Up Till Now (5 page)

There was a hotel with an all-you-can-eat buffet for $2.50 (Canadian) a few blocks from my rooming house. To save money I ate there most nights. Early in the evening it was a family restaurant; workingmen could come in with their wives and children and eat well, and then go back in line and eat again. It was a festive family place, ringing with loud voices, chattering mothers and fathers, and yelling children. It was alive with life, and I would sit there by myself, every night, usually reading a book. I sat there for several hours, until they closed the cafeteria. I had no place else to go.

By eight o’clock the families would leave. And across the lobby in this flea-bitten hotel was a seedy bar that opened when the cafeteria closed. I would move from the cafeteria to the bar and a whole other life began. It was like the second movie on a double bill. The first feature was a family movie, then after the intermission they showed the adult films. Once the families left the prostitutes moved in. It actually took me some time before I realized this was a hot-sheets motel, a brothel; the girls would pick up their johns in the bar and take them upstairs. And I would sit there watching the whole thing just as I’d watched the families.

After awhile the girls became accustomed to seeing me there and they would sit with me and talk. Then they’d get up and go upstairs and eventually come back. I don’t know what we talked about, but I know I was much too shy to talk about what was going on upstairs. For me, it was conversation; interacting with another person. There was no sex, the concept of paying for sex never occurred to me. That would be the worst of all the traits of a hanger-on; a hanger-on pays for sex.

Many years later I’d make a movie for television entitled
Secrets of a Married Man
in which I played a husband so straitlaced I wore a tie and jacket when having dinner with my family. Michelle Phillips played my wife and Cybill Shepherd played a call girl with a heart of cash. In one scene I was sitting at a bar with a cowboy-type who looked at a prostitute and said admiringly, “Whoa. Now, that’s somebody that’ll teach a man how to yodel. For a price.”

But for me it wasn’t like that at all. I was sitting in a bar and these were my friends. How I could not be curious about their lives I don’t know, but it was something we never discussed. So I sat there with them week after week, month after month, searching for jobs in the day, passing the nights, waiting for the Stratford Festival to reopen so I could regain some prestige.

One night one of the girls took me home with her. She wasn’t really much older than me, but she seemed so worldly. And she took me into her life and became my teacher. We slept in her bedroom while the other girls with whom she shared that apartment were talking in the living room. That began a relationship that lasted several months. It wasn’t a love affair, we weren’t in love with each other, but it was warm and soothing and nurturing. She cared about me and offered me her being. It was lovely.

Some months later I’d written a play,
Dreams,
for the CBC and cast a beautiful young woman to play the female lead opposite me. Her name was Gloria Rosenberg and I fell in love with her. Both figuratively and literally, she was the woman of my
Dreams
. That wonderful summer I called her every night from Stratford. We were on the phone so often that the operator from the Canadian Exchange felt sorry for me and allowed me to call for free. I didn’t fit into any of the groups that had formed at Stratford and I was very lonely there without Gloria. Finally I told her, “I love you, please come up.” She raced to be with me in Stratford, it was so romantic. It seemed like there was only one thing to do: I asked her to marry me.

Marry me? I’d known her for only four months. After she’d gone home to make preparations for our wedding I began wondering if this was the right thing to do. One night, I remember so well, I was caught outdoors in a thunderstorm and as the rain fell and the wind raged and the thunder burst above me I thought, I’m living an experience from a Shakespearean play. It was an incredibly dramatic moment and I had no one there to share it with; I was so lonely and I was in love and so we were married.

At the end of the season we returned to Toronto. I remember one
cold fall night coming out of a theater with Gloria and her parents. As we stood there I saw my prostitute walking down the sidewalk. Working in the night. I can close my eyes and see her now: a low-cut dress, red hair, black pumps. But when I saw her that night I turned my back on her. I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, I was terrified she would recognize me as she walked by.

