Ask Me Again Tomorrow (13 page)

We were inseparable from then on. Louie, it turns out, was as fiercely committed to his own quest as I was. He approached his work with absolute dedication and professionalism, and he took good care of himself, body and soul. He was intensely curious and an avid reader. He also understood that honing your craft was essential. He treated himself with a kind of respect and seriousness that I aspired to. And he treated me with the same respect. We discovered we had a lot in common.

Louie, who is six years older than I am, is also a first-generation American. His family immigrated to Chicago from Yugoslavia. He had been responsible for caring for his four younger siblings. When the United States entered World War II, Louie struck off on his own, joining the army at age eighteen. He served in Normandy, working as a fireman during the Battle of the Bulge, and when he got home, he took advantage of the GI Bill to study opera. This led him to study theater. He joined the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, where he worked with people such as Mike Nichols, Ed Asner, and Luther Adler, with whom he traveled to Canada with a tour of
A View from the Bridge
. He stayed there for a few years, working in television and on the stage. But he felt New York was where it was at, so he came back to study with the acting coach Lee Strasberg. He got work right away—always as the heavy, a “tough guy.” When we met, he was well entrenched in what we came to jokingly refer to as “the long march,” his path to self-fulfillment. It was our shorthand for his own quest for the American Dream. One of the things we had in common was growing up with the same frame of reference as first-generation Americans. We both knew what it was like to live with parents who spoke a foreign language; we knew what ethnic bias felt like; and we both knew what trying to survive on the streets was all about. We knew it took discipline and work to carve out an identity for yourself. This shared experience made moving forward together all the more possible and exciting.

After dating for a month, Louie and I decided to move in together, an enormous step for both of us. The day I was due to move in, I arrived at Louie’s door with two huge suitcases. I had a key to the place but couldn’t make myself go in. I dragged my suitcases to the bar across the street and had a drink. I was on the verge of making a commitment to another person. This person’s feelings and opinions would now have to be a part of my life. I had my drink, gathered up my bags, and made my way across the street. My heart told me to do it.

Louie was also very good at giving people a lot of space, since it was something he wanted and needed himself. I had no idea that two people could live in such close proximity without ever feeling crowded or controlled. Once I got used to it, I decided there was nothing better.

Louie, on the other hand, was frequently confused and confounded by feelings he had never had before. He’d say to me, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” I would laugh—he was so sweet and honest and vulnerable in those moments, and
his
confusion made me more confident of my own feelings. I trusted what was happening.

One evening, Louie turned to me and started to…mumble. “Olympia, wou…yu…mar….” Just what was he trying to say? He kept repeating this blur of words: “Would…you…ma…?” Oh, I got it. I said, “Louie, that won’t do. You have to
say
it.” Then, very slowly, he said, “Will you marry me?” Without hesitation, I said yes. We made an important and private vow to each other; we promised to do whatever we could to help each other realize our dreams, even if we didn’t approve of them. This simple idea has sustained us, has bonded us together in love and respect, for more than forty years.

Now that we were living together, some things had to change. We needed a bigger bed—one that two people would fit in. Some mornings we woke up and the apartment was so cold that we could see our breath—Louie agreed to ask the landlord for more heat. I even convinced him to eat meat once in a while; he had been a vegetarian eating nuts and beans and green leafy things even though his apartment was in the middle of the meat district.

My mother came to visit a couple of months after we moved in together. She looked around, her face like stone. She didn’t like this “living together business.” Later she told my brother, “Your father and I will have to leave the country.”

It was a season of breakthroughs. I was hired as Dame Wendy Hiller’s understudy in
The Aspern Papers.
The play, based on a novella by Henry James, follows an American editor in Venice as he attempts to track down letters written by a famous Italian poet to his mistress. For my audition, I read for three parts—the French mistress, her English niece, and their Italian maid—three different accents and three different ages!

I’d been studying voice ever since I’d arrived in New York, and now my efforts were to pay off. In the middle of my audition the play’s producer, Michael Redgrave, came tearing down the aisle of the theater: “Who
are
you?” he asked me. “Where did you come from?” He conferred with the play’s director, Margaret Webster, and I got the job. As an understudy, my chances of ever getting on stage were nothing if not slim, but the play was slated to open on Broadway, and opening on Broadway was, for any aspiring actress, an enormous, almost incomprehensible milestone.

