by Alan Arkin
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
PART one
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
intermission
PART two
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
INDEX
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks
To Susan Cohen, my wonderful literary agent who steadfastly refused to let me abandon this project.
To Barry Berg, my editor and now friend, who was endlessly encouraging, supportive and wise and who miraculously made working and reworking this book a joy.
And to my wife, Suzanne, my constant companion, my best friend and my muse. She is also an integral part of the workshops. She organizes them, she takes every one of them and interprets my broken English when I become inarticulate, which is more often than I’d like to admit. Her participation in the workshops is endlessly joyous, rooted in the moment, and without dropping character she becomes a perfect litmus paper when someone else in a scene is either ‘playwriting’ or making jokes. As a result, when she’s up there she has an unfailing ability to keep other participants in the reality of a scene. In addition, many comments we get from alumni speak of the joy they feel at the comfortable way we work together. Our collaboration seems to have become an important part of the workshops, and completely unintended. And miracle of miracles, Suzanne has no interest whatsoever in becoming an actress.
PROLOGUE
Some years ago I did a film with Madeline Kahn. A lot of it was shot on location, and one day we found ourselves at a particularly beautiful spot overlooking a panoramic view of the Hudson Valley. During a lull in the shooting, while the cameras were setting up, we went out onto an extensive lawn and sat there for a while, lost in the scenery. While we were musing and chatting, I found myself thinking about Madeline’s many gifts. She was a fine actress, an excellent pianist; she had an exquisite operatic voice with impeccable technique and she was also a brilliant comedian. I asked her which of her talents she considered to be her primary focus. She thought for a while and couldn’t come up with an answer. I don’t think she’d ever thought about it before. “Well, what did you start out wanting to do?” I asked. “What was your first impulse? Was it acting?” She shook her head “no,” but she didn’t seem sure.
“Singing?”
“No.”
“Playing the piano?”
“No.”
“Did you want to be a comedian?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, what was the first thing you thought of doing? There had to be something.”
Again she tried to thread her way back to her childhood ambitions. “I used to listen to a lot of music.” She paused, trying to find the words for what she was thinking. “And that’s what I wanted to be,” she finally said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
She answered, and it sounded as if she’d never formulated this thought before, as if it was news to herself.
“I wanted to be the music,” she said.
It was a revelatory and somewhat disturbing moment. With that one statement I realized that what she’d said about herself was the impulse behind all of my own interests, all of my needs, all of my studying, compulsions, and passions, and had I been aware of that idea when I was starting out, had I been able to assimilate it, live within it, I would have saved endless years of frustration and work and confusion because that thought was at the very bottom of what I was looking for. So much had been invested in craft, in externalization, in looking for something solid out there that would fill the void, create a sense of flight, of getting out of the oppression of self.
We don’t want to do it; we want to be it. Only we don’t know it. No one tells us.
This is dedicated to everyone who wants to be the music.
PART one
CHAPTER ONE
My father said that at the age of five I asked him if he could keep a secret. He said yes he could, so I told him I was going to be an actor when I grew up. At five, acting was already a fever in my blood, and somehow I knew, even then, that the decision was made and there would be no turning back. My father took my declaration with a grain of salt, knowing that children change their minds a dozen times before committing to something. I never changed my mind. My father had dreams of being a painter and a poet; and living with the ache of not having achieved his dreams he was keenly aware of the pitfalls involved in trying to have a career in the arts, so he mostly hoped I’d grow out of the idea. But my fate had been sealed before I had any notion of what I was letting myself in for, and my father bit his tongue.
Every film I saw, every play, every piece of music fed an unquenchable need to turn myself into something other than what I was. An aunt took me to see the ballet Petrouchka, and for months I became Stravinsky’s marionette. I played the music on the phonograph over and over again, dancing every part. I was Petrouchka, the bears, the jugglers, the moor, my fantasy life so intense that I sometimes literally gave myself a fever in the process. The next year I was Louis Hayward in the film The Man in the Iron Mask, fighting, swaggering, swashbuckling, and finally escaping torture at the hands of my evil twin brother. The following year I became Charlie Chaplin. I remember having a temper tantrum when I wasn’t allowed to sit through The Great Dictator for the third time, throwing myself on the floor of the movie theater, screaming bloody murder, and creating an embarrassing scene until my babysitter relented and sat back down, a hostage to my obsession. For months I tried to walk like Chaplin. I spent hours in front of a mirror pursing my mouth to the side, trying desperately to smile with that horizontal crease he had in his upper lip. I put on roller skates and swooped precariously on the edge of things. I performed endless imitations of Hitler through the filter of Chaplin’s genius. Then, the following year, I became Danny Kaye, spending hour after hour in front of a mirror trying in vain to make my eyes turn down at the corners. I threw water on my hair to try and make it shake like his. I tried to scat-sing as fast as he could. Away from the mirror, I imitated anyone and everyone. Outside in the street, if I’d see someone with an interesting walk, in half an hour I’d made it my own. Any exotic behavior was fair game: a limp, an accent, a nervous tic, anything to turn myself into someone other than me. One day I was playing in the backyard with my cousins and my aunt overheard me say, “Let’s play circus. I’ll be everything.”
