An Improvised Life

Every film I saw, every play, every piece of music fed an unquenchable need to turn myself into something other than what I was. An aunt took me to see the ballet Petrouchka, and for months I became Stravinsky's marionette. I played the music on the phonograph over and over again, dancing every part. I was Petrouchka, the bears, the jugglers, the moor, my fantasy life so intense that I sometimes literally gave myself a fever in the process. The next year I was Louis Hayward in the film The Man in the Iron Mask, fighting, swaggering, swashbuckling, and finally escaping torture at the hands of my evil twin brother. The following year I became Charlie Chaplin. I remember having a temper tantrum when I wasn't allowed to sit through The Great Dictator for the third time, throwing myself on the floor of the movie theater, screaming bloody murder, and creating an embarrassing scene until my babysitter relented and sat back down, a hostage to my obsession. For months I tried to walk like Chaplin. I spent hours in front of a mirror pursing my mouth to the side, trying desperately to smile with that horizontal crease he had in his upper lip. I put on roller skates and swooped precariously on the edge of things. I performed endless imitations of Hitler through the filter of Chaplin's genius. Then, the following year, I became Danny Kaye, spending hour after hour in front of a mirror trying in vain to make my eyes turn down at the corners. I threw water on my hair to try and make it shake like his. I tried to scat-sing as fast as he could. Away from the mirror, I imitated anyone and everyone. Outside in the street, if I'd see someone with an interesting walk, in half an hour I'd made it my own. Any exotic behavior was fair game: a limp, an accent, a nervous tic, anything to turn myself into someone other than me. One day I was playing in the backyard with my cousins and my aunt overheard me say, "Let's play circus. I'll be everything."

I grew up in Brooklyn, and every Saturday afternoon, for years, I would drag my reluctant mother to acting classes at the Academy of Music, making her sit in dark, empty hallways while I studied whatever children worked on in those days. I was incorrigible. By age seven or eight I was completely obsessed with performing. Theater, movies, music—I was obsessed by all of them. At school my main activity was staring out the window and daydreaming about being other people in other times, other places. How I got through even grammar school remains a mystery.

I have two important memories from those early years. Both were small events, really, and neither took place in school. But both changed how I thought about theater and acting.

The first occurred when I went to a film with my father. I was around eight years old, but he took me to a movie for grown-ups, in black and white, with a lot of adult talk and not much action. In one scene a couple of actors were in a living room engaged in an intimate, intense dialogue about something or other, and I watched for a while, trying hard to keep up with their situation, which was too sophisticated for me. It was rare that anything on a movie screen ever bored me, but this was starting to do the trick, so to keep myself entertained I pretended I was there with them watching the scene from inside a closet. Where the impulse came from I don't know, but I held a hand up to my face and made a small opening in my fist so I could watch everything through the keyhole of an imaginary door. All of a sudden the acting, which had seemed real enough a moment ago, looked false, and the scene turned stale and lifeless. I was amazed. It was as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes. In an instant, the actors were no longer cinema gods with huge heads, the idols I had been imitating for years. They'd lost their sense of authority and importance. In fact, at this moment they no longer existed in any reality at all. The scene had instantly turned false, and I had the distinct feeling that the performances of the two people in the scene were no longer directed at each other but toward some anonymous audience. "But who is their audience?" I wondered. "There's no one in the room with them. They don't know I'm here, in the closet. They don't know anyone is watching. Who are they focusing on? Not me. Not any other living soul."

I immediately felt that it would have been more appropriate for them to be focusing on each other, which is what people did in real life, when no one was watching. But they weren't doing that. They were talking to no one and for no purpose.

This strange moment for me was simultaneously disillusioning and enlightening. It had come from a simple childhood trick, but it completely changed my view of acting, and for the first time gave me a perspective and a value system by which to gauge a performance. It was also the beginning of a kind of method for me, and its validity sustained me for about a decade. At least while watching other people's work. Gauging the truth of my own work was something that had to come later.

