The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  I was invited to several parties at the Beresford, where the elevator came right to the foyer of the apartment and there were rooms and rooms without end. I was thrilled to meet John Steinbeck, Sidney Kingsley, and Madge Evans, who played with W. C. Fields in the film David Copperfield. The place smelled of expensive vanilla candles, and men with short white jackets carried around trays of caviar and champagne. The great composer Frank Loesser, who wrote the music and lyrics for How to Succeed and Guys and Dolls, entertained at the piano and was especially warm to Jimmy, his collaborator’s son, and to me, a kid trying not to gawk. Abe did a turn at the piano as well, the way he had in the living rooms of Hollywood stars when he’d been a premier radio writer of Duffy’s Tavern and a funny must-invite guest at the best parties. I especially loved his hilarious titles for songs, like “How You Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen the Farm.” Bob Fosse and his wife, Gwen Verdon, made an elegant grand entrance in matching formal suede slippers, with dancers’ grace, as if the whole thing had been choreographed.

  I hoped that this life might await me in the future, but in the meantime, I was a student with a long way to go. I was getting good experience in the major productions in school, though in two out of the three plays, my roles were small. The acting course continued to be an enigma, so, ever the performer, I took it upon myself to entertain my classmates, fulfilling the spirit if not always the letter of the assignment. I was a very funny loaded pistol and an amusing mute in two of the exercises. My pièce de résistance was created for an exercise in the use of makeup, and to parody Miss Welch’s one-man-show remarks. As was the custom, everyone did a two-person scene from a well-known play, but I chose to create an original scene (a monologue, of course). I applied a reddish-brown makeup with war paint to the right side of my face to portray a sort of clichéd American Indian, and I glued a little feather to my right ear. I applied an exaggerated pale color to the other half of my face to portray the white man. I cut a cowboy hat in half and wore the left half on the left side of my head. I sat in a swivel chair with my profile to the audience, so that with a push of my legs, I could turn 180 degrees, expose one side or the other of my face, and have a conversation with myself. The text of the dialogue was out of a grade-B Western, about making peace with the Great White Father, while the Indian spouted something about the white man speaking with forked tongue. I played both roles, though with a deadly seriousness, quite dramatically. Indian side facing audience: “You speak of peace and staying on the reservation, but squaws are starving.” Swivel chair to White Man facing audience: “Blackhawk, you are brave and a great leader, but you cannot defeat the blue coats.” Swivel chair to Indian facing audience: “We will die before we lose the pride that has made us.” Swivel to White Man: “Please, Blackhawk . . .” Swivel to Indian: “Speak no more, Long Knife.”

  The class loved it, big laughs, and even Miss Welch managed a confused smile before telling me again that I ought to do a one-man show. After a year of this, I felt that I’d had enough training, that I wanted to go out in the world and work. I thought my formal education was over.

  Chapter Eleven

  Summer Stock and Hard Knocks

  Not surprisingly, starting on June 21, summer came. A few weeks later, I was in South Hadley, Massachusetts, working in summer stock, living in a dormitory room on the campus of Mount Holyoke College, which was and is an all-female school. Unfortunately, the women were gone for the summer, but I made it a point to leave the toilet seats up at the end of my stay in order to cause a controversy when the girls returned in the fall.

  Curtis Canfield, the dean of the School of Drama, was coming to Holyoke to reprise his Yale production of Fashion, a nineteenth-century American melodrama in which I played the very good role of a villain named Joseph Snobson. I did not look forward to his visit, as I had a slight sense that I was betraying him by not returning to school, the school at which he had accepted me, and where he expected to see me in a few weeks. Though I had mixed feelings about the School of Drama, I was considered a talented prospect whom they wanted back.

  I was no longer depressed about Judy, but I sometimes wondered where she was and if she ever thought of me. There were a lot of young women in and around the summer theater community, including actresses and cute college apprentices covered with paint, whose presence was intriguing to a recovering boy officially on the loose. I was little interested in getting into a love affair; I was more interested in getting into them. It felt odd the first time I made out with one of them, as if I were cheating on Judy; but, as with riding a bicycle, I reacquired the hang of it in about a nanosecond and drowned my previous sorrow in their charms.

