by Alan Alda
The next day, when we were in the prison rehearsing, I asked if I could spend the night in a cell so I could see what it was like to sleep in a prison. The warden looked at me in grim silence. Finally he said, “We’ll think about it.” By the end of the day, I got word that there was no way I’d be allowed to sleep in the prison. Gee, I thought, what a shame. I’ll miss the noises at night, the talk exchanged from cell to cell.
I was thinking, in other words, like a lunatic.
The next day, we arrived early in the morning to begin the shoot. In the raw, early light, the prison was a clear statement of no escape and no compromises. Big and gray, it was surrounded by rings of fences dotted with gun turrets. It was planted on low-lying land with a magnificent view from the exercise yard of the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains. But the view was the only thing magnificent about this place. Mostly you felt a heaviness in your chest just looking at it. You do notice the door clank behind you when you walk in. You also notice the overbearing feeling of being inside a lot of concrete.
During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn’t do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.
On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.
We were shooting a scene in the exercise yard, where an inmate was to stab another prisoner. It was staged so that he would walk by the victim, stab him quickly, and walk on, disappearing into a crowd. After we did the first take, one of the inmates came over to Tom Gries, the director.
“Listen,” he said, “anybody stabs a guy like that, he’s a dead man. This looks stupid.”
We stopped shooting, and Tom conferred with the inmate, who was suddenly our technical adviser.
“You want to kill somebody, you don’t stab him once,” he said. “You stab him repeatedly, until you’re sure he’s dead. You just stab him once and he lives, forget it, you’re dead.”
“Won’t somebody see you do it?” Tom asked.
The inmate smiled and demonstrated how to do it. He pumped his hand quickly over and over into the man’s stomach. It took just a second or two.
Tom decided to restage the scene. After watching the new staging, the inmate went over to him again. “That’s a crappy-looking weapon you got there,” he said. He took a homemade knife out of his pocket and handed it to the director. “Use this,” he said.
“Where’d you get that?”
“I made it in the shop.” It was a spoon that had been sharpened to a point.
We were all surprised that he was walking around with this thing in his pocket. The inmate chuckled. “Everybody’s got a weapon in his cell. Maybe two or three.”
These were the people who would have been my roommates had I slept over the night before.
One man who had been there for a couple of decades came over and taught me about prison etiquette. If you accidentally bump into someone in the hall, you look him in the eye and apologize immediately and sincerely. Otherwise the next time you’re walking in the hall, you may get the edge of a dining hall tray smashed into your teeth.
After a day of this, I was exhausted. I started trying to look busy when they came up to me, but if they wanted to talk, they did. You couldn’t stop them. A very tall, very muscular man in his thirties called Nick came over. Nick had a small, shaved head and an enormous neck. He started giving me instructions on how to commit an armed robbery. He didn’t bother with the usual claims of innocence; he got right down to business. “First of all,” he said, “you gotta take a gun with you, and you gotta be willing to use it. Because, I mean, they’re gonna use theirs.”
I didn’t challenge the logic of this because I was fixated on the size of his neck. It seemed to have a larger circumference than his head. How did he get a neck like that? I wondered.
Suddenly, I was aware he was saying something to me that I should be paying attention to.
“. . . going to have to kill you.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
“I said if I’m ever holding up, like, a drugstore and you’re there at the counter, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because you’ll tell on me. I’ve already been sent up twice. If I come back, they’ll keep me here. I’m not coming back. So, I’m going to kill you.”
I noticed the slight shift in his grammar from “I’m going to have to kill you” to “I’m going to kill you.”
I realized the chances were slim that I’d ever be in the same store while he was holding it up; on the other hand, it seemed like something I ought to take care of while we were still in the discussion stage. “Why don’t we just work this out?” I said. “We could figure this out right now. I won’t tell them—how’s that? Then you won’t have to, you know, kill me.”
“No, no,” he said. “They can make you talk. I’m going to kill you.”
He smiled. He seemed to enjoy telling someone he was going to kill him. It cheered him up immensely.
He faded back into the crowd, but he managed to reappear every couple of days, always just before I shot a scene, to remind me that he was going to kill me if I ever shopped in the wrong drugstore. You knew he was doing it purely for the sadistic pleasure it gave him, but it was the kind of thing that made you wonder how much you really needed aspirin in your life.
Even when Nick left me alone, I was finding out about prison life in ways I hadn’t expected. We were going to shoot in an inmate’s cell one day, and when we entered it I saw a woman sitting on his bed. I was confused. There were no women in this prison. She looked up at me languidly and a little defensively, as if to say, “What are you looking at?” And then I realized she was a man. She was dressed like a woman, with a woman’s body language, and from the possessive look on the face of the guy next to her on the bed, she was clearly his woman, his punk. I knew there was sex in prison, but I hadn’t realized how much. The inmates told us there was plenty for everyone, whether through mutual understanding, financial arrangements, intimidation, or rape.
