by Peter Coyote
The week in Buffalo was uneventful and we departed on schedule for Canada. As we were being processed by Canadian customs, our stage manager Lee Vaughn suddenly confided that he had some marijuana in his suitcase. My heart nearly stopped, but miraculously we slipped through undetected. I ordered him to clean out his suitcase, and then forgot about it.
At the university, we were assigned two student guides I’ll call Judas and Judessa, who had apparently never considered fun as an operative mode of living. When they heard us (as they later testified) “laughing in the bathroom,” they decided we must be high on drugs and called the Mounties.
The company was gathered in our impromptu dressing room under the gym when the Mounties arrived and asked to search our luggage. We raised a storm of protest, citing the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (neither of which exists in Canada) and so thoroughly confused them that they left to get legal advice. We took advantage of the respite to triple-check everyone’s luggage for contraband.
We were confident when they returned, and watched smugly as they rifled through our socks and underwear, tie-dyed shirts, and raggedy blue jeans. Confidence changed to catastrophe when one of them discovered a bag of seeds and stems that hard-luck Lee had forgotten he had hidden in his sneakers. He was unceremoniously arrested and taken to Spy Hill Gaol.
When the school administration learned of Lee’s arrest, they canceled the show. Without their money, we had no funds to travel to Vancouver. We countered the administration’s move by asserting that (a) only the stage manager had been arrested so the company was still prepared to do the show according to contract and (b) it was the students, through their student council, who had hired us; we were answerable to them and not to the administration.
The administration resisted our interpretation, and we resisted their resistance. Honed by plenty of such “combat” experience, we had the added incentive of desperation. Each troupe member assumed a role: publicity, legal, rehearsal, show setup, and so on. We located a mimeograph machine and some willing students and flooded the campus with announcements of a rally to be held in the cafeteria the next afternoon to address the issue of student autonomy (essential to our survival). Afterward, we planned to perform off-campus in a downtown theater; the rally would also serve as publicity.
The next day at noon the cafeteria was jammed with curious students. We had erected a makeshift stage, borrowed a microphone and loudspeaker, and convinced two faculty members to join us onstage as a gesture of solidarity. The issue, we explained to the crowd, was that they, the students, were supposed to have autonomy in running their student unions. The administration had arbitrarily reversed one of their decisions. There was much cheering and whistling at this, and things were beginning to percolate when a school official entered the room accompanied by two Mounties in long black overcoats. The official’s first act was to pull the plug on our loudspeaker, which couldn’t have suited us better. Lack of amplification was no obstacle to actors whose vocal cords were calcified from performing outdoors. Furthermore, by pulling the plug, he graphically reinforced our argument about censorship. The crowd booed him violently, and the harassed official decided to have us arrested.
Reality often beggars the imagination. Picture this scene: the cafeteria jammed with students, surrounding a raised stage on which three young black men (one with a glass eye, wearing a five-foot-long striped knitted cap) and three young white men with long hair, blue jeans, and earrings are sitting, all strangers to the campus. Next to these outside agitators are two tweedy faculty members in jackets and ties, bearing mute, principled witness to their administration’s injustices. At the official’s signal, the Mounties rushed forward and arrested—the two faculty members, while the Mime Troupe members climbed off the stage and slipped away in the crowd!
There was no time to ponder minor miracles. We were stranded and broke in Golgotha—beg pardon: Calgary—with no way to get home. We had to figure out how to mount a show and attract an audience in a strange town while being sought for arrest.
Fifty phone calls later, we discovered Milton “call me Milt” Harradence, reputed to be the Melvin Belli of Canada. He was a flashy dude sporting a camel’s hair trench coat who actually owned his own F-84 fighter jet. I’m certain he was the local fixer because he told us so, and we were relieved to know that he could “fix” our troubles. However, he wanted four thousand American dollars before he would lift a finger—and we didn’t have money for breakfast.
