I became the hypnotizer and she was the hypnotee. We developed a visual cue and a verbal cue. The visual one was that I’d hold my hand in front of her and collapse my fingers into my palm to make a fist. By the time my fingers were in a fist, she’d be out. The verbal cue was that I’d count from the date of my birthday (the seventh) to hers (the twelfth). Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. By the time I said twelve, bye-bye.
Mickey was so susceptible that I had to be careful not to include our cues in casual conversation, and when I put her under, I made sure she was protected and out of harm’s way.
Freddie taught me how to install positive suggestions in Mickey’s psyche. If she was nervous about an audition, I would hypnotize her beforehand and plant affirmations. If she was worried about a family member’s health, I would assuage her fears.
We also planted harmless and fun suggestions. Every time you hear Freddie’s name, you must touch him. Sure enough, when she came out of hypnosis, each time she’d hear his name, she’d find some rationale to grasp Freddie’s hand or wipe lint off his shoulder, having no idea why. Or, for example, we’d plant: When you hear the word sandy, you clap. And sure enough, when someone said, “The floor is sandy,” Mickey would find some justification to clap her hands.
Clap. “Now where did I put the broom?”
Skeptics always said, “No, no, it’s an act.” But believe me, it wasn’t an act. It wasn’t a gag. I’d see Mickey go under, deep, and it was real and it was wild. If I remember correctly, there are seven stages of depth in hypnosis. Freddie and I practiced to see how far we could make Mickey go. Occasionally I would get nervous. She’s at level six! I feared we couldn’t get her back. But that never came to pass.
Hypnosis was a kind of an intimacy, I guess, a trust. And Mickey was a good girlfriend. But we were primarily a couple because Mickey wanted us to be a couple. That is not a knock on her, but a comment on who I was at the time. Even though I’d gained a nascent sense of what I wanted to do professionally, I was still immature.
The Daytona Summer Music Theater’s season ended in August, and Ed and I resolved to head back to Los Angeles. We’d been on the road for two years, and it was time to go home. We had both decided. Law enforcement was not our path. We were both going to be actors. A few weeks before the journey west, I was trying to tell Mickey, I hope I see you sometime—vague, distant future talk. But she interrupted: I want to come with you. She was emphatic. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. She also wanted to try to make it in show business. Who was I to say Los Angeles was off-limits?
Sure, I said. Come along.
Off we went. The three of us, Mickey on the back of my bike. We took six weeks and really saw the country on our return trip. We made it as far north as the beautiful, desolate Badlands of South Dakota and marveled at Mount Rushmore before arcing down in a southwesterly direction. Little goblins and ghosts dotted the streets on the day we arrived in Los Angeles. Halloween.
• • •
Mickey and I settled into a two-bedroom apartment in Van Nuys. My main focus was building my life as an actor. Mickey’s suddenly was marriage, a house, a baby. She had incredibly precise domestic dreams and notions. There was a church choir component. She came from a Southern Baptist clan so tight-knit that when we moved west, Mickey’s dad, who had been the president of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, asked to move his president’s office to Embry-Riddle in Prescott, Arizona, to be closer to us.
After a couple of years together, Mickey wanted to get married. I wasn’t self-aware or courageous enough to say whoa. Instead I said: You want to get married? Okay. Sounds good to me.
I don’t remember what I was thinking as I watched her walk down the aisle. I know Mickey looked happy. I know I was nervous. But that’s about all I can conjure up. I must have been a stranger to myself. I was just a kid, twenty-three years old, dressed in a very 1970s tuxedo, standing at the makeshift altar at her parents’ house in Prescott, Arizona, a little town in Yavapai County, saying “I do” when what I really felt like saying was “I don’t know.”
Though I’d officiated other people’s weddings, I don’t think I grasped the depth and the consequence of the commitment I was making. The vows I spoke weren’t empty. I cared about her. I even loved her. But in the end, I wasn’t ready.
