by Jon Cryer
I always joke that the dynamic of our group was along the lines of Leopold and Loeb, but with the capacity to harm turned toward ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: Kids in our neighborhood played all the wholesome-looking games that movies about New York have always depicted—stickball, handball, ringolevio—but our playtime often took a different turn. We had games like “Overzealous Security Detail,” “Prison Snitch,” “Careless Gas Station Attendant,” and, one of my all-time faves, “Fraudulent Pot Bust.” That last one goes like this: Two of us would pretend to be cops who, upon stopping the third in his tracks and rifling through his pockets, would stuff a plastic Baggie in his pocket, pull it out, and then growl, “What’s this, marijuana?” and proceed to pummel him repeatedly. Pretty much all our “games” ended with someone getting pummeled, or merely tortured, or farted upon, or all of the above. Score was never kept.
Then there was the time our fondness for lighting fireworks-laden paper planes and throwing them out the window—a “game” I titled “Nightmare in MiG Alley”—went a bit awry. I know, I know. How is that possible? Well, David lit a firework, and as he was preparing to launch, it went off by his ear. He shrieked, because he was in pain. Artie and I laughed, because we were those kinds of friends.
David started screaming, “Do I still have my fingers?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What?” said David.
“I said YES!”
“Do I still have my fingers?”
“YES!”
“WHAT?!”
At which point Artie or I probably checked to see if what David was missing was an ear. (He wasn’t.)
One time David and I participated in a séance at the Equity Library Theatre, in the hopes of contacting the ghost of a dead Russian. The Master Apartments building, which then housed the Equity Library Theatre and still stands as a beautiful art deco monument on the Upper West Side, was built in 1929 in part as a showcase/haven/command center for a guy named Nicholas Roerich. He was a Russian-born artist who attracted a worldwide following to his brand of Eastern-influenced mysticism and philosophy. Roerich believed, for instance, that during the years of Jesus’s life the Bible skips over, Jesus traveled to Asia and studied Buddhism. He was a controversial dude, to say the least, and the Master building had a museum dedicated to the guy’s art. It was also thought that Roerich’s ghost haunted the place.
Well, those of us who worked as ushers at the Equity Library Theatre—which used to host Roerich’s lectures—had to find out. One night, we waited till everyone left after the show, and set up our spirit-calling circle of chairs onstage. Someone took down the portrait of Roerich from the lobby and put it in the center of the circle, his bald-headed, wizard-bearded mug staring into our souls as if he knew this day would come.
Shit got quiet. Then the chanting began. First his name.
“Nicholas Roerich . . . Nicholas Roerich . . . Nicholas Roerich . . .”
Not everyone knew exactly how to say it, so some pronounced it “Row-ritch,” while others of us—the smart ones—said “Roarick.”
Pretty soon we just started saying all kinds of weird stuff, just because we were in the mood. Some of us got up and moved around, the way you make fun of interpretive dance.
Then all the red lights in the theater turned on at the same time.
The simultaneous shriek that detonated from that group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds was like a hydrogen bomb of adolescent panic. It had to have burst an eardrum or two. The dash for the exits would have impressed a crack team of firefighters. David turned to me and kept saying, “Give me my cane! Give me my cane! Give me my cane!” As if he needed it, he was out of there so fucking fast.
My brain, meanwhile, went into shock, and then decided to update my reservoirs of accepted wisdom, as if adapting to the sudden proof that ghosts were real. Like a catastrophic data loss followed by a high-speed upload, I began believing in everything my supposedly rational teenage brain always thought wasn’t true. Bigfoot? Obviously. Loch Ness Monster? Of course. UFOs? Fuck, yeah. Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Documentary. That money under my pillow when I was five? That was from a goddamn tooth fairy!
The sad part is that this was still coursing through my consciousness as we were all in the lobby catching our breath and house manager Russ emerged from a connecting door, laughing his ass off. He’d stayed behind to fuck with us, as anybody with a sense of humor would have, and must have loved the psych-out carnage on display. But it took the rest of the night for me to decompress, which was weird. It was like I had to personally shove each myth back into its hole in the newly revived skeptical part of my brain.
