I memorized the scene he wanted me to read, found another character jacket, and also brought a prop (a hammer or a broom, I forget which) so that I could be doing something instead of just standing there saying lines.
The audition went well. Mr. Robbins asked me to come back the next day and audition again. This turned out to be a habit of Jerome Robbins’s, to keep actors auditioning so that he could be sure, and also, I’m sure, so that he could get ideas for how to direct certain scenes. (According to Actors Equity, you’re supposed to pay an actor after three auditions, which Mr. Robbins never did.)
After my fifth audition I was told that I would have to do one more final audition. The competition for the role was between me and a wonderful actor named Gerald Hiken. By this time my confidence had dropped a few notches. The horrible trap is that an actor tries to remember what he or she did that impressed the director originally, and then, unfortunately, the actor starts imitating what he thought he did. Nevertheless, after my sixth audition I got the part.
Rehearsals were a little strained. Mr. Robbins thought that the best way to get us into Brecht’s Communist/Socialist way of thinking was for all of us to play Monopoly during our lunch hour. I should have known that there was trouble ahead.
We opened previews at the Martin Beck Theater to a packed house. I had a rousing and funny scene toward the end of the first act, after which Mother Courage and her daughter and I pushed Mother Courage’s wagon to our next destination (on a revolving stage), accompanied by some thrilling music. Before the curtain could come down, the audience burst into applause. But Mr. Robbins cut the heart of the scene the next day. He said, “That isn’t what Brecht wants. It’s the intellectual ideas that he’s trying to get across, not the conventional emotion that we get in American plays.” (My father would have said, “Was you there, Charley?”)
Jerome Robbins found a patsy in every production—someone he could pick on if he was frustrated with how things were going. (Many famous directors have been guilty of the same habit—Otto Preminger and John Dexter, to name two.)
Robbins had selected a wonderful actor by the name of Eugene Roche to be his patsy. One afternoon, when everything Mr. Robbins was doing seemed to make things worse, he started in on Eugene in front of the rest of the cast. We all had to stand there and listen to Jerry Robbins railing and belittling—until he crossed the line. Eugene, who was a devout Catholic with five children, stood up and said:
“Listen, you little fuck—if you insult me one more time, I’m going to come over there and smash the teeth out of your fucking face.”
From that time on, Eugene Roche became Jerome Robbins’s favorite actor.
The whole Mother Courage experience felt like a big mistake.
After the previews began, Anne Bancroft asked me if I would like to meet her boyfriend, who came to pick her up each night after the show. I said, “Yes, I would love to meet him.” The boyfriend’s name was Mel Brooks.
WHAT I LEARNED
Occasionally, out of a horrible experience a blessing may come.
KITTY CARLISLE HART
Actress, Singer,
Champion of the Arts
As far back as I can remember, and I’m now ninety-six, I never really cooked anything. When I was growing up in Shreveport and New Orleans, we always had wonderful cooks, and having spent my teens in Europe, I always enjoyed good food whether dining in or out, and when I married Moss Hart we had even better cooks. Some of the chattering class even said Moss married me because I could speak French to the maître d’s.
I will never truly understand what possessed me, but one year I agreed to cook Thanksgiving dinner for Moss and my two small children in the country all by myself. “The country” was Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where we spent many wonderful summers, albeit with cooks and butlers and maids. This Thanksgiving would be en famille. (Other than to maître d’s, Moss hated it when I spoke French because he felt left out, but I thought it was good for les enfants.)
Now, “cooking” Thanksgiving dinner actually meant that our miraculous Alma (the real cook) would prepare everything ahead of time—that is, stuff the turkey, wrap it in bacon and buttered cheesecloth, prepare all the side dishes in casseroles, and so on. All I really had to do was put the bird in the oven and warm up the sides and the gravy. The four of us drove down to Long Beach Island for the first time in our lives without butlers and cooks and maids, and marveled at how much fun we were having en famille, and how we were starting a tradition and would never have Thanksgiving any other way. We arrived with plenty of time to enjoy the early-afternoon sun at the shore, and for me to get the bird in the oven. I sent Moss and the children out to the beach for a long walk to get their appetites going.
While they were away I put the bird in the oven, set the table, arranged all the sides and gravy on the stovetop, and took a short nap. When Moss and the children arrived back from their walk, everyone marveled that I had set the table all by myself, and how good the house smelled. “Sit down, I’ll serve,” I announced, and went back into the kitchen. I checked all the vegetables and gravy. Everything was perfect. I opened the oven door to pull out the turkey. I knelt down on the floor to get a better look at it. To my surprise, the bird was still perfectly white, covered with the same white buttered cheesecloth. It was the Moby Dick of turkeys. Though I had carefully set the temperature of the oven to Alma’s specifications, I had forgotten to actually turn the oven on.
And that is how my family found me, on the floor in the kitchen, my face in the oven, whimpering. We spent that Thanksgiving night under the orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s and promised to tell Alma that her instructions and her bird were the best we’d ever had.