The second experience happened in the living room of our apartment. I was playing on the floor while my mother was consoling a friend who was in the middle of some kind of personal crisis. My mother listened patiently while the woman sat there crying her eyes out. I was halfway across the room, now pretending to read a book, but of course I was much more engrossed in the drama being played out in front of me. I watched the woman pouring her heart out to my mother and found myself slightly revolted. "I'm not moved by her performance," I thought. "What is she doing wrong?" I examined her clinically as she tried to get her story out through her pain and tears, and I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn't moved by her situation because she was crying too much. If she wanted to interest me, I thought, she'd better cut back on the tears a little and leave some room for me and my feelings. Of course, what I was watching was not a performance; this was real life. But life, even at age eight, was merely food for my obsession with acting. For me, theater was more important than life, more educational than life, and certainly more moving than life.

As I look back, I think what irked me about the woman's outpouring was that it was filled with self-pity, not an attractive quality on or off stage. Had I been more emotionally engaged at the time, or perhaps a few years older, I might have realized this, but I was too deeply into "all the world's a stage," so I was precocious in one way, not so much in another.

Many years later, at a time when I had become more connected to my own emotional life, I had an experience with an actress that gave me my first warning of what the craft of acting could do to people if they weren't careful. I was working on a television show that was not going well, and a couple of weeks in I was informed that one of the actors had been fired. This actor was loved by the whole cast, and for some reason it became my job to inform the other actors in the company.

The first person I told was a regular on the show, a woman I had worked with for some time. She was a fine actress and a lovely person. "I have bad news," I said to her, as gently as I could, trying to brace her. "So and so's been fired." The woman's jaw fell open and she froze for a few seconds while she kept looking at me. Then she said, "Can you see the look on my face?" She pointed to her face and held the expression. I knew immediately what she was doing. She'd had a spontaneous reaction, but it was too good to just feel and let go, so she was taking note and filing it away for future reference. It might be useful later on, in some performance. She wanted me to notice it, too. I could see her checking my reaction to her now-frozen expression, paying careful attention to how much I was moved by it, which would let her know if the look was effective.

I fell into immediate despair. Not just for her, but for myself too, because I had done the same thing on countless occasions. It is a habit that now fills me with revulsion—a habit perhaps valuable for the actor, and for his craft, but not so good for the human being living inside.

Further, I had an instinct, even in those early days, that art was the direct injection of the artist's experiences into the audience, and that this transfusion was the highest purpose of all the arts. I felt that the epiphanies I'd had as a result of seeing other people's work, of exposure to other people's imaginations, whether through their acting or music or literature or painting, is what made the artists' experiences my own. I knew that these emotional adventures, transmitted from other people's triumphs or failures, were as real and tangible to me as a mathematical equation or a physics experiment. The artists' mastery of their craft gave them an invisible hypodermic injection that when inserted into me made me more than what I was. I could feel their essence working in my blood, and I knew myself to be capable of all manner of great and courageous things as a result of the art I'd been exposed to. The problem with these feelings, induced through the art of others, was that as real as they were, they didn't last. As I'd put down the book I was reading, or come out of the theater with my heart pounding and my imagination racing, there was no question that I could perform the same acts of transcendent courage or self-sacrifice that I saw and felt performed by the heroes whose lives I had become enmeshed in. But as the day wore on and my own daily activities and relationships came back into focus, the images and feelings inspired by whatever art form had riveted me would fade away and I'd be faced with my own fears and my own inadequacies. It was a deeply frustrating problem and one that I struggled with for years. What I realize now is that this is a good and healthy problem because it forces us, if we take the arts seriously, to constantly pit our own range of emotions and abilities against those behaviors that we can now feel are possible if we work on ourselves with patience and diligence.

At that time in my life I was unaware that I had any materials within me to work on. I had no sense that I myself was a work in progress, and that I was as malleable and formable as any character in a book or any piece of music or theatrical performance that I'd ever witnessed. It was an idea that had to wait many years for me to encounter consciously, and then many more years to embrace and work on. In short, at a very young age I'd become an addict. A film junkie. With all the dangers found in any other type of addiction. And like many addictions it pointed the way to something real and beautiful, but it also ran the risk of ruining my life.

I don't remember any of the arrangements, how we got past my parents quitting their jobs, what happened with the furniture and all our belongings, how they found a place to move to, the many good-byes, all of which were a blur for me, but in what seemed like just days I found myself squashed in the back seat of a sedan with my mother and brother, Sandy up front driving, my dad acting as copilot, and all of us heading to a new life in California. Through another uncle, who had written songs for several major films, my father had an introduction to someone in one of the film studios who could possibly help him to get work as a scene painter.

