by Alan Alda
The town was a mile square, the streets lined with trees that gave welcome shade in the summer. Summer was the month to enjoy the trees. In the spring, their roots pushed up the sidewalks in front of your house, and every fall they dropped three tons of leaves in your backyard. In the winter, their branches would ice up and fall on your car.
We loved it. Now we said yes to suburbia. School board meetings, town hall meetings, peace rallies, marches for fair housing; and, everywhere, I was rallying the troops. There was always a platform to get up on and make a speech that would have thrilled the nuns in Burbank.
“Mr. Mayor, you can’t develop Highwood Hills. It’s wilderness.”
“No one uses Highwood Hills. No one’s ever there.”
“Mr. Mayor, if you’re breathing, you’re using it right now!”
Ah, the rhetoric, the withering reductio ad absurdum.
We came home from meetings, twenty or thirty of us, flushed with victory; we opened a gallon of cheap wine and put on a seventy-eight of Middle Eastern music. We joined hands and danced through the house, in an endless chain that snaked through the living room into the dining room, the breakfast room, the kitchen, and back to the living room.
When a foot of snow fell in winter, we walked arm in arm from house to house with a bottle of brandy in my pocket, our songs cutting the icy air. When it snowed on Easter, I ran with my friend Mike across the snow on bare feet and jumped into his backyard pool. The men were crazy and funny and they could cook, and the women could laugh and swear and raise the banner of human rights for all. Our friends loved one another, then they loved one another’s neighbors, then they divorced one another. An epidemic of divorce hit the town. Just as a rash of participatory democracy had hit it a year earlier, now a plague of participatory sex was going around. Arlene and I were disturbed and saddened by the divorces, and by having to learn the trick of balancing friendships with a couple who used to be married but now felt betrayed if you stayed friends with their former partner.
On our little patch of land, I planted forsythia bushes beside the picket fence, and on New Year’s Eve we stayed home and painted the living room, a bottle of champagne on the floor and Guy Lombardo on the screen. I filled my car with free scrap wood, bark left over from the milling machine in a lumberyard. I paneled the basement with it, and when you went down to the basement, you could smell the rotting wood and watch the little bugs crawling out of the walls. This was entertaining for a while, but Arlene finally asked me to take my interior decoration and decorate the dump with it.
One night I fell asleep with a book on how to do your own plumbing resting on my chest. Arlene was terrified that I might actually try to install a toilet by myself, especially because I had that manic look when I talked about how much fun it would be to learn pipe fitting. Gently, and with much talk about how clever I was, she slowly brought me to my senses.
I kept acting and trying to sell my writing, but my real life was happening in this small New Jersey town with crooked sidewalks and pompous mayors.
Our children learned about life from watching us and we learned about it from watching them. When Bea was born I’d wondered how we would manage with three children because you could only hold two on your lap at one time. But when Bea was old enough to hook a leg over yours, she was there in your lap with her two sisters. She could always find a spot for herself.
We had the children in our twenties and we were all growing up together. Once, I announced at the dinner table that I needed a new pair of pants, and that I thought I’d go out and buy them in a day or so. Our small daughters looked up at me with big eyes. Why is he telling us this? I was making enough money for us to live comfortably in our own small house, but in my mind I was still too poor to buy a pair of pants without talking it over with the family. Their look of innocent amazement let me know I was at a new stage in my life.
I had not wanted my children to be actors. I knew how hard the life was, especially so for women. I wanted to steer them away from the theater. But as they got older, just as my father had, I began bringing them into my world.
I decided to teach myself how to direct movies, and knowing I needed a deadline to get me started, I put up posters around town announcing that in one month, in the meeting hall of the church down the street, I would be presenting an evening of short films. Then I started shooting the films. One was a simple story about a nine-year-old girl who is bored and takes the keys to the family car and goes for a drive around the neighborhood. I wanted to create the illusion of danger purely with moviemaking techniques. And just as my father had brought me out onstage when I was nine, I invited our nine-year-old daughter, Eve, to act in the movie.
