Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  Despite the general insanity of our lives, I was later able to see and be grateful for the many positive things that happened during those early years of Steppenwolf. We faced many challenges and made many messes, yet those years set the table for so much good to happen later on. A lot of party stuff happened back then: beer, booze, pot, coke, magic mushrooms. And while not everybody we knew participated heavily, it seemed that every night, after every performance, someone threw a party. This wasn’t just happening at Steppenwolf. Less than a year later, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi was found dead of a heroin overdose at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles. It felt like nearly everybody in those days—my whole generation—was going a bit crazy as we tried to find our way, grow up, and figure out our stuff. But onstage, we were serious and committed, and we left the partying for after our work was done. For Steppenwolf, this jumble of emotional childishness and passion infused its way into a lot of our early work, coming together in such a way that over-the-top emotion, commitment, and passion became signature characteristics of Steppenwolf.

  In the early 1980s, our theater grew, and we began to raise more money. We started to sell subscriptions and developed a stronger board of directors. We scored some hits at the box office, enabling us to extend the run of our plays. Eventually, as we started to have enough work as actors, we all were able to quit our day jobs and focus completely on building the theater, all the while getting better as actors and directors and theater artists.

  And Moira and me? After forty years of being together, through all our ups and downs, all our confusion, all our passion, all our mistakes, all our successes—we are still married and still in love.

  CHAPTER 5

  When We Started to Look Beyond Ourselves

  H. E. Baccus had been the artistic director of Steppenwolf from our beginnings when we were in the basement of the Catholic school in 1976. Four years later, in the fall of 1980 and about six months after I’d come back from Hollywood, Balm in Gilead became a huge hit for us, and we were on a roll. For the next production, H.E. had selected a comedy called Absent Friends that he was going to direct. During rehearsals, everything was going smoothly, or so we thought. One morning H.E. called us out of the blue and announced he wasn’t coming back in. He was a musician, he insisted, and he wanted to focus his energy there. So he quit the theater for good. We were caught completely off guard, but we wished him well and then scrambled to find another director. Malkovich stepped in and finished the production, which turned out to be a hit.

  Once we got through opening night and the play was up and running, we met to decide on the next permanent AD. Malkovich and I were both suggested. John reluctantly said okay to being considered, but his tone didn’t suggest he really wanted to do it. He’d filled in as AD a few years earlier when H.E. had taken a summer off, and under his leadership we’d done a controversial dark comedy by Wallace Shawn, Our Late Night. Edgy and sexually explicit, it received terrible reviews. We had thought it was kind of funny, but audience members walked out in droves. Being artistic director is a tough job with a lot of pressure. You pick all the plays. Some of them work; some don’t. So while John accepted putting his name in for a vote, I don’t think his heart was in it. The ensemble voted, and I landed the position. I think John was relieved. He liked his flexibility and the ability to work at Steppenwolf or other theaters if parts came along. As for me, I jumped into the role as artistic director, ready to go. I proved a much different type of leader than H.E. I was convinced we needed to approach our work more like a business. The following Monday morning, I came in with a new set of rules. High on the list was the following: “All staff members in by 9:00 a.m. every day.” I made several other changes, and even fired someone. Good Lord! The new rules and approach came as a shock to the ensemble, sort of like General Patton had just walked in. While we still maintained our collaborative approach to the direction we wanted to go as a company, as AD I felt it was time to approach things a bit differently, to step up our game and allow the artistic director to lead in a new way.

  One rule I implemented was the now-infamous—at least among the company—“no pot” rule. No pot could be smoked (or eaten) anywhere around the theater until after showtime. No beer either. Everyone thought the “No Pot” rule was hilarious coming from a guy who openly partook from time to time. But for the most part, everyone went along with it.

  On a few occasions, the new rules were broken, and I made my disapproval known. Once, during a performance of a play I directed, I sneaked into the theater to check on the play and watched from the back of the house. During one scene I saw that a bunch of lighting cues I’d set for the play had been screwed up—totally off. After the show, I went up to the light booth to talk to the crew and found open beer cans. They’d been drinking during the show and had messed up the cues. I hit the ceiling, threw their beer into the garbage, and shouted at them to shape up. They never messed up again. Another time I went out to lunch with our board president and afterward brought her back to the theater, only to find a friend of the company who we’d worked with a few times sitting there calmly rolling a doobie. I quickly turned the president around before she noticed him and walked her out to her car. I then came back and chewed him out. After a while, I calmed down and explained to him, and to others who had gathered around, that I was serious about our theater and wanted folks to get on board with the new way of operating. We had such amazing talent in our group, and I was simply trying to focus our energies on getting better, saving the partying for after hours.

  I felt confident in Steppenwolf. We all felt confident in Steppenwolf. Perhaps too confident. We had great faith in the chemistry and energy of our ensemble. But I believed we needed to get more serious about how we approached our work and built our company. And we did. And after a while, the “no pot” rule became a funny Steppenwolf legend that we still laugh about today.

