The Dangerous Animals Club Page 21

  When we finished typing the play, Beth sat down to write the title page. She couldn’t think of a name quite yet so she just left it blank and wrote underneath on the author’s line, “A play—by Amy Peach.” I said, “Amy Peach?” She said she had to go incognito so she wouldn’t get laughed out of the school. After my recent experience with my professor Joan Potter, I understood all too well the value of a low profile.

  As I look back, it was amazing the number of big changes we were going through at that time, unaware. Beth, writing. Me, acting professionally. We, living together as a couple.

  Also, for the first time in our lives we had developed friends outside of our circle at school. Alex and Allyn. This was big, but we didn’t know it at the time. A widening circle of friends is an invitation to become part of what is known as civilization.

  They lived a couple of streets away. They were both actors in the real world. Allyn had sandy hair and a beard and an extremely kind disposition. Alex was from Kentucky and was the niece of character actress Sudie Bond. We were kind of in awe knowing someone related to a true staple in Hollywood. They were a part of an acting troupe known as the Alpha Omega Players.

  During the day, I played cribbage with Allyn and listened to Paul Simon’s first solo album, speculating as to whether Paul would have a career after Garfunkel. We decided he would. On nights off, Beth and I would go over to Alex and Allyn’s apartment and listen to FM radio and eat a pizza. And believe it or not, that was all it took to have a great time. I remember one evening the local radio station was going to premiere Elton John’s new album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. They played it in its entirety, in sequence without commercial interruption. We sat in silence around the radio like those old pictures of a family listening to FDR during World War II. The importance of friendships cannot be underestimated. They are created the same way the Bible describes God’s creation of man, with free will. And the exercise of free will is what defines you as a person.

  When you watch a movie, a soundtrack guides you. The swelling music tells the audience that a letter you are reading is important or something on the other side of a door is waiting for you. In life we don’t get that kind of guidance. You never know when you hear news that will change your life.

  I needed that soundtrack for the evening Beth came home, scared and excited. One of the main-stage plays in the school’s season had fallen through and the department had decided to fill the spot “from within.” Plays by SMU playwrights past and present could be submitted to a committee. Beth’s playwriting teacher, Biff Leonard, had submitted an untitled play by someone called Amy Peach.

  After a week or so of deliberations, a simple notice was thumbtacked to the call-board in the green room. The committee selected the play by Amy Peach to finish off the subscription season.

  We were screaming. We were flabbergasted. Beth’s play—the one Louise and Terry and I typed—the one we never read and all made fun of—had won!

  The entire school was caught up in the mystery of who was Amy Peach. No one suspected Beth. Some thought Amy Peach was a man. Some thought it was a professor in disguise. Some thought it was one of the amazing talents who were past or present students in the department like Kathy Bates or Powers Boothe or James McLure. Tony Graham-White, our Theater History teacher, joked that he “wanted to take a bite out of Ima Peach.”

  Once the director was selected, the identity of Amy was revealed. No one knew what to make of it because I don’t think anyone had a clear opinion of Beth. She was the odd, cute girl who didn’t get cast much.

  Beth ended up calling the play Am I Blue because she loved Billie Holiday’s version of the song. The play went into immediate rehearsal. For the next few weeks Beth and I were in different worlds. I was playing my first leading role in a professional production. Beth was attending rehearsals as a first-time playwright. There was something unreal about the changes in our circumstances. Not in terms of money—we were still broke—but in terms of notoriety. I was learning what it was to leave the cocoon of anonymity.

  After I graduated, I noticed the one thing all acting majors had in common: frustration. When you don’t get auditions and don’t get acting jobs, it is easy to hide behind the persona of someone with enormous talent that the blind, underachieving world has overlooked. But when you get the job, those excuses vanish. You are no longer a genius in waiting. Your name is in the program. You have to deliver. And there’s almost nothing more frightening than being judged on your own work.

