Take a Roller Coaster Ride Through the Life of a Real Hollywood Actor
Rick Lenz is an actor who has made it in New York and Hollywood. You have seen him countless times on TV and in the movies. He has been a popular leading man as well as a character actor, consistently avoiding repetition in the roles he chooses. Rick Lenz has played leads opposite some of entertainment’s biggest names, and has had recurring or guest starring roles on many of your favorite TV shows.
Yet his book is more than just an ordinary Hollywood insider story. Lenz is a terrific writer with a wicked sense of humor. Also a gifted artist and widely produced playwright, Rick uses his extraordinary storytelling skills to take you into his personal experiences with actors and entertainers we normally only hear about through the rumor mills, and to reveal real-life experiences of heartbreak, suspense, discovery and joy.
His memoir is fascinating. He doesn’t pull any punches. Along with plenty of showbiz anecdotes, he tells us about his marriages (especially his “final” one) and his journey from summer stock through New York, then to Hollywood. He offers us deep insights into an actor’s life and living in general. Feeling the shock waves of his stormy family background, including the emotional tremors of nearly losing his daughter who struggled for years with drugs, Rick Lenz is a real life husband and dad—and the absorbing reality of that shines through his words.
Spending time with Rick Lenz is fun, enlightening and authentic. If this weren’t a true story it would make a mesmerizing fictional adventure. Bottom line: North of Hollywood is edgy, way out of the ordinary, and, as a bonus, funny as hell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Lenz has been a working actor almost all his adult life. He is as at home on the stage as he is in front of the camera. His acting ranges from the serious to the comedic, and he has been featured in both starring and supporting roles on TV and in film. In addition to acting opposite many of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars over the years, he is a playwright and artist. Rick lives in North Hollywood with his wife, and his favorite roles are husband, father and, recently, grandfather.
Smashwords Edition
North Hollywood, CA
© 2012 by Rick Lenz
Chromodroid
Press
13029-A
Victory Blvd., Suite 365
North
Hollywood, CA 91606-2925
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information contained in this book, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein.
ISBN E-book: 978-0-9848442-2-7
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication
Lenz, Rick.
North of Hollywood / Rick Lenz. -- 1st ed. -- North Hollywood, Calif. : Chromodroid Press, c2012.
p. ; cm.
1. Lenz, Rick. 2. Actors--United States--Biography. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses--United States--Biography. 4. Dramatists--United States--Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.L4329 L46 2012
2011961053
791.43/0280924
1202
Book
Consultant: Ellen Reid
Editing:
Pamela Guerrieri
Cover
Design: George Foster
Interior
Design: Ghislain Viau
This
book is dedicated to Linda
&
Scott, Charlie, and Abigail
&
to Debby
&
in loving memory of Grace Kurth
I am deeply grateful to my lifelong friend Michael Norell for his limitless patience and wisdom.
Also to Bret Easton Ellis, who has taught me as much of the ABCs of writing as I’ve been able to absorb.
And to my dear friends Betsy Hailey, Don Eitner, Tom Blake, John Gallagher, Anne Collum, Susan Gleason, and Michele Winkler who read the manuscript along the way and gave me invaluable feedback.
Also to Dian Parkinson and Carol Summers, whose love and support have been unfailing.
And to Pamela Guerrieri of Proofed to Perfection and Kevin Cook, who edited and re-edited—both tireless and encyclopedically smart.
Also the brilliant Ellen Reid, who made it all happen.
And to Ann Stuart.
Finally, more than anybody, to Linda, for everything.
Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.
—Terry Pratchett
North of Hollywood is more than a look inside show biz with the usual celebrity encounters and amusing anecdotes. It is also an inside look at a man who chooses—without really believing in the possibility of success—to seek a career in Hollywood.
In his forties, after startling good fortune as an actor/playwright (he’s had plays performed in New York and on PBS; played leading roles in films and on stage; starred in television series), Rick Lenz finds it all falling apart. One evening in North Hollywood, standing alone, naked—not only metaphorically—on the stage of a tiny Equity Waiver theatre, it hits him that his career has dropped out of frame and into helpless freefall. In some warped corner of his mind, it is what he has expected all along. It is vindication of the sure knowledge he’s always had that he will eventually fail. If fear of success wasn’t such a weary cliché, it would be funny—in fact, as he tells it, it often is.