Some authentic student guides, not the embryonic Rush Limbaughs we’d been assigned, led us to a subterranean student council office and a bank of precious telephones. The office was situated behind two glass walls that formed the intersection of two hallways. We rifled the Yellow Pages, commandeered the phones, and began organizing the myriad details necessary to produce a performance.
After half an hour’s intensive work, someone looked up and noticed a small crowd of police officers standing in the hall, observing us through the glass as if they were trying to decide whether we might be the people they had been sent to arrest. Anticipating that they might surmount this intellectual challenge quickly, we segued seamlessly into a group improvisation of “students late to class”—checking watches, gathering notebooks and coats, exclaiming things like “Oh, shit, I can’t be late to class again!” This piece of foolery actually got us out the door and halfway down a long corridor before we heard someone shout, “Stop in the name of the law” (really).
Our response was to run like hell. Our student mentors ran ahead to point the way. Doors burst open miraculously, yanked apart by students materializing from God-knows-where, indicating escape routes and shouting, “This way!” and “Follow me!” They led us under steam pipes, through furnace and utility rooms with the police in hot pursuit. It seems funny now, but we were not laughing.
We burst through a final door and were blinded by the glare of sunlight and ice. We bulled our way toward the parking lot through waist-deep snow with the Mounties close behind us, still demanding that we “stop in the name of the law!” As if summoned by prayer, two cars appeared, driven by loyal students, and we divided our group, diving into different cars and speeding off in opposite directions, congratulating ourselves on our escape.
My car got away, but the other, stopped at a red light, was surrounded by Mounties who were, by now, really pissed. Kent Minault, Ron Stallings, and Ronnie Davis were taken by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and searched thoroughly. They found one “seed” in Ronnie’s pocket and “residue” in Stallings’s and hustled them off to Spy Hill Gaol, without bail, charged with possession, a rap that carried a three-year sentence in Canada.
Ronnie was convinced that we had been set up by the student drivers, yet I was currently being sheltered in the house of mine. When he brought the next day’s morning paper, with bold red headlines announcing the “drug bust” of the troupe, I imagined downtown Calgary swarming with citizens erecting stakes and piles of faggots to immolate the outsiders who had come to defile their children. I didn’t like any of the things I could imagine—and liked even less the events that actually occurred.
Prior to the arrest of Ronnie and the others, Lee had been released and sent home to California on bail. Now he was in a quandary: If he showed up for his hearing, he could be found guilty and sent to prison. If he didn’t, there was no chance that Kent, Ronnie, and Ron would get bail. To his credit, Lee opted to return, but Canadian customs purposefully detained him at the border. He missed his hearing and was arrested and thrown in jail with the others for jumping bail. Learning this, Jason, Willie, and I, still free but cut off from all support systems, worked the telephones relentlessly, trying to find help.
In San Francisco, other members of the troupe, spearheaded by fellow actor Emmett Grogan, organized a press conference that put our story on the wire services. Emmett also organized a parallel demonstration at the Canadian consulate in New York City, where poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg appeared on our behalf. With its le
ader jailed, the troupe maintained itself on an emergency footing with actress Anne Bernstein running the office while Sandy Archer and Bob Hurwitt organized fund-raising benefits. Bob Scheer contacted Robert Kennedy’s people, who offered strategy and advice. Everyone pitched in except Milt Harradence, our Canadian lawyer, who did nothing but attend press conferences and get photographed in his camel’s hair trench coat. As Ronnie said later, “everyone in jail told me he was great. I should have noticed that all his clients were inside!”
Finally, Ronnie’s brother contacted a business acquaintance in Canada who vouched for them, and the three were bailed out for $2,500 apiece. The anonymous benefactor who put up the money without a moment’s hesitation was Ronnie’s “archenemy” Bill Graham, now wealthy from his rock-and-roll light shows at the Fillmore Auditorium. He stood up for us, just as he supported numerous causes and individuals over the years, without regard for his personal relationship to us. We flew home chastened, bankrupt, and despondent about the troupe’s future. The Canadian government must have been delighted to forget the whole thing, because the case just disappeared.
