21

Reading at the Greyhound Bus Terminal

George C. Scott once said, “You know what I regret? I can’t go watch people at the Greyhound Bus Terminal anymore.”

It is a great lesson: Go down to the bus station, bring no book or smartphone, and just start reading what’s in front of you. Remember it, store it. Milton Katselas, who actually directed George C., did the same thing. We would go to restaurants and watch people. We would make real-money bets on what people’s occupations were, and then one of us would go over and politely inquire to find out which of us had won.

My first teacher at San Francisco State, Dale Mackley, had us keep an observation notebook with us everywhere we went. He told us it was the secret sauce of an actor’s technique. In trying to live lives of integrity and meaning, we are often little more than a blooper reel of mistakes and embarrassments and overstatements and fulminations.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you some of my favorites:

•Our neighbor across the street when we lived at 102nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan would come out every morning to put her trash in the bin, then look up at the sky and scream, “God damn it!” and then go back inside.

•I was having dinner with a friend at a posh eatery in Lower Manhattan. The waiter was uptight and curt with us all evening—I’d say, 30% passive, 70% aggressive. At the end of our meal, I asked for sherbet.
“You mean sorbet?”
“Sure, okay.”
“We’re out.”
He then piled our dishes on his tray and abruptly walked away. A moment later, there was the sound of dishes crashing down the stairs to the kitchen, an explosion of sound straight out of a Feydeau farce. Like the Beatles said, “Instant Karma’s gonna get you.”

•Years ago I joined a USO tour to entertain our armed forces throughout eastern Asia and the western Pacific. We traveled from USO club to USO club in Japan, Korea, and Guam. We often dined in the officers’ club after the show. One night we were sitting at a table with a high-ranking officer and his wife. The “talent” did all the talking, while the officer and his wife listened politely…and drank. At the end of the meal, as we were all standing up to leave, the officer’s wife leaned down to get her purse and the officer whipped her around and without a word slapped her full-strength across the face. She picked up her purse and they left.

•I love diners. When I’m in New York City, I also seek them out. My favorite is the Metro on the Upper West Side. But before diners, my passion—and this dates me—was for automats. They used to be all over the city. For those of you under 100, an automat is a self-service joint. You want a sandwich? Open the glass case where the sandwiches are on display in separate compartments. Same for pie or my favorite rice pudding. You take your food and your cup of coffee over to the cash register and pay, then select a Formica-topped table to your liking. Mine was in the front corner facing out toward Fifty-Seventh Street.
One day I was seated and a man took the table next to me. He was nattily dressed in a plaid suit with a vest and bowtie. His hair was thin and blond. But here’s the thing: his fingernails were long. Like, Mandarin long. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was an actor starting out in New York.
“And what do you do?” I asked.
“I’m going to kill President Carter.”

•The streets of New York are a great democracy. Titled and untitled walk the same crammed pavement. One day I was walking down the East Side when I stopped at a light. There were quite a few people jammed up against one another waiting for the light to change. I noticed the woman to my left. She was dressed all in black and wearing a black hat like a tall beret. But it was her neck and the absolute stillness of her face that drew my attention. She held her head high, her neck perfectly aligned with her body. She was looking left and right without moving her head, the way my basketball coach had taught us—so as not to give away your intention to your opponent. I kept my gaze ahead as I whispered in her ear, “I won’t embarrass you, but thank you for everything, Miss Garbo.” Greta Garbo, arguably the biggest star of the 1940s, continued to look straight ahead. “Thank you,” she said, with the slight hint of a smile on her lips. That regal neck had supported that face that had changed motion pictures forever.

•I have a fear of being fat. Let me clarify—I have a horror of being fat. My career is a display of differing weights and protruding bellies. I hit my limit while filming the movie Pollock, and I did a scene with Ed Harris in a DeSoto. I got in the car, and it tipped. The diet and the sobriety began, and I’ve been in relatively good shape and poundage for some years now.

All of this is preface to this:

I used to go to the trendy Ma Maison in Los Angeles. The chef was Wolfgang Puck and the clientele were the crème de la crème of Hollywood. There was Peter Falk at one table, John Cassavetes at another, superagent Sue Mengers over there. And then at one table was a man sitting by himself. He was enormous. He had to be in the heavy 300s, but this was what was so remarkable: His table manners were dainty and precise. He cut his meat with surgical skill and ate very slowly. Patience and exactitude, that’s how you play “fleshy.”

•My dad, Barney Tambor, the man who went to every play and every baseball game I was in, once came to see me backstage when I was doing Sly Fox. He murmured his congratulations, but he wouldn’t smile, he wouldn’t open his mouth. The reason? His front teeth were missing. During his flight, he’d tried to open the little package of peanuts with his teeth and the peanuts won.
Here’s another thing about my dad. When he ordered coffee at a restaurant, he would pour a little bit out into the saucer, blow on it, then pour it into another cup. He kept doing that until the coffee in the original cup had cooled enough to drink. If you brought that behavior to the set, you’d probably be met with an argument from the director. But Brando would have used it, I assure you.

•On the Amtrak train to Boston from Washington, DC, there was a man in a blue suit, his hair slicked back and parted on the side. His nails were manicured, and his shoes were shiny and new. There was a pin of some kind on his lapel. An American flag? A congressman, maybe? Here are the two details: 1) He cracked his knuckles one by one, over and over again. My brother used to crack his knuckles before he went to sleep. Just once through; I’d count the ten cracks of his ten fingers, then I’d fall asleep. This guy kept cracking and cracking and cracking, while his leg bounced up and down. 2) He spent the whole journey talking quietly, but I saw no cell phone or earpiece. He was talking to himself.

These are people and this is how they behave. Pay attention. God is in the details, as every good writer knows. People are not generalities or abstraction; they are a collection of specifics, detail upon detail upon detail. In observing those details, you will discover this axiom: People are ridiculous.