Drama: An Actor's Education

by John Lithgow

  But there was something seriously wrong with this picture. My mother, my father, and my little sister, Sarah Jane, had moved out of Princeton, having lost their university-owned apartment. My father was no longer employed by Princeton University. He was out of a job. During a sabbatical from his duties as artistic director of McCarter Theatre, the Princeton administration had seized the moment to unceremoniously fire him. While my parents’ pride might have spurred them to move far away from the source of such an indignity, they had a compelling reason to stay in the area. Having lived in Princeton for eleven years, Sarah Jane was the only one of their children to spend all of her childhood in the same school system, the only one who had never suffered the trauma of being the new kid in town. Mom and Dad wanted to spare her that. They wanted her to finish up at Princeton High School before they left. So they had rented the Plainsboro farmhouse, doing their best to put on a brave face, enjoy a far less stressful life, and avoid all thoughts, as they surveyed the vast fields surrounding them, of being put out to pasture.

  When my father was let go from Princeton, the rationale handed down from above was that the quality of the company’s work had slipped. Arthur Lithgow, they declared, was no longer achieving a sufficiently “exciting” level of theatrical fare. This explanation enraged me, especially as it was couched in the fatuous phrases of Ivy League doublespeak. What did a bunch of stuffy, hidebound academics know about professional theater? Who did they think they were? And what the hell did they mean by “exciting”?! But beneath my indignation there was a hidden strain of guilt. My father had lost his job for many of the very reasons that I had chosen to stop working for him. Like his Princeton employers, I had wanted something better. I had left his company at the very moment when he most needed my support. And now my career had taken off like a rocket just as his had suffered a devastating setback. He was fifty-seven years old, eight years younger than I am as I write these words, and he had no idea where he was going next.

  For both my father and me, it was a season of deep conflict and painful contradiction. Success was countered by failure, pride by guilt, soaring confidence by gnawing doubt. I suppose that my dad’s circumspect nature stood him in good stead during that time. It was certainly a boon to me. I can only imagine his hidden feelings of injury and humiliation caused by his treatment at the hands of Princeton University. He must certainly have succumbed to occasional spasms of envy directed at Arvin Brown, and personal hurt that I had chosen Arvin’s theater over his. But outwardly he remained his sweet and genial self. To my eyes his delight in the success of The Changing Room was warm and genuine. He welcomed the cast to his home with effusive good will. If the events of the preceding year had taken their toll on him, he never showed it. He never betrayed a hint of self-pity nor made the slightest bid for sympathy. He may have revealed his bitterness and disappointment to my mother, but none of us saw a glimpse of it. Only in retrospect have I come to see what a Herculean effort that must have been for him. By keeping his pain to himself, he allowed me my first undiluted taste of success in a profession that had treated him shabbily and without mercy. It was a father’s selfless gift to a son. I love him for it.

  [25]

  Mr. Pleasant

  It is not for nothing that an actor is said to “give a performance.” At its essence, acting is a gift to an audience, whether that gift is delivered from a stage or a screen. An actor gives something to an audience and, with any luck, the audience gives him something in return. When this curious transaction is successful, everybody is happy. The audience is elated and the actor is fulfilled. Things get a little warped when the actor loses sight of his mission, when he forgets its essential generosity, when he feels that he is not getting his due, that his audience is not sufficiently responsive, grateful, adulatory. At such moments, another diva is born and unleashed on the world. All actors are susceptible to this syndrome. Every single one of us. Applause is a narcotic, and we’re all prone to addiction. The great challenge is to always remember a simple truth: that acting is not about us, it’s about them. I once worked with an actor who had forgotten that truth long before, if indeed he had ever known it at all.

  I’m disinclined to defame this man, so I’ll call him Rock. Rock Masters. I acted with him in a movie. I’ll return to him in a moment.

