“Our sex is a part of who we are. Not just our sensuality and our passion. Our sex. Sex. That thing that’s a part of what makes us walk the way we walk, talk the way we talk, think what we think.
—Sharon Stone, Inside the Actors Studio
It will come as no surprise that our students were in evident awe of Tom Cruise. And to anyone who has worked with him, it will come as no surprise that he quickly, gracefully put them at ease. I have encountered Tom several times since he was with our students and me in December 2003, and on every occasion he has been as open and gracious as he was that night. It appears to be his nature.
On our stage, he was caught off-guard, though I hadn’t anticipated he would be, when I produced his family tree. “When Vanessa Redgrave was in that chair we were able to trace her family tree back four generations to 1846. You break our record. We can track your forebears back to 1810.”
“Whoa! Really?”
“And the first Thomas Cruise Mapother to 1876. There’s your family tree.”
“Thank you. Let me see that.”
As I passed it to him, I asked, “Would you like to see the Mapother crest?”
“Yeah. Let’s see. You know what? You definitely learn something new about yourself every day. Wow!”
At this point in these pages, it seems redundant to say that the subject of parental loss came up. Tom told us that his parents divorced when he was twelve, and when I replied, “My father was absent for most of my life, and I reencountered him toward the end of his. Isn’t that what happened to you?” He said, “Yeah, that’s what happened. I’d finished shooting All the Right Moves, and I got a call from my grandmother—’cause I hadn’t seen my father really in almost ten years—just saying that your father’s dying, he’s in the hospital, and he’s going to die—and would you like to see him?
“So…I said, ‘Yeah, I want to see my father.’ And I went down, and he would see me under one condition, that we didn’t discuss the past. Didn’t want to discuss the past, what happened. I brought him a…gift, and it looked like Tom Sawyer, a little boy who was playing hooky, you know, a little statue. And it had the music from The Sting on it.” Tom hummed the theme. “Because he and I…we loved that movie and we saw that movie together….”
He stopped for a long moment, then resumed. “And…I gave him that as a gift, and he laughed, and he got it. You know, he hadn’t seen me at that point…I’m twenty-one years old…and it was a very powerful moment for me. And I looked at him—he was a big man, about six one, a striking-looking man, a very powerful-looking guy, and at that moment, you can’t help but feel such…compassion. And later on, I heard he recognized the…the loss of that family…and it was a very special family and it was a huge life force that he had…let go of. You know? He’d made some mistakes, and he knew it. And I wasn’t angry with him, I was really just looking at a man who was my father, and…and that I love, no matter what happened, uh…”
He stopped again. “Did you tell him how you felt about him?” I asked.
“Yeah. I held his hand, and he said, ‘Listen, we’ll go have a steak. I’m gonna get through this.’ And I just wanted him to know that I loved him, and what happened happened, it’s the past. It was very powerful.”
“Did you see him again?”
“No, I didn’t see him again. He died.”
“Do you feel that that chapter ended more or less satisfactorily?”
“More or less satisfactorily.”
As I looked, as always, for my guest’s approach to the craft that our students study and the guest practices, Tom’s reply was modest—and informative. “Although I’ve never really had formal training, I’ve had this ability—I guess not ability—the luck to be able to work with the people I’ve worked with, and just the ability to find what works for me. I’ve created my own way of preparing for a picture. I do a tremendous amount of research. I work very, very hard to get to the point where you just let go, and it just happens, and all the mechanics just fade away.
“It’s really the writer. He tells his story. As actors, you know, we’re writers also, because of the work that we do and the research. I do a lot of research, and I just absorb it—because that’s our writing. It’s not about the lines, it’s what goes underneath. We’re writing the subtext. That’s our job. As actors we have this structure, the lines, the scene, the story, and for me, personally, it’s really finding freedom within the structure of a scene, so that you can have moments like the one in Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman leans across and our heads touch. You’re just connected. I mean, that happened, you know? That’s the movie!
“We look for those moments. They just happen, you can’t plan. Sometimes, you try to plan things like that and it just doesn’t happen, and you start forcing moments, as opposed to just living, because it’s about being the character, and being there. When I’m doing a scene, I’m not thinking about anything else. I’ve done all my work, and I’m allowing myself to be affected by the people, by the environment that we’ve created.
“Those are the moments that are fresh and moving to me.”
When Jennifer Lopez accepted the invitation to come to our stage, the Purity Police mobilized in defense of the Inside the Actors Studio principles they suddenly understood and treasured—but had somehow neglected to mention or acknowledge before the perceived barbarian appeared at the gates.
Jennifer was invited because she has succeeded as few professionals of her age, gender and ethnicity have, in three of the disciplines being drilled by us into our students every day of their drama school lives: acting, singing and dance. While she was manifestly not Duse, Sutherland or Pavlova, none of that august group had ever attempted what the others could do.
What some of our guests have to offer our students is an infusion of spine and guts. Jennifer Lopez is emphatically of that number. When I asked her how her parents felt about her decision to leave college and pursue her passions, she said, “Not good, not at first. I think they were scared but, you know, I told them I had a dream. I woke up one Saturday morning and took my mom and dad into the living room and said, ‘I have to talk to you. I’m supposed to be in show business. Okay?’”
The students, many of whom had had similar talks with their parents, laughed appreciatively. “My dad, who’s kind of a dreamer, too, was like, ‘Okay,’ and my mom was like, ‘No way! You’re not dropping out of school! You’re staying in school and that’s it!’ And so that caused a bit of tension between us.”
“About that time, didn’t you leave home?”
Jennifer laughed. “Shortly thereafter.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I lived in the dance studio for a while.”
“How can you live in a dance studio?”
“Well, after they’d lock up, I’d clean up, and then I’d sleep in the office.”
“How long did you do that?”
“Until I got my first job a few months later.”
“Did your parents adjust?”
“No, they never got used to it. I still think they’re not used to me not being home.”
A few minutes later, I asked Jennifer, “What was your first album called?”
“On the Six.”
“And what is the six?”
