I'm Your Huckleberry

by Val Kilmer

  They loved it. One examiner called my poem a psalm. Another said it felt like I was auditioning them rather than vice versa. That’s what I was going for. They also liked the fact that I had written a play. Either way, the merciful gods granted me admission. As a sixteen-year-old high school dropout, I became the youngest kid ever accepted to their drama school.

  Mare didn’t want to go to theater school. There wasn’t anywhere for her to go that could help her put together the few last threads of her wedding dress of success she had been hand-stitching since was four or five. She was Bob Dylan–alive, wanted to share it right now. Although THE Juilliard would have welcomed her, she went straight to Hollywood, and within two years, she won an Emmy.

  From the moment I stepped on campus, I was skeptical. The name itself bothered me. You were instructed to say THE Juilliard School. You could not omit the THE. My attitude was, to hell with the THE. A school’s A school. Just as there isn’t THE truth; there’s A truth. My little brother was just taken away and I, too, had some Bob Dylan-now in me—in my naked now.

  Opening day was brutal. It didn’t help to be told that one of the people sitting next to us wouldn’t be there next year. What was this—the marines? It was suggested that of the thirty or so kids in this new class, only half would survive. What would be our ruin? When I asked the question, I was told lack of focus, an inadequate work ethic, and insufficient intellect. Then why were we there to begin with? These instructors couldn’t allow us the innocent delight of initiation without piling on a heaping serving of dread.

  Fear, not Love, was the introductory lesson. Fear of not measuring up. Fear of being dropped. Fear of displeasing the maestros. The mentality was boot camp. Tear the little bastards apart and build them back up. You think you can speak Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter—well, you can’t. Let us make it plain. You do not know how to talk. You do not know how to walk. You do not know how to think. You do not know how to listen. Or laugh. Or cry. Or read Konstantin Stanislavski with even a minimum of comprehension.

  I filled my room on campus with abstract paintings by myself and Wesley to stay humble and inspired and strange. I wrote and drew and resisted a classical approach and a one-sided career. Art was art. And it certainly wasn’t this or that. It was all of it. I would tell my classmates, “We’re paying a truckload of money for tuition. We’re working as waiters to make ends meet, and these puritans are using army training to crush our spirit. Don’t listen to them. They can’t teach because they don’t know how to love. Let’s make up our own class. Let’s find the Love in this work.”

  Training in a Suzuki Method class at THE Juilliard School, 1981

  The question, then, is this: how in hell did I survive four years at THE Juilliard? The answer is that I became A rebel. With a cause. Sometimes quietly, sometimes provokingly loud. I was just a kid developing my style. My cause was to survive the academy and, with some subversive flair, use it to get me into the real world of theater. I knew damn well it was a jumping-off point. It also didn’t help that my father, although he covered my college tuition, liked to manipulate me with money. He paid the rent for my small apartment overlooking Central Park but used that fact to lord over me. When he was displeased with me, he’d stop paying the rent. I’d call and ask why. He’d say that if I didn’t call more often, it wasn’t fair. During the coldest New York winter in seventy years, he ignored my utility bills. The city cut off the heat and I contracted pneumonia. After two years of this folly, I said to hell with him. One of the reasons I had left California for New York was to escape my father. He knew that and pushed back. I saw that I had to push back even more. So I stopped taking his money. Instead I asked my stepdad for a loan that I was able to pay back once I was out in the working world of New York theater.

  First thing we did at THE Juilliard was Richard III. Our teachers called it a “discovery play.” We were supposed to discover ourselves in the play. It should have been called a “discover-how-you’ll-fall-on-your-ass play.” Yet I tackled it, principally because I was cast as Richard. I liked leads. What actor doesn’t? Especially a chance to play a hunchbacked, demented, scheming, evil monarch who opens the play with that most ominous of lines: “Now is the winter of our discontent.”

