9
The Playwright would resent it, that everybody knew. Except him. The identity of the Blond Actress who’d been cast, for the reading, as his Magda.
Yes, he’d been told a name. A mumbled name. Over the phone. By the artistic director, Max Pearlman, who’d said in his usual hurried, harried manner that the Playwright would know everyone in the cast “except possibly the actress who’s reading Magda. She’s new to the Ensemble. She’s new to New York. I never met her before a few weeks ago when she walked into my office. She’s done a few films, and she’s fed up with Hollywood bullshit and restless to learn real acting, and she’s come to study with us.” Pearlman paused. His was a theatrical manner, in which pauses are as significant as punctuation to a writer. “Frankly, she isn’t bad.”
The Playwright, too much on his mind, the humiliating dream of Back There yet heavy in his gut, hadn’t asked to hear the woman’s name repeated or to be told anything more about her background. This was to be only an in-house reading at the New York Ensemble of Theatre Artists, the company with which the Playwright had been associated for twenty years; it wasn’t a public or a staged reading. Only members of the Ensemble were invited. No applause was allowed. Why would the Playwright pause to ask his old friend Pearlman, for whom he felt little personal warmth but whom he trusted absolutely in all things theatrical, to repeat the name of a little-known actress? Especially an actress not from New York? The Playwright knew only New York.
Too much on his mind! A swarm of gnats, gnat thoughts, buzzed continuously about the Playwright’s head, waking hours and often when he slept. In many of his dreams he continued to work. Work, work! No woman had ever been able to compete. A few women had won his body, but never his soul. His wife, long jealous, was jealous no longer. He’d taken little note of her emotional withdrawal, as he’d taken but cursory note that she was often away, visiting relatives. In the Playwright’s obsessive work dreams, his fingers plucked at words yet untyped on his Olivetti portable; he strained to hear dialogue of surpassing beauty and feeling yet unarticulated in actual sounds. His life was work, for only work justified his existence; and each hour contributed to, or more often failed to contribute to, the completion of his work.
The guilty conscience of mid-century America. Mercantile-consumer America. Tragic America. For the counterminings of Tragedy strike deeper than the cheap quick fixes of Comedy.
10
In the drafty loft space the reading began. Six actors on folding chairs on a raised platform, in a semicircle beneath bare lightbulbs. A perpetual dripping from a lavatory close by. The accumulating smoke of cigarettes, for some of the actors smoked, and many in the audience of about forty people.
Of the six actors, all but the two eldest, veterans of the Ensemble and of the Playwright’s plays, were visibly nervous. The Playwright for all his scholarly-rabbinical reserve had a reputation for being severely critical of actors, exasperated by their limitations. Don’t try to understand me too quickly he was notorious for having said, more than once.
The Playwright was seated in the first row, only a few yards from the actors. Immediately he began to stare at the Blond Actress. Through the lengthy first scene, in which the Blond Actress as Magda had no speaking role, he stared at her, now recognizing her, a heavy blood blush darkening his face. Marilyn Monroe? Here, at the New York Ensemble? Under the tutelage of the canny self-promoter Pearlman? This explained the murmurous excitement in the audience before the reading began; an air of anticipation the Playwright hadn’t dared to imagine might have to do with him. In fact, the Playwright now remembered having glanced at an item in Walter Winchell’s column not long before about the Blond Actress’s “mysterious disappearance” from Hollywood, in violation of a studio contract requiring her to begin work on a new film. Beneath an accompanying photo of Monroe was the caption RELOCATED TO NEW YORK CITY? The photo resembled an advertising logo, a human face reduced to its predominant features, the heavy-lidded eyes and sultry gash of a mouth in a parody of erotic supplication.
“My Magda. Her?”
But the Blond Actress who held the Playwright’s script in her trembling hands did not much resemble Marilyn Monroe. After the initial buzz of interest, the novelty quickly faded. Members of the Ensemble were actors and professional theater people to whom celebrity was fairly common. And talent, even genius. Their judgment would be impartial and unsentimental.