  Photograph by Martha Swope. Courtesy Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

  After the heady success of The Changing Room, I spent an entire year on Broadway performing in a dopey play called My Fat Friend. This was a campy four-character British farce whose main plot line concerned the drastic weight loss of its portly young leading lady. The play was a forgettable trifle, considerably elevated by the blithe performances of two terrific actors, Lynn Redgrave and George Rose. In the role of their dour, young Scottish flatmate, I had a great time playing second banana to these two expert comedians. I admired them both deeply and loved their bubbly comradeship. Besides, a year’s salary on Broadway was an unaccustomed luxury. It allowed Jean, Ian, and me to set up New York housekeeping again, in a bigger apartment with a comfortable, predictable daily life. But due to an insecurity born of my earlier hard times in the city, I clung to the show for far too long. After an entire year on Broadway, I joined Lynn and George on tour to Detroit and Toronto. When that was over, I still couldn’t let go. I soldiered on without them in a slapdash New Jersey stock production of the play at the Paramus Playhouse on the Mall. A year of weekly paychecks had created a severe dependency in me, and I desperately needed to break it. A change was long overdue.

  Happily, a filmmaker friend of mine came calling. Him I will call Paolo. Paolo had dreamed up a deliciously lurid suspense film set in Europe. I’ll call it Interdit. Shooting was all set to start and he wanted me to be in it.

  Interdit was second-generation Alfred Hitchcock. The leading role in the film is a man who falls in love with a much younger woman. This infatuation pulls him out of a long period of his life during which he has grimly buried himself in his work. The man has a longtime best friend who appears to have grave doubts about the disturbing intensity of his old friend’s love for the young girl. But true to the film’s Hitchcockian antecedents, the friend’s kind-hearted concern is not all that it appears to be. I played the devious best friend. The starring role was played by Rock Masters. Working with him would prove to be more than just a job. It was an education.

  By this time in his career, Rock Masters was running on fumes. He was navigating the rough waters of a middle-aged leading man’s faltering career. His genial manner was tinged with desperation. For him, starring in Interdit was a chance to regain some lost credibility in the movie business. The plot of the film paired the two of us in a complex psychological chess game, full of mystery, duplicity, and shocking revelations. It was a meaty on-screen relationship, the kind most actors would kill for. I had practically salivated when I first read the script. I suspect that Rock was pretty excited, too. But he could have been forgiven for feeling a little concerned when he learned that he would be partnered with an unknown, untested New York theater actor half his age.

  When the film’s cast and crew assembled on location in Europe, things started off promisingly enough. As so often happens in the odd world of filmmaking, I met Rock for the first time at a tedious afternoon-long session of makeup tests. That very morning I had stepped off a plane after a red-eye flight from New York, having delivered my last performance of My Fat Friend back in Paramus only twenty hours before. I was stupefied with jet lag but I managed to strike up the beginnings of a friendly working relationship with both Rock and his young costar, a Gallic beauty whom I’ll call Julianne Clement. The makeup tests were conducted under the watchful eyes of director Paolo and his cinematographer (call him “Laszlo”).

  A lot was at stake. The plot of the film cuts back and forth between two time periods. Rock was fifty and I was just shy of thirty, but we had to look the same age in every scene. Hence half the time I needed to
look twenty years older than my actual years and the other half Rock needed to look twenty years younger. This is what made the makeup tests so tricky and time-consuming. Through the fog of my jet lag I heard long, urgent discussions among Paolo, Laszlo, and Rock. Appearances, it seemed, were going to be a big issue on this film.

  Not just a big issue. A big problem. Appearances were at the heart of a fading film acting tradition to which Rock Masters still fiercely adhered. According to this tradition, good looks were everything. Years before, Rock had carefully constructed a distinctive screen persona. He wasn’t about to diverge from it. Thus he had devised several strategies to ward off incremental signs of change. His hair had begun to turn gray and thin out. He dyed it jet-black and battled hair loss with implants. These were several-inch-long strands of hair. He wrapped them around his scalp like a turban, massaged them into a sculpted helmet, and instructed the film’s hairdresser to stipple the underlying patches of bare scalp with inky black stain. To Laszlo’s dismay, Rock had schooled himself in the art of movie lighting. Whenever the crew had finished lighting a scene, Rock would stride onto the set with a tiny mirror, hold it eight inches from his eyes, and instruct the gaffer to add a tiny spotlight, called an “inky,” to lend an extra sparkle to his eyes. He was also inordinately concerned with appearing too short on film. Hence he wore inch-high lifts inside his shoes, insisted on standing on an apple box in every two-shot, and lagged back a step or two whenever he walked down a flight of steps with another actor.

