by George Takei
“Jack, whatever your setbacks, you know you have an obligation with me.” I was livid. “You can’t ask me to cover for you again, because I haven’t got it. It’s as simple as that.” I said that, but he knew that I had opened a savings account at the Dime Savings Bank on Sixth Avenue.
“Well, this is all I have. Take it,” he said piteously. He held out a twenty-dollar bill. It hardly covered his portion of the rent for one month, much less two. But I took it anyway. And I covered for the rest of his rent again. Palmer certainly couldn’t chip in more with his bakery earnings.
Jack slept at the apartment less and less. I learned that he had gotten another job singing at a small club on West 46th Street after his performance in Fly Blackbird! Jack was making money from two sources now! And yet, on the nights that he was back at the apartment, he made no offer to repay his debt. I seethed inside, but I wasn’t going to ask him again. He was going to have to make the move himself. I wasn’t going to force him to be honorable. But every time I came back in the street door, exhausted to my marrows from another frustrating day of fruitless rounds, and stared up the three long flights of stairs to the apartment, I cursed Jack. He was working. Two gigs! And I didn’t have any. Every weary step up the tread became a stomp on Jack Crowder. I was raging by the time I reached the door to the apartment that Crowder was not paying for.
Josie was the great comfort. It was so good getting together with her at our usual meeting place, the Horn and Hardart automat on Sixth Avenue. She gave me her sympathy over coffee and apple pie. She always made my anger and frustrations melt away—at least for the time I was with her. Josie thought I should deal with Jack head on. He should meet his obligation or make other arrangements. It was unhealthy for me just to burn inside day after day. Deal with the problem and get on with life. Of course, she was right.
Very late one night, about the time the club would be closing, I went striding in. The room was almost empty.
“I’d like to see Jack Crowder,” I said to the doorman. “I’m his roommate.” He directed me to a small, curtained-off cubbyhole far in the back beyond the kitchen. It was his dressing room, and he was cleaning up after his last show.
“Oh, George!” Jack seemed startled by my sudden appearance, but he quickly put on a broad smile. “You didn’t have to come here, you know. I was going to be paying you your money tomorrow. The whole thing. I just got paid tonight.”
“I know,” I said curtly. “That’s why I’m here. I’d like the money now.” Jack finished wiping his face very methodically and arranged his makeup with inordinate neatness on the little shelf that served as his table. He puttered as I stood there silently waiting. Then he got up smiling and said, “Excuse me a second. I’ll go get the dough from the manager.” He left the cubbyhole so quickly that I didn’t fully register his last words. I thought he said he had already gotten paid. Then I noticed his overcoat still hanging on the peg. I surmised that he probably was having his money held by the manager of the club for safekeeping. Then Jack popped back in.
“Excuse me,” he said, still smiling as he grabbed his overcoat. “I’ll be right back.” Then he was gone again. I stood there dumbfounded for a second. I rushed out into the empty club just in time to see him hurrying out the front door.
“Jack!” I shouted out across the room, and bolted after him. When I got outside, he was already halfway down the block.
“Jack, come back here!” I was raging as I started sprinting. Jack turned the corner and ran down Eighth Avenue with his long, loping strides. I charged after him bellowing at the top of my voice, “Jack, come back! Come back here! Jack!” His overcoat flapped frantically behind his lanky frame like a huge outstretched cape as I gave furious chase. “Jack! Come back here!”
The early morning sight of a tall black man wildly fleeing from an angry Asian down a deserted Eighth Avenue was a picture sure to sober up any drunken derelict who might have come upon the implausible scene.
I never caught Jack. His legs were longer than mine. And he never came back to the apartment again. His closet was filled with his clothes; he had fine taste, expensive taste. I was so angry I took his clothes and hocked them. The pawnbroker, however, did not value Jack’s clothes very highly. But I sent Jack the pawn tickets at his new address anyway.
Palmer and I now had another problem. We wouldn’t be able to manage the increased rent with Jack gone. My savings had been severely drained. I had just enough left for plane fare back to Los Angeles, and I didn’t want to touch that. We had to find other housing.
