
Hmm.
So there I am, sitting in Bumfuck, Michigan, snow up to my ass, frustrated with the whole Meadow Brook scene, spending more time teaching than acting, navigating the rocks with Betsy, and it hit me—if I was going to deal with the bullshit politics of acting, I might as well do it in Hollywood, where at least the pay is better. My romance with the world of classical theater had faded. It was hard for me to acknowledge my naïve notion that the theater was a sacred temple of art. And my thinking was that if my college friends had made peace with commercial Hollyweird, I could too. It was time to go home.
I drove west with two of my Academy buddies, which was an adventure in and of itself. When we got to Reno, one of my traveling partners—who considered himself somewhat of a cardshark—took a chunk of our gas money and hit the blackjack tables. For a starving actor like me, a guy who was saving all his money to rent an apartment for him and his wife, this was blasphemy. But the guy won big. We treated ourselves to Bloody Marys and gorged on filet mignon, eggs, orange juice, and hash browns. This first real meal we’d had in a week gave us the energy to make it to Los Angeles without stopping.
We rolled into my parents’ driveway at midnight, completely exhausted. I banged on the door, surprised the hell out of Mom and Dad, and just like that a new chapter of my life began.
CHAPTER 4
NIGHTMARE #4:
While summering at the seashore with my parents, I wandered into a late-afternoon double-bill matinee at the local movie house. The first half was a kiddie flick, but the second feature was a World War II movie, The Naked and the Dead, based on the famous novel by Norman Mailer. This gritty, adult war drama captivated me until a sequence when a young GI grunt is bitten by a poisonous, lime green snake and dies horribly. The soldier writhed in pain, and the snake’s poison bubbled and foamed from his mouth, nose, and eyes. After he died, one of his buddies found the giant green reptile and hacked it to pieces. For the rest of the summer, I checked under the bed in our rented beach house for snakes. And for the next ten years, I played host to the violent images from that film enhanced by my own imagination in the nightmares I suffered as a result of that summer day in a dark, dark, dark movie theater.
AFTER CRASHING WITH MY PARENTS FOR A couple of days, I put a deposit on a one-room bungalow managed by one Cliff Coleman. When I found out that Cliff was one of Sam Peckinpah’s longtime assistant directors, I knew I was officially home— after all, in Hollywood, everybody’s in the industry.
The tiny cottage was right on the sand by the Santa Monica Pier, a charming little joint I thought would be a perfect place for Betsy and me to recharge our marriage. We spent much of the summer enjoying the beach, surfing, catching up with old friends, collecting unemployment, and resting and recuperating. Along with some actor friends who followed me out from Michigan, I took weekly three-hour acting classes with an actor/director/concentration-camp survivor named Jack Garfein, figuring at the very least I’d meet some professional, working actors who could help me get a gig or two. I also needed to get back into the Hollywood loop; after being immersed in the classics, I felt I could do with an infusion of contemporary showbiz.
Before long, Betsy and I realized that things weren’t working out. We’d married too young, and we’d grown too far apart to repair a
nd rebuild our relationship, so we agreed to separate; then, a few months later, we got a do-it-yourself divorce. We ended on good terms. No lasting damage. We just changed. That’s sometimes the way it goes.
I soon learned that my New York friends Jan and Gary had also moved back home, to a place in the Hollywood foothills across the street from Frank Lloyd Wright’s son’s Batcave-looking house. They were huge film fanatics, and we all spent a lot of time at cheap movie matinees or in front of the television, checking out old and new films of all genres. With every movie, my respect for the medium grew.
Gary had registered as a conscientious objector and was forced to serve, in effect, community service for the government. The government sent him up to the NASA test center in the Bay Area, where, as an experiment, he had to remain in bed for six months. I’m not sure how watching an actor lie around for half a year helped the good old USA, but what do I know? Thank God it wasn’t me. It could’ve been a nightmare on Skylab.
