By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (5 page)

I’ll never forget my audition. I showed up at the Palmer House, a big hotel in Chicago, and was completely overwhelmed: they had three floors reserved for the auditions, and it seemed like there were about a thousand actors there, all vying for these same few spots. I had a private audition with Cherry, after which, I assumed, the teachers would talk to me. So I walked up to their desk and stood there waiting. One of the teachers looked at me coldly and asked, “What is it you want?” I was twenty years old and intimidated as hell. I tried to talk, but nothing came out of my mouth, so he just said, “Well then,
go back to your tribe.” That was my introduction to high-end acting: “Go back to your tribe.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but I got the sense that he considered me among the mediocre, the common—something I had always been terrified of being. I ended up becoming friends with that teacher, and I never asked him about the day of my audition, but I did discover that he was an alcoholic and had a lot of issues. In the end, like so many things, it probably said more about him than it did about me.

Just about the only other thing I ever thought about when I was at Temple was a girl named Michelle Stern. I met her the first day of school and thought I’d never seen a more beautiful girl in my life. I guess we’d all been sent pictures of our future classmates before the semester started, but I had never opened the packet. She obviously did, though, because she walked up to me and said, “I’m Michelle. You’re Tom, right?” I was transfixed.

That day, we each had to perform monologues. Although she wasn’t very good—she hadn’t acted much at all—she had the most amazing body I’d ever seen. Later, a bunch of us had dinner, and when she and I were talking, I asked her, “Can I tell you something?” She said something kind of obnoxious, like “Oh, are you going to tell me I’m pretty?” And I said, “Well, you are really beautiful, but also, you were sort of disastrous in your monologue.” She laughed. She knew she was pretty raw. She’d never really acted before and hadn’t done a play until her junior year in college.

I was thrilled when I wound up at her apartment later that night. I think some guys are afraid of girls who are really beautiful, but I wasn’t. I just desired her in a really profound way. My whole body got hard—not just my dick. But I didn’t want to appear too eager because I was trying to play it kind of cool. But then she whispered something
in my ear, and I just flew off the couch and tore off my clothes, and she thought that was funny. We both started laughing and then fell in a sort of joyful embrace on her couch. It really was an outrageously erotic night for both of us, and we didn’t actually get out of bed for about a day and a half. It was only at that point that she told me that she had a boyfriend in Cincinnati, and she was in love. But I stayed in her life, and by the following summer she confessed that she was in love with me. The eighteen months that followed that summer were probably the happiest of my life; it was the first time that I really, truly fell in love, and I don’t know if there’s any better feeling in the world.

As a student at Temple I became completely immersed in becoming an actor. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know how I managed to become obsessed with something that, let’s face it, is so outrageously unrealistic to do with your life. But it was all I thought about. And I got a lot of encouragement. Faculty members would tell me that I was the best actor who’d been through the school in years.

Graduate school taught me a great deal. I studied primarily with Dugald MacArthur, who was one of the better teachers there and thoroughly groomed me. I still remember all of my teachers—people like Joe Leonardo, who worked with actors on vocal production, and Kathy Garinella, who was a movement teacher. I also learned how to build sets and took a theater history class with Walt Cherry, the head of the program, and another one with a brilliant theater historian named Michael Burton.

I was the only first-year student to perform on the main stage there, when I played a rabbi in
The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.
—a play adapted from a novel by George Steiner. I had to learn Hebrew for the role, and I ended up studying it with a rabbi named Cohen at a synagogue in Philadelphia. I liked Rabbi Cohen so much that I actually enrolled in Hebrew school at his temple, Society Hill Synagogue;
I went to that Hebrew school for six months, when I was done with my acting classes for the day. The kids in that school, who were all thirteen-year-olds studying for their bar mitzvahs, thought it was weird that there was this twenty-two-year-old non-Jew there, but I befriended one named Isaac. And I actually seriously toyed with the idea of converting to Judaism and going and living on a kibbutz in Israel. Michelle was Jewish, and even though she wasn’t all that religious, her parents were, and we knew that if we were going to get married we’d have to talk about something like that anyway.