Over coffee and apple pie at Horn and Hardart’s, Josie suggested that I move in with her. I put my hand softly on hers. After the anger, the trauma, and the bile of the last few days, suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes from welling up. Dear Josie, my clever song-and-dance mate, the tender melter of my anger and my heart—my sweet, vulnerable Josie, whom I wanted to protect from this cold, hard city—was instead offering to be my guardian angel. Right there in the middle of the automat, I reached over and kissed her.
* * *
Jack Jackson was on the phone. His voice sounded diplomatic but also a little nervous.
“George, we’ve had a little problem with the show,” he began. I wondered why he was sharing this information with me. It had been at least three months since Fly Blackbird! opened. Practically a lifetime. What did any problem with the show have to do with me now?
Then, very slowly, very gently, Jack explained the reason for his call. The actor who had been playing George was leaving the show. He was cast in another production. I knew the basic part, although not as redirected for the New York production. There was a big favor the producers needed.
“Believe me, I know how it must feel to you now. But they’ve asked me to ask you if you would consider stepping in.” I felt that same flush of anger mixed with humiliation that I experienced when I was told that I wasn’t cast. The shock wasn’t there anymore. Instead, it was replaced by a welling indignation, a pain of a different kind. I was silent for a long time.
“I understand what you’re feeling now.” Jack broke the quiet. “Truly, I do, George. I would understand if you didn’t want to do it.” I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. A torrent of conflicting emotions was raging inside me. Finally I said, “Let me think about this, Jack. I’ll call you back in an hour.”
I walked the streets of the city for that hour. I got in lockstep with the teeming multitudes on the street. Thousands of people, all wrapped up in their own little worlds, with their own problems, their own private anguish. I walked for blocks. I reached Central Park. The branches of trees, withered gray by the cold blasts of winter, were at last starting to sprout tender green leaves. Birds were starting to sing and flit among those branches.
Finally, I walked into a phone booth and called Jack. Swallowing my pride, swallowing hard, I said to him, “Jack, I’ll do it. I’ll do George. When is the blocking rehearsal?”
The New York production of Fly Blackbird! was in its final weeks. I played George until it closed.
12
Return to Hollywood
I CELEBRATED MY TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY in New York City. A quarter century. I had been in Manhattan almost a year now and had little to show for it. Nothing was happening with my career. Two television guest shots and a few photo modeling gigs. The only theater I did in New York was the last couple weeks of the Fly Blackbird! run. Back in Los Angeles, there had been, at least, a steady upward progression to my career in films and television. And, most of all, I missed my family and hometown.
Josie, too, had her parents in Los Angeles and was getting homesick for the space and sunshine. We both decided to go back before it started getting cold again. I closed out my account at Dime Savings Bank and bought the ticket back to Los Angeles.
The first thing we did when we got back was to drive up the coast in my father’s big Buick—swooping up the Pacific Coast Highway all the way to Santa Barbara. It was sublimely liberating. After the overwhelming press of hu
manity, the racket and the crush of high-rises, suddenly the blue sky and the ocean, the sunshine, the breeze and open space tasted incredibly sweet. We were Californians. We needed the freedom to ride with the wind over the tawny, rolling hills of Malibu and cruise past the marinas of Ventura. The gulls were in the sky, soaring and wheeling, just hanging out. We were back where we started, back in California. But we were no longer the same people who had left.
We had been to the twentieth-century primordial pool of Manhattan. We now knew how teeming, how competitive, and how chancy survival could be. But we also knew we could do it. If anything, our season in New York had energized us, strengthend our determination, reawakened us to the powerful potentials of the theater. We just needed some time to breathe, an intermission, then we would be ready to dive back in. As we wet our feet in the cool Pacific at the beach in Santa Barbara, we talked about our next move.
