by Rick Lenz
* * *
Show business as a career, for those of us whom it chooses—we never choose it; no one lacks that much common sense—is the most enticing siren the gods ever conjured, at least to those with the weakness. The only pathway to her lies between Scylla and Charybdis. Any wayfarer with even minuscule common sense would take whatever evasive action was necessary to avoid that route.
My first acting experience was with a summer stock company, a job I got partly because I fit the costumes. Also, I’d been in a few plays in high school, the result of washing out of football when it became clear I was more than averagely breakable.
I inhaled my first season of stock. It was like the county fair, a magic bottle of emotions and smells, a perfumed medley of canvas and sawdust; hot dogs, popcorn, fresh paint, and old lumber varnished temporarily new. Every day, a genie slipped out of the bottle—this was his only trick and nobody could have asked for better—and blew the pungent winds that signaled the summer rains. The reedy grasses around Clark Lake swirled like an ocean in a typhoon, and I felt a frenzy that made me want to run out across the field, down to the water, and hurl myself into it—except I had a show that night. It was all adolescent longings, and they lingered with me like Erin Bibbin’s first kiss hung on the entire walk home after my first and final date with her.
I can still smell that summer. It comes to me in waves when I think of that spot on the lake where the Clark Lake Players lasted for an eternity of twenty-five years. When I think of the water lapping against the dock that extended out alongside the old clapboard theatre building that had previously been a roller rink, and before that a prohibition-era dancehall, I think of my wife’s question: “Did you ever feel so good you didn’t know what to do with it?”
The Clark Lake Playhouse was above a bar with a jukebox in it. You could hear the constant thrumming of rock and roll even during your loudest scene. I can still hear snatches of dialogue:
“Where were you on the night of August twenty-third?”
“On watch, sir.” (Me as a seventeen-year-old navy ensign.)
“And what were your duties on watch?”
“Well, sir … to watch.”
And then from downstairs: “Wake up, little Susie! Wake up!”
You could still hear the buzz of motorboats out on the lake, sometimes even after dark. None of these distractions mattered. It was all too lovely to be even slightly diminished by a trivial encircling din. The romance in the air was so intoxicating that nothing else mattered. The adult camaraderie, the playacting, the beer, and most urgently, the girls. Everywhere you looked there were girls. They paralyzed almost every other perception. It was acceptable to show off shamelessly for them. It was sweet to flirt with them. And they flirted back. It was even more fabulous than that. It wasn’t only a mysterious whirlwind of infatuations, not just art for art’s sake, not just pretending to be a grownup. It was bigger than all the exhilarating parts of itself. It was magic for magic’s sake.
Following my summer stock stint in theatre school at the University of Michigan, I trotted out for my first-year acting class some of the scenes from Broadway comedies I’d done. I found out still later that real actors call all acting “the work.” The response to my first anxious classroom performance—I’d wowed ’em in stock—was pretty much the same as it might have been if I’d taken the stage and done what my dog does in the park and for which I plan ahead by bringing along a pocketful of plastic grocery bags. *
About a half hour after sunset on a February evening, I was driving home from Ann Arbor, where I was an undistinguished graduate student, to my first wife, Sarah, and our two baby boys in Jackson. My plan in those days was to teach theatre in college. Nothing else seemed possible. While I was briefly studying pre-med I’d watched my father, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor, pack a bloody nose. I slid down the wall, unconscious. After my dad finished with the bloody nose, he stitched together the gash in my head and told me, “Young medical students faint all the time.”
I was looking in a mirror at my stitches for the first time when he said that. I threw up in the sink. He shrugged and his eyebrows, which always spoke the truth even if the rest of him was lying, told me that some part of him had understood all along that doctoring and I would make a sorry match.
Outside my car, a warmer day and then a cold rain had turned the countryside into a vast snow pudding. Now, it was freezing over again and the car was contesting my right to control it. I had the feeling I was not where I was meant to be. I noticed by moonlight the discarded cab of an old road grader that had been abandoned on a defunct utility road, and it struck me that the road grader was as pointless as I believed my life was going to be if I stayed.