“The six train, on the Lexington Avenue line, from The Bronx to Manhattan.”
“Is On the Six meant to draw attention to your roots?”
“I’m thinking to myself, what is this first album about? The journey of where I started, and where I am now, and how did I get there? And when I thought about it, I was like, I got there by getting on the six train from The Bronx, coming into the city, taking lessons, taking classes. It was a literal thing.”
Knowing her ambivalence about the J-Lo label, I asked her, “Who decided to call your second album J-Lo?”
She laughed. “I did.”
“Have you lived to regret it?”
“Yeah!” When the students chuckled, she amended it. “Well, yes and no, yes and no. I came up with it as a kind of homage to my fans, because people were shortening my name. They were saying ‘Jennifer Lo’ or ‘Jenny Lo’ or ‘JLo.’ And I thought to myself, you know what? In a way, my music persona is like J-Lo. Maybe that’ll be a good name for the album.
“But I didn’t name myself that,” she said firmly. “I named the album that, you know what I mean? And it caught on. It was like a headline thing: ‘J-Lo.’”
“It became another persona,” I suggested.
She nodded. “It became a persona, it became this thing that people could talk about.”
“And something people could own—quite independently of you.”
“Yeah, yeah. But that was not me, Jennifer.”
There was one more aspect of Jennifer’s life—and perhaps, for a few of the students, theirs—that I wanted the students to hear about. “Other guests in that chair have talked about the relentless glare and sometimes ruthless demands of fame in America,” I said. “And at times you’ve been a lightning rod. Literally.”
“Yes.”
“That can’t be pleasant.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Does it just come with the territory, or do you think there’s something wrong with it?”
“There’s definitely something wrong with it. I feel like I can handle things. I’m not whining, I’m not complaining about the fact that I have this spotlight on me because I’m in the public eye. But the most dangerous thing, the most terrifying thing about it, for me, is to have what I do taken away from me because of it.
“I feel it’s very dangerous when the focus comes off your work and onto your private life. Because that’s not why I got in the business in the first place. Why I got in is because I love the work, I love singing, I love performing. That’s what I do, that’s what I feel I was born to do, whatever anybody says. If I was doing it in a dive bar in Mexico, it wouldn’t matter. That’s what I’d be doing.
“And that’s the scariest part of it for me. If you look at the beginning of my career and the directors and the people that I worked with—for them, I was a clean slate. And now, with everybody having all these preconceived notions about you and knowing too much about your life, and saying, ‘No, she’s too this or she’s too that,’ that’s when it gets scary to me. I don’t want this to happen, you know? Because being a celebrity is not being an actor!
“One of my first teachers told me something: It’s not about where you get, it’s the process. If you don’t enjoy acting, if you don’t enjoy the class, if you don’t enjoy doing the work, then don’t do it. If you’re doing it to get somewhere, then forget it. Because this is what being an actor is. It’s doing the work, it’s being in class, it’s failing, it’s getting up. It’s nothing else. And the work for me is the important part. It’s not about having the biggest hit movies. I’m gonna keep doing it, and sometimes they’re gonna be good, and I’m always going to strive to make it great—but you never know.” She smiled at the students. “You know what I mean? It’s about the work. That’s all it’s about.”
Bette Midler established a new speed record for tears. A few minutes after she came on stage, as we talked about her childhood, I quoted her. “You’ve said, ‘I was constantly fighting for some self-esteem.’”
Welling up, she said, “Oh, my God, are we gonna bring out the Kleenex already? It’s like the third question! Yes, I was constantly fighting for some self-esteem, and you notice I got some. Oh!”
As she broke again and dabbed at her face with a tissue, I shuffled through my cards. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d cry till page twenty-six.”
Having weathered that brief squall, we proceeded with low humidity until I observed, “You’ve given credit for the change in your life and behavior to Beth Ellen Childers.”
“Absolutely,” Bette exclaimed. “Absolutely! She just thought I was a riot. I couldn’t say anything that she didn’t think was hilarious. And she was hilarious. She used to make me laugh so hard, I laughed until the tears rolled down my cheeks. And, you know, if you have never experienced that kind of laughter, it’s too bad. Because that’s the greatest thing in the world. I’m convinced of it. I think that’s better than sex. I do. And I’ve had great sex. But I think that’s it. And we laughed like that for four years.”
“And what happened finally?”
“Well, she…we graduated and she went on to college…she went to…she, uh, it was, uh, oh…oh…!” She had slowed to a shuddering halt, the dam breaking, tears tumbling down her cheeks. “I guess it’s page twenty-six,” she gasped, then burst out, “She was killed! Just…killed,” Bette sobbed. “It was an auto accident.” She looked at me, though I doubt she could see me through the flowing tears. “That’s page twenty-six?”
“I missed it by one,” I said. “It’s twenty-seven.” As Bette struggled to regain her composure, I tried to make amends. “We don’t try to make people cry….”
“I know,” Bette said, showing more consideration for me than I had for her. “That was sad.”
Bette’s record would hold until Dustin Hoffman appeared on our stage.
As I have set this record down over the past two years, one of the things I’ve realized is, of course, how fortunate I am to have spent time in the presence of this remarkable company.
Another realization that makes me the envy even, on reflection, of myself is how many evenings I’ve spent less than three feet away from many of the most famously beautiful women in the world. Imagine being privileged to spend an evening with any one, much less all, of them, and then going home with the only woman on earth who outshines them. This journey inside Inside has made me realize that in some respects I am one of the most fortunate of men.
A case in point: When Natalie Portman was on our stage, twenty-three years old, ravishing and recently graduated from Harvard, I recalled Anthony Lane’s description of her in his New Yorker review of Anywhere But Here. “Her beauty has now become so disabling that you should not attempt to drive or operate heavy machinery for twelve hours after viewing this picture.”
I said, “I’ll ask you the question I have asked several beautiful women who have been in that chair: Is being better-looking than many people a professional advantage, disadvantage or of no consequence or interest?”
