atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business (13 page)

Jimmy Stewart 

When we met to begin rehearsals for Harvey on Broadway, the 1970 revival of the play about the rabbit, we were told that Mr. Stewart would not be there for the first week. He was playing golf with President Nixon at that time. However, we weren’t to be concerned; he had played Elwood P. Dowd in the movies and knew all his lines.

When Jimmy Stewart walked in the next week, he was every bit the dream that preceded him, no question. He was the real goods. I had never been onstage with anyone so real.

In my scene with him, he invited me to meet him later at a cocktail party. At our first rehearsal, I used my own purse when searching for a piece of paper so I could write down the address. I was sitting down and had an impulse to look up at him, and I saw this tower of a man, this living icon, peering into my purse with me. I had a sensation: He knows all about me, just by looking in my purse. Everything.

I wished I had a nicer bag. It was just a beat-up, everyday purse. What was in there? I wondered later. I felt I’d better check. Aside from the usual wallet, keys, and appointment book, there were breath mints, a comb, a small Mason Pearson hairbrush from England, lipstick, liner and lint, dental floss, part of a muffin, Kleenex, diaphragm… oh, dear me.

“I’d like to give you my card,” he said. That was actually his next line. He was so smooth. All I had to say was, “Oh, thank you.”

On opening night, with mounted police at the stage door holding back the crowds, I was fully aware of what a big deal this was. I was so nervous that I didn’t think I’d be able to get through the scene with Jimmy. When it came time for him to give me his card, I dropped it. On opening night! I dropped a prop, a pivotal plot prop. I couldn’t move.

Jimmy Stewart just picked it up as if that were part of the scene, and I immediately dropped it again. I was wearing white gloves, and they made me fumble. Jimmy picked the card up again, and this time I opened my purse; he put it right in there and winked at me. The next day, the critic for the Times mentioned what a nice moment it was.

Every night after that, when I went down for our scene, he would be hiding in the curtains, waiting for me. When I got close, he’d part the curtains and say very quietly, “Boo.”

Psychology of an Enchanted Evening 

Just as I entered a party, a man came directly across the room to me. He said hello, smiled, and offered to get me a drink. The lyric “Across a crowded room, you will meet a stranger” came into my head, and I wondered why I had thought it so unbelievably corny when I first heard it.

While I was humming along, appreciating how life imitated art, he went for the drink and left me wondering if he was the reason I had gone there that night instead of finishing the John Irving book I was so into. He was back before I had a chance to think further and spent the next ten minutes by my side as we assessed the assembled guests and agreed that we were the only interesting people there. When he said, “Let’s get out of here,” I, with wobbling knees and thumping heart, followed him down to the street and into a cab, in which we started on the road to passion.

He was short, I discovered, and some kind of boring CPA. But my shrink had asked, “What are the qualities you want in a man?” I had said, “I want tall, dark, exciting, funny, smart, successful, in the arts, an architect, maybe, um… witty—”

He interrupted me. “How about a nice, gentle man?” Spraying ice water on my hot fantasy, he said in an unusually gentle fashion, “Go out with him three times before you close the door on him.”

The second time that Juan Enchanted Evening and I had dinner together, he was still boring and short. He didn’t seem to have anything to say. I had to do all the talking. The third time, he said, “Do you know your eyes are green but they’re flecked with gold?”

I did know this. “Excuse me,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

At the pay phone in the hallway to the bathroom, I called my shrink and said, “It’s been three times. Is it okay to go to bed with him now?”

My shrink said, “These things have their own way of developing and, uh, we need to talk about it but, uh… I’m in the middle of a session here, and, uh, can you wait until next week, when we’re scheduled to see each other?”

Well, I couldn’t wait. What if this suddenly great guy lost interest while I was waiting around for some dumb shrink’s permission? I knew what I wanted. So I went ahead, and it turned out that I really, really loved him in bed and the most extraordinary things happened there, things that probably happened to the people in the crowded-room song.

Then I found out the lad was married, and I’d done it again. Why? How?

I didn’t get it.

