Drama (30 page)

A marriage had come to an end. The change left the three of us reeling. For each of us, every day was a battle to dispel the gloom. But in the midst of all the pain, I sensed that my life had changed for the better. The same could not be said for Jean or Ian. The separation had been a bitter blow to both of them. In time we would all walk away from the train wreck of my late adolescence, but their injuries would take longer to heal. They continued to grieve for a past that was gone forever. Their grief saddened me as well. But despite it, and despite the grim loneliness of my solitary life, I was not looking backwards. I was looking ahead. In my homely little flat, I slowly taught myself the rudiments of self-sufficiency and self-knowledge. I put my adolescence behind me and wearily embraced adulthood at last. I was patiently waiting for my next chapter to begin.

[28]

My Biggest Mistake

C
hoices can drive an actor nuts. Having to choose between two job offers is a high-class problem, to be sure. Most actors spend their days pining for even one. But if a choice is a luxury, it can also be a torment. We actors are always looking for the main chance, the big break, the next rung on the illusory ladder of success. When a choice presents itself, a broad range of considerations comes into play—the roles, the material, the venues, the visibility, the other talent, the artistic fulfillment, the dough. The most compelling factor is the mysterious signal that comes from your gut: What do you really want to
do
? But sometimes the answer to that question is maddeningly difficult to formulate. Choosing between two jobs (not to mention three or four) necessarily means turning something down. Faced with a major choice, every actor is haunted by the dire scenario of declining a role that then brings undreamt-of glory to some other actor. I myself must hold the record for the most Tony Awards won by actors in roles that I’ve turned down. Inherent in every choice is the potential for making a terrible mistake. In the course of his career, an actor tiptoes through a minefield of such mistakes. In the fall of 1979, in choosing my last acting job of the decade, I made a whopper.

In the spring of that year, I participated in a reading of a new play at Joe Papp’s downtown Public Theater. It was an interesting play with an arresting title:
Salt Lake City Skyline
. The play was a loosely historical reenactment of the trial leading up to the 1915 execution of Joe Hill, the radical union organizer. It was written by one of Papp’s in-house playwrights, a contemporary of mine named Thomas Babe. Tom had been a friend at Harvard, although I had never worked with him there. Along with my old rival Timothy Mayer, he had been codirector of that long-ago Harvard summer theater that I had spurned in favor of my doomed Great Road Players in Princeton. At the time of the play reading, Joe Papp was in his glory years. If he summoned you to read a play, you showed up. But I was also eager to do a favor for Tom Babe, a man I liked and admired, in an effort to bury an old hatchet.

The reading was unexpectedly powerful. Ten good actors had been assembled for the occasion. I read the lead role of the immigrant Joe Hill, in a Swedish accent that owed a good deal to my recent friendship with a certain Norwegian film star. The other major role in the play was the sentencing judge from the Joe Hill trial. It was played by the dour, ironic, and very imposing Fred Gwynne, the only actor I had ever shared a stage with who was taller than I was. Typical of such occasions, the cast read through the script once in a Public Theater rehearsal studio. Then about thirty of the Public’s friends and staff members filed in and we performed the play full-out, standing before our little audience at a row of black music stands. At the play’s climax, the judge dolefully sings the anthemic union ballad “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” then BANG! Joe Hill is shot by a firing squad. Blackout. As the reading drew to an end, we could hear sniffles and muffled sobs. When it was over the crowd applauded strenuously and tearfully. I had asked my big brother, David, to come to the reading that day. He still remembers it as one of the most moving moments of theater he has ever seen. Unrehearsed play readings can sometimes have that effect.