And of course I never had to cook anything ever again.
WHAT I LEARNED
The more inexperienced you are, the more careful and thorough you have to be, and that applies to cooking a turkey and everything else in life.
MARY STEENBURGEN
Actress
When asked by my friend Charles Grodin to write about a mistake I made, I knew that I would have no problem thinking of plenty to write about. After all, upon meeting my best friend, I stated, “I have nothing in common with her,” and the love of my life, Ted Danson, was someone whom I judged so severely that I wasn’t even very excited about the prospect of working with him. I have a huge history of being wrong. But the story that I am going to tell is one that has haunted me, and it is something that I reflect back on when I tend to lose my way.
My dad was a sweet, strong angel of a man. He was a man of few words, but we respected him so much that when he did speak, we all listened. He was a freight train conductor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, but he had heart problems and so he was not able to work for years at a time. He would try to do odd jobs to help support our family. One time he got involved with a shoe company. They sold shoes by using traveling salesmen to help their customers order shoes through a catalog. The company sent my father a sign to put on the back of his car that said HANOVER SHOE SALESMAN.
It was an old secondhand car, and between the sign and the condition of the car, I wasn’t too keen on driving around with my father. I was thirteen and suddenly aware of our lack of money compared to the wealth of the rich kids at school. I mostly walked home from school, but this one day my father came to pick me up. As we were driving away from the school I saw this boy, Charles Harrison, who was president of our class and the most popular guy in our grade. I didn’t want him to see me in our embarrassing car, so I ducked down and pretended to tie my shoes.
There was silence for a moment and then my father softly said, “Mary, you don’t have to be ashamed of this old car.”
That’s all he said.
WHAT I LEARNED
Years later, I can still hear the sound of his sadness and feel my face burn with shame at my own snobbery. I think that this tiny little moment actually informed a lot about the way I have dealt with the many blessings that have come my way. I am
deeply proud to be a trainman’s daughter from Arkansas, and I have been vigilant to remember what does and doesn’t matter in life.
ORRIN G. HATCH
United States Senator
You can’t serve in politics for as long as I have without making a good number of mistakes.
I’m sure my critics have a long list of mistakes that I’ve made; some might be justified and some not. But my list is much different from theirs. They look at the issues I have championed that they opposed, or the times when I forged a compromise when they thought compromise was not an option. The mistakes on my list are more personal—people I may have hurt, missed opportunities with my family, or difficult experiences that molded my character.
One of the worst decisions I have made as a senator, though, was my vote against making Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.
I admired Dr. King for his amazing success in leading the cause of freedom and the constitutional right to individual civil rights. He was by far the most influential African American leader since the abolition of slavery and one of the greatest men of the twentieth century.
But I convinced myself that there were valid reasons to vote against the holiday. While he was a great leader who deserved to be revered for generations, I could think of other great men in our nation’s history who did not have commemorative holidays—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, to name just a few. Why, I argued, should we ask taxpayers to pay $1 billion a year in lost productivity, as no work is being done by so many, to elevate Dr. King above any of these other historical figures? I figured we had enough federal holidays.
I voted against the holiday, a vote that I will never get to rectify. A vote that has tugged at my conscience throughout my career.
WHAT I LEARNED
What I failed to realize at the time was that this holiday was more than just celebrating the life of one man. Dr. King represented the courage, conviction, and dedication of millions throughout America who had sacrificed themselves and even their lives for racial freedom.
I learned that legislation often goes beyond cold policy calculations, and Congress has a responsibility to consider the impact that policy will have on real people. So many Americans had an emotional and spiritual bond with Dr. King because they had felt the sting of discrimination and prejudice. They stood with him, fought intolerance with compassion, hatred with love, and violence with peaceful disobedience. Together, they secured America’s promise of freedom and opportunity for all in America, regardless of their race or any other discriminatory factor.
ROBERT ELLIS
Real Estate Executive
When my son was nine years old, I became a soccer coach for his team. This turn of events was orchestrated by my wife. When she found out all the league entries were taken, she told the authorities, “But my husband is a coach.” That certainly opened the door for my son. When she told me what she had done, her next question was “Do you know anything about soccer?” The answer was no, absolutely zero.
I approached the assignment as though I were coaching a professional team. The next year was filled with books on soccer; going to clinics; meeting Juan Mazia, Pelé’s coach; and even meeting Pelé.
One day after having practices three days a week, giving lectures to the team that would make Knute Rockne and George Patton proud, I asked, “Are there any questions?” One boy raised his hand and said, “My brother got a goldfish for his birthday.” It suddenly hit me that the kids had never been in organized sports before. They wanted to have fun. To get them to a more skillful level, I had to take it slow and easy. I wanted to be the total opposite of the bullying coach who abuses the authority he’s given.
One of the boys became a team captain or assistant coach. He could talk to the others on their level. After each game, I called every kid on the phone to encourage him and thank him. Parents’ suggestions were accepted, and many parents participated. Practices became fun—it wasn’t all soccer talk.