When I wasn’t studying Hebrew or in my classes, I was learning about movies. I focused on actors who had a presence that made you say, “I’m willing to continue to watch this even though they’re talking about banal shit.” I remember seeing the Robert De Niro–Meryl Streep movie
Falling in Love
and not liking the movie but knowing that I was watching two actors who were as good as they get and at the height of their powers. It barely mattered to me that I didn’t like the movie: watching them do anything was magnetic.

Another movie that came out when I was in graduate school was
The Big Chill
. I was blown away. I thought William Hurt was auspiciously great, and so to see him act alongside Tom Berenger, JoBeth Williams, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Tilly, and Kevin Kline—who I’ve always thought is easily one of the ten best living actors—was exhilarating. I was amazed by the talent but also by the movie in general. It was about such a specific type of feeling—that sense that you’re no longer young but you’re not old, either, and that everything you know about life is being called into question. I felt like I was right there with them—at a point where dying seemed very far away, but, in a way, youth did, too.

The whole time I was in Philadelphia I knew that it was only a matter of time before I’d go to New York. I understood that that’s
where I was going to have to be to actually launch an acting career and I was smart enough to understand that I didn’t have the wherewithal to go there until I’d gotten my MFA. Michelle felt the same way, and we decided to make the move together. And even though I was still deeply in love with her, I also had a feeling of dread about our future because I knew that in order to make it as an actor I probably wasn’t going to be able to make all the compromises that would be necessary to maintain our relationship. And becoming successful as an actor meant everything in the world to me. Still, we found a place in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn and got ready for our lives to start.

WE MOVED TO
New York on July 1, 1986, just a few weeks before the so-called Preppy Murder, when Robert Chambers strangled Jennifer Levin in Central Park after leaving a bar on the Upper East Side. I don’t know why that event sticks out in my head so much but I think it probably has to do with the fact that this violent murder seemed to be in such stark contrast to the cushion of hopefulness that I felt like I was living in. New York was big and full of possibilities. I don’t think I realized just how big it was until I looked at the phone book one day, saw that there were something like 12 million names in there, and realized I didn’t know one of them. At Temple, I’d been a big star, and on top of that, Michelle and I both had all the exuberance of youth. But we had no connections at all in the real-life acting world and we didn’t know how to get them.

It was tough in the beginning. I had read in
Backstage
magazine about how the Ensemble Studio Theatre was where David Mamet and Lanford Wilson launched their new works, so I started taking acting classes there. I felt like I was a freshman in college again. I
would do menial chores just to get the chance to dress the stage. And it was worth it. This was a place that had been started by Curt Dempster, who was both a playwright and an actor. He was friends with some of the world’s best playwrights, both those who were already established and those who were coming up—from David Mamet and Horton Foote to John Patrick Shanley. Curt would decide to, say, put on
Cyrano de Bergerac;
he would play Cyrano and then hire out other New York actors to play the smaller parts. A lot of talented actors came up through Ensemble—people like John Turturro, Ellen Barkin, William H. Macy, and Richard Dreyfuss—and plays would often launch there before moving to Broadway.

I could tell that Ensemble was the place to be, but at the same time, I was a realist. I’d look around my acting classes, just like every actor does, and think, “Not all of us are going to be in movies—in fact, the odds are that none of us are going to be in movies—so I’d better be the best actor in this fucking class if I’m to continue to do this with any possibility of it being real.” I was determined.

It was an exciting time to be in New York. I remember I’d walk out of the four-story brownstone apartment building Michelle and I lived in and think that it didn’t matter which way I turned, because a walk in either direction was going to be interesting. But New York’s a tough place. Mike Wallace really embodied the city for me. I’d watch
60 Minutes
and think, “This motherfucker
is
New York City—his whole comportment, how bright and thorough he is, the way he takes everyone to task about everything, and his generosity and his coldness.” New York is a mess of contradictions.