We rehearsed in Philadelphia. I rearranged the furniture in my hotel room to resemble the set so that I could run my lines, knowing I’d never set foot on stage during a performance. Dame Wendy
owned
the stage. A classically trained English actress, she’d debuted in the movies in 1937, winning acclaim for her role in
Pygmalion.
Twenty-one years later she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in
Separate Tables.

One afternoon, we learned that Dame Wendy had a painful eye infection and wouldn’t be able to appear. Suddenly my services were needed. It was all so sudden that I didn’t have time to be nervous.

Margaret Webster took me aside. “I know you can imitate Dame Wendy,” she told me. “I’ve heard you. But don’t do it that way. Do it
your
way.”

I started to work. I’d rehearsed in my hotel room so many times that I felt comfortable. But in the middle of my first scene, I sensed someone walking behind me. Then a hand on my back pushed me off the stage, as Dame Wendy finished the line I had started. Unable to rest at home, she’d come to the theater to take her place on stage.

After the play, as I bounded up the stairs to my dressing room, I heard Dame Wendy call to me as I passed her dressing room. “Miss Olympia,” she said, beckoning me to come in. I knew she enjoyed me; she thought I was a character. I thought about that small hand, pushing me off the stage with all the might of a hammer.

“I bet if you broke your leg you’d drag the bloody stump to the stage before you’d let anyone else go on for you,” I said.

“That’s right. You’ll never play this part.” She smiled.

That summer, we got a call from Nikos Psacharopoulos, the artistic director of the Williamstown Summer Theatre in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He wanted us to come up for the summer to appear in Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece,
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
directed by Tom Brennan, who had directed us in
Medea
in New York. Tom wanted Louie to play James Tyrone, and for me to play his wife, Mary. I didn’t think I was right for the part. Mary Tyrone is Irish, I was not. I couldn’t possibly be convincing! Olympia Dukakis playing Mary Tyrone, who would believe it? I told Louie to go without me. I even suggested to Tom other actresses who might be suited for the role. When I told the psychiatrist I was seeing, he called me on it. “Why would you want to give away the part?”

“I’m
not
,” I said, “I’m just not right for it.” He asked me to describe the character. “Well, she’s an addict,” and that statement stopped me. I could play
Irish,
it was the addiction I didn’t want to go near. I feared that inhabiting this character would evoke in
me
a need for drugs again. The therapist pointed out that I
knew
what this character was about and wasn’t that, after all, what an actor brings to a part? I decided to accept.

We had only two weeks to rehearse. Opening night was well received. The second night, on the way to the theater, I started to hyperventilate and fell to my knees on the grass, gasping for air.

“You have to get up, Olympia.” Louie was leaning over me, speaking gently, trying to reassure me. “You have to get up. There is no understudy.” I managed to get through the first two acts, but in the third act, where Mary is totally high, I suddenly “went up”—which means all of my lines flew out of my head. This is not an uncommon occurrence for actors, but it was the first time it ever happened to me. I turned to the prompter, but he wasn’t in his place. I started wandering around the stage, improvising half-formed sentences and touching the furniture. Finally I caught a full line and Mary’s dialogue seemed to float back into my consciousness. I had survived. I had withdrawn from the situation but had found my way back. I felt strengthened by this. I had come a long way from the coward who couldn’t stop crying in
The Seagull
.

Once we got back to New York, I was cast as the lead in Brecht’s
A Man Is a Man
that opened at the Masque Theater. This part brought me national attention for the first time (the play was reviewed in
Time
magazine); I was also nominated for an Obie, an off-Broadway award. I would not be able to attend the ceremony because I had landed a small part in a movie filming on location; Louie would attend on my behalf. On the off chance that I might win, I gave him a list of people to thank. When indeed my name was called, Louie strode to the stage, ignored my note, and said, “She deserves this!”

Shortly thereafter, I took a part in a production of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
only to be fired after my first rehearsal. Clearly being an Obie winner didn’t mean I was safe from rejection.