Natalie’s answer was immediate, frank and, I would submit, neither modest nor boastful, since it simply acknowledged an obvious reality. “Advantage. I mean, I think whoever says it’s not would be lying. Maybe people don’t take you as seriously, and maybe there are roles you can’t play—but I think it’s much easier. Look at people who are actresses. I think it’s much easier to work in film if you’re considered to be attractive.
“But I don’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘Hey, I’m good-looking.’ Obviously, a serious-actress answer would be ‘Oh, it’s a disadvantage. It’s distracting from my work.’ But no, in terms of getting work, of course it’s helpful.”
Yvette Brooks, a surpassingly beautiful young woman in our school, asked a variation of the question during Sharon Stone’s classroom session. “One of the things I’m most interested in is, you’re able to really own your sexuality. As a woman in this field, I know I’m always sort of trying to run away from that—because I don’t want to be objectified. How do you deal with that?”
“No matter what you do, someone’s going to objectify you,” Sharon said. “So, you might as well just get over it.” She smiled as the students laughed. “And no matter what you think, you’ve already objectified someone in this room tonight. It’s a part of who we are. Our sex is a part of who we are. Not just our sensuality and our passion. Our sex. Sex. That thing that’s a part of what makes us walk the way we walk, talk the way we talk, think what we think.
“To take this Gestalt out of yourself is to rob yourself of part of the fire and the core that drives you or any character you play. Yes, some characters are void of sexuality. As some people. But then you have to figure out why.”
She paused, studying Yvette, then said, “It’s as much a part of you as your vocalization. Or your physicality. Or what you wear or think or do. And I think it’s absurd and puritanical and wrong to be afraid of it. What you have to say is ‘Who made me think that I should be ashamed of my sexuality? Okay, now they can drop dead!’”
Her dictum was met with laughter and applause, which prompted her to continue as Yvette’s inner voice: “‘And how about this beautiful part of me?’ Because it is a beautiful part of you. It’s the part that makes the rose bloom. You don’t let someone take that!”
“I’m coming in tomorrow with a very tight dress on,” Yvette declared.
“If it makes you feel ‘you,’” Sharon responded. “You have to feel ‘you.’ See, a tight dress doesn’t make me feel ‘me.’ A tight dress makes me feel embarrassed. But, a short dress? I feel that. It’s whatever it is for you.”
Kurt Vonnnegut was fond of quoting H. L. Mencken on the subject of yet another award to Columbia University’s Nicholas Murray Butler: “Nothing remained to be done but to wrap him in sheet-gold and burnish him until he blinds the sun itself.” Morgan Freeman came to our stage heaped with honors, but for us the one that counted most was the regard in which he was held by our guests. Over the years, each time his name came up, there was an immediate shift to a particular tone that we heard on no other subject or occasion.
Our evening with Morgan began as I asked him a question that revealed a family tree as deeply rooted as the Redgraves’ or the Barrymores’: “How far back are you able to trace your family’s history?”
“My great-great-great-grandmother,” Morgan said, “who was a slave in Virginia, was bought by a man named Colonel Wright, and taken into the area that I live in now in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.”
That evening marked the first onstage reunion in the history of Inside the Actors Studio, in celebration of Morgan’s Broadway debut as an actor and mine as a Broadway producer. “One night in 1977,” I said, “I went to the Manhattan Theatre Club, and saw a remarkable play called The Last Street Play. It was written by a young writer named Richard Wesley. There were a number of powerful performances in it, but when a derelict called Zeke shuffled onstage and delivered himself of a stunning monologue, Shakespearean in quality and length, I felt the way I’d felt the first time I saw Marlon Brando on the stage: that I was seeing something that was opening brand new doors.
“In the next few weeks, I formed a partnership with the Shubert Organization and Paramount Pictures, and The Last Street Play, renamed The Mighty Gents, opened on Broadway in April of 1978. Mel Gussow of the Times called it the best new play of the season, and Morgan received a nomination for the Tony Award.”
I introduced Richard Wesley, who was in the front row, and concluded, “This is my opportunity tonight to say, all these years later, thank you, Morgan, and thank you, Richard.”
“Thank you, Jim,” Morgan said. “You were the producer.” He looked at Richard. “Actors get accolades because people see whatever it is they do, and they call it artistry. But I don’t think of it as that at all. Sometimes somebody comes along and they’ve written a part, and all you have to do is put it on. Richard did that. That character was so compelling, so right, so clear to me, I was just channeling.”
Morgan’s “just channeling” prompted critic Walter Kerr to write, “Mr. Freeman’s shift from one level of honesty to another is literally beautiful performing.” A short time later, reviewing one of Morgan’s first movie performances, Pauline Kael posed the question: “Is he the greatest American actor?”
Searching for the secrets of Morgan’s formidable craft, I quoted David Fincher, who had directed him in Seven: “Morgan will give you seven or eight subtle variations on a precise mood or emotion.”
“How much difference do you look for between takes?” I asked.
“If I think I’ve nailed it,” Morgan answered, “I try to do it the same way. If there are different ways to approach the other actor, then, I’ll just try that and see.”
“How much of your performance comes from what your partner is doing at any given moment in a scene?”
“All of it. Acting is reacting in my book.”
I am an admirer of film critic Roger Ebert not only for what he thinks but how he thinks. There is a decency and cleanliness in his thought process that, for me, sorts matters out definitively, time after time. And, as usual, he got it right when he wrote about Morgan, “What Freeman brings to all of his scenes is a very particular attentiveness. He doesn’t merely listen. He seems to weigh what he is told, to evaluate it. That quality creates an amusing result sometimes, when other actors will tell him something and then, you can clearly sense, look to see if he buys it.”
After reading Ebert’s comment on our stage, I returned to a familiar theme. “I believe that actors listen differently than civilians do. How important to you is listening when you’re acting?”
“You’re not going to do it if you’re not listening. I have this little trick I’ll do sometimes. Someone will say a line to me and I’ll say, ‘Huh?’ and see what happens.”
“That gets their attention.”
