15

In Thrall

To be in thrall is to be consumed by the need to please, the need to have people like you and to like your work. It is as though you are under a spell.

That is certainly how it felt to me in the early days of my career as a young actor. I was always worried about doing it right, having the right costume, the right prop, the right timing, the right entrance, the right exit. Would the audience like me? Would the director like me? Being in thrall to someone or something is death to spontaneity and invention. And allegiance to its rules is dangerous. Mediocrity is close by.

When I was doing Sly Fox on Broadway, there was a man with a white beard and wearing a safari jacket who came backstage after a performance to say hello to George C. Scott and Héctor Elizondo. There was something about him that drew my attention. Afterward, I said to Héctor, “Who’s that guy?”

“That’s Milton Katselas. He’s a character.”

Milton was a renowned theater and film director who had received a Tony nomination for Butterflies Are Free, which he also directed for the big-screen version starring Goldie Hawn. He had studied with Lee Strasberg at the famed Actors Studio in New York and worked closely with the great director Elia Kazan. In 1978 he founded the Beverly Hills Playhouse, where he taught some of the biggest heavy hitters in the business.

CUT TO: A few years later, I noticed that some of my actor friends were talking about a class they took Saturday mornings with the same Milton Katselas. One was Craig T. Nelson, whom I’d worked with in And Justice for All. Another was Valerie Curtin, who had cowritten the film with her then husband and writing partner, Barry Levinson.

One Saturday, I decided to check it out. I made my way down to the Zephyr Theatre on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. The Zephyr was this little ninety-nine-seat theater in the back of an alley. The stage was surrounded on three sides by seats where the class assembled, waiting for Milton. I looked around and noted some of the major-league talent in this room: Doris Roberts, Jessica Walter, Tony Lo Bianco, Tyne Daly.

Milton arrived on crutches and attended on both sides by helpers as he made his way to the front row. The helpers settled him into his seat and brought another chair for him to prop up his leg.

“What happened to his leg?” I whispered to the student sitting next to me. She gave me a stern look that seemed to say one didn’t ask questions about Milton.

When I looked back down toward the front row, Milton was talking to the veteran television actor James Farentino. Quickly, the conversation grew heated—something about theater policy—and then they were yelling at each other. Milton kept saying, “No, no, I don’t agree with you, Jimmy.” It was quite an introduction—first the grand entrance on crutches and then an argument with one of Hollywood’s most famous leading men.

Then class began. I didn’t love the work the actors were doing in the first scenes Milton had assigned, but after each one, they would step to the edge of the stage and sit down. Milton would say, “Anything you want to say?”

The actor would do a short exegesis of his approach or concerns, and then Milton would look at his legal pad and begin his critique. What I remember is that the critique was so much better than the scenes. His notes were spot-on—educational, often funny, and quite inspiring. He was indeed a master teacher.

After he gave each note, he would draw a line through it with a pencil. I can still hear the scratch of that pencil on the paper as he did so. What I didn’t know was that I was going to hear that scratch of pencil on pad for the next twenty years.

I walked up to him after class to introduce myself and pay my respects. He said, “I know who you are. Come back next week. Don’t worry about signing up. Just come back.”

The next week, I went back. And the next. And the next. I was mesmerized by the critiques he gave, which were as much about life as about acting.

About two months in, I was ready to do a scene. I brought a copy of the poem “Birches” by Robert Frost. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to read it, but when I arrived in class, a bit late that day, he said, “We’re going to do some work today, and then Jeffrey is going to read from Robert Frost’s ‘Birches.’ ” I have no idea how he knew. Anyway, one person did a scene and got a critique, then another person did a scene and got a critique, and then I was up. I sat on the edge of the stage, put on my glasses, and read the poem in my basso-important-Jeffrey voice. When I was done, Milton stepped over to me and gave me my critique.

“You do not need to study here,” he said. “You’re already a fine actor. You know what you’re doing. But, if you should decide to study here, this is what we would work on. You ready?”

I nodded.

“You’re a good boy,” he said. “You’re a director’s dream.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a good boy,” he said. “You’re the first one off book. You’re the first one to rehearsal. You like to please people. That’s a good thing, and a bad thing.”

He had me nailed. No one had ever said that to me.

“Bring this back next week.”

The whole week, I kept fulminating. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? I was in a play at the time, and I went to the property master and said, “Do you have a gun?” I have no idea why I said this. He gave me a prop gun that had no chamber, and the gun hole (who says “gun hole”?) was blocked. I didn’t work on the poem at all.

