Needless to say this made me realize I had a lot of unfinished business to attend to so I decided to make a private safari back to the old campus and stroll about packing away the treasured past for good so that I might proceed into the future (i.e., the army) with something more like composure. Well I did, and it worked.
Cheers,
Rich
After basic training at Fort Ord, I was sent to Korea and made company clerk of the infantry company. The job may sound like easy pickings, but it was in fact complex and quite difficult, and it saved my sanity. I plunged into my work with concentration I’d never known before. Work helped me escape from the colossal boredom of regimented life in the middle of nowhere (after the Korean War, South Korea was, though naturally beautiful, devastated).
During my entire sixteen-month tour I was allowed only one R&R to Japan, but I made the most of that fabulous week. Here’s a portion of another letter I wrote at the time to Joe:
I’ve caught up with you, Joseph. I am a MAN (as of 0230, 8 Dec. 57), and I characterize the experience not as dramatic or monumental or artistic, but simply as enormously pleasant. Following a two-day flirtation, this enchanting creature and I proceeded, partially plastered, to an ancient Japanese hotel of her choice, immersed ourselves in a pool of fragrant, steaming water, donned flowing kimonos, floated up a narrow flight of shiny wooden stairs worn smooth by centuries of shoeless feet, and plopped into bed. It was all so charmingly easy, so utterly enjoyable. Then to be awakened the following dawn with sandy-eyed tenderness, sober, to enjoy lengthily our lazy warmth. This comprises my sole memory of Japan.
There was, I admit, another avenue of escape. After several months I finally made some friends and after work we used to drink ourselves into oblivion almost every night at the Enlisted Men’s club, where a bottle of beer cost a quarter. Once in a while we’d get a weekend pass to go into Seoul. Here’s part of a letter I wrote to Joe about these jaunts into the capital city:
Take Miss Pearl S. Buck, add a dash of shattered plate glass, and blend in a liberal amount of Coca-Cola to the rhythm of ancient auto horns, bicycle bells, and clomping oxen, and you’ll end up with an inedible concoction called Seoul. The accidental beauty of makeshift, primitive constructions, brown bodies draped in flashing white cloth, the fresh green of vegetable patches interrupting filthy grays. Glance through an open shutter into a room just large enough to contain the bed that supports a flat-faced, thickly painted prostitute applying more paint. It’s early morning, by the way, and sunlight is just beginning to break itself against lines of locust trees, shattering down among dust, bamboo, and mounds of old rubber tires, filtering through streams of charcoal smoke—the residue of millions of bitty breakfast fires.
Silent faces drift into the street and perch upon squatting bodies that have been there behind apple baskets and turnips for centuries. Bare lightbulbs still burn in showcases full of Korean candies, American watches, and various cures for clap. (It should be warned that said cures are not too reliable. Upon awakening one morning and finding himself alarmingly puffed up, a buddy of mine queried the local medic concerning his condition only to discover that the shot of penicillin he had recently received from a clandestine Korean “physician” was actually Wild Root Cream Oil hair tonic). Everybody sells and nobody buys. I guess they end up eating their own damned apples. And where these apples come from is not lesser among Asian mysteries. There are no apple trees in Korea.
With the sun come the Slicky-Boys and of course their sisters in iniquity. Slicky-Boys are thoroughly charming youngsters, expert in everything from vulgar theft to the fine art of pimpery. They’ll pimp for their sisters and mothers, and even for their fathers if you happen to be so disposed.
Children outside the city are far less needy and therefore far less wicked. Last Sunday a friend and I were out in the country on a camera tour when we ran across two little fellows fooling around on the dirt road. We quickly made friends and raced and piggy-backed etc. for quite a ways. Friend and I were going to buy the poor skinny little creatures something to eat, but they would have none of it—they wanted us to eat with them and their family at their nearby bamboo cottage. We would have too, but GIs aren’t allowed to associate with the villagers. Too bad. We missed out on something really interesting.
My compulsively hard work at company headquarters made me indispensable, and my captain promoted me to the rank of staff sergeant. This gave me entrée into our camp’s real bar, and, with the hard stuff, quicker inebriation.