He has worked with or had life-altering experiences with Al Pacino, Jill Clayburgh, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda, Richard Dreyfuss, James Caan, Lily Tomlin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jonathan Demme, Curtis Hanson, and many others.
As a young actor, he played major roles with some of the biggest names in Hollywood history: John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Ingrid Bergman, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, Jackie Gleason, Elizabeth Taylor, James Stewart, Van Johnson, Eve Arden, both Gabor sisters (at once), Teresa Wright, Angela Lansbury, Rod Taylor, Raymond Burr, Peter Lawford, Richard Boone, and Lauren Bacall.
Under the heading of “sometimes hilarious encounters with,” he meets Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, George C. Scott, Peter Falk, Jason Robards, Sam Shepard, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, William Wyler, and Claude Rains (grandfather of Lenz’s daughter, Abigail).
But the most compelling story is personal. Deeper than show biz are the childhood memories of his drug addict-cum-nurse mother and his doctor father (Dad once lost his drug license because of the huge number of narcotics he prescribed to his family).
Finally, this is a story of the astonishing courage and compassion of an actor’s wife—in a sense, the book’s protagonist. She copes with her husband’s personal and professional fiascos, and also helps him find the resources to support his sister in her battle with cancer and his daughter in her life-and-death struggle with addiction.
North of Hollywood is not merely a memoir told with wonderful humor; it’s a psychological cliffhanger that unfolds as it is being lived. Will the crises that give signs of merging into catastrophe permit a happy ending, or will our flawed and histrionic hero end up alone in a fleabag hotel room like the one he stayed in when he first moved to New York?
Lenz tries to hang onto the real-life life he’s been blessed to find. But he can’t do it alone any more than his daughter can beat drugs without the help of ... something greater than herself. He reads the diary of his friend, Ann, Michael Curtiz’s late mistress, and imagines analogies to Casablanca. Will he remain under the house arrest of his show business compulsions, the incarcerating world of Hollywood, and most of all his own ghosts, or will he fly off to freedom with his wife Linda?
—MICHAEL NORELL, “WGA” award winner and twice Christopher Award Winner
I was raised in Jackson, Michigan—population 50,000—a city that lies at the third corner of a triangle with Lansing and Ann Arbor, about forty miles from each. Those towns are home to Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. Jackson is home to the longest-walled prison in the world and The Cascades, the world’s second largest man-made waterfall. It also lays convincing claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party—it was host to the first official party convention on July 6, 1854. A large pile of rocks on Washington Street marks the spawning ground of the GOP. There is also a plaque in case the rocks don’t ipso facto identify themselves as birth-of-the-Republican-Party boulders.
When it was time for me to spread my wings, I headed to New York because that’s where my theatre professors at U of M told me real actors go. They didn’t mention anything about real bill collectors, and very little time passed before it dawned on me that “real acting” and show business have a commonality factor that ranges from lessthan-you’d-hope-for to zilch. Before I learned that, I once asked an old character actor, didn’t he just love being an actor and not having to worry about little hollow people’s little petty rules?
He told me I had a paper ass.
Show business as a career, for those of us whom it chooses—we never choose it; no one lacks that much common sense—is the most enticing siren the gods ever conjured, at least to those with the weakness. The only pathway to her lies between Scylla and Charybdis. Any wayfarer with even minuscule common sense would take whatever evasive action was necessary to avoid that route.
My first acting experience was with a summer stock company, a job I got partly because I fit the costumes. Also, I’d been in a few plays in high school, the result of washing out of football when it became clear I was more than averagely breakable.
I inhaled my first season of stock. It was like the county fair, a magic bottle of emotions and smells, a perfumed medley of canvas and sawdust; hot dogs, popcorn, fresh paint, and old lumber varnished temporarily new. Every day, a genie slipped out of the bottle—this was his only trick and nobody could have asked for better—and blew the pungent winds that signaled the summer rains. The reedy grasses around Clark Lake swirled like an ocean in a typhoon, and I felt a frenzy that made me want to run out across the field, down to the water, and hurl myself into it—except I had a show that night. It was all adolescent longings, and they lingered with me like Erin Bibbin’s first kiss hung on the entire walk home after my first and final date with her.