Louie and I tried to work together whenever possible. Our song was “Moon River”—we were definitely “two drifters, off to see the world.” One of the things we loved doing during our courtship was going to see foreign films—we especially loved movies by Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, and Visconti. Dinner consisted of hot dogs and beer from Grant’s soda fountain between double features.

Tom Brennan cast us together once again, this time in Strindberg’s romantic comedy,
Crimes and Crimes
. After opening night, the
New York Times
gave it a terrible review. The reviewer
hated
everything about the production—except Louie and me. The second night we showed up at the theater and it was deserted! The play had closed, only no one bothered to let us know. Louie turned to me and said, “Well? What next? Let’s go to the movies,” as though we had not a care in the world.

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMED
like my life was one big effort to insist on my own definition of myself. Whenever I felt someone trying to define me, I tried to get there first. I didn’t want to be defined by my ethnicity or my gender or anything that I didn’t choose. When Louie and I decided to get married, we
chose
to do it in a civil ceremony at city hall. My parents wanted a traditional wedding, in a church, followed by a big reception. Once again, I failed to be the dutiful Greek daughter they’d wanted.

In the end, though disappointed by my decision, my parents came to New York for the wedding. Louie was more nervous than I was (he panicked when he thought he’d forgotten the ring), and our friends Roberta and George stood up as our witnesses. Afterward, we all went across the street to Schrafft’s and had a sherry. We didn’t take a honeymoon; Louie was appearing in
Moby Dick
on Broadway and had to make the seven-thirty call.

I would be lying if I said being married wasn’t hard for me at first. Something in me resisted it. Three months after we were married, I broke out in a terrible rash. I appeared to be allergic to Louie. I would go to bed, and when I’d wake up, whatever side of my body had been touching him during the night would be covered with red bumps. My system was reacting to this new state of matrimony. It was as though having someone so close, who was not going to leave, was more than my body could handle. If it wasn’t Louie himself, perhaps it was the
comfort
of marriage that was making me itch: I certainly wasn’t used to living with someone who was so supportive—and, well, so
tender
.

Along with that hideous rash, I also began to neglect my share of the chores—and Louie. Finally, after weeks of doing all the chores himself—and of very little intimacy—he’d had enough. He pointed out the unmade bed, the unswept floor, and the stack of dirty dishes he now refused to wash. “You’re not even a good roommate anymore!”

As he shouted, something in me snapped and I ran into the kitchen, shouting back at him, “You want me to get rid of these?” I grabbed a plate and smashed it on the kitchen floor. Then I grabbed another. And another. I didn’t stop until every dish we owned was in pieces. Louie responded by walking calmly into the living room and mangling four Greek metal trays we’d been given as a wedding present. Before we were finished, we’d broken or torn every single wedding present. Finally, exhausted, we sat down and started talking. Well,
I
started talking—Louie listened. I told him I didn’t want to turn into a “wife,” at least not someone else’s definition of what a wife was. He said, “And I don’t want to be someone else’s idea of what a husband is.” We were going to figure out for ourselves what it meant to be married.

By 1962, many of the social mores and institutions that had begun to loosen during the 1950s were starting to give way to experimentation. Both Louie and I had spent our lives trying to understand who we were within the context of our immigrant families and our ethnic communities while also trying to define ourselves as individuals. Now we were trying to define ourselves as a couple. As part of our journey of self-discovery, we, like many couples in that era, had what was known as an “open” marriage. We had a few encounters—all brief, mostly fun—and, mercifully, none of them interfered with our feelings for each other.

In 1965, while Louie was up in Williamstown doing summer stock, I found out that, despite using birth control, I was pregnant, but were we ready? Would we be good parents? My doctor told me that no one was ever really ready and that if I waited until I was “ready,” it was possible my life could slip through my fingers. From that moment on, I knew with every fiber of my being that I wanted this child and it was time for us to “close” our marriage.

