Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned

by Alan Alda

  It’s not surprising for a child to have that spontaneity, but how did Mike, playing the Devil, do it? As we talked about it, I realized that his interest in the Devil came from a strong belief in spiritualism. He told me about a man called Edgar Cayce and gave me a book on his life. At home that night, I turned the first page and entered the spirit world, where I would live for a few years in blissful self-deception.

  Cayce had been active in the forties, when he supposedly had the ability, after going into a trance, to see where you’d left your sunglasses. Soon, people who had lost not only their sunglasses but their husbands and uncles were asking him to contact loved ones who were now in a very different postal zone.

  I had a strange reaction reading about Cayce. My eyes would water and I would have to put down the book. There was no sadness or joy or any other emotion; I just found water coming out of my eyes. At the time, this made me wonder if I wasn’t getting in touch with a higher realm. It didn’t occur to me that, having spent my adolescence among the saints, I might still be nostalgic for their world; or that I was simply allergic to the paper in the book.

  How could I fall into this faerie world? At fourteen, I had shaken my head and adamantly refused to let the monsignor think for me. At seventeen, I had earned a perfect score on my final in logic. But now I was reading book after book on spiritualism and extrasensory perception. At one point, I could cast a horoscope using a sidereal ephemeris, which is a kind of bus schedule of the planets. I was studiously exploring what I later came to think of as highly improbable stuff, but it headed me unexpectedly toward an interest in science. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was actually working my way through the same stages of pseudoscience that humanity itself had gone through on its way to real science.

  I started by exploring some of the strange things I was reading about. I hooked up an oscilloscope to a ficus plant and tried to communicate with it. In those days there were people who were sure they could talk to plants, but I never got the time of day out of mine. I tried automatic writing, where you let your hand write whatever it’s inclined to put down. Some people thought if you did this you were communicating with the spirit world. Who knows, I thought, maybe the spirits could predict the first race at Aqueduct. If they could, they were keeping it to themselves.

  Finally, I read a series of books about a character called Seth who was supposed to have lived two hundred years ago and could now channel himself through the body of a woman in a trance. Seth claimed to have done a lot of studying since his death and he had opinions about pretty much everything, including science. He said all matter was composed of only three basic building blocks. “Just ask any physicist,” he said. We had a physicist living across the street and I asked him about it, but none of this sounded familiar to him. Since he worked with a particle accelerator every day, I thought he ought to know, and I had doubts about Seth’s knowledge of science. I began reading every issue of Scientific American. If any of what Seth said was true, it would show up there. I was making a naïve but honest attempt to test the reality of what was in these books. In a way, it was the same way I had tested my mother’s reality as a child. What I found was a whole new way of thinking. Here, in these pages, no one believed what anyone said unless it could be tested by others. An exciting world had opened up to me.

  But it still hadn’t answered the question that led me into this. I still longed for spontaneity. And I was trying some crazy maneuvers to achieve it.

  I had a small part in Ossie Davis’s play, Purlie Victorious, and I would stand in the wings, every night, watching Ossie deliver a ten-minute speech full of passion and anger that seemed to overtake him completely every time he did it.

  I wanted to live in the moment the way he did; to have emotions well up in me and take me by surprise. I wanted to live in the now, but with all of my past ready to wash over me.

  I had no idea how to do this. In order to be totally spontaneous during my opening scene in the play, I thought it would be a good idea to surprise myself with it. So instead of standing in the wings waiting to go on, I would stay in my dressing room until the very last second. When I heard over the loudspeaker that the previous scene was about to end, I’d race down the stairs to the stage and jump on the turntable that held our set just before it revolved and the lights came up on the scene, my heart beating, every molecule of me alive to the danger of being late. This would panic my scene partner, Beah Richards, who was too brilliant an actress to deserve this kind of amateur behavior. One night I made it onstage after the turntable had begun to revolve, just before the lights came up. I heard the sharpness in her whisper: “Where were you?” and I started hunting for some other way to be spontaneous.

  I heard about an improvisational company called Compass at the Yachtsman that was going to play for the summer in Hyannisport. I had a scary audition in which I was given a name, a job, and an activity and was pushed out onstage to make a scene out of nothing. On sheer guts, I got through it and was hired.

  After four weeks of rehearsal, the prospect of opening night was so frightening that one of the actors in the company tried to get out of the show by pretending to slip on a cement floor and pass out. His eyes fluttered up into his head, and we took him to the hospital with what we thought was a concussion but was actually a severe case of stage fright. The director told him we’d do the show without him, and he miraculously recovered.

  John Kennedy was president that summer, and we did our show every evening in a cabaret in the basement of the hotel where he held his morning press conferences. Half of the show was made up of sketches based on improvisations we had done in rehearsal. The other half was a series of pure spot improvisations. No preparation; we just got out there and hoped for the best. One impromptu piece was a press conference in which one of the actors played Khrushchev and I played Kennedy. I read five newspapers every day to keep up with what the audience might ask me, but the reporters who covered Kennedy in the morning would come down to the cabaret that night and ask me the same questions they had asked him. None of this had been in the paper yet, and I often didn’t know what they were talking about. If you weren’t lucky, it could produce a state of perpetual existential nausea. I was mostly lucky. I was excited by improvising, and I was getting more spontaneous onstage. Onstage, but not off.

