by Gary Sinise
California was amazing to us midwestern kids. We did all the touristy things. We drove up the coast from L.A. to San Francisco with my parents, marveling at the ocean the whole way. We stopped in the romantic towns of Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea. We headed back to L.A. and toured Universal Studios and Hollywood Boulevard. My mom took us to Beverly Hills to see the stars’ homes, then down to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where we put our hands in the handprints and saw the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Moira and I really enjoyed our trip, even though throughout our travels, the big decision of whether to break up for good still hung over our heads.
When we returned to Chicago, we decided to give it one more go, but our relationship remained rocky. While we were working at the St. Nicholas on Fifth of July, Moira’s father, who’d been battling lung cancer for some time, was not doing well at all. Moira had a new day job as a receptionist at a law firm in Chicago where one of the attorneys developed a crush on her. Moira’s parents and older sister wanted her to break up with me and take up with the attorney. So Moira felt very torn at this time. We loved each other, but our relationship spiked up and plunged down, always confused. During the run of Fifth of July, Moira’s father passed away. It was hard on her, and I tried my best to help her through.
In January 1979, Chicago experienced a blisteringly cold winter with record amounts of snowfall. Steppenwolf rented the Hull House again and was set to perform the absurdist drama Exit the King during one of our hardest winters ever. Snow piled high throughout Chicago, over people’s heads in some places, and people literally rode snowmobiles up and down the street in front of the theater. We wondered if anyone would come to the play. In typical Steppenwolf style, we threw everything we had into the show, and after it opened critics reviewed it well. But given the cold nights and frosty streets, and perhaps the nontraditional tone of the play, hardly anyone showed up to see it. After the last show, we got together at someone’s apartment. Malkovich looked at me, and I looked at Malkovich, and Jeff looked at Terry, and Terry looked at Jeff. No one knew what to do or say. Steppenwolf was broke, completely flat out of money. It was maybe our lowest point as a company.
The winter ice thawed. In the spring, back in the basement in Highland Park, Steppenwolf somehow scraped up enough cash to put on another play. But in my quietest moments I began to have doubts about what I was doing and I wondered if I should take a break from the theater. Try something else. It was just so difficult to make acting a career. Did I actually have the stuff to make it? I decided not to be a part of the play. Instead, I could take advantage of the opportunity of my parents having a place to stay in California and give Hollywood a try instead. So Moira and I made a decision to take a break from Steppenwolf, move out to Los Angeles, and live with my parents for a while—and we also decided to get married. Mom was thrilled and jumped into wedding planning with Moira, but I could tell something was churning in Moira’s mind.
In Los Angeles, I worked with my dad at his editing business and tried to land auditions anywhere I could think of, but everywhere I went, I heard the same thing. Casting directors asked, “Where did you study?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t study. I started a theater company in Chicago.” And they said, “Go get some acting lessons and come back.”
Dad knew someone at the daytime soap General Hospital, so I landed a job for one day as an extra. It was a disco scene with the two stars, Luke and Laura, one of my first brushes with being on set. I danced in the background at a club while Luke and Laura played their scene. This was my first experience in Hollywood, just one of a dozen extras shaking my hips in the background. I felt like an idiot, and afterward I wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but at least it put a few bucks in my pocket.
A tiny Hollywood theater called the Met had placed an ad in the newspaper. They were looking for an actor to step into the role of the son in a play called Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. Malkovich had performed the same show a year earlier in Chicago—not with Steppenwolf—and I’d seen it, so I was already familiar with the play. They were auditioning actors because the guy playing the son had been in the role awhile. It was an “equity waiver” production in a theater with only fifty-five seats. Equity is the term given to the theater actors’ union, and under an equity waiver contract, in theaters with under ninety-nine seats, equity actors can work basically for free and do four performances a week, a total of eighty shows of the same production, before a regular union contract needs to be negotiated. The Met theater wanted to keep the show running without going union. If you act in an equity show, you waive a salary, but you get paid gas money, with the chance that agents, casting directors, and film producers will wander into the show and see you. So I auditioned and landed the role of the young son named Wesley. Sally Kirkland and James Gammon, two well-known Hollywood staples, played the mom and dad. Wesley was a great part, a wild kid who is cursed and ends up going completely crazy. There is a live lamb onstage throughout the show, and toward the end of the play the wild kid walks onstage stark naked, picks up the lamb, and carries it offstage. My parents came to my opening night. Look, Mom! It’s me in my birthday suit. Yikes! We started doing four shows a week.
