by Alan Alda
She was dragging me unwillingly into an uncomfortable side of life, the one on the other side of the footlights. Not only would I have to accept civilians as equals, I would have to become one. I knew she was smarter than I was, and she probably had some inkling I didn’t have about the value of all this, but it seemed a diversion from what I really should be learning, which was acting and writing. It would be a while before I realized that these were things I’d never learn if I didn’t learn her thing first.
My real education was just beginning, and it would lead to a new way of thinking of myself—as a person, and even as an actor. But first I had to be willing to be taught. Not easy for someone who at twenty-two was pretty sure he had seen it all.
chapter 9
WATCHING FROM THE WINGS
Too poor to study, and afraid I would spoil my natural genius by going to classes, I was trying to teach myself to act. I would read soliloquies from Shakespeare into a tape recorder, trying to make sense of them. I would accent one word, then another, until finally I was leaning heavily into almost every word in the sentence. It was unintelligible.
My writing wasn’t going any better. Amazed that I could string words together, I wrote plays, short stories, and sketches. I wondered why writers said they had trouble filling a blank page. I filled reams of them.
But I wanted an audience for all this brilliance, and one day I saw a small classified ad in a show business trade paper asking for submissions of sketches for an Off Broadway revue. I wrote half a dozen sketches and sent them off to the post office box listed in the ad. A week later, I got a call to come down and see the producer. Would I like to have my sketches in the show? Would I like to be in the show? Would I like to direct it? Of course, I said yes; but I couldn’t understand all the flattering attention until they showed me a press release that used my father’s name as often as possible.
On the night of the first preview, I stood in the wings and watched the opening sketch I had written. I heard actual laughs coming from the audience. This was the first time I had heard an audience laugh at something I had written, and a cocktail of sweet, tingling hormones shot through my brain. I was suddenly aware of what an astonishing power there was in words. Once you set a thought in motion, it went on its own. You could write something on Tuesday, and they would laugh at it a week from Friday. I also began to hear what didn’t work. And after a while, I could imagine as I wrote a line what the response would be. The wings were teaching me again.
I had watched my father from the wings since I was a baby. The wings had been my home, my spy perch, and my cocoon—my inspiration.
My father had let me stand in a magical place. From the wings, you see the actors’ discipline; how even the slightest movement is both controlled and spontaneous. And the sheer physical effort: You see them spitting as they talk, sweating, giving one another energy as they toss the ball of the audience’s attention back and forth between them. You see things the audience never sees.
When I was ten years old, I was standing in the wings of a vaudeville house in Baltimore. My father had become famous in the movies and was on a tour of vaudeville houses, singing and doing patter with his old partner Beetlepuss Lewis. Blackstone the Magician and Bela Lugosi were also on the bill. Lugosi didn’t have a real act. A classically trained actor known in this country for horror movies, he read some poetry in a scary blue light. After the first few shows, he sat with my father and Beetlepuss in their dressing room and said he wished he had more to offer the audience. Beetlepuss thought about it and came up with an idea for him: The singer in the show, a young woman, would introduce Bela to the audience and he would come onstage and do a joke with her—a line about bats, or maybe he would ask if you can get a good glass of blood at the local diner. Then she’d laugh and say, “Oh, Bela, you kill me.” And he’d look at her hungrily and say, “In due time, my dear.” In those days, this was close enough to funny to seem like an act.
I watched Bela, but I studied Blackstone, every day, five shows a day. I loved magic. I had been inventing magic tricks for years. When I was seven, my mother was appalled when I wanted to show her a trick in which I would pretend to cut off my thumb with a kitchen knife and have it show up later in a matchbox. She wouldn’t let me do it, no matter how many times I explained it was just a trick.
With a view of Blackstone from the side, I saw things from the wings the audience never saw. With elaborate gestures, he took apart a bridge table and showed them that nothing could be hidden in it. But I could see that the tabletop was thicker than the audience thought it was. I could even see the heads of a few white birds in a compartment behind it. With a flourish, he let the birds loose and the audience gasped and applauded. They were surprised, but I wasn’t. This was why I liked watching actors from the wings. You could see where they hid the birds.
I watched my father, too. Knowing him so well, I could see what parts of his performance were truly him and what were layered on, just putting on a show. I was competitive, watching him critically. When he was introduced in each show, I noticed the staginess of his entrance. He walked out swiftly, making a large banana curve as he headed for the microphone so that the second half of the trip would be full face to the audience. As he scooped out a path across the stage, one hand was on his rib cage, as if he were a headwaiter holding his jacket away from a flaming dessert. I tried to figure this out. Doesn’t he realize this doesn’t look like a regular person walking to a microphone?
It didn’t occur to me that he probably wasn’t trying to look like a regular person. The audience expected a movie star to walk out, and that’s what they got. They seemed to love it. He seemed to love it, too, and for some reason I didn’t approve of his loving it.
Watching, of course, is not the same as doing. It can give you an unearned sense of accomplishment. Even at the age of ten, I was convinced I knew more about acting than my father did.
