by Alan Alda
Finally, the beautiful leather book I had chosen so carefully was too seductive to resist. I picked it up and opened it. I began reading Hamlet, and not far into the play I was stopped cold by Hamlet’s speech about acting. Not the speech to the players (“Speak the speech, I pray you . . .”), which is technical stuff about delivery, but his lines about one of the players, after he’s seen him play a short speech. This is a deeper version of acting than speaking words trippingly on the tongue. It gets to what theater, and in some ways life itself, is all about.
Hamlet greets the players and asks one of the actors to do a monologue for him about a character from ancient Greece called Hecuba. Almost instantly, the actor is moved to tears and the blood drains from his face as he describes Hecuba’s cries of anguish on seeing her husband hacked to death by his enemy. Hamlet is stunned by how this actor can get genuinely choked up in a speech about someone with whom the actor has no connection, someone who, if she existed, lived two thousand years ago.
I was still a boy, not yet able to carry off even the technical side of acting very well, but when I read this speech of Hamlet’s I was struck, as Hamlet is, by what this actor can accomplish; how emotional he can become about imaginary events. Hamlet thinks it’s monstrous that the actor can do this while he, Hamlet, is unable to act with passion in the face of a real call to action—his father’s murder.
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
As I put down the book, what was monstrous for me was that I realized that Hecuba meant nothing to me. There was no way I could weep for an offstage Hecuba who was purely imaginary. I couldn’t really relate to a person who was actually there onstage, either, but I was only dimly aware of this at the time. All I wanted then was to be able to cry onstage. I wanted to care about Hecuba so much that she opened my faucets. I knew this was possible because I’d seen actors who in a scene that began casually could be so caught up that with no warning or preparation, they would choke up with tears, almost against their will. I couldn’t do this, and I wanted it more than anything. I realized when I read this passage in Hamlet how much I craved spontaneity and how I hungered to be swept away by emotion. But in these youthful days, even if I managed to be spontaneous, when it came to emotion, all I could do was pump it up. It didn’t blossom on its own. And if I started out on one emotion, I stayed there. Changes didn’t come about by themselves. I was protected against change. In a way, I was imitating life, but not living it. I was stuffing the dog. If I could learn to unstuff it, maybe I’d become an actor. I didn’t know it then, but maybe I’d become a better person, too.
If all that was ever going to happen, though, it was a long way off. I was going to have to stand a lot longer in the wings. Watching my words played that first night in the Off Broadway review, and listening to the audience laughing, had fueled my dream of becoming a playwright. Reading the review the next day woke me up. I opened the paper and turned to the theater section first, as I always did in those days, and there was the first review of my work as a writer. It began: “Backward children in a school for the retarded wouldn’t have been proud of what happened last night.” After that it got worse. There was clearly more to learn.
I tried to become more disciplined, to learn from others who had been at it longer than I had. I took a mime course with Étienne Decroux, the man who had taught Marcel Marceau. I let him teach me. I tugged on the imaginary rope and walked like a chicken and fell face forward onto the floor without flinching when he cried “Salamander!” I was taking instruction and giving my body over to another person for the first time since the physical therapist tried to take it apart when I had polio.
I went out for a beer after class one evening with a fellow student. He looked down in his beer and said, “You know, if we really want to make it, if we want to be first-class artists, we’ll have to give up everything. Everything. We’ll have to give up friends and movies and reading the Sunday Times.”
I nodded and grunted in agreement. But inwardly I was thinking, What the hell is he talking about? What kind of romantic bullshit is this? My idea of discipline didn’t include giving things up. It was supposed to be fun. I had long ago decided that the perfect regimen of a disciplined life would include a certain amount of time that was totally unaccounted for and in fact wasted. Moderation in all things, especially moderation: This was my motto, and I thought I was very clever to have thought it up.
As time went on, it was a revelation to learn, as only a few young people do, that if you looked carefully, you could find the most wonderful ways to waste time.
Of all of them, the racetrack was the best. It was there you had fresh air, a beating heart, the piercing imminence of glory, and, eventually, the rueful discovery that these massive beasts can shrug you off their backs without your ever having to get on them.
chapter 10
FUN AT THE RACES
My career at the racetrack, brilliant as it was, had humble beginnings. It began with a search for ordinary, actual work that could support us.
I was at the dining room table, counting up our money. Our daughter Eve, one year old, was playing on the floor and swaying to a recording of Domenico Modugno’s “Volare.” Arlene was at the stove, making dinner. I finished counting and sat back in my chair. We had just enough to make one more month’s rent.
After dinner, I went out and bought a newspaper and started looking at the classifieds. I saw that a company called Restaurant Associates was looking for a doorman. I went to the personnel office on Fifty-seventh Street and climbed the stairs, pretty confident that with a college education and an affable personality I could easily make a few dollars opening doors and hailing cabs. The personnel manager looked at me coldly. “Yes?” he said. I smiled affably and told him I was there for the doorman job. He looked at the top of my head for what seemed like quite a while; then he said, “There’s a barbershop downstairs. Get a haircut and come back and then we’ll talk about the doorman job.” He closed the door. I went down and got a haircut for a dollar seventy-five; I thought it made me look like a geek, but it seemed to be just right for the personnel manager, because he hired me.
