7

Troubadour

When I go to the theater and the lights dim, and there’s that second alone in the complete darkness, I tear up. I’m not quite sure what it is, maybe that hush of expectancy, of intimacy, of connection; it is the sacred pact between audience and performer. It is what E. M. Forster was thinking when he wrote in Howards End: “Connect. Only connect.” For me, it is the red bowtie.

It happened again last night. I went to see my lovely friend Judith Light at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York on the opening night of Neil LaBute’s one-woman play All the Ways to Say I Love You. The audience was talking, then the house lights dimmed halfway, the audience hushed, and then complete darkness. In that silence, we are together, we hope, we need. There’s apprehension. It’s not relaxed, that silence. It’s full of need—Please, please, let this be the message that I need, that changes me for the better or at least gets me through the night. Then the curtain rose, and the show began. Judith killed. This is why they invented the phrase “artistic killer.” There was not a heart left unbroken, especially mine.

Like me, Judith got her start in repertory theater, and repertory theater is not for the faint of heart. We all had to earn the right to be there.

In 1965, I graduated from San Francisco State summa cum laude, which all of you who studied Latin know means I had one of the larger laudes in my graduating class. From there I moved to Detroit, Michigan, to attend graduate school at Wayne State University. I love Detroit. It has one of the best art institutes in the world, the best Greek food in “Greek town,” the Tigers are mighty and the Lions are fantastic, and Wayne is one of the best universities going. If your doctor or your lawyer is from Wayne State, you’re going to live and/or win your lawsuit.

But I thought all cities were like San Francisco. Detroit is not like San Francisco. Downtown Detroit, where I lived on Cass and Hancock, was especially not like San Francisco. It was inner city and had fallen on hard times. Around campus, it was très funky. Right across the street from the Hilberry Classic Theatre, there was Teddy’s, where grease was on and in the menu, the coffee was burnt and as acidic as Teddy’s face when anyone entered. The diner was the prototype of the Aykroyd/Belushi “cheeseburger, cheeseburger” sketch from early SNL.

My life at Wayne State was all theater all the time. In the mornings, I attended graduate classes and I also taught speech, theater, and acting classes to undergraduates. Afternoons between 1:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. were for rehearsal, a break for dinner until 7:00 p.m., and back to the Hilberry for performances. Theater students participated in real repertory theater, real meaning a different play every night. We would do The Tempest one night, Twelfth Night the next, John Whiting’s The Devils the next, and a Restoration comedy the next. I did a lot of Feydeau farces. I still have nightmares about making my entrance onstage and having no idea what play we were doing.

My first-ever review was of my Caliban in The Tempest, of which the critic Jay Carr wrote in the Detroit News: “Jeffrey Tambor is a beaded bag gone wrong.” They weren’t wrong about the beads—I was covered with green makeup and shiny beads. It was way wrong. I even chewed a pack of chlorophyll gum to turn my tongue green before my entrance, and I would dart it out during every speech. It was reptilian and stupid; such was my waywardness.

The thing about repertory theater is that the play goes on even if it’s not ready. My study of acting went straight from theory to Oh my God, these people have paid money, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. The season begins in September and runs through May, so you build the show in front of the audience. For example, our production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which I played Sir Andrew Aguecheek, opened to so-so reviews, but by the spring it had become one of the strongest, and most delightful, productions I was ever in.

During my third year of graduate school, I decided to audition for the TCGs. The Theatre Communications Group is the umbrella organization for resident theaters all over the country. And repertory theater was a growing and exciting part of the national theater scene, with new theaters being founded by esteemed artists from coast to coast. William Ball founded the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 1965; David Wheeler founded the Theatre Company of Boston in 1963; Gordon Davidson started the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1967. What you hoped to walk away with was a LORT contract. The League of Resident Theatres administers contracts between the regional theaters and the Actors’ Equity Association, and you could become either an apprentice or a full-fledged resident actor.

