Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (6 page)

What I remember as the most formative aspect from this experience was a chance to see the guys in the group who were really committed, the guys in the group whose families had real skin in the game, and which guys in the group were going through the motions because their parents wanted them to. I concluded I was one of the guys doing it because my grandmother wanted it, but it wasn’t anything I knew my dad could give a flying fuck about. He listened when I told him about what I learned at temple, about ritual and the tradition of it all, what it means to go through this rite of passage. He didn’t relate to it on any level, but he said nothing to negate it. He dropped me off at Hebrew school. That was the extent of it. And he picked me up. He helped me buy the suits we both wore on the day of the ceremony. That was it.

When it was over, one day we were driving somewhere and had passed the temple. I asked him, “What is your view?”

He started to talk about a book he was reading by a guy named Robert Ingersoll, who had taken agnosticism to a philosophical level. Ingersoll was the Sigmund Freud of agnosticism. And he wrote a lot of books about his position and was a famous orator in the late 1800s during the “Golden Age of Free Thought.”

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous—if they aver that doubt is a crime—then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

—Robert Green Ingersoll

My dad found sense in these books and gave me some quotes as we drove. “I just like the guy,” my father said. “The guy says shit like this: ‘Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.’ Or how about this: ‘Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.’”

I don’t remember any of his opinions being forced down my throat, and I said nothing after he told me what he believed in. In hindsight, my takeaway from all that is that it made me start to look around. I did see a lot of people who went to temple and synagogue and church who were the most racist muthafuckas I’ve ever seen, who were always throwing really bad words around. They had this attitude about anyone who wasn’t like them. Whether you were black, Puerto Rican, Asian, or whatever—there was this blatant hypocrisy. On one hand, they were church-going, religion-keeping people, but on the other hand, they were as far from what religion was intended to embody as you could possibly imagine. Whereas my dad was the only completely nonreligious committed person I ever met, and he had the type of ethics I wanted. He was never racist, he was really kind, and he would go out of his way to help anybody who was down and out. By his actions he embodied the Golden Rule, and I realized you don’t need to belong to any fuckin’ edifice or ascribe to any dogma to have a relationship with God, to be a good person. You just have to be a good person.

What’s the point in having a hero in name only? What good is it to admire someone and not be willing to emulate them and to try to live up to the qualities that made them inspirational to you in the first place? They stood for things that were noble, spoke about the human condition. What good is it to complain about cowardice or the lack of backbone or resolve that you see in others if you’re going to do the same things? Whenever I catch myself being hypocritical I chastise myself, have trouble sleeping at night. Over the years I developed a reputation in the industry as a guy who doesn’t keep his mouth shut when I see some injustice or disrespect happening around me. Even
when I didn’t have the self-respect I have now or was loathing who I was, I still didn’t sit back and take it. In making movies there’s egotistical, greed-driven fuckers at every turn. If I saw crews or actors being mistreated or taken advantage of, I got into people’s faces.

Many looked at me sideways: “This Perlman doesn’t mind his own business. We hired him for a job, and he’s like some fuckin’ unionizer.”

I like being this guy who says we’re all in this together. I’ve gone right up to the top and said, “You might be the producer, the guy with all the money, but treat people with respect goddammit, because if you don’t, you’re going to hear from me. We’re all equal here, from the lowliest guy to the filmmaker. We are all trying to bring our A-game here, so don’t fuck with people.”

Sometimes this instinct that I learned when I was a kid was to the detriment of my own career and reputation. But this was core stuff, which I eventually learned how to grow into, to find the proper balance and regulate it to be most effective and do more good than harm. All of it came from what I learned as a young man, from people I admired.

But of all the gifts I borrowed out of my old man’s passions and then went on to make my own, the most enduring sprung from the aesthetic. To this day the artists he taught me to love are the artists I revere the most—in fact, way more intensely these days than when I was first discovering them. Because—and to my enduring regret—those artists who exploded off the screen, out of the Victrola, through the TV box remain unsurpassable: Gable, Tracy, Bogie, Cagney, the Coop, Eddie G, Erroll, Fred and Gene, the Marx Boys, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Crawford, Jimmie, Cary and Kate, Garbo and Harlowe, Capra and Curtiz, Irene Dunne, Fonda, the Duke, Kirk and Burt, Monty and Brando, Malden and Freddie March, Steiger and George C, the “kings of cool,” Lee Marvin and Bob Mitchum and “Wild Bill” Wildman, F and Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd, Ford, Wilder, Hawkes, Chaplin, Keaton, George Stevens, William Wyler—I could go on and on. And Gleason,
Sid Ceasar, Red Skelton, Uncle Milty, Hope and Crosby, Dino and Sam, Lucy and Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Stooges, and Martin and Lewis. Need I say more? And Frankie and Ella and Mel Torme and Donald O’Connor and, and, and . . . these were his heroes.

And why not?! No disrespect for the current crop but . . . well, you know what I mean. All these artists were walking the earth when I was figuring out what was good, some at the peak of their powers. These beauties who my dad passed down to me, they were the stuff that dreams truly were made on. Shit, they were the ones who started me dreaming. Dreaming bigger than the biggest $200 million tent pole can buy. Those are the shoulders we have stepped down from to assume the mantle of progress in modern-day cinema. That step has yielded . . . well, let’s put it this way: we’ve replaced humanity with technology. We went from an obsession with figuring out the glory of being human to the desensitization of the very same. And so I don’t write this book, this letter to my kids and my kid’s friends, and every fuckin’ kid who dreams big and aspires to a life in the arts with anything less than the fiercest sense of urgency. ’Cuz although the progress we’ve made has taken us to lots of unimaginable places, the price we paid is vast. And the chasm is widening with every passing day. So for me, this shit is personal!