The Forum of the Twelve Caesars was a fancy restaurant on Forty-eighth Street, and I had to wear a coat that looked a little like a double-breasted toga, but the tips—the quarters and dollar bills I stuffed in my toga every night—paid our rent for a couple of months. And it placed me in the theater district during lunch hour. One afternoon I left the door, ran downstairs to the locker room, tore off my semitoga, put on a jacket over my striped pants, raced to the Cort Theater, and auditioned for a play. After I read for the director, I ran the two blocks to the restaurant and was back on the street before they knew I was gone. I got the part—only five lines long, but in a Broadway play, and I was able to pass on my Caesar costume to the next young artist in line.
Like most plays I got into in those days, this one closed after a couple of performances and I was back looking for a part-time job. I saw another ad in the paper. An office in Brooklyn was looking for people to sell mutual funds. I applied, was accepted, and studied to take a test for a license, which involved having to remember when the Blue Sky Laws were passed (in the 1930s) without having to know what the Blue Sky Laws were. More important, the manager of the office taught me how to say, “Mr. Prospect, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but if you had started ten years ago to put away ten dollars a month in the Wellington Fund, it would be worth five thousand dollars today! Only ten dollars a month. That’s less than
a pack of cigarettes a day.” I was so convincing, I sold myself a plan.
I also was able to convince my mother’s masseuse to put away a few thousand dollars that she hadn’t mentioned to the IRS. But that was pretty much it. I talked to a lot of prospects, but nobody seemed all that impressed with my knowledge of the Blue Sky Laws.
Another ad in the paper took me to Queens, where they were looking for people to color baby pictures. This was before color film was cheap, so department stores would photograph your baby and sell you prints that were colored by hand. I had colored pictures as a boy, so I knew exactly how to do this job. The only problem was that it was piecework, and I wasn’t very fast. Before I had finished the first batch of pictures, I realized I was making about ten cents an hour. I took the train back to Queens, which cost more than I had earned, gave them their photos back, and got out of the baby pictures racket.
As I walked around the city, I would scan bulletin boards for part-time jobs, and I saw a notice on one that was intriguing. A psychiatrist was looking for volunteers to be hypnotized in a study of the nervous system.
I took the train up to Albert Einstein hospital in the Bronx and was interviewed for the job. The doctor told me that if I was a good subject for hypnosis, I would get twenty-five dollars for three sessions. This was fantastic. We could live for half a week on that, and all I had to do was go into a trance.
In the first session, he told me to close my eyes and relax. He said I wouldn’t lose consciousness and that my ability to go into a light trance depended not on him, but on my ability to concentrate. He said not to block out stray thoughts or sounds from the street, but to let them in and incorporate them. This seemed like good advice for all kinds of concentration, and it’s how I’ve gone about concentrating ever since that afternoon. At first, though, I thought nothing was happening because I was fully conscious. I remembered the time I was ten years old, watching a nightclub show with my parents. A stage hypnotist asked for volunteers, and I went onstage to be hypnotized along with three other people. We all went through a comically bizarre scenario. He told us it was cold, and we shivered; he told us it was hot, and we opened our collars. But mostly we did these things because he was whispering to us, telling us what to do next, and we simply played our parts.
I decided to play along with the psychiatrist, too. I really wanted the twenty-five dollars, and if it took a little acting to get it, I would act hypnotized. Then he said, “Now I’m going to test how deep you are. Stay in your chair and hold your legs straight out in the air. I’m going to see if I can balance this office chair on your legs.” He picked up a really big swivel chair.
The chair looked as if it weighed forty or fifty pounds. This is not going to work, I thought. I’m out twenty-five bucks. He placed the chair on top of my extended legs, and to my astonishment, my legs didn’t give.
He continued on with the experiment, which was designed to see if hypnosis could increase the efficiency of the autonomic nervous system. He would flash words on a screen for a fraction of a second and time how long it took for the words to become recognizable. With hypnosis, I recognized them much faster than I had without it. But what was most interesting to me was the realization that through concentration alone I could affect parts of my body that I couldn’t control with conscious commands. I was sure that no amount of willpower could have allowed me to support the office chair with outstretched legs or recognize the words faster, but deep concentration could. I became excited by the idea that there was a way to get in touch with parts of my body that would allow me to assume the gestures of other characters and go through their emotions without the phoniness that comes from consciously forcing the body to do these things. He didn’t know it, but he had given me an important way to get in touch with parts of myself, and I would use it for the rest of my life. Plus, I got the twenty-five dollars.