Josie knew theater could be a force in building a new America. It spoke the binding language of the “mind and the heart,” and that was where the dialogue for change had to be carried on. She had been talking with Jack Jackson about a multiethnic theater where not just the performers on stage, but the policymakers, the artists, and, most importantly, the audience would reflect the entire ethnic tapestry of a community. This would be a theater literally “of the diversity of America.” Josie was talking about forging a new American theater, carrying the energy of our Los Angeles production of Fly Blackbird! to a grander scale.
On that beach in Santa Barbara, our plans for the future soared like the gulls circling in the sky. We were back in California, where dreams still seemed possible.
* * *
Fred Ishimoto welcomed me back enthusiastically. There had been a lot of activity that I had missed out on, he told me, and he read off a laundry list of film and television projects that he was convinced I would have had—had I stayed in Los Angeles. I hated this speculating on the ifs and buts of something past.
“Fred, I don’t believe in crying over spilt milk,” I countered. “But I do believe in making sure the new milk I get has plenty of cream in it. That’s your job—to get me the cream.”
“Boy oh boy,” he exclaimed. “Send the kid to New York, and he comes back dictating orders to you. Well, yes, sir!” And he punctuated it with a snappy salute.
Within a month, Fred had me in a guest shot playing a young psychologist in a new medical series, 11th Hour, starring Wendell Corey. This was followed sporadically by other television work like My Three Sons, The Gallant Men, and Mister Roberts, the most notable of which was a two-character episode of Twilight Zone with Neville Brand.
I also picked up where I had left off at UCLA. I had most of my credits for a Master of Arts degree. The final hurdle was the thesis. I decided to do my dissertation on Arthur Hopkins, the great producer/director, and his venturesome productions—from the classics to bold original plays—while he held the lease on the Plymouth Theater in New York from 1917 to 1926. So whenever I landed television or movie work, I was back to carrying my books with me onto the sets.
“You’re such a studious young man, George. Study, study, study.” It was Cary Grant commenting on the books in the pocket of my set-side chair when I worked with him on Walk, Don’t Run, a comedy that also starred Jim Hutton and Samantha Eggar. “Why do you want to be a smart actor when all you need to be is dumb and handsome like me?”
“Well, since I’m not as handsome as you,” I answered, “I thought I’d hedge my bet by trying to be a bit educated.”
“Good idea. Get educated. You’ll be so smart that you’ll become a producer. And if you’re a really smart producer, you’ll be paying me millions of dollars to act in your movies. Study on, I say.” Cary always got the wittiest last word in.
I received my M.A. from UCLA in 1964, but, contrary to Cary Grant’s prophecy, I did not become a producer. Instead, I took a first step toward following in Daddy’s footsteps. I made my first real estate investment on my own. Of course, I had guidance from Daddy, but I conducted my own search, made my own analysis, and did my own negotiating. Daddy was just there as a shadow consultant. I parlayed my cemetery plot profits into an investment in a modest eight-unit apartment building near a hospital. The hospital staff, I concluded, would be a good tenant base for the building.
This new venture, unlike cemetery plots, however, required maintenance work. So, in between acting gigs, I put on several other hats, those of painter of vacated apartments, Saturday-afternoon gardener, and all-around odd-jobs man.
Fortunately, the acting jobs maintained a regular if unpredictable flow. Unpredictability, I think, was more the hallmark of my career at this point than regularity. Certainly, I didn’t expect to be working with so many Hollywood legends.
My next job was with fabled director Howard Hawks. He was sixty-nine years old, thin as a rail and topped with a bald head wearing a fringe of snowy white hair, but his eyes were still as crafty and sharp as the bird of his name. For his new film, a stock car racing adventure titled Red Line 7000, he had gathered a cast made up completely of young unknowns. I was cast in the role of the mechanic, who, he told me, was originally named Kelley but was changed, of course, to Kato for me. Hawks had a reputation for having a keen eye for talent and discovering young unknowns who go on to become stars, like Lauren Bacall. Again, he was boldly predicting that all seven of the young actors in his film were destined for stardom. Out of this group only James Caan emerged to fulfill his prophecy.
