Still Me (35 page)

Once again the three columns were out of sync. Column B, career, failed to advance. I was proud of Column A, talent and skill; in a couple of interviews I expressed relief that the Superman years were behind me and said that I felt my best opportunities as an actor still lay ahead. In my forties and fifties I expected to find challenging, satisfying work both in films and in the theater. Column C, personal life, was soaring far beyond my dreams. Dana, Will, and I moved to Bedford, and for the first time it was a real pleasure to spend time at home, just enjoying our life together.

I was also fortunate in having other passionate interests that helped sustain me during the reversals in my career. In the late '80s I began to take riding more seriously, eventually training five and six days a week to prepare for competing in combined training events. Dana and I had the
Sea Angel
built and roamed from the Chesapeake to Nova Scotia, sometimes by ourselves but often with friends or with the children. I also continued finding great satisfaction in working on political issues. I campaigned for Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a strong advocate for the environment and the arts, and made speeches around the state on his behalf. I became a board member of the Charles Lindbergh Fund, which provides grants for environmentally sound new technologies. I lent my support to Amnesty International, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and People for the American Way.

My Cheyenne II, NIIAM, affectionately known as “Mike.”

I joined the Environmental Air Force, using my plane (now a Cheyenne II, a seven-seat turboprop) to give government officials and journalists a firsthand look at hidden areas of environmental damage. I took them on a number of trips over the Maine woods. The aerial view revealed a common practice of the lumber companies: they would clear-cut hundreds of acres of timber but leave the perimeter intact to conceal the devastation.

In the fall of 1987 I was asked to participate in a political action that was far more dangerous. Seventy-seven actors in Santiago, Chile, had been threatened with execution by the dictator Pinochet if they did not leave the country by November 30. Ariel Dorfman, the exiled Chilean novelist and playwright, contacted me in Williamstown and explained that only the presence of internationally recognized artists in the days preceding the deadline could save their lives. I joined a small group of actors representing Germany, France, Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. As a council member of Actors' Equity Association, I represented 38,000 of their counterparts in the United States.

For years the Chilean people had suffered under a reign of terror. Dissident students and prominent citizens who opposed Pinochet were simply “disappeared” at night by his death squads. Because they performed thinly disguised political satire and had the support of the people, the actors in Santiago were considered subversive and threatening to the dictator. Their ability to influence public opinion became more and more of a problem for Pinochet as he prepared for a referendum the following April that would determine whether he remained in power. His open declaration of his intention to execute so many members of the opposition signaled a new level of oppression, even by the standards of Pinochet. Telegrams and letters of protest poured in from governments and private citizens all over the world. When I met with many of the threatened actors at various locations in Santiago, I was always accompanied by six bodyguards. There was genuine concern that any one of the visiting artists might be the target of a reprisal by the military.

At a press conference with several of the condemned actors.

On the Saturday evening of my week-long visit, several thousand people gathered at a sports arena for a rally “
Por Vida y Arte
” (For Life and Art). Permission had been granted for the performance, but just before it began the military attacked with fire hoses and beat the crowd back from the entrance gates. We retreated to a garage, and the performance took place as planned, even as sharpshooters surrounded the building. In halting Spanish I expressed the support of actors and ordinary citizens in the United States. There were songs of protest, readings from the works of Pablo Neruda, and a message of solidarity from the widow of Salvador Allende, who had been murdered in the military coup in 1973.

During my trip abroad in 1972, in places like Glasgow, Liverpool, and Leeds I had seen strong relationships between the theater and the local community. But in Santiago I witnessed something much more profound: the power of art to speak for the oppressed and disenfranchised.

The rally “For Life and Art.”

The next morning one of the newspapers ran a cartoon on the front page that showed me carrying Pinochet by the scruff of his neck, with the caption “Where will you take him, Superman?” I returned home somewhat shaken by the intensity of the experience but gratified that we had made such an impact. When the November 30 deadline passed and all the actors survived, it was the first time a threat by the dictatorship had not been carried out. The people of Chile began to believe that Pinochet could be overthrown. The plebiscite that was supposed to give a rubber-stamp approval to his leadership went against him. In April 1988 he was forced to resign, although he remained as commander in chief of the army. Several months later elections were held. Patricio Alwyn, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, became president.