A few months after we did that downtown reading, I went back to work on Broadway. I joined the cast of Peter Hall’s production of
Bedroom Farce
at the Brooks Atkinson on Forty-seventh Street. That show’s producer was Robert Whitehead, one of the great gentlemen of the New York theater. In his day, Bob had produced such historic Broadway fare as
The Member of the Wedding
,
A Man for All Seasons
, and the premieres of four major plays by Arthur Miller. With his impeccable suits, his urbane mustache, and his mane of white hair, Bob radiated class. Late in the run of
Bedroom Farce
, he came to my dressing room. He was giddy with good news. He was all set to produce the American premiere of Harold Pinter’s
Betrayal
for Broadway. Peter Hall himself was slated to direct it, having just staged it in London to loud acclaim. Roy Scheider and Blythe Danner were already cast in it. Bob breathlessly announced that Hall wanted me to play Jerry, rounding out the three characters. This was wonderful news, of course, but Bob took more pleasure in delivering it than I took in receiving it. Joe Papp, you see, wanted to mount
Salt Lake City Skyline
at the Public Theater at the very same time. Even as Bob spoke, I could feel the burden of
choice
descending on my shoulders.

Joe Papp was the very opposite of Robert Whitehead. If Bob was a Broadway aristocrat, Joe was a Lower East Side street tough. Since the late 1950s, he had built the New York Shakespeare Festival from a downtown church basement workshop into an indispensable American institution. Having introduced free Shakespeare in Central Park in 1962, he had since grabbed hold of the enormous Astor Library on Lafayette Street and turned it into the Public, a sprawling, splendidly renovated five-theater incubator of new American plays and musicals. A list of productions begotten at the Public reads like a history of New York theater in the last thirty years of the twentieth entury. Such Tony-winning creations as
That Championship Season
,
A Chorus Line
, and
Hair
only scratch the surface of his prodigious output.

This miraculous body of work was the result of a unique good cop/bad cop management partnership at the top of Joe’s organization. The good cop was his producing partner, a genial and warmly persuasive man named Bernard Gersten. The bad cop was Joe himself, a charismatic, irascible, fearless, mercurial, and frequently impossible man to deal with. He had a kind of genius for throwing people off guard and bending them to his will. To that end, he cultivated a complex love-hate relationship with everyone who worked with him, including even Bernie Gersten himself. The first time I met Joe had been years before, at a Shakespeare audition in a rehearsal room at the Public. In front of six or eight staffers, he greeted me that day with a booming voice, cigar in hand:

“John Lithgow! The son who has outstripped his father, as every son must!”

Zap! By some sixth sense, he had found my emotional sore spot and plunged a needle straight into it. I was stunned and confused. On the one hand, he was complimenting my nascent success. On the other, he was airily dismissing my father’s entire life’s work, without knowing a thing about my relationship with him. I was frozen in place, caught somewhere between flattery and outrage. Just like that, Joe Papp had me right where he wanted me. A man like that is incredibly hard to say no to.

And there I was, years later, caught between Bob Whitehead and Joe Papp, between Broadway and downtown, between Harold Pinter and Thomas Babe, between
Betrayal
and
Salt Lake City Skyline
. I twisted myself into knots trying to decide between the two jobs. I spoke on the phone with Bob Whitehead, who was incredulous that I would even consider turning down
Betrayal
. Then I spoke to Joe, who did a classic Joe Papp number on me:

“Whaddya wanna do another English play for? That’s all y’been doing! You’re an American! You should be playing an American! Everybody thinks you’re a limey!”—(this, notwithstanding the fact that Joe Hill was a Swede). “That Harold Pinter thing’s already been done! That’s all the Broadway crowd wants! Something that’s already a big deal in
London
!” (pronouncing the word as if it were week-old fish). “That’s safe stuff! It’s soft! Come on down here and show everybody you’ve got some
balls
!”

Never the most decisive actor in town, I was a reed in the wind, blowing this way and that. The deciding vote was cast by my agent at William Morris. This was a young man to whom I’d recently been relegated after my longtime rep, Rick Nicita, had decamped for an upstart agency in Los Angeles called CAA. My new agent took the Joe Papp line. Let’s go with the bold choice, he proclaimed. Let’s be daring. Let’s take
Salt Lake City Skyline
! So I did. I called Bob Whitehead and told him my decision. To Bob it sounded as if I had chosen dirt over gold dust, but without a trace of ill will he wished me well.

