The Measure of a Man (21 page)

Here I interrupted. “Would what we now perceive as truth be so tough for them to handle?” I asked. “Why
not
share with them what we’ve observed? Tell them it appears that Nature doesn’t give doodley-squat about the whites and the blacks and the browns and the blues. That on the evidence, she looks to be operating in her own best interests, and
we
, as best as can be told, are a part of how
she
operates and
not
vice versa. That we believe her to have no preference between opposites but feel that her focus falls sharpest on the clashing
of opposing forces in mutual annihilation. If we speak of basic facts, truths, constant realities that are forever there, then of course a lot of dreams
will
be stripped away, sending Capra and John Wayne right out the window. But how bad is that? If the children hear our thoughts about opposing forces in mutual annihilation providing energy by which Nature perpetuates herself,
and
they learn, thereby, that the browns, the blues, the whites, the blacks, and whatever combinations there are will continually go clash! flash! slash! wham! bang! boom!
and not know why
—then those children will be the better for it. Otherwise, they might grow up to hear each other exclaim, ‘Oh, my God. Jesus Christ, these people don’t understand! Why can’t we get them to learn? Why can’t we get them to see? We’ve got to
show
them.’ And they would remain unaware that Nature sees all, while her interest encompasses only the sparks that fly.”

“Right,” Charley conceded. “But if you’d known that truth when you were a kid, before you left for Nassau, would that truth have taken away from the hope that kept you alive? What we’re
really
talking about is Santa Claus.
We
know there’s no Santa Claus, but we’re grown up. We’re talking about
when
we let the children become aware that there’s no Santa Claus.”

“Hope, Charley, is always born out of the same womb. It doesn’t matter what your level is. If you’re a child, your hope comes from the place where your imagination and your little bit of knowledge tell you that things are most favorable. Where you get comfort, warmth, kisses; where you get cared
for. Where you get fed. Your hope is all intertwined with that. With the people who do the feeding, when they feed you, how they feed you, how they protect you from the elements, and so on.
But
—take that child to ten or twelve years old and share with him our adult speculations about Nature, about what Nature does and how it operates, and that child—then—would have to begin to articulate his or her hopes and dreams on the basis of
that
understanding.”

I paused for breath. “In other words, hopes and dreams are necessary tools to the survival instinct. With the acceptance of new truths, hopes and dreams become subject to rewriting according to the needs of the new reality. On the other hand, hopelessness sneaks about on the periphery of our lives, waiting to close in on us behind certain truths. It’s watched and held in check at a safe distance by our instinct to survive. Of course, when hopelessness succeeds in narrowing the distance enough to infect hopes and dreams and slowly sap their strength, then the instinct to survive falters. Begins to wear down. And if it’s ever subdued to a point where it can no longer churn out the stuff from which dreams are spun to give flight to hope, then one resigns oneself to what follows. And, over time, hopelessness lays claim to another victim. But, as the old saying goes, ‘As long as there’s life, there’s hope.’”

“Is that an assumption?” Charley asked.

“As long as there’s life, there’s hope?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you have to quality the line,” I said. “As long as there’s a
chance
for the life you envision—and so on.”

“And hope isn’t
planted
in us?” inquired Charley. “It isn’t a vision given to us as we grow up, by surroundings such as movies, patriotic books, attitudes of people around us, you know?—what Studs Terkel called the ‘good war’?”

“Yeah, it’s planted some, but it’s there from the beginning too. I think it shares a primal bond with pleasure.”

“I’m talking about general, basic hope,” said Charley. “You know, Hope 101. The hope that is a kind of belief that things, people, conditions,
whatever
can get better.”

“That hope is constant, Charley, but let’s examine what we mean by ‘things.’ And what do we mean by ‘better’? We have to define ‘better’ as well.”

I took a moment to marshal my thoughts. “Let’s go back to the time when we were unaware that Nature might be operating the way we now suspect she does. At that point, hope was qualitatively different. But now, when we assume, as we do, the possibility that Nature doesn’t give doodley-squat beyond the flying sparks that are important to her sustenance, we then say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What is it that
I
want? The hell with Nature; she’s getting hers. What is it that
I
want? Well, I want a better life.’