I wanted a shot of her appearing to drive, so I lay down on the hood of the car and shot through the windshield. She was behind the wheel and my friend Mike was beside her, out of camera range, helping steer the car. We weren’t going very fast, but I had just had the car waxed so it would look good in the movie. I called out, “Slam on the brakes, Eve!” She did, and I slid like butter on a griddle down the length of the waxed hood. It was fortunate that she kept her foot on the brake, because I was lying in a heap next to the front tire.
When she was nine, our youngest daughter, Beatrice, wrote a play about Cinderella and I directed her third-grade class in it. I wanted to see what would happen if I rehearsed them using improvisation instead of asking them to learn words on a piece of paper. I never showed them the script, but with each improvisation, I brought them closer to using the words Bea had written. They never had a picture in their minds of words on a page. All they had was one another and impulses that came from inside them. When they got in front of an audience, their energy was enormous and you could hear every word at the back of the house. It made me realize how even professional actors are bound by conventional ways of working. The French call rehearsals répétitions, and too often that’s le mot juste. It’s better when rehearsals are a series of spontaneous little discoveries. It was becoming clear to me that life is better that way, too, instead of endless répétitions.
Saying yes to everything was a kind of caring without caring. I had nothing to lose, so I was free to try anything. Sometimes, until I got the hang of it, it made me more casual than I ought to have been. I got a call from Philip Rose, who had produced Purlie Victorious. He had a new play and wanted to have a reading for backers. Would I do the reading with Diana Sands? I said sure and gave it no more thought until the night we read it for thirty people. It was a two-character play, something any normal actor would study and analyze. I was twenty-seven, old enough to know better, yet I didn’t understand that this was an audition for me as well as for the play. Diana and I had improvised together in Hyannisport, and it seemed to me we would find the play together, one way or another.
Somehow I got through the reading, at times not realizing what the scene was about until three pages after I was into it, then scrambling to make up for lost time. Phil, maybe sensing that my talent would outweigh my recklessness, hired me.
The play was The Owl and the Pussycat. It would show an interracial couple kissing for the first time in a romantic comedy on Broadway. Neither Diana nor I realized we were breaking ground. All we thought about as we began rehearsals was finding the heart of the play and making it work.
Elaine May, who of course is in the pantheon of improvisers, has told me she thinks improvising is a fascinating thing to do, but it doesn’t teach you how to act. That may be true. I went into rehearsals for The Owl and the Pussycat with no idea how to break down the scenes or even how to figure out what the character was like. By chance, though, the director, Arthur Storch, had a way of working that was a perfect match for the only training I’d had in the theater aside from watching in the wings: improvisation. We had four weeks to rehearse, and for the first three of those weeks we never got on our feet. We sat at the table and read the play over and over. Then we put aside the scripts, got up from the table, and started acting out the play. If we coul
dn’t remember what happened next, we just improvised. Where we moved on the stage was improvised, too, and almost all the staging on opening night was identical to where we had moved in those first impromptu rehearsals. Even a few stretches of dialogue that worked, but had not been written by the author, stayed in the play. Shortly before we opened, I finally figured out how to play the character, and between Diana’s skill and my raw talent, we managed to run for a year.
I was entering a new phase of my professional life. I was starting to feel as though I were getting someplace. I noticed that more and more of what I improvised in rehearsal was winding up in the play, and that made me think I was a writer. As an actor, I was taking on responsibilities I had never had to face before. I had begun as an eccentric comedian. I had felt uncomfortable competing with my father, who was one of the most attractive leading men of his generation. So I had carved out an area for myself I could excel in without competing and surely losing to him. But as I got older, the parts that started coming to me were leading men, where I had to take on the responsibility of providing the drive of the play instead of standing on the sidelines, commenting wryly on the poor earnest guy who carried the story. It also meant I’d have to take the blame if the play failed. There was a lot of maturing that had to go on, and I didn’t leap at it. I had to grow into it slowly. But things were changing.