WITHOUT GARY, IT BECAME difficult for Jan and their other roommate to foot the rent, so they asked me to move in. Their friends all seemed to be in the industry: actors, cameramen, choreographers, and future film critics, and it further immersed me in the culture of Hollywood. This entire crowd ate, drank, and slept movies, but couldn’t afford to see new films, so we did what many enterprising, young starving artists did in the early 1970s: we crashed studio screenings. And we were so slick that we never got caught.
Over the next year, I rediscovered and again fell in love with American cinema and spent many an evening at the local revival theater, watching a Billy Wilder double feature, or a couple of Hitchcock films, or back-to-back film noirs. A revival schedule was always tacked up on the wall by the telephone, with all the titles we wanted to see over the next several weeks highlighted in red.
Considering our dovetailing tastes, our proximity to one another, and that Gary and Jan had been having problems before he was sent to San Francisco, it was all but inevitable that Jan and I would fall into a relationship. Even though it was wrong on a certain level, we couldn’t not fall into each other’s arms. Sometimes these things are meant to happen. You can’t help it, and you can’t fight it. Gary and Jan eventually officially broke up, and Jan and I officially became an item.
I went on my first real Hollywood audition in early 1973 for a film called Buster and Billie, starring Jan-Michael Vincent, who was one of Hollywood’s true rising stars at the time, having come off of the hit Charles Bronson movie The Mechanic, as well as the Disney classic The World’s Greatest Athlete. He was being groomed as the next James Dean/Steve McQueen, and if I managed to land a job in this movie—a movie that was going to be in the tradition of Peter Bogdanovich’s recent successful period piece, The Last Picture Show—it would be huge.
I read for the role of Whitey, the classic sidekick, an albino southerner, and the third male lead. And I got it, beating out Gary Busey. (Gary was young and calm then; if I’d taken a part from him at any point after, say, 1983, who knows what would’ve happened?) My salary: about $5,000. Not exactly Freddy Krueger money, but at the time that paycheck was damn welcome.
Not only was Whitey an albino, but he was a self-conscious albino who so despised his affliction that he dyed his hair with black shoe polish. A few weeks before the shoot kicked off, I went to see the makeup man, and more than anything else, he was concerned about my hair. He took me to see the studio wig expert, a little Russian lady who had a cluster of Emmy Awards on her mantel. At the back of her ranch house—which, from the inside, looked like a Russian Orthodox church—was a room with dozens of wigheads topped with toupees. Since she was the best in town, rugs of every variety were on display, some of which had been worn by the likes of John Wayne and Rip Torn. She took one look at my blond surfer ringlets and decided that dye wouldn’t work, so she ducked into an annex and came back with a jet-black crew-cut toupee, plopped it on my head, and said, “Perfect!”
She was right. It looked great. But it had an odd smell about it. “Has somebody worn this recently?”
“No,” she said. “The last time it was used was four years ago. Alan Arkin wore it in Catch-22.”
Now that was cool. Smelly, but cool.
BUSTER AND BILLIE WAS shot in Allman Brothers country, outside a tiny Georgia town called Statesboro. On our first day there we went to a pancake breakfast held by the local Rotarians, who ran the town. It was a can’t-miss event— especially for the big star Jan-Michael—because we needed to butter up the townsfolk to get cheaper rates for our film locations. This was my first lesson on how to stretch your film dollar, which prepared me for the myriad budget restrictions on the early Nightmare movies, as well as the tight budgets on movies I would later direct.
A few days before we’d left for Georgia, I’d been shuttled over to the studio-appointed optometrist in Beverly Hills, who was going to measure me for a pair of albino-like pink contact lenses. The lenses arrived in town right after the Rotary Club breakfast, and I had to try them on immediately because shooting started that afternoon. The contacts were kind of big, so big that it felt as if teacup saucers were under my eyelids, and I immediately started tearing up. Another problem: the lenses were red, which would theoretically make my eyes look pink. Unfortunately, my eyes are light green, and when you mix red and green, you get brown. When I got to the set, despite being scared shitless I’d get thrown off the movie if I complained about anything, I told our director, Daniel Petrie— an A-lister who’d directed A Raisin in the Sun—that the lenses were causing problems. “I can’t act in these. I just can’t. Maybe you can’t see it, but I feel like I’m crying all the time. What can we do, Dan?”
