After I graduated from Iowa in 1955 I got accepted at the Old Vic Theatre School, in Bristol, England. I wanted to go there because I felt deficient in all the physical techniques and the Old Vic offered courses in singing, movement, voice and speech, ballet exercise, Swedish gymnastics, and fencing. I took my Stanislavsky and my compulsion with me. I’d been acting since I was thirteen and praying compulsively since I was eighteen. I started to wonder if the compulsion would be with me for the rest of my life. Pain, then pleasure; pleasure, then pain.
On my way to England, on the Queen Elizabeth again, I met a young Indian girl named Romy who had been studying in New York and was returning to London. We hit it off very well, and I began questioning her about the philosophy of desirelessness.
“Well,” she said, “in my religion we believe that life is full of suffering, and it’s all caused by desire. And the only way to stop this suffering is through enlightenment, so that we can end this sort of endless cycle of births and deaths.”
“And do you really want to stop desiring?”
“Well,” she said, “I wish I could, but –” and she started to giggle “– but I’m not strong enough to do that, because I’m enjoying myself too much.” And she giggled again.
When I got to Bristol, I stayed at the YMCA for a few days and then found a very reasonable boardinghouse, run by a warm and friendly Austrian lady. She was divorced and had her three children living with her. The cost to me was £11 per week – breakfast, dinner, and lodging included – which came to $31.24 per week. If you were lucky enough to find such a place today, it would cost $324 per week. School was a fifteen-minute walk from the house.
The Old Vic school was located in three Victorian houses, all stuck together, and offered a two-year course. I was one of two Americans at the school; the other students were English.
Whenever I did a scene from Shakespeare in my acting class, the principal of the school, Duncan Ross, would say, “You’re breaking the back of the meter, dear boy.”
“I’m what?”
“Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, and you’re not paying any attention to it.”
“Mr. Ross, I want my acting to come from a real human being…. I don’t want to sound like a poetry professor.”
“But you can’t break the back of the meter, dear boy. You’re acting some of the greatest lines every written, and they’re written in iambic pentameter … a long followed by a short, or a short followed by a long…. ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ … Do you see, dear boy?”
I liked Mr. Ross, but I wanted to punch him every time he said, “Dear boy.”
Victor Shargai – the other American student – got tickets for the two of us to see Sir John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, at Stratford-upon-Avon. Victor had written a note to Sir John, requesting a short meeting after the show, which Sir John graciously allowed. We went backstage when the play ended, and, after saying how wonderful we thought he was, I took a deep breath.
“Sir John, my acting teacher at the Old Vic school keeps telling me that I’m breaking the back of the meter whenever I do a scene from Shakespeare. Do you think about meter and iambic pentameter when you’re on stage, acting those beautiful lines?”
“No, I don’t think about such things when I’m acting. Shakespeare takes care of most of the work…. If you have a good ear, the poetry will come out. If you don’t have a good ear, it won’t much matter what you do.”
When Victor and I got back to school the next day, the principal was waiting for me.
“Well, what did the Master have to say?”
I told him what the Master had to say.
As long as I was with the other students in class, I felt safe. They all loved it when I took on the principal and argued with him, for hours, even after the school day was over. But when I was alone, I was vulnerable. The Demon would arrive and prod me until I bled from guilt – as if I had killed someone and left him to die alone. I no longer thought of my praying as holy … I hated it.
Of all the courses, fencing was my favorite. I won the All School Fencing Championship after only six months. No first-year student had ever done that before. All my years of “pretend sword fighting,” and all the Errol Flynn movies I’d seen, had paid off. But when the principal got around to teaching more advanced acting – for example, how to laugh onstage by letting all the air out of your gut and creating a gagging effect, or how to find a chair onstage without looking down, by feeling for it with your toe or heel – I decided to leave. I knew I would be drafted shortly after I got back to the States (this was near the end of Compulsory Military Training), and I wanted to study where they taught Stanislavsky.
My sister had started acting classes at the HB Studio in New York, which was run by Herbert Berghof and his wife, Uta Hagen. Corinne invited me to come to New York and live with her and her family in Queens, so I drove from Milwaukee and enrolled at the HB Studio that summer.
I was drafted into the army on September 10, 1956. All I took with me were some underwear, a few pair of socks, and Dear Theo – the letters of van Gogh to his brother Theo. At the end of Basic Training, I was assigned to the medical corps and sent to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, for eight weeks of medical training.
While I was at Fort Sam, I helped the officers’ wives stage-manage a variety show that they had written. The wife in charge of the production was married to a colonel, who just happened to be the commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston. At the end of my eight weeks – when I was about to be given the orders that would station me somewhere in the world for the next year and eight months – a letter from the commanding officer instructed the office in charge of issuing orders to allow me to pick any post that was open, anywhere in the country. I was glad I had helped the commanding officer’s wife. I chose Valley Forge Army Hospital, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which was the closest post to New York City.
When I arrived at Valley Forge, I was given a choice of work: sterilization of equipment, tubercular ward, etc. I chose the Neuropsychiatric hospital, which was across the road. I imagined that the things I would see there might relate more to acting than any of the other choices. I wasn’t wrong.
On my first day at work, I was shown a short film called Shades of Gray, which showed the mental health of all of us as being at some stage of gray – none of us being completely white or black. If stress is too great, the gray becomes darker. If the gray becomes too dark, that person needs to be institutionalized. Watching the film, I felt a sense of relief that I really didn’t understand.
I was assigned to a “locked ward,” which meant that the patients were locked in, with bars