Jack was not amused. He said he never claimed he was in the show. He said he worked on the show. He was in charge of giving enemas to the animals that appeared onstage so they wouldn’t have an accident during a musical number and horrify the audience.
Pause.
There have only been a few times in my life when I have been speechless. In this case it was the combination of horror, surprise, and curiosity as to how much the job paid and if they offered it to me, would I take it.
Jack was rightfully offended by whatever look we had on our faces. He hit us with a now classic rejoinder: “Hey, at least I’m on Broadway.” Jack and his rubber gloves taught me never to trust an actor when they say they’re working.
For years I have assumed that one reason why I am not frequently asked interesting questions is that I am a character actor. Even though I have been in hundreds of shows, I am not famous by any unit of measure. You would recognize me if you saw me in line at the coffee shop. Not necessarily as an actor. There is a fifty-fifty chance you might think that I was the guy who used to work there. Or a science teacher at your high school. Or the man who sold insurance to your parents. In Canada, one man came up to me on the street thinking we had played hockey together.
I was premiering my film Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party at the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen in 2005. As a sociological experiment, I asked strangers on the street if they had heard of Stephen Tobolowsky. They all had.
One man said he just read about Stephen Tobolowsky that morning. He was a serial killer in Denver about to be released from prison. There was a huge protest. Another man said that he thought that Stephen Tobolowsky was the real name of a popular porn star, someone named Rick “Hot Rod” Rocket. Unfamiliar with Mr. Rocket’s work, I moved on. One woman had a kinder but equally incorrect view of the universe. She thought Stephen Tobolowsky was either a financial expert or a physicist who had just discovered something about time.
I liked that one.
Time has always interested me. We always tend to imagine time as a line of past, present, and future. But I don’t think we experience it that way. In our lives, memory rarely serves as a measurement of time, but rather as a measurement of meaning. The associations we make are rarely linear. Time and memory combine to create an unpredictable picture. We never can know what moments will rise to the level of significance. The strangest, smallest things can become your evening star.
FAQ will almost always relate to work. I’ve been asked dozens of times over the years, “What was it like to perform on Broadway the first time?”
To tell the truth, my opening night on Broadway in 1982 is a blur. Not completely. I remember I wore blue boxer shorts. But the play and the applause, nothing. You would think, being an actor, that event would be central to my personal history. But it’s not. Unpredictably, two events that happened when I was five years old dwarf my first night on Broadway. These memories are always with me.
I was five and had just proposed to the first girl I ever fell in love with, Alice Nell Allen. She was also five. I ran home and told my mother that I was getting married and would probably be leaving soon to start a family of my own. Mom took the news well. “That’s nice,” she said.
I dashed out of our kitchen screen door and ran across our backyard into the world. I was as excited as only a young man in love could be. I wanted to give my mother a gift to thank her for her kindness and support during my early, formative years.
Behind our house in Oak Cliff, Texas, was a tangle of wildness. There were fields and woods and a creek. But there was also a meadow that covered an entire block. It was filled with the most beautiful flowers I had ever seen in my life. They were red, and yellow, and orange.
I ran barefoot through the field at sundown to pick a bouquet. I came running back into the kitchen. I put my flowers in a glass with a little water and offered them to Mom. She looked down at me holding my flowers as she washed the chicken. “Stepidoors, those are just weeds. Those aren’t nice flowers that you give to someone. Throw them away,” she said. I couldn’t move. Mom took the wildflowers out of the glass and tossed them into the trash.
I was devastated and embarrassed. My mother, though the kindest person I have ever known, could not have understood what those flowers meant to me. They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and I wanted to share that beauty with her.
A week later the land where the wildflowers grew was sold and plowed over. They started building homes on the lots. The flowers never returned. I looked for them for years, but they were gone. That was the last time I saw those reds, yellows, and oranges by our home. They entered the realm of memory, becoming a sort of evening star that warned me to protect what I loved.
Another important story comes from the same distant era. I’m afraid I need to explain some ancient history. Back then, in the early 1950s, kids walked. We walked everywhere. Or we ran or rode bikes. We were on our own a lot. I remember I had walked down to Daughtery’s Drug Store to buy a candy bar and read comic books. Thick in the middle of the latest Batman, I noticed the sky had darkened. I thought I should head back. Texas was always prone to sudden and dangerous shifts in the weather. I didn’t want to get caught in a thunderstorm.
I started to walk down the bumpy, tar-covered, two-lane road that led back home. I saw something about half a mile away that upset me. There was something wrong. I couldn’t quite make it out. As I got closer I saw a car was leaning sideways on the shoulder of the road. I could smell smoke in the air.
I ran toward the wreck to investigate. Steam was coming from the radiator. I heard a noise and I saw movement and turned. There was a man lying by the side of the road. I froze.
He was wearing light blue pants and a light blue shirt and he had a black belt with a silver buckle. He whispered to me. “Buddy, come here.” I obeyed. He said, “Help me here, buddy. I need to sit up.”
I knelt beside the man and put my arms around him and helped him. He didn’t have the strength to sit. I kept holding him. He said, “Thanks. I can’t be lying there like that.” A sudden stream of blood flowed out of his mouth onto his blue shirt.