A mile farther toward Jackson I saw the slush-covered, rusted-out shell of an old Pontiac. I imagined the man who’d been driving it stopping one day, or maybe one winter night, and getting out. It could have been a night like the one that was shaping up now. The Pontiac had just frozen up and quit. He said to hell with it, and hitched a ride straight to New York City. I pictured him living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, telling his new friends how he had once been imprisoned in an Andrew Wyeth winterscape until one day he found he’d had it with the bitter cold and scraping ice off his windshield with the base of a tire jack, and he finally got smart enough to make his way out of that frigid hell and come to this civilized place, to live the way elegant people should.
And all the well-bred guests warm their hands by the fire and their insides with Hendrick’s martinis. They laugh with captivating suavity and one of them says, “By Gad, sir, you are a character. A Pontiac. By Gad, sir.” (Apparently Sydney Greenstreet is on the guest list.) And everybody smirks and chortles until they’re contented as puppies wedged in and warming themselves in all the comforts of mom.
Then it hits me, in my case anyway, that’s not a soothing thought—that being tucked in with Mom is a lot like being outside in a freezing cold Pontiac.
“By Gad, sir,” says Sydney. “You are a character.”
It dawns on me: This is an improv.
“Which character are you, by the way?”
Improv is torture when you fear there is only one perfect answer for each question. At any rate, I don’t know the answer to this one.
“By Gad, sir.” Sydney is frowning now, has a distinctly menacing look. “You seem to be in the wrong movie.”
* * *
This story is about celebrity and non-celebrity and, from a very personal point of view, everything in between. It is about the stumbling progress of my life, and about Hollywood, and how I feel about both. Sometimes I feel cheerful, sometimes dark. I try to apply light therapy as I go—light is my preference—but there is no way I can make the dark parts go away (yet) at my personal whim.
One more thing: There will be no descriptions of anyone’s tits—for example, Jacqueline Bisset’s—which by the way I have seen, nor will I say anything directly bad about Lauren Bacall. Were I to describe Jackie Bisset’s breasts or anything physically about her, it would be insufficient and redundant anyway. If you’ve never seen them, I suggest renting the The Deep and taking a look for yourself. As for Lauren Bacall, she’s a complicated lady and it would be stupid and in poor taste for me to give you an appraisal of her personality based on my limited experiences with her. It wouldn’t be fairly representative.
Besides, I really do hate being unkind.
* * *
In Cactus Flower, my first Hollywood movie, I played opposite Goldie Hawn, who became pretty much my best friend for a while. It was the first big part in a movie for both of us. Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman were in it, too. Walter told me he’d had a crush on Ingrid for years, and since he was the muscle in getting the film made, being very hot at the time, he insisted she play the role.
Ingrid talked to me at length about Casablanca because I was married at the time to Claude Rains’ daughter (whom I’d played opposite in Buffalo in a stage production of “You Can’t T
ake It With You”). I told Ingrid that Claude never saw Casablanca because he didn’t like watching himself on film—had a phobia about it. She was surprised, but then acknowledged that she, too, was usually uncomfortable watching herself. (I think it’s an unnatural experience for anyone.) She still spoke with wonder about the success of Casablanca. She had almost no relationship with Humphrey Bogart away from the set—their involvement was exclusively professional. She also expressed awe that the film worked as well as it did. She said that as they were shooting it, she had no idea where the story was going, that nobody really did. She was completely baffled as to whom she was supposed to care about most, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid’s character) or Rick Blaine (Bogie’s).
I had very little firsthand knowledge about movie stars, but I speculated that Ingrid was different from the rest. She was in her very early fifties. I was twenty-nine. It didn’t matter; she was incredibly sexy. Like Walter Matthau, I developed a crush on her. It was hard to be around her and not fall under her spell. She was elegant in a kind, centered way with something friendly to say to everyone. But also, one of her secrets, both on screen and in person, seemed to be the ability to make men fall in love with her—with the possible exception of Humphrey Bogart. I think she knew she had that gift, and I wondered if she wasn’t turning it on just a tiny bit for me. (I got the idea she wasn’t particularly attracted to Matthau.) She was especially kind to me, I thought.
