Drama: An Actor's Education

envious heart!). So for her, my appearance on the doorstep that day was a deeply underwhelming disappointment. Her mistaken first impression of me was twofold: I was Australian, and I was gay.

Fortunately, she was too polite to slam the door in our faces. Off we went for a notably inelegant nosh at the long-gone Westside Delicatessen on San Vicente Boulevard. The three of us had a fantastic time. We laughed ourselves breathless for ninety minutes. When Walter and I dropped Mary off afterwards, I kissed her cheek at the curb in front of her home. We arranged to get together the next day to see a Sunday-afternoon showing of the film Norma Rae. We spent that entire Sunday talking and laughing on her living room couch. We never got to Norma Rae. I went to UCLA on Monday morning and watched her give the first lecture of her survey course on American Economic History. From her lips I heard the name “Joseph Schumpeter” for the first time. Who would have dreamed that the name “Joseph Schumpeter” could ever sound so sexy?

By Tuesday, Mary had left for an academic conference in Washington, D.C. She was gone for three days. The days were punctuated by a dozen phone calls between us. She returned just in time to go with me to a weekend barbecue for the cast of The Oldest Living Graduate. It was her introduction into the exotic backstage world of show business. She hobnobbed at poolside with leathery Harry Dean Stanton and callow Timothy Hutton. She chatted with Henry Fonda, the first screen legend she’d ever met in the flesh. After the barbecue, a manic Cloris Leachman insisted on giving us a Cook’s tour of her vast home, perched atop Coldwater Canyon. More bemused than starstruck, Mary navigated the events of that afternoon like a research scholar stumbling onto a captivating new field of study.

The following week, my flying visit to Los Angeles came to an end. I had spent every possible hour with Mary. I left for Dallas to perform The Oldest Living Graduate on television. By that time, the die was cast. Walter had been right. Mary and I were made for each other. We’ve been together ever since. It was the best deal Walter Teller ever struck.

God probably never intended for actors and professors to marry. When an actor weds a professor, they are both asking for trouble. By nature, a professor’s life is orderly and predictable. Years in advance, she knows what courses she’ll teach, what conferences she’ll attend, and what faculty committees she will serve on. She carefully doles out months and years of time to conduct research and write books. If she is to amass a substantial body of work and build a distinguished academic career, nothing must distract her from her clearly defined scholarly mission.

By comparison, an actor’s life is scatterbrained chaos. He never knows where his next job is coming from, or when. A stray phone call from his agent can send him to another continent for a three-month gig on three days’ notice. With every new offer, his career is totally rejiggered. Given a choice between jobs, he can bore the bark off a tree with his agonizing equivocations. Worse still, months can go by with no jobs at all. When this happens, an actor’s gloom and self-doubt can make him an insufferable conjugal partner. But the opposite can also apply: a professor with a book deadline or a pending promotional review is no walk in the park, either. The twin disciplines of academia and show business require two completely different emotional skill sets and temperaments. On the face of it, a marriage between an actor and a professor can never work.

Ours does. It has for thirty years. Who knows why? Perhaps our differences have somehow bound us together. Mary is earthbound and practical, I am airheaded and artistic. She is restless and mercurial, I’m phlegmatic and plodding. She is pessimistic and contrary, I’m optimistic and accommodating. She is fearless and combative, I’m fretful and politic. She is openhearted and generous, I’m self-absorbed and tightfisted. She shuns the spotlight, I am drawn to it like a heliotropic flower. Shakespeare is Greek to her, economics is Greek to me. Spectator sports? She is frostily indifferent, I am rabidly passionate. And yet from the first day we met, we have never bored each other for a second. For both of us there is no one else in the world whose company we would prefer. She has brought a tough-mindedness and reassuring order to my life, and I have brought a measure of disruptive fun and happy disorder to hers. By now, it is impossible for either of us to imagine life without the other.

After my lunch with Mary at the Westside Deli, the next four years passed with lightning speed. They were jam-packed with momentous changes for both of us. For a while we played a transcontinental tug-’o-war, struggling to choose between my life in New York and hers in Los Angeles. Mary took a sabbatical from UCLA to test the waters in Manhattan. She weighed job offers on the East Coast. We snooped around for a bigger Upper West Side apartment. One day my agent called. He’d made an appointment for me to read for a film based on John Irving’s bestselling novel The World According to Garp. At my audition, I read for the role of the transsexual Roberta Muldoon. Director George Roy Hill cast me as Roberta and I shot the film in and around New York. Halfway through the shoot, Mary was granted tenure at UCLA. This news abruptly ended our geographical tug-’o-war. She won. I was heading west. But before leaving town, Mary and I got married at City Hall, with nine-year-old Ian as my best man. Arriving in Los Angeles, I joined Mary in the apartment at the corner of Montana and Harvard. Ian became a frequent visitor. Mary gave birth to our daughter, Phoebe. Soon after, Garp was released. The next year, our son Nathan came along. We bought a house, minutes from UCLA (where we have lived ever since). Rick Nicita was my agent again and Walter Teller was now my attorney. Awards began to pile up for my performance as Roberta Muldoon. When I won the New York Film Critics’ Award, my old friend David Ansen gleefully called me with the news. Hollywood embraced me with open arms. After Garp, I played a back-to-back string of wildly different roles in major Hollywood films: Twilight Zone, Footloose, Terms of Endearment, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. Celebrity struck like an avalanche. I escorted Mary to the Academy Awards for two successive Oscar nominations. We barely knew what hit us. Our lives had been hurled into a completely new level of reality. If we hadn’t had each other we might not have survived our dizzying flight into the ozone. But we did. We had each other. And we’ve had each other ever since.

A cautionary tale? Indeed. But it is a cautionary tale with a difference. This cautionary tale has a happy ending, right out of O. Henry. It is an ending shot through with one blazing, life-affirming irony:

None of these things would have ever happened if I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my career.

Let us examine for a moment what my wife’s professorial colleagues might call “a counterfactual.” I choose Betrayal and I celebrate a gratifying success on Broadway. But look what I miss out on? I never meet Mary Yeager. I completely forgo my life with her. Phoebe and Nathan are never born. A thousand happy events in our lives never take place — birthday parties, school plays, graduation ceremonies, camping trips, foreign countries, Christmas mornings, Halloween nights, swimming lessons, bicycle lessons, weddings, baby steps, pets. My professional life is impacted as well. I never achieve that unique dual citizenship as a Broadway and Hollywood actor that has been my calling card ever since. Everything of substance that has defined the second half of my life simply never happens. Such an alternate universe is completely inconceivable to me. Each of these things I hold near and dear. They will live in me forever, long after everyone else has lost all memory of a hit Broadway play in 1979.

And what is the moral of this story? It is a truth at the heart of my whole life:

Acting is pretty great. But it isn’t everything.

Coda

Years after my father died, my thoughts continued to dwell on memories of him. The most vivid of those memories was that evening in 2002 when I first read him a bedtime story. As I relived that evening again and again, an idea gradually began to form in my mind. On that long-ago night, my mother, my father, and I made our deepest connection with each other. But that’s not all that happened. By chance, I also stumbled across a nugget of pure gold. The nugget was called “Uncle Fred Flits By.” That Wodehouse short story was a work of comedy genius, a fine-tuned machine for manufacturing riotous laughter. Best of all, it was a story that almost no one west of the Atlantic Ocean had ever heard of. I began to imagine a theatrical performance consisting of nothing more than “Uncle Fred Flits By” enacted by a single actor on an empty stage. It would be a