Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  Here’s the good news. After True West opened in New York, the cast and producers held an opening-night party down the block at Chumley’s, an old speakeasy turned into a hamburger joint. Malkovich was married to actress Glenne Headly at the time, and she and John were there, along with Moira and me. In classic New York tradition, the reviews came out on opening night. The New York Times was delivered to the restaurant; someone handed the paper to Wayne, and he stood up on a table and read it out loud:

  [True West] is an exhilarating confluence of writing, acting, and staging. As performed by John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, two members of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company making their New York debuts, and as directed by Mr. Sinise, this is the true “True West.” The compass needle is unwavering . . .

  The review was a rave. We went nuts. A single review from the Times can make or break a show. Early the next morning, the box office phone started ringing off the hook with people trying to get tickets. Other reviewers loved us too.

  Here’s how forgiveness can work. When the programs for True West were printed, they didn’t mention Steppenwolf in any official capacity, because the ensemble back in Chicago didn’t want it. But the programs contained the bios of Malkovich and me, and pretty much all John and I had ever done were Steppenwolf shows. So the media picked this up, and the company started getting great publicity about these two actors from this little-known theater in Chicago who night after night were kicking butt at the downtown Cherry Lane. Steppenwolf started being mentioned all over the New York and national press, which of course was a positive thing for us back at home. As difficult as it all was getting there, the doors had been opened for our company in New York. Some of the fears and reservations held by many of the folks in the company started to melt away, and the board of directors and ensemble members of Steppenwolf began to soften their stance toward me. All would soon be forgiven.

  John’s performance was especially getting a lot of attention, and his star began to rise during the run. He was doing media interviews and photo sessions for magazine covers. He had recently hired a manager and was meeting a lot of very famous people who were coming to see the show. This of course was all brand-new to us. Two guys from Chicago had come to New York as unknowns, and suddenly celebrities such as Jackie O, John F. Kennedy Jr., Robert Duvall, Bernardo Bertolucci, Susan Sarandon, and others were sitting in the front row and coming backstage afterward to meet us. I say “us,” but really it was mostly to meet John, who was so powerful in the show and getting press comparing him to Marlon Brando.

  The week after we opened, John told me he’d been approached by William Morris talent agent Johnnie Planco and had signed with him. Planco was a very powerful agent back then, and he had wasted no time in signing John. I hoped this might happen to me as well, so I waited for the phone to ring. But after two or three months of running the show, no agents had approached me. I decided to go to the box office and ask which agents had come to see the show. I got the list and made phone calls to them myself. Although I’d heard from no one, they were happy to set up meetings, and after a while another agent at William Morris signed on to represent me. Perhaps it would lead to something, I thought, but nothing much changed immediately after.

  John, on the other hand, was riding high. He was enjoying his newfound celebrity, and things were going great for him on that front. Many nights we would come into the theater to get ready for the show, and John would fill me in on who he’d had dinner with after the show the night before. It was always at a great New York restaurant with someone very well-known in our business. I would listen, nod my head, and then fill him in on what I’d done after the show, scoring over 100,000 on the Asteroids video game at the little Greek diner near my apartment. The gyros were wonderful there.

  I was happy for my friend. He’s a great actor, and it was clear to me that he was going to launch into the movie business after we concluded our run of the show. And I couldn’t help wondering if a movie role might be in the cards for me also.

  True West ended up running for almost two years, albeit recast with different actors after John and I finished our sixth-month run, as is often done. As soon as we finished we went into a television studio and shot the play for a PBS production on American Playhouse. The play continued at the Cherry Lane with other actors in the roles, among them Jim Belushi and Gary Cole, and then the brothers Randy and Dennis Quaid, both very well-known by then. I continued to direct each new cast, and Randy and Dennis liked their roles so much that later we took the show to Los Angeles, opening at the LA Stage Company. Then Daniel Stern and Tim Matheson played the roles back in New York. Toward the end of its New York run in 1984, Erik Estrada came in. Erik was very kind, always good-natured, and although his fame was already high from playing Ponch on CHiPs, he hadn’t done much theater. “Just show me what to do,” Erik said, the first time we met. So I worked with Erik to help him understand the role, and he did great. After nearly two years and 762 performances, True West closed, a very good run for an Off-Broadway show.