The shrink said, “Don’t you see? It’s easy. A married man is a marked man. You can spot him at a glance. He’s more comfortable with himself; he’s relaxed; he’s easy to hang with. His wife has already explained him to himself, and best of all for you, he’s safe. You don’t want a commitment. He’s perfect for you.”

I had to agree with him.

Phoenicia 

I wanted to be friends with Phoenicia, so I lent her a book. It was a special book about Chekhov and his mistress, Olga, his favorite actress who later became his wife. It was a tiny book full of intimate stories and anecdotes about the two of them. I had never heard of it; neither had Phoenicia, and since we both thought Chekhov was the best of all possible playwrights, it occurred to me that he might support me in my effort at this friendship.

Phoenicia worked a great deal more often than I did and got better parts. I wanted to study her close up, to find out how she functioned and got jobs so I could improve my skills in that area.

The book didn’t help at all. Every time I saw Phoenicia after lending it to her, she would look at me and I could see her eyes skimming through the files in her head. Then she’d say, “I have your book!”

And I’d say, “Oh, right.” Yet she never mentioned anything about when she would return it, which pissed me off.

We played out this little scene for about ten years, but when I ran into her recently at a party at Austin’s and she said “I have your book” for about the nine hundred and seventy-seventh time, something evil sprang up in me and I said, “Son of a bitch, Phoenicia, for Christ’s sakes! Keep the goddamned book! Just stop talking about it!”

Quelle gaffe. The room became a still life.

Perfect little tears gathered in Phoenicia’s eyes, not enough to run down her face and leave mascara tracks, but just enough to glisten in the soft light and cause a few guests to become entranced. “Oh, darling, do you have a hankie I could borrow?” she said.

When I handed her what I had, some toilet paper I had folded into tissues before I’d left my house, she said, “Oh, never mind. I’ll ask… I’ll ask Austin to help me.” Austin had come up next to us.

“What’s the matter, Faneesh? What’s going on?” he said.

He looked at me. I felt a sudden empathy for Alice when she shrank in Wonderland.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “We’re having a slight difference of opinion.”

“Oh, Austin,” said Phoenicia, “please be kind. I so need someone to be kind to me at this moment.” She reached out to him and started to kneel in front of him.

Austin is a director. He never let her get to the floor. She leaned against him as he took her arm and said, “C’mon, Faneesh. Let me freshen your drink. You can tell me about it in the kitchen.” He winked at me as he led her away.

I stood there going through pain, betrayal, abandonment, deprivation, impotence, fear, and rage, all climaxing in a wave of joy over the fact that I would be using every bit of this experience in my very next job, where I would cause a sensation.

“What’s a Nice Girl Like You—?” 

My grandmother Gwinkie left my cousin Leonard a thousand dollars when she died. He bought an airplane with it. On Sunday afternoons, if it wasn’t raining, he would buzz our house in it, and we’d spill out onto the driveway—my family, the cook, the dog, and the upstairs maid—in a show of encouragement and mixed emotions. We waved, wagged, barked, and shouted, “Hey, Leonard! Call us when you get home!” Then he would dip his wings to us and fly off into the distance. He was a hero to me.

We went to the movies to see Amelia Earhart flying the same plane with the engine in its nose. At the end of the film, she flew solo into the sunset to save the country, as a collective shiver ran down our spines.

It was Amelia Earhart whose name I carved into the beech tree where I spent the summer reading Black Beauty, Greyfriars Bobby, and Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with a Circus. Leonard was my godfather. I adored him. Amelia Earhart, twenty-four feet tall on the silver screen at the Claridge Theatre, was a hero. I wanted to be her.

The Lone Ranger called to me as well. Over the radio, I heard his distant “Hi-ho, Silver, away!” backed up by the William Tell Overture as he rode off into the night. His business was saving lives and towns in the Wild West, far from Montclair in time and place. I wanted to be him, too.

Gracie Allen, another hero, also beckoned. I felt lonely and different from the rest of my classmates, and she made me laugh as I lay in bed at night after a long day at school. She cheered me every time George Burns put her down and she put him on. She was a model of built-in self-esteem.

My heroes were loners like me. In my dreams, I could fly off into the distance like Amelia on wings, the Lone Ranger on a horse, or Gracie Allen on a wave of laughter. I loved laughter, the spontaneity of it, the rush of joy around my heart.