  I felt like Popeye gobbling down spinach. I gorged on that fiery iambic pentameter and found a superpower. So much so that in the second scene, after saying to a soldier, “Unmanner’d dog!” I took my poor classmate by his costume, a burlap sack, and flung him into the wall of the rehearsal space. Like a cartoon character, he flew right through it, as if it were paper. Well… if that wasn’t a crowd pleaser! Fortunately, the actor wasn’t harmed. In fact, he loved it. He was stuck on the other side of the wall, with just his arms and legs hanging through. We tried to gracefully pull him back through and stay on cue. He was a soldier, one of my boys for the pending war with THE Juilliard School. I loved being hateful Richard. Loved his unmerciful contempt for his physical disfigurement, loved how he declaims, “I, that am rudely stamp’d.” In other words, he hates his looks and uses his fury to steal the crown. To do so, he must seduce Lady Anne, despite the fact that Richard has killed her dad and husband. Gaining her favor requires extreme histrionics. He takes a sword and offers to kill himself, then gives the sword to Anne so she might kill him. All this to prove his repentance. I coaxed the girl playing Anne nearly to impale me.

  At one point I broke character, and when Anne turned away from my boyish flirting, I quickly made a repulsive face. The audience howled. I did all kinds of schtick. The schtick paid off—for Richard and for me. Richard gets the girl and the crown and, in a triumphant monologue, asks, “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won?”

  I myself felt triumphant. Now I’m going to say something that sounds self-serving because it is self-serving. But it’s also the truth. I never played a leading role at THE Juilliard without receiving a standing ovation. I was a teenage actor on fire. Part of that fire was fueled by my animosity for the academy. I was dead set on showing how I could woo and win the audience while ignoring academic techniques.

  What were those techniques? Or is technique even the right word?

  I struggle to explain my methodology. I don’t put myself in the same class as Bob Dylan, but I have a feeling if you asked him to explain his methodology of writing or singing songs, he’d simply say, “I just do it.” That four-word explanation, as simplistic as it might sound, suits me fine. Or as Marlon used to say in a myriad of different ways—though my favorite was always the simplest—“Fill yourself up with all the character’s magic stuff, spin it up, then let fly!” When it comes to acting, I just do it. Those four words could be expanded into four thousand or four hundred thousand. But I’m not sure the expansion would shed much light.

  Actually those four words could be too many. You could cut them in half and say to act is simply to be. If Hamlet is the ultimate role and if “To be or not to be” the ultimate question, then the ultimate answer is yes. Be. It’s actually the same answer God gives when asked to describe his nature: “I am.” That’s it. God has always been my comfort, and Hamlet has always been my man.

  * * *

  Even as a know-nothing youth, I knew how to pray for direction against the faculty’s orthodox dictums. Praying is unifying oneself with life’s purpose. I quote Mary Baker Eddy, “To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relationship to the divine, the spiritual and the eternal is to individualize infinite spirit, and this is Christian Science.” And if the words Christian Science grate on you, may I suggest you substitute the words divine Love. I don’t think KRS-ONE or any great poet gets too hung up on meanings if they are caught up in the spirit, in the moment of inspiration. Mrs. Eddy wrote that Science and Christian were the two most important words in the English language. I have spent over half my life pondering alternatives to those words, attempting to find two that are equally important. This is not the subject of this chapter or even this book. I am merely
attempting to give you an idea of what kind of rabbit hole we were invited or demanded to jump into in our first year at THE Juilliard School. I don’t want to sound pompous or pretentious, but that was my way, even as a teen actor: I was motivated by Love’s purpose. Love said love Richard III. Understand Richard III. Rely on divine principle to see how this desperately unhappy king was able to drain all humanity from his soul. Focus on his drained soul for ten seconds or ten minutes or ten hours. Let go of ideas. Focus on color. Focus on sound without ideas. Let go of everything and sink onto the floor. Maybe lie down and sleep on the floor for a half hour. You wouldn’t believe how I got screamed at for sleeping on the stage floor before rehearsals.

  “What are you doing, Val?”

  “Why are you goofing off, Val?”

  “Why are you asleep at the very moment you need to be awake?”

  I had no answers. To tell them I was simply yielding would not have assuaged their anger. I let them be angry. I continued to sleep.