In October of 1991, I was in Paris filming Bitter Moon for Roman Polanski when a bundle of mail arrived from home for my fiftieth birthday. Included in the packet of cards and notes from friends was a newspaper account of Bill’s death in a helicopter accident. Shortly before I had left for Paris to begin this film, Bill and I had passed an evening together, attending a fundraiser for the Holocaust Oral History Project, run by a valiant cousin of mine named Lani Silver. Her organization has by hook and by crook collected more than 1,200 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors, despite being ignored by foundations that tell her they’ve “done the Holocaust.” Bill had walked away from Auschwitz at eight years old. One of his sisters had died in his arms, and he was not done with the Holocaust; he was one of the project’s staunchest angels.
Bill was ebullient that night. Months earlier, director Barry Levinson had asked him to play Meyer Lansky in his film Bugsy. Bill had called me in a panic: “I haven’t acted in twenty years, Peter! What do I do?” I introduced him to Harold Guskin, an eminent acting coach in Manhattan, and they worked brilliantly together. Now Bill was proud of his work in the film, relaxed and healthy-looking, and obviously in love with the beautiful woman sitting next to him. When we parted, it was a tad sentimental, and he reflected emotionally on the years and miles we’d traveled as friends on parallel routes. I left feeling that the shadows haunting him had finally turned their attention elsewhere. In Paris on my fiftieth birthday, I learned that they’d only taken a coffee break.
6
growing a new skin
The troupe, although famous now, spent the spring of 1967 clambering out of the economic difficulties engendered by the Calgary misadventure. “Appeal IV,” our last rock-and-roll light-show benefit, raised enough money to repay Bill Graham for our bail, but not much more. The shows in the park were barely breaking even, and college tours were not delivering enough cash to sustain us. The escalating intensity of the antiwar movement and the lure of groups like the Diggers was fragmenting troupe energy and commitment.
On May 1, Ron sent out a letter to thirty-five members of the company, firing them in a triage to save the core. When the dust settled (and it settled without rancor or blame, because the situation was so clearly desperate), those remaining began to prepare a national tour of a new show, L’Aimant Militaire (The Military Lover), a remake of an old Goldoni farce that we had revised to comment on the Vietnam War.
Because this was to be a long tour, we created several other, smaller shows to give ourselves a more varied repertoire. One was Olive Pits, another Goldoni adaptation, scripted by Peter Berg and me in one frenetic afternoon; we retired to separate rooms, each wrote a version, and then we returned to the rehearsal hall, where we cut and spliced the two scripts into a show that won the troupe a special OBIE (the off-Broadway awards presented by the Village Voice) later that year.
The third show was a small troupe classic, featuring nine-foot-tall puppets designed and built by Roberto La Morticella. The show had a short pithy title, designed to compress all its essentials into two words: Eagle Fuck.
Roberto was a stocky, cryptic man with the loyalties (and thick mustache) of an Italian anarchist. A welder by trade, he had a penchant for mammoth projects such as constructing out of telephone poles a children’s playground apparatus in the shape of a dinosaur. He loved to make things with his hands and practiced a very direct, no-bullshit approach to issues and ideas.
La Morticella’s analysis of the war in Vietnam was articulated by these gigantic puppets, draped in black shrouds and topped with mournful, skull-white papier-mâché heads, representing Vietnamese women. The “women” walked around carrying little puppet babies and going about their bucolic business for a few minutes, before an equally gargantuan eagle puppet with an enormous pink penis entered, fucked them, and killed them. End of show. Five minutes tops. Simple—eloquent even, like hitting a cat on the head with a hammer. We threw that playlet into the mix just to make sure the “great” drama schools of Yale and Carnegie Tech we were about to visit knew exactly where we stood on the issue.
