Hollywood Monster Page 3

  At the end of the summer, my father somehow tracked me down at the theater, and, rather than read me the riot act or threaten to disown me, he acted as if nothing had happened. He said he was glad to see me, gave me some money, and took me out for a steak, which was a welcome treat, as I’d survived the past year on coffee and French fries. I think he was impressed that I’d stuck to my guns. Once he realized how seriously I took my acting, he was proud, and that negated any residual anger or resentment … on both of our parts.

  WHEN SCHOOL STARTED, I had little trouble assimilating. It didn’t matter whether I was a surfer, a baseball player, a fighter pilot, or a drug dealer; when you go off to college, everybody starts at zero. You could be who you wanted to be. I wanted to be an actor. Fortunately, at that time, being an acting major at Cal State was just about the coolest thing you could be.

  I knew right off the bat, just before my general audition for the drama department, that the acting scene in college was definitely going to be challenging. The young man who auditioned before me didn’t look that intimidating—he was short and not anywhere near what you would call movie-star hand-some—but the guy had talent. He strutted up onstage, stood confidently in front of the entire faculty, delivered a monologue from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, and with seemingly no effort just fucking nailed it. This kid was passionate, he had presence, and he was original; I don’t know if he could’ve handled the lead in Pinocchio or pulled off playing a randy pigeon, but this young man, this Richard Dreyfuss, was an Actor. With a capital A.

  As I watched him knock one of my favorite monologues out of the park, I realized that if I was going to make any kind of mark in school—hell, if I was even going to survive—I had to step it up. The bar had been raised. As it happened, Richard wasn’t long for Cal State, and he knew it. The day after my audition, he sidled over to me in the hall and whispered, “I’ve gotta get out of this place, and you should too.” He dropped out soon thereafter and, within a few weeks, was doing improv comedy with Rob Reiner and, a few months after that, started popping up in TV shows such as Bewitched, Gidget, and That Girl. (Who knows—maybe I should’ve followed him to the Promised Land.)

  One of my acting teachers during college was Jeff Corey. Jeff, who’d been blacklisted in the 1950s during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt, was the real deal and counted Jack Nicholson among his students. When I studied under him, Corey’s career was on the upswing, and over the next few years he appeared in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Between his film and television roles, he ran a challenging, unique master class in acting. I may have been a bit intellectually behind my other Corey classmates, but once I settled in and began to understand his language and philosophy, I was okay. He gave us a bunch of improv-oriented exercises that seemed to me to be well ahead of their time; for instance, he’d have two of us sit across the table from one another and hold off on our dialogue. We were supposed to just look at each other until some uncomfortable something—a funny blink of an eye or a suppressed burp—compelled one of us to begin the scene. On paper, that might not sound so exciting, but believe me, it gave us the skills to act more organically and observe and listen during a scene. But the truth is, much of what he taught me then didn’t make practical sense until years later.

  Another gentleman whose teachings confused me a bit while I was still in college was Lee Strasberg. One of the greatest gurus in acting history, Lee used to preach relaxation, relaxation, relaxation. He was all about “eliminating tension,” and I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about until I was twenty-nine. The director had just called, “Action,” during a particularly big scene in one of my first TV series when, without even thinking about it, I neglected to press my internal energy button and fell into a state of relaxation that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced either onstage or in front of the camera. I’d clicked into a mode that superseded my normal impulse to go a hundred miles an hour. I didn’t have to work at manufacturing inner energy. I realized I could play a role excited even when I was feeling calm, and it gave me much more control over myself and the material. That was only a small tenet of Strasberg’s method, and it’s little surprise that the actors who studied with him for significant amounts of time—James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, and Jane Fonda, among many others—turned out to be among the best of their respective generations.

  Lee’s classes were held in a movie theater in Westwood, and I studied alongside Shelley Winters and Lesley Ann Warren, as well as a number of other actors, writers, and directors who went on to have successful careers in Hollywood—and I was more than a little starstruck. I realized early on that a lot of what Lee was teaching only applied to working actors; novices such as me wouldn’t get nearly as much out of the Strasberg Method as the pros. All the business about “sense memory” and “affective memory” and “protecting your character’s agenda” didn’t make sense to me at the time. But when it clicked in … well, suffice it to say that without Lee Strasberg—not to mention Jeff Corey and James Rawley—audiences wouldn’t have believed in Freddy Krueger.

  All of a sudden, school was in full swing, and things started getting serious. I’d initially gotten into acting for the girls and the adrenaline high—I didn’t have an aesthetic agenda. But now, instead of splitting time between the surfers and the artists, I hung out almost exclusively with my fellow actors and ate, drank, and slept the theater. This wasn’t considered mainstream behavior at that time. Good kids from good families weren’t supposed to wear all black and yammer on about Pinter; we were fast-tracked to be doctors or engineers or businessmen, or—in the case of people with the gift of gab such as myself—lawyers. A nine-to-five job was respected. A hand-to-mouth job wasn’t.