After two years of this curious routine of hard work and booze (being the son of an alcoholic I did begin to worry a bit about the latter), I was honorably and happily discharged and sent home with a much-improved work ethic and a few hundred dollars saved from my lavish army pay.
My new freedom was a joy, but my prospects for “the big splash” seemed bleak. My friend Joe tried to talk me into trying my luck in New York, where he was breaking into musical theater, but somehow I felt compelled to pursue my destiny in Los Angeles. “Now I do want to ‘make it’ in the East, and I don’t much like the West, and I do want to get far away from home sweet home, but I am totally committed to a life or death tussle here. And it is a beauteous thing finally to be committed,” I wrote Joe on my father’s stationery, just after being discharged from the army. For a few uncomfortable months I lived with my parents in their new home on Bayview Place in Laguna Beach. I stayed downstairs next to the garage in a small room filled with the same bedroom furniture I grew up with in the Beverly Hills house. Eerie. After about six weeks of feeling slightly unwelcome in my folks’ house, I went downstairs to bed one night and had a very spooky surprise. Instead of sliding into bed as usual, for some mysterious reason I flung back the covers and was stunned to find a large, lively scorpion quite alert and poised to strike standing right smack in the middle of the mattress. The poisonous insect was positioned so perfectly that it seemed to have been carefully placed. If there was a message in all this I got it. As soon as I could I bought the cheapest car I could find with my army dough and found a tiny apartment in L.A. around Western and Santa Monica Boulevards right next to the Hollywood Freeway. At sixty bucks a month it was noisy and smoggy, the neighborhood was depressing and sort of scary, my fellow tenants were mostly ancient and nearing death, the kitchen had bugs, the bed was a sagging contraption you pulled down from a wall, and I loved the place! It was a minifortress from which I’d one way or another storm the gates of Hollywood. And no scorpions!
During my two years of exile in Korea most of my college friends had scattered across the country to seek their fortunes. One pal from those idyllic ivory-tower days, Bob Towne, did answer the old phone number I called and we got together to catch up.
I’d always been somewhat in awe of Bob. Women found him exciting, and his love life was the stuff of legend even before graduation. He was a serious and talented writer, a bright student, and a good actor to boot. We had acted together in several college plays, including The Crucible and the aforementioned production of Arms and the Man, in which he played Sergius to my Bluntschli. (In the early seventies I wasn’t surprised when Bob caused a sensation by writing the screenplay for Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s brilliant film noir about the Los Angeles we had grown up in. Years later he wrote something about screenwriting that struck me as just right. Never underestimate the suggestions of an actor when rewriting a script, because the actor, if he or she is any good, will almost invariably get deeper into his or her character than the writer has. The actor’s insights can be extremely useful.)
Bob said he was planning to audition for the hottest actors’ workshop in town taught by Jeff Corey (a disciple of the Method) and suggested that I try out, too. With considerable trepidation I made an appointment to meet Corey in the garage studio behind his Hollywood home. On the appointed day I approached him with shaky knees and luckily was bidden to sit.
Jeff Corey had been blacklisted in the 1950s after being called in front of the House Un-American Act
ivities Committee. He refused to name names. For twelve years he couldn’t get an acting job, so he turned his considerable talents to teaching. Among his many students were Kirk Douglas, Anthony Perkins, Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, and, briefly, James Dean. Jeff’s appearance—craggy features, bushy eyebrows, and the intense gaze of a Tolkien wizard—was formidable. I was equally fascinated and terrified. I worked up all the charm I could muster, called forth my old game of appearing intelligent, and tried to exhibit some sort of potential.
It worked! Jeff accepted me in his beginners group. I was overjoyed. As I was leaving he said, “You’re very formal, aren’t you?” I said that I hadn’t really thought about it, but, yes, I guess I was. He replied, “That’s an interesting way to stay safe.” If I were to characterize in its simplest form our work together for the next two years, I’d say it was the struggle between his challenge to risk and be free and my fearful need for what I thought was the safety of my all-American boy image.
