To the Stars

by George Takei

  At the end of the genuinely exhausting day, as we both trudged the pier back toward the village, I couldn’t keep the fan in me contained. “Mr. Burton,” I began. But he stopped me abruptly with a raised hand.

  “My name is Richard,” he declared. “Call me Richard, and I shall call you George. If you must call me Mr. Burton, then I shall call you Mr. Wang.” And he chortled without embarrassment at his own lame wit.

  A car was waiting at the foot of the pier. An assistant ran to open the door for him. Richard looked at it in puzzlement.

  “And where do you propose to take me in this car?” he asked.

  “To your hotel, sir,” the man answered.

  “My hotel is right there,” Burton said, pointing to the building only a short block away. “I can literally spit at it from here. Isn’t this rather silly?”

  “It’s the company car for your use, sir,” the driver replied a bit sheepishly.

  “You’re so kind. Thank you, but I think I prefer to walk. What about you, George?”

  I said I’d join him, and we started to stroll down the main street. But before we were more than a few yards down the road, we passed a saloon. Two blondes, dressed in their finest, I’m sure, in order to be noticed by the movie people in town, came running out.

  “Richard, Richard,” they cried out.

  “Ah, Julie and . . . what was your name, my dear?” Richard’s sparkling eyes sparkled even brighter.

  “Nova,” pouted the other. “I told you my name’s Nova.”

  “Of course! Nova. Forgive me, my dear. I’ve had an absolutely horrific day out there in the cannery. You will forgive me, won’t you, Nova?” Then turning to me, Richard said, “Carry on, George. I’ll see you in the morning.” Richard disappeared into the saloon with his arms around the two buxom blondes.

  The breeze that blew down the road was bracing, but it was the exhilaration I felt that quickened my steps back to the hotel. I was working with a man who was a classic actor of the theater and a dazzling new movie star. He was elegant and at the same time passionate; his zest, his appetite for life was infectious; he had grace and cultivation combined with folksy heartiness. He was a legend who wanted me to call him Richard! I had a feeling that this was going to be a great experience.

  * * *

  Anyone other than Richard would probably have considered me a pest. In the days and weeks that followed, I peppered him with questions about his experiences in the theater both in England and on Broadway. “What was it like doing Hamlet at the Old Vic?” “What were Helen Hayes and Susan Strasberg like in the Jean Anouilh play on Broadway?” “What American playwrights do you like?” But rather than considering me an annoyance, Richard seemed to revel in the enthusiasm and inquisitiveness of a stagestruck young actor. Richard, as it turned out, was a poet raconteur.

  It was during one of these talk-story sessions that Richard made an astounding revelation. We were seated in our chairs in the bright Alaskan sunshine on the pier while the crew set up for another shot.

  I asked him a question that I thought would prompt another expansive and wittily told story. “How did they teach Shakespeare in England when you were growing up?”

  Suddenly, his eyes seemed to blaze in mock fury. “England! Grow up in England! Do you take me to be English?”

  He may have been acting, but the intensity of the feigned outrage was so unexpected that I was momentarily stunned. What had I said to offend him?

  “I will have you know, I was born in . . .” And he said a strange, long, foreign-sounding name I could not quite grasp. Was he an immigrant to England from some European country? That name sounded somewhat East European. He certainly didn’t look Nordic or Mediterranean, I thought.

  “Pontrhydyfen,” he repeated slowly, almost caressingly. His eyes turned soft and wistful. “I was born in Pontrhydyfen.”

  “You mean, Richard, that you didn’t grow up in England?” It seemed unthinkable that this quintessential exponent of the English language should not be an Englishman.

  “I grew up, George, in the warmest bosom of Wales, Pontrhydyfen,” he announced. “And I grew up speaking the honeyed sounds of God—Welsh.”

  “You didn’t grow up speaking English?” I was dumbfounded.

