“Why do you have to go?”
“Well … what do you mean? You said I could stay with you for a few days, till I could find something else…. Don’t you remember?”
“But why leave?”
“But I have to find my own place, Mary.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think it’s healthy this way – I mean, emotionally – for either of us.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Of course I like you…. What are you talking about?”
The tears flowed from her eyes like raindrops.
“So why do you have to go?”
I did look at that apartment; it was terrible. Sunlight got lost trying to find its way in. No wonder it was so cheap.
Several days later, while Mary and I were having dinner, I got a phone call from a friend of mine from class. He told me that his girlfriend was pregnant.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m going to marry her,” he said. “I think I have to.”
After I hung up, I told Mary about the call, and she said, “You’d be out of here faster than a speeding bullet if that ever happened to us.” What possessed me, I don’t know – some kind of idiotic gallantry, I suppose – but I answered, “No I wouldn’t.” Mary stared at me for several seconds. I held her gaze. Then she came over and kissed me. We were engaged that night.
Mary worked at the British Information Service in Rockefeller Center. I would meet her during her tea break in the afternoons, and we’d have a quick kiss. I thought, perhaps, married life could be wonderful.
We were married that July. I borrowed a friend’s old Buick, and we drove to a justice of the peace in Suffern County, New York.
After the four-minute ceremony – a policeman and a postal worker were our witnesses – we drove to Mystic, Connecticut, for our honeymoon. We were no sooner out of the justice’s driveway than the battles began: which route to take – inland or the coast, which diner to stop at for breakfast, which music to listen to, which motel to stop at that night, which restaurant to have dinner in. It wasn’t a romantic honeymoon; it never was romantic from that time on.
WHAT DO ACTORS WANT?
Apart from fame and fortune and all the whipped cream that goes with them, which very few actors ever achieve – what do actors really want, artistically? To be great actors? Yes, but you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word “great” out of it – it just gets you into trouble. I think to be believed – onstage or on-screen – is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?
I’d been studying with Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen for three years now – two of them while I was still in the army – but I felt that there was something basic missing, something less intellectual than what they offered. I wanted to know how to reach that area of the subconscious that I had reached, by accident, in Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.
Stanislavsky called two of his main tools Actions and Objectives, and that’s what I was being taught – that the character you’re playing must want something (an Objective) and then he needed Actions to accomplish his Objective. Just as an example, let’s suppose that I’m really smitten with the beautiful Frenchwoman who lives upstairs and that I desperately want her to love me. To achieve my Objective, I might:
1 Try to nonchalantly hold her hand when we meet on the street.
2 Say something in French as we pass each other on the stairs.
3 Affect a limp as we meet on the sidewalk, in hopes that she’ll now look at me in a special way.
4 Invite her to dinner in my apartment, but before she arrives, arrange piles of her favorite flower in every place where she might sit.
I was exhausting myself with Actions and Objectives, and I didn’t know if the problem lay in my shortcomings or the process itself. Twenty seconds before I was about to do a scene in class, I would still be searching for my Objective, thinking that if only I could find the right one, it would solve all my acting problems. I even started thinking that the greater my Objective, the greater my acting would be.
One of my closest friends was – and still is – Charles Grodin. He had recently started studying with Lee Strasberg. When we were both on unemployment, Chuck and I used to meet on summer evenings, drink our Pepsis, and walk along the East River, talking about life and love – but mostly about acting. One night I asked Chuck what Strasberg said about Actions and Objectives. He said he’d never heard him mention those words. A month later I began studying with Lee Strasberg in his private class.
STRASBERG’S CLASS
Each class started in the same way, with “sense memory” exercises, in which you tried to recall one of your sharpest memories of smell, hearing, taste, sight, or touch.
Every Thursday afternoon six students, out of thirty in the class, would sit in chairs onstage and try to get into a relaxed position – a position in which you could possibly fall asleep – while the remainder of the class was watching. In the first weeks we all started out with an exercise that was very simple, such as holding a cup of hot coffee or tea, trying to feel the weight of the cup, and then actually taking a drink … except of course that there was no cup, only the imaginary one you were holding, which was filled with imaginary hot coffee or tea that you were trying to taste.
Then we advanced to recalling some physical pain. I sat on my chair, and after I felt relaxed, I imagined that I was sitting in a dentist’s chair, trying to recall having my tooth drilled. In this exercise I was more successful than any of the others, perhaps because I had had so much experience in the dentist’s chair. After three or four minutes of recalling that drill – how it looked and how it smelled and even how it tasted as it bored its way into my tooth – I felt the pain so sharply that tears came to my eyes. Now I understood what a sense memory was.
Of course, the whole idea of the thing was not to be able to recall hot tea or a dentist’s drill, but rather to recall something that could be used onstage in other ways. For example: you’re in a play, on the witness stand, accused of a murder that you didn’t commit. The prosecuting attorney is grilling you. You’re in the hot seat, so to speak. If the actual situation and the author’s words don’t start your emotional motor going, you might try a sense memory of being in a steam bath – feeling the heat and tasting the salt as the sweat pours out of you – so long as you avoid any giveaway physical actions that are strictly steam bath behavior. Hopefully, the audience will see someone who seems to be sweating bullets because of the questions the prosecuting attorney is asking.
During these months in Strasberg’s classes, I used to sneak into the balcony of The Actors Studio and watch him give critiques to members. A very talented actor named Gerald Hiken had just done his first scene for Lee Strasberg. After the scene was over, Strasberg said, “Tell us what you were working on.” Gerald said, “I just wanted to show you how I normally work – using Actions, Objectives, Conditions, Obstacles … all the things I was taught in classes with Uta Hagen.”
Then Strasberg illuminated the mystery I had been wrestling with for many years. He said, “You did very well, Gerald, because we got it. We could see everything you worked on – all the Actions and Objectives and all the rest of it. But at the Studio we believe that if you have a relaxed body and a relaxed mind, and if you can believe that the situation the character is in is actually happening to you, then all those other things you were talking about are going to happen by themselves, only not in an intellectual way, but in a more natural, organic