“Okay,” I continued. “Before you can achieve a better life, you’ve got to be able to spell out what a better life means. What it means
for you
. Not for your neighbor or the white guy across the tracks. For
you
. You’re probably going to say, ‘A better life is
more comforts
. And those comforts are of a great variety. I want to be more comfortable
emotionally
. I want to be more comfortable
physically
. I want to be more comfortable
psychologically
.
More comfortable with myself. With my neighbors. In my consciousness of myself and my existence. Aside from comfort, I want to feel good. I want to feel good about things.’”

Charley nodded agreement and poured another cup of coffee.

“Okay,
what
things?” I pressed. You might say, ‘I want to feel good about what goes on around me. I want to feel good about the way I’m thought of. The way I think of myself. Good about how my friends see me and how they feel with me and how they accept me. I want to feel good about the things I do. For myself and for my children, for my wife, my friends and my community. I want to feel good in other ways too. I want to feel
pleasurably
good. Ideally, I would like life to be as close to an orgasm as it can get.’ And who wouldn’t?

“So my call is this: hope essentially is goal-oriented. And however else one may define hope, there’s no denying the likelihood that comfort, feeling good, and pleasures are basic ingredients in the stuff that hope spins into dreams. Therefore, when hope attains an occasional goal, a dream or part of a dream is realized, causing us to feel that much ‘better’ about our lives. How much is due to hope implanted by books and movies and how much to inborn urges and instincts whose natural orientation is toward the pursuit of pleasure? If a harder look at ‘things’ and ‘better’ doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer, it should at least give us a clearer view of how hope matches up to reality and how dreams keep us keeping on.”

Charley looked at me a moment, then asked, “Now that we’re here, looking back across our years—the children; what
shall we tell them about our journey? What shall we tell them about ourselves?”

“The truth,” I said without hesitation.

“That life is tough?”

“Life
is
tough, damn right!”

IN THE PROFESSIONAL theater, audiences are known to have been swept out of their individual realities and transported to imaginary places and to imaginary times that appear as real as any place or time out of their own experience. I once was well acquainted with such occurrences. On more than a few such occasions I was present, on one side of the footlights or the other, when actors and audience conspired to make magic. Time and again I witnessed some unknown force take hold and keep us transfixed to the evening’s end, then release us gently and send us home with gifts of remembrances to last for a lifetime.

For me, over the decades, much of the purity gradually
faded from that process, giving way to a tolerable sameness. I had a film career to manage, as well as a directing career, a family to raise, business to take care of. And as I grew older, the events on my calendar began to take on a more retrospective flavor. Testimonial dinners and award ceremonies, sometimes for colleagues, sometimes for myself, documentaries and interviews as film historians and others looked back to recapture some essence of my time in Hollywood. It was as if I had become a living repository, and not much more.

Then, a few years ago, on an early spring evening at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the magic of theater returned in full bloom for me. Actress Anna DeVere Smith was onstage in a solo performance, and as I sat mesmerized, I surrendered completely to her craftsmanship. She had so captured the imagination of the audience that we were all a living part of the world she had created on that Mark Taper stage. She had convinced us that all the magic laid out in front of us was real.

When the final curtain fell, I was elated. In addition to the pleasure of the experience, I also felt a hunger—one that had lain dormant for years—suddenly begin to gnaw inside me.

Out of the power of her artistry, one actress alone populated that stage with a variety of characters and brought to life settings that could be seen only through the eyes of the imagination and touched only by the finger of wonder. Throughout the evening she had complete command of my senses. And for good reason: she had taken me back to times that had slipped from memory.

Early in my struggling years as an actor I had no knowledge of the word
pantomime
. When I was introduced to it in an acting class, I was intrigued by its complexity. To tell a story without words—to convey physically all the nuances of tragedy, comedy, and drama (nuances that would ordinarily be illuminated by words)—appeared to me to be creativity of a very special kind. It wasn’t long before I began to devise comic pantomimes and present them in acting class, with encouraging results. Soon I had developed a repertoire good enough to roll out at parties as entertainment for friends. My confidence at pantomime would grow steadily in the following two years. I actually began fantasizing about honing my sketches into a nightclub routine.

Soon enough, however, the idea of pantomime and nightclubs was abandoned in the wake of a gathering film career that would eventually absorb my focus to the exclusion of all else. Left beneath the swirling shadows of Hollywood’s intoxicating promise, such notions withered and faded, slowly slipping from memory’s reach to lie dormant for decades. Then, that night at the Mark Taper, they suddenly reawakened as part of a creative explosion at the center of my consciousness. They came to life in a cluster of long-forgotten, unfulfilled desires that I had abandoned and left to perish, along with once-strong urges that had been either unmet or ignored so long that they too had faded or crumbled into dust. “So much had been dreamed of,” I thought to myself. “So much had been left undone.”

