By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but I got the sense that he considered me among the mediocre, the common—something I had always been terrified of being. I ended up becoming friends with that teacher, and I never asked him about the day of my audition, but I did discover that he was an alcoholic and had a lot of issues. In the end, like so many things, it probably said more about him than it did about me.

  Just about the only other thing I ever thought about when I was at Temple was a girl named Michelle Stern. I met her the first day of school and thought I’d never seen a more beautiful girl in my life. I guess we’d all been sent pictures of our future classmates before the semester started, but I had never opened the packet. She obviously did, though, because she walked up to me and said, “I’m Michelle. You’re Tom, right?” I was transfixed.

  That day, we each had to perform monologues. Although she wasn’t very good—she hadn’t acted much at all—she had the most amazing body I’d ever seen. Later, a bunch of us had dinner, and when she and I were talking, I asked her, “Can I tell you something?” She said something kind of obnoxious, like “Oh, are you going to tell me I’m pretty?” And I said, “Well, you are really beautiful, but also, you were sort of disastrous in your monologue.” She laughed. She knew she was pretty raw. She’d never really acted before and hadn’t done a play until her junior year in college.

  I was thrilled when I wound up at her apartment later that night. I think some guys are afraid of girls who are really beautiful, but I wasn’t. I just desired her in a really profound way. My whole body got hard—not just my dick. But I didn’t want to appear too eager because I was trying to play it kind of cool. But then she whispered something in my ear, and I just flew off the couch and tore off my clothes, and she thought that was funny. We both started laughing and then fell in a sort of joyful embrace on her couch. It really was an outrageously erotic night for both of us, and we didn’t actually get out of bed for about a day and a half. It was only at that point that she told me that she had a boyfriend in Cincinnati, and she was in love. But I stayed in her life, and by the following summer she confessed that she was in love with me. The eighteen months that followed that summer were probably the happiest of my life; it was the first time that I really, truly fell in love, and I don’t know if there’s any better feeling in the world.

  As a student at Temple I became completely immersed in becoming an actor. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know how I managed to become obsessed with something that, let’s face it, is so outrageously unrealistic to do with your life. But it was all I thought about. And I got a lot of encouragement. Faculty members would tell me that I was the best actor who’d been through the school in years.

  Graduate school taught me a great deal. I studied primarily with Dugald MacArthur, who was one of the better teachers there and thoroughly groomed me. I still remember all of my teachers—people like Joe Leonardo, who worked with actors on vocal production, and Kathy Garinella, who was a movement teacher. I also learned how to build sets and took a theater history class with Walt Cherry, the head of the program, and another one with a brilliant theater historian named Michael Burton.

  I was the only first-year student to perform on the main stage there, when I played a rabbi in The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.—a play adapted from a novel by George Steiner. I had to learn Hebrew for the role, and I ended up studying it with a rabbi named Cohen at a synagogue in Philadelphia. I liked Rabbi Cohen so much that I actually enrolled in Hebrew school at his temple, Society Hill Synagogue; I went to that Hebrew school for six months, when I was done with my acting classes for the day. The kids in that school, who were all thirteen-year-olds studying for their bar mitzvahs, thought it was weird that there was this twenty-two-year-old non-Jew there, but I befriended one named Isaac. And I actually seriously toyed with the idea of converting to Judaism and going and living on a kibbutz in Israel. Michelle was Jewish, and even though she wasn’t all that religious, her parents were, and we knew that if we were going to get married we’d have to talk about something like that anyway.

  When I wasn’t studying Hebrew or in my classes, I was learning about movies. I focused on actors who had a presence that made you say, “I’m willing to continue to watch this even though they’re talking about banal shit.” I remember seeing the Robert De Niro–Meryl Streep movie Falling in Love and not liking the movie but knowing that I was watching two actors who were as good as they get and at the height of their powers. It barely mattered to me that I didn’t like the movie: watching them do anything was magnetic.

  Another movie that came out when I was in graduate school was The Big Chill. I was blown away. I thought William Hurt was auspiciously great, and so to see him act alongside Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilly, and Kevin Kline—who I’ve always thought is easily one of the ten best living actors—was exhilarating. I was amazed by the talent but also by the movie in general. It was about such a specific type of feeling—that sense that you’re no longer young but you’re not old, either, and that everything you know about life is being called into question. I felt like I was right there with them—at a point where dying seemed very far away, but, in a way, youth did, too.

  The whole time I was in Philadelphia I knew that it was only a matter of time before I’d go to New York. I understood that that’s where I was going to have to be to actually launch an acting career and I was smart enough to understand that I didn’t have the wherewithal to go there until I’d gotten my MFA. Michelle felt the same way, and we decided to make the move together. And even though I was still deeply in love with her, I also had a feeling of dread about our future because I knew that in order to make it as an actor I probably wasn’t going to be able to make all the compromises that would be necessary to maintain our relationship. And becoming successful as an actor meant everything in the world to me. Still, we found a place in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn and got ready for our lives to start.

