Still Me (11 page)

So I put a lot of pressure on myself. My mother would say later that I was always straining to be older than I was. It was as if I were trying to race through my childhood, to get it over with. I remember this desire from as far back as the age of six, wanting to read more difficult books, not only because the older kids did but because my father was always surrounded by books, always studying, always writing. Later on the scholar's image became problematic because I wasn't very good in math. But for many years I excelled academically, and that gave me a certain standing with my father, which I needed.

Ben started PCD a year after I did, and we entered one of the best periods of our relationship. We both played baseball for the Hulit's Shoe Store Yankees; we skied together on a little hill with a rope tow just outside of town; we rigged up an intercom between our two bedrooms and checked in with each other day and night. One summer we went to a day camp, where we both loved archery and building mud forts down by the stream.

This was also about the time we had some goldfish. But Ben and I decided it was wrong to keep them in captivity, and we should set them free. So we carried these goldfish in their bowl a couple of miles down to Carnegie Lake. We stood on the bridge on Washington Street and had a little ceremony. We told the fish, “Go. Be free. Swim. Live. Enjoy your life. Good-bye.” Then we turned the bowl upside down, sending the fish to an instant death. Their little bodies floated on the water. We were so confused.

We rode our bikes to school every day through the town. That was both exciting and dangerous; we rode without helmets right out on Route 206. I nearly got killed by a truck riding home from school one day. I had to fall over onto the side of the road to avoid being hit. I came home with my arms and legs all banged up and scraped from landing hard on the pavement. Still, we were allowed to ride to school by ourselves. My friends and I used to race each other through the university campus down to Princeton Country Day. I savored the independence, the fact that we were given so much freedom.

I loved peewee hockey on Saturday mornings, and then going over to Deebs Young's house to skate on his pond. I remember one day in February 1964—I would've been in seventh grade—going to his house to have breakfast and skate, and seeing on the front page of the paper four really weird-looking guys with strange haircuts coming down the steps of an airplane. The Beatles were arriving for
The Ed Sullivan Show
. We thought, What freaks! We all had crew cuts in those days. We went to a barber named Bob Chaty down in Palmer Square, and if Ben and I didn't get our hair cut short enough, my mother would send us back. But I always had my hair cut exactly the way I was told to.

My mission was never to give anybody cause for complaint. When I was in fourth grade at PCD, our reading teacher, Wesley McCaughn, taught us to love stories. He would record them in a sonorous, Walt Disneyish voice, then play the tapes in class. We would sit there enthralled by the way he told a story. Later that love of storytelling informed my love of acting. On one of my report cards he wrote, “Would they were all cut from the same cloth.” I cherished his words, because they validated all my efforts to excel.

Then one day in the spring of 1962, when I was nine, somebody came over to PCD from the Princeton Savoyards, an amateur group that put on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas once or twice a year. She asked if any of us could sing and would like to try out for a production of
The Yeomen of the Guard.
I shot up my hand and went for the tryout. I was cast with grown-ups over at McCarter Theater, the big thousand-seat theater that had been built in the twenties to house productions of the Princeton Triangle Club. I was given the small part of a townsperson. It was my first time onstage, and it was intoxicating.

It was one thing to be a good student-athlete, but acting was even better. I even got to miss school for rehearsals. McCarter had a state-sponsored program of student matinees, usually at 10:30 in the morning or 2:30 in the afternoon. I would get to pack up my books and walk out of the classroom for a performance. I was special.

Then I started to act at PCD. When I was eleven or twelve, we put on a production of Agatha Christie's
Witness for the Prosecution
, and, of course, all the parts were played by boys. I was cast as Janet Mackenzie, the sixty-five-year-old housekeeper in the mansion where the murders take place. I was outfitted with a gray wig and a dowdy Scottish tweed housekeeper's suit. At one point in the play, Janet Mackenzie fiercely defends her actions, insisting that she's not guilty. On opening night, as I was finishing a heated exchange from the witness box, I got applause from the audience. Right in the middle of the first act. It went straight to my head, and I thought, This is wonderful.

I found every excuse I could to get down to the theater. Even before they started casting me in plays, I went down and wired dressing-room speakers for sound and worked on the light board. It was an old-fashioned one—sometimes you had to reach out with your foot to get one handle and stretch out an arm to get another one, and I was tall enough to do it. I would ride the curtain, too, and I loved that. Groups like the Joffrey or the Pennsylvania Ballet would come through, and I often had my eye on some ballerina. The quickest way to make an impression was to ride the curtain. I pulled the curtain down, then, in order to get it started the other way, I rode the rope that pulled it up as soon as the curtain hit the floor. I'd sail fifteen, twenty feet into the air, and then my body weight would start it down again. The girls in the corps de ballet often looked over to watch my acrobatics. After that it was easy to start a conversation.

Before long I was cast in small parts with the professional repertory company at McCarter. It felt like a family. I was part of a group of people who worked together every day on projects they believed in. All the horses were pulling the wagon in the same direction, toward opening night. And during the rehearsal process the excitement grew as a play started to jell. I loved the whole atmosphere. No strife, no tension here, at least none that I could see. I behaved myself and tried hard, and the adults liked me. Right there was the beginning of a way to escape the conflicting feelings I had about my two families. I'm sure that's why I became an actor.

That early success set me up for life. I didn't know what I was doing at first, didn't have a clue. As a result I did quite well; I just instinctively responded to the material and did what I was told by the director. They began to use me more and more at McCarter Theater, and by my senior year in high school I was playing some good parts.

