Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  Just for fun, I rented a little super 8 film camera with a microphone on it. I put together a short comedy-of-errors film titled The Audition, set in the small town of Beason, Illinois. A big-city, out-of-work New York hack is hired to direct Hamlet for a Beason community theater production of the play. The director starts with a grandiose speech, then the various citizens of the town try out for the play by giving their best rendition of the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

  Everyone in the company was in the movie, so today this is considered everyone’s first film performance. Terry starred as the hack director, Dan Ville, who begins to lose his mind as each audition gets worse and worse until finally, after it’s all over and he’s sitting alone in the empty theater, he closes his eyes in exhaustion and dreams of his perfect Hamlet—which, since he’s a terrible director himself, is not all that great. Moira played the assistant director, Cheryl Soul, a Corn Chex–chomping nutcase who crunches on cereal constantly but absolutely loves everyone’s audition. Jeff played a character called Billy Guile, a local car dealer with a bad haircut and a hideously ugly plaid jacket. Someone has coaxed him into auditioning, so he walks up with a potbelly and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and, bored to tears and a bit aggravated at being there, delivers his Hamlet speech like he’s got some bad indigestion. Then he just quits in the middle of the speech because he’s tired and wants to sit down. Al Wilder played a character in a hideously ugly leisure suit who performed the lead role in Beason’s most recent musical, so he’s overconfident, feeling spunky, and turns the classic speech into a song-and-dance number. Laurie Metcalf danced behind Wilder, dressed up as the self-described “ugliest gal in town,” complete with crazy hair, dopey glasses, and no dancing skills whatsoever. When Wilder is asked by the director why Laurie is onstage, he replies, “She’s my chorus.” H. E. Baccus played Julius Rudell, an eccentric man in very tight shorts with an inflated vision of himself, and Malkovich was the local numbskull called Two-Barrel Wimer.

  It was a wonderful experiment in how stupid we could be. We shot the twelve-minute movie in the basement, then realized some of the film I’d bought wasn’t equipped for sound. We had to shoot part of the movie again. Joan Allen was part of the first shoot, cast as a dancing girl with Laurie, but she couldn’t be there for the reshoot, so she only appeared in the soundless outtakes I strung together as a blooper reel. We rented a projector and a screen and threw a couple of parties where we showed the film. I still have copies, and one of these days, who knows, maybe it’ll show up again.

  At one point, Terry decided to leave again. Then he wanted back in again. This time, we held a meeting to decide if Terry could rejoin. We all argued and shouted about “standing on our principles” and “being fully committed.” Moira was there, and we were still dating, although our relationship was constantly up and down, on and off. Her father was dying of cancer then, and all the chaos and stress of the meeting prompted Moira to boil over. Her passion turned to fury, and she lost it. I mean, absolutely lost it. She started yelling, “How can we not let our friend back in the company?! My father is dying, and this is all so stupid! If we’re a company, then we’re a company, and we should stay together no matter what!”

  She ran out of the basement into the grassy yard of the school yelling at the top of her lungs. We all ran out into the yard after her. Her logic made sense. Terry was our friend. Moira’s dad was dying. Terry wanted back in the company. Why did we care so passionately about something so trivial when life-and-death issues were all around us?

  Moira was still screaming and crying. We grabbed hold of her and hung on. Neighbors poked their heads out of doorways. She screamed and screamed, and the commotion grew so loud the police showed up. Moira calmed down. The police left. We all felt bad for Moira, bad for Terry, and we ended the meeting. Of course, Terry was back in the company. He was a founder and our friend. In those early days, the drama wasn’t limited to the stage.

  I don’t think any of us knew exactly what we were doing. The basement cocoon we created gave us a foundation to try anything, do anything, become anything—and the freedom of the space allowed us ultimately to glimpse the world through a wider lens. All of us were committed to becoming better at what we were doing, and we often mixed and mingled our directing and performing, directing one play, acting in the next, sometimes doing both. In those early days, we didn’t talk about going to Hollywood or New York or being in the movies. We wanted to do our own thing—there, in Chicagoland—and I think by being in the basement, isolated, we developed the chip on our shoulder necessary to survive. We felt we had a lot of emerging talent and wanted our work to feel real and raw and fearless, and we worked hard to keep it deeply rooted in the sheer grit that we had onstage together. Whether it was true or not, we needed to somehow believe our work was different, unique, and special. It would take some time and effort before anyone tried to branch out beyond our city, but I think in those early days we all felt like we were getting better and stronger and more confident as artists, and that the sky would be the limit—eventually.