The following Saturday, I went to class and sat in the theater with the other students. Milton arrived and took his seat.

The girl sitting next to me had her back somewhat turned to me, as though I wasn’t important enough to sit near her. I had no idea who she was. I waited and waited and waited until finally Milton said, “And now Jeffrey will do ‘Birches.’ ”

I asked the great Doris Roberts, who played the mother in Everybody Loves Raymond, and two or three other people to come up onstage. I set it up like a casting session, with the other actors sitting behind a desk, and I was there for an audition. There was a piano onstage. I didn’t tell them anything else.

I knocked on the door, and Doris said, “Come in.”

I walked in and began to read “Birches.” I did it with a lisp. When I had a lisp as a young person, it had been a point of great derision. Everyone had always laughed at my lisp. And as soon as I started to recite the poem, they started to laugh, as I knew they would. That’s when I pulled my gun and pointed it at them. Then I pointed it at my head. Trish Van Devere, who was married to George C. Scott, was in the third or fourth row and she stood up and said, “Don’t do it, Jeffrey!”

I walked over to the piano and said, “Do you mind if I play?”

They were all thrown. Doris was crying. Everybody was crying. I sat down at the piano and began to sing “Feelings,” still with the lisp but in a sweet voice. I don’t know how to play the piano, so my playing was just plonk plonk plonk as I pounded the keys. It was madness. People were laughing.

And then I stopped playing and finished my reading of the poem, which when filtered through all the mayhem and emotion, boiled down to this:

I’d like to get away from Earth a while

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me

Away

Not to return.

Earth’s the right place for

Love

And there was silence and tears.

I do not remember Milton’s critique. But I remember while he was talking to me that he kept turning to look at someone in the back row who was visiting the class, as though to say, “You see? You see?” I knew it was good, whatever was happening.

During the break, the visitor walked up to me and said, “Do you want to know what Milton just said to me? ‘That’s Marlon. Marlon acts like that.’ ” Marlon Brando was one of Milton’s heroes. Hell, Marlon Brando was everybody’s hero. That first critique from the previous week changed my life. I did it badly. The good boy was vanquished.

I didn’t have to study anymore after that, but I went to that Saturday class from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. for the next twenty years. Eventually, Milton had so many classes to teach during the week, he couldn’t do them all, and he asked me to teach those. Some weeks, I taught Monday and Wednesday; others, I taught Tuesday and Thursday. I still have actors coming up to me to this day introducing themselves to me with their name and then “Tuesday/Thursday” or “Monday/Wednesday.”

Over time, the class became reality, and what happened outside of class wasn’t. You didn’t work to improve your acting for the films and plays you were doing, you worked to be successful for the class, for Milton. After I did a reading, he would sidle up to me and say, “You’re one fuck of an actor.” It was the biggest “attaboy” an actor could have gotten. I ate it up.

He also claimed part of your life outside of class. After the Saturday class, a small group of us—all men—were invited to his house for lunch and to hang out, maybe watch a basketball game on television. It was not an invitation one could refuse. Friday nights, he would take a group of hangers-on out for dinner. There were so many hangers-on, and I became the president of them. I was Milton’s right-hand man.

Here’s the irony: the one thing he said I needed to work on as an actor was breaking out of being a good boy, but here I was being a good boy for him, living to please him. I gave up my marriage to Katie, one of the most charming and wonderful people in the world, for him. I stopped speaking to my daughter Molly for a while because Milton told me, “Don’t bring her around.” (I cringe as I write this. To have such cowardice about my own child; it was as if I were possessed.)

CUT TO: I was in New York filming Meet Joe Black. I had no girlfriend, no daughter. I had nothing. But I sat at the first table read, looking around the room, in awe. That’s Brad Pitt. That’s Sir Anthony Hopkins. That’s Marcia Gay Harden. How did I get here?

Every day after shooting, I would return to my beautiful, empty apartment on Central Park West. I’d have something to eat, and then I’d go for a walk. But it wasn’t just a walk; there was something pulling me out of that space. It was late spring, beautiful weather, and every night, I’d go walking around the Upper West Side. Usually, I’d end up in the Barnes & Noble on Broadway or a bar opposite Lincoln Center. About three weeks into this nightly compulsion to roam, I walked up to Symphony Space on Broadway at Ninety-Fifth Street where there was an all-night reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses, an annual tradition held every June 16, a.k.a. Bloomsday. (If you’ve never read the book, the action takes place on June 16 and the hero is named Leo Bloom.) Every half hour, another actor would step in to read. I stayed for a couple of hours before that urge came back. I was like Leo Bloom on his quest through Dublin as I headed back down Broadway a few blocks until I came upon a jazz club called Cleopatra’s Needle (presumably named after the ancient Egyptian obelisk parked in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum).