WHAT I LEARNED
I learned more from my young players than they ever learned from me.
I learned how to listen and to value other people’s opinions no matter what their age, and this serves me well in all parts of my life.
Kids nine to ten years old have not developed total physical strength and coordination, so we worked on developing mental skills. Since we had practices three days a week, more than any other team, we should be better. They believed it, and, quite frankly, so did I. We went on to have five out of eight seasons with undefeated teams.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Journalist, Author
I was twenty-one when I first met Bernard Levin on a panel for Face the Music, a British guess-the-music TV show. He was forty-two. I was there as a curiosity—a young woman with a foreign accent, elected president of the Cambridge Union. He was there as the celebrated columnist for the Times, an intellectual with an encyclopedic knowledge of music and pretty much everything else. Except me. He knew nothing about me. But I knew a lot about him. I’d had a major intellectual crush on him ever since I had discovered his writings while at Cambridge. I had devoured his book The Pendulum Years and would meticulously clip his columns, underline them, and save them in a file (no, I did not put pressed flowers in the file, but I might as well have). So when I found out that he was on the panel, I was reduced to an inarticulate bundle of fear. I’m still amazed that in my fog I actually managed to recognize Schumann’s Fourth Symphony.
At the end of the taping, he asked me out to dinner for the following week. All I remember is that I spent the week in a state of high anxiety, prepping, primping, and getting myself up to date on Northern Ireland, recent developments in the Soviet Union, and the latest Wagner recordings. I had so many fear butterflies during dinner, I basically just rearranged the food on my plate. I must have bored him to death, because he made sure our second date didn’t involve a lot of talking. He took me to Covent Garden to see Wagner’s Mastersingers. As you might have guessed by now, I spent the time between the dinner and the opera date reading all about Mastersingers—and considering more has been written about Wagner than anyone else except Jesus Christ, that meant a lot of reading.
That week we started a relationship that would last until the end of 1980, when I left London to move to New York. In many ways Bernard was, in fact, the reason I left London. I was thirty by then and still deeply in love with him, but I longed to have children. He, on the other hand, never wanted to have children or get married. What was touching about him was that he saw this rejection not as a badge of independence and freedom for me but as a character flaw in him, a by-product of his deepest fears. He even wrote about it. And the fear he described is by no means confined to men: “What fear of revealing, of vulnerability, of being human, grips us so fiercely, and above all why? What is it that, down there in the darkness of the psyche, cries its silent ‘No’ to the longing for ‘Yes’?” For him this “No” often coincided with a retreat into depression—which he described as “that dark lair where the sick soul’s desire for solitude turns into misanthropy.” No wonder he loved cats so much. “Above all,” he wrote once, “I love the detachment of cats, their willingness to be loved but not to respond beyond a certain, very clearly defined point; no cat ever gave its entire heart to any human being.”
I have since talked with dozens of women trapped in relationships like mine, in which the man is not able or willing to match our longing for a deeper intimacy. And however necessary it is, it’s incredibly hard and painful to extricate ourselves. Instead we keep trying to make things better—by which we mean make ourselves better. I know how hard I worked to gain Bernard’s approval. Because on some level I feared that I had fallen short—that if it weren’t for my shortcomings, we would be spending our lives together. Rationally I knew that his intimacy and commitment issues were his and had little or nothing to do with me, but irrationally I feared that it was I who wasn’t
enough. And in the process I stayed long after it was clear that I was no longer being true to myself.
In fact, I still marvel at what reserves of fearlessness I must have tapped into to be able to leave him. And not just to leave him—the first big love of my life, as well as a mentor as a writer and a role model as a thinker—but also to leave London and to change continents. But I had to. Our lives in London were so inextricably intertwined that I couldn’t live there any longer. A quarter of a century later, I can still feel how painful that decision was.
WHAT I LEARNED
Our mistakes can be blessings from which we discover a lot about ourselves. The only thing that matters is not to repeat the same mistakes—but to make fresh ones all the time!
SUZYN WALDMAN
New York Yankees Radio
Broadcaster
The year 1987, my first in sports broadcasting, was not an easy one. I was new in the Yankees clubhouse. I was extremely nervous and aware that game after game the male reporters were waiting for me to make a mistake.
I rarely asked a player a question when another reporter was in the vicinity. One evening, Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield had a particularly great game. I mustered up all my courage, and with my tape recorder going, I started to ask my question—and made a mistake with his stats. Two things ran through my mind. Do I keep going, pretend I didn’t notice, and not be able to use the tape, or do I stop the tape and make it clear to everyone here that I made a mistake? Dave Winfield made the decision for me. He put his hand on the machine’s Stop button, knowing I had reversed the stats, and said, “I don’t like the way I started to answer that. Can we do it again?” My mistake had led to an incredible act of kindness by a relative stranger.
If I Only Knew Then... Page 3