American Prince (10 page)

After more than three years of living on my own in the service, I had become a lot better at handling my mother. When she started ranting, I just heard her out, nodded, and did whatever I wanted to. I wasn’t around home that much anyway. But when I was around, she would try to pick fights with me. My father stayed out of it, but I could see that he hated seeing her go after me.

It wasn’t long after I started acting classes that I was able to say to myself,
I can do this.
I was inspired by my own progress, and by the encouragement of my fellow actors, talented people such as Walter Matthau. I liked being in classes with Walter. He was a little older than I was, twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and he had already worked off-Broadway. He had some acting experience, and he was kind enough to share what he’d learned.

Bea Arthur was a magnificent woman, highly intelligent, charming, and also very generous to anybody and everybody. She was a natural. We put on a play called
Whistler’s Father,
and she played Lysistrata, who arranged for all the women not to have sex with their husbands or boyfriends until they stopped the war. I played a married soldier, and Bea and I had a three-or four-minute scene where I tried to convince her that making love was the best thing to do, but she wouldn’t have any part of it. In the show I wore a sort of kilt and laced-up boots, and I carried a shield. When I came out on that stage, I could hear the girls in the audience go “Ooooh.” Hearing that sound helped boost my confidence.

Harry Belafonte was about my age. He had had a lot of additional hurdles to overcome simply because he was black. He wasn’t sure how much of a future he could have as an actor since there weren’t many good parts being written for black men, so he also maintained a career as a singer. Harry and I were very much alike—we were both outsiders. He was like a brother to me. We had a wonderful relationship. We’d hang out together and go to pubs down in the Bowery, where we were less likely to run into racial discrimination. Harry knew where he could go and where he couldn’t, so I just followed his lead.

We used to have dinner at one of the several Horn & Hard art’s Automats in New York. This was a chain of cafeterias where you put your money in a slot, a little window would open, and you took your food. Horn & Hardart’s cafeterias were safe for blacks because there was no maître d’ to tell you to get out. After dinner, Harry and I would go down into the subway, and while we were waiting on the platform for the train, he’d beat out a rhythm and sing. When we were with other guys, some of them would hum while he sang, “Daylight come and me wanna go home.” Even then he sounded great.

When people invited me to parties, I’d say, “Can I bring my friend Harry?” The place would be crowded with good-looking girls, and we’d work the room like nobody’s business. I’d be with this one girl, and I’d look across the room and he’d be with another one, and we’d nod to each other. I loved sharing that moment with him.

Another thing I had in common with Harry was a tendency to get depressed. Knowing that feeling only too well, I could recognize it when Harry had a bad case of the blues. I’d sit down next to him and say, “Come on, Harry. I know what you’re dealing with, and I’m here for you. Come on. Pull out of it.” I knew how he was suffering, and I knew he appreciated my support.

One evening we were putting on a performance at the school when a group of toughs from the surrounding neighborhood came in to harass us. How they got in, I don’t know. They were fifteen or sixteen years old, a gang of young hoodlums. When I came out on stage, I could hear them rustling in the back seats. One guy screamed out, “Hey faggot! Fairy! Yoo-hoo!” We didn’t have any security, so I stopped in the middle of my line and said, “Fuck off, get out of here,” in the toughest voice I could muster. Then Harry and Walter and a couple of teachers walked over and told them they had called the cops, so the kids took off.

I was still standing on stage, so I said to the audience, “Excuse me, please.” I calmly turned around to the girl I was in the scene with and gave the next line in the play, like I imagined a real pro would do it. Slowly, surely, I was learning.

I was also becoming more experienced with the ladies. One afternoon I met this beautiful girl on the street. I chatted with her, and we went up to her apartment. She was a few years older than I was and a real stunner. After we made love, she told me her boyfriend was Bobby Thomson, the outfielder for the New York Giants. I was still in bed with her when the phone rang. She answered and said, “Hi, Bobby, how are you?” She talked to this great ballplayer while I was snuggling next to her in bed!