I grew up in Brooklyn, and every Saturday afternoon, for years, I would drag my reluctant mother to acting classes at the Academy of Music, making her sit in dark, empty hallways while I studied whatever children worked on in those days. I was incorrigible. By age seven or eight I was completely obsessed with performing. Theater, movies, music—I was obsessed by all of them. At school my main activity was staring out the window and daydreaming about being other people in other times, other places. How I got through even grammar school remains a mystery.
I have two important memories from those early years. Both were small events, really, and neither took place in school. But both changed how I thought about theater and acting.
The first occurred when I went to a film with my father. I was around eight years old, but he took me to a movie for grown-ups, in black and white, with a lot o
f adult talk and not much action. In one scene a couple of actors were in a living room engaged in an intimate, intense dialogue about something or other, and I watched for a while, trying hard to keep up with their situation, which was too sophisticated for me. It was rare that anything on a movie screen ever bored me, but this was starting to do the trick, so to keep myself entertained I pretended I was there with them watching the scene from inside a closet. Where the impulse came from I don’t know, but I held a hand up to my face and made a small opening in my fist so I could watch everything through the keyhole of an imaginary door. All of a sudden the acting, which had seemed real enough a moment ago, looked false, and the scene turned stale and lifeless. I was amazed. It was as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes. In an instant, the actors were no longer cinema gods with huge heads, the idols I had been imitating for years. They’d lost their sense of authority and importance. In fact, at this moment they no longer existed in any reality at all. The scene had instantly turned false, and I had the distinct feeling that the performances of the two people in the scene were no longer directed at each other but toward some anonymous audience. “But who is their audience?” I wondered. “There’s no one in the room with them. They don’t know I’m here, in the closet. They don’t know anyone is watching. Who are they focusing on? Not me. Not any other living soul.”
I immediately felt that it would have been more appropriate for them to be focusing on each other, which is what people did in real life, when no one was watching. But they weren’t doing that. They were talking to no one and for no purpose.
This strange moment for me was simultaneously disillusioning and enlightening. It had come from a simple childhood trick, but it completely changed my view of acting, and for the first time gave me a perspective and a value system by which to gauge a performance. It was also the beginning of a kind of method for me, and its validity sustained me for about a decade. At least while watching other people’s work. Gauging the truth of my own work was something that had to come later.
The second experience happened in the living room of our apartment. I was playing on the floor while my mother was consoling a friend who was in the middle of some kind of personal crisis. My mother listened patiently while the woman sat there crying her eyes out. I was halfway across the room, now pretending to read a book, but of course I was much more engrossed in the drama being played out in front of me. I watched the woman pouring her heart out to my mother and found myself slightly revolted. “I’m not moved by her performance,” I thought. “What is she doing wrong?” I examined her clinically as she tried to get her story out through her pain and tears, and I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn’t moved by her situation because she was crying too much. If she wanted to interest me, I thought, she’d better cut back on the tears a little and leave some room for me and my feelings. Of course, what I was watching was not a performance; this was real life. But life, even at age eight, was merely food for my obsession with acting. For me, theater was more important than life, more educational than life, and certainly more moving than life.
As I look back, I think what irked me about the woman’s outpouring was that it was filled with self-pity, not an attractive quality on or off stage. Had I been more emotionally engaged at the time, or perhaps a few years older, I might have realized this, but I was too deeply into “all the world’s a stage,” so I was precocious in one way, not so much in another.
Many years later, at a time when I had become more connected to my own emotional life, I had an experience with an actress that gave me my first warning of what the craft of acting could do to people if they weren’t careful. I was working on a television show that was not going well, and a couple of weeks in I was informed that one of the actors had been fired. This actor was loved by the whole cast, and for some reason it became my job to inform the other actors in the company.
The first person I told was a regular on the show, a woman I had worked with for some time. She was a fine actress and a lovely person. “I have bad news,” I said to her, as gently as I could, trying to brace her. “So and so’s been fired.” The woman’s jaw fell open and she froze for a few seconds while she kept looking at me. Then she said, “Can you see the look on my face?” She pointed to her face and held the expression. I knew immediately what she was doing. She’d had a spontaneous reaction, but it was too good to just feel and let go, so she was taking note and filing it away for future reference. It might be useful later on, in some performance. She wanted me to notice it, too. I could see her checking my reaction to her now-frozen expression, paying careful attention to how much I was moved by it, which would let her know if the look was effective.