  One Saturday night, we had a packed house and somebody high up in the government was trying to get a table. Arlene didn’t like to hang around the theater, but she had come to see the show that night. After the performance, I heard that the producer of the show had panicked because the official from Washington would be turned away from a full house and had brusquely told Arlene to leave to make room for him. The producer was a decent person and I liked him, but I was furious at how Arlene had been treated. Outside the theater, I went over to him and grabbed him by the lapels. I actually saw the color blue. I saw the two of us as if I were standing off to the side, and we were both colored blue. Even the air was blue. I looked in his eyes and spoke in an unmistakably threatening voice. “If you evah, evah behave like that with my wife again, I sweah to God . . .” I heard myself saying these words and noticed there was something peculiar about the sound of them. I wasn’t speaking in my own voice. I was speaking as if I were John Kennedy. I was so afraid of my rage, I had to become someone else to express it.

  When I got back to New York, I was introduced to a kind of improvising that took most of the fear out of not knowing what you were doing. David Shepherd, who directed our company in Hyannisport, recommended me to Paul Sills. David and Paul had started the Compass Players in Chicago, and Compass evolved into Second City. I began working with Paul for months on a brand of improvising invented by his mother, Viola Spolin. It was an approach to improvising that changed theater in America and changed my life along with it.

  Viola’s theater games didn’t rely on guts so much as playing by a set of rules. Concentrating on the rules kept you from concentrating on yourself, and as a result, things came out of yo
u that were unexpectedly poignant and funny.

  We were working on a scene one day when Paul Sills said, “Reach into the dark and get the answer.” That stuck with me. If you had the courage not to know the answer beforehand, it would come to you. If you could trust yourself, not knowing was an exciting place to be.

  But to trust yourself, you had to know yourself. It was hard for me to trust a stranger, and I was still a stranger to myself.

  For me, reaching into the dark was a mysterious, magical process—as magical as talking to the dead, and it would still be a while before talking to living people was as easy as talking to dead ones had been.

  chapter 12

  YES TO EVERYTHING

  To be young, out of work, and an actor is to say yes to everything. Can you ride a horse? Certainly. Can you play the trumpet? Oh, yes. How tall are you? How tall do you need?

  You take any acting job you can get—not just to be able to live, but also to learn how to act.

  As our family grew, saying yes to everything wasn’t easy, especially when Arlene was due to have our third baby. Our daughters seemed to be arriving like clockwork every year or so, and paying the doctor this time was beyond the capacity of the envelopes we kept our money in. I was offered a small part in a Broadway musical called Anatol that was trying out in Boston. It seemed to me from reading the script that the play would probably close out of town, but even if it did, those two weeks of work would pay the hospital bills. The hard part was that Arlene’s due date fell within those two weeks. I hated owing money, and I thought I should go to Boston on the chance that she might deliver later than expected. Arlene didn’t like owing money, either, but she also didn’t like having a baby by herself. We agonized over it, and finally, she stayed behind while I went on the road. I tried to make the most of it. For an extra fifteen dollars a week I understudied Anatol, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont. He saw I was young and struggling and told me that actors who understudied him all became stars. Gregory Peck, he said, had understudied him. That sounded good, but I had taken on the extra responsibility of understudying knowing that I had no time to learn his songs or rehearse the dialogue. I was taking a chance that I would never have to go on for him, but I had nightmares in which I did have to go on. I would stand in the middle of the stage with the cast staring at me while I made up an entire musical comedy. Ultimately, I won that bet but lost the bet on the baby. Beatrice was born while I was in Boston, with Arlene’s parents helping out. As I thought it might, the show closed out of town.

  I was taking jobs that would make normal people wonder if they were perhaps not going anywhere. But actors don’t think that way. We were getting by; in fact, we were happy. When money got low, I would stop drinking the single can of beer I had every night at dinner, and that would save us $1.05 a six-pack, enough to get us out of a rent crisis that month. One of us could always find a way to make a few dollars. We would take turns—one working while the other stayed home with our three daughters. In the winter, it would take an hour to diaper and bundle them up to get out of the apartment. We’d take them, two in a carriage, the third pulled by a rope on a tricycle, down the hill on 115th Street to Riverside Park, where we would spend a half hour before one of them needed a nap again, when we’d head back up the hill. Sisyphus lived just down the block.

  I was in our two-room apartment, trying to see if the sun was shining by sticking my head out the window and looking up the air shaft, when the phone rang. Someone was calling from a small town in the Midwest to offer me an acting job. They had begun rehearsals for a production of Guys and Dolls, and their leading man had fallen sick and had to drop out. The theater, in Sullivan, Illinois, had to open the show in two and a half days. They had seen me listed in an actors’ directory called Players Guide and wondered if I happened to know the part of Sky Masterson—since my father had played it on Broadway. I glanced over at the orange-and-black clown suit peeking out of a shopping bag in the corner of the room.

  “Yes,” I said, lying, “I do know the part.”