You were required to prepare a four-minute audition: two minutes of something classical, and two minutes of something modern. I chose Tyrone from Long Day’s Journey into Night and Falstaff. There were several levels of auditions to get through—local, regional, state—before you were invited to the national audition held every year in Chicago.

I made it through the preliminaries and booked myself a room at the Statler Hilton on Michigan Avenue overlooking Lake Michigan. On the morning of the audition, I walked the few blocks from the hotel to the 11th Street Theater. There was a table in the lobby where auditioning actors were to sign in.

“We’re going in alphabetical order, so come back around three o’clock,” the woman at the desk told me.

I went back to my room to warm up and prepare. At the appointed time, I returned to the theater, which was packed with the artistic directors of nearly every theater in the country. This audition in front of this room is arguably the most important and prestigious audition of a young actor’s career.

I did my Falstaff and my Tyrone. It went okay. Not great. Okay. I was told to come back after lunch, when I could check my box to see which ADs wanted to see me. I think I had three or four, at most.

One of the people was David Wheeler of the Theatre Company of Boston, who was, as they say, a BFD. He essentially turned Boston into a theater town. When I met with him, he said, “Now, listen to me. You’re a good actor. You did well. But I have people who are sixty-five to play Falstaff. You’re twenty-five. Choose material that is better for you.”

“So, you’re not interested in me?” I said.

“I have no place for you.”

“So…no.”

“I have no place for you.”

“So—you’re not offering me a position?”

“Choose better material.”

“So…?”

I went back to Detroit and my classes and repertory at the Hilberry Classic Theatre.

A year later I tried again. Two minutes of Bertolt Brecht’s Edward II and two minutes of Anton Chekhov’s The Boor. With Jack Cook’s lesson about preparation implanted deep in my brain, I worked on my audition for six months. I thought that was my problem the first time, that I hadn’t prepared enough, never mind that David Wheeler had told me I simply picked the wrong material. I didn’t hear it. I’m the student who underlined every line in the textbook so when it was time to study for the test, I had to read the whole thing again cover to cover, and I was no less overzealous in my preparation now. I would do my audition for everyone I knew, whether they wanted to see it or not. I did it for strangers. If someone passing on the street happened to make eye contact, I did it for them. I did it over and over and over and over, ad nauseam, until I had that thing down.

I went to the local audition, got accepted. I went to the regional audition, got accepted. I went to the state audition, got accepted. I was heading back to Chicago.

Once again, I got a room at the Statler Hilton. This time I brought my wife, Joyce. We went for dinner the evening before. And then I spent the rest of the night unable to sleep, going over and over the audition in my head. There was so much riding on this—it was the audition of my life.

In the morning, I took the now-familiar walk to the 11th Street Theater to sign in before returning to the hotel to do my prep routine: work out, do yoga, worry, smoke cigarettes, worry, have a shower and shave while worrying, and warm up.

“Okay, I’ll see you later,” I said after I signed in.

“Where are you going? We’re reversing the order this year. We’re going from Z to A. You’re up now.”

What? Fuck.

There was one person before me, Zbrinski or somebody, and then it was my turn. I walked down to the stage, up the side stairs, stepped to the center, and looked out at all of those ADs who held my future in their hands. I opened my mouth and began.

Because I had rehearsed so much in the months leading up to this moment, it was like automatic writing. The words just flowed from me. I did Edward II first. It was okay. Then I turned my back to the audience for a moment, then back around to face them and said my first line from The Boor: “You have no idea how to treat a lady, Mr. Smirnov.” It got a huge laugh. Then my next line got a huge laugh. And the next. I sailed.

I walked off the stage in complete silence, but the casting director and producer Rosemarie Tichler, who went on to become the casting doyenne of New York City and Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival, stopped me on the way out and said, “Have a nice lunch. You’re going to be a very busy man this afternoon.” And indeed, that afternoon I received offers from the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Provincetown Theater, San Diego Repertory Theatre, almost every theater in the country (except the Theatre Company of Boston—neither David Wheeler nor any of his people were in attendance that year). I would work for the next eight to ten years off that one four-minute audition.

