I didn’t get to play Captain von Trapp with the principal actors on the actual sets until a couple of quick run-throughs the day before I went onstage for real. Again it took me about two weeks of performing to finally settle in.
We played Broadway for several happy months and then ventured off on a ten-month tour of the States. The tour was one of the most successful in history.
Eight performances a week plus constant traveling make touring an endless grind that requires total discipline and the stamina of mountain goats. But our wonderful cast with charming Meg Tolin as Maria saved the day. We all had a lot of fun together despite the arduous schedule.
I was surprised to see, in all this traveling around, how homogenized our country has become. City after city, state after state, the same malls with the same shops and Cineplexes selling the same movies and clothes repeated themselves everywhere. Apart from Boston, Portland, and maybe San Francisco it seemed like we’d keep getting on planes, fly a thousand miles, and then land in the same place.
THE INDEPENDENTS
In and around these theatrical ventures I acted in three incredibly disparate independent feature films. The first was titled Bird of Prey and was shot in Sofia, Bulgaria. I played Jennifer Tilly’s father and Lesley Ann Warren played my oddly sexy mistress. The lead was a Bulgarian actor who wrote the screenplay to star himself and who seemed to be paying for the entire production with cash literally out of his own pocket. He’d just reach in and pull out wads of what we began to jokingly refer to as Bulgarian Mafia lucre whenever and wherever necessary.
Bulgaria seemed a highly cultured country brought to the edge of ruin by seventy years of Communist domination. The grand buildings of Sofia were charming, but crumbling. Our local film crew was sweet and friendly, but most seemed to have been robbed by their former patriarchal bosses of their ability to take any initiative and get things done. Our sets, for instance, were a shambles, saved only by the skill of our British lighting designer who transformed the dreadful decor with magical light and shadow—mostly shadow.
Gypsies with trained bears were the popular street entertainment. My hotel room overlooked a town square with flower vendors and always at least one of these formerly majestic, now pathetic bears forced by chains linked to their sensitive noses into doing demeaning tricks.
The grand prize of this production was our director, Temi Lopez, a highly talented Venezuelan with a charming accent and considerable flamboyance.
As we began the film we were rehearsing my first scene with Jennifer. Partly because I was still searching for my character, I was relying on my usual overcalculated and preconceived acting style. When we were ready to shoot the scene, Temi took me aside and said a bit plaintively, “Richard, Richard, you are so handsome, so charming, please stop ‘acting’ and just be yourself.”
This was one of those simple, but perfectly timed statements that hit home with a wallop. The seed, “Just be,” planted by Nana years before was ready to sprout. If he’d said it a year earlier I might not have understood, but I was somehow ready to hear it and get it and, most important, I was ready to risk. I thought, that sounds exciting, why not! So, more than ever before, I consciously stopped “acting” and started playing around with just being myself as the character and letting it all happen. This new freedom worked like gangbusters and was great fun to boot.
Thanks to Temi I was able to continue this experiment in spontaneity in A River Made to Drown In, my second indie film. The director was James Merendino, a precociously gifted child of twenty-something who moved his camera around with astonishingly liquid grace and worked well with us actors. We shot the film along a particularly seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
I played a successful and flamboyant lawyer who had had affairs with several male hookers he’d picked up along this notorious street. When he learns that he’s dying of AIDS, he returns to his old haunts trying to find the young man he really loved (played by Michael Imperioli of Sopranos fame), wanting to leave the kid a legacy of some kind.
Working with Michael (a first-rate actor) and Uta Lemper who played Michael’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, and with Merendino and his young, hip crew was a novel treat—my first brush with young Hollywood.
The third film, The Pavilion, was based on a Robert Louis Stevenson short story—a period adventure in which I got to play an old cocaine-sniffing scoundrel who was forced out of the slave trade by the American Civil War. He proceeded to swindle the Mexican government out of millions in gold that he hid on a deserted island off the coast of North Carolina. The story involves him, his daughter (Patsy Kensit), with whom he may or may not be sleeping, and his cohort (Craig Scheffer) hiding out in an abandoned pavilion on the island with the vengeful Mexicans in hot pursuit.
I’ve always thought of myself as a character actor in leading-man clothing, so playing this nefarious codger in all his seedy complexity was a wonderfully freeing challenge. Portraying leading men can be great—they blitz the villains and get the girl—but their parameters are necessarily narrow. The emotional, creative, quirky, and humorous possibilities in playing character parts are much more varied and a lot more fun.
The movie was shot on Bald Head Island off the Carolina coast, an island that the director’s father happened to be developing. It was off-season so each actor got to stay in his or her own big house right on the sea where dolphins leapt and played almost every day. One afternoon I saw three dolphins jump in perfect unison high out of the water and dive back in with total perfection, as if they were trained as part of a Sea World entertainment. But they had contrived this amazing stunt on their own, just for fun.
THE THORN BIRDS II
For at least a couple of years during the mid-nineties the Wolper organization, which produced the immensely successful The Thorn Birds, was pushing to capitalize on that big-time winner with a sequel, and they kept asking me if I would reprise the role of Father Ralph. Since most of the main characters were either old or dead by the end of the original show, they proposed inventing a new story to fit into a vacant period in the middle of the first saga.