In the classroom, a student said, “You speak about your intuition, and you refer to the script as being the bible. I want to know, is that intuition informed by the script?”
“I think it’s informed by life,” Morgan replied. “I haven’t said this, and I might as well say it: In terms of being an actor, I’m also a peeker. I’m real serious about the keyhole. I watch people. My wife used to slap me because, if I see somebody doing something unique, I’ll do it. You know? If I see somebody with a walk, a limp, I’ll do it. Just to get it.”
He zeroed in on a student, fixing him with a steely regard. “I’m looking at this very handsome dude right here, and I’m watching him. I’m all over the place, but my eyes keep coming back here, because he’s seriously focused. He hasn’t looked anywhere else.” He looked away, then swiveled back. “I glance back—I see his eyes right here.” Morgan transferred his gaze to another student, then another, engaging each of them in a virtual duel of concentration, with each student staring back, transfixed, looking, seeing, listening.
“You’re all doing it, I know, because I’m talking,” Morgan said, “…and I’m a major, internationally famous star.” As the students exploded into laughter, the spell broken, Morgan sat back with a smile, satisfied that his point had been made. “I’m just saying that this whole intuition thing is informed by study.”
I continually look for guests who can instruct our students in more than one discipline. When Jamie Foxx came to Inside the Actors Studio, I introduced him to our students with “Tonight breaks a record. In the more than ten years of this series, no other guest has come to this stage as an actor, comedian, writer, producer, director, composer, pianist, singer, and recording artist.”
The subject of parental loss came up instantly with Jamie. “How old were you when your parents separated?”
“I don’t know exactly when they separated, because at seven months I was in another family.”
“How did that happen?”
“Well, when my mother had me, she wasn’t really prepared, or ready to take on that responsibility. And the lady that had adopted her, also adopted me. So, the ones who I consider my parents were Estelle Talley and Mark Talley.”
“Then, technically, legally, your mother is what?”
“My sister. Technically. It’s a Southern thing. You know how it is in the South. Technically, my mother is my sister, and technically, my uncle is my brother, so it really is a yee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee type of situation, you know?” His chant bounced on a wave of laugher.
“It also points to a couple of extraordinary people,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm!”
Describing his grandmother/adoptive mother, Jamie said, “She had the bow and arrow, and I was the arrow. She let me out there, but she made sure she aimed me in the right direction, and because of that upbringing, I think that’s why I’m where I am right now.”
Since several of our guests have been veterans of the stand-up wars, I’ve been struck often by the parallels between comedy and combat. In the stand-up comic’s lexicon, every time they go onstage, they either “kill” or “die.” Obviously, every night, it’s a life-and-death battle, which may explain why so many of them have emerged from that crucible, as the rappers have from theirs, with skills that open the door to acting.
One of my blue cards contained a quote, which I read to Jamie. “You’ve said, ‘When I go out on the road, that’s when I sling my guns. I’m a gunslinger.’”
“Yes, I am.”
“Is stand-up that important to you?”
“Stand-up is important to me because it keeps me—and I’ll use it as a metaphor—it keeps me in the street, it tells me what people are thinking about.”
“I’ve watched a lot of your stand-up,” I said, “and one of the things I was hoping tonight was that you would address me as a playa.”
“You are a true playa, man!”
“I don’t know that that’s so at all. You have to be honest with me. When you address that audience of playas, you’re talking to playas. What do I have to do to qualify to be a playa?”
“I’m gonna tell you what a playa is.”
“Okay.”
“A playa is somebody who is moving culture, no matter what the size. Now, you move culture, people come to you and watch what you say and what you talk about, and they actually value your opinion. That’s a playa—somebody whose opinion is valued. You are doing it, you know what I’m saying? These people come in here, and they have a great time, and you’re bringing all that. That’s playa status, that’s what playa is to me.”
“It makes me a playa?” I asked, still uncertain.
“Yeah. You are a playa, man.”
Will Smith had granted me jiggy status, and now I was a playa. My cup was running over—even if I suspected that both of them were being kind to an irreparable honkie.
It was Jamie’s grandmother’s insistence that he begin piano lessons at five, and enter college as a classical music major, that enabled him to play Ray Charles in Ray. When I asked him whether Charles had had to approve him, he said, “Oh, yeah. He walks in with that smile and that sway. You just go, wow, man! He grabs me and says, ‘Oh, you got strong fingers, let’s go play the blues.’
“He got on one piano, I got on the other, and he said, ‘Jamie, if you can do the blues, you can do anything.’ So we start singing the blues, back and forth, and then he moved into Thelonius Monk. That’s like treacherous waters! And I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, where you going?’ And I hit a wrong note. He said, ‘Now, why the hell did you do that? It’s right underneath your fingers, man.’
“And so I use that now in life, I used it for the film: Life is notes underneath our fingers. We just gotta figure out which notes to play to make our music.”
Like Melanie Griffith, Jamie came to us later than he had planned, but for a different reason. After we had discussed his performance in Ray, and after he’d played the piano on our stage, and sung to our students, I said, “This brings us to the final note of the evening. As our audience here knows, Jamie has come to us, selflessly and courageously, tonight. He was supposed to be here ten days ago. But something happened.”
I looked at Jamie, who had begun crying, silently, bitterly, uncontrollably and, like others on our stage, without embarrassment or disguise. I waited for thirty seconds, ready to veer away from the subject if he chose to, but finally, still weeping, he said, “The lady that, uh, made all the tools…she decided that…she did her job. And, uh, she said, ‘Go ahead.’ She said, ‘It’s time, you know? You do your thing. I gave you everything you needed.’”
Looking through tears at the students, whose faces mirrored his, he brandished a hand at the stage. “I didn’t want to do this. But…I didn’t want to just sit somewhere and, you know, let it stew.” He straightened in his chair. “But she gave me the tools for this moment too. ’Cause…God loaned my grandmother to us for ninety-five years. And her beautiful contract is up.”