I loved being pregnant. I gave up smoking and drinking. Louie and I took natural childbirth classes with Elizabeth Bing, who advocated partner-supported labor and delivery. Louie was in the delivery room with me when I gave birth to our daughter, Christina, thanks to our obstetrician, Dr. Walters. I was a week overdue and the doctor said, “What are you waiting for?” Louie was in Washington, D.C., doing a play, and I told the doctor his only night off was Monday. Dr. Walters said if I didn’t give birth by the following Monday, he was going to induce labor. That Monday I woke up and started having contractions. Louie flew in from Washington and made it back in time to be my labor coach. When Christina was born, she sailed into the world like a brilliant silver fish. Whoosh, and she was on her own.

My mother didn’t offer to visit once during my pregnancy. Then again, I never asked for her help or invited her to come. The fact that we were both now mothers to daughters didn’t help assuage the tension between us.

I never knew that I could love another person so unconditionally and protectively until I had my daughter. Even before we got home from the hospital, a sixth sense began operating in me. One night I awoke in the maternity ward, certain that something was wrong. I immediately went to the nursery, where I found Christina surrounded by nurses; one of them was taking blood. She had become jaundiced and they needed to test her liver function. Fortunately, the problem (which is not uncommon) resolved itself in a few days and we were able to go home on schedule.

Once we were home, my insecurities took over. I again didn’t trust my instincts. I would ask Louie if he thought Christina was warm enough. Was the room too cold? Was she sleeping in the right position? Louie had his own issues; he gave everyone else space to live their lives and now we had no space at all.

When I finally felt stabilized enough with Christina, I invited my parents to come meet her. Becoming a confident mother helped prepare me for the criticism I knew my mother would have. As soon as she started to point out everything I was doing wrong, I asked her to leave my kitchen. She stopped. It was that easy.

Even so, they were delighted by their first grandchild. In the Greek tradition, they showered her with silver coins to ensure good fortune; they also showered her with love and affection.

I went back to work when Christina was about six months old. I took her with me to Maryland, where I did
The Rose Tattoo.
When I returned, I was cast as Tamora in Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus,
directed by Gerry Freedman and produced by Joseph Papp in Central Park. It’s a bloody, violent story of murder and revenge. Tamora is a force of nature, a complex, powerful, and awesome figure who is at once a woman, a queen, a murderer, and a mother. I got excellent reviews for my work, and though many people assume this is what actors are after, it was very hard for me to take.

I couldn’t miss what was happening. When I got bad reviews, I felt bad about myself. When I got good reviews, I was
supposed
to feel good about myself, but this wasn’t happening. In fact, a kind of desperation started to build within my body.

Having reached an impasse, I had left “talk therapy.” I had begun to understand that there was a very real link between our bodies and our emotions, a mind-body connection. Because of the building desperation and terrible anxiety I had begun to feel, I made an appointment to see Dr. S, a bioenergetic therapist.

The philosophy behind bioenergetics is about the physicality of feeling—the idea that our bodies take on our repressed feelings, disrupting the flow of energy in our bodies and in our lives. Dr. S didn’t want to talk, he wanted to observe my reactions to various physical exercises he led me through. In this way, we worked toward getting to the surface the feelings that were affecting me physically.

During my sessions with him, a series of events began to unfold. I began to experience my body as a dark, empty tunnel.
Who was I?
I couldn’t find
me
. I had let reviewers tell me how I should feel about myself—good or bad, depending on
their
point of view. What was the difference between this and letting people define me because I was Greek, or a woman?
None
.

Then one day my face began to contort and I couldn’t control it. “What’s happening to me?” I cried, clutching my paralyzed cheek. Dr. S suggested I look in the mirror, and what I saw shocked me: it was as though my face had been cleaved in two, with one half at rest and the other in agony. Dr. S reassured me that this was simply the physical manifestation of my inner conflict—my contradictory feelings were coming to the surface and were now written on my face. I couldn’t then think about what that meant, I was worried about how I would go on stage in just a few hours. Dr. S assured me my face would return to normal before too long. At five o’clock I was still sitting there when Dr. S said good-bye to his last patient. My face had returned to normal, but inside I was in a panic. I begged him to give me some drugs. He gave me two aspirin. I said, “This won’t do anything!” I demanded drugs. He told me no, I needed to
feel
what was going on. “But how can I manage? How will I do it?” He said, “The way you’ve always done it—will power.”