A
s the spring
semester was coming to a close, I saw a notice on the bulletin board that there was an opening for an actor with the Stanley Wolf Players. It was a non-union job, which made it possible for me to apply. Wolf had been a Broadway producer, but he had fallen out of favor with the powers that be in the New York theater world, so he created a drama troupe that played the Borscht Belt resorts in the Catskill Mountains. I went to meet Stanley in his office in Manhattan, and he hired me on the spot. We would be going out on the road for the whole summer. My pay was to be forty bucks a week.

To make a stage for us, the hotels would clear away the dining room tables and set up folding chairs for the audience. We did the same play everywhere we went. It was
This Too Shall Pass,
a play about anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. The audiences always seemed to like it, so we played it every night: three nights in one hotel, four nights in another.

There were five of us in the cast, three guys and two girls, and we all got very close. That was what being on the road in the Catskills was all about. We’d play the hotels at night, and during the day we were expected to circulate among the hotel guests, so that’s what I did. To me the Catskills was female guests in bathing suits and all the food you could eat. In the evenings, we put on the play. It was a great experience, heightened by the knowledge that it wouldn’t last beyond the end of the summer.

In smaller hotels, we slept in cots in the corridors near the kitchen. There was usually a bathroom down the hall, and the strong smell of food all through the night. At the bigger hotels, sometimes we’d be lucky enough to get our own rooms. I’ll never forget one night when I got lucky, and I do mean lucky. I’d been given my own room, right next to one that was being shared by my two fellow actresses. A door with locks on both sides separated us. I was twenty-two, and they were a little older than I was, but not by much. At the time we were all a little crazy.

After the performance that night, I knocked on the door between the rooms. The girls unlocked their side and invited me in. As I entered, one of the girls left to go into my room. The girl who stayed behind started to undress and made it clear she wanted me to do the same. We got in bed together and had sex, and after we were done, I went back in my room and did it with the other one! Incredible! I was able to have great sex on both sides of that door! We shared those adjoining rooms for only two nights, but it was sweet while it lasted.

I liked my part in
This Too Shall Pass.
Stanley also put on
The Jazz Singer,
and I had the Al Jolson role, although I didn’t have to do much singing. It was a cut-down version of the full play, which moved from one scene to the next without the musical number in between. I was disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to do more, but I was glad they didn’t ask me to do the full play. Not only would that have been taxing, but I was probably the wrong guy for the part. Wolf knew what he was doing. He had been in the business for a long time.

While I was performing in
This Too Shall Pass,
Oscar Osker-off, who ran the Yiddish Theater in Chicago, came to see the play.
This Too Shall Pass
was very Jewish, and he loved me in it, so he asked me to come to Chicago and perform in his company. He said he’d bump my salary to sixty-five dollars a week, so I took the job.

He also wanted me to change my name. He said, “If I put you on the stage as Bernie Schwartz, everybody is going to think I got an Italian boy from the neighborhood and changed his name to Bernie Schwartz. So I’m going to call you Bernie White.” I didn’t understand his logic, but it was his nickel, so I agreed. After I arrived in Chicago, Oscar also said he wanted me to marry Henreyetta Jacobsen, an actress in the company, so we could become the reigning couple of Jewish theater. He offered to increase my salary to a hundred and fifty dollars a week if I’d do it. At first I wasn’t sure he was serious, but to my astonishment it turned out that he was.

Henreyetta was a nice enough young woman, but certainly not someone I wanted to marry. She didn’t exactly remind me of my mother, but she was much too close for comfort. Throughout my whole life I’ve had one overriding philosophy: Don’t marry someone who reminds you of your mother. And I’m happy to report that I never did. So to Oscar’s great disappointment, I turned him down.

Oscar’s play opened with me, playing a kid, running into the house. I’m dressed in short pants and a cap so I look about twelve years old. My father in the play, acted by Menachim Rubin, is eating dinner. Rubin was a real character in real life. He would carry around a little cotton bag with his gallstones in it. He loved to show them off. In the play, I would say, “Look what I made, Dad. I earned a quarter cleaning someone’s basement.” With that, Rubin slaps me in the face, taking altogether too much pleasure in the job. Every night this guy almost knocks my head off, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Then he says to me, “Listen, you’ll never have to work like that. I want you going to college. I want you to become an attorney or a doctor—no cleaning anybody’s house.”