  WE MOVED TO New York on July 1, 1986, just a few weeks before the so-called Preppy Murder, when Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park after leaving a bar on the Upper East Side. I don’t know why that event sticks out in my head so much but I think it probably has to do with the fact that this violent murder seemed to be in such stark contrast to the cushion of hopefulness that I felt like I was living in. New York was big and full of possibilities. I don’t think I realized just how big it was until I looked at the phone book one day, saw that there were something like 12 million names in there, and realized I didn’t know one of them. At Temple, I’d been a big star, and on top of that, Michelle and I both had all the exuberance of youth. But we had no connections at all in the real-life acting world and we didn’t know how to get them.

  It was tough in the beginning. I had read in Backstage magazine about how the Ensemble Studio Theatre was where David Mamet and Lanford Wilson launched their new works, so I started taking acting classes there. I felt like I was a freshman in college again. I would do menial chores just to get the chance to dress the stage. And it was worth it. This was a place that had been started by Curt Dempster, who was both a playwright and an actor. He was friends with some of the world’s best playwrights, both those who were already established and those who were coming up—from David Mamet and Horton Foote to John Patrick Shanley. Curt would decide to, say, put on Cyrano de Bergerac; he would play Cyrano and then hire out other New York actors to play the smaller parts. A lot of talented actors came up through Ensemble—people like John Turturro, Ellen Barkin, William H. Macy, and Richard Dreyfuss—and plays would often launch there before moving to Broadway.

  I could tell that Ensemble was the place to be, but at the same time, I was a realist. I’d look around my acting classes, just like every actor does, and think, “Not all of us are going to be in movies—in fact, the odds are that none of us are going to be in movies—so I’d better be the best actor in this fucking class if I’m to continue to do this with any po
ssibility of it being real.” I was determined.

  It was an exciting time to be in New York. I remember I’d walk out of the four-story brownstone apartment building Michelle and I lived in and think that it didn’t matter which way I turned, because a walk in either direction was going to be interesting. But New York’s a tough place. Mike Wallace really embodied the city for me. I’d watch 60 Minutes and think, “This motherfucker is New York City—his whole comportment, how bright and thorough he is, the way he takes everyone to task about everything, and his generosity and his coldness.” New York is a mess of contradictions.

  I was doing everything I knew I had to do to succeed—whether that was hundreds of push-ups every day to stay in shape or obsessively reading Shakespeare plays. Sometimes it felt like I was trapped in a cycle I’d never escape: I wanted to be in movies so it was like, okay, how do you get in a movie? Well, you get a tape of you being in a movie. Well, how do you get the first tape then? The logic would spin round and round like a washing machine.

  In New York City back then, if you didn’t have an agent, you’d go to the Actors’ Equity Association, located at Forty-Fourth Street and Broadway, which was the union for actors and stage managers, because they listed the open calls for theater auditions. If you saw, say, an open call for The Tooth of Crime by Sam Shepard, you’d sign up and sit there for two and a half days to get an audition. I’d go there about once a week, on Tuesdays.

  Because I had to manage my time carefully in New York, between leaving my apartment in the morning and not coming back until nighttime, I started playing chess with the newspaper when I was waiting around at Actor’s Equity. One day, some big Italian guy walked up to me and said, “Tired of playing with yourself? Because I am.” It was James Gandolfini, who later, of course, gained fame starring in HBO’s The Sopranos. Actors who are that good are usually very bright and funny, and Jimmy is no exception.

  I was also seeing a lot of theater and getting a strong sense of which actors who were already making it were legitimately great. I saw John Malkovich do True West with Gary Sinise on Broadway, and he was magnificent. When I saw him play Biff opposite Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman, I saw how really good he was. But at the same time—and I realize how conceited this sounds—I thought I was just as good, if not better, than the biggest actors out there. I don’t think I would have continued to pursue acting in the dogged way that I was if I didn’t believe that. I understood that if I made it, it wasn’t going to be because I was pretty; I just believed in my raw talent. Of course, you can’t be objective about yourself, but something in me still believed that I was as good as the actors I was watching, and that made me continue to pursue it even though I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  At the time I was doing odd jobs like loading trucks for UPS and Coca-Cola and working at nightclubs. It was when I was working at the clubs that I started to see people doing a lot of drugs. I was curious about them, but I wasn’t doing any of that myself really. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Chet Baker—all my cultural heroes had been somehow connected to drugs, so I believe I had a constant back-of-my-mind fixation with the dark side. I was highly aware of the fact that in the sixties, all the guys who were considered cool were drugging and they always had all the girls. But I also wanted to be the best actor in my class, and that kept me from living anything but a fairly clean life. I wanted my acting teachers to keep telling me that they thought I was going to be a star, so I wasn’t going to get all fucked-up at night and then go to acting class hungover in the morning.