  When I awoke, often something was there—an understanding I had previously lacked. Mind you, I was never opposed to rehearsal. I liked it. I accepted the notion that craft is endless repetition. It’s finding joy in the smallest gesture. The cat cleans itself with its left foot folded over and repeats the motion fifty times. I can be the cat. I can clean myself. I can practice. I can repeat. I abandon my old conscience and find the new conscience that makes Hamlet a coward. I can be that coward. All this is to say that in the context of an academy dedicated to its own sort of orthodoxy, I learned that the theater of the absurd was more than a genre. The theater has always been an arena of the absurd, whether the classical theater of Shakespeare and Molière or the modern theater of Chekhov and Ibsen. The avant-garde absurdists—Beckett, Genet, Pinter—carried on the tradition. The tradition is a theatrical reflection of life, and the reflection, at least as far as I can see, is always skewed.

  I was blessed to always take it seriously and not seriously at all. Seriously because, as Hamlet said, we may always be on the verge of shuffling off this mortal coil. And that’s a serious thing. But not seriously because, in following perfect man—Willie Nelson’s term for Christ—we know we’ll never achieve that status. If we seriously think that we will, we confuse ourselves with God. Our seriousness will do us in. That’s another reason I’ve always loved the wildly comic theatrical dance.

  That’s the dance I began as a teenage actor. Serious and silly at the same time. Sane and insane at the same time. Allowing myself to travel the distance between eagerness and hesitancy. Willing and unwilling. Teachable and unteachable. Pliable and stubborn. Ready and reluctant. Driven by an inherent need for attention—wherever that need might come from—and tempered by a skepticism of traditional methods to gain such attention.

  All we have as artists is our instincts, to begin with.

  Tadashi Suzuki and the Elusive Nature of Fate

  I am suddenly aware of how, in writing a memoir like this, I can get riled up. Just a few pages back, I was on a tirade, bemoaning the stilted academic ambience of THE Juilliard. I fancy myself a rebel, so at any opportunity, I’ll go off. Hear me roar. Well, I like rebelling and I like roaring, but in this enterprise I’m committed to reflection. I had amazing teachers and directors that made THE Juilliard School THE best school in the world. And I’ll say THE with pride till the day I die.

  The truth is that when I got to THE Juilliard, I had a terribly strong Californian accent, which was only to be replaced by a proper general American kind of transatlantic theater-snob accent. But the godly vocal coach at school, Tim Monich, helped me work my voice like it was a trumpet. He is a master of his craft, also from the West Coast, and a dutiful disciple of the mighty Edith Skinner, whom we had the extreme privilege of studying with in her last years. Tim got me. He was patient, but he gave it to you straight. I vowed to never take a project without him. You’d be shocked at how many directors and producers wouldn’t allow me to bring him on. In so many ways theater is more earnest than film, and I miss it and love it so much.

  Which brings me to someone I can’t forget: Michael Langham, the drama director at THE Juilliard School. Born in England in 1919, Langham fought for the British Army in World War II and spent five years in German prisoner-of-war camps. I’d heard it was in these camps that he honed his theater skills, directing plays among the prisoners. I’d try to get him to talk about it. He never would. He was a gentle, loving man, and we were more than lucky to have him around. He talked to students. Another teacher at THE Juilliard, Alan Schneider, was a pillar of American theater, having directed the American premieres of many Beckett plays including Waiting for Godot, but he talked at us. Big difference. True teachers are givers, and Langham gave all. In his dry manner, he gave Love. He recognized my talent and candor and would call me into his office, wanting to know whether there were any demons among his instructors. I named a few, and I’m convinced he took those few to task. He saw the drawbacks of THE Juilliard School’s rigidity and did his best to loosen things up. But schools are cultures with long histories not easily altered. Michael Langham was a selfless man who did all he could to promote a humane pedagogy.

  Things got a little happier at THE Juilliard School when we did Chekhov’s The Wood Demon, an earlier working of Uncle Vanya Uncle Vanya is brilliant. The Wood Demon ain’t, but it made me appreciate how, by staying true to his craft, the playwright went from the mediocre to the marvelous. It also gave me a chance to advocate for greater equality in our casting, as I insisted the role of my co-lead go to an African American classmate.