  There were plenty of parties and opportunities to socialize, and in general, the energy and enthusiasm generated around the Casino in the Park Playhouse, in work and play, was exhilarating. The “park” in question was unfortunately an amusement park, in whose center the theater was located. Among the more ambitious productions was Romeo and Juliet. The weird juxtaposition of Shakespeare with the accompaniment of roller coasters, calliopes, and people hawking cotton candy left much to the audience’s imagination. “Ah, sweet Mercutio is dead. That gallant spirit hath—” “Hey, cotton candy here! Hey, guess your weight for fifty cents!”—“aspired the clouds, which all too soon did know his grace.”

  My character, Benvolio, had a sword fight with Tybalt, which was carefully choreographed by a fencing master. In dress rehearsal it was perfect and believably authentic, but on opening night James Dodson, the Tybalt, forgot all the choreography in his nervousness and came at me with a maniacal look in his eyes, swinging his sword wildly. Forget about avenging Mercutio’s death, I was forced to run for my life: a less than Shakepearean moment.

  The interaction, though, with professional actors, many with Broadway experience, was invaluable to the novice; and some praiseworthy performances in George Bernard Shaw, James Thurber, and Bertolt Brecht plays made me believe that I had a future on the stage. The general word was that I was good, especially for a beginner. Ted Mann, of the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, had come up to Holyoke to direct George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which I played Freddy Eynsford Hill. I told him that I did not want to return to Yale. He had long talks with me about my ambiguous year there and came to the same conclusion. This would be a monumental move, as I was only twenty-one and had been going to school all my life, so the concurrence of an expert comforted me in my decision.

  There was an actress named Georgia Parks, who seemed a distant personage. We had hardly spoken, though I admired her work, which was acknowledged to be among the very best in the company. She was about twenty-six years old, not a beautiful woman in the conventional way, but her smile, her dark eyes, and the magnetic power she projected onstage made her very appealing indeed, and very sensual. She quickly became my number one fantasy, though the reality seemed remote, since I was nobody and she was in an exalted position.

  During rehearsal for A Thurber Carnival, we became friends. It turned out that Georgia was not remote at all, but quite a friendly woman and a terrific laugher whose nostrils flared when she got excited. She called me Bobby, and we found a lot to laugh about. I recounted to her the saga of Judy, which by now had become more historical than emotional, with only the slightest twinge of regret. The story had the patina of many tellings, and for the first time I was actually bored by my discourse on the subject. Georgia was a sympathetic ear, but she was a thoroughly optimistic person who emphasized looking forward, moving on: “You’ve got a wonderful life ahead of you.” She wasn’t just repeating jargon for my sake; she actually believed it.

  The common cold had been going around the company two days before the opening of the Thurber piece, but Georgia wasn’t worried. “I have no time for a cold,” she said as I sneezed.

  “What if you had time for a cold?”

  “Then the cold would have to make an appointment, and I would decide whether or not to have it.” She laughed, and h
er nostrils flared, and she posed like a flamenco dancer but without the stomping.

  Though Georgia and I had no claim on the other, I began to be self-conscious about pairing off with young women around her. We were platonic friends, but I thought of her sexually in my private moments, though I made no move to change things. She seemed to have no negative feelings about my social life, even teasing me a few times with a slap on the back like a big sister: “Hiya, lover boy.” Yet we were physical with each other, with hugs, little kisses, and shoulder rubbing. My unforgivably licentious thoughts were held in check because Georgia was such a decent person, and some part of me still considered a sexual overture to be wrong. She was far from prudish, but she was a proper and accomplished young woman: a good girl who had never behaved in a provocative manner toward me.

  One night after rehearsal, we were playing gin rummy in her room in the quaint New England bed-and-breakfast where she was living for the summer. We had played for an hour, and I got up to leave, and at the door I delivered my usual peck on the lips and a hug. Only this time, I was more aware that our bodies were touching, and the hug was extending, and our hands began rubbing on our backs sensually, as opposed to the comforting taps of friends.