  All this time with the drama crew was fine and good, but it wasn’t doing a damn thing for my grade-point average, which was going down the toilet, primarily because we didn’t get credit units for any of our stage appearances. I was barely attending any nondrama classes anyway, and zero plus zero equals zero. It looked as if I wasn’t destined to get a diploma. So not only was I not going to be a lawyer, I wasn’t even going to earn a college degree. My parents were less than impressed.

  Near the end of that semester, I reconnected with my old high school sweetheart, Betsy, who was working at Cal State. The timing was right and we fell in love again. I was mature enough to appreciate true love, so I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I was twenty-one, close to being kicked out of school, and I was about to take my bride.

  * * *

  THAT SPRING, ONE OF my friends went to England to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, one of the most prestigious training grounds for actors in the entire world. When he came back, he told me the RADA faculty was holding auditions at Mills College, a small school up in Oakland. Now between the Teenage Drama Workshop, high school, Théâtre Intime, and Cal State, I’d performed in almost fifty plays and I had a number of solid audition pieces ready to go, so I figured I’d give it a try. Four of my actor friends also wanted to give RADA a shot, so, fueled on coffee and uppers, we piled into our hippie-mobile and hauled ass up to the Bay Area.

  About halfway there, we stopped at a kitschy, Catskills-like honeymoon motel called the Madonna Inn to use the toilet and grab some food, because we realized it was foolish to rely entirely on stimulants to get us up to Oakland and through our auditions. The highlight of my Madonna Inn experience was the bathroom, where, after pissing about six gallons of coffee, I experienced my first automatic electronic-eye flush toilet. After I played with the urinal for a while, I zipped up, and it dawned on me that the bathroom had some of the best acoustics I’d ever heard, so I told my friends they needed to get in there and start running their lines because they’d never sound better. After about thirty minutes of practicing in the john, we piled back into the car and kept heading north.

  We finally made it to Mills College and immediately realized that this was just about the w
orst place we could possibly audition because the distractions were myriad. Turned out that Mills was an all-girls school. While I was trying to brush up on my Shakespeare, every hot coed in northern California was either sunbathing on the campus lawn or walking around in black tights and no bra. Between the speed, and the girls, and the long drive, I was a mess.

  The old theater where the auditions were held had great acoustics, almost as good as the crapper at the Madonna Inn. My friends and I paced up and down the creaky aisles, warmed up our voices, practiced our lines, and did our best to calm our nerves.

  Then it was time to do my thing.

  What felt like the entire RADA faculty sat in the front row, wearing their turtlenecks and tweedy jackets, looking oh-so- English. Feeling equally European in my head-to-toe corduroy outfit and work boots, I presented myself as professionally as possible, offered up my name, introduced my audition pieces, and went to work. The rest is a blank. I know I rushed my lines a bit—no surprise, considering all the caffeine coursing through my bloodstream—and I recall getting a single laugh, but that’s it. After I finished, one of the faculty members told me that he liked my energy. (Thank you, pills and coffee.) I waited while my friends read their monologues, then we all headed back south.

  The letters showed up a few weeks later. That year, out of nearly nine hundred who auditioned, only fifteen were invited to train at RADA. Three of that fifteen were from my little group. So just like that, it was off to London. Or so we thought.

  Several months prior, RADA had apparently become embroiled in a huge controversy about teaching methodology. Long story short, the old schoolers didn’t like the touchy-feely avant-garde direction the new schoolers were headed in, and the new schoolers wanted the old schoolers to get hip. The traditionalists got fed up with the whole thing, left RADA, and headed to the United States, in search of a university in a community with an arts budget that could support a professional acting-training school. What better location than the American Midwest—Rochester, Michigan, home of Oakland University?

  So much for swinging London.

  CHAPTER 3

  NIGHTMARE #3:

  I find myself in the hills of Griffith Park, the massive urban park that divides East Hollywood, Los Angeles, and the Valley. I’m not sure of my age; I could be at a Cub Scout outing or attending a hippie love-in during my early college years. I’m on a rough cut hiking path on a steep slope. There are scattered oak trees and chaparral flanking me. I’m running. I’m in control and dodging large rocks, roots, and holes. Suddenly I’m accelerating, going faster. I lose control; it’s as if my legs and gravity have taken over. My heart rate quickens, I can’t catch my breath. As I barrel downhill on the uneven trail I see a coiled rattlesnake thirty yards ahead of me. I can’t stop. I’m going too fast. I use my momentum to vault over the rattler. I never look back. My pounding heart awakens me.

  OAKLAND UNIVERSITY WAS CALLED “THE Harvard of the Midwest,” which was a slight exaggeration. But while OU might not have been in the Ivy League, it had one hell of an arts program, a whole lot of wealthy alumni, and a gorgeous professional theater called the Meadow Brook. So those canny Englishmen drew up some paperwork, pulled some strings, and opened up the Academy of Dramatic Art, a two-year acting school helmed by the newly arrived faculty from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. RADA became ADA.

  The teachers all lived on the Matilda Dodge Wilson Estate at the forested edge of the Oakland campus. That’s Dodge as in “Dodge cars,” and that’s Dodge cars as in “We have enough money to build a Tudor-style mansion with the largest indoor horse-riding arena in the world.” The university welcomed the RADA gang with open arms and an open pocketbook; they so wanted the Brits to feel at home that they allowed them to convert a stable into a twenty-four-hour pub, complete with a Union Jack flying in front of it.

