Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (18 page)

Although I was having fun, laughing my head off a good part of every day, I felt as if there was no one there who really knew me.  And I felt that they never would know me, unless I was able to tell them the truth about what had happened to me.  When, in the midst of just one more van ride to or from a location, I happened to mention that I had spent most of the previous year in and out of the hospital, all heads swung in my direction.

“Why were you in the hospital?” someone asked.

“I had leukemia,” I answered.

After a stunned pause, the questions began.  I was surprised to find that, rather than being repulsed by my history, people were intensely curious.  Revealing the hidden details of my life didn’t cause people to treat me as someone more delicate than themselves.  Instead, I found myself being regarded with admiration.  While I might have felt uncomfortable had they been respecting me only for having been ill, that didn’t seem to be the case.  At first I barely listened as one of my comrades said, “Wow, that’s brave.”  It was an empty statement to me by this point, no more incisive or heartfelt than someone saying “Have a nice day.”  But when I heard them go on, I was moved.  “Telling us about that the way you did,” caught my ear as a fresh twist.  “Just saying ‘Hey, this is me’ flat out like that.  That is really brave.”

It was my first taste of a new power, a new path, that wouldn’t become clear to me for some time.  My new friends were looking at me with a surprised esteem for having openly revealed to them the crux of my existence.

Just past midnight on July 1, after finishing a somewhat tedious sequence of shots, the assistant director of
Sweet Lorraine
called out, “That’s a wrap!” and the filming was complete.  I wandered out, in a bit of a daze, to the back lawns of the hotel where we had spent the last six weeks making the film.  As I heard the cast and crew scrambling to finish their work so the party could begin, as the music wafted toward me from the ballroom of the hotel, I drifted farther and farther away from the sounds.  My eyes were drawn up to the night sky, which was splattered with sparkling lights.  The Milky Way was a solid, misty stripe  cutting a swath across the darker background, where the lonelier stars throbbed their light toward me and my self-obsessed insignificance.  I climbed on top of a picnic table and took off my shoes and my sweaty shirt.  It had been broiling hot inside, under the film lights, but here in the cold mountain air, with only those distant fires burning in the sky, the temperature had dropped surprisingly low.

Standing on the picnic table shortly after midnight on the first of July, listening to the shouts of joy wafting their way out to me and hearing the corks popping on the champagne bottles, I had a celebration of my own.  I stood, half-naked in the cold, and I screamed out into the night.  I yelped and I howled at the stars and the moon, with a sense of joy and relief and accomplishment big enough to fill the sky above me.  I had my celebration separately from the others because I had different things to celebrate.  I hadn’t realized, until the job was done, how frightened I’d been.  That I might be interrupted.  That my health might fail and ruin everything.  But I had done it.  This time the task begun had been completed, and it gave me a feeling that I’d never had so intensely before.  I licked the salt from the tears that were rolling down my face and, out of breath and exhausted, I headed up the sloping grass to join the others, ready to take my place as one of them.

My separation from Jackie didn’t last long.  Neither did any of the others that we tried over the next several months.  Jackie and I had come to equate our survival with our attachment to each other.  Like an old couple who emerge from hiding after a long siege, Jackie and I both feared that it was the act of clinging to one another that had spared our lives.  Never mind the fact that we didn’t know how to live
with
each other.  Letting go, even for a moment, made us feel exposed and vulnerable to the flying bullets and exploding bombs that we had dodged together so far.

We traveled to Europe.  I made another movie.  I had my triumphant return to Sundance Institute, where I was welcomed by the people I’d met just before falling ill.  I lived loud and embraced my mistakes, and for the first time I felt great about all of it.  Every aspect of life had become a terrific adventure.  Something to be done, just to see what would happen.  Even going to the dentist became a great way to spend the day, because it was part of life, and life was what I had wanted, and now it was mine.  I’d sit in the dentist’s chair, determined to
feel
everything.  Enjoying the fact that I was there, privileged enough to have that needle piercing my gums.  Feeling lucky to be smelling my teeth burning up under the drill.