The Blond Actress was seated in the center of the semicircle as if Pearlman had placed her there for protection. You saw that, unlike the other, more experienced stage actors, she held herself unnaturally still, her shoulders squared and her head, which seemed just slightly oversized, large for her slender frame, brought forward. She was nervous, licking her lips compulsively. Her eyes glistened with withheld tears. Her face was a girl’s face, the skin markedly pale and shadows beneath the eyes exaggerated by the overhead lights. She wore a cable-knit sweater bleached of all color by the stark lighting, and dark woolen slacks tucked into ankle-high boots. Her blond hair was plaited in a single short braid at the nape of her neck. She wore no jewelry, no makeup. You wouldn’t have recognized her. She was no one. The Playwright felt a stab of resentment, that Pearlman had dared to cast the Blond Actress in his play without more explicitly consulting him. His play! A piece of his heart. And the Blond Actress, for better or worse, would draw all the audience’s attention.
But when at last the Blond Actress spoke, in Magda’s voice, at the start of scene two, she was tentative and searching and it was immediately clear that her voice was too small for the space. This wasn’t a Hollywood sound stage with microphones, amplification, close-ups. Her excitement, or her terror, was mesmerizing to the audience as if she’d been stripped naked before them. She’s miscast, the Playwright thought. Not my Magda. He was furious with Pearlman, who leaned against a wall close by, chewing on an unlit cigar and watching the scene with an expression of rapt absorption. He’s in love with her. The bastard.
Yet the Blond Actress, as Magda, was so appealing! There was a flamelike quivering in her voice, in the very uncertainty of her gestures, that made you sympathize deeply with her: her plight as Magda, the nineteen-year-old daughter of immigrant Hungarians, circa 1925, hired out to work in a suburban New Jersey Jewish household, and her plight as the Blond Actress, a Hollywood concoction and something of a national joke, bravely pitted against New York stage performers in a pitilessly exposed environment.
“Oh, excuse me? Mr. Pearlman? C-can I do this again? Please.”
The request was made in naïveté and desperation. The Blond Actress’s voice quavered. Even the Playwright, long a stoic of the theater, winced. For at the Ensemble, no actor ever dared interrupt a scene to address Pearlman or anyone; only the director had the authority to interrupt, an authority he exercised with kingly restraint. But the Blond Actress knew nothing of such a protocol. Her New York comrades observed her as spectators at a zoo might gaze at a rare, gorgeous, primitive species of simian ancestor, possessed of speech and yet lacking the intelligence to speak correctly. In the awkward silence the Blond Actress squinted over at Pearlman, with a grimace of a smile and a flutter of eyelids meant perhaps to be seductive, and said again, in a husky, breathy voice, “Oh, I know I can do better. Oh, please!” The appeal was so raw, it might have been Magda herself who spoke. Women in the audience who had studied acting with Pearlman and had unwisely fallen in love with him and allowed themselves to be “loved” by him in return, however briefly and sporadically, felt in that instant not a furious rivalry with the Blond Actress but a sisterly sympathy and a fear for her, who was so vulnerable, risking a public rebuke; men stiffened in embarrassment. Pearlman shoved his cigar into his mouth and bit down hard. The other actors stared at their scripts. You could see (so everyone would claim!) that Pearlman was about to say something withering to the Blond Actress, in his terse, cold manner, quick as a reptile’s tongue. Yet Pearlman only grunted, “Sure.”
11
Pearlman! The Pla
ywright had known the controversial founder of the New York Ensemble of Theatre Artists for a quarter of a century and had always feared the man, in secret. For Pearlman reserved his deepest respect, whatever the enthusiasms of the day, the week, the season, for dramatists who were dead and “classic.” He had been responsible for bringing to postwar New York, in radically spare, politicized productions, García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, Ibsen’s The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken; he had not only directed but translated Chekhov, daring to present Chekhov as the playwright had wished, not in the dirgelike tones of tragedy but as bittersweet comedy. He would claim to have “discovered” the Playwright though the two were of the same generation and of the same German-Jewish immigrant background.