  What I know today is that our theater benefited from a larger institution—the United States of America. The country of our birth allowed us any number of freedoms that we subconsciously used and enjoyed and benefited from, even though we didn’t realize it. We had freedom of speech at Steppenwolf—we could express thoughts and ideas about anything in public or private. The people around us might disagree or debate us or push back when they thought we were being stupid, but by no means were we ever stifled in what we said or thought. We exercised the freedom to assemble. We used a sort of freedom of religion, although nothing we did was religious, which was a freedom all its own. No one forced us to dress a certain way or talk a certain way because of their beliefs. We were free to live or travel anywhere we wanted, and we were free to work any job we wanted—so we played in bands and created our own theater and worked in sewers where we found baby racoons. We were free to educate ourselves by any means possible, formal or practical. And all this freedom led to something. It allowed us to create and innovate. It allowed us to dream big. Gratefully, it allowed us to be us. Everyone who stayed with the theater in those early days went on to make their livings as actors and directors. And I think everyone would agree that those days spent in the basement provided the solid foundation for each of our careers. The building of Steppenwolf Theatre is truly an American dream story, a story of starting with nothing but an idea and a passion, and building it into something purposeful, meaningful, and successful. And you know, one of these days I’m going to have to get around to reading the Hermann Hesse novel.

  Moira and I got together as a couple a year after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, and I started to meet her family members who had served in the US Army. Moira’s brother, Arthur Harris, was a helicopter pilot, having flown eight hundred combat hours in Vietnam. Moira’s oldest brother, Boyd McCanna “Mac” Harris, had been to Vietnam twice, first as a lieutenant and platoon leader, and second as captain and company commander. He’d received the Silver Star for gallantry in combat. Moira’s sister, Amy, went through ROTC in college and went into the army herself after graduation. She met and married a great guy, Jack Treese, who’d served as a combat medic with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. Jack earned two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. When Arthur came home from Vietnam, he withdrew from things, and I would see him only on rare occasions when Moira and I would visit her mother. But from time to time, Mac, Jack, and Amy came to visit us in Chicago and would see our plays.

  I didn’t spend a ton of time with these veterans at first, but anytime we got together, we talked about deeper matters, and as I slowly learned more and more about the people who protected our freedoms, I began to look for ways to give back.

  In 1976 and 1977, Mac came to see a few of our basement plays whenever he was on leave from his assignment as a tactical officer at West Point. I was a pretty ragged kid then, with torn-up jeans and a T-shirt and lots of hair.
He was spit-shined, strong as Atlas, and had a deep, powerful voice.

  “Gary, what are your goals?” Mac asked me one day after a show. He wasn’t grilling me. I sensed kindness within his toughness. He was interested in other people’s lives and genuinely wanted to know about my goals. But I wasn’t sure if he was asking about my goals in life or my designs on his sister. Possibly, he wanted to know where we wanted to go as a theater company. So I described my goals for Steppenwolf, how I wanted to take it as big as possible. We had a conversation, a real conversation. This elite former company commander and me, a long-haired American twenty-one-year-old with big dreams. Of all things, we connected on the subject of leadership.

  In high school, at the height of the war, I had been oblivious to so much that was happening in Vietnam. Yet in the early years of Steppenwolf, as I began to form genuine friendships with these military veterans, they began to open my eyes to so much more. I knew the war hadn’t gone well. I remembered casualty reports on the news and knew the reports were grim. But now I was meeting actual veterans who’d lived there, served there, fought there, and I knew that many of the Vietnam veterans who’d returned home hadn’t been honored for their service.

  I didn’t know what to do yet about this, if anything. But I felt something stirring inside of me. Honor needed to be granted. Respect was due. A simple “thanks” needed to be said. It would take a few years before I figured out any sort of next step. But in the meantime, I had theater and Moira’s family members, and I knew something in our country desperately needed to change. I would start where I could. With Steppenwolf. And without being able to articulate it this way yet, I would begin to do my part to give back.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Corner of Hollywood and Love

  Moira, sweet Moira. Her story—our story—is intertwined with Steppenwolf and Chicago and Hollywood and the anything-goes culture of the day, as well as hopes and dreams and stops and starts.

  In the summer of 1975, Steppenwolf was under way with one final production of the original group of high school kids, a play called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel. My only involvement was writing the music. It would be another year before the fuller ensemble formed, and over the course of the summer, I worked part-time for my dad, played in my bands, and as often as I could I would take a break from all that to visit Terry and Jeff at Illinois State University.

  The school had a summer repertory theater for students, and Jeff and Terry took me to see a production of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize– winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The actress playing “Maggie the Cat” absolutely came alive up onstage. Maggie is a desperate character, rejected and scorned, who wears a negligee for the entire first act of the show. She attempts to seduce her estranged husband while trying to coax her dying father-in-law to give them his Mississippi cotton plantation.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the actress playing Maggie—long brown hair to the middle of her back, blue eyes and beautifully expressive face, and a dynamic stage presence. She had the raw power of classic Broadway and film actresses like Colleen Dewhurst or Geraldine Page, and her beauty reminded me of Natalie Wood or Sophia Loren.

  After the show, Jeff introduced me to her. She was a theater student named Moira Harris, and our initial meeting was quick. Somehow, I found out that she had a crush on Jeff, so I headed back up to Highland Park and continued playing in my bands and working for my dad. I didn’t see or hear of her for some time, although later, when she played the role of Blanche DuBois in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire at ISU, I hopped in my ’69 Camaro and drove down to see that play too. Once again, she was electric. I never knew what she would do next onstage, and every movement she made captivated me. And once again, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  In January 1976, Jeff and Terry and I started holding meetings at Illinois State to put together the Steppenwolf ensemble, and Moira was one of the actresses Jeff and Terry invited to the meetings. We held lots of meetings, and after one I drove Moira back to her dorm. We clicked quickly. She was funny, offbeat, highly intelligent, and sexy. When I stopped in front of her dorm, Moira jumped out, said a quick “see ya,” and hurried inside. Rats.

