Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment (10 page)

Still, the transition was difficult. At first, they all crammed into two small rooms in a hotel on Madison Avenue and 35
^th
Street. Pat and Robbie enrolled in a nearby public school for a short time, but a few months later they again moved to another tiny apartment, also with just two rooms. Coincidentally the new place was on 67
^th
Street, the very same street where I would soon be living. As it turned out, Pat and I actually continued living on the same street just a few blocks apart for years, and not once did we ever see each other out on the street.

At the time, there were five of them crammed into their apartment. But, to make matters still worse, Pat’s grandfather just showed up at the door one day. Out of work and with no place to stay, Pat remembers thinking to herself, “Not another one.”

The overcrowded living quarters made it difficult for Pat to do her schoolwork, and she was constantly worried about getting enough sleep with all the chatter going on with so many people crammed into just two rooms. As a result, to this day, Pat cherishes her privacy. When we raised our own kids, if they complained, she would remind them how lucky they were to each have their own room. Even now, Pat likes to set time aside when she locks the gate and enjoys just being alone for a few hours in the afternoon out in our backyard by the pool. It drives me crazy, because I like a big crowd around. No doubt growing up with everyone on top of each other, she learned to appreciate having a little space of her own. I’m sure that’s true of many people raised in overcrowded city apartments, who turn to the suburbs for more space—even if it means a longer commute to work.

Helon found work dancing at the 52
^nd
Street nightclubs. These were the bars where, in the 1940s, comics, singers and dancers of New York City congregated. The first time Helon met Jackie Gleason was at one of the clubs. Among her friends was a dancer named Sally Marh, the mother of comic legend, Lenny Bruce. It wasn’t glamorous work, and she would always have to share a drink or two with the patrons between dance numbers, but she scraped together enough money for the family to survive.

Pat and Robbie took classes in the evening from New York’s premier dance instructor, Alberto Gallo. They were grueling sessions—each night, Pat and Robbie rushed home from school, did their homework amidst the constant noise in the small, over-crowded apartment and then headed off to dance practice until late in the night.

Despite the grind and the overcrowding, Pat remembers her childhood in New York City as happy years. Like her mom, Pat loved dancing. She was a natural and dreamed about dancing on the big stage. One day that dream would be realized, but that was still a few years away from her arrival in the seat next to mine at New York’s Professional Children’s School.

Meanwhile, in 1942, I received a call to try out for the stage production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play,
The Skin of Our Teeth
. It would be the first major Broadway production of a new, young and innovative director, Elia Kazan. Eventually recognized as one of the most prominent stage and film directors of the twentieth century, Kazan was especially known for his association with Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and the emergence of “method” acting—a style in which actors attempt to draw upon their own emotions in their portrayal of a character. If done well, “the method” can result in a performance that is more “real,” and thus more believable.

Kazan later described method acting as less complicated than some have imagined. The technique, he said, “consists of recalling the circumstances…surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past.” Lee Strasberg would have his actors take a moment “to remember the details” of that emotional experience just before their performance. Marlon Brando, with whom Kazan would work on numerous films, including the classic,
On the Waterfront
, became the most successful and popular representative of the method-acting style.

The Skin of Our Teeth
starred Fredric March, his wife Florence Eldridge and Tallulah Bankhead—all practitioners of the older, classical model associated with the Barrymores. There was, however, an up-and-comer in the play named Montgomery Clift, who would eventually be cut more from the new style. At the time, Monty was in his early twenties and had recently finished working with the great team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Kazan needed a teenager to play the role of a telegraph boy, and Fredric March recommended me for the part.

Although it won the Pulitzer Prize,
The Skin of Our Teeth
was a strange, if not downright bizarre, production. To be honest, I was fourteen years old when I first read the script, and I didn’t have a clue as to what it all meant. And I wasn’t alone.

One critic described the play as an “abstract allegory that portrays the difficulties of life through a series of scenes starting with Adam and Eve, through Noah’s Ark and then finally a Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.” Well, that didn’t help much. To further confound us, the play had a range of weird characters, including monsters and mammoths and dinosaurs. And the main character, Mr. Antrobus, was, through the course of the play, engaging in such eccentric endeavors as inventing the wheel and creating the alphabet.

If all that sounds strange, it was even more peculiar when performed live onstage. We took the play for tryouts in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Haven, and we bombed everywhere. Nobody understood what it all meant, and the critics were savage.

In Washington, things got stranger still. I was in the middle of a scene with Tallulah Bankhead when suddenly these two ladies—and I shouldn’t say this, but I remember so clearly that they were two tremendously fat women—came right out onstage, grabbed me by the shirt and dragged me off. I was stunned, and I said, “What’s the matter?” They told me, “You’re too young to be onstage.” It turned out there was a law in Washington, D.C. that nobody under sixteen years old could go onstage professionally.

Laws protecting child actors were not unusual. They affected me at an early age. I was just six years old, and my mom couldn’t get me roles on Broadway. I debuted in
Tapestry in Grey
, just a month after turning seven, which was the age limit. Laws protecting young actors were essentially child labor regulations, and a group called the Garry Society shielded children from abusive labor practices. In Hollywood, the Jackie Coogan Law forced the parents of a child actor to put ten percent of his income in an account they couldn’t touch. Coogan had been a famous child star, playing with Charlie Chaplin in
The Kid
and many other roles. But when he became an adult, he discovered all his money was gone and he was broke. Years later, when my son, Vincent, worked on several television shows, a percentage of his earnings had to go directly into a trust account, which was turned over to him when he turned eighteen. There is no way to completely protect child actors against abusive or excessively greedy parents, but these laws certainly helped to ensure that situations like Jackie Coogan’s were less common.