  “Wonderful,” they said. “Can you fly right out here and do it?”

  “Sure. Glad I can help out.”

  Somehow, standing there in our little apartment on 115th Street, talking to someone willing to hire me as an actor, I believed I did know the part. But I didn’t. Seven years earlier, I had watched it from the wings, but I’d never learned it. And I didn’t know the songs. Even if I did know the songs, I couldn’t sing in tune. What was the matter with me? Was I insane? I was an actor.

  I got on a plane, and as soon as the door closed, I started shaking. I shook all the way to Illinois.

  I landed in Sullivan and headed for the theater, which seemed to be situated in a cornfield. The rehearsal was in progress, and I stepped in as Sky Masterson, stopping to ask for my line whenever I couldn’t remember it, which meant stopping to ask whenever I had a line. After rehearsal, I went out with the other actors, who were mostly from there and knew the town. Apparently, this was a town in which nothing happened. Except for the summer theater, the closest thing to entertainment was driving in circles around the main square. We did that for a while, and then they decided that since I was from New York and used to more action, they would take me out to what they called Seven Hills. Fine. Whatever they wanted to do was all right with me. I just needed to get comfortable with my fellow actors.

  Seven Hills was a stretch of two-lane road that had seven steep hills on it—probably the only hills for hundreds of miles. They seemed to be a natural wonder to the town’s young men and a challenge to their manhood. The idea was to drive ninety miles an hour up and down these hills without crashing. The driver took off with what I would not describe as a complete discussion of what we were going to do. We went up. Down. Up. Down. At the top of each hill, the car left the ground and stayed for a moment suspended in the air. My heart was pounding. I knew I was going to die.

  But this was not as bad as opening night, a day later.

  I was trembling again, shaking the way I had at the Hollywood Canteen when I was nine. I came out onstage as Sky Masterson, and I got through the first scene even though one of my legs had an involuntary twitch that made my knee bang against the leg of my pants. In the second scene, I was supposed to be cocky and confident as I bantered with the ingénue, but my hands were shaking so much that I had to keep them in my pockets. Usually the first line of dialogue relaxed me, but I had a song coming up and I had to sing harmony. I was terrified, because usually, if I was lucky, harmony was what came out when I tried to sing the melody.

  I was too poor to own my own suit, so they had given me a suit that had been hanging in a warehouse for six months. To calm myself, I started playing with a piece of lint in my pocket. It felt like a thick nub of lint, maybe a wad of thread. In an attempt to appear relaxed, I casually took it out of my pocket and glanced down at it. And then I saw it.

  It wasn’t lint. It wasn’t a wad of thread. It was a cockroach.

  The sight of the cockroach and the crackling sensation of its squirming between my fingers had a distinct effect on me. I was onstage in front of hundreds of people, in the middle of a play. I couldn’t jump back and scream like a six-year-old girl, which was my first choice. Instead, I was focused like a laser. I looked at the actress I was playing with, and for the first time I really saw her. The cockroach had given me a reality more compelling than my fear. And the doorway to my imagination swung open. I wasn’t in a little theater in a cornfield in front of an audience that might find out I didn’t know the words or the melody. I was in the Save-A-Soul Mission, and I was talking to Sarah, the mission doll. I opened my mouth, and to my amazement, a song came out. And almost in tune.

  I went back to New York having learned something about concentration, but with not many opportunities to apply it.

  Finally, after hundreds of auditions, I was cast as the comical young love interest in a Broadway play called Fair Game for Lovers. It was a good part, and in rehearsals, some of my improvised l
ines were thought to be funny and were kept in the play; so, on opening night I had the intoxicating pleasure again of hearing an audience laugh at something I had made up. Unfortunately, this became the second time I nearly died onstage. In the play, my fiancée was interested in an older man and in a moment alone onstage, I ranted impatiently about women while I smoked a cigarette. I had never quite gotten the hang of smoking. The smoke made me choke, and I often found it difficult to light a cigarette without burning the end of my nose. This night, I managed to get it lit and waved out the match, which I held at my side while I went on with my monologue. There were two important things I didn’t realize: I was wearing a cheap acetate robe, and the match head was still glowing. Halfway through my comical rant, I heard a whoosh, like wind suddenly rushing through an open car window. I looked down and saw that the entire front of my robe was a sheet of flames. In a moment like this, a normal person might think, How close am I to a seltzer bottle? But not an actor. My first thought was, Oh, God, this is going to get such a gigantic laugh. The audience, of course, familiar with the image of people being trampled to death in a burning theater, was not laughing. There was dead silence while I furiously patted out the flames. I didn’t even get a round of applause for my quick thinking. I did get a nice mention in the New York Times review the next day when Walter Kerr said that I was a young actor willing to do anything to get attention, including set myself on fire.

  Slowly, one job led to another. Each tended to be like the previous one, or worse, but little by little, the parts got bigger; and after nine years, between small parts on television and increasingly larger ones on the stage, we were finally making a modest living from my acting and able to move to a small house in New Jersey. Our children could have a yard to play in, and instead of dragging them to a park, we could bundle them up and open the door to the yard.