Jamie and the students mourned his grandmother together for a moment, then he offered them and himself some balm. “So, her and Ray Charles is sitting there talking, right?” Jamie said. “Therefore, I’m gonna be all right.”
It goes without saying that the evening ended with the students chanting, “Jamie! Jamie! Jamie!” The Academy agreed. Bravo telecast Jamie’s episode November 28, 2004, as the Oscar campaign began; on Sunday, February 27, 2005, he received the Best Actor Oscar; and that night we celebrated with it at the Vanity Fair party.
When Jay Leno agreed to appear on Inside the Actors Studio in 2003, I had the hubris to propose that, as a lecture-demonstration, one of his writers prepare for me a monologue, which I would deliver to our audience and he would critique. With Jay looking on, I delivered my monologue, replete with lines like “As dean of the Actors Studio Drama School, I’d like to give you an update on our progress. The good news: We have two hundred great actors, writers and directors earning their master’s degrees. The bad news: Our football team got a rotten review in The New York Times. Will Ferrell makes me sound slow, boring, funereal and pretentious. That is ridiculous! I am not pretentious.”
The writer had done his best and I did mine. Jay, like all comedians, can turn very serious when it comes to the subject of comedy. With the monologue semisafely behind me, I said, “All right, Jay, I can take it. On the usual academic scale of A to F, how did I do?”
“F is the lowest?” Jay asked.
“Well, we could go to a…G?”
“I would go to…a C.”
Feeling a genuine wave of relief, I said, “C! That’s good.”
Jay was reflective—and in dead earnest—muttering, “C. Yeah, C.”
That night, Jay gave the students a master class in the craft—and cost—of comedy. It began with my question “What is your workday like at The Tonight Show?”
“I get there about eight-fifteen in the morning. Then you write joke, write joke, discuss this, discuss that, write joke, have meeting, write joke. I have two or three TVs on. The trick is not to know more than anybody else, it’s to know exactly what everybody else knows.
“We have a noon meeting that lasts about forty-five minutes: Who is the guest, what will we talk about? Go back, write joke, write joke, maybe shoot something. Rehearse down in the set, write joke, write joke. Tape four-thirty to five-thirty, and then, usually, six-thirty to nine, we go out and do walkarounds or pieces like that. And then from ten to two, you write the monologue for the next day.”
“But we started you at eight-fifteen in the morning.”
“Yeah.”
“And you go to two in the morning.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“And then, the next morning is eight-fifteen again.”
With a “what’s-the-big-deal?” look, Jay said, “Yeah.”
“How much sleep do you get a night?”
He shrugged. “Four, four and a half hours. I’m not doing heavy lifting here.”
To a student aspiring to do stand-up, Jay said, “When you’re onstage, you’re the only person in the world. Everybody in there is focused on you. You have all the attention—right now! I sometimes feel sorry for actors, because the play has to be good. It’s got to be directed well, it’s got to be all these things for them to spot you. But, if you’re up there alone, you’re writing and producing and directing it yourself. It’s all you. You take all the credit and you get all the blame.”
As the student nodded vigorously, Jay offered a final cautionary—and encouraging—note. “You can’t blame anybody. It’s yours if you fail, and yours if you don’t. You wrote it and you directed it. It’s all your own.”
When Robert Redford came to our stage in December 2004, our students were once again in the presence of a legend. Not that he felt or behaved that way. Like Clint Eastwood, Bob Redford is so utterly lacking in affectation or attitude, on-screen and off, that he manages simultaneously to seem at first less than what we anticipated and, finally, much, much more than we could have imagined. If there is a definition for the overused, misused and abused word star, “Clint Eastwood” or “Robert Redford” will suffice—though either of them would wave the title away.
Mies van der Rohe’s aphorism “God is in the details” (which has been mysteriously turned into its opposite by the relentless misquotation “The devil is in the details”) applies perfectly to the subtle texture of any Robert Redford performance. In pursuit of his elusive approach, I asked him, “How do you normally work on a role? How much preparation do you do before the camera turns, and how much do you depend on the spontaneity of the moment, when the director says, ‘Action’?”
“I don’t do a lot of prep for the camera. I never have, and for that reason it was hard when I directed my first film. I refused to learn the language of the camera because I didn’t want it to bother me as an actor. Some actors are quite different: They learn everything about the camera. And they work more technically. I always enjoyed spontaneity. But I also appreciate the value of certain controls, to shape what you’re doing. I like improvisation.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, a lot. I also know it’s dangerous. But it’s very exciting because there’s a freedom, and something alive about it, and you have to use your brain, you have to be there, you have to inhabit the character, otherwise you’re going to bounce out of the parade, and so I like that. I like to get the frame, understand what the director’s got in mind, if I’m acting. If I go out of the camera range, tell me, but let me be, let me inhabit the space I’m in. And I love acting with other actors, when they can act. For me, it’s very hard to act with actors who have everything memorized perfectly and you can see it in their eyeballs, you know, that they have it all worked out.”
Since Paul Newman had told us what had transpired when a reporter suggested they co-star in a remake of Indecent Proposal, and since the two of them were famous for their affection for practical jokes, I asked Bob, “Didn’t you once send Paul a Porsche, wrapped in a red bow?”
“Yeah. He bored you to tears when you were with him ’cause he’d always talk about his racing cars. So, on his fiftieth birthday, I went to a towing service and said, ‘Can you find a junked car, a Porsche?’ And they called back and said, ‘We found one, totaled, just completely totaled.’ And I said, ‘Okay, can you wrap it up and put a ribbon around it and tow it over and put it on his back porch?’
“So, they did that, and it just said ‘Happy birthday,’ that’s all. I didn’t hear anything, and two weeks later, I came to my house and opened the door, and there’s a crate in the living room foyer. Inside it is a big piece of metal that’s been compressed down to just a solid block. It’d crushed the floor. So I realized what he had done. I did not acknowledge that it’d happened. I had to have the towing service that had brought it there come and take it out. They’re making a ton of dough on this thing! I had it boiled down to a garden sculpture, and had it placed in his garden. And that was the end of it. And no one to this day has ever acknowledged it.”