The actors there were a wonderfully eccentric group. They were tolerant and kind—unless you missed an entrance or really screwed up in the work. But even then the consequences weren't too serious. I remember a time when John Lithgow, Tom Tarpey, Jim LaFerla, John Braden, and I were in a not-too-terrific production of
Troilus and Cressida
. During one Sunday matinee we were all down in the greenroom watching the NBA play-offs. A real cliffhanger was in progress: the Knicks against the Celtics in double overtime. We were listening to the play on the monitor, but we couldn't drag ourselves away from the game. We all missed our entrance. I think it was a council scene or a camp meeting where the Greeks are making plans against the Trojans. Unfortunately, the scene just didn't happen. The lights came up, and gradually six actors wandered on. Only the fact that so many of us were involved made it look like it might have been done on purpose.

While I was developing my interest in theater and working at McCarter, Ben's natural talent for things mechanical and mathematical took him down to the engineering quadrangle at Princeton. At the age of twelve or thirteen, he was working on computers with a lot of the “brains” at the university, often staying out until one or two in the morning. He helped write a computer language that was taught at Princeton for many years,

Ben also had access to the university radio station, WPRB. He had permission to use their spare studios in the bottom of Nassau Hall. I would be the DJ, he'd be the engineer, and we'd pretend to do a show, cuing up songs and commercials and imitating Walter Cronkite reading the news.

These moments of collaboration and friendship were wonderful, but as we became teenagers there were not nearly enough of them. Too often we would push each other's buttons and one of us would get fed up and walk away. I remember when I was about thirteen, coming home from a visit to Franklin's house in Higganum, Connecticut. By then my father was teaching at Wesleyan and my stepmother at Connecticut College. I came into Ben's room and found him smoking a cigarette, listening to a Janis Joplin record. I tried to talk to him about what was going on up at Franklin's, that they had just moved to an old Victorian farmhouse (where my stepmother still lives today). Ben just clamped down. I felt that he wanted to know, he wanted to be included, but he didn't want to appear too interested. Perhaps he resented the fact that I'd been there by myself.

I wrote a short story about that episode for English class. It ended with the main character walking down the hall to his room saying, “Oh well, we'll have to try again. There can be more attempts, but it's getting late. I had thought that physical distance might have solved the problems of distance brought on by being in the same place.” Ben and I lived in the same house but usually felt miles apart. We kept trying to connect. Whenever we lost touch we missed each other and looked forward to reconnecting. But somehow we were never able to develop the real closeness that would have made our growing up easier for both of us.

Both Ben and I misbehaved fairly frequently in our new house at 25 Campbelton Circle, and by 1963 there were two new half siblings, Jeff and Kevin, who provided plenty of distraction. My brother would often stay out late or not even come home some nights. I used to take the family car and go down to Bay Head in the middle of the night, and there was the episode of raiding the Browns' liquor cabinet. I also liked to hang out with my older stepbrother Johnny and his friends, especially during the summer after his senior year in high school. Once I went out on Barnegat Bay in somebody's motorboat and at one point found myself sitting in the cabin with a Marlboro in one hand, a Budweiser in the other, and a seventeen-year-old blonde in my lap. Obviously, my mother was right: I
was
in a hurry to grow up.

Kevin and Jeff at six and four.

But somehow I almost never got into trouble, perhaps because no one suspected that someone of my apparently upstanding nature would do these kinds of things. But I did, and almost always got away with it. Ben did not.

He and my father couldn't seem to get along. Alya, Brock, Mark, and I all had ways of getting Franklin's approval, but I think it was much more difficult for Ben because it wasn't in his nature to go out of his way to placate anyone. Franklin's love for his children always seemed tied to performance. Perhaps my father was even a little afraid of Ben because he was so intelligent and wouldn't submit to his will. The rest of us were more pliable and had a much easier time. Over the years Ben and Franklin saw less of each other, until their relationship broke down completely.

For years Franklin talked as though our relationship with him had been decided by the divorce proceedings. He lost custody of us, then had to watch as Tris Johnson became the dominant figure in our lives. I think he felt that if we'd spent more time with him, if he had been given the teaching position at Princeton, if he'd been able to have a greater influence on us, we would have turned out better. Often when he heard what Ben was up to, he would just shrug his shoulders and say, “What can we do? We saw this coming years ago.” Fortunately, his fears were unfounded. Ben graduated from Princeton and got a law degree from Northeastern. Today he does consulting work and is writing a book on systems and structures in politics and the law. His research into all aspects of spinal cord injury has been a tremendous help to me since my accident, and he has often given speeches on my behalf. Alya is a neuropsychiatrist; Mark is an environmental lawyer; Brock got an MBA from Harvard and works as a management consultant. I became a successful actor, although probably too much in the mainstream for my father's liking. Nevertheless, I did not end up a taxi driver or a waiter still hoping to make it at age forty-five.

Franklin himself had a difficult upbringing. Lives repeat themselves in succeeding generations, often in the worst ways, and patterns of behavior can be difficult to break. Like Ben and me, Franklin and his brother, Dickie, are about a year apart. Dickie literally tried to kill Franklin a couple of times, once with a shotgun, once with a bow and arrow. They also had a complex relationship with a father who became a distant figure in their lives.

I only saw my grandfather Big Dick Reeve a couple of times in my life. When I was thirteen, in the spring of 1966, he flew my mother and Ben and me out to his place in Arizona. It was a big adventure. We were picked up in Tucson and driven out to his ranch, a spread of 400,000 acres where he raised cattle and trained Labrador retrievers. I think he loved those dogs more than any offspring he produced.