Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  [27]

  Adolescence

  We all have to go through adolescence. If you’re lucky you go through it when you’re actually an adolescent. With me, it kicked in at thirty, about fifteen years late. For a compulsively good boy—a dutiful son, a committed husband, a doting father—my late adolescence was like a hair-raising ride on a runaway train. I clung for dear life to my seat on that train. There seemed to be no way to control its speed or direction. At a certain point I knew I was going to crash. I swung crazily between exhilaration, confusion, emotional exhaustion, and guilt. I was in an altered state of consciousness. I had no perspective. It would be years before I realized that the whole mess had been inevitable. The crash was long overdue, but it had to happen.

  In distant hindsight, my life up to the age of thirty resembles a stately edifice, constructed over many years, only to be reduced to rubble in an instant. Emerging from a wildly unpredictable childhood, I had followed an orderly path. By its very nature, a theater career is disorderly, but I had pursued mine with as much rationality and discipline as I could muster: a Harvard education, British academy training, rigorous work in rep theater, and success on Broadway. I had married at an absurdly young age, but my wife was resourceful and supportive, and our son didn’t arrive until we’d been married for a sensible six years. To all appearances we were a model family. So what was missing from this picture of happy domesticity?

  Simply this: my adolescence.

  In the theater, love and sex are occupational hazards. We actors are no more lovesick and libidinous than anybody else, but our working life is a chemistry lab of emotions and urges. It renders us uniquely susceptible. Let’s say two people are hired to portray two characters who fall in love. The two have never met. They are attached to other partners. At their first rehearsal, they don’t even appeal to each other all that much. But they set about to learn their lines and rehearse their scenes, always striving toward the closest possible imitation of the truth. In an atmosphere of erotic intimacy, the play begins to come to life in the rehearsal studio. A director with the intensity of Svengali does his damnedest to stir a mutual attraction between the two. They gradually discover seductive qualities in each other. They turn each other on. They start to hang out together after rehearsals in restaurants and bars. They think they are hiding their titillating secret from the rest of the cast, but in fact everyone else is on to them. On a night of giddy excitement, they open their play. The two act out their love relationship in front of hundreds of people. They touch the audience deeply. They are elated by their success. Somewhere around this time, they finally sleep together. Onstage, night after night, they go through the motions of their pretend passion. Offstage, their passion is genuine. They are madly in love. Their lives become a kind of ecstatic chaos. Eventually the magic begins to dissipate. Life’s complications begin to wear them down. The play itself begins to bore them. They break up. Long after the show closes, they both look back and wonder what in the world they had been thinking.

  Is it any wonder there are so many affairs among actors? The miracle is that there are not many more.

  I know whereof I speak. I acted in some twenty plays in and out of New York in the 1970s. In eight of them I had an affair with an actress in the cast. I staged a one-man sexual revolution, a dozen years after the actual sexual revolution had liberated my own generation. My backstage infidelities were dignified only slightly by the fact that they were, in a manner of speaking, serially monogamous: each time I would fall into an agony of love, replete with tears, longing, and late-night phone calls. Each time, my marriage would lose a little more tensile strength. Repeatedly I would feel on the brink of ending it and starting anew. Yet in each of these affairs, I had involved myself with a woman who was so enmeshed in her own relationship with someone else that there was no realistic possibility of my committing to her. Although I did not admit it to myself, this was probably a relief. It may even have been an unconscious choice. It allowed me to crawl back to my marriage, wallowing in a mire of confessional self-flagellation. It was Hickey’s dynamic, from The Iceman Cometh, but without the booze and the whores. Lacking the courage of my own concupiscence, I brought as much misery to my wife and my lover-of-the-moment as I had brought upon myself.

  With the reckless passion, comical clumsiness, and destructive power of a rampaging elephant, I had finally reached my adolescence. But adolescence, too, comes to an end eventually. That runaway train goes too fast. It races out of control. Along comes one curve it can’t quite navigate. It crashes spectacularly. You survive the cataclysm, you crawl out of the wreckage, you wipe the blood from your face and check your limbs for broken bones. Then you stagger away from the crash site and get on with the rest of your life. For me, this was the story of the last few years of the 1970s.