“Really?” I asked, over the students’ raucous applause.
“Yeah,” Bob said, then added reflectively, “I’m kind of sad I told that story because this is on television.”
“No, it’s not.”
He grinned at me. “Oh, it isn’t? Well, then, that’s great, ’cause maybe we can keep this going for a while.”
The family history Jane Fonda related on our stage began with a childhood in a royal Hollywood court reigned over by her father, Henry Fonda; but the conversation changed direction sharply as I mentioned the theme of parental divorce, which, I said, “has hung over this show like a cloud. When did it happen to you?”
“Around twelve.”
“How was it explained to you?”
“I was going to school one morning, and my mother was standing in the door of the living room, and she said, ‘If anybody tells you that your parents are getting divorced, tell them you already know.’
“Was that when your mother’s illness began to be evident?”
“It was before then. My mother suffered from manic depression. She was institutionalized.”
“At one point, didn’t she come home for a day, with a nurse?”
“Yes, she came home in a limousine with a nurse. I was upstairs on a hardwood floor like this, playing jacks with my brother, and she arrived, and I said, ‘Peter, don’t go down, let’s not go down. If you stay up here, I’ll let you win.’ But he went down and I didn’t.” She slowed. “And I…I never saw her. I never did. That’s when she got…the razor that she used to kill herself.
“It’s complicated for a child because you, you, you wonder…years later, why didn’t I go down? Was it that I was angry with her? ‘I’ll show you! I don’t need you either.’ ’Cause she hadn’t been there. Did I not love her? These are the kind of questions that you spend a lot of time thinking about as a child.”
“What were you initially told when your mother died?”
“That she had a heart attack.”
“And how did you find out that it was other than that?
“A year later, someone passed me a movie magazine in study hall, and it said in there that Henry Fonda’s wife had killed herself.”
“Did your mother leave any notes?”
“Yeah, there was one to me, one to my brother, my sister, and…her mother…and the doctor. But we never saw them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
When I asked Jane about her experience in Lee Strasberg’s private classes, she said, “I sat right behind Marilyn Monroe. She would sit there with her trench coat, and she never did anything, and I never did anything. I was terrified, as was she. But then I thought, I’ll give it a chance, I’ll do a sense memory, and I decided to do orange juice….” A stir in the audience caught her attention, and she turned to the students. “Do you do sense memories?”
“They do it night and day,” I said.
“I was still living with my dad,” Jane said, “and I’ll never forget, he came home one day and he said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said ‘I’m practicing my sense memory,’ and he went, yech, and walked out. He hated the Method, hated it. He was very dismissive, so I moved out. And then I did my first exercise, and it changed my life, because Lee said, ‘Jane, you have real talent.’ At that moment, the top of my head came off, and birds flew out, and the light changed, and I owned the city, and I knew why I was alive—from then on. Everybody else would do like one scene a month, and I would do four.”
Two Academy Awards and four Golden Globes later, Jane produced and appeared in On Golden Pond. She told us why. “My father was dying and I wanted to do a movie with him. I saw the play, and thought, well, this is it. So, my partner Bruce Gilbert and I bought the rights. I bought it for my dad, because I sort of sensed that it was a movie that could finally win him his Oscar.”
When Mark Rydell had been with us, we’d talked about On Golden Pond, which he had directed. I said to Jane, “Mark feels very strongly that in important ways the film mirrors your relationship with your father.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She looked out at the students, most of whom hadn’t been born when she’d made On Golden Pond. “The most important scene for my character is the one after my mother has said to me, ‘Tell him how you feel. He’s eighty years old, for heaven’s sake! How long are you going to wait?’
“So, I gird my loins, and I wade out into the water as he’s coming in in his boat. This is the scene where I come up to him and say, ‘I want us to be friends.’ And from the first time I read the script, through every single rehearsal, I would get to it and tears would just come…like this,” she said, as her eyes filled.
“I mean, these are things I could never say to my father. We didn’t talk that way to each other. I couldn’t even speak the words at the rehearsal that morning. So, we shoot his side first, and I so want him to be full, I want him to have emotion. I know it’s going to be his last movie, and I want that so much! He was an actor who hated spontaneity. It had to be exactly the way it was when you rehearsed it. But in the last close-up, when I said, ‘I want to be friends,’ I reached out and touched him, which I hadn’t done before. And it shook him. You can see it on the screen: He begins to well up and he ducks his head and turns away. It just meant the world to me.
“Okay, now it’s my turn: my big scene in the movie that means so much to me because of the personal part…and I am dry! There’s nothing. There’s nothing! What am I going to do? Where is Lee Strasberg now that I need him? What sense memory can I use? All the songs I can usually sing—nothing was working! I was so scared. And who shows up but Kate. She’s not even supposed to be there that day.”
Jane delivered a perfect Hepburn imitation. “‘How are things going, Jane?’ I said, ‘I’m dry! Don’t tell Dad.’ Okay, the camera’s ready, and I said to Mark, ‘I’m going to turn my back to the camera and prepare, and when I turn around, start to film.’ Not having any idea what I was going to do! So I turned my back to the camera—and there is Kate, crouching in the bushes. Like this!”
Jane balled her hands into fists and shook them. “It was mother to daughter: ‘You can do it! You can do it, Jane! Come on!’ It was older actress, to younger actress; she’s been there and she knows. And it was woman to woman—and she willed me with her eyes and her fists. She willed me into that scene!”
The scene got an enormous hand from our students—not the scene in the film, which many of them hadn’t seen, but the gripping scene on our stage.
Jane collected herself and resumed. “He was too sick to get his Oscar when he won. I accepted it for him.”
“And then?”
“I took it home to him. He was sitting in a chair where his wife, Shirlee, had gotten him all fixed up, and I brought it to him with my children and my husband and Bridget and the clan, and I said, ‘How do you feel, Dad?’ and he said, ‘I’m so happy for Kate.’”
Jane looked at me and shrugged, helpless, silent.
“How much longer did your father live after that?” I asked.