The possibility of stardom is an insidious virus. It can narrow vision and judgment, and it can throw values off balance. An all-consuming fever takes over. I got a touch of it back in those early years. How I sometimes suffer its aftereffects in the wee hours of the night, by the cold blue light of the late-night reruns.
It happens whenever one of two Jerry Lewis comedies I did comes on. The Big Mouth and Which Way to the Front? I lie still in bed with chills running up and down my spine. Then I convulse and heave. I’ve sometimes tried suffocating the nausea with a pillow. But always, I wind up staring at the screen in frozen horror watching myself playing cartoon “oriental” characters—outlandish cartoon wackos!
Fred, who was supposed to be my agent, the good shepherd of my career, urged me to do it.
“Jerry Lewis is the biggest box office star in Hollywood,” he enthused. “It can’t hurt you to be in a giant money-making movie. Every one of his productions makes megabucks, and you’ll be associated with that.” And then his voice turned seductive. “George, it’ll help you become . . . a star!” The scent of stardom is a mind-addling virus, and agents are the usual carriers. The disease runs virulent in this little town called Hollywood.
Jerry Lewis himself was a pleasant surprise. His voice had the same familiar nasal inflection, but unexpectedly, his real sound was modulated and calm. There was none of that manic energy about him off-screen but, instead, a controlled air of authority. He was directing the movies, and everyone on the set knew who was in charge.
I also found him to be an innovative filmmaker. I had never seen a television playback machine on a film set until I worked with Jerry Lewis. Rather than waiting twenty-four hours to see the previous day’s work in “dailies,” with the playback machine Jerry could check the scene just filmed immediately after shouting, “Cut!” This eliminated costly time and labor. Any reshooting that needed to be done could be accomplished right then and there. Today, this system is commonly utilized, but in the sixties, Jerry Lewis was a pioneer in incorporating this new technology to filmmaking.
* * *
Films and television were maintaining my career as an actor, but the theater still remained tantalizingly elusive. Los Angeles had a vigorous theater scene. In Hollywood, there were scrappy and venturesome little theaters, and at the acropolis of culture in southern California, the Los Angeles Music Center downtown, there were the grand institutions: the Center Theater Group, started at UCLA by the great John Houseman, was presenting important works at the Mark Taper Forum;
and the Ahmanson Theater presented stellar artists like Ingrid Bergman in O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions or Richard Chamberlain in Cyrano de Bergerac. But as in New York, I was a part of this exciting theater scene only as a member of the audience.
One night, Josie and I went to a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood to see a production of Jean Genet’s prison drama, Deathwatch. It took place in a claustrophobic little jail cell occupied by three prisoners: a shrewd and insinuating homosexual, the muscularly handsome object of his desire, and a detached and silently brooding cell mate. The actors who played the three roles were all unknowns. Paul Mazursky was electrifying as the homosexual, Michael Forrest taunting and charismatic as the object of attention, and, in the least flashy role in the triangle but still compelling, was an actor named Leonard Nimoy. We walked out of the theater impressed by all three but predicting brilliant futures only for Paul Mazursky and Michael Forrest. The third actor, Nimoy, we thought was good as well—but he seemed too intellectual, too cool, no star quality.
* * *
It was an unusually sultry August night, one of those Los Angeles summer evenings when the dark doesn’t bring any relief. People drove around just to feel the heavy air rush by their faces. It was useless. The heat was inescapable.
I can’t remember why I dropped in on Jack Jackson. He had returned to Los Angeles from New York and was living in the Echo Park district. I frequently dropped by his place just to chat. It was probably to discuss the idea of the new American theater that Josie had been talking about. I don’t remember for sure. But August 12, 1965, is a night I can never forget.
The picture on the television screen was shaky. It reeled and lurched from a scene of chaos to the next of conflagration. There were screams and shouts. Police sirens shrieked incessantly. The reporter’s voice was breathless and staccato with alarm. A riot had broken out in Watts and was spreading to other parts of the city. Towers of flame were lighting up the night sky. Some people had been shot.