She was so wise; as she walked by she did nothing to indicate she knew me, but she subtly acknowledged my presence. As she passed I looked at her, and she looked back over her shoulder. I know she saw me but she kept walking and the moment was gone and I never saw her again.

This was a woman who had taken a naïve, middle-class, untutored boy, an alien really, and gave me the comfort I so desperately needed. And then, when it became convenient for me, I turned my back on her. In the end, that was the true source of my shame—I had turned my back on someone who had been good to me. It was a moment I’ve never forgotten and I still feel shamed by it.

As if it’s any excuse, I was in love for the first time in my life. Of course I had absolutely no idea what love was, but she was a beautiful young woman and she was attracted to me and when I was with her I felt something very special. That feeling had to be love, I figured. She was an actress, professionally known as Gloria Rand. Oh, that was perfect, I thought, we shared a passion for the theater. We shared the same dream.

As I discovered, there is only one problem when two actors marry: they’re both actors! Actors tend to be extremely focused, of necessity narcissistic and often highly competitive. One dream isn’t big enough for the two of them. If both careers are progressing even roughly equally it can be wonderful. But when one is having success while the other is staying home with kids, it can be less than wonderful. Difficult. Of course, Gloria and I didn’t know any of that. We were both young and...

Oh, I just found out that the
New York Post,
in an article listing the 100 best cover songs of all time, named my version of Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” number 60—ahead of Elton
John’s cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (72) and Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” (86). Note to self: Do cover versions of every song ever written.

So, Gloria and I were both young and... and young. That really explains it.

We both wanted to work in America, so we took the $750 I’d won as Stratford’s Most Promising Actor and moved to New York City. We got a small apartment in Jackson Heights, in Queens, four subway stops from Broadway.

It was during this time that I’d made my American television debut. I suspect because of my considerable experience as a featured player at the prestigious Stratford Festival I was offered a role that utilized all of my many talents. I was given the opportunity to create the role of Ranger Bob on the
Howdy Doody Show,
co-starring with several puppets and a live clown named Clarabelle who rather than speaking honked her answers on a bicycle horn. “And how are you this morning, Clarabelle?”

Honk, honk.

Admittedly that cut down on the dialogue between us. And made it unusually easy for Clarabelle to remember her honks. But there are a limited number of things an actor can do when playing opposite a clown who honks. A good actor responds to whatever emotion is presented to him or her by another actor, although, admittedly, on this show there were times when I wasn’t always certain how best to respond to the bevy of honks.

I had a little more success on Canadian television. My first major TV role in Canada was the lead in Herman Melville’s tragedy
Billy Budd
, co-starring with Basil Rathbone. Basil Rathbone! I’d grown up watching him playing Sherlock Holmes in the movies. He was a very well-respected stage and movie actor, but this was one of his first, if not his very first, live television appearances. Some people wondered how he’d respond—a lot of veteran actors had difficulty making the transition to TV—but during rehearsals he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit anxious. “Do you know why I’m not nervous?” he asked me.

I could hear the confidence of many years’ experience resonating in his voice. I shook my head.

“Because, you see, in the United States there’s thirty to fifty million people watching a television program, but in Canada it’s only five to ten million.”

Oh. Only ten million? That rationale seemed absurd to me, but if it worked for him, hey, that’s all that mattered. The night of the broadcast he really was perfectly calm. This was just another acting job for him. We went on the air and the first act was progressing very well, right until the moment he walked onboard the ship and stepped into a bucket. His foot got caught in the bucket and he couldn’t get it off. The camera shot only his upper body so none of the viewers could see him madly shaking his leg, trying to get his foot out of that bucket. He was working so hard to get his foot free that he forgot his lines. And when he forgot his lines he began to sweat. The rest of us tried to feed him his lines, but that was hard to do because we were too busy laughing. It was like acting in a cartoon: Basil Rathbone had caught his foot in a bucket and was hobbling through the scene. It was a disaster. But fortunately it was seen by only ten million Canadians.