“Five months.”
“What happened the last time you saw him?”
“He was in the hospital.” She fell silent again.
“Were you close on that occasion?”
It was several moments before she responded, “No one wanted to admit he was ill. That’s not the way I’d want it. I’d want to know when the last kiss was and all of that, but everybody was in denial. I did say to him, ‘I love you, Dad. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I know you did the best you could, and I love you for that.’ I was so grateful to his wife, who took such good care of him, and I promised him that she would stay and be part of our family forever. And he started to cry…and, I knew he didn’t want…he, he didn’t want me to see him cry, so I left. But it was closure for me.”
Since I am sometimes criticized for a bias toward my guests—a charge that puzzles me, since why else would I invite them to teach our students?—I will assert at the outset that Michael J. Fox is one of the heroes of this record of the last thirteen years. Michael’s valor is a matter of public record. But, like Chris Reeve and others who have fought a tigerish battle against obstacles that would have overwhelmed most of us, Michael arrived at our school in high spirits and eager to go to work. I will never know what it took for him to come to us and open himself and his illness to our students and our television audience, but I know that it has become one of my definitions of courage.
His account of his early struggles in Hollywood was both cautionary and inspirational. Describing his uphill fight for the role of Alex Keaton in Family Ties, he said, “I was the first person to come in, and Gary Goldberg hated me. He just thought I was terrible. And Judith Wiener thought I was pretty good. Now I’m waiting—and I need this job so bad. And Judith kept going back to him and back to him and back to him—and calling me, saying, ‘I’m working on him.’ She’s calling me, by the way, at a pay phone at Pioneer Chicken, ’cause I didn’t have a phone. I would say, ‘I’ll be in my office,’ and go to the Pioneer Chicken and get my phone calls there. I’d given her the number of the phone booth.”
When Judith Wiener finally prevailed, Michael returned to his post outside the Pioneer Chicken. “It was one of the silliest things of all time: I had no money, and I’m sitting at this pay phone at Pioneer Chicken, negotiating my contract, saying, ‘I can’t do it for less than three thousand a week,’ and wishing I had the money to go and buy a Snack Pack from the Pioneer Chicken.”
As we talked about Spin City, I asked him how he dealt with the onset of Parkinson’s.
“The first couple years of the show was just trying not to let anybody know. But it got to a point where I couldn’t hide it anymore. It wasn’t fair to the people I was working with. So, I just decided the time had come.”
“You told the cast?”
“Yeah. You know—as a matter of fact, can I take five minutes?”
“Of course.”
During the previous few minutes the tremors had become more pronounced. Now, as he rose unsteadily, he said, “On Spin City, I couldn’t do this.” He looked at the audience. “I need to take a few minutes for a pill to kick in.”
The students and I waited, and five minutes later Michael returned, to a standing ovation, and picked up where he had left off. “That was basically what was happening when we were doing the show. I was waiting for a pill to kick in, I was waiting to feel better. And I knew there was an audience out there and I couldn’t go out and say, ‘This is why I can’t come out.’ I thought, ‘Can I be funny if people know I’m sick? Is it okay to laugh at a sick person?’ Now, to be able to say to you, ‘Just give me five minutes,’ and then come back out here and say, ‘I love it when the drugs kick in,’ that’s what I need to do.”
A short time later, as we waited together in the greenroom while our crew reset the stage for the classroom session, Michael paced back and forth. “Sorry,” he said. “The more I move, the quicker the pill kicks in.”
The tremors had been calmed by the pill he’d taken when he left the stage, but not stilled: They were still visible when he returned. Now, as he paced the greenroom, I witnessed an astonishing transformation: He stopped suddenly and turned to me with the winning, boyish smile that had won him legions of fans. “It just kicked in,” he said, straightening and stretching his arms up over his head and rotating them smoothly, gracefully, freely, released for the moment from the grip of his illness.
When he took his place in the director’s chair at the front of the classroom, he was relaxed and animated. There were a few stammers, and sometimes his hand trembled, but he was unquestionably Michael J. Fox in charge.
A young woman said, “I’m a first-year actor, and I just wanted to say thank you. You’ve been an incredible inspiration to me. About the same time”—she started to break, then steadied herself—“about the same time that you came out and told everybody, I was diagnosed with dystonia, which is neurological….”
“Yeah.”
“And it was wonderful to see that there could be people out there in the industry who were doing what they love to do, even though they might be affected by it. And I want to ask, realistically—you’re Michael J. Fox, and for a person who is just Megan from Arizona, who doesn’t know anybody, or is anybody, how realistic is it to come out and tell people about what you have?”
Michael’s answer was straightforward. “One of the things I had difficulty with when I tried to put people at ease about how I felt and that I was okay with it, was that I didn’t want to downplay what a challenge it is for a lot of people. I didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, it’s a piece of cake.’ That’s a slight to people who really struggle with it, and don’t have the advantages that I have, and have to worry about their insurance and about losing their jobs, and about other people’s perceptions.”
He studied Megan for a moment, then said, “You know, it’s all about accepting. Not to get too twelve-steppy about it, but it’s about what’s in my power, what’s in my control. What other people think of me is not in my power. Clearly, whether or not this manifestation of symptoms happens or doesn’t happen isn’t in my control. I can temper it with drugs to an extent but, really, it’s beyond my control.
“But, in accepting that, do I throw in the towel, or have a tantrum about it, or kill myself? None of those are acceptable solutions to me. The only one that’s acceptable is to go on and see what happens. And what I find is cool. There’s great stuff out there. When you walk through the fear, when you walk through ‘What are people going to think about it?’ or ‘What’s going to happen?’—well, something’s going to happen. We don’t know what it is, but chances are at least fifty-fifty it’ll be pretty good. So, I’m willing to take that risk.”
So, it was clear now, was Megan.
Elton John was one of the guests who brought to our classroom a panoply of the skills we are committed to instill in our students. His Oscar, Tony and Grammy awards give him elite status among his contemporaries, but the evening-long, private, personal concert he gave our students provided them with elite status among theirs.