I gasped. “You’re bleeding.”
“Don’t worry, buddy. I’m okay. I don’t hurt at all. So don’t be scared. I may need to ask you for a favor.”
I was trembling but said, “Yes, sir.”
“I may need you to find my daughter. Her name is Diane. I may need you to tell her that I’m okay.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
I heard the sounds of tires screeching on the road behind me and footsteps running. A grown man in a light-colored jacket came up to me and said, “What happened?”
“I found him here,” I said.
The injured man looked around at the scene. Other cars stopped. More help ran over. He turned to me and said, “Buddy, I guess you can go on home now.”
“What about your daughter, Diane?”
“Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine.”
I handed my charge off to those more capable. I started to leave. I looked back at the man once more. He tried to gesture to me. I remember his pale blue eyes and his parting words, “Go on home now. And, buddy, don’t be afraid.”
I am sorry to say I have been unable to honor his request. I have been afraid. Often. When I asked Claire Richards to the prom. When I was held hostage at gunpoint in a grocery store. The first time I made love. Just about every audition I’ve had. And yes, opening night on Broadway in 1982. The list is too long. But I still see the man dressed in light blue—broken, in need of a doctor, worried for his daughter. Yet he spent a moment to quiet the fears of a child he happened to meet by the side of the road.
Of the many questions I have never been asked, one stands out as being significant. “What were the happiest moments in your life?” There are the obvious answers: when I fell in love, the birth of my children, the second time I married my wife, Ann—but there is one I have never mentioned.
Several years ago, I
was in one of those periods in my life when happiness was hard to come by. I returned to Dallas to visit my family. I thought family would make things better—or not. My brother took me out on a bike ride to White Rock Lake and to have breakfast with his friends. I hadn’t ridden a bike in ages. It was a beautiful day. I felt like I was flying. We crested a hill, and as if by divine gift I saw something that took my breath away. There, before my eyes, were my wildflowers—the reds, yellows, and oranges—acres and acres and acres of them in every direction. They were never gone. I just thought they were. I smiled for the first time in months, knowing they were probably here all along. I had just never ridden on the right path.
A question I frequently ask myself: why do I tell these stories? My answer: the mystery.
It is a mystery as to what makes us do what we do. It is the other side of the mystery as to what makes us who we are. One of my favorite philosophers, Epictetus, said that the only things we can control in our lives are what we are drawn to and what we are repelled by. Somewhere between the last field of wildflowers and the words of comfort from a dying man, there was something powerful that made me stop and take notice.
Telling a story is my way of living up to the high standards created for me by the woman in Aspen: to be the physicist who has come up with something new about time. It is the only way I know to make sense of the unpredictable. It is the only way I know to search for Diane.
3.
LOCAL HERO
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with heroism was in the figure of Davy Crockett, ably portrayed by Mr. Fess Parker on Walt Disney’s television program. Or miniseries. Or whatever it was. I don’t think it was called Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color yet. At that point in time, the world was pretty much in black and white. It was the mid-1950s. It was a time so simple, so innocent, that if you could time-travel and magically run an episode of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, millions of Americans would believe that they had died in their sleep and gone straight to hell.
Simplicity doesn’t mean simpleminded. It just meant we didn’t have cell phones, or computers, or automatic transmissions. We thought wrestling was real. We liked our symbols like we liked our scotch—straight up. Davy was a symbol. He wore the signature coonskin cap and lived in the woods with his wife, Polly. He had a friend, Georgie, played by Buddy Ebsen, in a pre–Beverly Hillbillies role. Through an eerie act of Hollywood precognition, Ebsen, as Georgie, was costumed almost exactly like Jed Clampett.
Davy was a great shot. Always. But when he wanted to shoot really well, he would lick his thumb and transfer the spit to the metal gun sight on the end of the barrel of his rifle. I tried this technique when I was five, playing Cowboys and Indians. I would carry an imaginary rifle and lick my thumb and swipe it across the imaginary metal sight when I wanted to insure real accuracy with my imaginary bullets.
My father bought me a coonskin cap. I almost broke down into tears I was so happy. The cap and I were inseparable. Most photos taken of me when I was four and five feature me in this hat. But the hat was more than a fashion statement. It was also a symbol. A symbol of the heroic life. Of rugged individualism. Of personal skill. Of manhood.
On television, Davy had to combat men like Mike Fink. You knew they were bad because they had unappealing names and they never shaved. Shaving was a big part of heroism. The one contradiction to the shaving rule was the comic sidekick. For men like Buddy Ebsen and Gabby Hayes, spotty personal hygiene was an indication that despite their good nature and appeal, they had not achieved full hero status.
On television, Davy once had to hypnotize a bear to save a little boy. Even though Davy had a knife and gun, he knew violence was not always necessary. Not always the best way. Not when you had the powers of hypnosis. He knew the ways of the bear almost better than the ways of man.
Like most men, Davy was uneasy on the dance floor, but his wife, Polly, didn’t mind. She knew learning bear hypnosis took time. Davy could only muster an awkward two-step. There were many endearing shots of Polly and Buddy Ebsen smiling and shaking their heads at Davy’s poor but earnest attempts on dance night.
