Pieces of My Heart (33 page)

After five years, Stefanie became a little worried about becoming a permanent double act. She invoked Laurel and Hardy, and I still can’t quite figure that out, perhaps because I’ve always loved Laurel and Hardy. So Stefanie stepped out, and I asked Jill to step in. She initially refused, because she didn’t want to be compared to Stefanie and because she hadn’t been on the stage since she was a child.

“How many actresses have done this part?” I asked her. “Dozens! The part’s never been identified with any single actress.” She thought about it, then said yes. Jill and I did the play together for nine years, from 1995 to 2004.

On balance, I think Jill’s performance was more real than Stefanie’s. Stefanie is more theatrical; when Stefanie is in England, she becomes English, complete with accent. She has an incredible ear and picks things up automatically, and because of that, her emotions can be in a constant state of flux.

Whether I was doing it with Stefanie or Jill, it was very hard work. Not the play—that was a constant joy—but the traveling. Because it was mostly one-nighters, I realized after a time that I wasn’t being paid to act, I was being paid to travel.

If at all possible, we’d use a hub system that Jill developed. If we were playing towns in Illinois, we’d stay at the Four Seasons in Chicago—Jill picks hotels by how good their room-service eggs Benedict are. Every afternoon we’d drive to the airport and head for someplace like Springfield or Joliet, and we’d come back that same night. That way, we could spend five or six nights in the same hotel, although there were lots of times when that wasn’t possible and we’d be at an airport twice a day.

Other than the travel, it was a totally positive experience. One of the high points was the month we played in Chicago to great reviews. We were
the
hot ticket. I told Jill, “This doesn’t happen often. Enjoy it.”

I loved that play. To be able to sit down and say words, without the crutches of music or scenery, just words, and have those words move thousands of people every night so that they were stunned and in tears and standing up and applauding—there can be no greater reward for an actor.

I remember when we opened at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, the director gave us a note: “Don’t play it. Just read the letters and let it happen.” And that’s exactly what we did, bringing our own emotional coloring as actors and through that discovering the layers of the characters, and the layers of ourselves. I never looked at Jill onstage, and she only looked at me once, at the very end. We had some extraordinary nights. We found new values in that play every night.
Every night!

We took the images of different people out onstage with us. In Jill’s case, it was the young Barbara Hutton. Barbara had been Jill’s mother-in-law when she was married to Lance Reventlow. Barbara was one of those people who didn’t like to be alone—a woman whose life just didn’t work out. Jill never particularly liked her, but she admired her wit and intelligence and felt sorry for her. Occasionally, Barbara told Jill stories about her terrible childhood, and in Jill’s mental image of her character, she was similar to the “poor little rich girl” that Barbara Hutton had been.

We covered America two or three times over, played Europe, played Atlantic City twice, Vegas three times. We played casinos, we played basketball stadiums, we even played synagogues. We played everything but a men’s room. When we played in Texas, words like “fuck” and “snatch” lifted some people in the audience right out of their chairs, out of the theater, and into their cars. Alabama had the same response. When we played the synagogues, Jill took those words out of the script. “I’m not saying ‘snatch’ in a synagogue,” she told me. Other than that, we never changed a word of Gurney’s script.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and I had some discussions about doing
Love Letters
with a revolving cast. One night it would be Paul and Jill, another night it would be me and Joanne, and just to keep things really interesting, every third night Paul and I would do it. Just kidding. The revolving cast never happened, but I still think it was a good idea.

After Stefanie Powers and I had done six
Hart to Hart
TV movies, I was offered $10 million to produce three more. It seemed like a good idea to me, and Lionel Stander and the rest of the team were up for it, but Stefanie opted out in favor of doing a road company of the musical
Applause
. I was furious at her decision, regarding it as a betrayal—not just of me but of all the cast and crew who had worked with us for years and certainly could have used the work. But Stefanie had come to believe that
Hart to Hart
had typecast her and the show was somehow holding her back. There was some halfhearted conversation about recasting her part, or even writing her out of the shows, but I pointed out that if we did that, it wouldn’t be
Hart to Hart
anymore. I felt I had to be loyal to the audience’s expectations. I walked away.