Bob was accepted, too. We arrived early the evening of our first class, walked along the driveway to the backyard, and sat on the lawn with the other new students, trying to look cool as we waited for Jeff Corey to emerge from his house and open up the studio. Bob and I were excited and very nervous, wondering if we were falling into the ferocious clutches of a West Coast Lee Strasberg. In due time Jeff did appear and invited us into his studio. And so it began.
One of the first things Jeff said was that the theater is a temple—whenever you enter it, wear shoes. He meant that, possible fame and fortune aside, acting is a deeply serious and sometimes profound art, and that we must approach our training with the utmost respect. With Jeff as our teacher it was hard not to.
Our work in class focused mainly on improvisation and scene work. The improvisations began with Jeff calling two or three students onstage and describing a basic dramatic situation, for instance a couple on the verge of divorce. Then Jeff would whisper to each actor his or her foremost action or desire in the scene. He might whisper to the girl that in her view her husband is ruining her life, stifling her, and that she must get rid of him as quickly as possible in order to rejoin her secret lover. Then he might whisper to the fellow that he loves his wife more than life itself and must convince her to stay with him and rekindle their love or die trying. The actors then improvise this drama using their imaginations and hopefully tapping into their personal emotions, experience, and power.
Some of the students became very good at involving themselves emotionally in these improvs. My problem was that I had long ago rejected my real self (whoever that might be—I didn’t want to know) and presented to the world (and to myself) a remarkably perfect Richard. My real feelings were unavailable to me and unwelcome. So I had to think fast and fake it most of the time. I had a creative imagination and I improvised reasonably well on occasion, but you can’t fool all the people all the time, and Jeff was always on my case to get real. It took years of therapy and various consciousness workshops to accomplish that. So I was in the complex position of having to improvise not as myself (which was the whole point), but as the character Perfect Richard that I was already playing full-time in life. I was the “bad” me pretending to be the “good” me who was then improvising or acting a character in scene work. No wonder I was tired all the time.
Most of my friends those days came from Jeff’s classes—excited, ambitious, lively young hopefuls. And, wonder of wonders, in this heady new atmosphere of artistic discovery, I fell in love for the first time in my uptight life. Of course I’d had secret crushes before, but this was the first time all those falling-in-love mechanisms Mother Nature so exuberantly built into our minds and bodies were powerful enough to mow down my titanic shame and fear.
On our first date Dave took me to his favorite restaurant, the Golden Pagoda, in L.A.’s Chinatown. The romantic vibes of new love made it seem like Shangri-la. Just going to the movies or cooking up some dinner or hiking in the mountains was wonderful fun in the swirl of first romance. Our idyll lasted about a year and was pure delight. This was the simplest, most trouble-free relationship I’ve ever had, which is amazing considering how inhibited I’d been previously, and how emotionally confused I remained afterward. Prejudice was still rampant in the late 1950s so we kept our affair as secret as possible, even from our friends. I think my experience of unexpected freedom during this clandestine interlude was made possible by my friend’s contagiously easy, playful nature and by the fact that I was as yet unknown and therefore blissfully anonymous. Eventually a fellow student caught Dave’s eye, and we were back to being “just friends.” The separation hurt, but fickle youth recovers quickly.
Very few of us were finding much work, so we formed our own theater group called The Angel’s Company and put on a number of well-received plays like La Ronde and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. I was taking singing and dancing lessons as well and was getting a rep for hard work and discipline (as opposed to the wild and risky freedom coming into fashion at the time).
A family friend introduced me to an agent named Lilly Messinger. Lilly was a small, stout woman but quite grand. She had been Louis B. Mayer’s assistant during the glory days of MGM, was married to a mysterious prince, and was officially known as Princess Lilly Turntaxis. She was a friend of Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford had once lived in her guesthouse (the windows of which were rigged, for reasons never explained, with pipes to produce the appearance of rain). I wrote to Joe, “Her home has an outer jungle, and inner jungle, and an inner inner jungle in which stalks at present the feline Marlene D. Lilly has promised to introduce us, but so far no dice.”