This super-charged curiosity about life completely changed the way people responded to me.  I would never have described myself as having a “magnetic personality,” but the freedom I felt as a result of unshackling myself from the accepted constraints of behavior drew people toward me in ways and numbers I had never before experienced.  As I breezed through my days indulging my whims, arriving places according to my own personal schedule, and speaking my mind with the candor of someone who had nothing to lose, I found myself surrounded by admirers who wanted to play along.  I revisited the summer theater retreat in Tannersville where Jackie and I had met and, with no responsibilities to live up to myself, I encouraged others to abandon theirs.  I was the “hooky mascot” that summer, available to sneak off with whoever might be ready to desert his or her post on any given day.

This dynamic crystalized a theory I’d held for a long time already: people are attracted to those who can afford to behave in ways they can’t get away with themselves.  It’s a trait that runs through many of our celebrities, both in the characters they portray and in their own personal lives.  Those who can brawl and sleep around, mouth off and back it up with heavy firepower allow the rest of us to vicariously experience the freedom that would leave us jobless and friendless if we ever truly embraced it.

And that’s exactly what started to happen to me.  The role that I had chosen to play in the immediate aftermath of my struggle, that of the “professional distractor,” eventually set me apart from the same people whom I had lured in with it.  Using the money I’d saved from
Sweet Lorraine
,  I absolved myself from all obligations other than to myself.  Traveling back and forth between Tannersville, New York City, Utah, and South Carolina – visiting friends, driving aimlessly for hours – I granted myself a respite from the pressures of time.  I was free not only for the one afternoon I might have convinced one person to run off with me, but for every day afterward as well.  This laid the ground for resentment toward me when each of my new friends went back to work and I continued to frolic.  If any intimacy had developed between us in our afternoon of abandon, either romantic or not, there was the specter of jealousy as I repeated my daily ritual with someone else the next day.  If I did get myself into an interpersonal scrape that felt too tempestuous for my mood, I might just skip town the next day.  The people I met during those days seemed to be drawn in and repulsed in equal measure.

And there was still, of course, Jackie, who, after all the time she had been forced to live without stability in her life, was probably after anything but adventure in this phase of it.  One by one, the same people who had run after me either drifted away or expressed the limits of their tolerance, for the very same reasons they had sought me out to begin with.  It started to become clear that I would have a choice to make eventually between accepting the different attitudes and priorities my experiences had instilled in me, and so leading a life set apart from most others, and finding my way back to the lives being lived by most of the people I cared about, and assenting to the terms of the social contract most people tacitly agree to without such conscious deliberation.

* * *

I had wondered, since the first day of the ordeal, whether the fact that I’d been ill would affect my career.  Would people less generous and enlightened than Steve Gomer be reluctant to hire me, since I had left a Broadway production because of illness?  About a year into my brand-new life, I got a call to go audition for another Neil Simon play.  If I could get back on Broadway, I thought, working for the same people that I worked for before I got robbed, I’d be able to feel like I had really reclaimed all the possessions of my life.

Down in the basement of the theater, I was sitting on the dirty concrete floor with about six other actors.  I had already read a couple of scenes for Neil and Manny Azenberg and Gene Saks, the power trio, and they’d sent me downstairs to look over another one.  A shadow blocked the light, and I looked up to see Manny, the producer, towering over me.

He said, “You’re a breath away.  Don’t blow it.”

I squinted up at Manny, and opened my mouth.  Before I could make a sound, he said, “Don’t blow it.”   And he walked away, back up the stairs.

I decided to take this as encouragement.  I mean, it seemed like Manny was really rooting for me — in his own way.

And by the time I got home that day, I had the part.  I went to the window and I screamed out into the sweaty New York air.  I couldn’t stop screaming.  I don’t think I had ever gotten as excited before in my life.  Not in any way that I showed it.  But I had gotten everything back, and more.  I had fooled the angel of death and won back all my toys, all the possessions and freedoms that somehow added up and equaled my life.  I had them all, once again, plus a brand-new spirit to enjoy them with.   Everything felt complete, and for the next four months I basked in the luxury of my victory.