In interviews that rankled the Playwright, Pearlman spoke of the “mysterious and mystical” collaborative process of the theater in which “part-talents” merge, groping, fumbling, in the way of Darwin’s theory of evolution through modification, to create unique works of art. “As if I wouldn’t have written my plays without him.” Yet it was true, the Playwright’s early plays had been developed at the Ensemble, and Pearlman had directed the premiere production of the Playwright’s most ambitious play, the one for which he’d become famous and to which his name would be forever attached. Pearlman professed himself a spiritual brother of the Playwright’s, not a rival; he’d congratulated the Playwright on every award, every honor the Playwright had received, while uttering his cryptic remarks within the Playwright’s hearing: “Genius is what remains when reputations die.”
Yet, unexpectedly, for he’d been a mediocre actor himself, Pearlman shone most brilliantly as a trainer of actors. The New York Ensemble of Theatre Artists had acquired international fame for Pearlman’s intimate workshops and tutorials; he taught both beginning actors, if they were talented, and actors who were already professionals. The Ensemble quickly became a haven for such actors, successful Broadway and television performers who yearned to return to their roots or yearned to acquire roots. The Ensemble’s low-rent midtown quarters became a place of refuge, not unlike a religious retreat. Meeting Pearlman had changed the lives of many actors and rejuvenated their careers, if not always commercially. Pearlman promised, “Here at my theater, a ‘success’ can fail. A ‘success’ can fall flat on his face or his ass and no reviewer will take note. A ‘success’ can admit he doesn’t know shit about his profession. He can begin again at zero. He can be twelve years old, four years old. He can be an infant. If you can’t crawl, my friend, you can’t walk. If you can’t walk, you can’t run. If you can’t run, you can’t soar. Begin with the basics. The aim of theater is to break the heart. Not to entertain. Crap TV and the tabloids entertain. The aim of theater is to transform the spectator. If you can’t transform the spectator, give it up. The aim of theater—Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best—is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there’s no catharsis, there’s no theater. At the Ensemble, we don’t coddle you but we’ll respect you. If you show us you can open your veins, we’ll respect you. If it’s more bullshit praise you want from asshole critics and reviewers, you’ve come to the wrong place. I don’t ask much from my actors: just that you scour out your guts.” To Pearlman, the most tragic of all performers was the prodigy who, like the great Nijinski, reaches the peak of genius in adolescence and is doomed to an equally premature decline.
“The true actor,” Pearlman said, “will continue to grow until the day he dies. Death is just the last scene of the last act. We’re in rehearsal!”
The Playwright, given to brooding self-doubt, afflicted with a vanity very different from Pearlman’s, had to admire this man. What energy! What supreme self-confidence! Pearlman reminded the Playwright of a matador. He was a short man, not five feet seven; a dandy, without being handsome, well-groomed, or well-dressed; his skin was coarse and exuded a sweaty, febrile odor; he combed his thinning hair slickly across his ruddy scalp; in his early forties, he’d suddenly had his stained front teeth capped so his smile now glared like reflector lights. Pearlman was notorious for keeping actors in exhausting rehearsals past midnight, in the days before Equity contracts; yet he was admired, or at least respected, for never demanding more of anyone than he demanded of himself. He worked twelve-hour, fifteen-hour days. He freely acknowledged that he was an obsessive; he boasted of being “selectively psychotic.” He’d been married three times and had five children; he’d had numerous love affairs, including a few (it was rumored) with young men; he was attracted to “the spark within” regardless of an individual’s appearance. (So he would insist, in interviews, that his interest in working with the Blond Actress had nothing to do with the woman’s beauty but only with her “spiritual gift.”) Several of Pearlman’s acclaimed actors had faces you would have to call “idiosyncratic”; alone of American theater directors, Pearlman dared to cast heavyset men and women in his productions if they were qualified; he’d earned some admiration, but mostly derision, for having cast a large-boned six-foot Hedda Gabler in an Ensemble production of Ibsen’s play—“My point being, Hedda is the lonely Amazon in a world of pygmy males.” Pearlman might be ridiculed, but Pearlman was never wrong.