  From the time True West opened in October 1982, everything ran nonstop. The morning after we finished shooting the PBS version, John was indeed off to film his first big movie, The Killing Fields, which was shot in Thailand. His film career was off to the races, and within a few years he would receive his first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for Places in the Heart. As soon as I finished my specific involvement as an actor with the run of True West, I was back at Steppenwolf directing The Miss Firecracker Contest. Then the winter of 1984, I directed Tracers, and that spring we brought our production of Balm in Gilead to New York, running eight months Off Broadway, another big hit for us. Right after that, I directed a production of Orphans in the winter-spring of 1985, a play about two brothers who kidnap a stranger. It had a tremendous cast of company members Terry Kinney, Kevin Anderson, and John Mahoney. The actors were awesome, and wanting to push it over the edge in tone and style, I scored the play entirely with Pat Metheny music, cranked up loud. It got great reviews in Chicago, and that summer we moved the play to Off Broadway, where acclaim from the New York Times opened even more doors for us.

  The great British actor Albert Finney came to see Orphans and liked it so much he asked if I’d direct him in a London production of the show. He wanted the role of Harold, played by John Mahoney in my original production. Albert was a legend, and I was knocked out by the magnitude of his request. So we made a deal to bring Kevin Anderson from the original cast as the younger brother, and as Terry was caught up with developing another play he was going to direct, we brought in Jeff Fahey to play the older brother. In March of 1986, Orphans opened for a limited engagement at the 173-seat Hampstead Theatre before moving to the larger Apollo Theatre in the West End of London. Albert was in the finest form imaginable, winning the Olivier Award for his performance. During rehearsals, I stayed in an extra room in Albert’s house. Although Albert was about twenty years older than I was, we went out every night, and I could not keep up. We’d wine and dine and party until 2:00 a.m., and I’d be conked out the next morning when Albert would stop by my room at seven, bright-eyed and clearheaded, hollering, “C’mon, Gary, we’re going for coffee!”

  Many top British actors came to see Albert in the show, including Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, and Vanessa Redgrave. Very gracious and extremely smart, Vanessa took Moira and me out to dinner one evening and talked about international things we knew nothing about. We just nodded whenever it seemed appropriate and said, “Yeah? . . . Yeah.” Or . . . “Yeah!”

  From 1982 to 1987, we produced even more shows back in Chicago, moving a total of six of those shows to New York—True West, And a Nightingale Sang, Balm in Gilead, Orphans, The Caretaker, and Educating Rita. With the exception of The Caretaker, which was produced in midtown Manhattan at the Circle in the Square Theatre, these were all Off-Broadway productions, and all of them did well. In early 1985, I was appointed artistic director again, taking back the reins from my buddy Jeff Perry.r />
  More good things were coming. That summer, Steppenwolf won the Tony Award for Regional Theatre Excellence. A Tony is the highest honor you can receive in the New York theater. A bunch of teenagers had stayed true to their dreams, created their own fiercely independent theater company in a basement in Highland Park, given it everything they had, and emerged on the other side with the top honors in the country. It had taken us just over a decade to be recognized nationally for our work.

  We hatched more big plans. In summer 1986, I directed the production of a play written by musician Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, titled Franks Wild Years. Terry Kinney started out directing the play, but Tom and Terry didn’t see eye to eye, and at one point they came into my office to try to talk things out. There was a lot of tension, and for a while Tom just sat and rocked back and forth, clearly feeling a lot of anxiety. I was worried. Steppenwolf had brought in some outside investors who had put some big money into the show in hopes of moving it to New York, and as artistic director it was my job to sort things out.

