José Ferrer, a great actor who came to fame in his superb film portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac, was (like most of us) a bit ashamed of being in this B bee movie no matter how much Irwin Allen was paying. One day as we were waiting to shoot a particularly embarrassing scene, he said in a mock theatrical voice, “Ah, Richard, I’ve whored in television, I’ve whored in movies, but I’ve never whored in the theater!”
To balance my film work I tried to do as many plays as possible. Word had gotten out about the Birmingham Hamlet, and the Seattle Repertory Company asked me to play Shakespeare’s Richard II, a splendid role that I took on a second time in a quite different production at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles directed somewhat arbitrarily by Jonathan Miller. Jonathan detested King Richard and loved his nemesis Bolingbroke, so I had some interesting problems this second time around. Also at the Ahmanson I played Cyrano de Bergerac and Shannon in The Night of the Iguana.
Around this time Richard Lester, whom I’d loved working with in Petulia, asked me to play Aramis in his witty version of The Three Musketeers, with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Charlton Heston, and Christopher Lee. I jumped at the chance to play debonair Aramis, the ultimate hypocrite who, while pretending to be deeply religious, was seducing every damsel in the parish.
Musketeers was shot in a variety of fascinating Spanish locations, like Seville and Toledo—an education in itself. And the high romance of the story coupled with the often hilarious swordplay and the colorful personalities of the cast made this a dream job.
Raquel Welch was a revelation. She didn’t arrive on set until about three weeks into production and was preceded by a gale of unpleasant rumors. While the rest of us had formed a rather jolly group willing to rough it a bit, it was said that Raquel was demanding all sorts of perks like a dressing room painted a special color filled daily with flowers, and she insisted that she be addressed on the set by us all as “Miss Welch.” It was generally agreed that we were going to hate her guts.
When “Miss Welch,” having just flown into Madrid, was to deign to visit our set, we were not thrilled. Not, that is, until she arrived in a soft blue denim outfit showing lots of perfect skin and looking so gorgeous she took our combined breath away. She smiled dazzling smiles and said sweet, friendly things with a simple charm that absolutely captivated us all. In five minutes we were enslaved. She was in like Flynn.
Raquel gave one of her best performances as Michael York’s accident-prone lover. She handled her almost slapstick part with good humor and finesse. She was gorgeous and funny.
Oliver Reed was the one to be wary of. While he could in his own way be as charming and friendly as Raquel, he was in fact a rough-and-ready barroom scraper, tough as nails, and dangerous.
Oliver had incredible stamina. His studio drivers hated driving for him because he’d be out all night every night boozing and roughing up people and eating live goldfish out of restaurant aquariums. Yet he was always on set on time every morning, his lines down pat, giving his usual first-rate performance. I haven’t the foggiest idea how he did it.
In our endless sword fighting scenes Oliver was very rough with the Spanish stunt men, kicking them around something fierce. Of course, the stunt men had to be very careful of the actors and were forbidden to fight back except as choreographed. During a staged fight near the end of shooting, one of the stunt guys “accidentally” stabbed Oliver for real. His sword point entered Oliver’s hand just below his wrist and came out halfway up his arm. It was a very nasty wound that put Oliver in the local hospital for several days. We all suspected it wasn’t accidental at all—we sniffed revenge.
The screenplay for Musketeers was unusually long and divided into two halves by an intermission. I thought, well, if an intermission worked for Cleopatra with Taylor and Burton, why not for Musketeers with Welch and York? It wasn’t until Musketeers was released as two movies, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, that we realized our producers, the Salkinds, had paid us all for one film and then turned around and sold it as two films. Luckily there was something in Raquel Welch’s contract that allowed us to threaten legal action, and the producers agreed to pay us for the second film. Actors’ (already voluminous) contracts now include an additional “Salkind” clause forbidding this scam.