Consistent with a lot of my father's luck, the job didn't pan out. The week we arrived in Los Angeles a strike was called in the studios that lasted six months, and my father's first and only opportunity in the movie business dried up, but I was in heaven. We were in L.A. The golden land. The place where all my dreams would come true. We were in the movie capital of the world and I knew I'd be discovered within ten minutes of arriving.

Our first home was in the hills directly above Hollywood Boulevard, and every day after school I'd hike down to that magic street in the hopes that something major and life-changing would happen to me. Once I saw Sidney Toler, the actor who'd played Charlie Chan, and another time I passed Charlie Ruggles striding briskly down the boulevard, dressed to the teeth. Other than knowing they were professionals, I barely knew who they were, and I wasn't a fan of either actor, but seeing them in person, two honest-to-God, real-life movie stars, walking down the street just like ordinary people, thrilled me more than if I'd seen the president of the United States. There they were in three dimensions, real and tangible people. Their heads were no larger than mine, no matter how big they'd seemed in the movie theaters. It gave me hope.

I enrolled in junior high and found that miraculously there was a course called acting in the curriculum. It was taught by a warm, wonderful woman named Mrs. Lewis, who enjoyed her students and loved the process of putting on plays. We felt safe with her, and we all took chances, and had a terrific time. I felt nurtured and cared for and appreciated in school for perhaps the first time in my life. Her class was virtually the only thing I remember from junior high.

In high school things weren't as promising. The drama teacher was a failed actor with a lantern jaw and long grey hair. He looked like a cliché from a third-rate Shakespearean touring company, which is exactly what he'd been. His primary activity was telling us endless stories of his triumphs in little theaters around the country. Back then, we were properly impressed. The one comment I can remember his making about my work, probably casual on his part, seared me like a branding iron. "You might end up being a comedian," he said, "but you'll never be an actor." His remark was tossed off, something he probably forgot the minute he said it, but now fifty years later it still lives with me. Without his help or encouragement I auditioned for all the school plays and got leads in every one. There was also a course in radio broadcasting taught by a wonderful woman named Lucy Assadorian. She was a tiny, immaculately dressed, beautiful woman who was worshipped by every boy in the class. With her encouragement, along with the radio plays we put on in her class and the stage plays I was cast in, I managed to survive high school.

Throughout the entire four years, I don't believe I ever opened a work of nonfiction. I cut every possible class to hang out in the theater, forging the names of teachers and my parents whenever I had to. The teachers used to say to me on a regular basis, "Alan, you could do so much for this school if you put your mind to it." I didn't want to put my mind to it. I didn't want to do anything for the school. It wasn't doing much for me and I thought it only fair to reciprocate. How I graduated remains a mystery.

Chorus was of some interest to me. So was a class in ceramics run by a Miss Beatty, a wonderfully imaginative, eccentric, and completely unappreciated woman who at one point literally chased me around her studio with a glaze pot in an attempt to have me at least try to work with the stuff. I refused. All of my ceramics remained rough terra cotta. I also remember one history teacher, Mr. Engles, a thoroughly decent man with a passion for history so great that he allowed us to approach the subject from any vantage point that made sense to us, and in any form that we could identify with. In his classroom I wrote my first play. It was on the topic of slavery in the United States. I think I got an A. Probably the only grade above a C I received in my four years there.

High school consistently made me feel as if I were in prison, but being in plays sustained me. I lived for the rehearsals and performances. It was the only arena in which I felt that I had any identity and any purpose. As I write this it seems strange to think that for so many years my sense of comfort and identity was secured only when I was being someone else, but I think this is true of many actors. My own unformed personality found grounding and shape in the words and actions of the characters in the scripts, and I would turn into the characters during rehearsals and stay within them until long after the plays had finished their runs.

It was around this time that I began to study guitar. Like most of my hobbies, playing the guitar began as an attempt to keep my mind off acting, and gave me something to occupy my mind when I didn't have a part in a play. I worked hard at the guitar, and soon got good enough to perform at functions around L.A. I masqueraded as a folk singer, but I was a maverick within the folk scene because folk music wasn't a particular passion of mine. I was more interested in jazz, but wasn't disciplined enough to learn jazz guitar.