That audition was about being in the moment. It was about risk, and play, and spontaneity. Yes, I had prepared, but in the moment I’d had to trust the preparation and just let it come. It was there, it had always been there, just waiting to be asked to the dance. That was why it worked. I would forget this lesson and have to learn it again and again in the course of my career. But for those four minutes, it didn’t matter that I was dressed badly and unshaven, because apparently I was wearing this rather big red bowtie.

My first gig was at the Seattle Rep. Joyce and I sold our red Volkswagen for $300 (I cried) and bought a Greenbrier station wagon (green) so we could fit our two cats, Andrew and Buster, and our tchotchkes, and we headed west. We rented an apartment in the back of a house on Queen Anne Hill that overlooked the entire city. Our landlord was an Amway salesman, and he charged us $125 a month.

Seattle was perfect for me. As Ken Kesey famously said, to understand madness, you have to spend a winter in the Pacific Northwest. It was foggy and rainy all the time. It suited my personality. My people understand this place.

My very first role was Senator Logan in Arthur Kopit’s Indians, directed by Arne Zaslove; the cast included Manu Tupou, who had been in the Broadway production of the play a few years earlier. The acting staff was largely composed of young actors and students from the University of Washington. It was culture shock in so many ways, not least of which was having free time. In Detroit, the hours of my days were crammed with class and teaching and rehearsals and performances. Now, I would go to rehearsal, do the few scenes I had, and the director would say, “Okay, you’re done for the day.” I had no idea what to do with my life. It was a shock.

It was even worse when I was only understudying. When you understudy, you might as well have a sign around your neck that says DEATH / PLAGUE, because you only go on if someone gets sick. I understudied one actor who was such an asshole, he would come to my dressing room door, throw it open, scream, “I’m never going to get sick, goddammit!” and slam the door shut.

So I started baking bread. I’d go to the famed Pike Place Market every day and buy the ingredients, and I’d bake loaves and loaves of French bread and take them to the theater, although there was something about the weather there—maybe it was that the barometric pressure was always low because of the rain—the bread wouldn’t rise.

The theater was right next to the Seattle Sonics arena, so on nights when there were home games, I would check in at the theater: “He’s here. You’re free for the evening.” I would go over there, sneak in, grab a seat in the first row, and watch basketball and munch on my unleavened French bread. I knew every move in the Sonics playbook.

It was the beginning of a great adventure, traveling in that old station wagon with Joyce and the cats, going from town to town like troubadours of old who went from village to village, were invited in for a bite to eat, and in exchange entertained their host. We rented cheap apartments, sometimes in beautiful neighborhoods, and led a simple life. This is what acting was to me, and I loved it.

We ended up staying in Milwaukee for five years. Milwaukee was a revelation: I didn’t know that when it was ten below in the dead of January, people went on about their lives as though nothing remarkable was occurring. I would be at the theater before a show, thinking, We can’t possibly perform tonight, there’s a blizzard! And the place would be packed, night after night. It was at the Milwaukee Rep that I met Judith Light in 1971, more than forty years before we would costar in Transparent. We still have a running argument about whether she forgot to introduce me onstage one night by forgetting the cue line. She denies; j’accuse. She can rebut in her book.

I want to be very clear about the caliber of actors who worked in repertory theater. These were not lesser actors. I shared a dressing room for a year in Milwaukee with an actor named Bill McKerrigan. We spent so much time together, we became like family. We talked about life, we shared recipes, we told jokes, we fought. Bill wasn’t passing through Milwaukee; he really lived there. He brought up his kids in Milwaukee. And he was one of the finest actors I’ve ever worked with. He didn’t want to do all the red carpet horseshit, he just wanted to act. Like so many actors I encountered during those years traveling the country, he was a dedicated artist. We all were.

Actors like Bill were citizens of whatever city they were in; they paid taxes there; they voted there; they had library cards there. And there are still actors like that all over the country. There are actors in those local companies who kill in show after show, and they never leave because they are already doing exactly what they want to do.