I can still smell that summer. It comes to me in waves when I think of that spot on the lake where the Clark Lake Players lasted for an eternity of twenty-five years. When I think of the water lapping against the dock that extended out alongside the old clapboard theatre building that had previously been a roller rink, and before that a prohibition era dancehall, I think of my wife’s question: “Did you ever feel so good you didn’t know what to do with it?”
The Clark Lake Playhouse was above a bar with a jukebox in it. You could hear the constant thrumming of rock and roll even during your loudest scene. I can still hear snatches of dialogue:
“Where were you on the night of August 23rd?”
“On watch, sir.” (Me as a seventeen-year-old Navy Ensign.)
“And what were your duties on watch?”
“Well, sir ... to watch.”
And then from downstairs: “Wake up, little Susie! Wake up!”
You could still hear the buzz of motorboats out on the lake, sometimes even after dark. None of these distractions mattered. It was all too lovely to be even slightly diminished by a trivial encircling din. The romance in the air was so intoxicating that nothing else mattered. The adult camaraderie, the playacting, the beer, and most urgently, the girls. Everywhere you looked there were girls. They paralyzed almost every other perception. It was acceptable to show off shamelessly for them. It was sweet to flirt with them. And they flirted back. It was even more fabulous than that. It wasn’t only a mysterious whirlwind of infatuations, not just art for art’s sake, not just pretending to be a grownup. It was bigger than all the exhilarating parts of itself. It was magic for magic’s sake.
In theatre school at the University of Michigan, following my summer stock stint, I trotted out for my first-year acting class some of the scenes from Broadway comedies I’d done. I found out still later that real actors call all acting “the work.” The response to my first anxious classroom performance—I’d wowed ‘em in stock—was pretty much the same as it might have been if I’d taken the stage and done what my dog does in the park and for which I plan ahead by bringing along a pocketful of plastic grocery bags.
About a half-hour after sunset on a February evening, I was driving home from Ann Arbor, where I was an undistinguished graduate student, to my first wife Sarah and our two baby boys in Jackson. My plan in those days was to teach theatre in college. Nothing else seemed possible. While I was briefly studying pre-med I’d watched my father, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor, pack a bloody nose. I slid down the wall, unconscious. After my dad finished with the bloody nose, he stitched together the gash in my head and told me, “Young medical students faint all the time.”
I was looking in a mirror at my stitches for the first time when he said that. I threw up in the sink. He shrugged and his eyebrows, which always spoke the truth even if the rest of him was lying, told me that some part of him had understood all along that doctoring and I would make a sorry match.
Outside my car, a warmer day and then a cold rain had turned the countryside into a vast snow pudding. Now, it was freezing over again and the car was contesting my right to control it. I had the feeling I was not where I was meant to be. I noticed by moonlight the discarded cab of an old road grader that had been abandoned on a defunct utility road, and it struck me that the road grader was as pointless as I believed my life was going to be if I stayed.
A mile farther toward Jackson I saw the slush-covered, rusted-out shell of an old Pontiac. I imagined the man who’d been driving it stopping one day, or maybe one winter night, and getting out. It could have been a night like the one that was shaping up now. The Pontiac had just frozen up and quit. He said to hell with it, and hitched a ride straight to New York City. I pictured him living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, telling his new friends how he had once been imprisoned in an Andrew Wyeth winterscape until one day he found he’d had it with the bitter cold and scraping ice off his windshield with the base of a tire jack, and he finally got smart enough to make his way out of that frigid hell and come to this civilized place, to live the way elegant people should.
And all the well-bred guests warm their hands by the fire and their insides with Hendrick’s martinis. They laugh with captivating suavity and one of them says, “By Gad, sir, you are a character. A Pontiac. By Gad, sir.” (Apparently Sydney Greenstreet is on the guest list.) And everybody smirks and chortles until they’re contented as puppies wedged in and warming themselves in all the comforts of mom.