We were back in La Tuna Canyon after the vaudeville tour, and he was shooting another movie at Warners. He came into the living room where I was stretched out on the floor with the Congressional Record and asked if I’d like to hold the book for him while he went over his lines for the next day. I said sure, not thinking this was any special honor, and took the script. I read his first cue and he said his line. He got a word wrong and I corrected him. He said the speech again and got it right. I looked at the script for a moment, not saying anything. “Do I say more?” he asked me.
“No, that’s all,” I said, “but what if you said that line like this. . . .” And I read the line differently for him.
He looked at me, amused. “Are you directing me?” he asked. He was smiling, but he seemed a little amazed. I didn’t know what he was amazed at.
“Don’t you think it’s better that way?” I asked.
“Well, let me think about it,” he said. “Why don’t we just do the lines for now?”
Okay, I thought, but I’m giving you a much better reading.
I had utter confidence. After all, look at how many performances I had watched by the time I was ten.
At fifteen, I would stand in the wings and watch my father and Sam Levene in Guys and Dolls—and I did this almost every Saturday for two years, at both shows. My father was playing a character perfectly within his range, and his own magnetism became Sky Masterson’s magnetism. I was riveted by how quietly powerful he could be. In the Havana bar scene, he left a tip for the waiter, took a last sip from his whiskey glass, and plunked it down on top of the money so it wouldn’t blow away. That small gesture was so strong, it became a part of me. It’s how I leave a tip on the table even now; I put a glass on it, and the click it makes as it hits the tabletop is the sound of his glass hitting the table at each performance.
Watching Sam Levene was thrilling. He could ride a moment as if it were a wild animal. He went wherever it took him and stayed on its back. I’d never seen anything like this. New meanings occurred to him on the spot. Not only did he play the same lines differently ev
ery night, but the laughs rolled in from the audience in different places. How did he do it? This kind of spontaneity and this utter commitment to the moment became what I wanted to have. As good as my father was, what I was seeing as they played together a few feet away was the difference between my early life and my future life; between burlesque and theater; between performing and acting. I chose acting. I wanted to be Sam.
What I really wanted was to be both of them. But I didn’t know that yet. And it would take a long time before they could both live comfortably in me.
By the time I finished high school, I’d made up my mind what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to act. I was sixteen, and I announced it one day to my father, formally. He looked at me without saying anything for a while. “You know,” he said, “it takes a lot of energy to be an actor.”
“I have a lot of energy,” I said. Of course I did. I was sixteen.
“You don’t think you’d like to be a doctor?” he asked.
I knew he had wanted to be a doctor, but I didn’t want to be one. If I did, people would come to me with problems and expect me to cure them. I would have to touch sick people and watch them die. He could see I was determined, and he let it go.
And then he gave me what was, apart from not drifting while I talked, the only advice he ever gave me about acting. “Always find a place to sit down,” he said. “Your legs will get tired. Look for places to sit down. Whenever you can.” I nodded as if I understood. This is really strange advice, I thought. What could he possibly mean? Is he so empty that he thinks this is the secret of a life on the stage? I wish I could go back now and touch his hand. Touch his hand and thank him for sharing a speck of the reality of his life with me. Not the vague generality of most people’s advice, but a little bite of life: the ache in his leg on a long day. Anesthetized by youth, I missed it.
Then we talked about what my name would be. Would I use the name Alda? I was proud of being Italian, and I thought about using the name I had been born with: D’Abruzzo. But I realized that most people couldn’t pronounce my name, even after I’d said it three times. Alda was a name my father had constructed by taking the first two letters of Alphonso (his own true first name) and the first two letters of D’Abruzzo. In practice, it was now our family name, so I said I would stick with Alda, which I think made him happy.
My father enjoyed being Italian, as I did, and he identified himself as an Italian even in the forties, when it wasn’t especially popular to do that. The rest of the country saw Italians as somewhat foreign creatures without much class but a lot of names. When he went to Hollywood, his press releases started including the information that his real name was Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo, about three first names more than he was born with. When he sang on The Ed Sullivan Show, he chose the Italian love song “Oh Marie” and dedicated it to “all my paisans out there.” In all of this, he was trying deftly to play both sides by pointing to his Italian ancestry, but doing it in terms the American audience would accept. Italians were okay as long as they were colorful, fun-loving folks who had the good taste to know their place. He was a handsome leading man who, without making a big deal out of it, was moving the boundary a little. I knew from the experiences of my friend Joe Colangelo, though, that in places like Rye, New York, where he lived, if you were an ordinary middle-class Italian, the boundaries were not so movable.
My father, from a working-class background, dreamed of celebrating his good fortune with his family and the neighborhood he grew up in. As soon as he had saved a few dollars from the modest salary he was earning at the studio, he organized a block party in Queens for what he billed as his eight hundred cousins (another stereotype he gladly played into).