  Yet even with a little bit of chaos in our business approach to things, onstage we were dynamite, and by that time we were brash and even a bit arrogant about our work. We felt we had one of the best companies anywhere and as actors we could do anything we set our minds to. When Malkovich had directed Balm in Gilead, the success of the show had fueled those feelings of invincibility. John was ready to tackle his next big challenge.

  One of my primary responsibilities as the new AD was to figure out what to put on the stage. But when I began as AD, I inherited a season that had already been planned by our previous AD. One production already in the works was Savages, by British playwright Christopher Hampton, with Malkovich set to direct. The plot centers around a historical atrocity that happened in the early 1960s: the systematic removal from the rain forest and the eventual slaughter of a single tribe of South American Indians. The play was an ambitious undertaking for our company—not only because of the calamitous subject matter, but also due to the simple logistics of assembling the needed cast.

  The show was written for five or six South American tribespeople, but John wanted an epic. He envisioned twenty-five tribespeople in the cast, and he wanted them all naked for the whole show. We didn’t have anything close to South American tribespeople in our ensemble, so we hired mostly Caucasian actors from all over Chicago. We held rehearsals with our big, naked cast, put Moe wigs on their heads (we called them Moe wigs because they looked like the hair of the Three Stooges character), and painted them up with full body makeup. Looking back, this entire idea was totally misguided, of course. But we did it. We were a risk-taking kind of company, right? Sometimes those risks work. Sometimes they misfire. The wigs and the body paint were just of few of many misfires for this production.

  We did our tech rehearsals, adding the lights and a set that had these long drapes hanging on the back wall that looked like five strips of turkey bacon. Another misfire. The show began. Malkovich thought it was great to have a big group of fleshy people onstage, and I thought, why not? But since the Hull House Theater had only 134 seats, twenty-five nak
ed people onstage felt sweaty and cramped—and not in a nice way. Attendance was low, and having a huge group of unclothed people sitting everywhere backstage before each show created a surreal vibe in the company. One day I wandered backstage and Jeff Perry, my best buddy, whom I’d known since high school days, was sitting with his Moe wig on. He was wearing his glasses, smoking a cigarette, legs crossed, and playing backgammon, as naked as the day he was born. He casually nodded at me, and I casually nodded back. What else were we supposed to do?

  Critics hated the show. Absolutely despised it. Savages went down in history as an infamous Steppenwolf failure. Today, it gives us all endless pleasure to sit around, fully clothed (thankfully), telling stories about all the nakedness, wondering what could have possibly gone wrong.

  As AD, I searched for all kinds of plays—and my radar was definitely tuned for plays about Vietnam. In 1981, we were only about six years removed from the American withdrawal from Saigon.

  I’d been talking with Moira’s two brothers, Mac Harris and Arthur Harris, and to Jack Treese, the husband of Moira’s sister Amy, about their days in combat. The more we talked, the more I received a personal education about how bravely our country’s veterans had fought and how poorly they were treated when they returned home. I came to see how our country had turned its back on the returning warriors and how that war still divided us. It was a shameful period in our nation’s history, and many Vietnam veterans had simply disappeared into the shadows, not wanting to talk.

  Jack, the combat medic, was nineteen years old when he served as a member of the Second Battalion 502nd Airborne Infantry. From July 3, 1967, to March 12, 1968, he saw 245 days of combat and survived some extremely difficult battles. He told me how he’d been so happy to be coming home before landing in San Francisco and seeing protests right in the airport. Glancing down at his uniform, he realized he was in hostile territory on American soil, so he went into the airport bathroom, took off his uniform, and put on civilian clothes for fear of being spit on or screamed at. Like so many of our Vietnam veterans, there was no “welcome home” for him.

  Jack would go on to stay in the army for twenty-two years. He came from a difficult family environment, and joining the army as a young man gave him structure, discipline, and a home. It was always tough for him to recall the hostile reception our veterans received when returning from Vietnam, although I think for Jack and others who continued their service post-Vietnam, their transition was less difficult than for those who came home and immediately went back to civilian life. Somehow the culture shock wasn’t as severe for those who continued to serve alongside fellow combat veterans. Years later, on a gray and misty September morning, he and I would travel to Washington, DC, where he would visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall for the first time. I watched him trace the names of two of his fallen comrades with a pencil and a thin piece of paper. It was a quiet and somber moment of reflection for Jack that I’ll always remember.

  Arthur told me he’d come back from Vietnam a changed man. Before he deployed, he had trained at helicopter school at Fort Wolters in Texas. He was an excellent pilot who survived many combat missions in Vietnam as well as a crash during training that gave him a banged-up hip that troubles him to this day. From 1971 to 1972 he served as a warrant officer second class with Delta Company and Bravo Company, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, First Cavalry Division out of Bien Hoa, Vietnam, enduring more than eight hundred combat hours as a helicopter pilot. He’d seen and experienced terrible moments during the war, one hot zone after another, and when he returned from Vietnam, for many years he had difficulty shaking away the memories. In fact, even today, talk to Arthur about Vietnam and it’s as if it were yesterday; even the smallest details are burned into his memory—his mind totally sharp regarding his days in the war zone. After Vietnam, he went back to college and flew for the Illinois National Guard for a while. But adjusting to life outside combat did not come easy. He married, but as time went on he struggled, he drank more and more, and eventually he became estranged from his wife and daughters.