Then it hits me, in my case anyway, that’s not a soothing thought— that being tucked in with mom is a lot like being outside in a freezing cold Pontiac.
“By Gad, sir,” says Sydney. “You are a character.”
It dawns on me: This is an improv.
“Which character are you by the way?”
Improv is torture when you fear there is only one perfect answer for each question. At any rate, I don’t know the answer to this one.
“By Gad, sir.” Sydney is frowning now, has a distinctly menacing look. “You seem to be in the wrong movie.”
This story is about celebrity and non-celebrity and, from a very personal point of view, everything in between. It is about the stumbling progress of my life, and about Hollywood, and how I feel about both. Sometimes I feel cheerful, sometimes dark. I try to apply light therapy as I go—light is my preference—but there is no way I can make the dark parts go away (yet) at my personal whim.
One more thing: There will be no descriptions of anyone’s tits—for example, Jacqueline Bisset’s—which by the way I have seen, nor will I say anything directly bad about Lauren Bacall. Were I to describe Jackie Bisset’s breasts or anything physically about her, it would be insufficient and redundant anyway. If you’ve never seen them, I suggest renting the The Deep and taking a look for yourself. As for Lauren Bacall, she’s a complicated lady and it would be stupid and in poor taste for me to give you an appraisal of her personality based on my limited experiences with her. It wouldn’t be fairly representative.
Besides, I really do hate being unkind.
In Cactus Flower, my first Hollywood movie, I played opposite Goldie Hawn, who became pretty much my best friend for a while. It was the first big part in a movie for both of us. Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman were in it, too. Walter told me he’d had a crush on Ingrid for years, and since he was the muscle in getting the film made, being very hot at the time, he insisted she play the role.
Ingrid talked to me at length about Casablanca because I was married at the time to Claude Rains’ daughter (whom I’d played opposite in Buffalo in a stage production of You Can’t Take It With You). I told Ingrid that Claude never saw Casablanca because he didn’t like watching himself on film—had a phobia about it. She was surprised, but then acknowledged that she, too, was usually uncomfortable watching herself (I think it’s an unnatural experience for anyone). She still spoke with wonder about the success of Casablanca. She had almost no relationship with Humphrey Bogart away from the set—their involvement was exclusively professional. She also expressed awe that the film worked as well as it did. She said that as they were shooting it, she had no idea where the story was going, that nobody really did. She was completely baffled as to whom she was supposed to care about most, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid’s character) or Rick Blaine (Bogie’s).
I had very little firsthand knowledge about movie stars, but I speculated that Ingrid was different from the rest. She was in her very early fifties. I was twenty-nine. It didn’t matter; she was incredibly sexy. Like Walter Matthau, I developed a crush on her. It was hard to be around her and not fall under her spell. She was elegant in a kind, centered way with something friendly to say to everyone. But also, one of her secrets, both on screen and in person, seemed to be the ability to make men fall in love with her—with the possible exception of Humphrey Bogart. I think she knew she had that gift, and I wondered if she wasn’t turning it on just a tiny bit for me (I got the idea she wasn’t particularly attracted to Matthau). She was especially kind to me, I thought.
One day, Gene Saks, the director, called cut on a shot in which she and I were dancing. He said, “Rick, your hand is covering Ingrid’s face.”
I had ruined Ingrid Bergman’s profile! I was going to be sent to would-be movie-actor-failure hell. But she smiled sympathetically at me and petted the back of my head; she knew these things happened. Now I was positive she was very fond of me.
Seeing me at the premiere in New York several months later, she said, “Hi, Nick.”
A year or two before this, I’d done the Broadway version of Cactus Flower with Lauren Bacall, who terrified me because she reminded me of my mother and who later told John Wayne—when I was in The Shootist with them—that she’d “discovered me.” Wayne glowered at her and said, “Aw, shut up, Betty.” (Her real name is Betty Perske.) He was “a little ill”—so they said at the time—and I guess not in the mood for Hollywood nonsense. I got along fine with him, although protocol called for me not to volunteer much chitchat. He asked me what my politics were—I think because I had long hair, a pretty good giveaway in those days. I told him I wasn’t political. He studied me for a couple of seconds, then smiled and shrugged.