Anyone might have guessed the outcome. With a full production in the Public’s churchlike Anspacher Theater,
Salt Lake City Skyline
wilted into an inert and preachy bore. The reviews said as much. My brother barely recognized it from that exhilarating play reading six months before. We played for three weeks to half-empty houses. Joe Papp had sat through half of a dress rehearsal and had never been heard from again. At a desultory party on our opening night I learned the reason that my new agent at William Morris had so strenuously urged me to choose the Babe play: he also represented its director.

And
Betrayal
? It opened halfway through our brief run, with Raúl Juliá in the role of Jerry. The show was an unqualified success, hailed as one of Pinter’s greatest works. It was the talk of the town, destined to play to sell-out crowds well into the following season. In every bio of Robert Whitehead, it is listed first among his many great successes. Since that hit Broadway premiere, there have been hundreds of revivals of it all over the world. Gallingly, I’ve been asked to play Jerry in it, three or four more times. By contrast,
Salt Lake City Skyline
was never performed again. In the next thirty years, the two plays would come to symbolize the biggest professional mistake I ever made.

A few nights before we closed, Bob Whitehead and his wife, Zoe Caldwell, came downtown to see our show. Afterward, they made their way to my makeup table through a crowd of half-dressed actors in our cluttered common dressing room. Bob was aglow with his recent Broadway triumph. In possibly his most gracious moment, he complimented me warmly on my performance. He said that, while he’d been baffled by my decision to pass on
Betrayal
, having seen me in the role of Joe Hill he could understand why I’d chosen it. Fred Gwynne slouched nearby, listening to the exchange. After the Whiteheads left, he put a hand on my shoulder, shook his head, and looked at me with a world-weary smile on his long, mournful face. He didn’t have to say a word.

But that is not the end of this cautionary tale. There is another chapter.

While the cast of
Betrayal
merrily continued their sold-out run on Broadway, I ate my heart out with self-recrimination and regret. But because
Salt Lake City Skyline
had closed so abruptly, I was available for other work. Before long, another job did indeed materialize. I was hired to play a small supporting role in a live network TV production of
The Oldest Living Graduate
, a recent play by the Texas writer Preston Jones. Headlining the show would be Henry Fonda, Cloris Leachman, and George Grizzard. The play would be broadcast from the campus theater of SMU in Dallas, but the cast was scheduled to rehearse for three weeks in Los Angeles prior to the live performance. This modest job was a far cry from a leading role in a hit Broadway show, but I was happy to put a few thousand miles between me and the thrumming New York success of
Betrayal
. In the month of March 1980, I flew west to begin rehearsals. It was a trip that was destined to completely change my life.

Soon after my arrival in Los Angeles, I called up Walter Teller. Walter and I had been good friends for a dozen years. I had met him on the night that Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, in November of 1968. That was the month when I’d sneaked home from England to direct
As You Like It
for my father in Princeton. Walter’s parents and mine were part of a crowd of Princeton friends who had gathered for an election-night party at the house of a gung-ho Democratic couple. Walter and I had tagged along with our parents, the only members of our generation in attendance. He was smart, cynical, and funny. Like so many of my college friends of that era, he was highly educated and totally directionless. I took to him immediately. We spent the evening skulking in the basement of the house, playing pool, drinking beer, bemoaning the ascendancy of Richard Nixon, and hatching a lifelong friendship.

In the years between that election night and my West Coast trip, Walt had gone to law school at Berkeley, had turned to entertainment law, had moved to Los Angeles, and had joined a booming law practice there. This career path had put a continent between us. We hadn’t connected for ages. When I reached him in his L.A. office, he was delighted to hear from me. We arranged to have supper the following night at El Coyote, a clamorous Mexican restaurant on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. That evening, over enchiladas, beans, and beer, I spent an hour bringing Walter up to date on the events of my last couple of years. It was a pretty gloomy narrative, but it was leavened by Walt’s usual drollery and wry perspective. At a certain point, I paused for a breath and a swig of Dos Equis. Walter chose that moment for a twinkly pronouncement.