  Photograph by Martha Swope. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  In 1977, Liv Ullmann was the most beautiful and celebrated film actress in the world. From her modest beginnings in the Norwegian town of Trondheim, she had risen to the status of an incandescent international star. She had played leading roles in several films of Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish auteur. The naked intimacy of her performances in those films perfectly matched Bergman’s bleak vision of human emotion, spirituality, and sexuality. She was spoken of as Bergman’s muse. Their offscreen romantic attachment had ended a few years before, but it was still inextricably linked to the power of their collaborative work. She had most recently appeared in Bergman’s harrowing Scenes from a Marriage. In that film, it was impossible to imagine any other actress in the role Bergman had created for her. In her memoir Changing, published that same year, Liv fearlessly described the tortured passion between the two of them during their long affair. These passages read like scenes from a Bergman film. I was destined to reenact a few of those scenes myself.

  One day in late spring 1977, I got a phone call from Alexander Cohen. Alex was one of the last great one-man Broadway producers, a throwback to a bygone era. A call from him was always good news. In his baritone growl, Alex said he wanted me to play Mat Burke opposite Liv Ullmann in Anna Christie on Broadway for the upcoming season. I knew next to nothing about either the role or the play, but I was elated at the offer. I dashed out to a bookstore, bought the play, and read it that very afternoon. My heart raced and my fingers trembled as I turned the pages. I was going to perform these scenes with Liv Ullmann!

  My excitement was boundless, but underneath it another emotion began to stir. At the time, I had just extricated myself from my most recent ill-fated love affair. Jean and I had regained a measure of equilibrium and had once again resolved to make our marriage work. It was a cycle we had repeated two or three times in the preceding couple of years. As I read Anna Christie, my giddy anticipation was tempered by a sense of foreboding. This could be trouble. The cycle could start all over again. How could I prevent it? In the case of Liv Ullmann, I was already in love.

  I met Liv at our first rehearsal. Sure enough, she cast a spell. In person she had a kind of heartbreaking beauty. No man in the room could take his eyes off her, nor any woman. She was a mix of playful and serious, vulnerable and tough, shy and daring. She disarmed us all with her earthiness and her willingness to be one of the gang. She was clearly accustomed to being treated like a queen, and yet she charmingly deflected everyone’s adulation. Her broad smile and ready laugh lit up the room. In the ensuing days, the work did not come easy for her. She had a regal bearing and a sensuous bloom of health that made her oddly ill-suited to the role of the downtrodden Anna, and with her heavy Nordic accent she struggled to master O’Neill’s yeasty slang. But she loved the high drama of José Quintero’s direction and she poured herself into the work. Watching her day by day, the whole cast became smitten with her. None more than I.

  Prior to Broadway, we took the show out of town. Our first stop was Toronto. The production’s major players were put up at the Sutton Place Hotel. T
he company plunged into a week of tedious tech rehearsals at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. Outside of the gravitational pull of New York, Liv and I became closer and closer. We began spending all our time together, inside the playhouse and out. After our first Toronto performance, she invited the cast to celebrate with champagne in her dressing room. After twenty minutes, everyone began to peel off and say goodnight. Finally only Liv and I were left. The two of us sat alone in the room for another hour, laughing and talking in a thickening haze of drunkenness. Two or three times the stage-door man tapped on the door and asked us when we were going to leave and let him lock up. With too much champagne in us, we finally left the theater and climbed into the back of Liv’s car. Her impassive driver took us back to the Sutton Place Hotel. That night, the night we first performed Anna Christie, was the beginning of a year-long affair. Ever since that night, the Sutton Place Hotel has loomed in my mind as a grim landmark. It memorializes a moment shot through with a dizzying mix of joy, pain, and guilt, the first night of a year that changed everything.