  Richard proceeded to give me a taste of the honey. He started to recite something in Welsh. It was indeed the sweetest, the most lyrical, the most transcendent sounds I had heard. Sitting there on the pier, with the waters of the narrows sparkling against the rugged majesty of Alaska, Richard sang on and on. And I sat listening, spellbound by the discovery of a totally unexpected dimension to this endlessly fascinating man. So this was Richard Burton’s native tongue. English was for him a second language! This great master of Shakespeare grew up speaking the strange and beautiful sounds that he was reciting before me with rapture, gusto, and such pride. I, who had grown up bilingually with Japanese and English, sat there mesmerized by his wondrous command of languages. And I felt a kind of communion with this charismatic man.

  “Mr. Burton, George, we’re ready for you now,” interrupted the assistant. The terrific concert was over. As we got up, Richard said to me, “That was Dylan Thomas in the original you were listening to.”

  * * *

  After the Alaskan location shoot, we returned to the Warner Brothers studios back in Hollywood. The other cast members—Carolyn Jones, Martha Hyer, Jim Backus, Shirley Knight, Ray Danton, and Diane McBain—joined us.

  On the days I wasn’t involved in the scene being shot, I went back to my classes at UCLA. Time seemed to fly as I shuttled from campus to studio, studio to campus. Much too quickly, the fearful last two weeks in the old-age makeup came. They were torture. I dreaded every morning that I had to submit to the painful aging process. But all too soon, the filming of Ice Palace was completed, and I was again a full-time student.

  But now on campus, I became the object of both curiosity and envy. I found it interesting how certain people studiously avoided mentioning anything about my summer experience while others showered me with questions. “How did you get cast?” “What was Alaska like?” “What was it like doing a big feature film?” The one question I loved responding to was “What was it like working with Richard Burton?”

  I usually began my answer with the word “glorious” and from there, I carried on and expanded, waxing rhapsodic. My words became luminous, shining, utterly iridescent. After all, I had been tutored by the master himself. And this, I now like to tell people, was in Richard Burton’s pre-Elizabethan days—Taylor, that is.

  * * *

  Although Ice Palace flopped at the box office, Warner Brothers liked my work. Actually, Hoyt Bowers liked my work. He opened the door to a whole lineup of television series that Warners was grinding out at the time. I became practically a member of the repertory company of players on Hawaiian Eye. One week, I might be playing a Tibetan monk; another, a scion of a great samurai family; and another, a Hong Kong street urchin, all the while still going to UCLA. I was probably the only actor on the studio lot who, between camera setups, was reading his world theater history textbook instead of the Daily Variety.

  Acting now was starting to pay off financially. The car that I had been driving on my commute down Sunset Boulevard between UCLA and Warner Brothers studios was an old ‘54 Chevy coupe that I’d bought with my Venetian blind job earnings. Now, I could buy that sporty M.G. that I had always wanted. Alas, it was not to be.

  My father, as in so many pivotal points in my life, stepped in with his guidance. He did this by, of all things, quoting an old show biz maxim.

  “I understand that in this business of acting there is a good old cautionary saying, ‘It’s feast or famine.’ You seem to be enjoying the feast right now,” he observed.

  “Daddy, I really feel good about my career. I’m building steady momentum. I don’t think my career is going to be one of those up-and-down roller coaster rides. I think an M.G. sports coupe would be a good investment at this time.”

  �
��A car is not an investment. It’s a moving depreciation,” he retorted. “But I agree that an investment is a good idea. An investment today won’t make the feast a full feast, but it also won’t make the famine a real famine come tomorrow. And believe me, that tomorrow will come. If you’re going to be an actor, I want you to be able to afford being an actor.” And with that, he put my movie earnings into real estate investments for me. It wasn’t much money, so he put it into small land parcels that he said would produce a “steady, sure return, unlike show business.” My father put my first real movie earnings into mortgages on cemetery plots.

  I protested bitterly then. I had my heart set on that M.G. But with the passage of time, I have come to appreciate more and more the wisdom and good counsel my father gave me. The irony of my survival as an actor being initially assured by a collection of cemetery plots also does not escape me.

  * * *

  My father’s premonition of the famine that tomorrow might bring was yet to come true. I landed another feature film, this one starring the rising young star Jeffrey Hunter. It was titled Hell to Eternity. The title sounded an awful lot like From Here to Eternity, suggesting a cheap knock-off of the much-lauded film. Like the Academy Award winner, ours was a World War II movie. Unlike that film, however, our script was essentially an action drama, but with a unique—indeed precedent-setting—historic component.