Applause
closed quickly, and I suppose we could have reconstituted the
Hart to Hart
TV movies, but I had lost interest in working with Stefanie. Last year, her agent called to ask if I would be interested in doing a reunion
Hart to Hart
project. “Who the hell wants to see people our age cuddling in bed?” I asked him. I love Angela Lansbury, but I’m not about to give her a run for her money as the oldest detective in television history.

Mostly, I’ve continued to work as much as I want. A movie or two a year, a couple of TV shows a year. Lately, the biggest hits I’ve been associated with have been Mike Myers’s
Austin Powers
movies. I met Mike when I hosted
Saturday Night Live
in December 1989. At that point, Mike and his wife, Robin, were living in a tiny apartment in New York, and she cooked for them on a hot plate. I had a great time on the show, and I did a couple of skits that Mike wrote, in particular a hilarious bit playing a gay nurse—Nurse Stivers.

Years went by, and in 1997 Mike sent me a script he’d written about a secret agent from the Swinging Sixties who was cryogenically frozen and became the ultimate fish out of water in the modern era. I was to be the jealous second-in-command to Dr. Evil, Mike’s take on James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld.

Austin Powers
looked good on paper, and it looked better on film. Everything you saw in the film was in the script—my eye patch, everything. Mike is extremely shy but fantastic to work with—he knows exactly what he wants. Those pictures are definitely Mike Myers productions—Jay Roach is the credited director, but Mike calls the shots and does the editing. The success of the film, and the notice people took of me, confirmed Gadge Kazan’s suggestion that my instincts for comedy were excellent and I should do more in that line.

The odd thing about the
Austin Powers
pictures is that they sometimes look like we’re improvising, but we’re not. Everything’s written. I did feel that on
Austin Powers in Goldmember,
the last of the trilogy, the script was better than the film. There were some terrific scenes that ended up getting cut, including one of all of us in drag singing, “What’s it all about, Alfieeeeeee…,” and there was another sequence with me and a herd of llamas that was quite funny.

Mike’s brand of comedy certainly pays dividends for a modern audience, although my favorite kind of comedy comes out of reality. The people I grew up laughing at, like Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy, usually started with a very realistic premise. That tradition was carried on by Blake Edwards, who I think was the best comedy director of his generation.

W
ith all the quantum changes in show business—the transition to multinational conglomerate owners and the growth in foreign audiences, which affects the way a lot of movies are made—one thing hasn’t really changed since I drove onto the Fox lot in 1949: it’s a brutal business.

Just like sports, show business is for front-runners: they either boo you or applaud you, and it changes day to day. It’s particularly hard for actors. Logistically, a writer needs nothing more than a legal pad in order to write, but an actor needs a stage or a camera. Basically, someone has to hire him, and that changes the dynamic because it becomes money-intensive; it’s less of a talent issue and more of a sales issue. Add to that the fact that very few films are made because people have a passion to make that film. Mostly, films exist because corporations think they will be profitable, which results in a very different kind of movie.

In any case, I’ve been an actor for nearly sixty years, and nobody with that kind of career has any cause to complain. I’ve been very fortunate, and I think it’s largely because I was determined to be a working actor, emphasis on working. I just kept going to the plate and swinging. It didn’t matter whether the reviews were great or terrible, whether the films and shows were successful or unsuccessful.
I kept showing up.
Some actors go into a depressive shell when something doesn’t work, as if a critical or commercial failure is somehow a reflection on them and their ability. I’ve never believed that.

When I was a kid and just starting out, I read my reviews, but I came to realize that if you believe the good reviews, you have to believe the bad ones. Rather than focusing on what other people thought of me, I chose to concentrate on the work, the job, and my commitment to that work. I was at the studio, I was on time, and I knew my lines. As Spencer Tracy told me more than a half-century ago, don’t worry about anything but the scene. I extrapolated that to the big picture. From focusing on the scene, I focused on the job, then I focused on the next job.

