“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t have a reason that makes sense.”
“Then give me a reason that doesn’t make sense.”
“… I thought it was wrong. I don’t mean for anyone else, just me. I think I might have enjoyed it too much.”
“Why would it be wrong if you enjoyed it too much?”
I lay motionless for almost a minute, searching for the answer, but I didn’t know the answer.
Margie wrote something in her pad.
NO TIME FOR COMEDY
When the season at the Reginald Goode Theater ended, Corinne and I went to New York and saw Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Even after I had started studying acting with Mr. Gottlieb, I didn’t know that acting could be this real – it was as if what I was watching was actually happening. Until that night I had thought often about being a comedian, mostly because I had seen Danny Kaye in Up in Arms and then Jerry Lewis on television and then – for me, the king of them all – Sid Caesar, on Your Show of Shows. But after seeing Death of a Salesman, I had no more thoughts of being a comedian – I wanted to be an actor; perhaps a comic actor, but an actor, not a comedian.
I went back to Milwaukee and made a one-hour adaptation of Death of a Salesman. I played Lee J. Cobb’s part, of course – a sixteen-year-old Willy Loman – and, along with two of my acting friends from school, we performed at churches and women’s clubs all over Milwaukee and then in front of two thousand students at my high school. I also began reading An Actor Prepares, by Constantin Stanislavsky.
One afternoon, while we were performing at some women’s club, I came to the scene where Willy Loman is trying to plant seeds in his backyard at night. I was very relaxed. I don’t think there was any tension in my body or my mind. There was no actual earth, of course, only a wooden floor, but when I started planting …
ME (AS WILLY LOMAN): Carrots … quarter inch apart …
Suddenly I was in a backyard, not an auditorium, planting seeds. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I heard everything that I was saying and what the other actors were saying. I knew I was acting in a play … but I also knew that I wasn’t acting.
Corinne had gone to the University of Iowa during my high-school years. It was reputed to have one of the five best theater departments in the country. I drove from Milwaukee to visit Corinne in Iowa City several times. We’d go to a football game together, and then I’d see her in one of the university productions. When I was seventeen, I saw her play the part of Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest. After the show I met her stage director, whom I liked very much. He looked at me for a second and then said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
Corinne was invited to a party that someone was giving after the show. She told the host that she would like to bring her kid brother along. We walked into an old Victorian house, stuffed with college students. There were all kinds of things to eat and drink. Corinne introduced me to her roommate, Mary Jo, who had the most original lips I had ever seen – except perhaps for those of the French actress Jeanne Moreau, whom I had seen in a movie called The Lovers. She and Jeanne Moreau must have traded lip secrets. I wished that Mary Jo was going to my high school so that I could date her, but since she was a college student and I was what my father would have called “a high-school pisher,” I honestly didn’t think she would give me the time of day after we were introduced. I wasn’t particularly handsome, and I certainly wasn’t very experienced – especially when it came to the opposite sex – but, to my surprise, Mary Jo stayed with me during the whole party.
We sat down on a small sofa and ate hors d’oeuvres and watched everyone else in the room either kissing or drinking beer, or both. I don’t know if I kissed Mary Jo first or if she kissed me – maybe it was both at the same time – but we started kissing. And we kept on kissing. I don’t remember anything we said to each other – I just remember the kissing and the look in her eyes, where a small beam of light was reflected from a street lamp. When the party broke up, we said good-bye.
I slept in my used car that night and drove back to Milwaukee the next morning. The memory of Mary Jo’s eyes stayed in my dreams for a long time.
As a high-school graduation present, my mother and father let me go to New York to see plays, provided I stayed at an inexpensive hotel. The old Taft Hotel on Fiftieth and Sixth Avenue fit the bill.
I saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing. During her performance I was particularly curious how she could keep using her throat to make the guttural sounds she used, in her talking and singing, without going hoarse. After the show I stood at the stage door with a few other people, waiting for her to come out. When she did, she signed some autographs and then came up to me, expecting me to give her a program to sign. I don’t know where I got the nerve to say it: “Miss Channing – does it hurt your throat when you talk and sing in that special way that you do?”
She looked at me as if I were some kind of country bumpkin and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She gave me an autograph. I thanked her, and she left.
One evening, instead of seeing a play, I went to the Paris movie theater and saw Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. More than any other movie I’ve ever seen, City Lights made the biggest impression on me as an actor. It was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.
That fall I went straight off to the University of Iowa, acting in the first production of the year, The Winslow Boy, directed by Corinne’s director, whom I liked so much and who had said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
I suppose that everyone has had to wrestle with a demon at some time in their life. My Demon came out of hiding on the first day of spring, during my freshman year. It came out without warning, like a sudden eclipse of the sun – not in the disguise of alcohol abuse or drugs or gambling or sexual perversion – nothing like that. My Demon came out in the form of a horrible compulsion to pray. I say “horrible” because I didn’t want to pray – I had to pray, wherever I was, even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to be praying for.
When the compulsion came upon me, I would pray in front of whichever building I was about to enter for my next class. I would speak to God, out loud, but I tried to move my lips as little as possible when people passed by because I was afraid they’d think I was another one of those poor souls who hadn’t bathed or changed clothes for a week, who usually smelled of urine as they mumbled up and down busy streets, talking to God, or the Devil, oblivious of everyone around them. I was excruciatingly aware of everyone around me, but I thought that if I were truly humble, then the presence of all these passersby shouldn’t bother me. I kept on mumbling softly, trying to find out – as I prayed – what terrible thing I could possibly have done for which I needed God’s forgiveness.
The craziness reached a point where, one morning, I plastered down my curly hair with Vaseline, just to prove how truly humble I was. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a freak. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know how I could leave the house and go to class … but I did. I walked into my theater history class and sat next to my lunch pal, Betty Kanzell. She used to make fun of me if I missed breakfast and she heard my stomach gurgling, but on this morning