Knowing that sequels, or in this case a mid-quel, usually disappoint, I declined. The producers continued to press until I finally said I would consider playing Ralph again if they came up with a script that at least equaled the excellence of the original. A script finally materialized, but I found it a bit dull compared with what we had already done, and I declined again.
About a year later a high-powered network executive I had worked with and liked when he was a producer called me out of the blue and invited Martin and me to dinner at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. It was great to see him again. In the middle of our lively conversation he casually said, “Oh, by the way, did you know that The Thorn Birds II is all ready to shoot in Australia, but they still haven’t been able to cast a new Father Ralph?” I looked over to Martin and lightbulbs flashed above both our heads.
The next morning I called my agent at Creative Arts Agency (CAA) with this juicy news and said I would agree to play Father Ralph again, but for quite a fantastic salary. I named an impossible figure. Two days later my astonished agent called back and nearly shouted into the phone that they had in desperation agreed to our price. I picked myself up off the floor, packed my bags, and flew to Sydney.
The incomparable Rachel Ward had wisely turned down this dubious project; she was replaced by Amanda Donohoe, also a beautiful and very good actress. But, alas, the chemistry was not the same. As good as the new cast was, it was disconcertingly odd to replay Father Ralph with a new lover, a new son, a new Luke, and a new Cardinal mentor. We all worked very hard to make the show compare as favorably as possible to the original. Whether or not we succeeded I don’t know, because I didn’t have the heart to look at the finished product. The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years was, however, a considerable success in the numbers game.
Along with this surprising variety of jobs and the immense relief of exorcising my demons
and making peace with myself, the generous nineties offered me the chance to make peace with the specter of my father.
HATRED AND FORGIVENESS
The person I’ve hated most often and intensely is my father. It wasn’t the only feeling I had for Dad. I was grateful that he worked hard and paid the bills, I respected his common sense in practical matters, and in later years I admired his important work in Alcoholics Anonymous. But mostly I experienced Dad as self-aggrandizing, hypocritical, and covertly, but powerfully, suppressive to all of us, including my mother. I felt subdued and powerless around him. Without physical violence, Dad somehow managed to keep us all scared. Even after he sobered up and became a revered speaker in AA (claiming to have abandoned his ego and to have taken up residence at the right hand of God), I experienced him being sober but otherwise little changed.
Dad’s public persona was immensely helpful to hundreds of people in AA. Folks I’d never met used to come up to me in airports and supermarkets and say that my dad had saved their lives. But he could be a very negative presence at home.
Of course I wanted to confront Dad with what I thought were his many offenses, to whittle him down to size and to find my own strength in his presence. But, sensing my fear, he easily demolished my attempts to challenge his power. My failure to stand up to my father only intensified my hatred and my desire for some kind of revenge.
Feeling in some way victimized by a parent is not uncommon. A victim is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment. Certainly a child, needing care, love, and nurture, can be the victim of oppression and mistreatment and will quite naturally be hurt and angry. But as we mature into independence, is it wise to drag along with us childhood hurts and hates that are no longer relevant to our lives? Is it wise to hold on to negative stories about the love we should have gotten and how we should have been encouraged and how awfully misunderstood we were? By hanging on to and failing to understand and move on from our past hurts, disappointments, and anger we pollute our present lives. We torture ourselves over and over again not with present facts, but with distant memories, no longer relevant stories. And, given the unreliable and self-serving nature of memory, we can’t even be sure these wrongs really happened as we thought they did. And we certainly can’t be sure of the “wrongdoer’s” motives and intentions. It is simply not possible to fully understand another human being. The only person we can truly know is our self (and that takes a lifetime or more).
Believe it or not it wasn’t until my late forties that I felt I had the strength and the ammunition to launch an appropriately devastating attack on my father’s arrogant and domineering persona. I thought I had at last seen through his Wizard of Oz machinations into the weaknesses and fears that motivated his destructive behavior. I was going to dart in behind his defenses and expose him as a lily-livered fraud.
However, just as I was preparing for all-out war, Dad, a longtime smoker, was enfeebled by emphysema. This once majestic tyrant, now tied to an oxygen tank, could barely walk across his living room. Bloody revenge was out of the question. There would be no satisfaction in punching a dying man. So it seemed as if I’d be stuck with my angry victimhood forever.
That was the delusional soap opera I was living. I actually believed that by changing or wounding my father (showing him the error of his ways in order to improve his behavior or reduce him to rubble), I would at last find my own strength and well-being. Wrong. Once I was grown, the only power my father had over me was power I gave him. The source of my well-being as well as the source of my fear were within me not him. The only person in our difficult relationship who needed to change was ME. The only solution to my problems of hating and fearing Dad was forgiving him. But how do you do that?
