I began rehearsing a scene with a rather strange young actress I’d worked with in Jeff’s class, Adele. It was from an exotic fiction called Rema of the Jungle, and Adele played a beautiful wood sprite that I encountered and chased around an enchanted rain forest.
On the appointed day Adele and I arrived at the lavish MCA offices in Beverly Hills and were guided to a basement room filled, like the rest of the handsome pseudo-Greek building, with priceless antiques. Moments later Ms. James and Ms. Bernstein entered, chatted briefly, and asked to see our scene.
Adele and I rearranged gorgeous chairs and ancient tables to represent jungle trees and pools, and we romped somewhat edgily through our tropical romance. Sensing our nervousness, Ms. James asked us to play the scene a second time, which we did with a bit more verve. The two great ladies said very nice and we were dismissed.
I drove Adele home in exhausted silence, returned to my freeway abode, and spent the night in an agony of suspense.
Two endless days later Alan Bernard phoned me and announced with a tone of disbelief that Monique James, a major player at the agency, had recommended that MCA sign me on as a client! You could have knocked me over with a wisp of thistledown.
Because Monique was so respected (and feared) in the industry, the producers and directors she sent me to audition for greeted me with an interest and warmth I hadn’t experienced before. This new friendliness gave me confidence, and I was actually hired to be an actor!
My very first professional job was one day’s work on the long-running television series Gunsmoke, playing the part of a young punk cowboy who caused a lot of trouble in Dodge City. I’d never worked in film before and didn’t know about the special techniques required in film: shooting scenes out of sequence (attending your victim’s funeral before killing him), shooting scenes over and over again from different angles and distances, having to repeat all your movements exactly for each repeat, and hitting precise marks on every move. But I was so hyped up by the thrill of actually working on a film set with famous performers like James Arness that I caught on fast, and I don’t remember making a single mistake. This miraculous feat of concentration used up at least a week’s worth of energy, and I could hardly get out of my sagging pull-down bed for a few days afterward.
Susie Lloyd was a fellow student of Jeff Corey. We’d done several scenes in class together and had become good friends. Susie’s father, Norman Lloyd, was a producer of television’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Susie invited me home for dinner one night with the hope that her father might cast me in one of his episodes.
The next week I was called to audition for an intense part playing one of Raymond Massey’s sons in a Hitchcock television thriller. Getting that part was more fateful than I could have known. Ray Massey and I got on very well during the six-day shoot and the next year, based on this experience, he approved me for the biggest break of my life.
During the following months Monique found me enough interesting work in television to pay my modest bills. Of course I continued studying with Corey and Carolyn Trojanowski, my singing teacher.
Carolyn had become in many ways my mentor. She was a short, plump, dynamic woman with a lot of street smarts and considerable wisdom. She said I was too thin and should start working out with weights. I did. She said I didn’t move very well and should study the rigors of ballet. I did. She said I could increase my energy by eating huge quantities of rare beef. For better or worse, I did.
Carolyn gave me psychological advice, too. Singing, next to love-making, is probably the most revealing human activity of all. You can fool people with speech and body language and charm, but the primal act of producing the sounds of song from deep within your body and heart (or not) will showcase your every fear, inhibition, reluctance, sensuality, joy, freedom, and love.
Though I had a good voice and could make pleasant sounds, my chronic and deeply buried fears and inhibitions severely limited the energy and the physical and emotional freedom that make singing worth listening to. You can’t turn people on when you’re turned off. The same problems of self-rejection and hiding behind a defensively “perfect” image that limited me in acting class were even more obvious to Carolyn as she observed my pleasant, but mightily inhibited, attempts at singing. Inhibition is the enemy of song. She guessed it would take more than musical technique to loosen me up psychologically.
Carolyn pointed out that I was promising but severely damaged goods and suggested that I see a psychologist she consulted from time to time named Linda Harris. My reaction was mixed. I didn’t at all want my “perfect person” image to be penetrated. But I couldn’t help being aware of my often intense discomfort and inexplicable inner pain. And lurking beneath all my denial and resistance was an immense curiosity not only about life but also about my own hang-ups. Working with Linda helped me to see that I wanted to know, to see truthfully, more than I wanted to hide and defend my shaky status quo.
My first session with Linda was in retrospect hilarious.
Linda:
So, how is your life going at present?
Richard:
Oh, great. I’m working occasionally and all sorts of good things are happening. I’m getting along just fine.
L:
And your family? How’s your relationship with your mother and father?
R:
Mom and Dad are swell people. Dad’s a popular speaker in AA, and Mom is gracious and lovely. We’re just fine.
L:
And you have close friends?
R:
Oh, yeah, lots.
L:
Your love life? How’s that going?
R:
Umm…Nice, exciting, sweet. Just fine.
L:
I see. Tell me, Richard, why is such a perfect person like you, living a life that’s “just fine,” consulting a psychologist?