On tour members would receive the princely sum of eighty dollars a week. It seems incredible today, but you could survive on eighty dollars a week in 1967 and have something to spare for marijuana and guitar strings. Life support was always hazardous in the troupe (and remains so today—current troupe members raise families on approximately two hundred dollars a week). We had no government grants or foundation support, no bookers or agents. Our loyalties were to the movement, each other, and our beliefs. We had become what we had intended—a guerrilla theater troupe—and we were totally committed to its roles, on and off stage.
By most measures the tour, which began on my twenty-sixth birthday, October 10, 1967, was a grand success: we made money, won prizes, and garnered extraordinary reviews. But in the midst of this bloom were some presentiments that my path with the company was coming to an end. I had become a peer in every regard. During the tour, for some forgotten reason, Sandy Archer and I were not speaking. In my self-righteous anger, I was aware that she had once appeared unapproachably exalted; the fact that I was now arguing with her and defending something of my own (even if it was stupid) crystallized a sense of my own evolution since our meeting only two years before.
Madison, Wisconsin, was a center of student intellectual ferment, like Cambridge and Berkeley, bustling with smart people and hot ideas. “There was music in the cafés at night, and revolution in the air.” You could crash, get weed, meet great girls who would talk with you about books, music, and politics, and sleep with you if they felt like it. Madison was happening!
We were preparing to perform in the 1,500-seat college auditorium when some students asked us to announce a demonstration organized for the next day to protest the presence of recruiters from Dow Chemical (makers of napalm and Agent Orange) on campus. That night after our show, Ronnie made a curtain speech:
We are from another area but would like to help you all here. We were told there will be a demonstration against the Dow recruiters tomorrow at 12:00, and we thought that you and we might all be there. We have learned through our experience that, after all, this country is our country, and if we don’t like it, then we should try to change it, and if we can’t change it, then we should destroy it. See you at the demonstration.
These were the types of speeches and sentiments that endeared the troupe to school administrators and public officials everywhere. I missed the demonstration, having overslept after a bawdy night with an undergraduate Valkyrie who was not about to let me go until I had decimated every ideological misconception and physical tension she had accumulated since birth. The demonstration evolved into a full-blown riot and late-twentieth-century readers are familiar enough with riots to render a description unnecessary.
We toured many of the famous Ivy League schools: Columbia, Brandeis, Boston University, M
IT, Yale, and Harvard. After the immensely popular show at Yale, the troupe was invited to the inner sanctum of drama professor Robert Brustein, one of the reigning lights of the “new” theater. Brustein, seated dead center in a large, wood-paneled room, surrounded by adoring students in cable-knits and cords, proceeded to give us a lecture on guerrilla theater. Since we had struggled the last several years as guerrilla actors without the support of any foundations, stipends, institutions, charities, trust funds, or investments—since we had logged thousands of hours on the road and met with disappointments, accidents, physical abuse, arrest, threats, and danger—we felt that he might have had the humility to ask us at least one question on the subject. But I suppose one does not attend Yale to listen to people your parents have sent you there to avoid becoming, and we were all too tired to argue with him. I had played out this encounter one too many times, and the bottom suddenly fell out of my desire to enlist this particular group to our cause. The other actors must have felt similarly, because we reverted to our traditional “if-I-fuck-you-can-I-sleep-in-your-bed?” routine, which probably confirmed Brustein’s opinion of us as an inconsequential fringe phenomenon. We left what should have been a memorable evening with a bad taste in our mouths.
The tour culminated in a triumphal visit to New York City, where we played for two weeks at Jonas Mekas’s Filmmakers’ Co-op and won rave reviews from all the papers. We gave a San Francisco–style outdoor performance of Olive Pits on Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, for which the troupe was awarded its special OBIE. Everything we touched seemed to blossom, and the troupe’s destiny seemed assured. However, the whole experience was no longer as fresh or as satisfying to me as it had once been, and the political and intellectual perspective that had so engaged me on first contact was now losing its edge. After all, if the society you are criticizing gives you a medal, how effective a vehicle for social change can theater be?