It was hilarious how poor we all were, how desperately we all wanted to make it into the movie business. Gammon lived across the alley from the theater in a tiny shoebox of a walk-up, and he’d done more than one of these equity shows. He’d become so used to doing the play that he simply hung out in his living room watching TV until his scene came up. He would then pop across the alley, do the scene, then amble off home again. I wasn’t quite this industry-weary yet. I was thrilled to be part of the show, and lo and behold, an agent actually came to see me and even landed me a few auditions. They were all busts.
But I had the play. Meanwhile, Mom was planning the wedding, and I was trying to figure out what Moira was thinking. One day, shortly before the wedding date, Moira told me she planned to fly home to Illinois to spend some time with her mom before coming back in time for the wedding. A couple days after she landed in Chicago, the phone rang.
“Gary, I don’t want to get married,” Moira said. “I’m not coming back.”
“Wh-what?” I said.
She paused, then added, “I can’t do it.”
“Wait! Invitations have gone out. We’ve got all this food ordered.”
“I know, but I’m not going to do it. I can’t. I just can’t.”
We were both young. We’d been through our good times and some difficult times, and looking back I’m not surprised at her reluctance to get married. Deep down, I think we both had some fear about making lifelong vows.
I hung up and told my parents the wedding was off. I didn’t say much more than that, and let my parents deal with the mess of cancellations and everything else. Moira stayed in Chicago, and I stayed in Hollywood and kept doing the play. Eventually I found out that Moira had returned to California with her mother. Reflecting on the death of her father, Moira had decided to become a nurse, so while taking acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute, she also was going to nursing school. But we didn’t see each other. We didn’t connect. We didn’t talk.
In late summer 1979, I found out that Robert Redford was making a big movie called Ordinary People, and I landed an audition but didn’t get called back. How could that be?! I was perfect for this role, I thought. Mr. Redford didn’t know what he was missing. The story takes place in Lake Forest, Illinois, right next to Highland Park where I grew up. This is me! I already know this character inside and out! I should be playing this part! I’d heard all these Hollywood urban myths, like the one where Steven Spielberg climbs over the fence at Universal Studios and gets his start in the film industry. I thought, Hey, I can do that too. As soon as he sees me, Mr. Redford will cast me. All I need is for him to see me face-to-face!
So I sneaked into the Warner Bros. lot, planted myself down on the couch in the office of casting director Penny Perry, and informed the receptionist that I wouldn�
��t leave until I could have an audition with Mr. Redford himself. The receptionist asked if I had an appointment. I said no, but explained the story. The receptionist went and told Penny Perry, and Penny came out and asked in a kind, but very flat voice: “Gary, what are you doing?”
“I know I wasn’t cast,” I said. “But I grew up in Highland Park. I’m perfect for this movie! I need to see Robert Redford.”
She sighed. “Sorry. You are not going to see Robert Redford.”
“Well, I’m not leaving. I’m going to sit right on this couch until I do.”
She crossed her arms. “Gary, don’t do this. If you don’t get off the couch, I’m going to have to call security.”
“Please! I grew up right there!”
Penny’s eyebrows lowered. “You auditioned. You didn’t get called back. Leave the building, or I will have you taken off the lot.”
I stared back at her. Silent. Hangdog. Reluctantly, I accepted the fact that Robert Redford would not be meeting Gary Sinise that afternoon. I slowly got up, utterly defeated, left the office, and walked out the front gate of the studios. I wasn’t doing very well in this town. The thought of heading back to Chicago sounded better and better. On the way home I came to the conclusion that had been brewing in me for a while now: Hollywood hates me.