  Beth and I would have to face the critics. What if we were sliced and diced? What if the Dallas Morning News made a meal out of Mr. Spoon? What if our parents had to watch our public humiliation?

  Beth told me she wanted me there opening night. We asked Alex and Allyn to join us for moral support. We sat together with friends and family. We laughed and made small talk, but the level of chatter and anxiety rose as the Margo Jones Theatre filled to capacity. I saw critics from the newspapers pull out notepads. The house lights started to go down. It hit me how huge this was in human terms, and what would be left of Beth if this play was an embarrassment.

  We sat in the dark. Beth squeezed my hand until my circulation stopped. Lights came up onstage. There was a young girl, sixteen, wearing pieces of different outfits—reminiscent of Beth’s long-underwear/miniskirt look. The play got a little laugh right away. I breathed easier. The girl appeared to be a street urchin with no home. She meets our leading man, a lonely, fat boy of seventeen. He’s been given an all-night pass to a whorehouse as a fraternity hazing. He’s a virgin. And he’s terrified. She has nowhere to go. They decide to spend the night together.

  As the play proceeded, laugh followed laugh. There was a certain wacky reality, but underneath it all there was terror and hurt. To Beth’s credit, after about ten minutes, I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I was captivated. In the middle of the hilarity, our young heroine gets a phone call from her drunken father. The laughs in the theater stopped in a heartbeat. Everyone was silent. Tears burned down my cheeks—not just because of the play—but because of Beth. This play was not just good. It was one of the best things I had ever seen. And, remember, we had just seen Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud in London. Rather than answer any questions I may have had about Miss Hard to Get, now I had more questions than ever. Who was this girl sitting beside me? What was her talent?

  The play ended with a thunderous ovation. Beth was brought up onstage. She took a bow. We were on the mountaintop called triumph. We celebrated with an impromptu party at our apartment. Everyone came. It was interesting to watch our friends relate to Beth in a different way. She was no longer anonymous. Her work set her apart from everyone. In the room that night you could have observed on a microscopic level the seeds of fame: the busy, joyous, noisy form of isolation.

  The drinking started, reefers were lit, chaos reigned in a tame imitation of a future party we would have in the Hollywood Hills a little over a decade from now. I checked on the status of the kitchen. Everything in our home had been eaten, including the remains of the Chicken Volcano. I grabbed Beth and showed her the empty dish in the fridge. She made a face of mock horror, laughed, and then mimed slitting her throat with her index finger. In that moment I realized the two great qualities of actors: they’ll eat anything and they’ll take advantage of any opportunity to celebrate. Not a bad road to walk in this world.

  As Beth and I cleaned up from the party, our spirits were soaring. Our lives had changed since we got back from Europe. We had a handle on things. But in truth, we had no idea what was coming our way. And even if we did, we would not have had the foresight to know what it would mean. We had no defining soundtrack.

  Within a few weeks, Beth would be in despair working as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. Our friend Alex would call us in tears to tell us that Allyn had vanished without a trace. And instead of pursuing our careers in New York or Los Angeles as we had planned, we were heading to Illinois to be students again.

  18.
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br />   DATING TIPS FOR ACTORS

  VALENTINE’S DAY HAS been accused of being a made-up holiday, a holiday invented by candy salesmen and flower shops. I have known women who get livid around this time of year, saying the holiday is designed to make single people feel inadequate. I have also known men who start to get the sweats around mid-January, fearful of getting the wrong present, again.

  Regardless of what you think about Valentine’s Day, it does tend to make you think about relationships. Relationships have always proved the simplest and most complex of human endeavors. Even though people talk about relationships all the time, it is hard to make any headway. It is difficult to define what men look for in women and what women look for in men. One thing is for certain: it’s not the same thing.