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, came a realization. It was something I never, ever should have forgotten. A credo, a
deeply held conviction, a challenge in waiting. For most of my life in films and theater I had believed that an actor should repeatedly seek to have his measure taken by challenges inherent in his craft. Every actor should aim always toward earning a place among those privileged members of his profession who are considered by most to be creative, artistic, and suited to their calling. I had always known that the very best way for me to improve self and craft was to continually test my limits. And I knew, on that evening of my realization—I was in my mid-sixties at the time—that the ideal way to do that would
still
be to walk out onto an empty stage, face an audience alone, and for two hours spin words, talent, skill, and craft into magic enough to seduce that audience into my imagination, and have them invite me into theirs.

All through my career I had been driven by a huge need to stay on my toes, in life as well as on the stage. Backed by the brashness of youth and a recklessness of thought, that need was translated into a warning that was always with me: “Don’t be as good as, be better than; raise the risk level.” Vague recollections suggest that I even managed, on occasion, to forge discipline out of resolve.

But looking back from the distance of that early spring evening at the Mark Taper, I realized that I had forgotten all that. I had tarried too long in places where success had tempted me into
lowering
my risk level. But at least I could still feel the need to rattle this cage of my own making. Before the evening was over, that need came rushing forth as the powerful urge to step on a stage, face an audience, and test my limits once again.
Revitalized and pulsating, the old theatrical impulse I had first met at the American Negro Theatre came charging upward to flex itself in the presence of all the magic it sensed being spun everywhere around us. It also came to take a look at me and once again vibrate through my body. And in that reawakening, the impulse was as forceful as I had ever known it to be—which was, of course, a reassuring surprise.

There it was, that old compulsion standing in the wings. We recognized each other instantly. It hadn’t changed, as far as I could tell. It was still dangerous. I knew that it would demand of me the same commitment it had required years before. In looking each other over, we both could see that I had changed. With age I had grown increasingly cautious, and over time I had conveniently forgotten about that old bond between us. How
could
I have forgotten how much we had in common? Forgotten how often I had been attracted and repulsed at the same time? Forgotten how often in my dreams we had teamed up and scored? Now that old compulsion had returned to stare back at me from the center of my consciousness. I felt its power reaching out to me. Trying to take hold. Yet I felt comfortable in my distance. Still capable of standing my ground.

In the magic of that evening, the flirtation began exactly where it had left off when I was young and unafraid of looking inward in search of whatever I might find—when something living in the darkness was discovered tugging at the sleeves of my imagination. And our flirtation moved quickly to action, as flirtations often do.

On that evening at the Mark Taper, I decided that there could be no better time than that moment for me to explore the long-forgotten, unfulfilled urge that had once possessed me. To engage compulsion on all matters of unfinished business between us. To look around inside myself at roadways that had once seemed to lead nowhere in particular and ask why they had been dead-ends. What was it about those roadways? Were they overwhelmed by challenges too great? Were they intercepted by risks too high? Were they restrained by regrets too painful? Or was it me? Maybe it was
me
. Maybe I was in denial of fears I didn’t have the courage to face.

Now that I’m older, with fewer axes to grind, I suspect that certain roadways that seemed to lead nowhere weren’t the dead-ends I saw, but simply roads marked with warning flares saying that some personal failure was destined to occur. On the other hand, I can’t help wondering whether, had I persevered,
some
of those roadways might have been the very paths I should have traveled most. Maybe along those untraveled pathways I would have found important lessons waiting to be learned.

Still, to step onstage in a professional theater at my age to do a one-man show with voice, body, and mind as my only tools was clearly a risky business. “You must be nuts,” I told myself on the way home, as the magic of Anna DeVere Smith began to wear off.

Over the next few weeks I attempted a sober, practical, objective, clearheaded analysis of the pros and cons. I realized that whatever force was drawing me nearer to this sizable
undertaking had origins too troublesome to untangle. After a full month, I still hadn’t been able to shake off the magic of the theater or regain a safe distance from my old friend compulsion. The cautious side of me resisted this business of walking on the edge—especially now, at a time when a fall was likely to be fatal. The wild side of me, on the other hand, was ready to accept the fact that high gains require high risks.