Goldie and I remained friends for a few years, but we drifted apart. Her career went better than mine. So I started to ask her for parts in her movies. After that, it didn’t take long for her to stop returning my calls. She and I have the same birthday, different years. I’m older by six. Occasionally, we exchange cards.
One time, my late friend John Ritter did a staged reading of one of my plays, opposite Sharon Gless. I invited Goldie and she wrote me a note, saying she was sorry she couldn’t come, that she was out of town. That was as close as we ever came to seeing each other since the unforgettable day that she and Julie Christie and I played tennis on Boris Karloff’s court.
I’m lost. I don’t know what movie I’m in. It could be Star Wars. It’s as if I’m in a George Lucas spacecraft, careening around in a kaleidoscopic wash of ceaselessly merging space and time, illogically-sequenced, tumbling moments of my life. I hang still for an instant, then whoosh, I’m shot into the next moment, each time increasingly sure nobody I encounter knows my name—or anything about me, which in the business I’ve chosen to spend my life, is catastrophic. Sometimes these moments are happening to me right now. Sometimes they’re merely memory. I never know until I get there.
I pray all of this is no more than a nightmare, that I’ll wake up before I crash, but it doesn’t happen. The harsh reality hits me that I’ve become one of those Hollywood people catalogued in the entertainment industry, because I’m over fifty and not famous, as old-to-dead. I’m like a drowning man, watching his life in fast-forward—except there isn’t the slightest sense of chronology.
I watch the Academy Awards with friends. Brokeback Mountain is nominated in several categories, and gay cowboy jokes are sprinkled through the opening of the ceremony. Jon Stewart, the host, introduces a montage—film clips that can be taken as sexually ambiguous, featuring cowboys of past Westerns taking off their coats, their chaps, opening their vests for the showdown; handling and caressing their guns. Then, near the end of the montage, they show a shocked and terrified frontier newspaperman as John Wayne in The Shootist inserts an immense Colt .45 into my mouth. (All I remember about that scene was trying to keep my teeth from getting broken.) My reaction to having a large, metaphorical penis stuck in my mouth in front of hundreds of millions of people on Academy Award night is that I’m thrilled. It’s the largest audience I’ve ever played to.
About two weeks after that scene was filmed, I arrive in Carson City, Nevada, to do more work on the movie and find out that Wayne has been feeling worse than a little ill. He’s been in the hospital with pneumonia for several days. “If shooting lasts much longer,” the wardrobe guy confides, “he may not make it.”
But I know better. I live in this culture. He’s John Wayne.
My last scene with him is an exterior. It’s the continuation of the gun-in-my-mouth scene.
He’s shaky. When he hits me with his pistol hand on the back of my neck, he also hits me with the pistol. After we’re wrapped for the day, I go to the hospital where they put two stitches in the back of my head.
Two weeks later, I’m on the Warner Brothers lot. I have one last scene with Harry Morgan. It’s early in the morning, at least a couple of hours before I’ll be shooting with Harry. I’m alone on an idle backlot street, sitting in a canvas chair with my name stenciled on it. I’m watching some extras at the end of the street, just sitting around, staring. One of them is in a telephone booth. Others are lined up, waiting to make their calls. They’re spending these moments of (what seems to me) their virtually vacant today—trying to get themselves booked for a vacant tomorrow.
I hear a familiar voice, behind me.
“Did you know [director Don] Siegel used a double for me while I was sick?”
I swivel my head around and look up dumbly at John Wayne. I can’t make myself say a word. People come to Wayne, not the other way around.
“A couple long shots in this thing are going to show some other guy being J.B. Books.”
He’s remembered the pistol slap and is telling me he wasn’t himself that day.
“Anyway,” he growls at me, “sorry about that.” He briefly directs his gaze toward the back of my head. “I only ever did that once before.”
He shows me a barely perceptible shoulder shrug, turns, and with his distinctive hitchy saunter, moves off toward his trailer.
I should have saved those stitches. I wonder what they’d bring on eBay?