  By prior arrangement, Jean came up to Toronto a week later to join me for a short visit. She brought along five-year-old Ian. I had not told her about what had transpired between Liv and me. In a state of numb paralysis, I had done nothing to forestall her trip. The visit was horrific. On the very first night Jean was there, I blurted out to her the news of my latest infidelity. Her first response was incredulous laughter (“You’re kidding!”). This was quickly followed by bewilderment, then rage, and ultimately a kind of deranged despair. I was so choked with my own tears and guilt that I was blind to my unintended cruelty toward her. In retrospect it appalls me. There was plenty wrong with our marriage, but I’d had neither the honesty nor the courage to flatly state that I wanted it to end. Instead I blamed our troubles on some inexorable outside force that had me in its grip. How can we go on, I wailed, when I keep doing this to you? How can you endure it? I’m such a bastard! Why don’t you throw me out? The scene could have been scripted by Eugene O’Neill.

  In essence that evening was the beginning of the end of our ten-year marriage. Jean flew home early with Ian, leaving me to grapple with a turbulent new reality of my own devising. The pre-Broadway tour continued for two more months. After Toronto we played Washington and Baltimore. The out-of-town run constituted a de facto separation from Jean and a de facto live-in relationship with Liv. Between Liv and me, passions ran so high that it was almost impossible to sort them out. We loved each other’s company, but from the very outset our relationship was beset with insecurity and strife. Following the age-old pattern of stage romances, the play had released a torrent of need in both of us. She longed for a simple love relationship, a safe haven from the unwanted glare of celebrity and star worship. In me she was looking for a strong and defiant protector. I was completely incapable of assuming that role. I was a tangled mass of conflict, woefully lacking in self-knowledge. On the one hand I was a horny teenager in a thirty-year-old body, grasping insatiably for all the sex I had never allowed myself. On the other, I was an escapee from an unhappy marriage and a defecting father, tortured with guilt and doubt. With such baggage, the affair was unlikely to be good for either of us, but this prevented neither of us from hurling ourselves into it. In the coming months, things only grew more troubled and intense. But by some miracle, despite all the tempestuous offstage drama of our relationship, the two of us managed to put on our costumes every night, walk out onstage, and act.

  As the weeks passed, more complications weighed on us. The backstage world of Anna Christie grew claustrophobic. It became the least fun show I’d ever been in. A subtle hierarchy took hold in the company, with Liv at the top. My friendships with three-fourths of the cast evaporated. Although Liv never invoked the privileges of stardom, an entourage gradually formed itself around her, answering to her every whim. It was comprised of our director, our company manager, Liv’s dresser, an older character actress in the cast, and their various traveling companions. Of this inner circle of fawning courtiers, I was the only heterosexual. I wrestled disconsolately with the role of royal consort. After every show the group would merrily carouse in a restaurant, striving mightily to flatter and entertain their queen bee. At the end of such evenings I would squire Liv back to her hotel room and leave the others behind. Everyone tacitly understood my courtly function. My male ego, fragile at the best of times, swung crazily between swaggering pride and cringing humiliation.

  In those days, everywhere Liv went she was treated like visiting royalty. In every city, she was invited to glittering A-list events to which I would dutifully escort her. Rudolf Nureyev greeted us in his Toronto dressing room after a performance with Canada’s Royal Ballet. Ethel Kennedy hosted us at a lawn party at Hickory Hill, her rambling family seat. We sat on either side of Henry Kissinger at Sweden’s embassy in Washington. We had chummy lunches with the likes of Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Bergman. With fellow partygoers Katharine Graham and Teddy Kennedy, we witnessed a gleeful frat-boy food fight between George Stevens, Jr., and Bob Woodward at Stevens’ Georgetown home. Our show’s press agent engineered an after-theater soiree in honor of Liv and Elizabeth Taylor. On another night we shared an intimate dinner with Richard Burton, Robert Preston, and their wives. Burton began that evening gracious, charming, and sober. Liv and I watched in fascination and horror, exchanging eye-rolling glances, as too much drink gradually turned that splendid man into a boorish, self-loathing sot.