  A group of sociologists performed an experiment in which they took the silhouettes of forty women’s bodies (tall, short, fat, thin) and pasted the shapes on a poster. Then they traveled all over the world and had men pick which one they found the most appealing. From Berlin, to New York, to the Outback, to the Amazon jungle, to nomads in the Sahara desert, interestingly, men everywhere picked the same shape as the most desirable: the silhouette of Marilyn Monroe.

  Obviously, not everyone can have Marilyn Monroe. Even Joe DiMaggio, who had Marilyn Monroe, found out that having Marilyn Monroe wasn’t what he thought it would be.

  Because relationships are so difficult to make and keep, people always try to simplify them, codify them, and crystallize them into something understandable. One popular form of the canon is found in dating tips.

  I am always interested in dating tips, and I believe them all. I remember one I heard from the nineteenth century: a woman could tell everything she needs to know about a man from his shoes. Does he work hard, is he vain, does he travel a lot? That morphed into the early-twentieth-century advice that you can always tell how a man will treat you by the way he treats his mother. Yikes.

  When I was in New York a few years ago, a woman told me that she looked for potential men to date in sports bars. She said she would get there early and sit next to a big-screen television so she would be noticed. She figured if a man was there to watch the game, he was probably straight. If she could divert his attention from the TV for eight straight seconds, he was dating material. Thirty straight seconds, we’re talking marriage.

  Online, they recently had an expert say that the three things that will doom you on a date are bad posture, dirty fingernails, and cat hair on your clothes. When I read this article I was sitting in my office chair, with a cat on my lap, right after I cleaned the rabbit cage.

  I have boiled down my view of relationships over the years. I’ve made peace with the idea that most men are looking for a woman to deliver the three L’s: Laundry, Lunch, and Lovin’. Some may call that crass. I look at it as simplicity itself.

  Women are much more complicated. They are like walking, talking dramas looking for the type of movie they want to be. The man provides the genre: family film, horror, comedy. Many relationships end up as film noir.

  I conducted my own sociological experiment on a trip to New York several years ago to see if I could understand what women look for in a man. Recalling the study with the silhouettes of women shown around the world, I went to three bars with my friend Greg and told three different stories to see what a woman would respond to. I wanted to know, if this were a real-world situation, could I have gotten a date?

  Bar number one was the famous White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there. Greg and I sidled up to the bar and found two available-looking women. We said hello, offered to buy drinks, and then I hit them with story number one. I said I was a dermatologist. I lived in New Jersey and was having the time of my life coming to Manhattan. Business was so good I decided to cut down my practice in Newark to only two days a week and open up an office in Greenwich Village. I’d work one day a week in Manhattan, take in some shows, go to the symphony, eat food—basically, have some fun.

  Without even a casual glance at my shoes or a question about my mother, the woman took out her card and wrote her phone number on it. She said that it sounded exciting and if I needed a “guide” around town to give her a call. Her eyes lit up as she asked me how I liked dermatology. I told her I loved it, except for lupus and melanoma. Otherwise, it was all rashes and acne. Within five seconds I knew whether to moisten it or dry it up.

  Bar number two was McHale’s Sports Bar. We found two unsuspecting subjects. Greg and I walked up and offered to buy them drinks. I started story number two. I told the woman that today was the happiest day of my life. I paid off my bicycle and I got put on the night shift at the delivery service where I worked. This meant I could continue to take acting classes during the day and start to earn money to get my pictures and résumé together—and then, hopefully, get an agent. She didn’t check my shoes, either. She just excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and never returned.

  Bar number three was McAleer’s Pub on Amsterdam. Same drill. Greg and I walked in. We went up to the bar. We met two women. We bought drinks. I started story number three—the unadorned truth—that I was a successful actor in films and television and was having a great time visiting friends in Manhattan before I had to go back to L.A. and start my next movie. The girl put her drink on the bar untouched and said with a certain degree of hostility, “Why do I meet all the fuckin’ nuts?” And then she left. So for all you guys out there looking for the three Ls, I would go with dermatology.