One day, Gene Saks, the director, called cut on a shot in which she and I were dancing. He said, “Rick, your hand is covering Ingrid’s face.”
I had ruined Ingrid Bergman’s profile! I was going to be sent to would-be movie-actor-failure hell. But she smiled sympathetically at me and petted the back of my head; she knew these things happened. Now I was positive she was very fond of me.
Seeing me at the premiere in New York several months later, she said, “Hi, Nick.”
A year or two before this, I’d done the Broadway version of “Cactus Flower” with Lauren Bacall, who terrified me because she reminded me of my mother and who later told John Wayne—when I was in The Shootist with them—that she’d “discovered me.” Wayne glowered at her and said, “Aw, shut up, Betty.” (Her real name is Betty Persky.) He was “a little ill”—so they said at the time—and I guess not in the mood for Hollywood nonsense. I got along fine with him, although protocol called for me not to volunteer much chitchat. He asked me what my politics were—I think because I had long hair, a pretty good giveaway in those days. I told him I wasn’t political. He studied me for a couple of seconds, then smiled and shrugged.
Goldie and I remained friends for a few years, but we drifted apart. Her career went better than mine. So I started to ask her for parts in her movies. After that, it didn’t take long for her to stop returning my calls. She and I have the same birthday, different years. I’m older by six. Occasionally, we exchange cards.
One time, my late friend John Ritter did a staged reading of one of my plays, opposite Sharon Gless. I invited Goldie and she wrote me a note, saying she was sorry she couldn’t come, that she was out of town. That was as close as we ever came to seeing each other since the unforgettable day that she and Julie Christie and I played tennis on Boris Karloff’s court.
* * *
I’m lost. I don’t know what movie I’m in. It could be Star Wars. It’s as if I’m in a George Lucas spacecraft, careening around in a kaleidoscopic wash of ceaselessly merging space and time, illogically sequenced, tumbling moments of my life. I hang still for an instant, then whoosh, I’m shot into the next moment, each time increasingly sure nobody I encounter knows my name—or anything about me, which in the business I’ve chosen to spend my life is catastrophic. Sometimes these moments are happening to me right now. Sometimes they’re merely memory. I never know until I get there.
I pray all of this is no more than a nightmare, that I’ll wake up before I crash, but it doesn’t happen. The harsh reality hits me that I’ve become one of those Hollywood people catalogued in the entertainment industry, because I’m over fifty and not famous, as old-to-dead. I’m like a drowning man, watching his life in fast-forward—except there isn’t the slightest sense of chronology.
* * *
I watch the Academy Awards with friends. Brokeback Mountain is nominated in several categories, and gay cowboy jokes are sprinkled through the opening of the ceremony. Jon Stewart, the host, introduces a montage—film clips that can be taken as sexually ambiguous, featuring cowboys of past Westerns taking off their coats, their chaps, opening their vests for the showdown; handling and caressing their guns. Then, near the end of the montage, they show a shocked and terrified frontier newspaperman as John Wayne in The Shootist inserts an immense Colt .45 into my mouth. All I remember about that scene was trying to keep my teeth from getting broken. My reaction to having a large, metaphorical penis stuck in my mouth in front of hundreds of millions of people on Academy Award night is that I’m thrilled. It’s the largest audience I’ve ever played to.
About two weeks after that scene was filmed, I arrive in Carson City, Nevada, to do more work on the movie and find out that Wayne has been feeling worse than a little ill. He’s been in the hospital with pneumonia for several days. “If shooting lasts much longer,” the wardrobe guy confides, “he may not make it.”
But I know better. I live in this culture. He’s John Wayne.
My last scene with him is an exterior. It’s the continuation of the gun-in-my-mouth scene.