That night I took some smelling salts on stage with me and even managed to give a decent performance. What happened that day was a breakthrough, and I continued to work with Dr. S.

In 1968, pregnant with my son Peter, I was performing in Vaclav Havel’s
The Memorandum,
also a Public Theater production, and something quite wonderful happened. I lost my reason for going on stage. Suddenly, I no longer needed to prove that the little Greek girl from Lowell, Massachusetts, was as good—better—than everyone else in New York. That realization liberated me and now I was free to go on stage and
play.

Things were going well for us. I dubbed Louie “Carl Commercial” because he had finally cracked the market and was making money. Christina was there and already had quite a personality. And now we had Peter, our first son—a beautiful child.

I was still working with Dr. S, who encouraged me to take a further step in my therapy—join an encounter group—and he gave me the name of a couple who were putting one together.

The first night of group, I walked into a room of about a dozen people, all between the ages of twenty and forty, all strangers to one another. The group leaders, Mike and Sonia Gilligan, had developed therapeutic techniques in their work with addicts. They had found that addressing repressed feelings in front of others as witnesses helped release those feelings. Sonia began that evening by asking who wanted to go first. I raised my hand and said I wanted to get to my anger, that I had been trying with a bioenergetics therapist but had been unsuccessful, and he had suggested I come to this group.

“Who are you angry at?”

“My mother,” I blurted out.

Then she asked me to imagine my mother’s face on the wall and address her directly. “What do you want to say to her?”

“No!” I felt out of breath.

Sonia gave me a breathing technique and I continued to say, “No. No. No.” Then I began shouting it.

Then Sonia said, “Say I won’t,” and from that I just let all my anger out and was shouting things. What was remarkable was that I connected with all my deep-seated rage and no one was hurt. I was no longer afraid of my anger—what it could do to me—and knew that it was necessary. My anger could be a part of my life, and my work. This technique worked so well with my mother, a few weeks later I put my father “on the wall.” For so long I had felt that most of my inner turmoil had to do with my mother. I had never once confronted my father about his own erratic behavior, about how secretive he was with all of us. It began to dawn on me that perhaps my mother was not just being deferential to him; perhaps she had been protecting him. Or perhaps she had been protecting us. The work I did in group reminded me that there are two sides to every coin, two sides to every story—and two people in every marriage.

Louie was so intrigued by my experience that he decided to join the group, too.

Louie and I learned a great deal about each other through this group work. We learned how to have a good fight, which meant we learned how to say the hard things to each other. To trust that we meant no harm. Louie and I were so good at this encounter stuff, the group leader suggested we start our own group. We wanted one made up of theater couples. I had been talking to Louie about wanting a theater company, similar to the Actors Company in Boston. Maybe the encounter group would lead to that.

The group filled up very quickly. We met twice a week, and by the end of the year, the group had jelled and consisted of theater couples who shared our dream of forming a company. As we began to sketch out our plans, Louie was offered a role in the film version of
Fiddler on the Roof
to be shot in Yugoslavia and England. It was a great opportunity—far too good to pass up—so we decided to pack up our two kids and go to Europe. At the time, I was three months pregnant. Much to our delight and amazement, six couples who were involved in our burgeoning theater decided to come along, too. In Zagreb, we’d all gather in a beautiful, ornate guild hall and share our various approaches to theater. Thanks to our group therapy work, we all knew how to resolve conflicts and support one another in a community setting, crucial skills for putting together a theater group.

We spent three months in Zagreb and one month in London, returning to New York just after Christmas in 1971. The stewardess on the New York flight from London panicked to see I was then nine months pregnant. I gave birth to our third child, our son Stefan, a few weeks later.

Back in New York, we continued to flesh out our plans for our theater company. This was really going to happen: we were going to launch a company, surrounded by a sizable group of people—nine other couples—who shared the same dream.

I was getting a lot of work in New York, mostly in not-for-profit theater, like the Public Theater and Off-Broadway, neither of which paid a living wage. To supplement that work, I had started teaching acting classes in the graduate program at New York University. I was offered the occasional spaghetti commercial, which helped financially, but I was starting to get typecast. Most of the parts I was offered were either “ethnic” women or prostitutes. Once in a while I got to play an ethnic prostitute.