I went back to the classifieds, and for one ghastly night I worked in a telephone boiler room in the Bronx. At seven in the evening, I made my way down a flight of dark steps to a large basement lit by a few bulbs hanging overhead. There were dozens of phones, each in a little cubicle. Two skinny men in their thirties explained to me that I would be calling people in Riverdale. “These are good prospects. Apartments go for forty dollars a room there. These people have money. Here’s the script. Stick to the script. If they hesitate, but they don’t hang up, just go back to this paragraph, here.”
I took the script and dialed my first prospect. “Hello,” I said, reading from the paper in front of me, “this is Ed Jastrow, down here at the Veterans of Foreign Wars.” Down here, I thought. That’s clever. “Down here” could be anywhere.
“Yes?” said the voice at the other end.
“We’re asking people like yourself if they’d be kind enough to help us. Every Sunday we take a few paraplegic veterans out on the town. We take them on the Circle Line for a tour of Manhattan. Then we treat them to dinner at the Brass Rail Restaurant. And I have to tell you, Mr. Prospect, you should see those boys’ faces at the end of that day.”
“Well, I don’t know how I could help. . . .”
“Well, it really doesn’t take much, Mr. Prospect. All it takes is ten dollars for each veteran. Can I put you down for three boys, Mr. Prospect?”
“No, wait. I’d like to help, but don’t put me down. I’m not able to.”
“You know, you really should see their faces at the end of the day. It means an awful lot to them. How about if I put you down for two?”
Click.
Until this moment, I had thought there actually were veterans who were being taken on trips. But as I dialed new calls, I began mentally adding up the figures. I was supposed to be paid three dollars an hour and an extra dollar for every ten that was pledged. The phone calls cost money, too, and as dim and grungy as the room we were in was, that had to cost something. The two skinny guys were sure to be taking a cut from each ten-dollar sale, so how much did that leave for the veterans? I was starting to feel a little sick. If they gave even one dollar to help paraplegic veterans, it would be amazing. I made it through a few more phone calls, but I felt like such a shit, lying to people about wounded soldiers, I quit after about an hour. No one had donated any money, so I wasn’t owed a commission, but they did owe me three dollars for my time. I didn’t collect. I left and never went back.
An actor friend who was a master at part-time jobs saw I was getting desperate and offered to help. He had worked as a clown at the openings of gas stations and other businesses that were trying to draw attention to themselves. All you had to do was dance in the street for six or eight hours and hand out balloons. He was moving on to real work and offered me his clown suit. My first job was at a store on 103rd Street that sold chicken parts. I don’t think they cooked the chicken parts; they just laid out the bluish legs and wings in trays and waited for people to come in and buy them, which I doubt they ever did, with or without a clown. I was handing out balloons when a group of boys about nine decided they wanted all of them.
Within a minute, I was backing up the street, smiling, joking, and reassuring them that if they were patient, there would be plenty for everyone. One of them, a chubby kid who was surprisingly strong, started twisting my wrist until I let go of a handful. Finally, I climbed a lamppost and threw the balloons as far as I could. When they ran for them, I jumped down and went home.
The next day, I was in front of a gas station in Brooklyn. Hasidic boys coming home from school in black stockings, black hats, and payes stood and stared at the clown with the white face and big red lips in his orange-and-black suit. I hadn’t ever seen anything like them, and I guess they hadn’t ever seen anything like me. They dealt with that a few minutes later by standing across the street and lobbing eggs at me.
Next, I was in the Bronx, dodging trucks and dancing in front of a Texaco station on Gun Hill Road. In fact, it wasn’t exactly dancing. I leapt and twirled in the air without quite knowing how to land. The street was hot from the summer sun,
and each time I came down on the ground, my foot would stick to the hot macadam while my body kept turning, and my knee would twist like a corkscrew. At the end of the day, as I limped to the men’s room to wash off my clown makeup, a mechanic who’d been watching me from underneath a car came out of the garage and stood in front of me with his hands on his hips.
“How much they pay you to jump around like that?” he asked.
“Twenty-five dollars for the day,” I said.
“Shit,” he said, “you got it easy.”
I hobbled over to the toilet and washed off the clown face, but when I looked in the mirror I realized I really didn’t understand the basics of makeup. All I had done at the start of the day was paint big eyes and a large mouth on my face. I hadn’t applied a base. As a result, the sun had burned the outline of a huge pair of eyes and a gigantic mouth on me. I rode home on the subway with a permanent clown face that lasted a week. I was starting to feel deeply sorry for myself.
I applied for a hack license. This involved taking another quiz during which I had to convince an official of the Taxi and Limousine Commission that I knew where Penn Station was.
My first night on the job, I went down to the garage and waited for my car. You sat around for an hour or so until the driver who had your car during the day turned it in for the night shift.
We sat on long wooden benches, and while I waited, I was listening to two drivers who I could tell had been doing this for a long time. I tried to listen in on their conversation, hoping to pick up a few clues about what it would be like out on the streets. They were chatting quietly, and I could hardly hear them, so I moved a little closer, just in time to hear one of them say to the other, “Yeah, I knew it was a holdup the minute he got in the car.”