Estranged Son
The motel my mother and Peter bought in Florida didn’t pan out. To no one’s surprise, she and Peter didn’t pan out, either. Shortly after they moved back to California, they split. My mom moved to a mobile home in Desert Hot Springs. Her hobbies included finding early bird specials, flirting with men, and drinking—she’d switched from wine to . . . anything. Once I went to visit her in her trailer, and she took three trips into the bathroom in the span of an hour. Each time she returned a little more inebriated. I went to the bathroom on a hunch and searched around. I finally lifted the lid off the toilet tank and peered inside. I saw a tall, thin plastic container filled halfway with a clear liquid. I picked it up and unscrewed the top and smelled it. Vodka. That’s the kind of alcoholic she’d become.
My poor sister, Amy. With good reason, she’d run away from my mom when they were living in Florida. After dropping out of high school at sixteen, she was waiting tables, living in North Hollywood with our family friend Julia, the one who eventually married my brother to stay in the country. Amy got her GED, but it would take her several years to decide she wanted to go back to school and become a nurse.
Ed and I saw our mom sporadically, and we checked in on Amy and Julia in their little two-bedroom apartment as often as we could. But we were laser-like in our focus. We wanted to be actors. Ed changed his name again and enrolled at UCLA as a theater major as Kyle Cranston. I took the impatient route. I wanted to get to work right away.
Though our paths were different, our purpose was the same. And that spurred us to track down our dad. We hadn’t seen him in a decade, but my paternal grandmother, Alice, was still alive, so he wasn’t hard to find. I guess we could have tried earlier, but I think we’d assumed he didn’t have any interest.
But now we had a subject. Men have to have a subject, a reason. If a guy said to me, “Let’s have lunch together,” I’d say, “What’s up?” There has to be a reason. Women like to get together to get together. Men need a reason. Kyle and I had ours. We wanted to get into acting. We wanted his help. I think subconsciously we really wanted to reconnect with him, but we were scared to admit that.
Kyle and I decided that a reconciliation dinner at Grandma’s was the best idea; Grandma could be a buffer. And her presence did put us all at ease. We bantered. We discussed the business. My dad was glad to help, glad to have some neutral topic on which to focus.
Though we never talked about it directly—men of his generation didn’t talk about things—I think he felt a tremendous, heavy guilt about how he’d left. He just kept saying over and over again, “It was a bad time.” My brother and I would try for years after that to reopen the subject, but we’d never get much more than that. For my father, the past was the past. It was painful, and it could teach us nothing. So it wasn’t worth dredging up. Eventually I realized he had gone as far as he was capable.
Still, I saw how he tried with us, his forced casualness, his eagerness to help with our careers (he introduced me to my first talent agent, Doovid Barksin), and I felt the regret we all had about the unrecoverable chasm of lost time, the ten years he’d been gone, recede a bit.
We played racquetball. It was good to have an activity and something to hit. There was just the thwack of the racket and the hard boing of the ball and the focus and intensity and driving rhythms. There was winning and losing. I’m sure we said a lot in those games without ever saying a word.
Paul Bratter
When you first start out in the business, you have to expend a lot of energy. Hustling isn’t complicated. How much energy you put out dictates how much heat you generate. I decided to be a furnace. I felt the hotter
I could get, the higher the odds of something catching fire.
I did psychotherapy. I did improv and stand-up comedy solely for the purpose of conquering my fears. It was the 1980s, the self-help era, and EST (Erhard Seminars) and Scientology were big in Los Angeles. I took what I could from those ways of thinking and discarded the rest. If I became too enthralled with one approach, one way of thinking, I knew it was time to move on.
I enrolled in a bunch of acting classes, and I soaked up everything I could. Some actors fall under the sway of one teacher, but I learned important lessons from so many: Ivan Markota, Warren Robertson, Harry Mastrogeorge, Shirley Knight, Bill Esper, Andy Goldberg, Mindy Sterling, Michael Patrick King, and legendary comedy teacher Harvey Lembeck. I guarded against becoming a great “classroom actor.” Whenever I felt I was one of the best actors in a class, I left to find another one where I wasn’t.
