Shattered Love

by Richard Chamberlain

  So, it was a time of considerable upheaval. The worst part was knowing (even though I didn’t want to admit it) that I had carelessly endangered my relationship with Martin. I was still less than fully committed. I wasn’t yet willing to go to the mat with him. I still had one foot out the back door, and I felt guilty about it.

  It helped that I am good at being on my own. I’ve spent so much time away from home on film and theater jobs that I’ve learned to enjoy my own company. During these troubled months, my workaholic nature gave way more easily than I expected to the novel freedom of being able to spend the days pretty much as I pleased. And in my newfound leisure I rediscovered an old friend.

  CANVAS, BRUSHES, AND PAINTS

  I had done very little painting since my student days at Pomona College, where I had unceremoniously jilted art for acting. But I continued to think about painting a lot, and my “painter’s eye” kept spotting beautiful subjects, possible paintings that almost never materialized. Now that I had time on my hands I thought, “Ah hah, why not start painting again.”

  As the years sail by, the mellow, carefree mai tai and sunset life here in Hawaii becomes less and less resistible. The flower-scented air and the slow rhythms of the surf combine with sweet people and two-finger poi (that yummy gummy pureed taro root) to calm nerves and cool down the hot fires of ambition. Living itself becomes a worthy occupation. While I didn’t think yet of retiring, I felt less inclined to prove anything to anybody. I began to think of myself as a sort of beach bum who paints, and occasionally acts.

  I set up a minimal art studio in our guest house, bought supplies in various mediums (oils are my home base, but I purchased watercolors, acrylics, and pastels as well) and blithely started in on my first project, a small watercolor called Heavenly Fish.

  Two surprises were in store. I’d thought of myself as a fairly good painter in college but was shocked at how little painterly technique had survived the years. I had an even better eye now, but little skill. On the positive side I found that my work ethic had strikingly improved. In college if a painting wasn’t going well I’d trash it and start something else. Now I seemed willing to work on a picture for weeks if necessary in order to find ways to get it right, to produce a painting that was worth looking at.

  Two early paintings in particular became training grounds of endless trial and error and hard-won discovery. I know good painting when I see it; I just didn’t know how to do it.

  The first was a large, rather academic still life called Magical Mango with lots of drapery and some fruit. The drapery had a fish pattern and some of the fish began to swim free into the air. I spent weeks drawing and redrawing, painting and scraping off paint, and painting again and scraping again until I finally got something close to what I wanted. About a year later I added some touches that made it just right.

  The second workhorse was a seascape of the view from our beach house called Maili Blue. Again I had no idea how to paint water, waves, and clouds, but I plugged away at it endlessly until the picture came to life and began “telling” me what to do. I ended up painting the clouds, the mountains, and the sea in three different styles, since they are three different domains of nature, and the variations worked. Anyway I consider these two paintings my first teachers, and I am very fond of both.

  A few years and many paintings later I actually had a one-man show at a gallery on the island of Maui. This sounds provincial, but, believe it or not, Maui is one of the biggest art markets in the world (by the way, I was not painting dolphins and whales). The show opened with a wild party and lots of friends. It was rather like opening night of a play with yours truly starring as the brilliant, but fatally avant-garde artiste.

  Painting is related to acting in that shape, line, color, and rhythm are intrinsic to both, but the creative process is almost totally different. Acting is done by committee—it’s a cocreation with sometimes dozens of other people. Even an actor doing a one-person show relies on writers, producers, directors, lighting designers, stagehands, costumers, and such. In a play or a film the character one creates exists only in relationship with all the other actors; none of you can tell the story alone. And what the other actors are doing at any moment inevitably affects what you will do. Even the stars are part of the ensemble experience—they just get paid more. I find great pleasure and excitement in this teamwork.

  Painting on the other hand is done alone; you’re the boss and the only responsible party. You fill the empty canvas with no one but yourself. However, it’s true that when a painting is going well, it takes on its own life and begins to tell you who it is and what it needs. Those are my favorite moments in painting—when a kind of silent communion develops between me and the art in progress.

  THE FLAME OF ATTENTION

  When I’m painting a picture, I often reach a point where I know something’s missing, but I don’t know what. I don’t know how to proceed. Then I sit back, look at the emerging picture, and wait, simply directing my attention to what’s already on the canvas. I may have to move the canvas to various places around the room, different distances, different light, sometimes turning it sideways or upside down. Sooner or later an idea or several ideas pop into my head. And sometimes they work!

  Where do these ideas come from? What is the source of art, literature, mathematics, and scientific discovery? Mysteries all. But preceding any creation or discovery is attention. It is giving our attention that opens the peepholes and great doors of discovery. When I watch the workings of my mind, including those moments of intuitive, inner knowing that we all experience, I see that my attention is in fact who I am. My attention is the focus of my being. Wherever my attention is is where I am. To the extent that I give anything or anyone my attention, to that extent I am giving them myself. I think attention is our primary power, perhaps our only power. Giving someone or something our entire attention, with no preconceived ideas or agendas whatever, is the essence of love.