In my experience all acting jobs are hard serious work, but Musketeers was great fun, too. Richard Lester was a fount of funny story ideas, the actors were all amusing people as well as first-rate performers, the locations were fabulous, and my horse never threw me. I returned home to Los Angeles happy and optimistic, a sure sign that challenges were in store.
DISCOVERING LOVE
In L.A. in the early seventies, everything was just fine on the outside—I had good friends and interesting work, and the fame and admiration I’d worked so hard and been so lucky to achieve. But inside, my old fears and deep insecurities remained curiously unabated. I was still living my life as a prelude to the real thing that I imagined would happen somewhere in the future, when some kind of magical kiss would turn this frog into a prince. In relationships I had to be always right and in control. If I lost the upper hand I was afraid that I’d be overwhelmed. I couldn’t really commit to anyone—I kept one foot out the door, ready to escape when things didn’t go my way. I could like, but I couldn’t love.
My acting was still overcalculated—there were wonderful moments, but I sometimes didn’t trust myself enough to consistently allow the kind of spontaneity that makes really exciting performances. It was a baffling disappointment that my prayers for success, having been generously answered, left me so unexpectedly incomplete. I seemed to have it all, yet I was vaguely aware of having very little of whatever it was (I wasn’t sure) that was of real importance to the art of living.
One afternoon I was standing in my kitchen, on the phone, discussing these dissatisfactions with Johanna Ray, one of my dearest friends. Johanna suggested I see a Gestalt therapist she knew named Don Barenfeld. She hadn’t gotten on with him, but she thought I would. I began working with Don both privately and in group therapy.
Group therapy was a revelation—especially for an actor observing human nature. It offered an intimate view into what makes us tick, to see how alike we all are. Watching people work through resistance, denial, and ignorance into the truth of how they defeated themselves with fictional stories and beliefs about themselves and others was a revelation. Seeing warmth and vitality flow back into their faces when they stepped through their fear and owned up to the truth (the beautiful truth) of what they would have called their own shit was deeply moving. Truth is the alchemy that turns our shit to gold.
However, it took me several months to dare to move from observer to participant. During the early weeks of group, I experienced an odd dichotomy in myself. I could fully see and appreciate the beauty of Don’s work with everyone else. I was excited to watch people drop their negative stuff and begin to bloom. I had on some level a considerable understanding and appreciation of this healing process, but I remained too proud, too passive-aggressive, too frightened of fessing up to my own shit to actively join in the process myself. I couldn’t break out of my habitual, fiercely guarded self-image of charming perfection. Again, I was unable to commit to being a fallible human being. After weeks of silence in these group sessions, Don aptly described me as dying of thirst in a sea of Evian.
During our halting work together Don took two weeks off to attend a workshop at Sky High Ranch in the Mojave Desert with a very interesting spiritual teacher named Brugh Joy. When he returned he was remarkably changed. He seemed much softer, more present, and far less abrasive. Don told me about Brugh’s work, and I was so intrigued I signed up for his next workshop, a seventeen-day retreat with about thirty people. The desert ranch was spare and starkly beautiful, the people were varied and bright, and Brugh was (perhaps literally) a godsend.
A page full of superlatives couldn’t exaggerate the importance of this workshop to the unfolding of my life.
Up to this time love and compassion were real to me only within the safe environment of acting. Dr. Kildare’s most luminous quality was his compassion for his patients, and as an actor I could embody his caring nature (which was not entirely alien to my own nature, however deeply buried it was). But in my daily life my heart remained tightly shut within protective walls of fear. I distrusted myself and therefore couldn’t begin to trust anyone else. Until you lovingly embrace your own existence, you have no context in which to love another person or the world or indeed life itself.
So there I was, driving up to the high desert, a clenched fist fiercely clutching the imagined safety of my habitual life, quite blind to the warm human caress of love. Though I couldn’t have said or even been aware of this at the time, love was in fact unknown to me. And yet I urgently longed for exactly that. Fortune smiled. Brugh’s genius was in facilitating the opening of our hearts to love.