The experience in Chile was a dramatic example of how celebrities can make a significant difference. I knew that a number of my colleagues felt the same way. During his campaign for the presidency in 1988, Michael Dukakis had enlisted the aid of several well-known actors to help draw crowds and gain more attention from the media. My friend Ron Silver, a longtime political activist as well as a recognized name, was appalled at how inarticulate and uninformed many of these celebrities were. It was his idea to form an organization that would help prepare celebrities to speak knowledgeably on the issues. Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Blythe Danner, and I were early members of the group. We decided to call ourselves The Creative Coalition and to open our membership to anyone in the arts. Within a few months we were joined by agents, publicists, writers, stagehands, and opera singers, all with different aspirations for the group. We agreed that we would be most effective if we focused on three or four important issues to be chosen by the board of directors and ratified by 75 percent of the membership.

Our first major undertaking was to defend the National Endowment for the Arts against attacks by conservative Republicans like Jesse Helms, who were outraged that taxpayer dollars were being used to fund art they considered obscene. We argued successfully that in its twenty-five-year history the NEA had given over 90,000 grants to artists and only about a dozen had ever provoked any controversy. Considering the cultural and economic benefit to the country and the provisions of the First Amendment, we felt this was a small price to pay. It was also our contention that politicians do not have the right to impose content restrictions on federally funded art. The peer-panel review system—artists judging the merits of other artists—had always worked effectively. The NEA survived that attack by Helms in 1990, but the issue has remained a source of controversy.

In 1994 Blair Brown and I were elected copresidents. We tried to deemphasize the importance of our celebrities and to create more opportunities for our general membership. Working with Robert Kennedy, Jr. (who became such a good friend after my accident), we launched an initiative to protect New York City's water supply. Unless the upstate reservoirs were protected from pollution, the city would have to install filtration systems costing billions of dollars that it could not afford. After appearing at town meetings, working the media, and lobbying in Albany for nearly two years, we managed to convince Governor Pataki and the state legislature to spend $1billion to protect the greater New York City watershed area. We were also instrumental in starting residential recycling in the city, over the objections of sanitation workers and the city administration. On several occasions when the administration tried to scrap the program because of budget constraints, we fought back with hard-hitting subway posters and radio spots, and funding was restored.

It wasn't long after the formation of TCC that our work was noticed both in Albany and in Washington. Soon we were besieged with requests from a wide variety of advocacy groups and politicians to help their causes or campaigns. One afternoon on my way back to the airport after testifying on behalf of the NEA, I was cornered by three officials of the Democratic Party who urged me to run for Congress. They hoped I might fill the seat representing the district in Massachusetts (including Williamstown) that had been vacated by the death of Rep. Silvio Conte. I immediately replied, “Run for Congress? And lose my influence in Washington?” I had learned that a member of the House has to worry constantly about money and the handling of special interest groups, whereas I and my colleagues at TCC were free to speak from the heart without obligations to anyone and would receive more coverage in the media. Unfair perhaps, but that's the way the system works.

During this period my friends at William Morris phoned frequently with various offers, but none was terribly interesting. John Kimble, one of the top television agents, was the most persistent caller, because the three major networks were all interested in my doing a series. Most of the scripts were pretty poor; some of them reminded me of material I had rejected in the summer of '76 (though none were as bad as
The Man from Atlantis
). One or two, however, were very well written. I particularly liked the pilot scripts for
Picket Fences
and
Chicago Hope
. CBS also offered me carte blanche to develop my own series. But any of these projects would have meant moving to Los Angeles, which neither Dana nor I wanted to do. It was always comforting to know that if Matthew or Al needed me for any reason, I could hop on the Concorde and be in London in a few hours. Sometimes I flew over to watch a soccer match or just to spend a weekend. I never missed either of their birthdays. Los Angeles would have added another three thousand miles to the distance between us.

But I didn't mind making brief trips out west for a film or television project. I went to New Mexico for a few weeks to shoot
Speechless
with Michael Keaton and Geena Davis. And the whole family particularly enjoyed the time we spent together in Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco, while I did a remake of
Village of the Damned
for John Carpenter.

One film, a project for HBO called
Above Suspicion
, took me once again into the world of the disabled. In
Fifth of July
I had learned to simulate a bilateral amputee; now I was cast as a police officer who sustains a bullet wound and becomes a paraplegic. I did research for the part at a rehab hospital in Van Nuys, a suburb of Los Angeles. I learned how to get in and out of cars and how to use a sliding board to transfer from a wheelchair onto a mattress in the physical therapy room. I spent most of my time with a young woman who had been crushed under a bookcase during a recent earthquake. She had a halo screwed into her head and was just beginning to walk again. In contrast to Mike Sulsona, my coach on
Fifth of July
, she was still deeply depressed and having real difficulty dealing with her condition. I tried to control my emotions as I watched her struggle to hold herself up on parallel bars while she took tiny, painful steps forward. At the end of these sessions I would retreat to the comforts of the Sunset Marquis Hotel, thinking all the while: Thank God that's not me.