I grew up surrounded by the theater, which looked fun, but also seemed to me an oddly unattainable world, something beyond my reach. Perhaps this was because I surmised that stage performers needed to have an actual skill, like acting or singing or dancing, or all three, and I possessed not a one. I couldn’t even do a card trick.
Television, on the other hand, was this warm, funny, comforting babysitter, and from around the age of about eight on, I was pretty obsessed with it—The Carol Burnett Show, Barney Miller, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family, Maude, The Bob Newhart Show, Saturday Night Live, The Jeffersons. I know the Golden Age of television is often referred to as the 1950s, but the 1970s were right up there in my opinion. I mean, The Facts of Life, people. You watched it. Don’t deny it. You cared when Jo shed that rebel pose and let her soft side show. You loved it when Mrs. Garrett got off a zinger. And you knew, deep down inside, we are all Natalie. (If you are under thirty, I apologize for this series of words and names that make no sense. I hope in the future that you continue to think this book is “tight.”)
But it never occurred to me that performing on the tube was something to aspire to, maybe because when I heard those immortal words “Live from Television City in Hollywood!” it sounded like television was a commuter destination or a tourist spot, not a magical land of art.
That’s where movies came in. A darkened theater is where my showbiz aspirations really began.
I came of age in the dawn of the blockbuster, after all, when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas inspired moviegoers with their mixture of old-fashioned storytelling and eye-popping visuals. Event movies like Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark were just about my favorite things on earth.
Unlike today’s special-effects behemoths, the movies of that era couldn’t be so overly hyped in advance. Back then, we didn’t know what we were in for when we stepped inside the theater. When Star Wars first appeared at the Loews Astor Plaza in 1977, I remember going with my mother, her then-boyfriend Tony, and Tony’s son, whom I got along well with, and while Tony’s son and I were excited to see it, we weren’t crazy-excited, because we’d seen only a couple of commercials. There was no Internet to tease and spoil the discovery of it. All we knew was that we thought it looked cool, so we gave it a chance.
For two unspoiled, blissfully unprepared sci-fi-loving kids, then, that first shot in Star Wars was a real declaration of wow. A tiny ship shoots into view from the top of the screen, taking fire from something, which we learn moments later is an enormous spaceship whose undercarriage (is there a better word for it?) hovers over our view ominously. It also seems to go on forever, the massiveness slowly dawning on everyone in the audience, and I recall Mom’s boyfriend Tony bursting out laughing at the audacity of the movie’s opening. As soon as that Imperial Star Destroyer passed by in full, showcasing its gigantic burners, Tony burst into applause and more laughter. Then I did, and so did nearly everyone else in that theater. Nobody had seen an establishing shot of grandeur like that before, and ever since, whenever a movie floors me with something completely unexpected and awe-inspiring, I hoot and clap. This is why we go to movies, no?
I had to be a part of moviemaking after that. It changed e
verything for me. At first I wanted to direct movies, as evidenced by the painstakingly crafted Super 8 films I made at home featuring the Japanese-originated line of toys sold in America as Micronauts. I would have been happy in any behind-the-scenes capacity, actually: special-effects technician, production designer, even an errand-running assistant. Whatever was going to get me close enough so I could observe cinematic brilliance as a Spielberg or a Scorsese creates that jaw-dropping moment that makes someone like me hoot and clap.
I had also grown to love the idea of “Hollywood,” to the extent that when I was a grade schooler visiting my dad after he moved there to kick-start a movie career as an actor, I could stand on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard completely starstruck by a name in brass on the ground and ignore what a disaster the neighborhood around it had become. I distinctly remember at nine years old idling on the sidewalk outside of C. C. Brown’s (an old-school ice-cream parlor that had seen better days), staring at Mary Tyler Moore’s name and imagining that if I waited long enough, I was sure to catch a glimpse of her as she stopped by regularly to properly care for her star, conscientiously scraping the gum off the charcoal terrazzo.