“It’s true. I owe him a lot. But hardly everything.”
The Playwright was a tall lanky storklike man. He had a reserved, watchful manner, guarded eyes, and a mouth slow to smile. In the New York theater world he was not a “character,” he was a “citizen.” A hard worker, a man of integrity and responsibility. Not a poet perhaps (like his rival Tennessee Williams) but a craftsman. One of his few eccentricities was wearing white shirts and ties at play rehearsals, as if rehearsals were nine-to-five work in the mode of his salesman father in the Rahway Kelvinator store. By contrast, Max Pearlman was short and barrel-bodied and garrulous, in slovenly sweaters and trousers lacking belts, on his head a Greek fisherman’s cap or a jaunty fedora or, in winter, his trademark black Astrakhan lamb’s-wool hat that added several inches to his height. Where the Playwright handed over scrupulously written notes to actors, during rehearsals or following readings, Pearlman engaged in hour-long monologues, fascinating and exhausting his listeners in equal measure. Where the Playwright had a long lean austere face some women thought handsome, like a weathered Roman bust, Pearlman had a face even his mistresses could not call handsome, pudgy and pushed together with bulbous lips and nose. Yet what alert, appreciative eyes! Where the Playwright laughed softly with the air of a boy surprised by laughter in some space (school, synagogue?) in which laughter is forbidden, Pearlman laughed with zest as if laughter was a good thing, therapeutic as a sneeze. Pearlman’s laugh! You could hear it through walls. On the noisy street outside the theater, you could hear it. Actors adored Pearlman for laughing at their comic lines though he might have heard them dozens of times; during a play performance, Pearlman’s habit was to stand at the rear of the theater well into the play’s run, like all devoted, monomaniacal directors so wired into his actors’ performances that his face and body twitched in sympathy with them, laughing loudly, the loudest and most contagious laughter in the house.
Pearlman spoke of the Theater as you’d speak of God. Or more than God, for theater was something in which you participated and lived. “Die for it! For your talent! Scour out your guts! Be hard on yourself, you can take it. It’s life and death up there on the stage, my friends. And if not life and death, it’s nothing.”
It was what I revered in him. Oh, he could reach right in . . . .
But he exploited you, didn’t he? As a woman.
A woman? What do I care about myself as a woman? I never did. . . . I came to New York to learn to act.
Why do you give Pearlman so much credit? I hate it, in interviews, you exaggerate his role in your life. He eats it up, it’s great publicity for him.
Oh, but it’s true . . . isn’t it?
You just want to deflect attention from yourself
. It’s what women do. Defer to bullies. You knew how to act, darling, when you came here.
I did? No.
Certainly you did. I hate this, too, the way you misinterpret yourself.
I do? Gee. . . .
You were a damned good actress when you came to New York. He didn’t create you.
You created me.
Nobody created you, you were always yourself.
Well, I guess I knew. . . something. When I did movies. In fact I was reading Stanislavski. And the diary of, of . . . Nijinski.
Nijinski.
Nijinski. But I didn’t know what I knew. In practice. It was just. . . what happened when I had to perform. To improvise. Like striking a match. . . .
The hell with that. You were a natural actress from the start.
Oh, hey! Why’re you mad, Daddy? I don’t get this.
I’m only just saying, darling, you were born with the gift. You have a kind of genius. You don’t need theory. Forget Stanislavski! Nijinski! And him.
I never think of him.
Him messing with you . . . your mind, your talent . . . like somebody’s big thumbs gripping a butterfly, smearing and breaking the wings.
Hey, I’m no butterfly. Feel my muscle? My leg here. I’m a dancer.
Bullshit theory is for somebody like him: can’t act, can’t write.
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