  Before I knew it, we were in a mad, wild, groping kiss. In five seconds, we were on the bed, ripping our clothes off, sending the deck of cards everywhere, releasing what had been pent up for weeks. She said things in my ear: sensual things, naughty things, things she’d wanted to do to me. Uninhibited now, I released a torrent of words about what I’d been thinking about. It was the hottest, most spontaneous episode of my brief sexual life to that point, and it felt quite natural and right—though in a bow to my pragmatism, we took care not to make too much noise and alert the neighbors. We decided that even though we were single, we would keep our liaison a secret (we also vowed to have as many liaisons as possible, whenever and wherever). Georgia had been in several summer-stock theaters and suggested it was best for all concerned that it be nobody’s business but our own. “Everyone knows we’re friends, but there’s an awful lot of gossip in a place like this. I like it being our secret, don’t you? It kind of makes me more horny,” she said.

  “Yes it’s true, it makes it even hotter,” I said.

  We looked at each other, so close that our eyes were out of focus. “I can’t believe I’m lying here naked with Georgia Parks,” I said.

  “I can’t believe it, either. My little Bobby.”

  “What do you mean, little?” We laughed. “Now I’d like to make love to Georgia Parks again.”

  “I hope you’re not waiting for a printed invitation,” she said as she pulled me to her.

  I would like to state officially that I was no longer in the doldrums. I was no longer depressed or sorrowful, as it was turning into a hell of a summer: professionally satisfying, and a sexual dream. My only enemy was exhaustion, held at bay by youth and ardor. Georgia, it seemed, hadn’t had much sexual experience, either; but, like me, she was a sensual individual given to fantasy. Our sexual relationship became a learning process, with a lot of exploration of things we’d thought about and wanted to do. Of course, the term “learning process,” while true, is somewhat cold and misses the mark in describing what Georgia and I did together. She was a sexual soul mate who was on the same page, and it was such a good page that I didn’t want to turn it.

  The dean came and directed his play, but I didn’t have the courage to tell him my decision then. I would write him a letter. “Bobby, I’ll see you back at school in four weeks,” he said before he left. I nodded and smiled guiltily, knowing the scary truth.

  * * *

  I was sorry the summer was over. No longer a schoolboy, I had to make a career from scratch, with little knowledge of how it was done. From here, it looked like I’d be scaling Mount Everest, while I had trained only on the Poconos. I had studied how to speak, to move, and to pretend, but no one had taught me the business end of the actor’s life—how to get a job.

  What was worse, I would be living at home in the Bronx for the first time in five years, on my Castro convertible ottoman in the living room. Georgia had an apartment on the Upper East Side, which I visited regularly for hanky-panky, though, in all honesty, more panky than hanky. Professionally, she had options popping up daily, as her agent got her several auditions, one of which resulted in an offer for a decent part in a road company. She turned it down because she was up for a Broadway show, and her agent felt there was a good chance she would get it. Sure enough, she did.

  Ted Mann, the director of the Circle in the Square Theatre, whom I had met in Holyoke, gave me a tiny replacement part in Six Characters in Search of an Author, a successful off-Broadway production that was being performed at the Martinique Theater, a two-hundred-seat three-sided arena. Pirandello’s play is a unique take on reality in which an acting company is starting rehearsal and is interrupted by a family of six strange people (played by the featured actors) who take over the stage. There was no curtain or light cue, so the play starts seamlessly when the acting company begins drifting onto the stage like ordinary people showing up for work, chatting quietly. I was one of them, not yet a member of Actors’ Equity, at fifteen dollars a week. I had two lines in the play, though that didn’t count the improvisations required of us during tumultuous scenes, like: “Hey, watch it there!” or “What do you people think you’re doing!”