It was in these theaters that I learned how to act for real. We did six shows a week—with two on Saturday, at 4:15 and 8:15—while rehearsing the next show in the rotation. The work was amazing, the plays were amazing, and everybody was completely invested.

There were two newspapers in town—the Sentinel in the morning and the Journal in the afternoon—and on the Saturday after opening night, when the reviews came out, the good ones were posted in a frame backstage. Some Saturdays, there were two reviews in those frames. Some Saturdays, there was just one. And some Saturdays, the frames remained empty. That was life at the Milwaukee Rep.

One winter, the Rep, as we called it, did a Midwest tour of Molière’s The School for Wives. The production was directed by the theater’s genius artistic director, Nagle Jackson, the man who lured me to Milwaukee from San Diego Rep, where we did The Taming of the Shrew together.

On the tour, I played Arnolphe, one of Molière’s biggest and most outrageous fools. I had decided to quit smoking the day of our first run-through, because I realized that I would need to be in shape for the tour. At the end of the day, Nagle gave various cast members notes, and sent them on their way. He didn’t give me a single note, but he asked me to stay back for a minute after he’d dismissed the others. He complimented my handling of the material and Richard Wilbur’s rhyming verse translation, my characterization, my movement. “I have just one note,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can you start playing with the rest of the cast?”

I gathered my things, my script, my winter coat and hat, and went directly to the corner store to buy a carton of cigarettes. He’d caught me performing up my own ass, and I am forever grateful to him. It is one of the finest notes I have ever received. Thanks, Nagle.

When the show was on its feet, we hit the road. Our first night was in a packed gymnasium in Spearfish, South Dakota; the laughs were huge and the welcome gigantic. The audience was so grateful and appreciative of this classical comedy we brought them. In some towns, where there were no restaurants to speak of, we were invited into people’s homes for dinner before the show. The next morning, it was back on the bus to Ames, Iowa, or Duluth, Minnesota, where we were picked up again and taken to dinner before the performance. Our final stop on the tour was the John Deere Tractor Center in Moline, Illinois; the cast dressed downstairs with the tractors.

At every stop, people came out in droves to see the show and stayed to talk to the cast afterward. There were invitations after the show for pie and coffee. We learned about these wonderful people and their communities. They needed the theater, they needed us. This wasn’t entertainment, it was vital, and we were welcomed into their lives. This was true theater and true connection, authentic and humble. Not a red carpet in sight.

We repertory actors were perhaps a bit overinvested—we were derisive of actors who appeared on television or did commercials. We didn’t even watch television. We were onstage! I was onstage when the Detroit Tigers won the 1968 World Series and the audience and crew started clapping because they could hear the cheering and hooting outside the theater. I was in rehearsal when the moon landing happened, and someone suggested we take a break and watch on a TV in the lobby. When another actor told us about a television job they got, we snickered. When Laurence Olivier did his one and only television commercial for a Polaroid camera in 1972, painstakingly describing how to load the film, we thought the world had ended.

Incidentally, a few years later, after I had started to appear regularly on shows like Kojak and M*A*S*H, I was at a Lakers game in Los Angeles sitting high up in the arena.

A guy sitting near me said, “Hey, you’re on television, right?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“You like the Lakers?”

“I love the Lakers.”

Then he looked down courtside and back up at me, then back down courtside. “Oh, I get it. Film down there, television up here.”

It was as if I’d said it, because it was exactly what I thought.

After five years in Milwaukee, I journeyed south of the Mason–Dixon Line. I had the worst review of my life—and the best review of my life—in Louisville, Kentucky. I was at the Actors Theatre playing Tartuffe as though I were the hottest piece of shit that ever came down the mountainside. I preened and pranced around the stage—Look at me! Look at me! It was admittedly a lapse in taste, and the reviewer for the Louisville Courier, William Mootz, one of the deans of American criticism, called me on it. The morning after the show opened, I woke up and went to the kitchen to check out the review in the newspaper. There was no paper, just my wife standing by the sink in her blue bathrobe.

“Where’s the paper?” I asked.

“It didn’t come today,” Joyce said.