  So at the end of the summer of 1968, Betsy and I packed our things and drove out to Michigan. I was going to be an actor, she was going to be a medical secretary, and it was all a huge adventure into the great unknown. Even though the United States seemed to be falling apart around us—we’re talking the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations and the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago—we couldn’t have been happier. When we hit Rochester, I immediately went to work, and after nearly flunking out of a school where I had lost interest in academic theater, ADA was nirvana. The training, the discipline, rehearsing and performing a different classical play every six weeks—it was everything I’d hoped it would be.

  One of the first things I realized when I got to Oakland University was that in terms of social life, I’d landed my butt in a tub of butter. At RADA in the UK, I’m sure it would’ve been go to class, go to rehearsal, go home, do it again. But at ADA in Michigan, we went to class, went to rehearsal, then went to the pub and drank and bullshitted with the teachers—and we’re talking teachers who’d mentored the likes of Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, and Alan Bates—into the wee hours. Then back to classes again the next morning, and in the evening we’d go to the Meadow Brook Theatre and work in any capacity, from techie, to spear carrier, to understudy. My first paying job at the Meadow Brook was a combination of understudying a small role in a George Bernard Shaw play, and backstage janitor; even if I was lucky enough to get on the stage, I’d still have to mop it up at the end of the night. But I was becoming a professional in the world that I loved.

  ADA was a novel training program and attracted the attention of the country’s most prestigious drama educators. John Houseman, for example, sat in on several classes to pick up concepts and curriculum he could take back to his students at the new Juilliard acting school—the same Juilliard that Kevin Kline, Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, and Patty LuPone would attend the following year.

  Inspired by the artistic aura of the place, I thrived on the discipline. Every morning, I would train by myself before class: voice work, ballet exercises, memorization. Meanwhile, the teachers—these fifty- and sixtysomethings who’d been theater professionals for their entire adult lives—began embracing the culture of sixties America, most notably marijuana and the new independent cinema. There we were, eager students, trying to sound like Laurence Olivier, and there they were, all falling in love with Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Thai stick. It was the ultimate in weird role reversal, but it certainly made our trips to the pub that much more interesting. Once they’d tipped a few gin and tonics, our tutors became quite expansive with their storytelling, regaling us with tales about hanging out on Broadway with a very young Julie Andrews, and performing Shakespeare with Richard Burton, and Albert Finney’s notorious talents as a cocksman. It was an utterly romantic and magical time.

  LATE SPRING BETWEEN MY first and second years at ADA, I made my first pilgrimage to New York City to audition for summer stock theater; nobody was at the Academy during July and August, and I wasn’t about to sit around Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan, twiddling my thumbs. I showed up at my first New York audition looking like a Dickensian street urchin, clad in a John Lennon cap, a scarf, tight jeans, Beatle boots, and a peacoat. Despite my outfit, many of the casting people seemed to like me, specifically the fine folks from the Penn State Summer Theater, who offered me small parts in a couple of plays. Four hours later, I went to a second audition, this one for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, and they offered me even bigger roles. Two auditions, two offers. It wasn’t Broadway, but it’d do.

  Afterward, I met up with an old friend from junior high school, Gary Tigerman, who had become a working actor and lived in Greenwich Village. (Gary had scripted my infamous pigeon performance at the high school fashion show, and starred as Mark Antony in our Nazi-centric production of Julius Caesar.) This was my first time in the Village, and it blew me away. Every other shop sold psychedelic gear, and there was some infamous jazz club every few blocks, such as the Village Gate or Slugs. I thought that Gary, who was starring on Broadway, was the luckiest guy in the world.

  We we
nt back to his place, which was a dumbbell apartment—i.e., two big-ish rooms connected by a long, skinny hall. He gave me the grand tour (such as it was), which concluded in his bedroom, where, on a giant water bed that covered two-thirds of the room, lay his girlfriend, an actress named Janice Fisher. Jan, who was recovering from surgery, looked vaguely familiar to me. She, however, immediately recognized me as the actor who’d played Pinocchio in the Teenage Drama Workshop, the kid whom she’d had a crush on that summer long ago. It’s a small world after all.

  Jan climbed out of her sickbed—or sick water bed, more accurately—because she decided that it was her mission to show me Manhattan. For the next several weeks, it was Fellini movie premieres, and watching Katharine Hepburn on Broadway from the wings, and postperformance drinks with the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar. Meanwhile, my friends from Michigan and I were taking in Broadway plays, most memorably the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a musical that I considered so far ahead of its time that it put so-called radical works such as Hair to shame. I thought of myself as a “classical” actor now, an Anglophile, and somewhat of a theater snob, but this modern American musical rocked my world. I realized art could be contemporary, meaningful, and popular, all at the same time.

  As the week progressed, it became evident that Jan and I had a connection. We didn’t kiss. We didn’t sleep together. All we did was walk the streets of Manhattan and talk, talk, talk. We formed a bond, but nothing could happen romantically because I was married, and she was living with one of my oldest friends. Sounds like the plot of a corny Broadway musical.