Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (8 page)

He said, “I got news for you: If you don’t know how you’re going to act some part of the script—work on what you
do
know. Build up your confidence a little bit. That will help you find what you don’t know.”

Mary had auditioned for an English play called
Roots
, by Arnold Wesker, which was going to be done off Broadway and directed by a first-time director named Mark Rydell. (After
Roots
Mark went to Hollywood and began making beautiful films.
On Golden Pond
was one of them.)

Mark was very impressed by Mary. He was also looking for someone to play her character’s husband, Frankie Bryant. I asked Mary if she could get me an audition. She asked, and they said yes.

Mary helped me with my North Country English accent. She also suggested little touches of authenticity, like sticking a handkerchief up the sleeve of my borrowed costume jacket, since I was supposed to be something of a country bumpkin. From that time on, whenever I did an audition, I always wore some suggestion of a costume that fitted the character.

I did my audition for Mark Rydell. He liked it, and Mary and I were cast in the play as husband and wife.

The opening night was filled with dignitaries, including Mark’s agent, a magnificent lady named Lily Veidt. She was the Jewish widow of the famous German actor Conrad Veidt, who had left Germany with Lily to escape Hitler. He brought Lily to Hollywood, where he was cast as the Nazi colonel in
Casablanca
. When Conrad Veidt died in 1950, Louis B. Mayer talked Lily into becoming a theatrical agent. The morning after
Roots
opened, I got a call from Lily’s secretary, asking if I had representation. When I went to her office, she asked if I would like her to represent me in New York. She became my first agent and a second mother to me.

The executive producer of a television program called
The Play of the Week
had seen me in
Roots
and offered me the part of a cockney Englishman in Maxwell Anderson’s
Wingless Victory
, starring Eartha Kitt and Hugh O’Brian.

Irene Mayer Selznick—who had produced
A Streetcar Named Desire
on Broadway—saw me in
Wingless Victory
and asked me to come to her office. She had the strange notion that I might be right for the part of the Dutch valet in Graham Greene’s
The Complaisant Lover
, starring Michael Redgrave, which she was going to produce on Broadway.

I went to the Netherlands Information Service and took two lessons on how to speak with a Dutch accent. Then I had to audition for the director, a revered Englishman named Glen Byam Shaw. Irene Selznick was a smart cookie; she arranged for Mr. Shaw to audition the twenty other actors who were reading for the same part, and then she had me come in last. I had rented a valet’s jacket from a costume house, memorized the lines, got the part, and won the Clarence Derwent Award for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Nonfeatured Role.” Sounds so simple, but I was always good with accents, and by that time I knew how to act in comedy using the same method as I did for drama, which is . . . make it real.

January 1963

Jerome Robbins was going to direct Bertolt Brecht’s play
Mother Courage
on Broadway, with Anne Bancroft as the star.

Mr. Robbins wanted to audition as many actors from the Studio as he could, and since Cheryl Crawford was producing the play, it was easy. (She was the one who got me into the Studio, along with Elia Kazan.)

I read for the small, but very good part of Swiss Cheese, Mother Courage’s son. I memorized the scene I was supposed to read, as I always did, and found a “character jacket.” The audition went so well that Mr. Robbins asked me to come back the next day and read again. That audition went so well that he asked me to study the part of the Chaplain, which was one of the leading roles.

I memorized the scene he wanted me to read, found another
character jacket, and also brought a prop (a hammer or a broom, I forget which) so that I could be doing something instead of just standing there, saying lines.

The reading went so well that Mr. Robbins asked me to come back the next day and audition again. This turned out to be a habit of Jerome Robbins’s—to keep actors reading, so that he could be “sure,” and also,
I’m
sure, so that he could get ideas for how to direct certain scenes. (According to Actors Equity, you’re supposed to pay an actor after three readings, which Mr. Robbins never did.)

After my fifth reading I was told that I would have to do one more
final
audition. The competition for the role was between me and Gerald Hiken—the wonderful actor whose first scene at The Actors Studio I had snuck in to watch from the balcony. By this time my confidence had dropped a few notches. The horrible trap is that an actor tries to remember what he or she did that impressed the director originally, and, unfortunately, the actor starts imitating what he thought he did. Nevertheless, after my sixth audition, I got the part. Barbara Harris was cast as the Prostitute, and Zohra Lampert was cast as the mute daughter of Mother Courage.

Rehearsals were a little strained. Mr. Robbins thought that the best way to get us into Brecht’s Communist/Socialist way of thinking was for all of us to play Monopoly during our lunch hour. I should have known that there was trouble ahead.

We opened previews at the Martin Beck Theater to a packed house. I had a rousing and funny scene toward the end of the first act, after which Mother Courage and her daughter and I pushed Mother Courage’s wagon to our next destination (on a revolving stage), accompanied by some thrilling music. Before the curtain could come down, the audience burst into applause. Anne and Zohra and I were filled with joy. But Mr. Robbins cut the heart of the scene the next day. He said, “That isn’t what Brecht wants. It’s the intellectual ideas that he’s trying to get across, not the conventional
emotion that we get in American plays.” (My father would have said, “Was you there, Charley?”)

Jerome Robbins found a patsy in every production—someone he could pick on if he was frustrated with how things were going. (Many famous directors have been guilty of the same habit—Otto Preminger and John Dexter, to name two.)