  During one matinee, I stepped onto the stage with the others, the audience began to hush, and a guy came out of the audience and said, “Robert, how you doing? I just saw your name in the program, I didn’t know you were in this play.” It was Larry Resnick, a guy from Alfred, and he was talking to me on the stage, not realizing the play had started. “You went to the Yale Drama, right? That’s so great.” I tried to walk away from him, sending a message as subtly as I could through my teeth, without moving my lips, like a ventriloquist: “Larry, the play has started. What the hell are you doing? Go back to your seat.”

  “WHAT?” he said.

  “I’m acting here. The play is on, get the hell out of here.”

  He looked around as the spotlights came up and finally realized what he’d done. “Oh, jeez,” he said, and scurried, embarrassed, to his seat.

  The proximity of the first row of seats to the foot-high stage was two feet, and for all the intimacy it provided, it was a problem. We “actors” in the play spent quite a bit of time in that tiny space, elbows on the stage platform, practically sitting on the shoes of the first row as we watched “the family” act out their lives. One evening in the middle of the performance, I inadvertently let out a fart, inches from a couple in the first row. I had expected this release of gas to be one of those almost silent, imperceptible hisses, or I never would have allowed the sphincter muscles to relax. Unfortunately, it came out in the middle of a dramatic silence in the theater during which one could hear a pin drop. It was a moderately noisy ripper, reminiscent of a Times Square novelty toy. I froze like a camouflaged lizard, turned slightly, and from the corner of my eye, I saw the husband behind me shaking his head in disbelief, saying to the wife, “No, I don’t think so. Can’t be.” This was theater at its most spontaneous, up front and up close.

  One night the leading lady, a wonderful actress named Eileen Fowler, came into work and informed us that she had ptomaine poisoning from bad mushrooms. She looked quite awful and cautioned her colleagues not to jostle her too hard when certain physical scenes were played. Midway through the second act, Daniel Keyes, who played her stepfather, was removing her shoes during a seduction scene while she reclined on her back on a divan. “This is her scene,” he said, “she cannot give it up.” On the P of “give it up,” she gave up an explosive torrent of projectile vomit that practically hit the overhead lights and drenched poor Keyes and several other actors around her. David Margulies, in the featured role of the stage manager, instantly launched into a clever ad lib about how “we never should have allowed these people in here in the first place” as he
shook some of her dinner off his sleeve. The play was so well done and the audience so into it that it took a full six seconds and the smell of vomit before they realized that her throwing up was not part of the play. If that is not effective theater, then I don’t know what is.

  The mother in the family was played by Joan Croyden, who had played Miss Ferncliffe the schoolteacher in both the stage and film productions of The Bad Seed. She was a tall, angular woman of about sixty-five, with gray hair and long, veiny arms and fingers, whose costume was a shapeless black dress—one could almost say witchlike. There were an eight-year-old boy and girl in the family who were mute throughout but spent almost the entire show onstage. After a performance, while the actors were filing back to the dressing rooms, I saw Miss Croyden grab the little girl hard by the arm and yell at her in a mocking, contemptuous tone: “I saw you mugging during my speech. You think I didn’t see you? I saw you with your cute little eyes trying to upstage me, steal my scene. You keep still during that speech, do you hear me?” This was mighty scary to the little girl, who was already a little delicate, and she broke into hysterical sobs and ran into the women’s dressing room and the arms of Eileen Fowler. The child, required to stand still for minutes on end, had merely shown a fidget or two, like any normal eight-year-old might have under the circumstance. She was adorable, though, with a matching beret and cape, and knew it and was not unaware of the audience. The gnarly Miss Croyden entered the dressing room, looked at the girl, still crying, and said with grandeur: “If she can’t take it, she shouldn’t be in the theater!”

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Georgia was performing on Broadway and doing an excellent job in a modest role. She continually encouraged me to knock on agents’ doors and keep abreast of casting opportunities by reading Backstage, the casting newspaper. “Be positive,” she would say. I found it hard to push myself like an aspiring actor had to: I was an exhibitionist onstage yet shy as hell about trying to get there. I was terrified of rejection, a negative attribute for a professional actor. It would take me a while to realize that tenacity was as important as talent.