Emma Who Saved My Life (36 page)

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Gil Freeman? Yeah, uh, this is Tony Woodward down at the Chelsea New Generation Playhouse …

MY GOD could it be—a successful audition for me???

I've spared you the details of my latest get-out-there-Gil-and-audition drive—there's only so much rejection you can read about and only so much I can write about. Most people went into auditions hoping to land a role. I used to think that way too. Expectations lower, however, and my current goal was to not be asked to finish early. You see, you start your audition piece and the terror of every actor is to be interrupted in mid-piece with “Thank you, thank you very much for coming down. We've seen enough and we appreciate your time.” GOD THE TERROR OF THAT. Better a life of continual rejection than to be cut off in midaudition. A fate worse than anything—although no actor, I suppose, has
not
had that happen at one time or another. It may have nothing to do with you, actually—they may have found the right actor already, or decided justly and correctly from looking at you that you weren't right for the ninety-year-old man. But still, nothing was worse: that was my goal, to make it to the end of the audition piece.

I projected NICE, the good-natured NICE Midwestern sensitive actor, when I went into these things—no cockiness, no swagger, no gimmicks (you see, sometimes, these actors come in and they've memorized a passage from the director's autobiography or they pull some stunt to get attention, get remembered—it is always embarrassing). No, I was the NICE one, the one they couldn't cut off in midaudition piece. But I was not nice. I would have stabbed, killed, strangled with my bare hands ANYONE who was between me and that part, gladly, ruthlessly, with sadistic glee.

After Connie and I broke up, I auditioned for every theater in the Western World, that is, on Manhattan Island—no place was too low to consider. But I had come to accept the fact that nobody wanted me in a stock company; I was too … uh, stock, too average, I seemed to get the feeling. All right. Forget financial security—that would have been too easy, wouldn't it? I would audition for individual roles all over town. Get a copy of
Backstage
each week, sit down, circle the relevant roles …
ACTOR, MALE
25–30, Drama of a Brooklyn family … Yeah, I'd think, hit 'em in the audition with Biff in
Death of a Salesman.
ACTOR, MALE
25–30, Drama of an alcoholic wanderer … Hit them with the tuberculose son in
Long Day's Journey into Night
or Tom's opening in
The Glass Menagerie
(if you could get through Tom nodding wisely, saying “In Spain, there was Guernica…” without laughing, you deserved the part). Retarded son? Do
Flowers for Algernon.
Jocks?
That Championship Season
or Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Homosexuals?
The Shadow Box,
hot off the press;
Boys in the Band
was in disfavor, like
The Children's Hour,
too much emoting about how sick and dirty and unhappy you were, while the gay director and lesbian casting agent sat out there grimacing. ANYWAY, for each and every stereotype there was a perfect piece. Unfortunately all the other actors in New York knew them too. Nothing like being about to go on with the fifteenth Mangiacavallo in
The Rose Tattoo
of the day (the word was out they needed a nutty Italian immigrant) and hearing the director scream “Oh good god, not another
Rose Tattoo
—jeeezus christ!” Such experiences did not inspire confidence. But see, Emma? I still had it in me to get out there and court humiliation—your faith was justified. If I'd been on speaking terms with her, I'm sure she'd have approved.

But lo. April of 1979 I got a major role. A three-person family drama at the Chelsea New Generation Playhouse. The Chelsea New Generation Playhouse was probably representative in 1969 of a New Generation but ten years had made it just one more hand-to-mouth struggling theater, off the beaten track (walking distance from nowhere), desperate for hits (they'd had two in one season, both of which went to Broadway, so now they had Hit Fever and wanted every production to win a Pulitzer).

The name of the show was
Bermuda Triangle,
a drama about three people, mother, son and father, fighting it out realizing they love each other while on a vacation none of them wants to take in Bermuda. It starts off funny then gets bittersweet and in my opinion falls completely apart at the end. The son is urging his mother to get a divorce because he is fighting this Oedipal battle and hates his father and cares less for his mother's happiness than that his father have his world shattered. The father is tired of his wife, blames her for turning the son against him. The mother has a drinking problem brought on by father and son squabbling. There were worse things on off-Broadway, I promise you. This play was the work of Christopher Smalley. Smalley had had a well-received debut with
Bad Memories,
which must have been directly autobiographical, about him and his father. He was big on fathers and sons fighting it out and was convinced families worked like that, that people fought it out until they fell in each other's arms and said how much they loved each other. I always wanted to say: Don't you know people go through their lives NOT saying anything, not fighting anything important out, squabbling over how the roast was cooked and not who loved who when and because of what Freudian reason etc.? I hated this kind of drama. Rather, I hate it
now
—I was damn glad to be immersed in it then.

Our director was Brent Malverne and how he got to be a director God only knows. No wait a second, I think I know how: he was so dominating, so loud, so brash, so full of hyper-energy and ideas and bubbling, overflowing sentiments that people mistook this for genius … “Gilbert, darling, no, no, no. Listen to me: I want to see that RAGE, that ANGER, give it to me, give it to me from here, right
here!
” He clutched his bowels. “Make me feel it, talk to me, work for me, kid!” It's just Act One, I said—shouldn't we save the fireworks until Act Three? “Your sense of drama is pure Elizabethan, Gilbert. This is 1979—full blast, all the way through. We want to drain the audience, drag it through the mire, the experience. A sensory overload; it's the only way to communicate to a numbed, a battered audience these days. Saturate them in EXCESS—yes, that's right, excess, no restraint at all. I don't want one inhibition, is that understood people? Full throttle.”