The implications of this question knocked the wind out of me. I’d been totally busted, and I had no idea how to reply. I couldn’t understand why my charm wasn’t working, why my act wasn’t winning her over. It was as if this complete stranger, this attractive (she resembled the sophisticated and funny actress Mary Astor), cultured woman (the type I usually had great success with), far from being entranced, was calling me a liar.
I sat there stunned and dumb for some time, thoroughly shaken. Finally I admitted with great difficulty that despite my recent good fortune and my cheery exterior, I was disturbingly unhappy and conflicted, partly because my sexual orientation made me radically different from about ninety-five percent of the rest of humanity, and partly for shadowy reasons beyond my understanding. With this modicum of truth our good work began.
Fate’s finger continued to stir. I was called to MGM Studios for a general interview by a young executive there whom I’d known slightly in high school. That meeting led to my playing the lead in a pilot film for a western television series called The Paradise Kid for NBC. Unfortunately westerns were on the way out at that time and the series didn’t sell.
Years ago, long before television, MGM had produced twelve highly successful movies about the adventures of Young Dr. Kildare, starring Lew Ayres as Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as his mentor Dr. Gillespie. Unbeknownst to me, at the time of our Paradise Kid failure, the studio was developing a television series based on those old movies.
The producers had been searching unsuccessfully for months for a young actor, preferably unknown, to play the role of Kildare. In desperation they pulled the Paradise Kid pilot out of the vault and took a look. Voila! For reasons unknown to me (the fickle finger having its way), they decided I was their guy. Apparently I had the qualities they were looking for.
My “big splash” was sailing into view, but there was one more sandbar to negotiate. The redoubtable Raymond Massey had already been cast as Dr. Gillespie, and because of his eminence he’d been given the power to approve the actor cast as Kildare. Thanks to the heavens and to Susie and Norman Lloyd, Ray had favorable memories of our work together
in the Hitchcock show and gave his okay. With a mix of jubilance and panic I realized I had won the part—I shuddered and rejoiced. If I, an actor as green as grass, could manage to pull it off (a very big if), the Dr. Kildare television series would be my entrée into a brand-new life, the life of my wildest dreams.
STATUS AND PRESTIGE
I loved the challenges and joys of acting, but I was starving for the glitter of worldly “status” to fill my inner void. To paraphrase Mr. Henry: Give me applause or give me death!
In our culture, status—our state or condition in the eyes of others, our relative rank in the hierarchy of prestige—is perhaps the most fundamental preoccupation. I bought into our society’s values and foolishly linked my well-being to the status conferred by “success” and celebrity. If I could get enough applause from enough people, my fears would disappear and I’d suddenly be just fine inside, happy as a lark, free as a bee.
In hitching my happiness to the slippery star of status like so many of us do, I failed to see the madness in my method. My well-being was completely dependent on the good opinion of others who could give it or take it away at will. I was giving my power, literally my self, away to the crowd.
I indulged in the popular illusion that one human being can have greater intrinsic value than another. The truth is that each of us is a unique, necessary, and incomparable aspect of spirit. Each life is a sacred part of the creative design and dynamic structure of life, of God. Given that truth (the ultimate wholeness of life), the illusion of “relative rank in the hierarchy of prestige” is totally irrelevant; it simply doesn’t exist.
Human beings (and rocks and trees for that matter) are not just touched by divinity; we don’t merely contain a divine spark within our otherwise sinful selves. Each of us is the divine, experiencing and learning and doing whatever we’re doing each moment. It seems to me foolish to imagine that one aspect of the divine is intrinsically better or worse, higher or lower, than another. The drugged-out prostitute, the movie star, the potentate, and the archangel are all God itself exploring, creating, being, and learning. There is nothing but “God.”
This premise in no way negates appreciating and striving for excellence, goodness, and compassion. Nor does it nullify aversion to brutality, harmfulness, greed, and such. It does not contradict our need for law and order, or even our appreciation of elites in all disciplines. It simply means that the hidden mud bricks that anonymously support the glorious gilt dome are, in the grand scheme of things, no less important or prestigious than the dome itself. It means that before I feel superior to the grubby homeless person I’m walking by, I’d better remind myself that I have no way of knowing why God has become and is experiencing life as that down-and-out being. I may just walk by, or I may offer money, or I may attempt to find shelter for this homeless guy. But even though I’m obviously better off than he is, the divine as me is no better than the divine as him.
The “humble nobody” knows this and has called his wayward spirit home. He may have striven for, won, and become attached to “somebodyhood,” but has found its satisfactions short-lived and subtly hostile to those around him. He is free. Free to act rightly, to create lavishly, to love unconditionally, to do good unself-consciously, to embrace abundance with no need for labels or medals or even a whiff of prestige.
Back in 1960 on the verge of the Kildare phenomenon I was fiendishly hungry for any particle of prestige I could lay my hands on. I loved the work, but fame was my muse.