A couple of drunks walk out of a bar. One sez to the other, “I betcha a hundred bucks if I shine this flashlight up to the sky, you can’t climb up the beam of light.” The other one sez, “Ah, I know you. When I’m halfway up you’ll shut the fuckin thing off!”

—Bert Perlman, 1953

(CHAPTER 3)

Out of the Drink

George Washington High School was built in 1925 and took up an entire city block. It had architecture like you’d see in Philly, with a doom cornice on top and looking very historical from the onset. Inside, the drab hallways had been livened up to help motivate our class of neighborhood kids who went there. Some halls had been painted by famous artists from the Works Progress Administration era; that’s when President Roosevelt had the brains and guts to put unemployed artists, writers, and actors to work. I remembered one mural,
The Evolution of Music
, painted by Lucienne Bloch in 1938. Kids didn’t graffiti the murals much, maybe just a scribbled signature or something small, because if any of those murals were ruined, the kids who had done it would be hunted down by the rule of the pack. Screwing with the murals would be like somebody who killed the mockingbird when all it was trying to do was sing—even us city kids could see the talent that went into those paintings. In this case, the school’s administration hoped the murals would instill, by osmosis, some culture into our uncouth asses.

These were also important core forming years. I learned how to cut classes, how to roll doobies, how to sing doo-wop in the subway (fantastic reverb)—shit was happening. I was fourteen when I went to
high school, having skipped eighth grade and taking my first year of high school (ninth grade) in junior high, which is a New York tradition.

On my first day of high school there was a pit in my stomach that’s normal when you’re starting something new. It was no surprise what school I’d go to; each neighborhood had its preordained scholastic path or schools you’d attend unless you were wealthy and could go to private schools. My mom and dad had gone to George Washington, as did my brother, so there was history there. My brother had graduated some four years prior, and he had made a name for himself in the school band and was recognized for his virtuosity playing drums. So my first move was to try to endear myself to the orchestra/band teacher. The man not only ran the official school orchestra that played at assemblies and sporting events but also had an elective band for kids who were serious about music and were good at it.

When I introduced myself he said, “Okay, you’re going to be the new school drummer because your brother was a drummer, and he was phenomenal.” I was able to buy myself a couple of weeks with the band by playing so softly I practically couldn’t be heard. Eventually, however, the teacher caught on; it didn’t take him very long to figure out there was a vast space between the apple and the tree!

He said, “How about trumpets?”

I said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“Anything? Piano?” I told him I took five years of piano lessons but couldn’t even play chopsticks. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Practice—could never do it.” That was it, I thought, blowing my last chance to be a musician as my family expected me to be. I was clueless, though, on how this balloon-bursting letdown would introduce me to another art that was then so entirely outside my radar. I remember how this place gave me one of those life-changing opportunities we don’t get too often.

Once I got the message that family connections wouldn’t let me fake my way into the band, I knew it was time to stand and deliver. I began a mad dash to find a way to contribute, to distinguish myself from the pack. I knew I was not going to win any points with
“talkmanship” because I was always a wreck when it came to talking to girls; the low self-esteem just basically exacerbated whatever shot I had at turning on the charm. I was a man in search of a place to fit in. Some said that with my size, I could be a human blockade or a lineman for the football team. But a year earlier a star football player died on the field from what we now know as “sudden death” or heart failure, causing the school to scrap the entire football program the year I entered high school. I hated football anyway. The school had a baseball team, but back then it was kind of ragtag and nothing worth aspiring to. So I gave the swimming team a shot, and with the modest skills I had acquired during summers at the family urban country club, I actually made it. I was happy to become an undervalued member of the swimming team because at least I was on a varsity team. I was second string, or maybe third string, if all the great kids showed up on the same day. But I practiced really hard, got into really good shape, and dug being a part of something.

That’s another thing I thank my dad for—that is, making sure we were passably athletic at all sports. He joined and paid for a membership to a new place called the Fieldstone Baths and Tennis Club in the Bronx. It was built under a cross-section of elevated subway trains near Van Cortland Park that was noisy as all shit. Yet we spent family times there from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I would go on my own a lot to swim in the Olympic-size pool. I became a fairly decent swimmer, at least good enough to make a team.

When I was in my second year of high school, then a junior, I made the tryouts and was again on the swim team. However, it wasn’t long after the swim season started when one day during practice the coach blew his whistle. All of us guys in the water with our swim caps and goggles stopped and treaded water or held on to the side a minute to see what the coach wanted. Who could have guessed that the very tall, very skinny man standing next to the swimming coach would redirect my flight path to the very one I find myself on to this day?

This mysterious man standing there was a very well-dressed gentleman, like a Brooks Brothers window manikin (or today we’d say
he was right out of
GQ
). He was a striking contrast to our swimming coach, a hard-core jock, with his classic cardigan sweater with the holes in it. Just then my coach pointed in my direction. I looked back, hoping to see that there were guys behind me. But no. The coach blew the whistle again, then shouted, “Perlman, out of the pool.”

“What’d I do?”

“Just get out of the pool.”

When I went over to him, still dripping wet, I asked again what I did.

“Nothing. You’re going with this guy.”

“Who is he?” I didn’t even look at the man next to the coach, as if he wasn’t there.

“He’s the drama coach, and you’re going to audition for the school play.”

“What if I don’t want to go?”

“You don’t have any choice—you’re going. They had thirty-five girls show up for the school play to audition and no boys, so they’re looking for boys.”