I went in and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a scotch and listened to the band that was playing. The light in the bar is rose-colored, turning everything pink. Then out of the bathroom comes this creature. She is tall, with light hair, I can’t tell if it is blond or strawberry, and a face of such radiance and beauty. I’m going to marry her.

The place was packed, except for an empty stool to my left. She sat down and we talked and talked and talked. Her name was Kasia. She had no idea who I was, which was great. I told her I was doing a film and invited her to come to the set where we were filming in Brooklyn. We even talked about our notions of the ideal marriage. I drew a picture of two houses with a walkway in between the second floors. I’d gotten the idea from Raymond Carver and his second wife, Tess Gallagher, the poet, who lived in different houses in Seattle. If they wanted to spend the night together, one or the other had to drive across the city to the other’s house. I thought that was perfect. (I’m tough to live with.)

About two hours into this blissful evening, I discovered that she was dating the piano player, and I walked out. I was devastated.

A few days later, a production assistant came to me on set and said, “Tasha called.”

“Who? I don’t know a Tasha.” I went back to my trailer. Bing. I stepped back out and found the PA. “Do you mean ‘Kasia’?”

“The person said ‘Tasha.’ ”

“Call her back and invite her to the set.”

The next day, she showed up at the Armory in Park Slope, where we were filming. She had taken the subway from Manhattan and brought a paper bag lunch of juice and a little sandwich. It was the perfect Joycean prop. In acting we say there is a moment in an audition where you win the role. It’s the same in love. That paper bag, that simple, gorgeous prop, clinched it. I fell hard.

“Come here,” I said. I opened the door to where craft service was set up. Back then, when you were on an A-list film with people like Brad Pitt and Tony Hopkins, craft service was major. There were carving stations as far as the eye could see.

I asked if I could give her a ride back to Manhattan. We went to dinner at Fiorello’s on Upper Broadway, and we talked into the night. We saw each other every day after that. We ditched the piano player. We fell in love. Imagine Woody Allen’s Manhattan or Annie Hall, those love letters to the city and to love itself, with “Rhapsody in Blue” the theme music. That’s what our romance was like. New York was built for such love.

That walk I was compelled to take every night had led me straight to her, just as the walk to the San Francisco State College had led me to the theater. Those walks saved my life.

When I was done shooting Meet Joe Black, I went back to Los Angeles to resume Larry Sanders and my teaching at the Playhouse. Kasia joined me in L.A. I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.

And then things started to go wrong. Milton didn’t like Kasia. He was jealous. He wouldn’t invite her to the regular Friday dinners. He was rude to her. “She’s not for you,” he said.

“You’re crossing a line that very few people can negotiate,” I said.

Then, at a teachers meeting at the Playhouse, Milton asked me to sit beside him. He announced me as his successor, or words to that effect. He was giving me the Playhouse.

One Saturday at the master class, I was sitting in the theater with all of these other working, successful actors, waiting for Milton to arrive. When he walked in, Allen Garfield, a well-known actor who had been in The Cotton Club, stood and clapped. The rest of the class stood and clapped. One actor gathered his things and left, saying, “I’m outta here.” I began to see it too. The thrall.

One Sunday, Milton called to summon me.

As I started to leave, Kasia said, “It’s Sunday.”

“But I have to go see Milton.”

“It’s Sunday. You have to choose.”

Many years earlier, at one of the Friday night dinners, Milton had leaned over to me and said, “If I were you, I would run.” I think he knew the best and worst of himself, and he was telling me, warning me, that he could be dangerous for me. He was a brilliant teacher, his critiques were genius, but as he once said, “It depends who answers the phone: Mephistopheles or the other one.”

It finally hit me. I called him. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

I will never forget his answer. “Do what, sir?” He never talked like that. It was as though I had stepped into a Shakespearean scene. I was Prince Hal to his Falstaff.

“I’m out,” I said, and hung up the phone. I never talked to him again.

Then Kasia and I went to breakfast. I was free. At that breakfast, Kasia insisted I call my daughter and mend that fence. “You’re her father. She’s your daughter. Pick up the phone.”

I always felt guilty about leaving Milton so abruptly. People tried to get us to negotiate a truce, but he died without our ever speaking again. I was a pariah at the Playhouse. I still had two acting classes I was teaching, but I had to leave. I had to stop being a good boy. I had to get out from under the thrall.