  Years later, Arthur was living in a small place in Florida and, like so many of our Vietnam veterans, was having a tough time. Our home in California had a small guesthouse, and my wife and I invited him to come stay with us. He had served our country, and we wanted to try to help him get back on his feet. Arthur accepted the invitation, and once he settled in he started to attend AA meetings. He responded well to the AA program and also started to see a therapist. Over time, a trust grew between them. He started to share some of the things he’d witnessed in Vietnam, and healing began. Arthur also described to her trying to get his benefits when he returned home and how he eventually gave up as the VA had dragged its feet for too long. So, the therapist began to take him to the VA to fight for those benefits. After three years fighting red tape, he was eventually able to secure his long-overdue disability payments. Arthur planned to stay with us for six months, but with all that was going on, he ended up staying in California for five years. After that, he was able to use his back benefits to purchase his own place in Florida, where he lives quietly today.

  Overall, Arthur helped me understand the challenges that many of our Vietnam veterans and their families have gone through, challenges very similar to those of Lieutenant Dan. Arthur’s experience of falling into the shadows upon returning from war, struggling not only with the memories of combat, but with the alienation he felt from a divided nation and a government that had let the Vietnam veteran down, is part of what fuels my mission today, and I will always be grateful for his service to our country.

  Moira’s oldest brother, Mac Harris, made a big impression on me. He was a highly decorated officer and received the Silver Star, Bronze Star (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, and Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. From 1975 to 1978 he taught at West Point. He was promoted to major, served as a tactical officer, and was on the faculty of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. He then attended Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as a postgraduate student. Upon his completion of the course in June 1981, because of his extensive knowledge, experience, and army-wide reputation as the authority on creative leadership, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and selected to head the Center of Leadership and Ethics at Fort Leavenworth. There, one of his larger accomplishments was to write the new United States Army manual on leadership, known as Field Manual 22-100. He spent eighteen months researching, writing, and creating a manual that represented a positive and practical philosophy of leadership. His work soon became used as standard doctrine throughout the entire United States Army, and for his exceptional work on FM 22-100, Mac received the Legion of Merit Medal, given for outstanding service and achievement.

  Years later, I met General Vincent Brooks, who would eventually rise in rank to become a four-star general and the commander of the United States Forces Korea. A one-star when we first met at a fund-raiser for a 9/11 memorial we were building at the Pentagon, General Brooks told me he’d gone to West Point in the late ’70s, graduating class of 1980. I asked him if he knew Mac, and his face lit up, beaming with admiration. Mac had been one of his teachers. I also met General Curtis “Mike” Scaparrotti, who also became a four-star general and was Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations. He had gone to West Point as well, class of 1978, and he too knew Mac. Both of these incredible leaders told me how much they loved, respected, and admired him.

  I learned so much about the Vietnam experience from Jack, Arthur, and Mac. In 1981, as a result of the new perspective I was gaining, I looked for a play to direct about Vietnam. I pored over all the theater magazines that described plays in various cities around the United States, and all the while continued to talk about the war with these family members whose wartime service and coming home had inspired me to tell our veterans’ stories. I subscribed to Drama-Logue, the unofficial newsletter of the Los Angeles theater scene, and I stumbled across an
ad for a play called Tracers, written and performed by Vietnam veterans about their experiences before, during, and after the war. A light bulb clicked on. This was exactly what I was looking for.

  I flew to Los Angeles and saw the play at the Odyssey Theatre. The play was foulmouthed and blunt, darkly hilarious and grim, but powerful. Much of the play consisted of oral history, with characters pouring their hearts out, describing and reenacting the things they went through overseas. In one horrific scene, in pantomime, the veterans tried to reassemble the pieces of fellow soldiers who’d been blown apart. Torsos were matched to legs. Hands were matched to arms. The play brimmed with passion and tragedy, and I was deeply moved by it. Tracers made me trace the years of my life when I didn’t think about Vietnam and I didn’t understand. The next night I returned and saw the play again.

  On February 20, 1981, I typed a two-page letter addressed to the entire “Tracers Ensemble” in care of director John DiFusco, the Vietnam vet who conceived the play, cowrote it, and owned the rights to it. The letter ended with this plea: “I feel the play should be seen. It should be seen and experienced by others like myself. I want Chicago to understand. It would be a great achievement for our ensemble of non-veterans to bring to Tracers what you all did. It would educate the actors as well as the audience. If and when you are ready, please consider Steppenwolf. Thank you for bringing Tracers to us.”

  John DiFusco had never heard of Steppenwolf. He wrote back and said, “No, sorry; it’s a play both written and performed by veterans, and we feel it should always be done by veterans, so we’re not letting anybody else do it.”