  After trying our best to work through the problems, it was clear that Terry, Tom, and Kathleen were not going to be able to get on the same page, so I had no choice but to step in to take over directing the play. We were only days before the first audience, and we needed to get something up onstage quickly. It was important immediately to make Tom comfortable with working with me, so I started the new rehearsals by asking him simply to perform for our ensemble all the songs he’d written for the play. We put a single spotlight on the darkened stage, and while the band played, he stood under the light and entered the spirit of each song, relaxing more and more as he played and sang for us. I gave everyone the next day off so I could go through the script to figure out what I wanted to do. We had to work fast. I decided I needed kind of a clean slate so I could come up with a new staging. I removed most of the set that had been built, choosing instead to go with very simple and movable set pieces. We came back together with a reworked script, and over the next few days restaged the show, did our technical rehearsals, and added the lights and sound. It all began to gel, but the clock was ticking and the end of the first act was still not right. I woke up early one morning with an idea and came into rehearsals that day asking Tom for a new song. I felt we needed a big Vegas show tune to take us into intermission, so Tom went off with his band and came back in ten minutes. Right there on the spot, he’d written the song “Straight to the Top,” a classic Sinatra-styled up-tempo show tune. We decided Tom should wear a red velvet tuxedo and black Elvis wig, and he infused the song with a passionate clown-like tap dance. It was hilarious, and a great way to end the first half of the show.

  In the end, the show came together great. And while our hopes of moving the show to New York did not materialize, the investors made some of their money back, and the summer turned out to be peaceful, joyful, productive, and fun for the cast of Franks Wild Years.

  During this period in the mid-1980s, other doors opened, and at one point, the summer of 1985, we simultaneously ran shows in three different cities. We did Miss Julie in Chicago, Orphans in New York, and two shows in Washington, DC: Coyote Ugly, which Malkovich directed, and Streamers, another play set during the Vietnam War that Terry directed and I acted in. Then, a few years later, in 1990, we opened The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway. That production won us another Tony, this time the award for Best Play. Director Frank Galati, who also adapted the script, won the Tony for Best Director. Lois Smith and I received nominations for featured actress and actor in a play: Lois for her role as Ma Joad, and me for my part as Tom Joad, the iconic role played by Henry Fonda in the 1940s film version directed by John Ford. These accolades all helped cement Steppenwolf’s reputation—both nationally and internationally.

  Those were amazingly fruitful years for Steppenwolf. The New York productions helped many Steppenwolf actors break into the movies all while we continued to strengthen our theater in Chicago. We added more actors to our ensemble; our board of directors grew stronger as our growing reputation drew interest from more high-profile Chicago businesspeople; and we were able to raise more funds, increasing our ability to grow. In 1990, we realized another dream when Steppenwolf broke ground at 1650 North Halsted Street and built our own multimillion-dollar building. We designed our theater from the ground up and opened the doors not long afterward. The land of our birth had allowed us to pursue our dreams. Steppenwolf had truly arrived.

