by Alan Alda
One night, I stood in someone’s elegant beach house in Water Mill, New York, and glared at Annabella Sciorra. It didn’t matter that I really cared for her; she hadn’t returned my love, and I had been so wounded by her, I deserved to make her pay for it. A wave of righteous anger rose in me that made me want to destroy the room we were in, which I did, and then I chased her down the beach with a pickax. We were acting a scene in a movie while all this was going on. We would chat and joke between shots, but somewhere in my brain, through an act of imagination, what I wanted was real to me. I didn’t have to brood about how I felt—I was doing. The doing didn’t flow from feeling, the feeling came from doing.
As we were about to do the shot where I chased her across the sand, Annabella, who was twenty-eight years younger than me, warned me she was going to run fast and that I probably wouldn’t be able to catch her. I said, “You’d better run as fast as you can. I’m going to catch you.” After all, I deserved to catch her. And I did—way before she reached the spot where the camera was waiting for us. We had to do it again, and this time she ran for her life. I caught her again and tackled her (bruising my rib and getting a load of sand in my eye, which limits somewhat the physical prowess part of the story), and then I tried to kill her with the pickax. But her character was destined by the script to get what she wanted and mine to get what he deserved. I wound up floating in the ocean with the ax embedded in my skull. Planting the fake rubber ax on my head was a three-hour job in the makeup chair. But before we finished shooting the scene, we had to break for lunch, which on a night shoot like this can occur at two in the morning. It would take too long to take off the ax and then spend three hours putting it back, so it was assumed by everyone that I would have lunch without removing it. Not only lunchtime, but all of reality is altered on a movie set. I stood calmly at the window of the food truck, holding out my tray, with the ax sticking out of my head, and asked, “Do you have vegetables to go with that?”
I wonder if the Greeks who evolved this action-based form of storytelling also saw it as the way we live the stories of our lives, outside the theater. We seem made for action. All living things seem made for it. Every amoeba and every little nematode is looking for something, whether it’s plodding and slithering toward food for the here and now or the survival of its genes for eternity. I can’t believe that every person alive isn’t striving for something. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somewhere inside a catatonic is a person putting a great deal of energy into avoiding pain.
When actors behave in a lifelike way, they do it through action, and a few weeks after September eleventh, when a time came for actors to respond to the worst act of war on our shores, they did it through the only action they knew.
On a clear, cold morning in October, the casts of Broadway shows gathered to shoot a television spot. The mayor had said that New York City was back in business. Not just the theater, but all the hotels and the restaurants, too. Cabdrivers, travel agents, shopkeepers…all the trades that are in sync with, that rise and fall with, the rhythms and tunes of Broadway…they were all back. And to get out the word, five hundred Broadway performers were being asked to shoot a television spot in Duffy Square in Manhattan, with all the glitz of Times Square behind us, belting out Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York.”
As I headed to the Booth Theatre, where we were to meet, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put on a face that hid the sadness we all were carrying around. I didn’t feel much like singing. But as the Booth filled with actors, singers, and dancers, we all began to realize we were at an event unlike any we’d ever experienced before.
In one corner of the theater were the Rockettes, in other parts of the theater the casts of Beauty and the Beast, The Rocky Horror Show, The Producers… people from show after show were there, many of them in costume. Some had worked together the night before, and some had never met. Some of us hadn’t seen one another in years, since we had started out making the rounds together on foot, looking for our first jobs. People were climbing over seats, hugging, consoling, and kidding one another.
The choreographer came onstage and ran through a couple of dance steps he wanted us to do. A great laugh and cheer went up for the sheer Broadwayness of it. I panicked. I was still trying to learn the words of the song. Now I had to remember dance steps?
One by one, our shows were called out of the theater. We walked past alleyways where we had once stood in line to audition in days past. Finally we arrived, feeling like kids again, at Duffy Square, where dance captains would go over the routine that five hundred of us were expected to perform in unison a few minutes later.
With relief, I noticed that even a couple of experienced dancers were having trouble remembering when our hands were supposed to shoot out. “Is it Up, hands; Down, hands… New York, or is it Up, hands, New …Down, hands, York?”
A couple of nine-year-olds from Les Mis had the routine down within minutes. I asked them to coach me.
People were mixing, trading jokes, comparing costumes. Like characters who had stepped out of their stories, an actor from The Lion King and one from Beauty and the Beast were touching each other’s faces, each examining the other’s elaborate, heavy mask. While they talked, a child actor helpfully held the Beast’s tail for him.
In the chill morning air, dancers, male and female, with hardly any clothing to cover them, were practicing their moves and doing bits for one another. For the first time in what seemed like a long time, we were able to be antic again.
Every few minutes, a cheer went up and the actors applauded and waved their arms. A fire truck was going by, carrying heroes on their way downtown.
During a break, a couple of firefighters from Buffalo came over and asked to have their picture taken with us. Had they been working downtown? I asked. Yes. After a twelve-hour day in Buffalo, they’d had a bus ride to New York and fifteen straight hours on the pile. They hadn’t slept in at least two days. The pockets of flesh under their eyes were purple with fatigue. They were modest and shy. We embraced them, wanting them to know how proud they made us, probably wanting some of their strength to rub off on us.