Without hesitation he said, “Take ’em out. The eyes are the windows of the soul, and I want the audience to see your eyes, not some contact lenses. Nobody’s going to care if you don’t have pink eyes.” So I immediately took ’em out, and, man, was I grateful. I’d learned a valuable lesson: stick to your guns. Dan smiled, went back behind the camera, shouted, “Action,” and away we went.
Our female lead, Pamela Sue Martin, was one of the most gorgeous creatures in creation: porcelain skin, a willowy body, and large, expressive eyes. That she was talented made her that much more desirable. During the shoot, she caught a brutal cold, but even with a runny nose and red, swollen eyes she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. (Even if I had developed a crush on Pamela—which I didn’t—I wouldn’t have made a move because (a) I had a girlfriend, and (b) said girlfriend had come on location with me.)
Statesboro was a dry town, and the only place we could get a drink was at the local American Legion. And it wasn’t as if we could get beer or wine; all they had to offer us was homemade moonshine. And that was some quality moonshine—come 2002, that same stuff would bring $10 a shot in a high-end New York City cocktail lounge.
If we had a taste for something other than ‘shine, we had to find a way to get to the next county. One night, Jan-Michael had a craving for Cuervo Gold, so he stole one of the film’s 1940s-era prop cars and hauled ass across the county line to the nearest package-liquor store, justifying his behavior by saying, “This is what my character would do.” That sounded good to me, so I went along for the wild ride, which took us right across the local college football field. Somehow we managed not to get arrested. Talk about Method acting. Lee Strasberg would’ve been thrilled.
MY PERFORMANCE IN BUSTER AND BILLIE got great reviews—Time magazine said, “Buster and Billie contains some good acting, especially by a boy named Robert Englund, who plays Buster’s best friend”—and its success helped me get a number of prestigious auditions, most notably one for the role of Telly Savalas’s sidekick in the series Kojak. (Apparently I had a sidekick look about me.) After about a half-dozen callbacks, I was told I didn’t get it, which got me to thinking about the entire Hollywood audition process.
I realized that sometimes you’ve won or lost the part before you utter a single word of dialogue. Your blond hair mi
ght land you the role, while your height (or lack thereof) might help that tall guy you rode up in the elevator with get the part. I also realized that getting called back is a triumph itself, and even if I didn’t get a certain part, I should still feel good that somebody in the casting office, or several somebodies, liked me well enough to give me a second, or third, or even a tenth shot. You have to turn the negative into a positive and take what you can out of the experience, and that could be something as small as a good acting tip, or something as big as getting the producer’s contact number. At the very least, staying positive helps you stay sane.
It also dawned on me that there are two kinds of film roles: those you do for the money and the work, and those you do for artistic fulfillment. But every once in a while, something comes along that could be both lucrative and fulfilling, such as the film I auditioned for in 1973 called The Last Detail, which starred Jack Nicholson. I was in the running for the part of the young sailor that Jack and his navy buddy were escorting to the brig, a meaty, possibly career-making role. The role went to Randy Quaid—an actor I admire and who did a brilliant job in the film—but losing it still haunts me. (A few years later, a gentleman wandered over to me in a movie-theater lobby and told me how much he liked my work in Buster and Billie and Stay Hungry. This was Darryl Ponicsan, the guy who wrote both the novel and the screenplay for The Last Detail. All I could think was Why weren’t you at one of my auditions?!)
What somewhat softened the blow was that the following year I landed a small but crucial part in Hustle, a contemporary film noir with an all-star cast featuring Catherine Deneuve, Ernest Borgnine, and the man who at that time was arguably Hollywood’s biggest star, Burt Reynolds. This was a top-notch project—pancake breakfasts with the locals wouldn’t be required—but the coolest aspect was that I was to play the guy who kills Burt Reynolds.
Hollywood Monster Page 4