  And then there was that contentious issue of makeup. For years Rock had used the exact same bronzer to give him the manly face of a rugged, leathery cowboy. On every film he brought along his own supply. This had been the subject of the muttered conversations on the day of those makeup tests: Paolo wanted Rock to dispense with his beloved bronzer. The character had led a sequestered, office-bound life for twenty years, Paolo argued. It didn’t make sense for him to look like The Marlboro Man. In test after test, Paolo coaxed Rock to use less and less makeup. Finally Rock relented and Paolo was satisfied. But a week later, on the first day of shooting, Rock showed up on the set having already done his own makeup back at his hotel. He’d used the same old bronzer, slathered on thicker than ever. He was as ruddy as Sitting Bull, as if all those makeup tests had never happened. Paolo fumed. Laszlo despaired. Rock won.

  This was only our first day of shooting. There was much more to come. Day by day I began to perceive Rock’s priorities. It seemed that film acting to him was not about building a character, shaping scenes, or relating to other actors, and it certainly wasn’t about “giving to the audience.” It appeared to be about the everlasting pursuit of his own close-ups. To this end he had invented a system of doling out his energies. In the coverage of any given scene, his acting would be wooden and monotone all through the masters and two-shots. Only when he was being filmed in close-up did his performance come alive. By this means Rock calculated that the director and editor would be forced to heavily favor his close-ups when it came time to cut the scene together. And it wasn’t enough for him to supercharge his own close shots. When it was time for his fellow actors’ close-ups, he would lifelessly mumble his lines off camera, giving them almost nothing to play off.

  Sometimes Rock would go even farther. In one scene halfway through the script, he and Julianne were locked in a passionate embrace. It was first shot from an angle that favored Rock. His face was nicely framed as he embraced and kissed her. Next the camera and lights were reset for an angle that favored Julianne. As Rock embraced her with his back to the camera, he lifted his shoulder, covering half her face. Paolo cut the take and mentioned to Rock the little problem with the shoulder. Rock assured him that he would make an adjustment on the next take. The camera rolled again. Once again his shoulder rose up, and once again Julianne was blocked, tilting her face backwards as she struggled to be seen. Paolo repeated the same note. Rock cheerfully acknowledged it. Take three. Up went the shoulder. Another note, another nod, another take, and once again the shoulder went up. The three of them danced this little minuet five or six more times. The tension on the set approached the boiling point. Everyone felt it but Rock, who remained relaxed, affable, and eager to help out. At last Paolo gave up and moved on to the next setup. Another round had gone to Rock.

  A year later when the film was released, there was that embrace up on the screen. It plays in only one angle, with Rock’s ardent face nicely on display and Julianne seen from behind. You can see the editor’s dilemma. Why feature a shot in which a beautiful young starlet looks like a drowning woman, struggling to come up for air?

  As the shooting went on, I watched all of Rock’s moves with a kind of queasy wonderment. I was a starry-eyed innocent with the scales falling from my eyes. Confronted with all of these elaborate mind-games I began to self-protectively develop a few of my own. I made myself into Rock’s guileless disciple, peppering him with questions about his technique as if I had never set foot on a film set. I figured the more I was attentive to him, the less he would ambush me. For his part, Rock relished the role of crusty mentor. He would take me into his confidence and share with me his crafty wiles.

  One day on a city street, Rock and I were shooting a scene where we simply walked out of a building and climbed into a car. Paolo was covering the two of us in a broad master shot, followed by a closer shot of Rock as he got behind the wheel. Rock wanted to be sure that the closer shot would end up in the final edit.

  “Watch this,” he told me.