“Brent,” said Bonnie McHenry, who played Mom, “that's nonsense. People are going to get up and walk out if we scream and carry on for three acts of this dreck.”

I
loved
Bonnie. She was tall and statuesque, one of those women who looked like a gracious, slightly faded forty from the audience, but looked like fifty and hell on closer inspection, cigarette lips, a cackle that it took
eons
of smoking to produce, this kind of sunlamp tan which made the skin leathery and tough. She had made her career, as a young woman, in the bitch Noel Coward roles (always the interloper, the climber, the rotten older sister) and she could be brittle and refined without a thought. That's why it was funny to see that in real life she was as vulgar and guttermouthed as a Championship Wrestling fan—god, every other word out of her mouth was unprintable. She was tough. She was unforgiving.

Every once in a while, Bonnie would let up, take a breath and wind down and show herself to be vulnerable, almost childlike and optimistic inside. But watch out: Underneath that she was hard and tough again, this single woman, husbandless, childless, independent for a thirty-year, three-decades-the-hard-way career. I thought she hated me at first. Once I was bleating my lines, getting whiny, and she—not the director—cut me off in rehearsal, setting me straight: “Gil, you gotta be sympathetic or no one's gonna hang with you for this whole crappy play—stop the whining and the nagging and … and the
acting.
Just say the lines; save the scenery-chewing for Act Three.” I was sure she thought I was a second-rate amateur, beneath her standards. I was just being sensitive though. One time backstage she hugged me, ambushed me, cackling, “Ah, you're not put off by Bonnie McHenry, are ya kid? Nahhh, you're doing fine, just fine. We'll do the bar after this, okay? You and me and not … you-know.”

I knew who she meant by you-know. Tucker K. Broome, our co-star. Neither of us had come out and said it, but he stunk, he was awful, wrong for the role, and an unprofessional drunk to boot. We were united in this—I was so happy to be on Bonnie's side.

Tucker K. Broome (one of that generation of actors who insisted on middle initials) was familiar to people on a number of '60s situation comedies—he was Colonel Whackum on
Company B,
the blustering bank manager on
Blank Check,
and the foreman of the flip flop (you know, those rubber beach sandals) assembly line on
Flip Flop
(this set up one reviewer's shred under the headline:
FLOP FLOP
). I could devote the next three pages to things I didn't like about that man (who is dead now, so libel suits are not a threat).

He was pretentious (“I remember one time Thornton Wilder took me on his knee and he said to me…”), he overrated everything about himself. “I remember one time on
Flip Flop,
I told the director—”

“Don't hand us goddam
Flip Flop,
” interrupted Bonnie. “This is theater, not can-I-have-a-second-take TV, fella—not to mention second-rate TV.”

He was insecure, he stormed out of rehearsal at a moment's notice, and as things got closer to the opening, he drank more and more. He tried to mask his drinking by regularly using this extract of menthol, some alcoholic stuff (not c
eme de menthe) that looked to be eating away his tongue and mouth—completely disgusting. So as not to give his co-stars a blast of his lunchtime martinis (not that he cared about our comfort, but whether he'd be fired), he'd dab his tongue with this vial of greenish fluid, then grimace like a Cheshire cat and suck in air through his teeth to mix up the mint with his breath, and then his co-stars would get a blast of MENTHOL in the face instead of Manhattans.

“Shoooeee,” said Bonnie one rehearsal. “Good god, Tucker, I'd rather have the scotch than that shit.”

Righteous indignation, the man indistinguishable from the ham he's been the last thirty years: “Scotch? Scotch, my dear woman? Whatever do you mean?”

“I mean I'm sick of that goddam mint, and it's turning your teeth green.”

Brent the director steps in: “Children, children, please can we get on with it?”

In a doddering explosion of affronted dignity: “I won't work with this woman—I can't Malverne, I cannot!” And he would rage out of the rehearsal to drink some more, at a bar down the street.

“Bonnie, love, must you antagonize Tucker every rehearsal?”

“Brent, you don't have to face Lysol-breath every night—you get up here and see if your eyes don't water when he's yelling and bellowing away.”

Three weeks until we opened.

“I'm contemplating some new blocking…” Brent said, sitting in the musty theater, third row, lying across several seats Cleopatra-like. “When you go to change from your Bermuda shirt and swimsuit into your lounging clothes, Gil, I think you should change onstage. I envision you changing, slipping out of your wet bathing suit, and Doris [the mother played by Bonnie] turning and furtively staring at her son's undressing, seeing him as a young man who has come of age, vital, potent.”

I am not showing my ass to a New York Theater audience, Brent. NO WAY.

“Gil, I can't believe you're so shy. It's a wonderful idea.”

I'm not taking my pants down, particularly as it serves no purpose.

“This is 1979, Gilbert darling. Up the road in
Equus
there was a young actor doing frontal nude scenes every night for hours out there, showing his prick to the world.”

Good. Now that he's through up there showing his prick to the world let him come down here in Chelsea and show his ass to the world, but
I'm
not doing it.

Bonnie, slightly laughing, spoke up: “Brent, it's a crap idea—it sucks. It's just gratuitous. The New York audience is more sophisticated than that—our play isn't a bit better because Gil shows his ass. What's next? I change onstage and show my tits while Gil looks on?”

Brent hopped up excitedly. “Yes, yes! A balance, an incestuous subtext lurking beneath the script. That's brilliant Bonnie! Gil's bottom in Act One, your tits in Act Two!”

Bonnie was laughing, shaking her head. “Brent, I'm forty-nine. I'm not showing my tits and Gil's not showing his bottom. Why don't you see if Tucker will pull out his dick in Act Three?”

Brent: “It is a thought—”