Timothy Hutton landed the part. It was his first acting gig since playing a bit role in a movie when he was a kid plus a few small TV slots on Disney. Tim had never lived anywhere close to Highland Park, but for his performance in Ordinary People, he ended up winning an Oscar. He was only twenty when he won, the youngest male actor to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. And I had to admit, he was really good.
That’s how it goes in Hollywood.
And, nope, to this day I’ve never met Robert Redford.
Having decided Hollywood hated me, I started packing up to go home. A week before I left Los Angeles and headed back to Chicago, I called Moira and asked her to dinner at a jazz club on Cahuenga Boulevard called the Baked Potato. She agreed, perhaps only to say goodbye to me, and in the true spirit of the first few years of our relationship, we had dinner and sparks flew again. She was stunningly beautiful, as usual. We hadn’t seen each other or talked for a year, but we talked for a long time and sorted out a bunch of things. The electricity was palpable—and then during dinner I dumped my hot baked potato on my lap. Thankfully, nothing important was scalded.
I still needed to head back to Chicago. Hollywood might have offered no place for me, but Steppenwolf had made some good progress in my absence. While I was gone, they’d put on several successful shows, including a revival of The Glass Menagerie, which would be our final production in the Catholic school basement, the summer of 1979. In the fall, the theater would do productions of Waiting for Lefty and Say Goodnight Gracie at different theaters in Chicago. Then in early 1980, we were able to rent the larger space in the Hull House to make official the big move from Highland Park into the city. Steppenwolf had added some new members to the company too: Francis Guinan, Tom Irwin, Rondi Reed, Mary Copple, Mike Sassone, Glenne Headly, and John Mahoney. Mary and Mike would stay for only a few years.
Just before I left Hollywood, my agent landed me an audition for a bit part on the prime-time evening soap opera, Knots Landing, playing a teenager doing some underage drinking at a party on a beach. I got the part! My character’s name was Lee Maddox, and I had a couple of lines and a make-out scene with a girl while sitting beside a campfire. My very first time acting on film. Let’s just say it wasn’t From Here to Eternity. Certainly not enough to keep me in Los Angeles any longer.
Steppenwolf opened the 1980 season in March. I moved back with no place to live. I just showed up with my bags and said, “Hi, I’m back. What can I do?” Steppenwolf folded me back into the company immediately, although our current season was already under way, so I had no formal roles in plays for a while. Meanwhile, I did whatever I could to help. Park cars, mostly—splitting the ten-dollar-per-car parking fee between Steppenwolf and me. I also stepped back into Steppenwolf as a “substitute” actor—if someone needed to miss a performance for a night or a few weeks, I jumped into their role. I performed in Death of a Salesman and also Say Goodnight Gracie for a weekend, which turned out to be one of our biggest hits up to that point. We added a midnight series of plays, and I performed in one, The Collection by Harold Pinter. Steppenwolf wasn’t rolling in dough, but we could finally pay our actors a bit. Francis Guinan offered me space to sleep on the floor of his apartment. After a while, I found a small studio apartment a block away from the theater. Mice had moved in before me, and every night I heard the patter of tiny feet scamper across the countertops. Moira was still in California, finishing nursing school, but we talked regularly on the phone and wrote letters back and forth. The embers underneath the charred wood of our relationship roused to life and burned ever more brightly as time went on.
With no roles yet available in Steppenwolf, I heard about an audition for a role with another company called the Wisdom Bridge Theatre. The role was a paying gig, in a play called Getting Out. I landed the larger supporting role, playing a drug-addicted pimp named Carl. For playing Carl, I received my first award nomination, called the Joseph Jefferson Award. The nomination was for Best Supporting Actor, and I won.
I loved Chicago. In Hollywood, I was a dopey disco dancer in the background with Luke and Laura. I was a loser guy on the beach. And I’d been thrown off the lot at Warner Bros. and was told by a casting director to come back when I’d had some acting lessons. I couldn’t get ahead no matter how hard I tried. But back in Chicago, I went to work as an actor almost right away, got paid for it, and won a recognized award—all within six months.