He’s shaky. When he hits me with his pistol hand on the back of my neck, he also hits me with the pistol. After we’re wrapped for the day, I go to the hospital where they put two stitches in the back of my head.
Two weeks later, I’m on the Warner Brothers lot. I have one last scene with Harry Morgan. It’s early in the morning, at least a couple of hours before I’ll be shooting with Harry. I’m alone on an idle backlot street, sitting in a canvas chair with my name stenciled on it. I’m watching some extras at the end of the street, just sitting around, staring. One of them is in a telephone booth. Others are lined up, waiting to make their calls. They’re spending these moments of (what seems to me) their virtually vacant today—trying to get themselves booked for a vacant tomorrow.
I hear a familiar voice, behind me.
“Did you know [director Don] Siegel used a double for me while I was sick?”
I swivel my head around and look up dumbly at John Wayne. I can’t make myself say a word. People come to Wayne, not the other way around.
“A couple long shots in this thing are going to show some other guy being J.B. Books.”
He’s remembered the pistol slap and is telling me he wasn’t himself that day.
“Anyway,” he growls at me, “sorry about that.” He briefly directs his gaze toward the back of my head. “I only ever did that once before.”
He shows me a barely perceptible shoulder shrug, turns, and with his distinctive hitchy saunter, moves off toward his trailer.
I should have saved those stitches. I wonder what they’d bring on eBay?
Sometime after I’ve shot that exterior outside of the widow’s house (the widow is Bacall’s part) in Carson City, I run into Ronnie Howard at a blackjack table in the Orchard Casino in Carson City. He’s charming and affable and we chat about not much of anything. Then, out of nowhere, I’m surprised and gratified when he promises me that if he should ever have any success as a director, he will use me in all his films.
I still have a five-dollar chip from that casino. It’s probably worth five dollars today.
* * *
Cognitive dissonance is the basis of most good acting. It means that you come to believe what you find yourself doing. You take a job working for a political party, and you come to believe in the cause. You are an actor playing love scenes, and you find yourself falling in love with the actress you’re playing opposite. You are in an easy chair, in a warm pool of light. The rest of the house is in darkness. You’re reading an especially scary mystery
novel. You hear a noise from somewhere upstairs. You get up. You move slowly to the bottom of the stairway. You look up. Your anxiety builds. You hear the noise again. It sounds less like the squeaking you originally would have called it and more like moaning. You start up the stairs.
If you are any good, you should now be literally terrified.
If you hang around Hollywood long enough, cognitive dissonance becomes your genetic instruction. Your psyche gets bent into the shape of your eight-by-ten.
At first you say, “Not me.”
I was given a sobriety test by the side of the road early one morning in Beverly Hills. When I was called on to say my ABCs, I got hung up around P or Q and failed. And I was sober. It was the pressure of the moment. It was real life that was the problem—my instinctive cognitive dissonance. It’s a great acting tool. It can also work against you.
When I was ten years old, I used to play with a boy named Dixie Thorpe. He was nine. I have no idea where he got that name. I don’t think his family was from the South. One day, Dixie’s mother took us to Crispell Lake, one of the hundred or more swimmable lakes that pepper Jackson County, Michigan. Crispell was about a half mile across, and the area around it hadn’t been built up much. We were going to swim at the small county park.
Dixie changed into his bathing suit first and got down to the edge of the lake before I did. As I came out of the bathhouse, I saw a group of four or five boys in the water around the end of the swimming dock. Dixie and I didn’t know these kids well. They went to a different grade school. They were a little older than us and the few times we’d run into them, they’d always harassed us with preadolescent taunting for no other reason than they could, and because each of them wanted to prove to his buddies that he was a tough guy.
Dixie had never been to this lake before and wasn’t a strong swimmer, but I was. It was a pretty shallow lake, so no one seemed to be worried. I was almost down to the water when Dixie reached the end of the dock. I saw him look hesitantly down, apparently working up the courage to go in. The boys standing in the water jeered and yelled at him, “Dive in, pantywaist. What are you scared of?”