I loved going back with him to visit his family in Queens. There would be a Sunday dinner that went on for several hours at a table that took up the whole living room of my grandparents’ tiny apartment. From the first steaming dish of ravioli to the chestnut shells littering the table at the end of the meal, there was laughter and loud talk. Everyone spoke at a volume that would carry across a football field. You had to do this to be heard above everyone else. A lot of the laughter was at the expense of my grandfather, a small, quiet man who had been a barber until he retired but now spent his days looking out the window and following the activities of the neighborhood. He sat quietly nursing the half glass of red wine allowed by his doctor and looking for ways to trick someone into pouring him a little more. After dinner, they played cards and I was allowed to go out with my uncle and ten cents to bring back a bucket of beer.
I was glad, as I sat with my father deciding on a new name, that “Alda” sounded Italian.
“How about your first name?” my father asked. I hadn’t thought that was a problem. Everyone in school called me Al. “I don’t think a nickname is good for an actor,” he said. “It limits you. I called myself Buddy Alda when I started out, but it sounded too much like a kid. So I changed it to Robert.” He suggested Alan, which I didn’t like much, but I didn’t say anything. “Alan, with one ‘l,’ ” he said. And I liked that even less. But as we talked, I decided that he had named me the first time, and if he wanted to rename me now, I’d let him.
Then, probably to give me a chance to see what it’s like to work hard, he told me he would ask a friend who ran a summer stock theater if I could work as an apprentice in his company.
When I told my friend Joe, he wanted to go, too, and my dad arranged it, maybe glad that I’d have company while I was learning to work hard.
Joe and I took a bus down to Barnesville, Pennsylvania, and began ten weeks of a daily shift that started at eight in the morning and ended around midnight. We nailed canvas to frames of fresh-smelling wood and painted the cloth with sizing to make it taut. The sizing had the clean, pale odor of glue and water, and when it dried we painted the flats and hinged them together. We set up the scenery before each show, and then sometimes I stood behind it, my face against the back of the flats, breathing in the smell of paint and sizing as I listened to the music of the speeches by Noël Coward or lyrics by Cole Porter. It wasn’t the music of their songs that killed me; it was the music of the words themselves.
From the wings that first year in stock, I watched Mae West and Buster Keaton, and although I was too callow to understand what true artists I was watching, still, they impressed me. And sometimes I got to act onstage. I had talent, but it was raw talent, and I needed someone to take me through the steps that would lead to acting and not just flat-out performing. But here in Barnesville the main objective was to learn your sides, build the set, and get a new show on every week. John Kenley, the wonderful, flaming impresario of the Kenley Players, said to me, “Honey, here’s my theory of acting: Shout and duck.”
When I went to college that fall, I signed up for plays in the Theater Department. When my father pleaded almost wistfully with me to try a pre-med course in chemistry, I took the course halfheartedly. I was afraid if I did well in it, I’d be touching sick people for the rest of my life. It wasn’t something I took naturally to. In the lab, we had to prepare for experiments by breaking glass pipettes with our hands, which left me each and every time with bloody fingers. It was a summer course in which the basic concepts were brushed past so quickly, I had no idea that we were even talking about atoms bound into molecules. In the final exam, I managed to get a score of ten.
The professor asked me into his office. I sat on the hard wooden chair while he looked over my exam paper, full of red marks. He looked up at me and stared for a moment. “Why are you here?” he asked.
“My father would like me to be a doctor,” I said.
“Yes?”
“So, I was trying chemistry. To see how I would do. How it would work out.”
“I see.” We looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. After a while, I got up and left, leaving a world of blood, mostly my own, behind.
I was on a trajectory to become an actor. I knew I could do it, becaus
e I felt I knew more than some people who had been doing it all their lives.
My father’s birthday was coming up, and I wanted to get him something meaningful. I searched New York for days, and in a small shop on the East Side, I found a tattered, leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s plays. As scuffed as it was, I could just afford it. The store owner polished it up for me and carefully covered up the scuff marks. I was proud of the gift as I presented it to my father.
He opened the wrapping and looked at the title. There was an odd expression on his face that I couldn’t quite read. He thanked me, then asked in a neutral tone, “How come you got me this?”
“Well,” I said, “I thought it would be something you’d enjoy reading.” I didn’t say what I was thinking: It’s something you ought to be reading.
I was in my second year of college, and a new universe was opening up to me. I was suddenly aware of a world of ideas and galaxies of subtle shadings in language. I wanted to share that with him. Well, I didn’t really want to share it. That implies acceptance on his part. I wanted to impose it on him. I was taking advantage of his gentle nature to let him know in a subtle way that I was superior to him—just one of the many wonderful, hurtful things you can do with subtlety.
He thanked me and put the book aside on a table in the living room. He let it sit, unread, thinking rightly that there was an implied criticism in the gift. I was hinting that he didn’t take acting seriously enough. Somehow, I thought that all you had to do was take acting seriously to be good at it.
For several days as I moved through our apartment, I passed by the book, thinking if only he’d read it, his horizons would be extended, his acting would deepen. I was drunk with my own precocity.