  At such moments I could hardly believe that I was in the presence of such powerful, notorious figures, or that I was witnessing such larger-than-life behavior. It was both exciting and unsettling. On the one hand, I was thrilled to be so close to the white-hot center of the celebrity firmament. On the other, I knew very well where I stood. All eyes were on Liv. I was strangely invisible. I was an awkward, ungainly presence, regarded by all as tolerable, perhaps necessary, but vaguely embarrassing—if, that is, they noticed me at all.

  In retrospect, my comparative anonymity strikes me as a blessing. Back then, show business was not yet subject to the frantic 24/7 scandalmongering of our present era. Our affair had all the elements of a sensationally lurid tabloid serial, tracking the undoing of four lives. But in our case, the press was merciful. It turned a respectful blind eye to all of us. This was partly the result of a greater degree of circumspection among entertainment reporters in those days, and partly it was because of their worshipful regard for Liv. Whatever the reasons, only a single brief mention of our relationship ever appeared in the national press. In a Q&A feature for her Sunday gossip column, Liz Smith was asked about Liv Ullmann’s love life. Smith succinctly noted a “heavy affair” with her costar in Anna Christie. The subtext of the sentence was unmistakable: “Let’s leave these people alone.”

  The torrid weeks passed by, and we continued to perform our ponderous production of Anna Christie. My role was a monster. I’d never worked so hard onstage, and rarely to such little effect. It slowly dawned on me that, for most of the audience, the show’s main attraction was neither the play nor the production but Liv. As I bellowed my way through my speeches on one side of the stage, I would occasionally glimpse the audience gazing at the other side, where Liv was simply standing and listening, staring straight out into the lights. People were transfixed. Who could blame them? She was beautiful, the show was turgidly undramatic, and I was a lousy Mat Burke. But that adoring, misdirected gaze did little to shore up my faltering self-esteem.

  The most torturous period of our affair was during the first months of the Broadway run. When the tour ended, the heady swirl of life on the road smashed up against the reality of home. Back in the city, I was surrounded by all the touchstones of my everyday New York life—my apartment, my friends, and, most of all, my son, who had been pining for my return. I was utterly unprepared to leave any of this behind. Reaching out desperately for some semblance of normality, I moved back in with Jean. Liv was aghast. My feckless decision left her feeling abandoned, humiliated, and deeply inju
red. For weeks I shuttled between her and Jean, bicycling inanely between my apartment and Liv’s hotel suite on Central Park South, in the mad attempt to meet the needs of two very different women. I was frantically shoveling to fill two bottomless pits, yawning on either side of me. It was Scenes from a Marriage, but with two separate leading ladies. And through it all, the curtain went up eight times a week on Anna Christie at the Imperial Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, like the relentless tolling of a doomsday bell.

  I cut a strange figure during that time. I looked like a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. I had lost a lot of weight. I was pale, drawn, and perpetually seized with fatigue. I’d had my hair permed into tight Irish curls for the role of Mat Burke, altering my appearance so completely that friends did double takes when they ran into me on the street. One of them, actor (now director) Don Scardino, hadn’t seen me for months. As I shot by on my bicycle one day, he hailed me from the sidewalk. I pulled over and dismounted. He sized me up and greeted me, with a trace of concern in his voice: “How’s it goin’?” To Donnie’s astonishment, I instantly burst into tears.

  I was falling apart. I needed help. Thankfully, I had a place to go. It was a stuffy room in a musty apartment at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. The apartment belonged to a woman I’ll call Miriam. Miriam was my therapist. The room was her office. Six months before, I had sought her out in an attempt to put my emotional life in some kind of order. At the time I had been involved in an earlier extramarital entanglement. That one had been stormy as well, but compared to the cyclone that was battering me now, it had been barely a drizzle.