  Of course this experiment had way too many variables to be validated scientifically, but it does illustrate two points of irony. One, in all three stories it was the happiest day of my life and that didn’t seem to affect the outcome at all. Two, honesty, it would seem, was not the best policy.

  I have never seen honesty mentioned in any online dating tips. From shoes to cat hair, no one mentions honesty. Maybe we all know honesty is essential, and we don’t have to restate the obvious. Or we know the hopelessness of being honest, so why should we depress ourselves further?

  I’ve taught improvisation for the last seven years in Los Angeles. I do an exercise the first session of every class where we end up getting down to the basics of what matters most to us on a human level. Ninety-eight percent of the women and ninety-five percent of the men say quickly and with a complete sense of assurity that the most important part of a relationship is honesty. And number two is finding someone with a positive attitude.

  The human interaction most like dating or starting a relationship is an actor auditioning for a part. Actors are perpetual teenagers on a first date. They pick out their outfits and dress up to make the right impression. They practice their lines in the shower. They study themselves in the mirror to see which is their best side, and if their flaws are suitably covered.

  When I first started out in Hollywood, I used to practice shaking hands—with myself—to see how I came across. I concluded that my handshake was so clammy and invasive I had to retire it in favor of the fraternity boy head-nod and a “Howdy. How ya doin’. Good to see ya.” All of this in hopes of getting lucky, which in an actor’s case is getting a callback.

  Instead of the padded bra, the actor relies on the padded résumé to get attention. It is hard on young actors. Unless you were Mickey Rooney you don’t have a lot of credits from your teen years. I used to take a scene I did in acting class and put it on my résumé as if I had done the entire play at some made-up theater: Tom in The Glass Menagerie at the Meadowlark Dinner Theater. Over the years I didn’t get more parts, but I did get better at making up credits.

  You have to get the knack of making up names that sound like real theaters. You can try this technique at home. Pick a geographical entity—say, the Great Plains or Cripple Creek or the Grand Canyon—and then add the words “Playhouse” or “Dinner Theater” to it. It will sound real. You can also pick a name from the phone book like Kevin Montgomery or Sally Daniels and add “Playhouse” or “Dinner Theater.” It will soun
d real. Or you can take locations from the back of cereal boxes: Battle Creek Dinner Theater or the Quaker Oats Playhouse. It’s a little like having a fake ID to buy beer. It all smacks of desperation, but as actors we are all nerds trying to date the head cheerleader.

  Things got better for me when I stopped thinking that I was trying to get the part but, rather, seeing if I wanted to start a relationship. I quit worrying about what I wore. I stopped making up phony rave reviews of when I played Hap Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Cream of Wheat Playhouse. I started focusing on the one thing the producers and I had in common—the project.

  So my dating advice for actors is the opposite of cruising the bars of New York. Be prepared. As impossible as it seems, be honest. And make sure you’re not covered in cat hair.

  I HAD JUST finished reshooting my death scene in Heroes with a broken neck. My manager, Steven Levy, sent me a script for a new show called Glee. I was anxious and excited. I hadn’t had an audition in about seven months.

  My troubles had started earlier in the year when I had lost my voice. I had a ruptured vocal cord. In the end I needed surgery and two months of silence to recover. I was told I couldn’t whisper, let alone audition. When I recovered from the surgery, the doctor told me to take a trip where I could remain quiet and not use my voice. I went fishing. It seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t. The first thing you do when you catch a fish is scream. After that, my wife suggested that we go horseback riding in Iceland. That seemed peaceful enough until the third day of our trek. We were riding single file along the side of an active volcano when a freak wind lifted me and my horse off the ground and threw us onto a lava flow. I broke my neck in five places. It was a yin-yang sort of thing. Now I could talk. I just couldn’t move. I had a neck brace on day and night. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t get socks out of my drawer. I had to sleep vertically for three months. And I couldn’t audition.