  As we shot the master, he would do something slightly wrong on every take. He would trip on the curb, drop his briefcase, bump the fender of the car, or fail on his first attempt to open the car door.

  “You see?” he said.

  “See what?”

  “Now they’ll have to use the closer shot.”

  “That’s incredible, Rock!” I said. “What do you call this?”

  Rock grinned and winked at me.

  “Trickery,” he growled.

  Despite all of this on-set gamesmanship, Rock’s demeanor was amiable, courteous, and masterfully disingenuous. Anyone visiting the set of Interdit would have envied us the privilege of working with such a gracious, considerate star. But movie crews are a cynical bunch. They’ve seen it all and they catch on fast. In no time they became aware of every hoary trick Rock was playing. He was fooling no one, least of all Paolo and his editor. By the end of the shoot, everyone on the set was referring to him behind his back by the pet name they had coined for him. They called him “Mr. Pleasant.”

  Interdit was released in the U.S. under another name. Its French title had not survived the rigorous market testing of its American distributor. It had a middling success in the States but did little to revive Rock Masters’ career. It was the last substantial leading role he ever played in films. But I took no pleasure in his decline. I’d actually liked the man. In fact, I was pleased for him when he recently scored a modest triumph in his late seventies, playing a small role in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. In retrospect, his strenuous self-aggrandizement during the filming of Interdit strikes me as sad, self-deluding, and almost poignant. He was clinging to a Hollywood that no longer existed. He was playing by rules that no longer applied. Teaching me those rules was his version of an actor’s generosity. Working with him had been an education all right. But it was an in-depth tutorial in how not to act in a movie.

  While we were on location in Europe, three of Paolo’s friends paid him a visit. By chance these three men had gathered in a nearby city to work on the script for a film that they would shoot in New York City the following summer. One of these friends was a screenwriter, one a director, and one an actor. Among them they were in the process of reinventing American movies. Their film would be dangerous, disturbing, and brutally real. It would be one of a handful of 1970s films that would shake Hollywood to its roots. It would be called Taxi Driver. The screenwriter was Paul Schrader. The director was Martin Scorsese. The actor was Robert De Niro. Their pr
esence made poor Rock Masters look like a dinosaur nearing extinction.

  [26]

  Broadway Baby

  © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. www.alhirschfeld.com.

  For me, the 1970s was Broadway. From The Changing Room in 1973 until the end of the decade, I acted in a dozen Broadway shows. It feels as if half of my waking life in those years was lived within the ten square blocks of the New York theater district. To be sure, I occasionally worked elsewhere. I did a couple of plays off-Broadway, one in D.C., one in San Francisco, and another one back at the Long Wharf. I directed two or three more times. I played smallish parts in a few more movies, one of which even took me back out to Hollywood for a month. But Broadway was my gravitational center, and I spent the overwhelming majority of my time there.

  How do you distill a decade of work on Broadway without sounding like a tedious windbag in a theater bar? Describing each one of those dozen plays would be like describing all the marching bands after a parade has passed by. Each band may have its own distinctive look, sound, and personality, but in retrospect they all become one big clamorous blur. How can I persuade anyone that there was anything special about any of my twelve Broadway shows in the seventies, or that they were even worth seeing? Theater is of the moment. Breathless self-praise, no matter how descriptive, can never recapture its impact after the fact. Simply put, you had to have been there.

  And yet each of those shows was a formative and memorable chapter in my own history. Those twelve directors, those half-dozen playwrights, those nine different playhouses, those scores of fellow actors, those endless hours of rehearsals, those hundreds of performances, those tens of thousands of spectators, that army of drama critics and their reams of theater reviews—all of these played a role in shaping me as an actor. I have always felt that my early Broadway years were an incalculable gift, a priceless part of my actor’s education. By the end of that decade I knew who I was onstage. I had learned what I did well and, more to the point, what I did badly. I had my successes and my failures, my rave notices and my withering pans. But nearly all of this took place in the friendly confines of the theater district. My hits and misses were watched not by the vast American film and television audience but by a comparatively tiny population of demanding yet forbearing New York theatergoers.