Sometime after I’ve shot that exterior outside of the widow’s house (the widow is Bacall’s part) in Carson City I run into Ronnie Howard at a blackjack table in the Orchard Casino in Carson City. He’s charming and affable and we chat about not much of anything. Then, out of nowhere, I’m surprised and gratified when he promises me that if he should ever have any success as a director, he will use me in all his films.
I still have a five-dollar chip from that casino. It’s probably worth five dollars today.
Cognitive dissonance is the basis of most good acting. It means that you come to believe what you find yourself doing. You take a job working for a political party, and you come to believe in the cause. You are an actor playing love scenes, and you find yourself falling in love with the actress you’re playing opposite. You are in an easy chair, in a warm pool of light. The rest of the house is in darkness. You’re reading an especially scary mystery novel. You hear a noise from somewhere upstairs. You get up. You move slowly to the bottom of the stairway. You look up. Your anxiety builds. You hear the noise again. It sounds less like the squeaking you originally would have called it and more like moaning. You start up the stairs.
If you are any good, you should now be literally terrified.
If you hang around Hollywood long enough, cognitive dissonance becomes your genetic instruction. Your psyche gets bent into the shape of your eight-by-ten.
At first you say, “Not me.”
I was given a sobriety test by the side of the road early one morning in Beverly Hills. When I was called on to say my ABCs, I got hung up around P or Q and failed. And I was sober. It was the pressure of the moment. It was real life that was the problem—my instinctive cognitive dissonance. It’s a great acting tool. It can also work against you.
When I was ten years old, I used to play with a boy named Dixie Thorpe. He was nine. I have no idea where he got that name. I don’t think his family was from the South. One day, Dixie’s mother took us to Crispell Lake, one of the hundred or more swimmable lakes that pepper Jackson County, Michigan. Crispell was about a half-mile across, and the area around it hadn’t been built up much. We were going to swim at the small county park.
Dixie changed into his bathing suit first and got down to the edge of the lake before I did. As I came out of the bathhouse, I saw a group of four or five boys in the water around the end of the swimming dock. Dixie and I didn’t know these kids well. They went to a different grade school. They were a little older than us and the few times we’d run into them, they’d always harassed us with pre-adolescent taunting for no other reason than they could, and because each of them wanted to prove to his buddies that he was a tough guy.
Dixie had never been to this lake before and wasn’t a strong swimmer, but I was. It was a pretty shallow lake, so no one seemed to be worried. I was almost down to the water when Dixie reached the end of the dock. I saw him look hesitantly down, apparently working up the courage to go in. The boys standing in the water jeered and yelled at him, “Dive in, pantywaist. What are you scared of?”
Dixie was a gutsy kid. He wasn’t scared of anybody. I liked that about him. It made me feel gutsy, too; confident, just like Dixie.
As I reached the lake, he backed up a few steps. The boys, standing shoulder deep in the water, continued to goad him.
I felt something leaden in the pit of my stomach. I ran out onto the dock, yelling, “Dixie! Don’t!”
But by then he was sprinting full tilt toward the water. He threw himself off, head first, launching himself into an awkward jackknife dive.
He seemed to hang in the air forever.
He hung on in the hospital for a week before he died. I never saw him again.
The boys had been standing on their knees.
Whatever punishment they got came from their parents. However much it was, it was surely not as much as they’ve had to live with their whole lives.
I should have seen what might happen to him before I did. I didn’t feel guilty—not exactly. I suppose the right word is angry. I was older than Dixie. I’d been swimming at that park before. I knew how shallow the water was. I shouldn’t have let it happen.
For a while, I tried to shut him out of my mind, to forget he’d ever existed. But it didn’t work. In a sense, I’ve seen him grow up. At every crossroad of my life, I’ve imagined the benchmark moments that never happened to Dixie. In some small way it feels as if I’ve looked at the world through Dixie’s eyes.
About twenty years ago, the anger started to fade. At the same time, I feel Dixie’s presence more than ever. He doesn’t speak to me, but he has quietly forgiven me.
Maybe guilt is the right word.
