ME: I don’t know.
MARGIE: What does that mean?
ME: No kissing, no hugging –
MARGIE: Wait a minute, Mister Wilder – kissing is what you majored in. Don’t tell me there was no kissing.
ME: Yes, we did a little mitsy-bitsy “Hello, how are you?” kind of kissing, but there wasn’t any real kissing. No touching. NO LAUGHING! I think that was the biggest problem. I’m guessing Joan was also a virgin – I don’t know. I thought I was the only virgin in New York. But I think she was just as afraid of messing up the “ideal” as I was: “If you’re too aggressive, what will she/he think of me?”
MARGIE: What happened?
ME: We got into her bedroom. She turned off the lights and took off her clothes and lay down on this little narrow bed. No talking. I think she must have been as nervous as I was. Then I took off my clothes, trying to hide the condom from her because I thought it wasn’t romantic. I held the condom in one hand while I tried to get out of my pants and underwear. Then I put the condom on my penis and got into bed with her. All I could think was, If I lose my erection, will the condom fall off? When I felt her naked body against my legs, I figured that I had better put my penis into her vagina while I still had the erection. I got halfway in and … boom!
MARGIE: You shot your wad.
ME: Thanks for putting it so delicately.
MARGIE: You’re welcome. And after “boom”?
ME: I’m an actor…. I acted a migraine headache. I told her I should never have tried making love under the circumstances, but I didn’t want to disappoint her, and how sorry I was, but I just felt as if my head were going to burst, and that I’d better go. I remembered thinking of poor Roger at Valley Forge – the patient who got those terrible headaches every time he danced with a girl. I had much more compassion for him now. Joan was very sympathetic. Maybe she was relieved, I don’t know. We sort of kissed good night, and then I left, feeling like a fool. That was five years ago, and I still feel like a fool. So, how do you think I did?
MARGIE: Well, I wouldn’t call you Don Juan, but … not bad, for the first time. So what about Katharine Cornell?
ME: I’ve heard that she used to be so nervous before a performance that she had to throw up … then she’d step out on stage and be brilliant.
STEPPING INTO LIFE
I got out of the army two years to the day after I was drafted and went to New York. My time in the army qualified me for unemployment insurance – thirty-five dollars a week. That was to pay for rent, food, and entertainment. Not much, but it helped, and I had saved a little from my monthly salary at Valley Forge. I found a tiny loft in the artificial flower district on Thirtieth Street, near Lord and Taylor’s department store, for one hundred dollars a month.
I got a scholarship to the HB Studio, so I was able to study acting full-time: Monday nights with Herbert Berghof and Thursday afternoons with Uta Hagen. I’d rehearse for two or three weeks with one acting partner during the day, and a different scene with a different acting partner during the evenings.
The odd thing is, I never did comedy scenes in class. I knew that comedy was my talent, but I wanted to learn “Stanislavsky” – real acting – so I always chose dramatic scenes. Of course, my thinking was schoolboy logic. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t have learned just as much by doing comedy scenes – which are all the funnier if done by actors who are playing them for real. I just didn’t know that yet.
In Uta’s class I did a scene from a Kafka short story with a lovely girl named Jessie. The work was good, but Jessie was better. She became my first actual girlfriend. I suppose it happened because we got to know each other before there was any physical intimacy. She worked as a freelance fashion designer, so we would rehearse at all hours, and then have either lunch or dinner together – something very inexpensive. We also laughed a lot. I couldn’t afford my tiny loft any longer – cheap as it was – so Jessie asked me to move in with her.
Physically, it was “Heaven on a stick” – for me, since I was the stick. But I didn’t know how to make her as happy as she was making me – how to touch her, where to touch her, with my finger, with my tongue. Eventually her frustration drove us apart. I felt like an imbecile again.
The compulsion came and went, but not so often anymore, and not in the same way. Now it would take something special to set it off, and it was always something I’d read or a picture I’d seen – someone who was doing something noble and unselfish to help others, and usually the noble person was making a sacrifice. Compulsion is doing; obsession is thinking. Instead of compulsive praying, the Demon – when he did come – took the form of obsessive thinking.
BEING A PROFESSIONAL MEANS YOU GET PAID
I got my first professional acting job playing the Second Officer in Herbert Berghof’s production of Twelfth Night, at the Cambridge Drama Festival. We performed in a huge tent alongside the Charles River. Herbert wanted me, I’m sure, because he needed a good fencing choreographer for the comic duel. And I was a good one.
Then the famous Cuban director José Quintero asked me to stay on and do the fencing choreography for Macbeth, with Jason Robards, Jr., and Siobhan McKenna. During rehearsals – when Mr. Robards was exhausted after a heavy emotional scene – he’d sit in the theater and watch the other actors rehearse scenes he wasn’t in, while he tried to catch his breath. It was during those short rest periods that I would go over the choreography of his sword fights, each of us holding a pencil instead of a sword, and going through all the movements in miniature.
THE WORST OF TIMES, THE BEST OF TIMES
When I returned to New York, I got a job teaching fencing at the Circle in the Square Theater … forty dollars a week, under the table.
I also got a job working for “Chauffeurs Unlimited: We Drive Your Car.” I earned two dollars an hour, plus tips. The owner of the company had polio and conducted all business from his apartment. He knew I was studying or rehearsing almost every day, and he told me that I could refuse any job, anytime, if it interfered with my “real” work. More than that I couldn’t ask. The clients would usually want to go to the theater and then to some restaurant for dinner afterwards, so after I left them at their theater I drove to the HB Studio and watched an acting class for a couple of hours. I met Mary at one of these classes.
Mary was English. I’m always drawn to English people, man or woman – I suppose because of my days at the Bristol Old Vic. Besides being English, Mary was also beautiful – in classical terms. I don’t mean sexy – I wasn’t at all physically attracted. Her beauty was fragile, in the way that Greta Garbo was fragile and beautiful. She was also a wonderful actress. To top it off, she was also a painter, so the cards were stacked against me.
After we had seen each other several times at the HB Studio, she heard that I had to get out of my temporary apartment. Mary said that I could stay with her for a few days, until I found something I could afford. What fools these mortals be. I moved in with Mary.
She had twin beds, at right angles to each other. One night, after all the lights were out, I heard a gentle invitation to join her in bed. I thought that she would think that I didn’t find her attractive, which of course was the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings in that way. So I joined