“The Louisville Courier didn’t come today?”

“Nope.”

That’s when I noticed a suspicious bulge under her robe.

“Let me see it,” I said.

“Oh, honey. Honey, don’t.”

I held my hand out until she caved and withdrew the folded Arts and Leisure section.

It remains to date the most excoriating review I have ever received. He described my performance as “Groucho Marx uneasily in search of a gag by George S. Kaufman.” It wasn’t just a bad review, it was a how-dare-you review. “Tambor destroys Tartuffe by playing the central character as if he were a mindless buffoon.” I burst into tears after reading it. It felt like somebody had caught me out. I was devastated.

Credit 5

Here’s the thing about bad reviews: no one calls you when you get one. You get calls when you get good reviews. You get calls when you get 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. You get calls when someone dies. And the worst part is, you still have to go to work and do it again.

You go to the theater, and you walk past the silent stage manager who doesn’t look you in the eye. You go to your dressing room and close the door.

Knock knock knock.

“Come in.”

“Ohhhh. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“I just want to tell you that I think you’re very good in this show.”

“Okay, thank you. See you onstage.”

Knock knock knock.

“Come in.”

“Are you okay?” The voice quavering on the edge of tears. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll see you onstage.”

Knock knock knock.

“I think you’re one of the finest actors out there. Are you okay?”

On and on and on it goes. By curtain time, you want to kill yourself.

Then you go out onstage. The curtain goes up, and you realize the audience has read that review too. Every laugh you had the previous night is gone. William Mootz is so right. That’s what they’re thinking. It is the single worst experience, and every actor has to go through it.

A month later, Mr. Mootz reviewed me again. I was directing the stage adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and this time the word “triumph” was in the headline. The performance had received a standing ovation at the first intermission. I was a hero. And the calls came in. My takeaway was that, ever after, I would always make the call when someone got a lousy review.

That production was notable for one other thing. During the rehearsal phase a few weeks earlier, Joyce had said to me over breakfast as I was heading out the door, “I think I missed a period.” I was busy rehearsing for Tartuffe, so I didn’t have time to talk to her about it, but I knew I’d see her later in the day when I went to the performance of Cuckoo’s Nest, since she was playing one of the nurses and I was planning to give the cast some notes.

When I got there, Joyce was onstage with the actor G. W. Bailey, who was playing one of the patients, named Cheswick. In the scene, Cheswick is taunting the nurse, and the line she is supposed to say is something like “Don’t touch me! I’m a nurse!” But as I’m sitting in the back of the house watching, and I guess because it was on her mind, I heard Joyce say, “Don’t touch me! I’m pregnant!” We would be back in Milwaukee when our daughter, Molly, was born about seven months later.

Maybe six months after that day in Louisville, I was sitting in the dark offstage in Milwaukee, waiting for my scene in our production of Brecht’s The Visions of Simone Machard, when it hit me. I have to go to New York. I have to try it. I was thirty-two years old, and I’d been doing regional theater for a decade. I went home that night and told Joyce. That weekend, we sold all of our books. Weeks later, I gave notice. The artistic director had become a friend by then, but he understood my going. I left Joyce and our infant daughter Molly in Milwaukee with a promise to find an apartment and send for them.

One of my former cast mates, Charlie Kimbrough, had made the move east some time earlier and had become a successful Broadway actor. I called him, and asked if he could introduce me to his agent, Milton Goldman at ICM, who was one of the most powerful in the business. He agreed and offered me his guest room in Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County, about thirty minutes north of the city.

I flew in during a blizzard, but Charlie met me at the airport and drove me up to his house. We had a lovely dinner and I hit the hay.

The following morning at breakfast, Charlie said, “I don’t know if I can do it.” He was getting cold feet about introducing me to Milton.

“You have to. It’s why I’m here.”

I finally persuaded him to make the call and get me an appointment. I took the train into Grand Central later that day.