In the end I agreed with the wild side and resolved to go forward on the basis of two compelling reasons. First, I needed to settle obligations owed to self. Second, in the process I wanted to spin enough magic to close out what had been for me a genuinely magical career.

Like a fighter in training, I started preparing for the event. I watched other actors in other theaters do solo evenings. I researched actors and textual material from successful productions in the past. I paid attention to details, adjusted my social calendar, carved out a preliminary timeframe, cleared my desk. But the two most basic issues remained unresolved. Who would write such an evening, and what would be the nature of the material?

I put this question to my friend Charley Blackwell, whom I had met in the late fifties, not long after he’d arrived in New York from Philadelphia to pursue his dreams. Like young unknowns before him, he went to New York to conquer Broadway as a dancer. But the times were insensitive and the pickings were lean. Race was a factor, and denial was comfortably in control of virtually all questions concerning race in the America of those days.

Though he would dance with both the Pearl Primus and Geoffrey Holder companies, times came early on when he had to sell cigarettes from the Philip Morris company to cover the rent. Once when things were at their bleakest, George Mills, a fellow dancer, asked Charley to accompany him as a drummer on an audition for an upcoming musical called
Fanny
, to be directed by Joshua Logan and produced by David Merrick. George Mills didn’t get the job, but Joshua Logan and David Merrick saw something in the drummer. Enough to offer him a job in the show—a spot that would make use of his dancing talent. The show was a hit. Charley Blackwell was launched. But not as a dancer. David Merrick was impressed with his quickness of mind, his critical thinking abilities, and his overall grasp of the technical nature of live theater.

During the next twenty years, Charley would move through the ranks in the Merrick organization to become a master stage manager. He went on to England to direct the Merrick productions of
Promises, Promises
and
One Hundred and Ten in the Shade
. After that he wrote the book for the Broadway musical
The Tap Dance Kid
. And then he wrote the movie
A Piece of the Action
, for my company, and rewrote
Stir Crazy
for Columbia Pictures, which I was privileged to direct. Along the way he had written two additional movie scripts for my company, so I knew of no better person for the job at hand now.

I laid out the plan to Charley, but he said he had commitments and obligations that could be long-term. When asked
how
long-term, he gave me a vague response that suggested a reluctance to clarify. “When and if I can work through
everything that’s on my desk at the moment,” he said, “I’ll call you.” Strange, I thought. But I left it to rest and turned my mind to the unwelcome task of finding a possible substitute.

For many weeks I searched through a mental list of all the writers I knew, as well as others I knew only by reputation. Meanwhile, I compiled notes in case the search ended on my own doorstep. Could
I
write a one-man show, to be performed by me, fashioned out of material each piece of which would be a living part of my own life? Yes, but not like Charley Blackwell could.

As more weeks passed and more notes accumulated, I saw with increasing clarity what a monumentally formidable task stood before me. However, I had no choice but to press on.

Late one morning the phone rang. I picked it up, and it was Charley, “How ya doin?” he asked in a cheery voice.

“Fine,” I said, delighted to hear from him.

“Well, I’m clear now. You still want to do that thing?”

“Yes! Yes!
Hell
, yes,” I replied.

“Well, I’m ready,” he said.

What he
didn’t
say, and what I didn’t know, was that in the months prior to our last conversation, doctors had discovered cancer in his bladder. Surgery followed, during which prostate cancer was also discovered and dealt with.

We went to work, yet all the while Charley kept his illness to himself. There was no telltale behavior, and the ostomy bag he wore under his clothing to collect his urine wasn’t apparent to any of us. Charley Blackwell was just as I’d always known him. Halfway through the project, my doctors saw warning
signs in my blood that maybe
my
prostate should be watched. Many ultrasounds and four biopsies later, they pinpointed the cancer. It was only then, in an effort to comfort me, that Charley revealed
his
history. I underwent surgery for the removal of my prostate on June 3, 1993.

When I was again able to work, we resumed, each of us hoping that the next five years would show no sign of our cancer’s return. Months later, we had a completed project. The entire evening was going to be material from my life. Nothing outside of my experiences would be added. We were relieved to have finished and were enthusiastic about the results.

Charley went back to New York with a copy of the script that we both agreed should be given to a producer friend of his, someone whom I, too, held in high regard. Here’s where dreams would meet reality—the project’s first exposure to objective scrutiny. Despite all our years in the business, we were both wired with anxiety and hopefulness.