I was saying yes to a little less than everything now. I had to make choices. At one point, I had to choose between playing the lead in a Neil Simon play and doing the second lead in a new musical directed by Mike Nichols. It wasn’t easy to decide. The musical was The Apple Tree, constructed of three separate stories, the first of which was based on Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve. There was a speech at the end of the first act where Adam speaks at Eve’s grave, and I was so moved by this speech that I wanted to be able to play that moment every night, even if it meant not being the main cheese. And that’s the show I chose. It was beautiful material, but I didn’t realize what a hard lesson this show would be for me.
The speech at Eve’s grave was only two minutes of the first act. In the second act, I wore feathers and a breastplate in a parody of a barbarian warrior. The story was “The Lady or the Tiger,” and I nearly went nuts trying to stride around the stage like a testosterone-drunk hero. I still hadn’t made the transition to leading man, and suddenly I was supposed to be one of the Greek god statues I had studied as a boy beside my erotically inspirational tutor. I tried. I nearly cracked my knuckles striking my fist against the breastplate in a manly salute to the barbarian princess.
Barbara Harris played the princess, and in rehearsal I watched her carefully, especially in the third act. There was something uncanny about her ability to transform herself. On a bare wooden floor, without the help of a costume or makeup, she was singing and dancing as a chimney sweep, and I thought, She’s perfect for this part; she has these stubby fingers and pug nose and looks a little hefty. Just right for someone dreaming about being a movie star, with no chance to be one. And then, moments later, with the help of the Devil, the chimney sweep is transformed into a beautiful, glamorous movie star. I was stunned by her transformation. With no help from makeup or costumes, her ankles had become thin, her fingers had become long and delicate, even her nose turned into a cute little movie-star nose. I wanted to be able to transform like that. I didn’t know how she did it, and I don’t know if she knew how she did it.
I hit the streets again. After many nights of walking up and down the hilly sidewalks of our little New Jersey town until one in the morning, talking myself into the idea that I was heroic, I was able to believe it enough to wear my feathers with pride. Then we went to Boston to try out the show, and for the third time I nearly died in front of an audience. I had just finished a song in act two and was heading upstage to choose one of two doors. Behind one was the Lady and behind the other was the Tiger, and certain death. Just as I turned, a huge lighting apparatus fell from the flies and, grazing the feathers of my cape, pounded against the floorboards, pinning the cape to the stage. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, and the noise was like that of a car crash. The audience gasped and so did Mike Nichols. I, of course, tugged at the feathered cape as though I were Marcel Marceau, and managed to get a laugh out of it. Mike jumped from his seat and ran backstage, where he found Jean Rosenthal, the lighting designer. Appalled and angry, he raised his voice to her. “How could that happen? We could have killed him!” Jean, looking very short next to Mike, but unintimidated by him, said calmly, “Mike, the theater is a dangerous place.”
As exhilarating as it was to nearly have my head split open, the part of the play that got to me was in the third act where I played a parody of a rock-and-roll singer. I had a big entrance: Standing on a platform ten feet high, I was rolled onstage wearing tights, a leather jacket, and a giant wig with hair that stood out about a foot from my head.
A large silk cloth was draped over me, and once I was onstage a couple of dancers would whip off the cloth and I would be revealed to the audience with a dumb look on my face. This would get a laugh. Then I’d climb down from my perch and sing a parody of a folk-rock song. Sheldon Harnick kept honing the lyric, and by the sixth performance he had written six versions of it. When I was given the seventh version, Mike Nichols said, “Look, you don’t have to put the song in tonight. Get used to it first.” But no, I was an improviser; I could handle changes like this. I decided to go on with all seven versions dancing around in my head. Just before the show, I tried to run through the song and realized I couldn’t tell if I was in version three, five, or seven. So I took a pen and wrote the lyric on the back of my hand.
