The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  On that evening at the Mark Taper, I decided that there could be no better time than that moment for me to explore the long-forgotten, unfulfilled urge that had once possessed me. To engage compulsion on all matters of unfinished business between us. To look around inside myself at roadways that had once seemed to lead nowhere in particular and ask why they had been dead-ends. What was it about those roadways? Were they overwhelmed by challenges too great? Were they intercepted by risks too high? Were they restrained by regrets too painful? Or was it me? Maybe it was me. Maybe I was in denial of fears I didn’t have the courage to face.

  Now that I’m older, with fewer axes to grind, I suspect that certain roadways that seemed to lead nowhere weren’t the dead-ends I saw, but simply roads marked with warning flares saying that some personal failure was destined to occur. On the other hand, I can’t help wondering whether, had I persevered, some of those roadways might have been the very paths I should have traveled most. Maybe along those untraveled pathways I would have found important lessons waiting to be learned.

  Still, to step onstage in a professional theater at my age to do a one-man show with voice, body, and mind as my only tools was clearly a risky business. “You must be nuts,” I told myself on the way home, as the magic of Anna DeVere Smith began to wear off.

  Over the next few weeks I attempted a sober, practical, objective, clearheaded analysis of the pros and cons. I realized that whatever force was drawing me nearer to this sizable undertaking had origins too troublesome to untangle. After a full month, I still hadn’t been able to shake off the magic of the theater or regain a safe distance from my old friend compulsion. The cautious side of me resisted this business of walking on the edge—especially now, at a time when a fall was likely to be fatal. The wild side of me, on the other hand, was ready to accept the fact that high gains require high risks.

  In the end I agreed with the wild side and resolved to go forward on the basis of two compelling reasons. First, I needed to settle obligations owed to self. Second, in the process I wanted to spin enough magic to close out what had been for me a genuinely magical career.

  Like a fighter in training, I started preparing for the event. I watched other actors in other theaters do solo evenings. I researched actors and textual material from successful productions in the past. I paid attention to details, adjusted my social calendar, carved out a preliminary timeframe, cleared my desk. But the two most basic issues remained unresolved. Who would write such an evening, and what would be the nature of the material?

  I put this question to my friend Charley Blackwell, whom I had met in the late fifties, not long after he’d arrived in New York from Philadelphia to pursue his dreams. Like young unknowns before him, he went to New York to conquer Broadway as a dancer. But the times were insensitive and the pickings were lean. Race was a factor, and denial was comfortably in control of virtually all questions concerning race in the America of those days.

  Though he would dance with both the Pearl Primus and Geoffrey Holder companies, times came early on when he had to sell cigarettes from the Philip Morris company to cover the rent. Once when things were at their bleakest, George Mills, a fellow dancer, asked Charley to accompany him as a drummer on an audition for an upcoming musical called Fanny, to be directed by Joshua Logan and produced by David Merrick. George Mills didn’t get the job, but Joshua Logan and David Merrick saw something in the drummer. Enough to offer him a job in the show—a spot that would make use of his dancing talent. The show was a hit. Charley Blackwell was launched. But not as a dancer. David Merrick was impressed with his quickness of mind, his critical thinking abilities, and his overall grasp of the technical nature of live theater.

  During the next twenty years, Charley would move through the ranks in the Merrick organization to become a master stage manager. He went on to England to direct the Merrick productions of Promises, Promises and One Hundred and Ten in the Shade. After that he wrote the book for the Broadway musical The Tap Dance Kid. And then he wrote the movie A Piece of the Action, for my company, and rewrote Stir Crazy for Columbia Pictures, which I was privileged to direct. Along the way he had written two additional movie scripts for my company, so I knew of no better person for the job at hand now.

  I laid out the plan to Charley, but he said he had commitments and obligations that could be long-term. When asked how long-term, he gave me a vague response that suggested a reluctance to clarify. “When and if I can work through everything that’s on my desk at the moment,” he said, “I’ll call you.” Strange, I thought. But I left it to rest and turned my mind to the unwelcome task of finding a possible substitute.

  For many weeks I searched through a mental list of all the writers I knew, as well as others I knew only by reputation. Meanwhile, I compiled notes in case the search ended on my own doorstep. Could I write a one-man show, to be performed by me, fashioned out of material each piece of which would be a living part of my own life? Yes, but not like Charley Blackwell could.

  As more weeks passed and more notes accumulated, I saw with increasing clarity what a monumentally formidable task stood before me. However, I had no choice but to press on.

  Late one morning the phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Charley, “How ya doin?” he asked in a cheery voice.

  “Fine,” I said, delighted to hear from him.

  “Well, I’m clear now. You still want to do that thing?”

  “Yes! Yes! Hell, yes,” I replied.