  In theater, as in so many other areas of life, people’s lives intersect in unexpected, even amazing ways. Who you know can become just as important as the work you do. The Grapes of Wrath is a good example. In 1985, when I was artistic director, I asked director Frank Galati to come direct the company in a production of the 1930s Kaufman and Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You. During rehearsals, it became clear the ensemble absolutely loved working with Frank, so I invited him to join the company. He enthusiastically accepted, and in that same meeting I asked him if he had future projects he wanted to work on. Frank told me he’d always thought that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath would make a great stage play. I loved the idea, and we went to work to get the stage rights. Three years later, in 1988, we finally opened the play in Chicago, one of the most ambitious projects we’d ever done. It was so big, that it could not be staged in our current theater, so we rented the larger Royal George down the street. The Grapes of Wrath is a long, epic novel, and Frank worked and reworked the script to get it right. It was a huge undertaking. When it first opened, each performance stretched a whopping four hours. We did eight shows a week, and on Saturdays and Sundays we did two shows each day. Those weekends we barely had time to eat between shows before we were back out onstage. After closing in Chicago, we worked on the script some more, reducing the runtime to about three hours. In the spring of 1989, we moved the show to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego before taking it to London for two weeks, performing at the National Theatre. Reviews were strong. Due to the success in London, we attracted New York producers, and in the spring of 1990, after more reworking, we opened the show on Broadway at the Cort Theatre with a very tight two-and-a-half-hour production. The show received great reviews and won a Tony for Best Play and for Best Director for Frank Galati. At the end of its run, we performed it on PBS for American Playhouse. Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s widow, was a wonderful woman and had granted us the rights to adapt the play. She knew and loved Steppenwolf’s work, and she and I had become friends over the years.

  During this same period—after closing The Grapes of Wrath in Chicago—I went back to California, and over the next few years directed television episodes of Thirtysomething and China Beach. I also acted in a bigger TV movie with James Woods and James Garner called My Name Is Bill W., about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  In 1984, I had switched from the William Morris Agency to a high-profile New York agent at International Creative Management (ICM), Sam Cohn, who also represented Meryl Streep and director Mike Nichols. Sam really wanted me to focus on directing. By then, I’d directed some acclaimed productions—True West, Tracers, and Orphans—and picked up some TV work, acting and directing in Chicago with Michael Mann’s Crime Story. The relationships with Elaine Steinbeck and Sam Cohn became pivotal in my life. Sam ushered me into Hollywood, and Elaine was the key to two projects that turned into career-shifting opportunities.

  In 1986, Sam introduced me to a Hollywood producer named David Puttnam, who came to see Orphans. He’d produced Chariots of Fire, The Mission, and The Killing Fields (Malkovich’s first movie, done right after True West), and had recently been hired by Columbia Pictures to run the studio. Sam called me and said that David wanted to offer me a directing deal in Hollywood at Columbia. David would pay me to move to California (I said “wow” to that), set me up with an assistant and an office (an actual office, not an office that you needed to climb up a ladder to reach), and pay me an actual salary for two years (I said double “wow” to that). The deal was for what they termed
a “first look,” which meant my job was to look for movies I wanted to direct, and then offer anything I might find to Columbia first. If Columbia didn’t want the movie, then I would be free to do it somewhere else.

  How green I was. Sam asked me, “How much do you need for two years?”

  I tried to imagine what a first look deal might yield and asked, “How about sixty thousand dollars per year? Do you think that would be okay?”

  Sam chuckled. He called David, then called me back and said, “David thinks you should get seventy-five thousand per year. Okay by you?”

  I was speechless. Sixty thousand sounded like a fortune to me, much less seventy-five. They gave me an office on the back lot of Warner Bros., where Columbia Pictures was based at the time—the same lot, incidentally, that I’d been thrown out of a few years earlier when I’d tried so hard to see Robert Redford. At the time I made the deal I was still artistic director at Steppenwolf. I turned over the reins to Jeff Perry and Randy Arney, invited my assistant Kate Richie to come be my assistant at Columbia, and in 1987, Moira and I moved to California where we rented a little two-bedroom house in Sherman Oaks. Life was changing. I had a pay increase from what I was making at Steppenwolf and a movie deal, and wouldn’t you know it, Moira and I were pregnant within a year.

  That spring, I pitched a few projects, but Columbia passed on all my ideas. Then I found a script titled The Farm of the Year about two brothers in Iowa. Their father dies, and the brothers inherit the family’s successful farm. But after running it for a few years, the farm fails, and the bank moves in to take it over. David Puttnam at Columbia liked the script, but another company, Cinecom Pictures, owned the rights and wanted to produce it. David, ever affable, told me, “Go, make it great.”