When we began filming the Dr. Kildare pilot on stage 11 at MGM Studios, a giant sprawl of real estate and dream-making facilities in Culver City, California, I was approaching the usually ripe age of twenty-five. But I was one of the slowest developers of all time, and I looked, felt, and acted a lot younger. In my still photos from the early years of the series I could almost have been a teenager.
Television networks like NBC and movie studios like MGM create and finance pilot films to sell projected series to advertisers. Everything depends on the success of the pilot. The networks schedule only potential winners.
I was of course aware of what was riding on the quality of our Kildare pilot, but I didn’t dare give what was at stake (everything) a lot of thought. This was to be my portal to the glittering land of Somebodyness. I needed success, a spectacular success if possible, like a junkie needs a fix. At last my life would have value, and I might even be (dare I say it) loved.
Boris Sagal (a great guy and first-rate director) directed the pilot script, which introduced the characters of Kildare and Gillespie and their sometimes warm, sometimes adversarial relationship. Beverly Garland, a dramatic actress at the height of her considerable powers, was our first guest star. Our crew—camera, lighting, sound, wardrobe, set design, makeup—was an assemblage of superb technicians—terrific people. The project was smelling good. The only possible weak link was the inexperienced lead actor—me.
The usual shooting schedule of six days for an hour show was stretched to eight days for the all-important pilot. This was lucky for me because I hadn’t yet learned to be Johnny-on-the-spot with my emotions, and I often needed a lot of takes to work up the requisite intensity, especially in the highly dramatic scenes. Extra takes eat up shooting time, and by the fifth day Boris Sagal lost patience and barked with considerable bite, “Okay, Richard, the honeymoon is over! Let’s get with it!”
Chastened, I did get with it and stayed with it for the next five years. Boris’s abrupt and derisive command in front of our whole crew and my fellow actors jolted me awake. Yes, I was genuinely inexperienced as an actor, but also I had been half-consciously indulging in a lot of neurotic baggage. My unacknowledged rage at life in general (for not being at all what I wanted it to be in my early years) had from the beginning taken the form not of explosive anger, but of the passive-aggressive stance of I won’t. I’d pretend to agree, but inwardly I would not cooperate. This almost total resistance to life gave me an illusory sense of control. It also kept me in a kind of living death.
Boris’s frustration shook me up enough to realize that I was sabotaging myself (and my desperate need for success) while fruitlessly “punishing” Boris, the father figure. In desperation I loosened the clamp I had long maintained on my emotions, and I called at least a temporary armistice in my war against authority. In other words, I started to get out of my own way and to become a professional.
Dr. Kildare was a rollicking success right from the beginning. The show was wildly popular all over the world and so was I (being identified by our vast audience with the sterling young doctor).
My hunger for recognition, attention, admiration, excitement, and adoration was satisfied a thousand times over. Fan mail poured in from everywhere, breaking studio records—twelve thousand letters a week. At birthdays and Christmas I was inundated with often charming gifts from fans as far away as Poland and Japan. The flash photos at public events were endlessly blinding. These were riches way beyond my wildest dreams. Even my relatively modest salary (I worked under a seven-year contract with MGM, the terms of which were set before the series’ great success) seemed fabulous to me.
Such sudden and prolonged adulation can create monsters of the young and unwary. I was able to hang on to some sense of proportion partly because the work was so relentless (we shot thirty-six episodes the first year; today television series shoot about twenty-two), and partly because my still potent and unresolved insecurities kept me from foolishly believing that my public persona was the real me, that I fully deserved all the frenzied attention coming my way.
We worked twelve-hour days, and I still studied singing and dance several nights a week. Between seasons the studio would cast me in movies (A Thunder of Drums, Twilight of Honor, Joy in the Morning—none made it to the National Archives), and if any spare time remained, I was sent out on publicity tours all over the country. Weekends were spent learning the next week’s script.
Fortunately I found the work exhilarating, and I loved the novelty of everyone thinking I
was a somebody even if I couldn’t quite believe it myself. My doubts remained even when I got to hobnob with genuine blue bloods.
A BRUSH WITH ROYALTY
It’s interesting to observe how thoroughly addicted we are to creating and believing in hierarchies. We’re endlessly calculating who gets to lord it over whom. I often ruthlessly judge my status relative to people I meet or even just observe from a distance, deciding who is better or worse. I do this so habitually that I barely notice the process, though I can acutely feel the results, which are distancing and closed-hearted and ignore the nonhierarchical nature of spirit.
Believing in hierarchical distinctions between the personal value of human beings can move us out of reality and into illusion. If we’re not careful, we allow the constant hyping of celebrities, tycoons, political bigwigs, and even religious “authorities” to make us feel somehow inferior to all those “important” folks. I can’t count the times that I have diminished myself in the presence of people I greatly admire.
In college I discovered the wonderfully witty plays and songs of Noel Coward and I was often asked to perform his musical whimsies at various student get-togethers. After Kildare ended, I even played Elyot in a tour of Coward’s sublime comedy Private Lives. I was a devoted fan.
Shattered Love Page 5