I fell into immediate despair. Not just for her, but for myself too, because I had done the same thing on countless occasions. It is a habit that now fills me with revulsion—a habit perhaps valuable for the actor, and for his craft, but not so good for the human being living inside.
From my earliest memory I had the strong sense that every character trait, every emotional condition possessed by the personalities I saw on screen, was accessible to me. In some deep place I always believed that what anyone else was feeling or doing, whether it be an act of heroism or cowardice or compassion or greed or villainy or anything in between, whatever the characters were going through emotionally was possible for me. I sensed that the entire range of emotions possessed by one human being was universal and available to everyone. Each of us had our own emphases and proclivities, but I intuitively believed that all of us were possessed of the entire spectrum of human feelings, and nothing that I’ve seen or felt since has convinced me otherwise.
Further, I had an instinct, even in those early days, that art was the direct injection of the artist’s experiences into the audience, and that this transfusion was the highest purpose of all the arts. I felt that the epiphanies I’d had as a result of seeing other people’s work, of exposure to other people’s imaginations, whether through their acting or music or literature or painting, is what made the artists’ experiences my own. I knew that these emotional adventures, transmitted from other people’s triumphs or failures, were as real and tangible to me as a mathematical equation or a physics experiment. The artists’ mastery of their craft gave them an invisible hypodermic injection that when inserted into me made me more than what I was. I could feel their essence working in my blood, and I knew myself to be capable of all manner of great and courageous things as a result of the art I’d been exposed to. The problem with these feelings, induced through the art of others, was that as real as they were, they didn’t last. As I’d put down the book I was reading, or come out of the theater with my heart pounding and my imagination racing, there was no question that I could perform the same acts of transcendent courage or self-sacrifice that I saw and felt performed by the heroes whose lives I had become enmeshed in. But as the day wore on and my own daily activities and relationships came back into focus, the images and feelings inspired by whatever art form had riveted me would fade away and I’d be faced with my own fears and my own inadequacies. It was a deeply frustrating problem and one that I struggled with for years. What I realize now is that this is a good and healthy problem because it forces us, if we take the arts seriously, to constantly pit our own range of emotions and abilities against those behaviors that we can now feel are possible if we work on ourselves with patience and diligence.
At that time in my life I was unaware that I had any materials within me to work on. I had no sense that I myself was a work in progress, and that I was as malleable and formable as any character in a book or any piece of music or theatrical performance that I’d ever witnessed. It was an idea that had to wait many years for me to encounter consciously, and then many more years to embrace and work on. In short, at a very young age I’d become an addict. A film junkie. With all the dangers found in any other type of addiction. And like many addictions it pointed the way to something real and beautiful, but it also ran the risk of ruining m
y life.
CHAPTER TWO
My uncle Sandy was a fighter pilot during World War II. He flew a P-38, and between combat missions he wrote letters to my father saying, “If I make it through this war alive I’m going to buy a car and we’re all going to move to California.” Sandy made it through the war alive, came home with a chest full of medals, and immediately went out and bought a car.
I don’t remember any of the arrangements, how we got past my parents quitting their jobs, what happened with the furniture and all our belongings, how they found a place to move to, the many good-byes, all of which were a blur for me, but in what seemed like just days I found myself squashed in the back seat of a sedan with my mother and brother, Sandy up front driving, my dad acting as copilot, and all of us heading to a new life in California. Through another uncle, who had written songs for several major films, my father had an introduction to someone in one of the film studios who could possibly help him to get work as a scene painter.
Consistent with a lot of my father’s luck, the job didn’t pan out. The week we arrived in Los Angeles a strike was called in the studios that lasted six months, and my father’s first and only opportunity in the movie business dried up, but I was in heaven. We were in L.A. The golden land. The place where all my dreams would come true. We were in the movie capital of the world and I knew I’d be discovered within ten minutes of arriving.
Our first home was in the hills directly above Hollywood Boulevard, and every day after school I’d hike down to that magic street in the hopes that something major and life-changing would happen to me. Once I saw Sidney Toler, the actor who’d played Charlie Chan, and another time I passed Charlie Ruggles striding briskly down the boulevard, dressed to the teeth. Other than knowing they were professionals, I barely knew who they were, and I wasn’t a fan of either actor, but seeing them in person, two honest-to-God, real-life movie stars, walking down the street just like ordinary people, thrilled me more than if I’d seen the president of the United States. There they were in three dimensions, real and tangible people. Their heads were no larger than mine, no matter how big they’d seemed in the movie theaters. It gave me hope.