Davy went to Washington, D.C., as a congressman from Tennessee. They all made fun of his clothes and especially the coonskin cap. He was little more than a savage to those blowhards who were running the country. But Davy had a couple of powerful skills: reason and plain speaking. What could have been an embarrassing episode turned once again into triumph.
The television show was so successful Disney decided to cobble all three television movies into an actual motion picture called Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. Davy Crockett on the big screen. This was better than butter pecan ice cream. It opened in downtown Dallas at one of the big theaters, the Tower or the Majestic. The line on that cold, cold Saturday morning had to have two or three hundred children, all in coonskin caps. All of us were there to see Davy Crockett. It included a new installment to the story: Davy Crockett at the Alamo! It sounded exciting.
God help us all.
We had no idea. It was like walking into an airplane propeller. None of us were prepared for the Alamo. The movie began innocently enough. There were bears, there was Polly, there were rasslin’ matches, there were displays of gunmanship with the signature “licking of the thumb and transferring spit to the gun sight.” There were rude, unshaven men bested by Davy.
And then there was more. There was a new character, Jim Bowie. He was well shaven. He carried a huge knife. He also knew his way around a bear. He told Davy about a place called Texas where a man could be a man. Davy listened with interest.
I was uneasy. This didn’t make sense. Why Texas? Tennessee was fine. Tennessee had everything a man could need. Then the fever came and Polly died! Polly died! The fever? What was that? That wasn’t on the television show! Buddy Ebsen tried to comfort Davy in his grief, but Davy was inconsolable. He left for Texas with Jim Bowie. That wasn’t on the television show, either. Something was going terribly wrong.
Davy got to Texas. Frankly, it was not scenic. It looked a lot like the deserty areas of Southern California. There were no bears and no forests. Even worse, there were Mexicans.
The Mexicans were in control of Texas and almost none of them shaved. Davy ended up in a little mission church called the Alamo with a lot of other men. The cleanest of all of them was William Travis. He was almost a sissy he was so clean. He told the men that Sam Houston was trying to get an army together to defeat the Mexicans, and they had to stall the onslaught of Santa Anna at all costs. At all costs. My five-year-old brain could not grasp the significance of “at all costs.”
The Alamo was not a good arena for Davy’s skills. He couldn’t use stealth, he couldn’t rassle, bear hypnosis was useless. He was trapped in a little building. My anxiety level was rising. But then, hurray! Buddy Ebsen showed up full of irony and good humor. His presence gave me a sense that everything would be all right.
It wasn’t. Buddy Ebsen got shot. In the heart. He died in Davy’s arms. He tried to muster a smile as he died—ironic to the end. With his last breath, he said, “I’ll say hello to Polly for you.” I burst into tears. My little five-year-old heart broke.
Heartbreak was not what I had bargained for when I bought my ticket. Buddy Ebsen, the soul of decency and rural humor, was dead. But it was going to get so much worse. The Mexicans stormed the walls. Davy and Jim Bowie fought back to back. A pile of Mexicans formed at their feet. The camera started to pull away. What? The camera pull-away is what always happened at the end of a movie. Was this the end? Certainly Davy could not survive.
How could Disney do this to me? It wasn’t just the end of a story. It was the end of a hero, of a coonskin cap. It was the end of someone I looked up to. Something with real meaning. It was the end of decency, of reason and plain speaking. It was the end of bear hypnosis and all mountain skills lost to the dusty books of time.
Without my hero, what would fill the void? Some of my friends had to wait for Star Trek. Others had to wait for Star Wars. O
ther poor souls still play numbly with their remotes, switching between American Idol and Survivor, hoping for something to replace the coonskin cap.
Two rival thoughts come to mind. One comes from Bertolt Brecht in Galileo. The play ends with Galileo renouncing his findings. A disheartened observer comments, “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo answers him, “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Second is the truism from G. K. Chesterton in the early twentieth century: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”
UNDER THE CATEGORY of those doomed to believe in anything, in March of 1978 an amazing story emerged from Southern California. The story began as the simple escape of a pigmy hippopotamus from a San Diego wildlife park. But this story grew until it gripped the nation. Now, over thirty years later, the event has vanished into the ash bin of history. But these were powerful times to have lived through. I, for one, feel this history deserves resurrection.
One must cast one’s mind back to the sunny days of the late seventies. Jimmy Carter was advocating multiculturalism and the neutron bomb. If you don’t remember the neutron bomb, it was a weapon whose positive feature was that it killed people but left buildings intact. True to form, Carter is still in the housing business.
Multiculturalism is still with us, albeit in a mercifully limited form. Its main expression today is in the kind of take-out you can get in Los Angeles and New York—and the types of holidays celebrated in the Santa Monica School District.
Back in the late seventies, there was a deep belief that multiculturalism could catch on, like folk music in the sixties. In that fever, there was an attempt to find something African to bring to America. It wasn’t going to be slavery this time. We didn’t care for the famines, genocides, and plagues. But just about everybody agreed on the animals. We loved the animals.
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 3