Robbins had selected a wonderful actor by the name of Eugene Roche to be his patsy. One afternoon, when everything Mr. Robbins was doing seemed to make things worse, he started in on Eugene in front of the rest of the cast. We all had to stand there and listen to Jerry Robbins railing and belittling—until he crossed the line. Eugene, who was a devout Catholic with five children, stood up and said:

“Listen, you little fuck—if you insult me one more time, I’m going to come over there and smash the teeth out of your fucking face.”

From that time on, Eugene Roche became Jerome Robbins’s favorite actor.

After the previews began, Anne Bancroft’s boyfriend came to pick her up each night, after the show. The boyfriend’s name was Mel Brooks.

When I met Mel for the first time he was wearing a black pea jacket, of the kind made famous by the merchant marines. Mel said, “You know, they used to call these urine jackets, but they didn’t sell.” Anne and I burst out laughing. She’s probably still his best audience.

I was terribly miscast in
Mother Courage
. Most of us were—especially Jerome Robbins. Despite Anne’s Academy Award that year for
The Miracle Worker, Mother Courage
closed after three months.

When the closing notice went up, Mel asked if I would like to
spend a weekend with him and Anne on Fire Island. He said that he had thirty pages of a screenplay he was writing and that he wanted to read it to us. It was called
Springtime for Hitler
.

I went to visit them on a weekend in June. Mel met me at the dock where the ferry comes in, and then he and I went fishing off the surf for about an hour. After dinner Mel asked Anne and me to sit down, and then he began reading the first three scenes of
Springtime for Hitler
, almost verbatim as they eventually appeared on screen—except the title was later changed to
The Producers
. Anne and I loved it.

“So, would you like to play the part of Leo Bloom?”

“Oh, yes, I would.”

“All right, now listen to me—don’t take anything on Broadway or Off Broadway or anywhere else without checking with me first.

Promise?”

“I promise.”

That September I was offered
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, to be produced on Broadway, Kirk Douglas starring, with Alex Segal directing. I was asked to play the part of Billie Bibbit, the young boy who stutters terribly and then commits suicide at the end of the play. I called Mel and told him the situation.

“Can you give them a two-week notice if you want to get out?”

“Two weeks? . . . Mel, I’m not a star. They might accept a four-week notice.”

“All right, all right—we’ll have to live with it.”

I did get a provision in my contract that I could give a four-week notice if I wanted to get out of the play. I think I was good in
One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, but I don’t think I could have done the part nearly as well if I hadn’t spent a year and a half at Valley Forge Army Hospital, on a locked ward, with all those poor fellows who were in the middle of psychotic breakdowns.

After three months there was still no word from Mel. I wasn’t going to call him—I guessed that they must be having problems raising money for
Springtime for Hitler
.

Something basic had changed since the days when I would meet Mary at the British Information Service for a quick kiss. I tried to make a go of our physical and emotional life, but there was no response. Mary and I made love once every six months—like clockwork. Easy for me to say, I know, but affection is my middle name, and her affection for me had dried up.

That fall she was cast in a play with Jane Fonda and wore the same heavy angora sweater to rehearsals every day. The director came to me, privately, and said that the odor from her underarms was so strong that he and the other actors were having a hard time. He asked if I would say something to her. I did tell her, that evening, as gently as I could. She just said, “Oh, poof.”

That spring Mary and I went to Ogunquit, Maine, to rehearse a workshop production of a new play. We stayed at a beautiful old inn that I knew from having worked at the Ogunquit Playhouse the summer before. This old house was a typical New England inn and had a small but lovely dining room. The only requirement for eating there was that men had to wear jackets and ladies had to wear a dress or a skirt—no pants. Mary refused to wear a dress or a skirt—she insisted on pants. So we walked into town most nights and ate at the local diner.

I’m not saying that the Demon came back because my wife refused to wear a dress. . . . I’m saying that I felt a rage that I didn’t, or couldn’t, express.

______

Our apartment was on Thirty-third Street, off Lexington Avenue. A woman I had seen several times in the elevator was moving out of her apartment. She had found something more to her liking on the Upper East Side, and she could afford it. I’ll call her Karla. She was not a fragile beauty; she was a buxom redhead—not unattractive—and looked a little like a former wrestler. She must have known that I was having troubles in my marriage because on the day that she moved out she handed me a card with her new address and telephone number. When we shook hands good-bye, she said, “If you ever get lonely, just give me a call.”

I shook my head after she disappeared down the hall. Karla would certainly be the last person in the world I’d ever call if I were lonely. Of course, if she had been fragile, artistic, and blond . . .

That summer Mary announced that she was going to Italy for six weeks to act in a play at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Spoleto Festival. She said she’d be back on September 5.

I went on a summer tour in a play called
The White House
, starring Helen Hayes. It had a good cast, and most of us had done the play with her on Broadway that spring. She played the wife of every president from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson, and I played one or two lawyers, a college roommate, and Mary Lincoln’s son at her trial. The play didn’t last very long on Broadway, but Miss Hayes liked it so much that she took a big cut in salary and asked all of us to tour New England with her in the summer.

I liked Helen Hayes—as an actress and as a person—but as well as we all got along with her, none of us ever called her Helen, only “Miss Hayes.” I wanted to be a little more familiar, but she had an aura about her from a world I had only read about.

When I got back to New York, I decided to give my marriage
one last chance. Mary was due back in ten days. I found a new apartment on Fifty-seventh and Third Avenue. It was only one room, but it was a big L-shaped room, with a little kitchenette, and it was new and clean, with sunlight pouring through the large window that overlooked Fifty-seventh Street. The rent was $150 a month, which was certainly reasonable, but also the limit of what I could afford.