Beyond anything else, I loved the business, and I loved working. And I don’t think people understand how important behavioral choices—not being an asshole, showing up on time, knowing your lines—are to sustaining a career. It’s easy to go from job to job when you’re hot, but it’s when things cool down that you can spot the jerks, because nobody will hire them.

I’m amazed that I’ve sustained a career for this length of time, because my contemporaries are either dead or haven’t worked in twenty years. The young actors with me at Fox were Cameron Mitchell and Jeffrey Hunter. Chuck Heston was at Paramount. Farley Granger was at Goldwyn, and John Erickson, who got the part in
Teresa
and got hammered for his trouble, was at MGM.

But the ironic reality is that no matter how devoted you are to your craft, it won’t necessarily have anything to do with whether or not lightning strikes. That’s actually a matter of the right part. Bill Holden, for instance, was not fully respectful of acting, but he got two films with Billy Wilder, and they changed his career and his life. Bill was a bit like Errol Flynn: he was ambivalent about his career choice but followed the path of least resistance and had a lot of doubts about himself as a result.

All my life, when I think about acting, I think about Spencer Tracy.
Spence knew his work
. He would say, “You’ve
got
to know the lines. If you know the lines, you can do anything you want to do.” Actors are really the least rehearsed of performers. The performers who really rehearse are musicians; they have those notes
down,
and that’s why they can go anywhere they want.

I remember sitting with the cellist Lynn Harrell. He was fretting about a problem he was having with a section of a piece. “I’m just not playing it the right way,” he said. The conductor offered some suggestions, and then Lynn said, “I know! I’ll think of Picasso.” These guys have played the music so many times that the problem of getting a fresh sound is in the forefront of their minds. The same thing happens with actors, except very few actors know their lines the way musicians know their notes.

I try to maintain a positive outlook about all the changes in the business and in the world, but I don’t like entitlement: kids who are pissed off if they don’t get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; actors who think they have to get where they’re going by the time they’re twenty-five because they’re afraid it won’t be there by the time they’re thirty-five. Recently I was talking to a young actor, and he mentioned a director he said was great because “he didn’t get in my way.”

This is insane. Acting is a give-and-take between the director and the actors. You have to have someone say the lines to you in order to prompt your lines. If that other actor is good, he will make you better, and if the director is good, you will be better still. But there are actors today who don’t care about that reciprocal arrangement. Their attitude is, “Fuck ’em, bring in somebody else.” These kinds of people are more concerned about their status than they are about the quality of the job they’re doing.

I’ve worked with guys who do push-ups or run around the block before a scene to work themselves into the proper state, but I tend to think that acting is analogous to music. When you hear a musician blowing a great sound, you don’t think about everything he’s gone through to be able to create those notes. You’re just interested in the result. The audience isn’t interested in what the actor goes through; they’re only interested in being transported, in being moved, and that’s what I find most thrilling—moving somebody.

After nearly sixty years, at this point it’s supposed to be Miller Time: hit the marks, say the words, go home. But I’m still nervous, and I still want to be as good as I can possibly be. The problem is not unlike Lynn Harrell’s: you want it to be there, but you want it to have a different value without pushing it.

I think my ability to sustain a long career has been at least partially a result of my ability to sustain long relationships, sometimes through succeeding generations. I’ve mentioned how much I valued Paul Ziffren, my lawyer. He was so innovative, so brilliant. It was Paul who set up the deal for
Charlie’s Angels,
and Paul who set up my profit participation in
Hart to Hart
. When Paul died, I simply moved my representation over to his younger brother Leo, who has fought my battles with all of the consideration, purposefulness, and accomplishment that his brother brought to my career. When Jill and I got married, it was Leo who gave her away. And Paul’s son John, who began his career in show business as a production assistant on
Hart to Hart
, is now a successful producer.