  Even more interesting than The Wood Demon was my plan for a play about a nefarious character. It was a collective effort I cowrote with my Juilliard classmates, How It All Began. The project would not have happened without the support of Michael Langham, who encouraged experimental writing. My own attitude was, then and now, unrelentingly proactive. If the material was not there, I’d write it. I relished the idea of writing as a group. I saw it as jazz. Let everyone jam. I unapologetically took the lead: as Michael Baumann—the play was based on his memoir—a man who went from protester to terrorist and then figured out through his newfound religion, rock and roll, that you can’t take away a gun with a gun. The moral of the story was that no matter where we look, whether to Malcolm X or Rudi Dutschke or John Lennon, Love conquers hate in the most unflinching way. We mounted it with the generosity of a hot young director named Des McAnuff.

  Performing Orestes with fellow student Mary Johnson at THE Juilliard School, 1981

  Great opening night—so great, in fact, that renowned producer and director Joseph Papp saw it and convinced THE Juilliard School to put more money into the production. We worked on it all through our third year and then throughout the summer and all through our fourth year. We had it so tight. I graduated on a Friday and on Monday we were doing a tech rehearsal at Papp’s prestigious Public Theater. Papp wasn’t the classiest or the wealthiest or the most well-read, but he created theater for the people. He had a decades-long history of doing it right, workshopping young, emerging talent with seasoned, beloved directors and writers. Joe rubbed sticks together and made fire. The first was a little musical simply called Hair. The second was a more experimental, behind-the-scenes concept. It would come to be called A Chorus Line.

  How It All Began ran for six weeks. The reviews were raves. I was suddenly a pro. But somewhere along the way our monologues grew longer, the play stretched from ninety minutes to more than two hours, and the air went out of the balloon. Arrogance did us in. Or at least did me in.

  I felt the power before I had it. It was from the universe, or it was from my soul. I was about to become one of the youngest stars on Broadway, but as I looked deep inside myself, I felt I wasn’t ready for the honor. Some might have said I was running away from my destiny, and at least one part of that would always be true. I was running. Perhaps I should have hung out and at least gambled a bit with the Icarus myth and tested the strength of the foundation all tho
se amazing teachers and directors and fellow actors had given me. It was so easy though. They just handed it to me, and it was a golden door to the Great White Way. Joe Papp solidified what was a quiet whisper throughout all the in-the-know hipsters of the new American theater, as well as the established classical theater crowd, all eighty-seven of them. It was the hardest work around.

  I went to see every Broadway hit time would allow, and sometimes didn’t allow. The world of working theater is rarefied air, and there aren’t that many who stick it out.

  I saw Sam Shepard’s True West with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise more times than I could count. It was a master class. Theater like that is worth selling your best boots or your wedding ring to see, because it’s priceless and then it’s gone. You can buy another ring. But you can’t go back in time. I remember being so moved that I grew shy. I was so confident in my own play but too nervous to go backstage and sit at Malkovich’s feet. Why? Maybe he would’ve liked a mentee.

  Now that I think about it, it was probably a big mistake. It would have been such a meaningful life, though a far less glittery one. Being a really great theater actor didn’t mean you could necessarily afford a comfortable home or health insurance. I knew actors who had Tonys and lived off bodega bagels, eggs, and cheese. And it started to depress me.

  * * *

  After graduating from THE Juilliard School, I was given two golden opportunities. The first came from my Christian Science practitioner. While in drama school, I continued to attend services. My faith did not flag. I felt the spirit as tangibly as I felt the spring breeze blowing off the Hudson. This practitioner was an elderly woman who had been in vaudeville and found success as an actor before giving up la vida loca for truth and grounding. When it came to ministry, she was the real thing. She had the gift of healing. She said that I too possessed that gift and asked me to accept a role as her acolyte and eventually her replacement. She quoted Mrs. Eddy: “To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine Love; to write truth first on the tablet of one’s own heart—this is the sanity and perfection of living.” I could have stayed. I could have lived a patient life. An earnest life. An experience on earth defined by divine healing.