Perhaps “basked” gives me a bit more credit than I deserve.  I was flying high with my newly reacquired Broadway swell status, and I wasn’t shy about combining my victory proclamation with a cry of triumph over my health.  “STILL ALIVE AND WELL: Evan Handler is back on Broadway in Neil Simon’s
Broadway Bound
” read the ad I took out in the trade papers to announce my return.  Each evening, at seven P.M. or so, as I rounded the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, I never failed to get misty-eyed and tingly when I saw the sparkling marquis of the theaters and passed through the stage door of the one I was appearing in.  But, as far as keeping a fresh appreciation of life and its gifts, my attitude began to spoil quickly.  In fact, as the boundless expectations I’d carried through my life once again took hold, it was swiftly turning rancid.

One of the most dependable follow-ups to landing any coveted acting job is the grim process of negotiating a contract.  In one instant, the potential employer who has selected you after careful examination of every available alternative turns from your smiling admirer into your snarling adversary.  After paying you the highest compliment possible, that of desiring your services, the employer begins to methodically catalogue all the reasons why your services are not worth very much.  Business is business, and every negotiation I have been involved in has come down to the same extremely simple decision: Take it or leave it.  And, if you can’t afford to walk away and lose the job, you ain’t gonna get what you think you deserve.

When I began my tenure in the cast of
Broadway Bound
, my disappointment over the fact that my salary was half that of my predecessor in the role was somewhat tempered by my inheritance of his dressing room.  I am, unfortunately, an individual over whom the craving for status has influence to rival that of my desire to lead a life of thoughtful fulfillment.  I hadn’t been able to secure the salary I wanted for the job, my demands for equal billing to the actor I had replaced were laughed at, and the length of my commitment to the show was firmly imposed upon me.  But, when I saw the palatial, luxurious dressing room I was being granted occupancy of — about the size of a small studio apartment, complete with sofa and easy chair and a modern bathroom with shower; when I saw that the room had both the space and impressiveness to function as a private, rent free midtown office for the duration of the run, I was enthralled by the possibilities, and anxious to impress my post-show visitors.

Also in the cast of
Broadway Bound
was an older actor, an avid Socialist and political activist named John Randolph.  John’s career had already spanned several decades, despite a fifteen-year run on the Hollywood studios’ blacklist of “subversives” in the 1950s and early ’60s, and included appearances in dozens of major films through almost as many different eras.  John’s wife had died suddenly the year before, and John himself had recently undergone heart bypass surgery.  In fact, he had begun rehearsals for the show only about two months after his operation.  In spite of those hardships, John, for as long as I have known him, has been a man with the spirit and energy of a gleeful, if somewhat irascible, youngster.  Both he and Linda Lavin had won Tony Awards for their roles in
Broadway Bound
, and John, upon accepting his award, had wished everyone watching on national television “Peace, love, and brown rice.”  Since the two of them had already been with the show for some time, they were both scheduled to leave the production after the first two months of my run.  I was asked, in deference to his stature as one of our greatest actors, if I might be willing to let John use the stage-side dressing room until he left the show.  Climbing the stairs to his room on the second floor was becoming a strain for him.

Of course, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.  It would have been ludicrous for me to think that, after a career such as John’s, I was entitled to any privilege over him, regardless of the size of our roles in that particular play.  And John was a great guy.  He was constantly poking his head into my room and saying, “Tell me, son, are you interested in politics?”  It didn’t matter at all what I said back.  The pamphlets were out in a flash, the latest news clipping was being analyzed, and John was picking apart someone’s latest speech.  If I was interested in politics, John was feeding my curiosity; if I wasn’t, then it was his responsibility to educate me.  Every now and again he would pause from his diatribe and look up with a smile as sweet as any child’s.