  Hell to Eternity was the first Hollywood film to deal with the internment of Japanese Americans. Jeffrey Hunter played a character based on a real person, Guy Gabaldon, a Mexican American orphan in East L.A. who was adopted by a Japanese American family. He grew up speaking Japanese and English in a warm, loving family that included his adoptive brother, the role I played. When war broke out, Gabaldon’s family was incarcerated, and he went on to fight and become a war hero.

  Our mother was played by a wonderful actress from the days of Hollywood’s silent era, Tsuru Aoki, who was also the wife of the old-time star Sessue Hayakawa. My girlfriend was played by Miiko Taka, who was Marlon Brando’s leading lady in the film version of James Michener’s Sayonara. The set-side chitchat on this one should be great, I imagined, and it quickened my pulse to realize that my personal history, the Japanese American history in Hollywood films, and my own advance in movies were merging in Hell to Eternity. I didn’t know, then, that Jeffrey Hunter would also play a role in my future.

  The making of the film was all that I hoped it would be. The actresses were delightful. Mrs. Hayakawa, as we addressed Tsuru Aoki, was a sweet, chatty lady. She loved reminiscing about the parties she and her husband used to throw in the palacial mansion they built where today the Hollywood Freeway courses near the Hollywood Bowl. Miiko waxed rhapsodic about Brando and especially about her dream promotional tour for Sayonara that took her to all the glamour capitals of the world.

  I found it revealing, however, that whenever Jeff brought up the subject of the internment camps, Miiko cheerfully redirected the conversation to another subject, and Mrs. Hayakawa airily announced that she had been in Japan and knew little about it. Despite the subject matter of the script we were working on, the camps were still an uncomfortable topic of conversation.

  Hell to Eternity was a modest success at the box office, but it was another solid stepping-stone in my Hollywood career progression. Daddy’s famine still seemed only proverbial.

  * * *

  My feast was prolonged again. Hoyt Bowers was there at Warners smiling and waving a shiny new key. The Broadway hit comedy A Majority of One was to be made into a film starring Rosalind Russell as the Jewish housewife from Brooklyn who is courted by a wealthy Japanese businessman, to be played by the Academy Award-winning British actor Alec Guinness. Veteran director Mervyn LeRoy was to be at the helm.

  I was cast to play the majordomo, or head butler, in the household of the Japanese businessman. It was a servant role, true. But this was a character with some refinement. This servant personified the restrained, formal tradition of Japanese service.

  What really excited me about doing A Majority of One, however, was the opportunity to work with another legendary British actor. I had been deeply affected by the epic film The Bridge on the River Kwai and the character of Colonel Nicholson that Alec Guinness created in the film. The actor’s genius had made a singularly idiosyncratic character not only understandable but tragic. What chameleon magic might this gifted English actor bring to playing a Japanese businessman? It was an extraordinary opportunity to be on the set and watch him deal with this challenge. I relished the prospect.

  Equally tempting was my image of the set-side chats. I remembered with delight those dazzling vicarious journeys that Richard Burton took me on with Ice Palace. Any actor of Guinness’s experience must have a fantastic hoard of stories to share. He belonged to an older generation of actors than Burton, and would be able to open up a whole different world for me. I couldn’t wait for the great talks that we might get into.

  It was my first day of filming. I was made up and in my kimono costume, ready on the set of Mr. Asano’s elegant Japanese-style home. Rosalind Russell was dressed as the dowdy, salt-and-pepper-haired matron Mrs. Jacoby, but carrying on as if she were still playing the flamboyant character she had dazzled Broadway with as Auntie Mame.

  “Mervyn, darling. You’re looking wonderful.” She greeted our director in her luxuriantly brash style. “You haven’t aged a day since yesterday. How do you do it?”

  “Well, my dear,” responded the courtly Mr. LeRoy, “I know that under that makeup is an actress of radiant beauty. Working with you keeps my spirit young.” “That’s what I wanted to hear, baby,” she said, breaking into a brassy vaudeville growl. “Stick with me, kid, and I’ll keep more than just your spirit young.” And she laughed raucously.