As I sat across from Ms. Messinger in her jungle shadowed office she appraised me with the sharp, practiced gaze of a medieval money changer and said with unassailable authority that my eyes were placed too high in my face (I shuddered), but that I had class, a rare quality those days (I relaxed slightly), and that she would take me on as an unofficial client (I silently cheered).
Lilly sent me out on quite a few job interviews, but I was defeated by my fear, extreme self-consciousness, and intense inhibition. My cold readings were just that—cold and read. I kept plugging away, but I was beginning to find my inexplicably frightened self a bit embarrassing.
I had no idea at the time why I was so withdrawn and scared at these auditions, which became a series of cool rejections. I’d walk in to meet the casting guys well prepared for the reading, but by the time I’d said hello, sat down, and picked up the script I’d freeze solid. I’d feel sort of mummified, bound up in invisible wrappings, severely restricted by forces I couldn’t locate and fight. I was continually, exasperatingly, hopelessly defeated by an enemy I couldn’t find.
I can see now that one of the most powerful factors in my emotional block in these situations was my unresolved relationship with my father. Though I was no longer living at home, I was still destructively attached to this man (or rather to my inner stories about him). My hatred and fear of Dad were virulent, even though I rarely saw him.
I projected these feelings onto every producer and director and casting agent I met. I unfairly turned these unsuspecting guys into my father, subconsciously fearing condescending judgments and suppressive sneers, certain that I could never measure up to their expectations. In reality the men behind these projected masks were merely hoping that I would fit the bill for the character in the show they were casting. Meanwhile my now permanently sober dad was happily bowling on the green in sunny Laguna Beach, completely unaware of the role I was writing for him in my self-generated struggles.
This is a near perfect example of how we endlessly torture ourselves and distort our lives with our own faulty thinking. There I was, a reasonably talented young actor trying to get work in Hollywood, ruthlessly sabotaging my efforts with distant memories of mean old Dad. My father was far away busily saving people in AA, but I couldn’t help dragging him back into my life. In his absence I took on his role of suppressing and making me feel impotent. Dad was gon
e, but I couldn’t let go of all my painful stories about the damage he’d done me and about my inadequacy in his presence. I continued to hate him even though I had assumed his nefarious ways.
We bamboozle ourselves with largely fictional stories all the time: My father despises me (how can I know that for sure?); anyone who really knows me couldn’t possibly love me; my children don’t appreciate me; my husband doesn’t listen to me; my religion makes me better than you; they should have dealt with me fairly; I’m more important than you because I’m famous; I’m too addictive or stressed to quit smoking; life is so unfair; they should have taken better care of me.
Byron Katie, a savvy teacher I know, suggests putting our mental stories and beliefs to the test with three questions: (1) Can I really know this is true? (2) What do I get from this story or belief, what does it do for or against me? (3) Who would I be in the situation without this belief?
Then she suggests that we turn it all around and take full responsibility for all the stuff we’re blaming on others. For instance, the story “You don’t love me enough!” becomes “I don’t love myself enough, and I don’t love you enough.” My story “My father suppressed and weakened me” becomes the much more accurate “I suppress and weaken myself with my thinking, and I also suppress my father by probably misunderstanding and misrepresenting him.”
In other words, being a grown-up means taking responsibility for my own life and my own integrity. My father’s integrity or lack of it is none of my business. My business is to come to understand the stifling fictions of my thinking and learn to prefer and honor reality, truth, what is.
Early in 1959 the fickle finger of fate began to stir things up in my life. Through AA, my father was acquainted with Jack Bailey, the loquacious host of Queen for a Day. Dad arranged for me to meet Jack and his agent, Alan Bernard, for lunch at the famous Brown Derby restaurant. Alan Bernard worked for MCA, which was then the most powerful talent agency in the world (before MCA took over Universal Studios and was forced by the feds in an antitrust suit to divest itself of its agency business). With only feigned interest, Bernard agreed to set up an audition for me at MCA with two agents, Monique James and Ina Bernstein, who specialized in launching young performers. I was instructed to present a dramatic scene for them in two weeks.
Shattered Love Page 4