Brugh Joy (the name is for real) had been a brilliant medical doctor who found in the course of his practice that he could feel the various qualities of his patients’ energies with his hands at a slight distance from their bodies. He also found that he could channel healing energy through his hands to his patients. These gifts, combined with his spiritual insights, drew him away from traditional medicine into teaching and spiritual healing.
Sensing these subtle energies and channeling healing energy (essentially love) were a central part of our training at the workshop. Being highly competitive in pursuing personal status of any kind, and harboring the vanity of secret hopes for spiritual superstardom, I, of course, couldn’t feel or do any of it. Others in the group progressed well right from the start, and my ineptitude was extremely painful and humiliating.
For the first few days I was embarrassed and angry with Brugh. I actually stalked out of one session, raging against the whole process, feeling (quite symbolically) sharp chest pains in the area of my heart. I was at war with myself. My habitual, controlling self-image fought for its survival against the urgings of my heart toward openness and freedom.
Brugh was also a master orchestrator of group energies. As we gradually got to know one another and became more immersed in our work and play together (surrounded by the subtle majesty of the desert landscape), we coalesced into a warm, unified group of inquiry and discovery. Our individual personalities, problems, and points of view, while remaining intact, melded into the various notes of a kind of humane music. Little by little our particular aspirations grew to include everyone (even the inevitable person whom you find intensely annoying).
A typical workshop day began before six o’clock when we all got up and in solitude watched the desert sunrise. Shortly after sunrise, we gathered in a large, pillow-lined living room for morning meditation followed by a delicious breakfast in a dining room that overlooked a vast panorama of the desert valley below and the purplish mountains beyond. After about an hour of free time, we would gather in the meeting room and lie down on the carpeted floor and listen to a piece of classical music played at high volume. Brugh believed the music elevated and energized the work session to follow. He then gave a talk and discussed our dreams, and we had a general conversation about our current work. The afternoons were usually free for desert exploration, individual “inner” work, or spiritual reading. Another group meeting followed dinner, after which we’d all return to our cabins for an often too brief night’s sleep. Many of the group meetings involved “energy work,” which taught us about the subtle energy fields that emanate from our bodies. We learned to sense, from another person’s body as well as from our own, a concentrated flow of energy from various points on the body. Those who could do this learned to sense imbalances in others and learned to correct these imbalances with energy that flowed from their own hands, often without actually touching the body.
If this seems difficult to understand, think of people you know who give wonderful hugs or massage therapists who have that special “healing touch.” Whether they know it or not, these people are also working with healing energy that naturally flows from them to you. For example, when you have a headache, a common gesture is to place your hand on your forehead for immediate soothing. The hand is transferring energy to the imbalance in the head, albeit unconsciously.
Even my ironclad heart couldn’t resist the loving energies that seemed to grow daily more intense and inclusive. For the first time in my life I felt the stirrings of love within me. In the energy work sessions, love began to flow through me to the person being treated, and I was opening to the love flowing into me from my fellow students. The workshop, which had begun so painfully, was becoming a series of joyous revelations.
Near the end of our seventeen days, we each had an energy-balancing session with Brugh. When my turn came, he put his hand slightly above my chest, and I felt an absolute waterfall of love pouring into me. Something within me opened to a sublime degree. I felt years of fear and withholding drop away. I was filled to overflowing with this sublime energy. One definition of sublime is “to render finer.” I was rendered finer by this transforming experience.
Predictably when I returned to my seemingly less exalted life in L.A., I experienced a thundering crash. All that I had cultivated in the nurturing safety of our desert community vanished, and old patterns of fear and self-protection reappeared. Being in the presence of a gifted teacher can be profoundly heightening. Brugh opened our hearts and ignited love in us all. Now, back in the everyday world, our challenge was to learn to ignite our own hearts, to nurture our own capacity for love. A good teacher discourages dependency. He empowers the student, not himself. Brugh folded up his magical tent and was gone. Now we were on our own.