  Mr. Guinness, I was told, was a bit delayed in the makeup department because of the complexity of the job. I thought I’d stroll over to the building to see how his Japanese guise was applied. I hoped, for his sake, that it wouldn’t be as painful as my old-age makeup for Ice Palace.

  I had just stepped out of the dark of the soundstage into the bright California sun. As I stood squinting, a big, black car drove up. The back door opened, and out stepped a slim, middle-aged man with a strong aquiline nose. Around his neck he wore a fringe of tissue papers tucked under his collar to protect it from the fresh makeup. It was Alec Guinness. I stepped back and hefted the heavy soundstage door open for him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Guinness,” I greeted him.

  “Good morning. Thank you so much,” he said, and nodded in an exaggerated Japanese manner as he walked past me. He was attempting to get in character, I thought. But what I saw shocked me. Delicately stretched over his eyes were thin pieces of latex membrane. It was done skillfully. It was smooth and tight. But it made the eyes look cold, sinister, almost reptilian. It was grotesquely offensive, and he was supposed to be the sympathetic “hero” of this comedy.

  I went up to the assistant director to ask if something might be done about Mr. Guinness’s so-called Japanese makeup. I was told that some scenes had already been shot with the makeup, and therefore nothing could be done about it. Besides, I was told quite curtly, it was none of my business. I felt as a Japanese that it was indeed my business, but I decided to bite my tongue. The power of Alec Guinness’s acting, I hoped, would overcome the burden of this unfortunate makeup job. However, I would be sadly disappointed.

  Guinness had been working with a Japanese dialogue coach, Bob Okazaki, for the accent as well as the few phrases of Japanese he had to speak. But the slurred, oddly broken British accent he affected as Mr. Asano was like nothing I had ever heard before. His Japanese phrases were even worse. They were incomprehensible gibberish. I was chilled standing set-side, watching all this go on before my eyes. I asked Bob Okazaki if anything could be done about the embarrassing sounds that Guinness was palming off as Japanese. But all the hapless dialogue coach could do was look down and shake his head hopelessly.

  “I can’t tell
him anything,” he moaned. “He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

  The wonderful experience that I had looked forward to was stingingly dashed. Even if I still had the desire for set-side chats with Alec Guinness, they were not to be. He retired to his dressing room as soon as his scenes were completed. He was aloof and utterly distant. Some people tried to explain him to me by saying that he was very “private” or that he was “shy.” But I simply found him colorless, withdrawn, and disappointingly banal. It made me wonder how he could be so unarguably effective in so many of his roles and so disastrous in A Majority of One. This experience got me to thinking on the issue of the casting of actors across ethnic lines.

  I obviously have a personal interest in ethnicity not being a barrier to casting. At UCLA I had played every race from black to white and everything in between. I had won awards as an American Indian and a Brechtian Chinese. But the academic world is where we try to reach for an ideal—the classic notion of casting on the basis of talent alone.

  If an actor’s power can create the theatrical truth onstage, that should supersede consistency with the ethnicity of the character. If a “lean and hungry” Japanese actor can compel an audience to believe he is a Roman senator, then he has succeeded as Cassius. Conversely, if a black actor cannot speak iambic pentameter with conviction, then the authenticity of his color will not save him as Othello. And therein lies the rub; the actor cast across racial or cultural lines must be keenly mindful of his increased accountability. In order to create theatrical truth despite racial inauthenticity, he bears the responsibility for crafting the verisimilitude of the character’s speech, mannerisms, and very being. Makeup alone cannot do it. The essentials are the actor’s talent and, most critically, his integrity. The latter was what was missing in Alec Guinness’s attempt at playing an aristocratic Japanese gentleman.

  Yet this ideal of color-blind/talent-based casting, if it is to be a part of American theater, must be practiced squarely and with balance. It has to be a genuine two-way street. The conceptual ideal must not be used as a euphemistic screen for the one-way traffic of white actors consistently playing Asian lead roles, simply because that singular flow courts a gridlock created by those squeezed out of the passage. I am on this road because I am hopeful that a free traffic of talent will lead to a richer, more vibrant American culture.