  It wasn’t until the summer of 1976, after Moira had joined Steppenwolf, that she began to show any interest in me. Everybody in our new company who came from Illinois State needed a place to live. I’d already found an apartment in Lake Bluff that Terry and I were going to share, so everybody piled into our apartment at the start, sort of commune-style, and all kinds of things happened in this little apartment until people found other places to rent. Moira and Nancy Evans soon found a rental to split in nearby Highwood, and Moira and I realized our attraction for each other was growing. Pretty soon, we became a couple and soon after decided to live together. Moira’s parents were none too happy about our decision. It was the 1970s, the days of “anything goes,” and Moira and I squabbled and broke up, got back together, then squabbled some more, then broke up, then got back together. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  After our summer season of four one-act plays at Steppenwolf, we opened the fall 1976 season with a play called Look, We’ve Come Through, and it flopped—our first play that really tanked—but as an ensemble we laughed it off. (We should have been tipped off about this play, because the director, H. E. Baccus, found it in a book titled Broadway’s Beautiful Losers.) After that, we started putting together The Sea Horse with Moira and me in main roles and John Malkovich directing. I loved being onstage with Moira. But just before opening night, she developed phlebitis in her leg, a highly painful condition where a vein becomes inflamed. We sought medical help right away, and doctors ordered her to stay off her feet for a while. Moira couldn’t go on. Holy cow! It was our opening performance. Tickets were sold, and we even had a few potential donors coming that night. We started to scramble. We asked the few critics who were reviewing us at the time to hold off until Moira was back, and John jumped into action to find a replacement. The show must go on!

  Rondi Reed, a classmate of all the ISU folks, had performed the same play the previous year, so Malkovich called her up and promised her fifty bucks for a one-night performance. She drove up from Bloomington-Normal and met me for the first time ever about fifteen minutes before the curtain went up. It’s a highly physical play that contains some violent scenes. Moira and I had never choreographed all of our movements, so I explained to Rondi that in rehearsals Moira and I just kind of whaled on each other during those moments. The lights dimmed, the curtain went up, and Rondi and I did the play. She pulled off the performance brilliantly, and thankfully nobody got hurt. The show played well to the audience, and Rondi got her fifty bucks and headed back to Illinois State.

  But what about the next night? Laurie Metcalf had returned to ISU that fall to finish her final semester at school, so John called and asked if she would be able to take time off to come back and help. Laurie is an amazingly quick study, so the next day she learned the part in the car on the way up to Highland Park, and when she arrived I also explained to her that for the fight scenes we would just go at each other. Crazy, but it worked. Laurie continued brilliantly in the role for the rest of that weekend. The following week Moira felt better again, came back full force, and was awesome. The critics came, the show, Moira, and I got good reviews, and it did well for us. So, it all worked out in the end. And since Laurie was already in Steppenwolf, we didn’t have to pay her. Hey, fifty bucks was fifty bucks.

  Steppenwolf put on more plays throughout 1976 and 1977, and from time to time we moved a few shows into the city. In the summer of 1977, we were able to pull some funding together to rent a bigger, more professional space on the North Side of Chicago called the Jane Addams Hull House. This was our first official run in the city of Chicago. We remounted two of our one-acts, Birdbath and The Indian Wants the Bronx, and, later, another play called Our Late Night. I was not in that play, so I took a bass-playing gig in the Quad Cities to back up a vocal group
, seven weeks of shows at the John Deere convention. I remember being there on August 16, 1977, when we heard the news that Elvis Presley had died. Sad to see the King go. We played a few Elvis songs that night.

  The one-acts did well that summer, the other show flopped, and we tried, as always, to learn from our mistakes in order to make our shows better. In fall 1978, Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theater Company, founded by William H. Macy and David Mamet, among others, hired seven out of the nine actors in our ensemble to be in a play called Fifth of July, written by the great playwright Lanford Wilson. It was the first time members of our company got paid for acting—eight shows a week for a hundred bucks per person. After taxes, it dropped to eighty-eight bucks a week, and the money didn’t go far. We all ate a lot of mac and cheese back then. A can of tuna fish mixed in was a big treat.

  Some family location shuffling turned out to have a big impact. My parents decided to move to Los Angeles where Dad opened the West Coast office of his film editing business. Mom, Dad, my brother, and my sister moved out to California while I stayed back in Highwood, living with Moira. Steppenwolf grew stronger all the time, although no one yet made a living from acting. We were into our second season of plays as a full ensemble and growing, yet we were all still working day jobs.

  Neither Moira nor I had ever been to California, so in the summer of 1978, we took a break from theater and visited my parents for a couple of weeks. Moira and I were at another tense point in our relationship—so tense we wondered if we should break up for good. We’d broken up a few times before, but a visceral magnetism always pulled us back together. Still, this time we visited my parents with the plan to break up after we returned to Chicago.