Following a week of postpartum blues, I had a wonderfully simple dream. In the dream I could see a slight glow all around my body, and I knew it was the glow of loving spirit. I also knew that if I carefully tended this subtle radiance, it would grow and flourish. When I awoke I knew that my heart was my responsibility, my child, not Brugh’s. I knew that with care my heart would prosper.
LOVE
My most vivid movie memory from a youth flooded with films is a haunting scene in Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad, in which young Sabu, the jungle boy, falls through a vine-covered hole in the jungle floor and tumbles head over heels into a vast cave filled with unbelievable treasure. The glittering cave’s prime glory is a golden scepter containing at its top an immense, flashing ruby. The trove is guarded by a huge, ancient cobra that hisses warnings but eventually recognizes that Sabu is pure of heart and befriends the boy.
Even to this day I’m tantalized, mesmerized by this vision of sparkling treasure. In the past it seemed that the allure of this dazzling vision derived from our culture’s belief that an abundance of material wealth can solve all our problems and bring endless happiness. But the memory of all those fabulous jewels and piles of golden coins has remained so vivid and resonant within me that I’m certain it carries a deeper personal significance.
The treasure hidden beneath the teeming chaos of the jungle of our world is like the divine inner truth of our being. The scepter’s magnificent ruby is our heart, the center of sacred love. This is the treasure of love within the radiant Christ, within the blissful detachment of Buddha. I think the only map to our conscious discovery of this treasure is awareness itself. I suspect the clarity of awareness, the eye of the soul, awakens in us when we tire of and step beyond our preprogrammed, conditioned reactions to life—when we’re psychologically and spiritually free of our past.
We’re talking about the all-pervasiveness of divine love here. There are of course many other aspects of love.
Our culture focuses overwhelmingly on romantic-sexual love, which, though immensely exciting, thrilling, temporarily transforming, and great fun, is exceedingly conditional and dependent for its very existence on pleasure. Once your lover stops giving you what you want, romantic love is yesterday’s newspaper under the litter box. Divine love can pervade romantic love, but I suspect it transform
s romance into something quite different from what we’re used to seeing and hearing about in movies and pop music.
Then there is our love for our work and our creative endeavors. I love to act and to paint. You might love to teach or to build a business or to nurture a garden or a child.
And there’s the unheralded, but profound love of friendship. Romantic love is often most exciting when its object is new, not well known, not familiar, and ripe for conquest. Friendship thrives on time, on knowing its object very well. I suspect that in the long run, friendship partakes of divine love more often and fully than does romance.
It is impossible to comprehend the supreme power, the explosive creativity, the infinite complexity within love’s absolute wholeness. Love is the essence of God, of life, of all that is and is not. Love cannot be captured by thought, and yet love is all we are.
The conditioning-shattering, heart-stopping, amazing truth about divine love is that in all its sublime magnificence it is absolutely, totally free. Like sunlight, like the air, love is within and around each of us at all times without any exceptions or conditions whatever. We have only to open our awareness to it to know that love is already here. There is no distance between us and love, ever.
MARTIN
Little did I know that shortly after glimpsing the blissful heights of impersonal love in Brugh’s workshop, I would bump smack into a personal love relationship that would last twenty-six years and counting.
Our work with Brugh Joy centered on the divine, unconditional, impersonal aspects of love—what I call love the noun. Love, the noun, isn’t primarily something you do, it’s something you are, a state of being. When you open to this level of love, you radiate love in all directions simply because that’s what you are.
Personal love is more a verb, an activity, a choice, something you do. Divine love has no object, it just is. Personal love is an emotion directed from you to a particular someone else or something else. Divine love shines freely like the sun on everything. Personal love tends to be selective and highly conditional. Of course personal love, the verb, can be enriched, indeed transformed by unconditional love.
Shattered Love Page 9