  “Well, I’m ready,” he said.

  What he didn’t say, and what I didn’t know, was that in the months prior to our last conversation, doctors had discovered cancer in his bladder. Surgery followed, during which prostate cancer was also discovered and dealt with.

  We went to work, yet all the while Charley kept his illness to himself. There was no telltale behavior, and the ostomy bag he wore under his clothing to collect his urine wasn’t apparent to any of us. Charley Blackwell was just as I’d always known him. Halfway through the project, my doctors saw warning signs in my blood that maybe my prostate should be watched. Many ultrasounds and four biopsies later, they pinpointed the cancer. It was only then, in an effort to comfort me, that Charley revealed his history. I underwent surgery for the removal of my prostate on June 3, 1993.

  When I was again able to work, we resumed, each of us hoping that the next five years would show no sign of our cancer’s return. Months later, we had a completed project. The entire evening was going to be material from my life. Nothing outside of my experiences would be added. We were relieved to have finished and were enthusiastic about the results.

  Charley went back to New York with a copy of the script that we both agreed should be given to a producer friend of his, someone whom I, too, held in high regard. Here’s where dreams would meet reality—the project’s first exposure to objective scrutiny. Despite all our years in the business, we were both wired with anxiety and hopefulness.

  Then the reaction came. Not good.

  Charley and I were disappointed, but we swallowed hard and digested the details. Finally, it came home to us that we had made a mistake in the selection of the source material. We were forced to admit that the material should have been taken not from my life but rather from life itself. We resolved to return to the drawing board with this new point of view.

  Charley and I didn’t see much of each other over the next several months, a time spent mostly in note-gathering. Early one evening he dropped by to visit with my wife and me at our New York apartment and to report on his progress. An hour later we shared a cab with him across town. My wife and I were on our way to the theater; Charley was on his way to somewhere else. At 97th Street and Columbus Avenue he got out. We said our goodbyes, and we never saw him again. The cancer had returned. He died on June 2, 1995.

  Sometimes it seems that when crushing losses are the reality, a resistant mechanism springs into action to protect the mind from instant overload, mercifully allowing for the gradual absorption of invasive and toxi
c information. Charley Blackwell was no more. He had slipped into what W.E.B. Du Bois once called “that long deep and endless sleep.” Needless to say, the world we knew hung heavy in the days and months that followed.

  After the magnitude of the loss had hit home and family and friends were finally able to turn the corner toward healing, I drifted back to the “material in progress.” I remember thinking of it at the time more as “material in shambles,” due to Charley’s untimely departure.

  As to questions that remain standing in the face of humanity’s relentless pursuit of answers, maybe Nature arranges it to her benefit that some of us set out on journeys that can have no end. Consider, for a moment, that the amount of energy spent by human beings in pursuit of something that doesn’t exist might, in very real terms, represent a sizable chunk of the energy Nature needs to make the world go ’round. Which might also explain why—even after a lifetime of struggle—most of us never find the rainbow we promised ourselves would lead us to our pot of gold.

  Charley never lived to see our dream fulfilled. The same cancer that declined to take me called him back to Nature. I don’t know why he died any more than I know why I went from being a stargazer on the beaches of Cat Island to an actor in Hollywood. But I do know that I’m responsible not for what happens but for what I make of it. It’s up to me to take my own measure, to claim what’s real, to answer for myself.

  I’m still here, and truth be told, the compulsion to create and express is still here. Our first efforts at a one-man show met with failure, and oh, how I hate to fail. My colleague has succumbed, and to an illness that I’ve shared, which is at times doubly dispiriting. But I still dream of that final moment onstage.

  Surely this must be the highest-stakes game of all. And maybe the oracles are trying to tell me that this is one I can’t win. That my survival instincts aren’t going to help me this time. That I won’t be able to charm this opponent into neutral, no matter how much drive and hard work and talent I apply. But there’s still a beating heart at the center of my being, and while there’s life…

  Human life is a highly imperfect system, filled with subordinate imperfections all the way down. The only thing we know for sure is that in another eight billion years it will all be over. Our sun will have spent itself; and the day it expires, you’ll hear the crunch all over this solar system, because then everything will turn to absolute zero.

  But you can’t live focused on that. You can’t hang on to that. Anyway, luckily we puny individuals have only seventy-five or eighty-two or ninety-six years to look forward to, which is still a snap in the overall impenetrableness of time. So what we do is we stay within the context of what’s practical, what’s real, what dreams can be fashioned into reality, what values can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageous enough to face our end with character.

  That’s what we’re seeking. That’s what it’s all about, you know? We’re all of us a little greedy. (Some of us are plenty greedy.) We’re all somewhat courageous, and we’re all considerably cowardly. We’re all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

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