The curtain closes, and when it opens again I’m lying in my pajamas on a couch reading the funnies. My mother, played by Gertrude Berg, says to me, “Listen, things are tough for your father. I thought maybe you could go get a job.” I say, “No way. I’m going to go to college, just like Dad wants me to.”

Then my father enters. He says, “A funny thing happened to me today on the way home from work. I told somebody I worked for the Metropolitan Insurance Company, and they thought I said, ‘The Metropolitan Opera.’” Then someone in the audience would scream, “Menachim, sing for us what you sang for them!” And he’d stop and sing an aria from
Figaro.

At the end of the play, he and my mother come over to where I’m lying on the couch in my pajamas, and my father says to me, “Son, things are not too good lately. I don’t have that much work anymore.”

“No, Menachim,
oy,
” the people in the audience are screaming.

Finally he says to me, “Son, I think you’re going to have to go to work.”

I get up from the couch, fold the comics, and walk straight down to the edge of the stage. I look at the audience, and I say in Yiddish, “I would rather die.”

The audience starts to boo, and then I begin to ad-lib in Yiddish and say, “I would rather be in the movies!” It wasn’t part of the play, and the audience didn’t quite know what to make of that, but I got a kick out of saying that line every night.

Oskeroff had promised me good parts, but the snooty kid who was too good for his parents wasn’t an auspicious start. In the second play, I played a boy selling newspapers; that’s all I did. So after the first performance of that play, I wrote Oscar a letter: “Dear Mr. Oskeroff: This part is something I cannot play. It’s too complicated.” I signed the letter and left it for him. Then I went to the house where I was renting a room and threw everything I had into a sheet. I tied the sheet up, threw it over my shoulder, and left. After hitchhiking to see some relatives in Cleveland, I eventually made my way home.

I returned to the Dramatic Workshop to find my buddies Walter Matthau and Harry Belafonte still there, much to their chagrin. Walter and I starred in a production of
Twelfth Night,
where I played Sebastian, the brother of Viola. I had been taking speech lessons, which made it possible for me to do Shakespeare, hitting each one of the words properly. Another play we put on was Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy,
about a boxer named Joe Bonaparte who plays the violin. At one point in the play, Joe goes out and gets himself a fight to make some money. When his father finds out, he goes nuts. The play was somewhat like
This Too Shall Pass
and
The Jazz Singer.

The Cherry Lane Theater, a professional theater connected to the New School, had scheduled the production of a play for the coming weekend, but it fell through, so they asked the staff at the Dramatic Workshop if they had something that might take its place. The teachers said they had this kid, Bernie Schwartz, who was playing Joe Bonaparte in
Golden Boy
and doing a good job of it. The Cherry Lane was thrilled. What they didn’t know was that we’d worked on only the first two-thirds of the play. The next thing I knew, my teachers came to me and said, “We’re going to open
Golden Boy
at the Cherry Lane Theater for a weekend, and you’ve got five days to learn the rest of it.”

But I didn’t mind. “I’m ready,” I said. And I was. By this time I had enough experience to know what I could and couldn’t do. Besides, I loved the play, and the role was perfect for me. It allowed me to play a tough, pugnacious kid who had an artistic side. (Sound familiar?) For five days we rehearsed six to eight hours a day at the school. We’d go to Central Park for a lunch break, and I would sit in the grass and learn my lines. I loved learning lines. It didn’t come naturally to me, but I loved doing it anyway, and eventually I got pretty good at it.

By the time the play opened on Friday night, I had it down well enough so that when I hit the stage, I wasn’t nervous at all. I was enjoying the atmosphere and getting into the part. Everything went off like a charm. We did our weekend of performances; then it was over, and I went back to school.

On that first Monday after
Golden Boy
finished its run at the Cherry Lane, I went to see a theatrical agent named Joyce Selznick, who worked for one of the smaller talent agencies. It turned out she was the niece of David Selznick, the legendary producer of
Gone With the Wind.