Gloria and I moved to New York, right into the Golden Age of Television. Of course at that time nobody realized it was the Golden Age, a lot of people still considered TV a gimmick that would eventually fade away. But immediately I started working regularly. I was exactly the type of actor television producers were desperately searching for: I worked cheap and was always available. And I had substantial stage experience. TV was considered a very long step down from motion pictures, the theory being that if the audience could see you for free they wouldn’t buy tickets for your movies. So established movie actors wouldn’t risk their careers by working for a small salary on the tiny black-and-white screen. New York’s theater community disdained the medium but loved the work; actors could work on a TV show during the day and earn enough money to survive, and still be able to perform on the stage that evening.

My experience onstage had taught me theatricality. I knew what
to do with my voice. I knew how to stand and how to walk and how to memorize lines. And I knew how to respond without panicking when Basil Rathbone got his foot caught in a bucket. I was dependable.

I began by appearing regularly on the Sunday morning religious shows like
Lamp Unto My Feet
. There was sort of a perfect symmetry: these shows were the answer to a young actor’s prayers. They paid about seventy-five dollars and needed six to ten actors every week. These were Biblical dramas and they required all the actors to speak in hushed tones: St. John never yelled, St. Peter didn’t have a Brooklyn accent, and St. Matthew didn’t forget his lines.

My first starring role on TV was in a play called
All Summer Long
on the
Goodyear Television Playhouse
in 1956, one of the many dramatic anthology series then on the air. Every major corporation seemed to be sponsoring its own series. These shows did an original drama, live, every week. The great television director Daniel Petrie had seen me on Broadway and offered me the role. After that I began working regularly. In the next decade I would play leading roles in more than hundred different TV dramas. I played every type of character imaginable, including blind U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, foppish Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney (who in reality is the swash-buckling Scarlet Pimpernel), a town marshal and a town bully, a priest and a physician, a killer and an attorney, an explorer and a terrified plane passenger. I played married men and single men, I even played a Burmese seaman. Very quickly I became one of the busiest actors in the city. It seemed like I was always working. Just about every morning I’d take the subway from Queens to the East Village, to Sixth Street and Second Avenue, to a famous rehearsal hall directly above Ratner’s Kosher Delicatessen. We’d rehearse all day and then I’d get back on the train and go home to Gloria. On air dates I’d do the show—and then get on the subway and go home. One show ran into the next; from week to week I didn’t know if I was doing a
Kaiser Aluminum Hour,
a
U.S. Steel Hour, Studio One,
or a
Kraft Television Theatre
. I suspect I’m one of the few actors to have starred in quirky dramas on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond,
and Boris Karloff’s
Thriller.
I did a scene from
Henry V
on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, I co-starred with Christopher Plummer in
Oedipus the King
on Sunday after-noon’s
Omnibus,
and I played Marc Antony in
Play of the Week
’s
Julius Caesar
. It was all the same to me: show up, know my lines, do the show, and start looking for the next job the next day. Occasionally programs would overlap, but generally producers were very good about arranging rehearsal times around other jobs.

For the first time people began to recognize me on the street. They didn’t know exactly where they had seen me, but they knew my face was familiar. I can’t begin to tell how often people stopped me and said, “I know you from somewhere. Aren’t you a teacher at the high school?”

I often found myself working with legendary movie stars, but generally they were older actors whose film careers had pretty much ended but whose name recognition made them valuable to TV producers. Many of them had difficulties adapting to the demands of live TV, including the short rehearsal schedules, the small budgets, the fact that they had to memorize their lines, and the unique technical demands. Movie sets were large and the cameras moved freely, often on cranes; TV studios were very small and the cameras were attached to long cables. Directors had to choreograph the movement of the cameras to ensure that the cables never crossed, so the actors were restricted in their movements. There was no room to improvise, you had to do a scene exactly as it had been done in rehearsal.