Steppenwolf remained superbusy, moving at a tornado’s pace. In the fall of 1980 we did a great production of Balm in Gilead. It was a huge hit with a huge cast—twenty-eight characters in all—and did so well we did it again the following summer, this time at a larger theater in Chicago called the Apollo.
Balm in Gilead is about misfits who hang out in a street corner diner in New York City. Every character is a hooker, pimp, drug addict, or alcoholic, and I played a junkie-druggie stage manager. Malkovich directed and used some cool music—Rickie Lee Jones and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits—to backdrop the whole show. I’d grown my hair out long, so I could really get into my character, and most days I walked around wearing old ripped jeans, a T-shirt, a red bandanna, and sunglasses.
Moira finished nursing school in California, yet she never worked as a nurse. She moved back to Chicago in 1981 and rejoined the company, and we formally rekindled our relationship. Somewhere in the middle of the revival production of Balm in Gilead, Moira and I took a good look at each other, shrugged, and said to each other: “Hey, let’s get married.”
So we did. We’d been dating for five years. The morning of July 21, 1981, we got a quick blood test because you needed one in those days to get a license, then made an appointment with a judge for later that same day. This time, there were no invitations or appetizers or monogrammed napkins. It was the total opposite of the kind of wedding that had been planned a couple of years earlier in California.
Moira and I didn’t even have any rings. We’d been living together in a basement apartment on Montana Street, not far from the Apollo Theater where Balm in Gilead was playing and right down the street from the Biograph Theater (gangster John Dillinger was shot and killed in the alley there). Just before we went to the judge, I dashed down the street from our apartment to a Woolworth’s five-and-dime store. I found two small rings in a plastic bag—a buck sixty-nine for both rings—and ran back to Moira. We invited a few friends to join us—Laurie Metcalf, Jeff Perry, Jeanine Morick, Moira’s sister Lois, and one of Lois’s good friends. We jumped into a cab and headed to the courthouse.
The judge was a diminutive African American woman. Maybe five feet tall. Moira and I stood before her desk and she asked, “Okay, you ready?” We both nodded. I’d taken off my ba
ndanna and sunglasses and slipped into slacks, a light-blue shirt, and a blazer. Moira wore a black blouse and a short skirt. The judge pulled out a little music box and wound it up. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” drifted out of the music box and we all grinned and hummed along. When the song finished, the judge walked us through our vows. We took our rings from the plastic bag and put them on each other’s fingers. (Within three weeks, our fingers turned green, and we never wore those rings again.) I kissed the bride. We were married. The ceremony lasted maybe two minutes, tops. We took a few photos; everyone hugged and headed out of the judge’s office for an early wedding celebration meal at Carson’s barbecue joint. After dinner, I went home, changed clothes, and headed off to do the play that evening, while Moira left with her sister and friends for a little more celebrating.
Later that evening, after Balm finished, I told the cast that Moira and I had tied the knot, and I invited everybody to come on over to our apartment for a party. Everybody was always up for a party, so I brought the whole cast and crew back. Only one problem: Moira wasn’t home yet—and it was late. I started calling around, trying to find her. A lot of theater folks hung out in a nearby bar called the Old Town Ale House, so I called them up, and sure enough, Moira and her sister were there—and they’d been there for a while.
“Honey,” I said into the phone, “I brought the cast over. Let’s have a party. It’s our wedding night!”
Moira, sounding slightly tipsy, said, “Okay. I’ll be home soon.”
Cast members were drinking heavily in our apartment, doing all sorts of party stuff, when Moira returned half an hour later. Everybody was tipsy by then. As soon as she came through the door, Moira’s emotions slid all over the place. She laughed hysterically one minute, cried like a baby the next. I have a photo of Moira, Malkovich, and me hugging while Moira sits on John’s lap on a chair in our kitchen, laughing with mascara running down her face. Very passionate, very drunk, like everyone else there. That was our wedding night.