Finally, we were ready to do a take. We had prerecorded the song, but we sang our hearts out anyway, cursing under our breath if our arms went up when they should have gone down.
As we sang, the choreographer coached us with terms I’d never heard before. “Sunshine and rain!” he called out. “Sunshine and rain!” (You rock forward as your hands go up to the sun and then you rock back as your hands go behind you and down toward the ground. Sunshine and rain.)
We got to the end of the song. “Come on…come…through…New York, New York!” We raised our arms on the last, long-held note, but he called out to us, “Not so fast! Slowly. Make ’em beg for it!” We collapsed in laughter. For a few healing hours, we’d been allowed into the sacred order of Broadway gypsies.
We did our final take, said good-bye, and broke up—more slowly than we might have on a normal shoot. On the way home, I thought about how much the day had given me. All we had done was show up, sing, and move a little. The real work, the heartbreaking work, was going on a couple of miles south of us. I knew that what we had done was trivial. But on the other hand, this is what we do, and doing it with all the energy we could give it had lifted us up. We had been in motion; we had taken action—and here and there, color began to come back to this wounded, gray city.
For a while, at least, life was a little less meaningless.
Chapter 10
* * *
When the Breeze Was Scarce, I Named the Boat Patience
The first time I met him, he was sitting behind a lacquered desk shaped like a large kidney. It wasn’t so much a desk as a shiny beige fortress of power and glitz. I was inside my own fortress of youthful self-confidence that only an out-of-work actor with no prospects could possess.
We both knew nothing much could come of this meeting. Arlene’s mother had asked me to see him. She and her husband, Simon, were friends with the Bre
gmans, a couple who lived in their building in the Bronx. They traveled together and played cards every week. The couple’s son had done well in the insurance business, but he had always been interested in show business and wanted to be a manager. Apparently, he had helped a few actors and singers get work. Arlene’s mother urged me to see him at his office. “He can help you,” she said. “Please see him. Martin Bregman. He knows people.”
So here I was at his insurance office. And there he was behind the beige kidney. We both smiled at the confidence his mother and Arlene’s mother had in his ability to help me find work. He had never seen me act, and I wasn’t performing in anything at the time, except a line or two on an occasional television show. “When you’re in a show, why don’t you let me know,” he said. “I can’t really be of much help unless I see your work.” I said I would be in touch and left. Even though nothing had come of it, I felt fine about our meeting. I’d had one more conversation, and every conversation made the next one a little more comfortable.
A few years went by, and I was in a play on Broadway that lasted only a couple of days, but on opening night, there was a man in a dark suit standing on the sidewalk as I came out of the stage door. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Martin Bregman. I enjoyed your performance very much.”
“Thanks,” I said, or something just as memorable.
A year after that, I was finally starring in a play on Broadway. Diana Sands and I were in The Owl and the Pussycat, a two-character play that actually became sort of a hit. As I came out of the stage door on opening night, there he was again on the sidewalk.
“Martin Bregman. You did a wonderful job.”
“Well, thank you.” I was developing an incredible command of the English language.
Because of the play’s surprising success, suddenly there were people interested in me. In one case, a little more interested than I would have liked. A few days after we opened, the phone rang and my agent told me I had a deal with the producer Ray Stark and his company Seven Arts. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I have a deal?”
“It’s pretty amazing,” said the voice on the other end. “It’s a deal for eight hundred thousand dollars.”
I was a little disoriented by this. Arlene and I had only a few hundred dollars in the bank. “Eight hundred thousand dollars?”
“I’m sending over the papers.”
I didn’t understand what he meant by saying I had a deal. I had never heard there was an offer. The papers came, and I read them with mounting anxiety. It was a seven-year deal. Two pictures a year. I could work for no other studio during those years. I would have to make whatever pictures they told me to make, wherever they wanted to shoot them. I would start at a few thousand a picture and get a raise every year, if they decided to keep me on for another year. They could drop me at any time. After I’d made fourteen pictures, I’d have been paid a total of eight hundred thousand dollars, which did sound like an enormous sum of money. A couple of years earlier, I had been driving a cab for twenty dollars a night or standing on the sidewalk until one in the morning, making a pocketful of change by parking cars in front of a fancy restaurant. But it was a seven-year contract, just the kind my father had suffered under at Warner Brothers. He was making only a couple of hundred a week, but in his first picture he made a sensational debut, playing George Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue. The next picture they had for him, though, was a witless, low-budget musical. He tried to turn it down, and they reacted by putting him on suspension. You weren’t allowed to turn down the studio in those days. There would be no income while he was on suspension, and he couldn’t work for anyone else. He pleaded with his agent for help. A week later, the agent called him back.
“Don’t worry, I smoothed it over.”
“Thank God.”
“No problem. All you have to do is report for work.”
“Report for work?”