  For three years, I worked at a catering company called Great Performances, which would handle functions like home dinner parties hosted by wealthy New Yorkers. The food would be pre-prepared by a great cook who would show up with a staff of waiters in tuxedos, and we would serve the dinner. Every actor in town wanted to work there. Your day was over by one o’clock, which meant that you had the rest of your day free for possible auditions. You had to get to work at four in the morning so everything would be ready to roll two hours later, but that was a small price to pay.

  I worked there for three years. At the time, they had a contract for the executive dining rooms of the Port Authority at the World Trade Center and at Kennedy Airport. I spent most of my time at the World Trade Center. I didn’t like working at the parties. I felt jealous of the rich people, and some of them treated us horribly. Nasty nouveau riche women would tell me that my pants weren’t long enough and that I had to go home to change; I’d go sit down somewhere, then come back in the same fucking pants and they’d say, “Oh, those are perfect.” It was bullshit.

  Even in that job I was ambitious, and decided I had to be the featured waiter in the executive dining room. My boss there—a lovely African-American gentleman named Ken Stiles—ran the executive dining room and had been doing it for fifteen years at that point. If I had an audition at 12:30 P.M., he’d let me go early and then pretend he had to send me out to do an errand; that way no one from Port Authority could get on my case for not being there.

  Eventually, I did become the featured waiter. By then Michelle was working as a hostess at Fafi, a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. But a year and a half into our life in New York, we were still working these server jobs. Moreover, I was starting to feel less passionate about our relationship.

  In the spring of 1987, at an audition for a Sam Shepard play, Cowboy Mouth, I met a pretty, red-haired, very talented girl named Tisha Roth. There were just two people in this play—Sam and Patti Smith played the parts initially—and Tisha got the female part. I didn’t get the male one, but I was so mesmerized by her, I almost didn’t care. I was also doing another play at the time—The Indian Wants the Bronx at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Tisha had been working at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, at Williams College—it was where all of the seriously talented people went; Christopher Walken was also there that summer. Tisha was considered one of the best actresses there.

  After Tisha and I met, we started spending a lot of time together. I hadn’t been with anybody but Michelle for nearly five years—hadn’t even kissed anybody else—but when I met Tisha, my attraction to Michelle began to cool. I was confused because up until that point I’d pretty much assumed I’d stay with Michelle forever.

  One night at Tisha’s apartment, we began fooling around. I broke down, though, because I felt so guilty about Michelle—I literally started crying. Tisha was very concerned and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know how to explain it.

  I didn’t know—and I still don’t—how people fall out of love with each other. It really is one of the great mysteries of adulthood. And after that night with Tisha, I was trying to make sense of my feelings around all of this. I was writing a lot in my journal, and then Tisha and I started exchanging letters. And here’s what an idiot I am: I liked the letters I was writing her so much that I photocopied them. They weren’t love letters—they were mostly about why I felt like I couldn’t just jump into a relationship with her because I didn’t know when I’d be emotionally ready to do that again. This letter writing went on for several months.

  In late May of that year, Michelle found all the letters. And she read every fucking word of them. When I came home that day, she said, “You have to move the fuck out.” She didn’t know who Tisha was, and she didn’t care. She just said it was clear that I was in love with somebody else, and I had to go.

  I was in deep shock. I’d kept the letters behind my dresser in our bedroom, in an envelope taped to the back. They were very well hidden. But she was cleaning some area where she never cleaned and found them. And when Michelle was done, she was done. She didn’t care that kicking me out was going to make her life harder. I honestly hadn’t known she had that kind of strength until she did that.

  It was terrible. I had loved our life and our little apartment on Clinton and Degraw, two blocks from Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn. Michelle understood that I wasn’t great with directions and that this was the only part of New York I knew, so she calle
d the landlord of our building and asked if he had any other apartments in the area; he did, and she found me a new place the very next day. I was inconsolable, but she was very matter-of-fact about everything, and in fact packed up all my stuff. She didn’t let the kind of shape I was in prevent what had to happen. I begged her to let me stay, but she just wasn’t hearing it. Within four days she had me packed up and moved. Not only that, but she’d also found me furniture, bought me toiletries and cleaning supplies, and hired the movers.

  I moved two and a half blocks from Michelle but she wouldn’t see me at all. Still, she was such a good person that she wanted to keep track of me until she knew I was going to be okay. Of course, I wasn’t okay for a while—I cried for a year and could barely get through my life at all in the first six months.

  I realized I had to go home, to Michigan—to my mom. I took a leave of absence from the catering job and stayed with my mom for two months. And once I was there, I was so disconsolate that I didn’t get out of bed for twelve days. Finally my mother said, “You have to get over the sadness. You have an apartment back in New York—you signed a lease there.” My dad came over and told me, “I know you’re afraid you’ll never fall in love again, but you will.” And then my mom said something I’d never heard from her: “I know that I didn’t support this idea of you being an actor six years ago, but I do now. Because you’re good at it and you’re only going to improve.”