I was doing everything I knew I had to do to succeed—whether that was hundreds of push-ups every day to stay in shape or obsessively reading Shakespeare plays. Sometimes it felt like I was trapped in a cycle I’d never escape: I wanted to be in movies so it was like,
okay, how do you get in a movie? Well, you get a tape of you being in a movie. Well, how do you get the first tape then? The logic would spin round and round like a washing machine.

In New York City back then, if you didn’t have an agent, you’d go to the Actors’ Equity Association, located at Forty-Fourth Street and Broadway, which was the union for actors and stage managers, because they listed the open calls for theater auditions. If you saw, say, an open call for
The Tooth of Crime
by Sam Shepard, you’d sign up and sit there for two and a half days to get an audition. I’d go there about once a week, on Tuesdays.

Because I had to manage my time carefully in New York, between leaving my apartment in the morning and not coming back until nighttime, I started playing chess with the newspaper when I was waiting around at Actor’s Equity. One day, some big Italian guy walked up to me and said, “Tired of playing with yourself? Because I am.” It was James Gandolfini, who later, of course, gained fame starring in HBO’s
The Sopranos
. Actors who are that good are usually very bright and funny, and Jimmy is no exception.

I was also seeing a lot of theater and getting a strong sense of which actors who were already making it were legitimately great. I saw John Malkovich do
True West
with Gary Sinise on Broadway, and he was magnificent. When I saw him play Biff opposite Dustin Hoffman in
Death of a Salesman,
I saw how
really
good he was. But at the same time—and I realize how conceited this sounds—I thought I was just as good, if not better, than the biggest actors out there. I don’t think I would have continued to pursue acting in the dogged way that I was if I didn’t believe that. I understood that if I made it, it wasn’t going to be because I was pretty; I just believed in my raw talent. Of course, you can’t be objective about yourself, but something
in me still believed that I was as good as the actors I was watching, and that made me continue to pursue it even though I wasn’t getting anywhere.

At the time I was doing odd jobs like loading trucks for UPS and Coca-Cola and working at nightclubs. It was when I was working at the clubs that I started to see people doing a lot of drugs. I was curious about them, but I wasn’t doing any of that myself really. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Chet Baker—all my cultural heroes had been somehow connected to drugs, so I believe I had a constant back-of-my-mind fixation with the dark side. I was highly aware of the fact that in the sixties, all the guys who were considered cool were drugging and they always had all the girls. But I also wanted to be the best actor in my class, and that kept me from living anything but a fairly clean life. I wanted my acting teachers to keep telling me that they thought I was going to be a star, so I wasn’t going to get all fucked-up at night and then go to acting class hungover in the morning.

For three years, I worked at a catering company called Great Performances, which would handle functions like home dinner parties hosted by wealthy New Yorkers. The food would be pre-prepared by a great cook who would show up with a staff of waiters in tuxedos, and we would serve the dinner. Every actor in town wanted to work there. Your day was over by one o’clock, which meant that you had the rest of your day free for possible auditions. You had to get to work at four in the morning so everything would be ready to roll two hours later, but that was a small price to pay.

I worked there for three years. At the time, they had a contract for the executive dining rooms of the Port Authority at the World Trade Center and at Kennedy Airport. I spent most of my time at the World
Trade Center. I didn’t like working at the parties. I felt jealous of the rich people, and some of them treated us horribly. Nasty nouveau riche women would tell me that my pants weren’t long enough and that I had to go home to change; I’d go sit down somewhere, then come back in the same fucking pants and they’d say, “Oh, those are perfect.” It was bullshit.

Even in that job I was ambitious, and decided I had to be the featured waiter in the executive dining room. My boss there—a lovely African-American gentleman named Ken Stiles—ran the executive dining room and had been doing it for fifteen years at that point. If I had an audition at 12:30
P.M.
, he’d let me go early and then pretend he had to send me out to do an errand; that way no one from Port Authority could get on my case for not being there.