The administration of the prison, I learned from the inmates, was really two-tiered. The warden and the guards were the top tier, the official tier. They could inflict a range of punishments, including the greatest threat: max. Maximum security is where you’re placed alone in the innermost box of the prison’s Chinese boxes in a totally dark cell for anywhere from days to weeks. This was where people sometimes went crazy, and because of this, when an inmate returned from max he was often given some leeway by the other prisoners.
The inmates—the next tier in the administration of the prison—had their own set of rules, their own enforcers, and their own leaders. Their punishments ranged anywhere from beatings to sudden death. There were competing hierarchies among the inmates. Blacks and whites, for instance, were separate groups. And there were subdivisions among these groups. Some kind of invisible quantum mechanics usually held these different kinds of energy apart and kept them from annihilating one another, but not always.
And then there were the nutcases. A short guy, called Tiny, with a manic personality came up to me while I was on my way to play a scene. They always got me while I was trying to remember my lines. I didn’t want to stop and talk; I kept moving, but he was beside me, sometimes in front of me, walking backward to face me, talking so fast that the pitch of his voice got higher as he spoke.
“You know that stunt they have in this movie where the guy jumps off the fifth floor?” Tiny asked.
“Yeah, I do.” There was a scene in which a young inmate has been brutally gang-raped and he commits suicide by jumping from the fifth tier of cells.
Tiny said, “I’m going to do that stunt.”
“Well,” I said, “I think they have a stunt man for that.”
Tiny put a hand on my chest and stopped me. “If a stunt man does
that stunt, he’s going out of here feet first. I’m doing the stunt.”
“Tiny, it’s the fifth floor. You could get killed. You have to know how to do it.”
“Hey, that’s easy for me,” Tiny said. “I was a second-story man. When the cops came, I used to jump out the window. This one time, I landed on my head on cement. Two floors, and I landed on my head—and that didn’t bother me at all.”
I wished him luck—sure that Tom, our director, would not be dumb enough to let him do the stunt. And then a week later, I found myself up on the fifth tier with Tiny, who’d been allowed to do the fall. He put one leg over the railing, and sweat started to bead on his head. He clung to a metal railing and stayed that way for a moment: one foot on the floor, the other suspended over a space five stories high. Piled on the deck below him were cardboard boxes that were intended to break his fall. From where we were standing, they didn’t look as though they’d be much help. And they looked easy to miss.
“Tiny, you don’t have to do it,” I whispered to him. “Tell them you changed your mind.”
“No, I’m doing it,” he said. But he didn’t move. Now he was drenched with sweat.
Then the catcalls started. Hundreds of other inmates were standing around the boxes waiting for the jump. His hands were welded solid to the railing. He couldn’t let himself go. They called him pussy and punk. They whistled and made falsetto girlie sounds. Still, he was paralyzed with fear. Finally, Tom couldn’t wait any longer. “Jump or get down,” the crew told him. After another agonizing minute, he swung his leg over the railing and got back on safe ground, next to me. The stunt man took his place and jumped.
As he walked down the stairs, Tiny was jeered. His humiliation was complete. His status was downgraded to pussy, and he stood little chance of standing up to anyone who wanted access to anything he had, from his cigarettes to his body. I wondered why Tom had allowed Tiny to put himself in this position.
Tom, it turned out, had an odd sense of humor. A few days later, we were in the exercise yard, waiting for the sun to come out. A group of inmates was standing nearby, waiting for something interesting to happen. To pass the time, Tom said to them, “You know, if you want to get out of here, you ought to make Alda a hostage.” The blood drained from my face. He saw this and turned back to the inmates, who were listening with what I would call genuine interest. “Really,” he said. “Nobody will stop you if you have an actor with you.”
I said nothing, knowing he couldn’t be stupid enough to say it again. And a couple of days later, he said it again. “Seriously, guys, you ought to think about taking Alda hostage.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. By now, he thought he had a hilarious running gag with the inmates. I wondered how he could think that getting out of prison was a subject for comedy with these men. But whenever we had a group of them together, he said, “Don’t forget—he’s your return ticket.”
I took him aside. “Tom, don’t joke like this. These people are in here for a reason. They’re dangerous people. And they have knives.” He just smiled at me and went to set up the next shot.
Finally, we were shooting the last scene. Three weeks in Utah State Prison were coming to an end. In a few hours, I’d be on a plane home.
Tiny, the second-story man, was in the final shot with me, and so was Nick, the armed robber with the size ninety-two neck who had such a good time telling me he was going to kill me in a drugstore someday. We were about ten feet from the door that led to the outside world. We got the final shot, and the assistant director called a wrap. Nick and Tiny came over to me.
“Is that it? The movie’s over?” Nick asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re done.”
“That’s it?” Tiny asked. “No more shooting?”
“No, we’re done,” I said.
Each put a hand on one of my arms. These were strong guys, even Tiny. They held me in a viselike grip while Nick took out a box cutter with a razor in it and held it to my throat.
“We’re taking you hostage,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. They walked me across the corridor, and we stood with my back to the wall.
“You think we’re kidding, don’t you,” Tiny said.