These giants’ lives were filled with adventure, while I moped around in the safe deposit box on Orange Road, where children were treated like possessions in an environment of leftover Victorian notions. I did what I was told and wondered how my heroes had escaped my fate. How did they turn their dreams into deeds? How could I claim their sense of freedom? I wanted to be all of them.

And I longed to be somebody else, not the dreary Gloomy Gus I felt I had become. An actress! That’s the ticket! Actresses can be all sorts of people. I could be a hero on a stage. I could hide there.

When I got to New York, I went to every acting teacher there. I learned to be a tree and a teaspoon. I learned how to plan my actions and relate to other actors on stage. I could be “in the moment” while I created a subtext. I learned to substitute here, personalize there, never forgetting the basic sense memory on which the whole structure trembled.

A sense memory can involve any of the five senses and is meant to help the actor create a reality that isn’t actually there. To see, hear, taste, touch, or smell something focuses the actor by giving him something to do. It also gives a scene a sense of truth, and colors it as well. It’s the opposite of indicating or pretending. For example, if you’re really cold, you will express it in an original way that will inform whatever you need to do in the scene, and you’ll become a star. If you want to just walk in and stamp your feet and rub your hands together, you can become a star, too. But sense memories were the thing in many classes.

The exercise involved much questioning. Do I really see it? What color is it? How heavy is it? Is it cold against my skin? Am I really smelling a rose or just pretending? This could go on for half an hour. Then the teacher would talk at length, analyze you, go off on comparisons of Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, tell stories of his life, and pretty soon it would be time for lunch.

Acting teachers were gods. There was Lee Strasberg, a small, gray man who looked like a tailor, on West Seventy-Second Street. He headed up the Actors Studio and argued that it took twenty years to become an actor. This implied that you would attend his classes for that amount of time. The glamorous Stella Adler, who had studied with Stanislavski for six weeks in Paris, had her own studio where she offered her students the opportunity to practice their craft by playing waiters at her dinner parties. There was the jolly, generous, roly-poly Harold Clurman, who had come up through the ranks of the Group Theatre, put on a fedora, and become a Broadway director. He held a midnight master class in scene work on top of Carnegie Hall on Thursday nights. He offered this class when he needed money for a trip to Paris. It was always exciting to be in Harold’s presence, especially when he ended up standing on a chair, waving his arms, his face turning a brilliant red as he waxed passionate about the theater. I ran into him at a party once and mentioned to him that the tag from the cleaners was still on his jacket. He got so flummoxed that when he responded, it came out as gibberish. How was I to know it was the Legion of Honor pin he was wearing? I was really hopeless in those days. I trust I’m more on top of things today. There was Sandy Meisner on the East Side, reigning regally at his school, where fencing and speaking were also taught. Downtown there were Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen, working actors, in a five-flight walk-up, a loft with no frills, just nuts and bolts. They’d show us the ropes quickly through scene work so we could go out and get a job as soon as possible.

The competition to get into the Actors Studio, a pathway to stardom, was fierce. A timed five-minute audition was required. Three members sat in judgment. If you didn’t pass, you could take the audition again, like a driver’s test, as often as you wanted. However, there was always a long wait, and a tremendous buildup of emotional stress. I think Geraldine Page auditioned eight times. I knew one fellow who after eleven tries with no success was planning to bomb the place. I did a few projects there for which I didn’t have to be a member; it would always be a part they couldn’t cast out of the studio.

A fellow in my class told me that during intermission one night in a theater lobby, a young actor threw himself at the feet of another man, grabbed him around his knees, and cried, “Please, please, I beg you, Mr. Strasberg! Take me into the Studio! Please, please, I can’t go through another audition.”

And with that, Stella Adler swung her umbrella and started beating the young man around his head and shoulders, saying, “You fool! Stop! Stop! That’s not Lee Strasberg! That’s my husband, Harold Clurman! Get away, now. Be gone!” I believe this story.

