Drama: An Actor's Education

made him a charismatic, beloved teacher when he was occasionally forced into that fallback line of work. I am constantly approached by people with grateful tales of my father changing their lives, in a classroom, a rehearsal studio, or a school play. He was deeply lovable, not an adjective often applied to your boss when you work in the theater.

But it is possible that his finest traits as a person were the very things that hobbled him as a theater manager. He was missing a key son-of-a-bitch chromosome, the quality that would have helped him make short work of Biff Richards. In creating his companies, he typically sought out theater talent that was just as easygoing and companionable as he was. He valued niceness overmuch. Often he would hire happily married couples to strengthen the social dynamic of an acting troupe, ignoring the fact that one of the partners was dead weight. By the same token, he steered clear of the blazing talents, the prima donnas, the edgy, challenging stars-in-embryo that light up the stage and magnetically draw audiences into theaters. These preferences extended to actors, directors, and designers alike. He refused to believe that such ego-driven behavior was an essential element in great theater. To him, it was not worth the trade-off.

Maybe he was right. Right or wrong, it was his inescapable nature. In retrospect, I revere him for it. But in those days I was a young Oedipus. I was hungry. I was impatient. I wanted to be involved in the best theater out there. I wanted to work for the best directors. I wanted to go up against the best actors. I didn’t give a damn for niceness. Bring on the tyrants! The monsters! The sons of bitches! I wanted to work for people who would settle for nothing but the best.

That McCarter season continued until the following May. My two productions came off well enough. I acted in two or three others. My father and I had a perfectly good working relationship. We never exchanged a word about the Biff Richards mess. This was a little weird, but it never seemed to cause us undue strain. In the summer, Jean and I kept our Princeton apartment while I acted and directed at the Bucks County Playhouse, a half hour’s drive away. Dad offered me another season at McCarter. He even proposed making me his associate director. I turned him down. I told him I needed to strike out on my own, to test myself in the marketplace, to audition and compete, to perform without a net. I needed to go to New York. He said he understood and he gave me his blessing, but he was probably more disappointed than he let on. By September, Jean and I had moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With her usual resourcefulness and alacrity, Jean found a job. I assumed the long-running role of an unemployed New York actor. There was work waiting for me in Princeton but I wouldn’t even consider it. Was this naked ambition on my part? Was it Oedipal pigheadedness? Did I have too high an opinion of my own abilities? Too low an opinion of my father’s? Whatever the reasons, I never worked for him again.

[21] Reality

How stupid can you get? That September I arrived in New York City a jobless twenty- four-year-old with no savings, and no income, only to learn that I had blown my chance to collect unemployment insurance. During the long McCarter season, my canny actor friends had advised me to contrive a fake New York address and apply those eight months of rep work in New Jersey to my record of earnings as a resident of New York State. That way I could start collecting unemployment as soon as I moved into town. “Unemployment is our biggest source of income,” my friends had proclaimed. “It’s the closest thing there is to state support for the arts. No actor in New York can survive without it!”

But alas, I am my father’s son. With the airheaded heedlessness that has always characterized my financial dealings, I barely heard their advice. I arrived in New York with no official work history whatsoever. This was an appalling strategic lapse. My first week there, I walked into the Unemployment Insurance Office at Broadway and Eighty-ninth to make a claim. I stood at a window as a weary, contemptuous woman informed me that, as far as New York State was concerned, I had never earned a salary in my life. Go out and accumulate twenty weeks of work, I was told, or you can’t collect a penny. Listening to her testy, offhand words, I was seized with money panic. My knees were like water, my face was ashen, I was clammy with sweat. I had turned my back on Princeton, eager to perform without a net. And I was already in free fall.

I also had no idea how to get a job. Unemployed in New York, I was the victim of an absurd irony. A Harvard degree, a Fulbright grant, two years of study in London, and a year in my father’s employ — all of this had given me a substantial head start in the profession. But it had also spoiled me rotten. I had never had to scramble for work. I had learned nothing of the gritty, fiercely competitive dogfight that is New York theater. Having abruptly left my father’s protective cocoon and moved into the city, I suddenly found myself lagging far behind every other actor in town. Reality hit and it hit hard.

Jean was now a teaching specialist in Westchester County and was essentially supporting the two of us. Her job required a daily forty-minute commute up the Saw Mill River Parkway. She couldn’t drive, so she got a learner’s permit and set out to learn. Seated beside her in the passenger seat of our VW wagon, I became her driving instructor. I squired her to and from her job in White Plains with my heart in my throat, five times a week. For all intents and purposes, this was the only work I could get. The rest of each day was spent chasing my tail in a parody of the clueless neophyte New York actor. I printed up resumes and glossy photos, I sat through frosty meetings with B-list agents, I pored through issues of Backstage, I sat for hours at Equity open calls, waiting for a two-minute interview with the assistant stage manager of a show I would later learn had already been cast. Day by day I was learning the most basic hardship of the acting profession: getting rejected by people of no consequence.

Photograph by Van Williams. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor.

On a good day I would land a commercial audition at one of the big Madison Avenue ad agencies — Young & Rubicam perhaps, or Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. This was the golden age of television advertising, with terrific character actors in stylish little mini-comedies pitching every conceivable product. To sell Alka Seltzer, a heavyset man in a T-shirt sits on the edge of his bed and moans, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” and the sentence enters the cultural lexicon overnight. A woman in a flowing white gown sits under a tree and, when she is told that she has tasted Chiffon margarine and not butter, her response becomes a catchphrase for passive-aggressives everywhere: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!” Lay’s Potato Chips even reeled in the great Bert Lahr. In a commercial for Lay’s, Bert donned a hokey devil’s costume and stood in red light with hellish smoke surrounding him. Holding a bag of potato chips, he comically growled Lay’s famous tagline: “Bet you can’t eat just one!” Ads like this were classy, clever, and extremely lucrative. Landing them was hardly where my larger ambitions lay, but I tried desperately to get one.

Bert Lahr’s memorable ad may have lent an extra measure of excitement when I got an audition for another Lay’s Potato Chip spot. This one was to be a parody of Mutiny on the Bounty. I was set to read for the Fletcher Christian role. In the ad, Captain Bligh tortures the crew of the ship by insisting that they be limited to only one Lay’s potato chip. “But, Captain, that’s impossible!” Mr. Christian exclaims. “Everyone knows you can’t eat just one!” Waiting to audition, I sat with a gang of Christians and a band of Blighs, spotting among them some of the best character men in New York. I was called in to audition with one of the Blighs. Scrutinizing us were the director, the writers, the admen, and the fretful folks from Lay’s. When I read the ad copy, this group seemed to like what they saw. I was called in again and paired with another Bligh. Then another. By the third time through I was performing off book, confident and cocky. Finally I was thanked profusely by all the parties and sent on my way.

I waited at the elevator, giddy with optimism. The elevator doors opened, disgorging a gabbling crowd of salty, grizzled men in bell bottoms, striped nautical T-shirts, and tam o’shanters. One had an eye-patch, another clenched a corncob pipe in his mouth. These were the actors auditioning for the Bounty’s crew, summoned from one floor below. Their entrance was hilarious, their high spirits infectious. I rode the elevator to the ground floor, laughing out loud the whole way. I stepped out of the building and onto Madison Avenue, golden in the midday autumn light. “I got the gig!” I thought to myself. “I’m sure of it!”