Anyway, these two women yanked me off the National Theatre stage, and the show came to an abrupt stop. After a short break, the curtain raised again and another actor, actually an older man, Stanley Prager, went on in my place. He looked silly playing the telegraph boy, especially after the audience had already seen me. But I’m not sure that it made much difference.
The Skin of Our Teeth
was such a strange play anyway—with actors periodically coming out of character and talking directly to the audience—they probably thought my being dragged off the stage was all part of the show. In fact, in the beginning of the play, Tallulah, who played Mr. Antrobus’s maid, Sabina, stepped out of character and told the audience: “I hate this play.”

The Skin of Our Teeth
barely made it through the tryouts. Because it was written by Thornton Wilder, who two years earlier had penned the prize-winning play,
Our Town
, the theaters were generally full. But that didn’t mean the audiences enjoyed it. In fact, some of the crowds literally booed us and walked out on the performance while the out-of-town critics brutalized the play. In the midst of all this, the actors began to grumble, and soon there was talk about getting off what seemed like a sinking ship.

Thornton Wilder, at the time, was serving as a captain in the United States Army. As previously mentioned, directors typically don’t want writers hanging around too much, but this case was different. And so Kazan asked Wilder to come speak with us. Wilder agreed, and he showed up while we were in Baltimore.

Wilder spoke to us while in full military uniform. There were about forty of us present, and Wilder said: “I know that the critics don’t understand my play. That doesn’t bother me as long as you understand it. So I’m going to explain it to you now.” He said the play was about the human spirit; that all people in all places and all times experience obstacles in life that threaten their happiness and even their survival. Nevertheless, said Wilder, we manage to get by—and we do so, “by the skin of our teeth.” It was that simple. The play was the story of human persistence in the face of obstacles and crisis. Wilder also predicted that the catcalls and vicious criticism would end when we got to Broadway.

He was right. After bombing everywhere, we opened at the Plymouth Theater in New York on November 18, 1942, and suddenly the play was a smash hit. Furthermore, the critics were now writing great reviews. Howard Barnes of the
Herald Tribune
exclaimed: “Theater-going became a rare and electrifying experience” with Thornton Wilder’s “daffy and illuminating”
The Skin of Our Teeth
. The play ran on Broadway for nearly a year.

I particularly enjoyed working with Monty Clift. He was eight years older than me and had also been a child actor on Broadway. That made it easy to talk with him. We stayed in touch for a while after the show, but then his film career took off, and he became one of the biggest draws in America. Ironically, his main rival, Marlon Brando, came from the same home town of Omaha, Nebraska. Sadly, Monty’s life began spiraling downward as he reached his peak, and he died while still a very young man of 45.

The most interesting person in the cast was Tallulah Bankhead, who played the sultry maid, Sabina. From a powerful Alabama political family, Tallulah made them all blush back home with her public antics. Her reputation for promiscuous behavior was widespread, and Tallulah fueled the gossip columns with her constant comments and insinuations about whom she was sleeping with in Hollywood. On top of it, Tallulah was a genuine wit, which always added fuel to the fire. One of my favorite lines was when Tallulah, a tremendous baseball fan, famously pronounced there were only two real geniuses in human history: “Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.”

I can actually tell you a little something firsthand about Tallulah’s indifference to conventional standards. One day she said to me: “Dickie, I want to see you tomorrow in my dressing room before the show.” So, I went to her dressing room, and there she was sitting on her chair in front of the mirror—stark naked! I did my best to act casual, as if it was nothing unusual. And Tallulah just started talking as if it was all perfectly normal. Referencing a point in the play when I pose a question to her, she said: “Dickie darling, when you ask me that question, you’re asking it like you already know the answer. You’re coming up at the end. Just do it a little more flat.” I said, “Sure.” That was it and I left. But for the remainder of the show, I kept thinking to myself, maybe I should mess up the line again so Tallulah would call me back to her dressing room!

During the run of
The Skin of Our Teeth
at the Plymouth Theater, there was a play called
Star and Garter
, across the street at the Music Box. It was pretty much a glorified burlesque. It was a big hit, and it starred the famous burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper I had unsuccessfully tried to see at the World’s Fair. This time I was not to be denied.

Every night, I appeared in the first act of
The Skin of Our Teeth
. Afterwards, I had to wait for the curtain call at 11 p.m. That gave me about an hour and a half to kill. One night, a stagehand took me over to see the
Star and Garter
from backstage. I was just fourteen, and it seemed like great fun to me—with all those pretty girls, comedians, and, of course, Gypsy Rose Lee.

There was also a great animal act in the show performed by a fellow named Gil Maison and his roller-skating monkey. Maison put his chimp, Herman, on a stool while a group of dogs performed a variety of tricks onstage. Then every so often, Maison turned to the Chimp and yelled out: “Frank Buck!” With that, Herman went crazy—shaking his arms and legs all over the place. And what made it even more hilarious was that the audience knew Frank Buck was actually a famous guy who had made his name capturing animals.

I absolutely loved the act. So one night I made my way up to Gil’s dressing room on the fourth floor of the Music Box to meet him. He must have liked me because he let me visit him every night while waiting for my curtain call across the street. He told me how he trained Herman and the dogs, who were all right there in the room with us.

One day, I whispered to him: “Mr. Maison, what would happen if right now I said ‘Frank Buck.’” Gil shook his head and warned: “Don’t ever do it.” “Why not?” I asked. He looked at me with great seriousness and said: “Dickie, I don’t want to go into it. Just don’t ever, ever say it.”