By then, the old Hollywood studio system lay in tatters, torn to shreds by filmmakers like Arthur Penn, John Schlesinger, and Robert Altman, who ushered in the modern era of adult-oriented drama, then later by the independent film world, which upended the studios’ entire business models. None of the old rules seemed to apply. I was fascinated by showbiz news. I loved the often farcical stupidity of the town, the ridiculous, unnecessary drama, the myopic greed, the insane genius, the venality, the tasteless vulgarity, the wasted millions, the wasted actors, and the wasted lives. It was all wildly entertaining, often more so than the movies themselves.
David Dennis’s brother Gary, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of film, showed me a copy of Kenneth Anger’s groundbreaking pictorial history of tabloid Tinseltown, Hollywood Babylon. I was transfixed by its mix of real regard for the artistic accomplishments of its denizens as well as lurid interest in the unseen dark side of their personal lives.
The seventies had unleashed the sexual revolution on cinema as well as on the people who worked in it. And as I started to understand the concept of sex, it also occurred to me that this place I’d heard of called the Playboy Mansion was somewhere near this so-called Hollywood town. And that meant that, by extension, Bo Derek was nearby as well. Because I was sure she lived there.
I pictured the mansion as sort of the Pentagon of nooky, the world headquarters of this campaign of carnality, replete with scantily clad female generals gathered around glowing strategy tables planning indecence on a global scale.
Hollywood took on a patina of alluring decadence. If the theater was another planet, then Hollywood was a galaxy far, far away. But one where I hoped one day to live, preferably in a reasonably priced studio apartment. Near the Playboy Mansion.
Performing was certainly one way to dip my toe in the showbiz waters and get me closer to my celluloid dreams, so I made some tentative steps in that direction in my early teen years through the most convenient venue: school. It started at Simon Baruch Junior High—commonly referred to as 104—where I had a chorus teacher named Bob Sharon, a gifted musician and admirably stern taskmaster. (I picked chorus as an elective not because I thought I could sing, but because my sister, Robin, was in it.) Mr. Sharon expected a lot out of his kids, and therefore got a lot from them. We were in a public school, but under his tutelage we might as well have been in the most elite conservatory. He inspired devotion and hard work to the extent that acceptance into the highest-level chorus—called the madrigal society—earned you a goofy yellow hat that looked like a four-cornered throw pillow on your head. It was a truly ugly piece of headwear, and yet people strived for the privilege to wear it as if it bestowed magical powers.
A plum assignment for a student in Mr. Sharon’s chorus was performing at old-age homes, partly, of course, because it meant getting out of school. My education in Jewish culture got a further boost because we had to learn lots of Jewish folk songs. To this day I know a lot more of that music than most Jews I know. During a play recently about an elderly Jewish woman, the character started singing “Rozhinkes mit mandlen,” and I instinctively turned to my wife and began whispering, “It means ‘Raisins and Almonds,’ and she’s singing how she’d give that as a gift, even though they’re very expensive. . . .” My wife was only somewhat surprised to discover that her husband had suddenly become a Talmudic scholar.
Though the only reason I was in chorus, as opposed to the drama department or the art department, was because of Robin. When Mr. Sharon began casting the school’s production of West Side Story, he plucked me from the chorus, and I got a one-line role as a Jet known as Big Deal. It was my first exposure to this great musical—that fantastic Leonard Bernstein score, and Stephen Sondheim’s witty, soaring lyrics—and to be a part of it felt pretty cool. And because this was New York, we had actual Puerto Ricans as Sharks, and truly white Jets.
Come showtime, facing an auditorium packed with hundreds of kids and parents, I had my line down cold, and in my mind I was a pantherish Russ Tamblyn type with a voice as booming as Ethel Merman’s. Make way, everyone. The first act is about to go nuclear. . . .
“But the gym’s neutral territory!”