When Marlon Brando came along, the Actors Studio bloomed, and “emotional memories” and “private moments” took hold. An emotional memory is a way of exploring an important event in your life by using all five senses to recreate the place where it happened: the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc. The actor begins five minutes before the event and usually ends up in a very emotional state, crying hysterically, laughing to beat the band, and so on. Later, with practice and rehearsal, he can summon up this memory at will for a play or a scene, that demands extraordinary emotional expression.

A private moment is an activity you wouldn’t be caught dead doing if anyone were watching. The fact that about thirty people in the class were looking on confused me.

These exercises are good for homework. When you get to doing a play, there’s an integration within the actor and you go to the first rehearsal, as Ben Kingsley suggests, with the lines learned or not. Your choice.

I was grateful to Michael Pollard, who joined the class fresh from high school and chose to drink a glass of orange juice as his first sense memory exercise. He got on stage down center, put his hand out in front of him, curled his fingers around some air, raised it to his mouth, and drank the whole thing down in four gulps. Then he put the glass down, patted his stomach, and beamed at us. He had just done a half-hour exercise in about a minute. He was wonderful to watch, standing there glowing, pleased, naked, and knowing.

I was simultaneously appalled and thrilled by him. That was the day Marilyn Monroe called Michael and said, “Hello, Michael? This is Marilyn, from class? I was wondering if you’d do a scene with me from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Soon after that, he was starring with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde.

Years later, I met a director at the Moscow Art Theatre and asked him his opinion on how the Stanislavsky method of acting was taught and practiced in the States. He thought for a moment and said, “Well, we believe in moving on.”

I’m a slow learner. My intuition is fabulous, yet I don’t trust it because of my suspicious nature. So I need time to get it all together. I also have trouble establishing intimacy, except when I’m onstage. There I can be intimate at the drop of a hat, especially if the house is full. The exchange of energy with the audience makes me high. The speed of the learning that happens during a performance can take your breath away. Here’s an example:

The House of Blue Leaves was originally staged at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. It was presented on a wooden platform facing bleachers and had a beech tree as a backdrop. I played Bunny, the girlfriend. Topping my excited summation of the pope’s visit to New York, I got to say the last line of the first act. Laughter exploded with such force that I felt it punch me in my stomach and make me gasp as the lights went down. Yet it didn’t hurt. I loved it. It was a complete connection as the audience and I traded energy. I found out how to play the scene, the audience was handed a hilarious truth, and a good time was had by all. Good theater is a great teacher.

To be an actor is to experience freedom. I got to be all kinds of people and to say and do things I could never get away with in life. When I was a junior in college, I started out in a tiny stock company of college actors and played Elvira, the gorgeous ghost in Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, and ended up decades later as Madame Arcati, the medium who calls Elvira back from the other side. In The Threepenny Opera, I got to enter from the bedroom scratching my crotch on my way downstage to sing “What’s the Use?” I played a lesbian lusting for another woman in The Children’s Hour. I can be the villain, the hero, and the clown and never have to answer for anything that happens while the curtain is up. Somebody else wrote the script.

My job is to take off the mask of caution I wear in life, stop holding my breath, and really breathe. It’s not the usual fight-or-flight breath in the top of my chest and shoulders. It’s a deep breath that extends down into the root of my body, where life begins and ends. Opera singers and dancers call it the crotch breath. Onstage, I breathe like this. It connects me with my body. I give up controlling with my mind and turn everything over to my subconscious, which speaks out, surprising me and everyone around me with what’s really going on inside me while I pretend to be somebody else. It’s called getting naked. It’s the most satisfying experience I know. It’s like standing on a cliff and diving into an unknown river time after time. It’s freedom from fear. It’s an athletic event. It’s shameless. It’s sexy. It’s heroic.

It takes a lot of nerve to be an actor, to get up there onstage in a play that could be good or bad. You can’t ever be sure, but you do it as if it’s the best play ever to come down the pike. I was in a new play early in my career, and a disgruntled playwright showed up before a preview looking for the author because he wanted to kill him. He pulled a knife out to prove it. Two of the actors, heroes both, chased him out of the theater and up Seventh Avenue for a couple of blocks before turning back. They would have chased him farther, but they had a curtain waiting and it’s more fun being a hero onstage than off.

I love their company.