Anyway, whenever I do something that feels like it’s the decent thing to do, or the kind thing, he sort of pats me on the back. It’s hard to explain.
Darkness.
Every theatre goes dark sometime. There are always other stages, other shows.
Not for Dixie.
When I first arrived in Manhattan to try to become an actor, I stayed in a cheap hotel in the West 90s. It was the kind of place where two years later there would be a double hatchet murder in the lobby. I didn’t go out much while I was living there. I was too afraid—although I did slip away from time to time to buy an armful of paperbacks: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde—authors I hoped would help fill up some of the holes in my Swiss cheese education and arm me for whatever lay ahead.
I slunk back to read them, alone in my room. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be in New York, but I had no choice. My wife, back in Jackson, wasn’t crazy about the idea, but she seemed to understand I had to try this. So did my father. He’d advanced me enough money to get by for a while.
It was the first time I would become even dimly aware that others might pay dearly for my restless ambitions.
Back in the hotel, the night clerk says, “What do you do up there all day?”
“I’m writing,” I say, even though all I’m writing are impressions of what I believe those great authors are conveying to me in the privacy of my garret.
“So you’re not just another wannabe actor?”
“Well, not only that.”
“How long have you been writing?”
“Since I was a teenager.”
Usually by this time of day I’ve already drunk a pint of gin.
He studies me carefully. “What do you write?”
He’s a man of average height and weight, with badly pocked skin. He’s probably in his mid-thirties. He has oily brown hair, combed straight back from a high brow; white, even teeth and small ears with almost no lobes. I’ve never forgotten his face. He will be one of the murder victims two years from now.
“I write whatever I imagine,” I say to the doomed night clerk.
“Well, what do you imagine?” he asks.
Stuck, I finally tell him: “There’s nothing I can’t imagine.”
Upstairs, my first New York hotel room is a simple setting: unpretentious, paint peeling, a balding carpet, leaking radiator, a single creaky bed.
I look out the window, down at the street. On the corner of 93rd and Broadway people buy newspapers from a guy at a stand. A fat lady sits on what looks like a wagon. She has a lapful of some kind of material she’s always sorting through. A little girl or boy—I can never tell—is crouched next to her. Fire trucks glide by with their sirens off. And nothing is going on in my head: just a vague awareness, just a murky perception, just an objective view of the world.
A cockroach runs along the windowsill and abruptly stops.
“Hello, roomie. Care for a nip?” I drop a fingerful of gin on him. He runs down to the floor and out of sight.
He is in serious contention for being my best friend in New York.
When I finally get up the nerve to go out onto the streets, I study people. I never catch anyone’s eye. You don’t do that in New York. You look near them, never at them. The metropolitan horizon in Manhattan is so dense with people that it’s always possible you’re looking at somebody else when you look near the first person, and the first person, if he’s become even peripherally aware of you, naturally assumes that’s what’s happening.
You can have satisfying people-watching experiences this way and at the same time look suitably anonymous and unthreatening. You can be scrutinizing everyone around you, and be altogether indistinguishable from every other blasé New Yorker. Also, a good thing: It doesn’t take long to learn these skills; we’re born with them. It’s the same animal phenomenon that makes a dog look away when he’s been watching you eat a hamburger and then you catch him at it and he casually gazes off, as if you’ve insulted him by even imagining he’d sink so low as to covet your burger.
I find myself wondering who I am as I walk the hectic streets of New York. Everyone else is unmistakably what he or she is, whereas I, manic observer, don’t fit into the pattern. Not that there is a pattern, which is a nonsensical thing to say, I know, because there must be one—one of those rules. But whatever it is, it has zero relationship to me. After awhile, this realization starts wearing at me, and I develop even less confidence than the none-at-all I arrived with. This insight hits me at the same moment I become aware that it’s time I crawl out of my hole and begin an actual search for acting work. If I went back home to try to do something else, I wouldn’t be able to live with the ridicule I always imagine waiting in the shadows.