“We’re not kidding,” Nick said. “We’re getting out and you’re coming with us.”
Time did that thing where it slows to a crawl. Every moment seemed to take fifteen minutes. I had long, internal dialogues with myself during each tick of the clock.
“Teach us to care and not to care,” T. S. Eliot said. As usual, I had remembered it a little differently. “Teach us to care without caring” was what stuck in my head, and it sounded like the perfect Zen solution to the need for both action and repose, trying hard while not trying at all. But I had never known how to achieve it.
As I stood against the wall with a razor to my throat, caring without caring came over me like a cool breeze. Calmly, I stood and waited.
“You think we’re kidding, don’t you,” they said again. “We’re not. We’re getting out of here.”
This may be a joke, I thought. On the other hand, we’re only a few feet from the exit. What if they find that the joke is working and decide to go ahead with it? What if they have someone waiting outside with a car? You get to consider a lot of possibilities when time slows down.
One of the guards walked over to us. He spoke to Nick and Tiny in a reasoning tone.
“Come on, boys,” he said. “You don’t want to go to max for this, do you? This isn’t worth it.”
The guard was only eighteen inches from me, and I could see that he was trembling. His voice was shaking. If this was a joke, the guard didn’t know about it.
I looked down and saw that the guard was wearing a gun. If they decided to go ahead with this, all they had to do was grab the gun, and then somebody would get hurt.
“Why don’t you let him go, boys?”
“No, we’re getting out of here. We’re taking him with us.”
I watched and listened for what seemed like hours but was probably only seconds.
Finally, Nick lowered the box cutter and showed me he’d retracted the blade. “It’s a joke,” he said. Clearly relieved, the guard took the box cutter from him, and Nick and Tiny moved off. As far as I know, they didn’t get in trouble for this incident—not for having a weapon and not for holding it to someone’s throat. At least not while the movie crew was there. Maybe everyone was glad there was no real crisis, and they were willing to let it pass. I walked over to Tom Gries. Speechless, I looked at him, waiting for an explanation. He just smiled. “I don’t think the guard was in on it,” he said.
A few minutes later, I walked through the door to the outside world, unaccompanied by Nick and Tiny. I left and they stayed.
While we were shooting in prison, I had read a script for another job, a television pilot. It was extraordinarily well written, but it sat on the night table in my hotel room for days. I didn’t know what to do. If the pilot sold, I would be committing myself for years. I called Arlene and told her I had been offered a terrific script, but of course I couldn’t do it because it had to be shot in California. Our family was settled in New Jersey, and we didn’t want to uproot our children, who were entering their teens or just about to. It didn’t seem possible to do the series. “This thing could run for a year or two,” I told her.
The next day, she called me back and said, “Look, if you really think it’s that good, why don’t you do it? We can probably work something out. We could travel back and forth or something.”
I knew she was right, but still I hesitated. The story dealt with some harsh realities of human behavior. What if the producers wanted to sanitize it and just go for laughs? I held off on my decision until I could get out of prison and talk to them face-to-face in Los Angeles. I wouldn’t be able to get to Los Angeles until the night before the first rehearsal was to begin.
I got on a plane and headed for Beverly Hills, where I had to decide in the next few hours if I would d
o a television series about a bunch of doctors and nurses in Korea.
chapter 14
ME AND HECUBA
We sat in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hilton until two in the morning. Gene Reynolds, who was producing the show, and Larry Gelbart, who was writing it, were genial and patient, but they must have been at least a little anxious. Rehearsals were to start the next day, and they still didn’t know who was going to be playing Hawkeye. I told them I was afraid the show might become nothing more than high jinks at the front, that under the pressure to entertain, it might make war look like a fun place to be. They said they didn’t want that, either. They seemed sincere, but I had learned from an expert not to trust a stranger, even if he was your son. And for better or worse, I was reluctant to defer to their experience or the positions they held. I could have said, Okay, they’re in charge; let them do it their way—but the boy in the church pew who shook his head no wouldn’t let me. Finally, I could see they were as committed as I was to what I hoped for the show. We talked for a few more minutes, having the sincere but requisite conversation about how excited we were to be working together, and we went home, only to get up after a few hours’ sleep and begin rehearsals for M*A*S*H.
Ten days later, I was standing in an aluminum shed in the mountains of Malibu, staring at the sandy floor, not sure what to do. I was waiting for my cue for the first shot of the show, and I was surprised to see how nervous I was. I didn’t feel I knew the character; I felt naked and awkward. Imagination escaped me. I didn’t know who I was. It was a simple shot, without dialogue. All I had to do was open the door and walk across the compound, but something important was missing. I felt a tingle of excitement that could pass for utter fear. Even after the days of rehearsal, as I waited for my cue, I was still wondering: How am I supposed to be this guy who seems totally unlike me? He drinks, he chases women, he’s a smart aleck. And what’s he thinking, what does he want? God, I thought, I’m thirty-five. I’ve been acting for almost twenty years. How can I have reached this point in my life and still be uncertain about this? Thoughts like this didn’t help. I only became more inert.