“Just do the musical and there won’t be any more trouble.”
He had no choice. The cheap musical was followed by smaller parts in gangster movies and even a horror movie. He never could hold out for better material. It was the tyranny of the old studio term contract. And I was holding in my hands the same contract, adjusted for inflation. It had already been signed by Ray Stark and was only waiting for my signature.
I called my agent, my voice shaking a little. “I don’t think I want to do this,” I said. “First of all, I live in New Jersey. What if they tell me I have to make fourteen pictures in Africa, or India, or California?” These were equally foreign places to me.
“You have to do it,” he said. “We have a deal.”
I was speechless. My agent, it turned out, had been negotiating with Stark for six months and had agreed to this offer without once mentioning it to me.
I didn’t know what to do. I felt inexperienced and alone. A powerful agent and a powerful producer had got together and decided what my life would be like for the next seven years. And they expected me to be excited about it. Dazed, I tried to get them to assure me that I wouldn’t have to leave my family to make movies in remote places. They made some suggestions that sounded like a compromise, and I said that sounded better. In spite of the pressure they were applying, I tried not to say literally that I was agreeing to the deal. I was getting heartsick because they’d still be able to have me make whatever pictures they wanted.
In the middle of all this, I got a call from Bregman. Would I come up to his office and see him? Yes, sure, fine. When people asked for meetings, I went.
I got off the elevator on his floor. He must be selling a lot of insurance, I thought. Now, he had the whole floor. I went through two secretaries before I was shown into his office, which was approximately the size of a basketball court.
He was sitting on the corner of his desk. Not a beige kidney this time, but dark, burnished wood. There was art on the walls and leather couches.
He smiled and congratulated me again on the play. And then he talked for what seemed like forty minutes about how I was going to have a really great life, and he’d like to be there. He had ideas. There were things he could suggest. He never really said anything specific. I actually didn’t know what he was talking about. Finally, I said, “Well, thank you. I mean, I appreciate this. But—I really don’t need any insurance.”
He looked at me for ten long seconds. “Insurance. You think I’m selling you insurance?”
“I’m sorry, isn’t that what you do?”
“I haven’t sold insurance for years. I’m a business manager. Have you heard of Barbra Streisand?”
“Barbra Streisand? Yes. Sure.”
“I manage her.”
“You manage Barbra Streisand.”
“That’s right. If you need insurance, I can help you get some. But what I’d like to do is manage you.”
I asked if I could think about it, and then I spent the next several minutes crossing the room to get to the door of his immense office.
Now I had something new to worry about. Having just been double-crossed by my agent, I was leery of letting someone else into my life who wanted to “manage” me. I talked about it with Arlene. She knew him as Marty. Her parents had known his parents for decades, and she had grown up with him. Only a few years older than her, he had been her baby-sitter when he was a teenager. They had grown up in the same building in the Bronx at 2911 Barnes Avenue.
As kids, she and Marty had both played in the courtyard between their two paired apartment buildings, the Mayflower and the Mayfair, where every family on every floor was known to them. They had friends in common and stories about all the neighbors, including Crazy Louis, a kid who would roam the building peeing into milk bottles left outside the tenants’ doors.
Having grown up with a psychotic mother who blew hot one day and cold the next, I didn’t trust people easily, but Arlene had known Marty for years, and he sounded like someone I could trust.
I called and told him I’d like to work with him, and we made a date to talk about it at lunch
. We met at his office, and on the way out to the restaurant I noticed he was walking with a cane and a slight limp.
“Hurt your leg?” I asked him.
He looked at me sideways, as if I were making a bad joke. I realized I had never seen him walking. I’d seen him standing on a sidewalk, or sitting behind a desk, or on the edge of one. It was then, for the first time, that I found out he’d had polio as a boy. I’d had polio, too, but mine was mild. I wasn’t left with paralysis. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it, so at the restaurant we stuck to the contract I’d been offered.
“It’s an awful lot of money,” I told him.
“It’s a lot of money if you think you won’t have a career. But if they keep you on for fourteen pictures, you’ll be worth much more than they’re offering you now.” In a way, he was suggesting patience. Steadfastness. Faith in myself.
I got Stark’s people on the phone and told them I was definitely and finally turning down the deal. And they immediately sued. They claimed I had agreed personally to the offer. The moment on the phone when I carefully avoided saying more than a conditional statement that if I didn’t have to travel too much it might be okay was, to them, a definite yes. They demanded that I fulfill the contract, plus pay them one hundred thousand dollars for some kind of damage I’d caused them. I didn’t even have enough money to hire a lawyer without borrowing some.
I was called in to give my deposition. I sat in a lawyer’s office and answered their questions, while out of the corner of my eye I saw a court stenographer’s fingers tapping furiously, taking down everything I said. This was a seductive sight for an actor. I began to play a little to her, the way I would to a camera.
“Mr. Alda, your agents—aren’t they authorized to negotiate for you?”
“Yes, but they can’t make a deal, sir, without consulting me. They have to ask me first.”
“But they do represent you in business, don’t they?”