Some aspects of acting—philosophies and ideas and techniques—can be imparted in a formal environment. But the fact is that at its heart there’s an element of mystery to any craft, and the mystery takes you inward. Writing, meditation, yoga, acting—it’s about letting go. You can teach someone how to drive a car or throw a fastball, but it’s hard to teach someone to let go.
The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.
I got the lead role (the Robert Redford role) in a production of Barefoot in the Park at the Granada Theater. I was Paul Bratter. A young woman from Nebraska played my bride, the Jane Fonda role, Corie. My costar was pretty and innocent and had a master’s degree in theater. I was impressed and excited to work with her. But things went south quickly.
We were supposed to be newlyweds, mad about each other. But while rehearsing, she’d stand as far away from me on the stage as she could. I’d go over to her and grab her and kiss her and she’d turn her cheek. I was thinking: Did I offend you? Am I not your type? If you’re not attracted me . . . fake it. You’re acting! Find something.
The director, Bob Barron, said to the girl: “You’re newlyweds. When he walks through the door after having been at work all day, what would you?”
“What would I do?”
“Yes.”
“I would run to him and throw my arms around him.”
“Yes! Do that!”
“Well, you didn’t tell me to do that.”
Most actors know instinctively to prepare. Part of that preparation is reading a script and studying a character and coming to the stage or the set with ideas. My costar didn’t seem to feel that sense of accountability, but still, I wanted to find a way in.
It’s tricky to navigate the romantic aspect of acting, to be open and vulnerable—even if you’re in love with someone else in real life. Or even if you find the actor you’re working with to be unattractive or repulsive. Whatever her reasons for not giving me much on stage, I wanted to try to make a connection. I was flirting, not intending to take it anywhere else, but I needed to see where she was vulnerable, where there was an opening. I needed her to see me, too.
I tried taking her to lunch. I complimented her regularly. My hygiene was set. I brushed my teeth. I spritzed myself with every cologne in the store until I finally found a scent I thought was irresistible. When that didn’t work, I changed colognes. Nothing moved her.
I wondered: Is it me? I thought back on that girl in that college drama course, the one who kissed me wildly and without warning on the park bench, and I thought: I wish I were doing this play with her. She was all in. She didn’t have any inhibitions. We’re in love? Let’s go.
I didn’t know what to do. I called Ivan Markota, with whom I was studying at the time. He was an insightful, no-bullshit, tough guy kind of mentor. He’d know what to do. “I can’t get in,” I told him. “She squashes all her impulses. She’s not open to me, and she’s not telling me why. I’m starting to judge this girl. I’m starting to shut down. She’s pissing me off, and it’s starting to affect the play.”
Ivan said, “Maybe she was taught improperly. There’s nothing you can do about that. Just keep it simple. Look for one thing. Find one thing about her that you find attractive. Focus on that.”
Fortunately she had very pretty blue eyes. I gazed into them. She became all eyes to me. It’s true that sometimes I imagined them on a different face. On a different person. Even though I felt annoyed by the rest of her, I could pour some affection into her eyes.
Conditions improved marginally, but what I learned from that experience on Barefoot in the Park was how to work in suboptimal circumstances, how to try to make something from nothing. What not to do.
Cranston!
I was absorbed in building my foundation as an actor, but I needed a job to survive. I found it on the loading dock at Roadway International, a large trucking firm, near intersecting highways in Vernon, a depressing industrial city five miles southeast of downtown LA. It often seemed that the only residents of Vernon were homeless people.
I worked on a cement slab—a dock—loading and unloading trucks. The foreman only used your last name, screaming, Garcia! McVicar! Fitzpatrick! Cranston! I worked a ten-hour shift—graveyard, 9:30 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., with a half an hour for lunch. Brutal, but I got paid $14.50 an hour, which was excellent money in 1979. Our rent for a two-bedroom place in Van Nuys was $375, so three days of work and I was covered for the month. Plus it was primarily a weekend job, so I was available during the week to audition.
The job was tough. Everyone was angry, even the punch clock. I’d stick my time card into the machine; it wouldn’t engage. I’d gently maneuver the card to just the right spot. Finally the machine would bark—AAARRRRNNNTTT. That first violent noise was my welcome each night, and it triggered a strong fight-or-flight response. Then the foremen would yell: CRANSTON, PICK IT UP, PICK IT UP, LET’S GO!