When I arrived in Milton’s office, he had two phones working at the same time, one to each ear. In one was the composer Gian Carlo Menotti (Amahl and the Night Visitors), and in the other was Vincent Price. To this day, I have no idea why these two would be communicating through Mr. Goldman or about what. While he carried on his conversations, I looked at the books on his shelves. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought I would be. When he got off the phones, we talked for a bit, and then he sent me to meet with another agent, Doris Mantz, who booked commercials. In the mid-’70s, there were lots of commercials that featured beleaguered, balding young fathers. There was a well-known actor named Ken Kimmins who had done a lot of these commercials, but he had recently left the agency. When I met with Doris, her eyes were virtually feasting on me. That’s right, I was balding and Ken Kimmins had just left. (Hi, Ken! Thanks, Ken!)

Doris then called Sheila Robinson, a theatrical agent whose clients included Meryl Streep, and told her, “Don’t let him leave the building.” I then met with Sheila and she said, “I’ll take care of you,” and I was signed.

That night, I didn’t go back to Dobbs Ferry. A composer friend from Milwaukee had a small apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, and he offered it to me while he was out of town. The taxi left me off in front of the building, and I walked up the stairs to the second floor. I opened the door and thought, What a lovely black carpet. Wait, that’s— The carpet was moving. What the fuck is that? Oh my God, those are cockroaches. He never mentioned the 730,000 roommates I’d have.

My upstairs neighbor was the fabulous Judith Light, who had made the move to New York before me. That night, Judith and her friend Warner Shook took me to see Bobby Short at the Carlyle Hotel. It was magical, my first night in New York City. I was so happy. Judith leaned over to me and said, “It won’t always be like this.”

For the next year, I booked commercial after commercial. My first one was shot in Cape May, New Jersey. It was my introduction to waiting around for a long time, working for the tiniest amount of time, and getting paid a lot. It completely threw me. I spent most of the time ordering room service at my hotel.

I did a National Airlines commercial. It was seven thirty in the morning on a sound stage in lower Manhattan. I was dressed in a suit to play the young bald man in business class.

The young bald businessman is watching television, he laughs. “Heh heh heh heh.” He turns to the camera and he says, “National Airlines, take me, I’m yours.”

“Great, we got it.” It’s 7:32. It’s a perfect take. We’re done.

When you do these commercials, the director is first rate. The costumer, first rate. The makeup artist, first rate. The ad agency, first rate.

The client said, “But we paid for the sound stage and the actor for the whole day.”

“We have the commercial. You just saw it. It’s perfect.”

“Yes. Let’s keep doing it.”

“But why?”

“Because we have the actor and the sound stage.”

We did another one. And another one. And another one. And another one.

Now it’s 9:15.

We do another one. Another one. Another one. Until lunch.

Again, we have the commercial. All I’m doing is repeating myself. We go to lunch. The crew eats together. The client sits apart, staring straight ahead, wondering about the validity of their lives.

Then we go back. We do it again. 3:00. “National Airlines, take me, I’m yours.” 4:15. We’ve had the commercial since 7:32. I keep saying it. “National Airlines, take me, I’m yours. National Airlines, take me, I’m yours.”

The director comes over to me. “The client is a little worried about something.” He was a famous commercial director in New York.

“What?”

“I don’t even know how to say this. I’ll just say it. It’s the k. They think you’re starting to sound a little Jewish.”

“You know we have this commercial.”

“Yeah, I know. Try it again.”

As soon as they put that in my head, I couldn’t control myself. With each successive take, the k got broader and broader until I was Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof. I couldn’t control it. It is now 5:15 and we’re going into overtime. People are getting a little tired. Take after take, it gets more and more Jewish. I sound like Golda Meir. Finally, I said, “I got it. I have the answer.”

“What is it?”

“We’re going to take out the k.”

“Great! Do it. Action!”

“National Airlines, tae me, I’m yours.”

“Cut! Print!”

When the commercial airs, it’s the first take, the 7:32 take.

I made $40,000 that first year, which was a lot of money then. I found an apartment, and Joyce and little Molly joined me. But I couldn’t get arrested in the theater.

Until I got a break.