I’d been a nervous wreck until my big moment halfway through the first act, and the sense of relief that washed over me after I brought the thunder is something I still remember. Now I could blend in with the chorus, and if I screwed up the choreography a bit, who would care, right? Only later, upon hearing the vinyl recording they made of the show—yes, vinyl, that’s how elderly I am—and seeing a primitive videotape of it, did I realize how I actually came off: as a distracted pudge ball with a vaguely disturbing zombie stare who got maybe half the choreography right, barely moved when I did the steps anyway, and whose big line had all the impact of a mouse sneeze.
“But the gym’s neutral territory!”
And because this is a junior high school production, everybody else is screaming their lines at the top of their lungs with absolutely no variation. That aspect of the show was hilarious enough, but at least you heard them. Then I came along, sounding as if I’d been in a locked box off to the side of the stage. I can only imagine the epidemic of quizzical glances and utterings among the audience members.
“Something about a chimp?”
“Did they let a hamster onstage?”
“Is that little girl okay?”
Of course, at the time of the performance, I was blissfully unaware of all this. Being involved in that West Side Story was actually quite fun, and for a brief, shining moment made a nervous, timid boy with a suitcase full of anxieties feel connected. I felt a part of something artistic, even if it wasn’t a movie, and I could sense a performance seed in me sprouting. Pursuing acting might just be worth my time, I realized, which made the summer looming ahead all the more intriguing.
Chapter 3
The Fish-in-a-Barrel Situation
Before High School Musical and Glee made ham-bone high schoolers breaking into anything other than pimples a cool thing, theater camp was definitely way down on the list of places you’d want to go to if you were a kid with confidence issues. Or if you were a kid who thought acting was fun, but studying to act sounded foolish. I was both: lacking in confidence, but suspicious of theatricality as a way to solve that problem. I loved movies, enjoyed theater, and had gotten a kick out of doing West Side Story in junior high. But a performing-arts camp sounded . . . odd. And yet, what convinced me at the naive and emotionally tender age of fourteen to spend my summer at one? My best buddy, David Dennis, was going, too. How could it not be fun with David?
The camp was called Stagedoor Manor, and it was located a few hours out of New York City in the Catskills Mountains. In 1979, my first year there, Stagedoor had been in operation only three years, but it
s reputation was growing as an arts-oriented summer camp for the age-ten-to-eighteen set. Calling it a camp, though, is probably an insult to people who actually pitch tents, urinate outdoors, fish for dinner, build fires, and don’t scream like a bingo winner every time a fly buzzes their ear. Sure, I’d been on a few family trips to the state park on Fire Island during sweltering summers past—miserable, ill-advised excursions that tested my endurance levels for sun exposure. But I was already in the process of trying to erase those memories. Stagedoor Manor, on the other hand, was housed in a former Borscht Belt resort, and that meant staying in air-conditioned hotel rooms with real beds, functioning showers, and catered meals. It rapidly warped my view of camping. Years later, I dated a girl who wanted to show me a cabin she had in the mountains.
“You went to camp, right?” she said.
“Yes, I went to camp!”
“So you’ll be fine.”
We got there and I noticed that there were no windows on the cabin, just square holes in the walls.
“Where are the windows?” I asked.
“You said you went camping.”
“Yeah, well, we had windows. And maid service.”
Stagedoor may have been more civilized than the usual “camp” experience of roughing it, but there was no mistaking that you were entering another world: that of theater-geek subculture. This was where the schoolkids who had no hope of being popular in their everyday public schools could rise to the top of the food chain on talent and an encyclopedic command of the works of Stephen Sondheim alone. (Alumnus Todd Graff’s 2003 movie Camp, which features a cameo by Sondheim, was inspired by his experiences there.)
Immersion starts immediately. If you take its legendary bus there, kids sing the entire way. It’s a show-tunes rager for the entirety of the New York State thruway, so by the time the bus drops them off, the sheen of polite-society otherness is gone, and they’re already like Shriners with secret handshakes in the form of two-part harmonies and knowledge of all the numbers cut from Dreamgirls during its Boston tryouts. Freak flags are at full mast.