Forgiveness is defined as ceasing to feel angry or resentful toward another. I think forgiveness is vastly more than pardoning a wrong. Forgiveness is coming to understand that there is in fact nothing to forgive. If I burn my hand in a fire, I don’t feel wronged by the flame. Fire is hot—that’s a fact, not an offense. If Dad was as oppressive as I thought he was (I cannot be sure), that’s simply who he was; his oppression was the result of his own inner dilemmas and like a flame it gave off a dangerous heat, a heat that surely could hurt. But like a flame, my dad’s hurting of others was not personal, it was the radiation of his own pain.
It might be argued that fire does not intend to hurt, but the person does. Indeed I believe my father did intend to suppress his family to retain his secretly fragile dominance. And I think he enjoyed this power. But again, like the flame, that’s just who he was. We all were burnt, but we were not wronged. To be wronged implies a right, a should have been. But should is invariably a fantasy. What is is what is.
This does not for a second relieve the “wrongdoer” of personal responsibility for his actions. We’re all totally responsible for what we think and do at every moment of our lives and must inevitably take the consequences, good or bad, that are the result of our thoughts and actions. The importance of forgiveness is not so much that it absolves the person forgiven as that it cleanses the person who forgives. Wholehearted forgiveness clears the forgiver of all the negative stories and baggage that keep him from dealing wisely and effectively with the offending person or group. Forgiveness clears the way for just action, self-protection, and wise change—not revenge.
With elegant and piercing simplicity, James Baldwin wrote the following on the subject of our personal responsibility:
People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.
Dad’s behavior had serious consequences. What father wants to be hated and feared by his children? What husband wants to drive his wife into a kind of self-protective somnambulism, creating within her a volcano of anger that didn’t surface until he was dying? Excepting his good works in AA and the somewhat impersonal camaraderie of that group, Dad was by his own doing frigidly alone. “Nobody knows me, even my wife doesn’t know me,” Dad complained to a friend near the end of his life (as if this was somehow our fault). His death in his mid-eighties was a welcome relief from his long illness. I didn’t miss him at all, nor as far as I know did Bill.
Forgiveness doesn’t obviate the need for self-defense. I determined to be as unlike my father as possible, and I got out of the house, away from his orbit, as soon as I could. My mother was of course stuck with him, but even she managed to protect herself by sort of disappearing behind her charming smile. Bill was stuck working with Dad, but he too managed to break free after a while.
Yes, we were living with an extraordinarily difficult personality, but we were not wronged. There he was. It was our job to learn to deal with him, to survive him. In this life we all have serious, painful challenges. The trick is to learn to see these difficulties for what they really are and to handle them with as much wisdom and strength as we can summon from our hearts and minds, from our friends, advisers, and teachers. If Mom and Bill and I punished ourselves with rancor and resentment, feelings that have no positive value except as indications that our thinking is off course, that was our creation, our doing, not his.
Sure, the rage and revenge we so take for granted as perfectly normal are tremendously stimulating, covertly entertaining, and give us a deceptive sense of personal power. Witness the horrific and seemingly endless results of ethnic and religious hatreds around the world, and the excitement of the combatants. Witness the endless soap operas of deceit and vengeance in television and movies. The violence of ill will can become intoxicating, addictive. But these macabre amusements are devoid of the wisdom and joyous freedom of forgiveness.
It is destructive of one’s self to wish another human ill. It seems to me that to harm another is to harm God, to harm a variation of one’s own self.
The feeling of being wronged comes from our unfounded expectations of being treated fairly, justly, kindly, lovingly, supportively, specially. In the tough and glorious world of what is, we a
re sometimes treated unfairly, unjustly, even cruelly. Our expectations are often unrealistic, misleading, counterproductive. What is, is.
When I am “wronged” I feel pain, then resentment, possibly even hatred for the villain. I wish him ill. What to do in this self-destructive dilemma?
I look at my pain, my hatred, with my whole being. I embrace them as best I can with clear awareness. I try to see the “villain” with openhearted objectivity. He is what he is, and he does what he does. His act against me was not (despite appearances) personal any more than earthquakes are personal.
Wholehearted seeing discovers that there is in fact nothing to forgive.
Of course, in some cases the “wrongdoer” should be reprimanded, sued, imprisoned, or some such, but these things can be done out of necessity, without hate, without any personal attachment whatever. Even as he is justly punished, you can wish his spirit well. Love has no limits.
If Dad were still alive, I’d tell him with great relief and happiness that the war is over, that I recognize that his spiritual history is unknown to me, and that he lived his troubled life as best he knew how. His integrity is his business, not mine. This deep level of forgiveness became real to me several years ago when I was about to be treated for what might have been a serious illness. I asked my dear friends and teachers Carolyn Conger and David Spangler to send me healing energy, a kind of blessing they were both very good at. Carolyn even made me a semihypnotic cassette tape of wonderfully positive thoughts to listen to during treatment.
Well, with their energy flowing my way I glided through this episode as if it were some sort of heavenly party—no fear, no problems, perfect healing. And, as an unexpected bonus, during recovery I was thinking about my troubled relationship with my father and suddenly had a total realization of his complete innocence—the innocence of a rock on which I’d stubbed my toe. He was what he was; there were severe difficulties, but no offense. There was nothing to forgive. My intense, self-destructive resentment evaporated. I at last let go of this exhausting burden.
Shattered Love Page 18