Then I learn the thing that jump-starts me. At the very beginning—and this only lasts a little while—they love “innocence.” “Unsophisticated” sells, and they’re not at all alarmed at—don’t even seem to be aware of—“O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”
One day, a few years later, I’m at my agent’s office. He’s just negotiated a deal for me to do a television pilot. If it goes to series (it doesn’t), I’ll come as near as I ever could have dreamed to being rich. I feel attractive, wanted, and full of myself.
My agent’s assistant, an ambitious young man who will later turn into one of the business’s dominant shark-people, studies me—an eager scientist watching a thrilling new development in his petri dish. “You’re like two different people,” he tells me. “One is reserved and unassuming, and the other one’s as shy as Milton Berle.”
When I first arrive in New York, Uncle Stu, who’s not really my uncle but a third cousin or something, takes me out to the theatre, to jazz clubs (Eddie Condon’s, Birdland, the Village Vanguard) and up to his home in Scarsdale, where we play golf. He treats me as if I were a beloved son. He’s a big, garrulous guy, generous and good-natured. He works in the snuff division of a tobacco company. Really.
Uncle Stu is a great memory. I’m sorry to have lost track of him for several decades. He still pops up in my mind unexpectedly. Maybe it’s because I’m older, but lately it’s as if someone has handed me several stacks of driver’s licenses, and I’m riffling through them like decks of cards, not because I want to but because I’m trying to locate someone I’ve lost, thinking this misplaced whoever-it-is will solve all my problems, put to rest all my unnamable fears and longings.
If I can only hunt down that perfect someone who knows the answers.
Then you’ll be happy.
Or if I could just remember that crucial lesson I didn’t fully appreciate the first time.
I recall something from childhood Sunday school. It’s from the book of Genesis. Jacob wrestles with the angel. After the long night, a new day breaks and the angel says congratulations, you’ve prevailed. You’re a higher consciousness.
Awesome.
Claude Rains was forty-eight when my second wife, Jessica, his only child, was born. He and I meet only once. Shortly after Jessica and I move in together, we drive from Manhattan up to Claude’s farm near Sandwich, New Hampshire, for Thanksgiving weekend. Jessica spends most of her time in the kitchen with the cook while her father does hours of readings, grateful for any audience: Shakespeare, various classical poets, Shaw. (He had played Julius Caesar opposite Vivien Leigh in the movie Caesar and Cleopatra. With this job, he was the first actor ever to be paid a million dollars for a film. You could win a party bet with that one). I sit, wet-eyed, mesmerized, through his hours-long performance. The two of us—old man (seventy-six) and kid (twenty-six)—are emotional wrecks by the time Thanksgiving dinner is ready. Claude has no appetite at all. I’m able to snap back and eat like a starving actor.
The day after Thanksgiving, Claude plays tapes of his old radio and television guest performances: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, Bob Hope. He starts to nod off but then surprises me by doing his favorite parts along with himself—kind of a chamber choral reading: Mr. Rains accompanying Mr. Rains.
In conversation, there is a glaze in his eyes that I will later recognize in several other performers. It’s as if he’s expecting someone else to show up, behind me, right over my shoulder. When I ask Jessica about it as we drive back to New York, she says, “It’s just him. He’s always a little vague.”
“I don’t mean vague,” I say, thinking about his desperate need to perform. “It was as if there was somebody else with us, or about to arrive. You know what I mean?”
Jessica shakes her head minutely and watches me steadily as if absorbed in a puzzle she never knew she’d been working on. Then she looks back at the lush hills of New Hampshire.
Claude will die a few months before Jessica and I are married.
I remember my favorite story about Claude. Jessica was with her father and his silly, fruity-voiced—according to Jessica—“lady friend,” trying to get onto the Appian Way in Rome.
But Queen Elizabeth happened to be visiting at the time, and in fact was about to drive down the Appian Way with her entourage. When a guard stopped Claude’s car and told them that because of the Queen’s visit there would be a considerable delay—again according to Jessica—Lady Friend leaned over toward the guard, pointing at Claude, and trilled, “Joolio Chay-sarree! Joolio Chay-sarree!”
Who evidently, in her mind, outranked the barbarian Queen of Britannia.
(There are many such stories, as well as an illuminating account of Claude’s amazing rags-to-riches life, in Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice written by David J. Skal and Jessica Rains.)