  In both acting and painting I find moments of communion between the creative but limited workings of my thinking and the eternal, unlimited storehouse of the unknown. The wisdom of the unknown responds to my attention. It responds to my interest (and yours) in its own voice and in its own time. There’s no way to know what spirit has to say until it says it.

  The other day I was driving along the H-2 freeway in Honolulu. Traffic was heavy and slow, and at one point choked to a standstill. To relieve my boredom I looked off toward the mountains, vaguely noticing a random row of coconut palms among some nondescript buildings.

  All of a sudden one palm tree caught my attention and I really looked at it, not as just another thing I called a “tree” among many other things of the same name, but as its single self, standing there fanning out its fronds to catch the sunlight and dance with the breeze.

  The minute I really saw this tree I felt a subtle connection with it—for a moment we were in each other’s lives, that tree and I.

  This was the first time I ever realized that there are two distinct and very different ways of seeing our world and the people in it. There is generalized observation, which is heavily reliant on remembered concepts, names, and ideas: oh, there are some palm trees, the sky is cloudy, here comes my friend Sally. In this generalized mode of observation we see our idea of the thing more than the thing or person itself. There is a vague kind of seeing, but not much detail and very little contact.

  Then there is the connected, relational kind of seeing in which you give the object or person your entire attention. This form of seeing notices the particular tree and what it’s doing, it sees the shapes and changing forms of the clouds against the blue sky, it sees how Sally is moving, how she is dressed, what her mood is, and it sees and feels the look in her eyes.

  In my experience, general observation, while obviously useful, is remote and uninvolved; you see things and people in a generic sort of way. Its inner feeling is somewhat passive. It is a necessary, but impersonal function of our intellect.

  Givin
g our wholehearted attention, on the other hand, is akin to love. Its inner feeling is expansive, alive, connected. You are suddenly in genuine relationship with the object of your interest. When you give your full attention you automatically give yourself, your spirit and life energy, to the object of your interest. Your attention is the flow of your being. Giving your complete attention is an act of love. The recipient of this flow of your total interest, whether a person or a bird or a book or a tree cannot help but respond, however silently, and share itself with you. I think even your car or computer is not impervious to your goodwill.

  Painting a picture, or any activity that focuses our entire attention, has mystical implications. Our full attention can bring into being that which was not.

  All at once my new friend, painting, had to take a backseat again to make way for yet another creative avenue, and I found myself back at work.

  A MUSICAL INTERLUDE

  Aside from Sondheim I’m not a fan of musicals. However, just as I was settling into my new role as a painter I was offered the part of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, that splendidly literate musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s great play Pygmalion. Martin had been in touch with some New York producers who had the rights to the musical, and they teamed up to produce this show together.

  This time the problem was not Robert Redford, but Rex Harrison, for whom the musical role was written and who gave us the definitive incarnation of Professor Higgins. Rex Harrison was one of the greatest light comedians of all time, and he played Higgins to perfection. How was I to make this wonderful part my own?

  The first few weeks of rehearsal were absolute hell for me. I couldn’t escape my memories of Harrison’s performance and found myself imitating him and hating myself for being so uncreative. Where was my Higgins? I couldn’t find him.

  The director was entranced by our leading lady and wasn’t much help. I struggled through the scenes and brilliant songs quite lost and nearly suicidal. About the middle of the rehearsal period I spent a couple of days so panicked that I became almost catatonic. The director shrugged with incomprehension.

  Finally these dire straits triggered some deep survival mechanism within me and my creative juices started to bubble—my own Higgins began to emerge.

  We toured My Fair Lady all around the country for eight months before opening on Broadway. I was still quite scared the first two weeks of performance but soon began to have fun and really enjoy playing this superb material. We were a hit.

  Playing a new city almost every week is a mixed blessing. It’s fun discovering the unique character of various parts of the country, getting to know northerners and southerners and westerners in their differing environments. On the other hand, playing eight shows a week and then having to pack up and spend your one day off traveling—often great distances—to the next venue, getting used to the new hotel and new bed and new weather and new theater and backstage crew, can be exhausting.

  Boston, where we played a merciful four weeks, was a delightful exception—there was time to settle in and explore that extraordinary city more thoroughly.

  One Monday (our day off) I spent a lazy afternoon in my hotel room watching television and then reading a book of Rumi’s exquisite poetry. Rumi was a thirteenth-century teacher and mystic who was born in Afghanistan, then part of the Persian Empire, and emigrated with his family to Turkey. As he grew up, Rumi, whose father was also a mystic, fell head over heels in love with the divine. He called the divine his “beloved” and expressed his passionate embrace of the sacred in hundreds of ecstatic poems of great beauty and power.