At first I buckled down, doing everything I was ordered to do and more. I figured that if I could outwork the others, I’d have a job as long as I needed it. I gave myself over to the physically demanding work. I reminded myself that working nights allowed me to be free to audition during the day. I was paying dues. That kept my spirits up.
We had scheduled fifteen-minute breaks every few hours. At one of the breaks, four of the union regulars (the nonunion guys like me were called “casuals”) paid me a visit. They told me I was working too hard—too fast—and that I needed to slow down. I was confused. I explained that the foreman was up my ass already to speed it up. The regular who’d been appointed spokesman said, “Fuck him. We run this place. You need to slow down or we’re going to have a problem. We gotta work here every damn day, you motherfuckers come in a few times a month. You work fast, it makes us look bad. That shit can’t happen, understand? It’s not your fault, but it is your problem. Slow. The. Fuck. Down. That’s it.”
Message received. I slowed the fuck down. I tried to set a pace so that the union guys and the foreman were both only mildly upset with me at all times. I cut it right down the middle.
“Cranston, get moving!” I learned to endure the foreman’s yelling. “High and tight! High and tight!” That’s how he wanted the cargo loaded. Fill every space. That job is where I learned how to load my dishwasher: high and tight. To this day, I’m the loader of my dishwasher. Please don’t do it. I’ll just redo it.
A lot of actors worked as Roadway casuals because of the pay. I remember working with Andy Garcia. I knew him only in passing. We were all so tired; it’s not like any of us had a lot of energy to make friends. Besides, we were all covered up: steel-toed boots, jeans, hooded sweatshirt, gloves, and a bandanna to cover our ears, noses, and mouths from the swirling dirt and cardboard dust. All you saw were a guy’s eyes. And some guys even wore clear plastic glasses to shield their eyes.
Somewhere beneath all that protective gear, I was elsewhere. They got my body, but I wasn’t going to let them get my mind or soul. I think if I hadn’t been absolutely determined to be an actor, I wouldn’t have made it through. But I was determined.
CR
ANSTON! When the foreman yelled, I acknowledged I heard him. I nodded, but I didn’t let him in. I just kept repeating a few lines from my inner script. I kept saying to myself: One day I will be able to call myself an actor. Not a part-time actor, but a real actor. One day. One day. One day.
I would fantasize: there’s me driving onto a studio lot; there’s me breaking down the beats of a scene on stage. I was cold and I was getting yelled at, and the energy of many of the guys was a dark energy. Most of those guys hated their jobs, and probably hated their lives. It would be so easy to be sucked into that despair. But I didn’t allow that to come inside. It wasn’t welcome. I wasn’t going to let them clutter my brain. I had something real to hold on to.
Assistant to the Assistant to the Assistant
Someone was terrorizing the people of Chicago in 1980. He slithered undetected through the sewers, killing stray animals, the homeless, sewer workers, and the occasional wandering soul seeking privacy for illicit activities. Only one person understood the true nature of this horrible thing, a lone police detective named David Madison. He fought in vain to warn others that they weren’t looking for a man, but a beast—a gigantic alligator with a voracious appetite. It sounded crazy, and the authorities ignored him at first. But when another citizen went missing, and another, Detective Madison was the city’s last hope. He leapt into action, and he hatched a plan to kill the alligator with a cache of TNT. But what to use as bait? He’d use himself. He would lure the monster out of its dank lair. And sure enough, the cold-blooded killer appeared, betrayed by its hunger. The alligator tried to make David its tasty lunch, but the experienced cop had an escape plan. A manhole. He had wired dynamite to the bottom rung of the ladder; as the angry alligator made a lunge, David climbed out through the manhole cover and rolled away on the street above just before—KABOOM! Pieces of the leviathan’s flesh, bone fragments, and blood spewed everywhere. David was fine—a bit bruised and cut up, but the beast was vanquished.
A Life in Parts Page 9