The dancers wheeled me onstage and pulled off my shroud, and I started to sing. The fear of forgetting prodded my sweat glands. After the first few lines, I went completely blank. Not a single version of the song presented itself. At a moment like this, of course, the orchestra goes on playing. Something has to come out of your mouth. I looked down at my hand, only to see it glistening with sweat. The words of the song were running down my arm and dripping onto the floor. In a blind panic, I made up my own lyric and got through the song with words that had little to do with one another other than that they rhymed. I spent the next day learning the words.
That night I remembered the song, but I fell apart anyway. As I waited to go on and do that number, I felt a blackness come over me. The strain of being out of town with a musical was compounded by the realization that I was thirty and my life still wasn’t where I’d thought it would be at this point. I had thought that by now I’d be playing Oedipus, and instead I was standing on a platform under a shroud, ready to be dragged onstage so I could look stupid in tights and a fright wig. As they rolled me out, under the cloth tears were streaming down my face. I was in despair. I managed to dry my face with a swipe of my hand just before they whipped off the silk. I looked stupidly at the audience, and they laughed. I did the song and finished the show. Then I took another long walk through the streets of Boston, thinking about where I was in my life. That moment under the silk shroud was a turning point for me. I realized that I was never going to have things the way I wanted them, no matter how vivid they seemed in my imagination. In a way, life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come. I went back to the show the next night with more energy than I’d ever had.
But I still was pulled by forces I didn’t feel good about. I left the show for a couple of months to do a movie in Mexico that was terrible, starting with the title—The Extraordinary Seaman—and got worse with each page. My agents told me I should do it because I would be playing the young lead in a picture with David Niven, Faye Dunaway, and Mickey Rooney. But the casting didn’t improve the words on the paper. And filming it was a disaster from the first moment. We shot it outside a town called Coatzocoalcos, on a river that wound through a thick jungle. Members of the crew were carried out on stretchers with typhoid. The river was so ful
l of unfamiliar microbes that a nick on my shin turned into a major infection. John Frankenheimer, the director, set me and three other actors adrift in a rowboat in the Gulf of Mexico while he and the camera crew flew off in a helicopter to get a shot of us bouncing helplessly in the water. While they were gone, the waves grew to ten-feet-high surges. We knew there were sharks in these waters because every morning we’d see them prowling around the support boat. When we pointed to them, Frankenheimer said, “No, no, they’re dolphins.” Right. Dolphins.
As the little wooden boat careened with the waves, one of the actors, a Polynesian prince named Manu Tupou, told us confidently how to take care of a shark. “Just punch him in the nose and he’ll go away,” he said. “We do it all the time at home.”
This was fine for a Polynesian prince to talk like that, but the rest of us had reservations, which we expressed in various ways. I started screaming, “Are you crazy? Are you crazy?” And every time the boat rose on a ten-foot wave, Mickey Rooney would say, “I’m out of here. Taxi!” The first few times you could tell he was kidding, but after a while it became clear that he was actually trying to hail a taxi in the Gulf of Mexico. The other actor in the boat, Jack Carter, just kept looking up at heaven with his arms out, saying, “Why me, God? Why me?” It sounded like a joke, because Carter couldn’t say anything that wasn’t funny, but it was actually a prayer before dying.
We finished the picture, and it was released directly into obscurity. I heard that it played on an airplane over Pittsburgh, and I imagined people strapping on parachutes and jumping to get away from it.
This was what happened anytime I did a movie I had no respect for. It was as though it had never happened. I was never able to make a cynical choice I could profit from.
I flew back from Mexico and finished the run of The Apple Tree. Closing nights always have a sense of finality. But not like this. I packed up my things in my dressing room, stuffing them into a brown paper bag, and said good-bye to the doorman. Arlene had seen our closing show, and we were the last ones to leave. We walked past stagehands striking the set and workers taking down signs outside the theater. We passed the front of the building, and Arlene suddenly pulled me out of the way as a bunch of letters with electric bulbs screwed into them came crashing down on the end of a rope. The letters hung in the air beside me, swaying on the rope, and in the gloom of the darkened Shubert Alley I could just make out what they spelled. A . . . L . . . A . . . I had nearly been hit on the head by my own name in lights.