  For a couple of hours that afternoon I sat on my Boston hotel bed quite transfixed by Rumi’s songs of divine love and the sublime freedom of unfettered awareness and pure uncaused joy. His expressions of bliss brought tears to my eyes.

  Descending from these heights, I ordered a light dinner from room service and decided to see a movie. I’d heard good things about the film Fried Green Tomatoes, which was playing nearby, so I pulled on my sneakers and trotted off to see it.

  Popcorn and Sprite in hand, I sat down in my theater seat and munched as the previews appeared. When Tomatoes started and the rather ordinary characters on-screen began to speak, I was suddenly aware that (I’m not sure how to express this) they were speaking God, that they and their ordinary lives were God, were divine.

  I glanced around the cinema and saw everyone in it as divine. After the movie, walking back to my hotel, the whole city seemed quietly sacred. As I entered the hotel lobby I spoke to the receptionist and she too glowed with a subtle divinity.

  It seemed to me that for a couple of precious hours (thanks to Rumi) I woke up. The veils of my soporific ignorance, which usually mask transcendent reality, were parted slightly by some divine breeze of grace. I was reminded of the Japanese woman praying at the Shinto shrine in Kyoto during Shogun. It was a brief, but incalculably precious gift that was absolutely free.

  I suspect that such experiences cannot be willed or sought after. The inner openness that makes grace possible is a state beyond thinking, will, and conceptual understanding. It is an openness beyond any image of self. It allows a glimpse of one’s true nature, and the sacred nature of the world.

  It was during the tour that my mother died. My father had passed away years earlier, after emphysema had reduced him to a kind of cantankerous frailty. Several times during his last weeks Mom and my brother had heard him whisper, “Please take me.” Then one afternoon Bill was sitting with Dad in my parents’ living room, Dad in his big chair looking out over his beloved view of Laguna Beach and the sea and sky beyond. In a moment of quiet Dad slumped a little and was gone.

  Mom was the same age, but she outlasted her husband by about seven years, during which a series of tiny strokes gradually robbed her of her memory. When My Fair Lady played Orange County, I visited her at home. She was immobilized in a wheelchair and didn’t seem to recognize me at all. I had a feeling this would be the last time I would see this brave woman, who had taken such good care of us. The next day I was to move on with the show back to the East Coast. I hugged her and told her blank eyes that I loved her and that she had been a wonderful mother.

  Two weeks later, just before going onstage as Professor Higgins I was told that Mom had died. I thought, given her condition, that this was a blessing. It wasn’t until I started singing my last song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” that the full emotion of the loss finally hit me. All the lyrics seemed suddenly to be about my mother. Somehow I wept my way through the song and finished the show. It seemed like a fitting good-bye to this lovely woman and her difficult life.

  About a year after the show closed, Martin produced another production of My Fair Lady in Europe. We had reconciled at the end of the American tour. Martin sensed that I had begun to realize that his well-being was at least as important as my own, and thank God, he came back home.

  We decided it would be a good idea to create another production for Germany, France, and Switzerland. Our friend Joe Hardy directed this one, and I felt it was far superior to the New York version even though we played huge auditoriums and even sports arenas in various German cities. Many Germans speak English, and they seemed to get most of the jokes and understand the subtleties of British wit.

  We also played Zurich and Paris on our tour. The French are not so fond of English, so we had electronic subtitles on each side of the stage to translate our lines into French, causing a very strange delayed reaction problem for us actors. By the time the French audience had read the occasionally funny lines and then laughed, we players were already speaking the next lines onstage. Actors normally wait for laughs to finish before continuing, but how do you wait for a laugh that doesn’t come until four or five seconds after the line is spoken? It took us several performances to figure out our timing in this peculiar situation and we never did get it quite right—a comic dilemma for a comedy.

  Both of these productions were so successful that two years later I was ask
ed to take over the part of Captain von Trapp in a gorgeous Broadway production of The Sound of Music. Mistakenly thinking this was just a sweet show for kids, I was hesitant. Martin and I agreed to fly to New York to take a look, and I was bowled over by its lavish staging and by the show itself, which was much more deeply touching than I’d remembered.

  Susan Schulman, the director, had emphasized the frightening aspects of the rise of Nazism in Austria, giving the show added weight and danger. The cast, including the superb Jan Maxwell as Elsa, was for the most part first-rate. Martin joined the production team and asked for certain changes in the show, including one particular bit of miscasting, and the show soared. I even received one of the best reviews of my career from the New York Times when we opened. In a musical!

  Rehearsing to take over a leading role in an already running show is a bizarre experience. Obviously the show’s actors are unavailable, so you’re stuck rehearsing with understudies and stage managers. Often the stage manager directs the rehearsals when the actual director is busy elsewhere—often working on yet another show. You must develop your performance in a kind of limbo, hoping against hope that what you’re doing will somehow fit into the existing production when the time comes.