Looking for the roots of Elton’s talent, I said, “Gifted people mature at different paces. But two gifts always manifest themselves at a very early age: music and math. How old were you when music emerged?”
“I was three when my grandmother sat me on her knee. There was an upright piano in the house, and I remember I could play tunes by ear very, very easily.”
When I asked him what happened to him at the age of eleven, he said, “I won a Junior Exhibitioner’s scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and studied piano, theory, harmony, and sang with the choir. I didn’t practice enough,” he confided, “because when I first heard Elvis Presley and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, my Chopin kind of thing went out the window—even though, for a pianist, the most wonderful thing to play on the piano is Chopin and Bach. But I knew at an early age that I wanted to be involved in modern music. And also I have incredibly small hands.” He raised his hands. “These are not the hands of a concert pianist—let alone the hands of an ordinary pianist. So, I set in my mind that I was going to enter the realm of popular music.”
As we discussed the songwriting career that had produced seven consecutive number-one albums, I said, “When Richard Rodgers was asked, which comes first, the music or the lyric, he replied, ‘The check.’ I believe that with you, Bernie Taupin wrote first.”
“Yes.”
“When you get the lyrics, are they complete?”
“Sometimes they weren’t in verse and chorus. In the early days, it would be maybe fifty, sixty lines, and I would have to carve them up into verses and choruses and middle eights. We’ve never written in the same room. We wrote ‘Your Song’ when we were living at my parents’ apartment. He would give me the lyric and I would go into the living room. He would go back into the bedroom and listen to records. And then I’d come and get him. That process is so rewarding, when you see someone’s face and you’ve got something right to their lyrics—the smiles, the feeling of joy, the happiness.”
“How long did it take you to write ‘Your Song’?”
“In all honesty, probably about thirty minutes.”
That brought astonished exclamations from the students and an envious “Whoa!” from me, to which Elton responded with “People say, ‘Elton, you shouldn’t say that kind of thing; people think you’re bragging,’ but that’s the way I write. I wrote that song in about thirty minutes. Other songs took a little longer, obviously….”
“Forty-five minutes?” I asked, reflecting grimly on the days I’ve spent laboring over a sixty-four-bar lyric.
“It’s weird.” Elton admitted. “I write very quickly. And if I haven’t got anything within forty-five minutes, I come back to it another day, or I give it up. I often sit at the piano and play a chord and I go, ‘Oh, that’s a really nice chord,’ and the song evolves from that. Let me show you.”
Going to the piano, Elton began a master class in composition. “If I’m playing in F-major, the root note of the chord would be…” He played a note and slid it into a chord. “If I’m writing something like ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight,’ which is a very dramatic lyric, I go…” He played the song’s opening chords, then parsed them with single notes. “There are three notes to a chord, there’s F, an A and a C. So, if you use the fifth, instead of that, you get…” He played the altered opening chords, then a cascade of modulations. “That’s chalk and cheese. Do you like that?” He played a chord. “Or do you like that?” He played another.
Finally, he began to sing. “When I think of those East End lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs.”
“There’s not a root note in there!” he said. “There’s only one that’s a regular chord. The other ones are all different variations of chords.” His hands were back on the keyboard, drawing new sounds from the piano. “And it gives you that beautiful tone—that you wouldn’t get on a guitar really. So, that’s why, playing a piano, I tend to put more chords in. Guitarists hate it, by the way, ’cause it means their fingers are all like that!” He twisted his hand into a knot, said, “End of subject,” and rose from the piano bench to cheers.
When he’d returned to the chair next to me, I recalled what Steve Sondheim and Billy Joel had said in praise of the flat keys.
“I totally agree with them,” Elton said. “I’m a flat-key person! E-flat, B-flat, D-flat. I can’t think in sharps, I think in flats.”
“When you’re writing, are you thinking of your own voice?”
“No. I’m trying to write the best melody I can to the lyric that’s in front of me.”
“I’ve been waiting a long time to ask this question. I’ve noticed that when you and countless British rockers sing, you don’t sound English. You’re singing what sounds like a regional American dialect. What is it?”
“It’s because the music that we listened to in the sixties and seventies and eighties, all came from America. All the great records we heard, were black music.”
“So, you’re singing in an American voice.”
“Yeah, I suppose we’re trying to sound like our idols, Otis Redding, Elvis Presley. It’s soul music, it comes from America.”
When I asked Elton if his flamboyant costumes were an important part of his public persona in the seventies, he said, “It was a very important part. It’s one that a lot of people didn’t like very much, because they thought it detracted from the intensity and quality of the music. And I can see that point, but you know, I was living my teenage years. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to wear Hush Puppies, so, I mean, you give a boy the keys to the highway when he’s twenty-three…!
“I was enjoying myself. The first five or six years were fine. But I took it wayyyy…I mean, there’s an intervention for drugs, there should’ve been an intervention for clothes. At the Hollywood Bowl, I had the pope introduce us. And then the queen came down, and then Linda Lovelace introduced us. I took it too far in the end.”
Later, Elton recalled an evening at Windsor Castle. “It was one of the most incredible nights of my life because here I was, a boy from Pinner, talking to Princess Di—and then Princess Anne said, ‘Shall we go into the disco and have a dance?’ It was the quietest disco you’ve ever heard, but anyway, I’m standing there shuffling from foot to foot with Princess Anne, and suddenly the queen came in with her handbag, and went, ‘Can we join you?’
“Well, what am I gonna say? No? And at that moment, they segued into ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley, and I thought, this is the most surreal thing that’s ever happened to me.”
All through the evening, Elton kept returning to the piano, to illustrate a point or just to oblige me or the students. In the classroom session, one of the students said, “My name is Steve Nicholas, I’m a third-year playwright, and when I was twenty, a friend of mine, uh, passed away. His name was Danny Michaels, and every time I hear ‘Daniel’…” He didn’t finish the sentence: Elton was already on his way to the piano.
Later in the classroom, a student said, “My name’s Daniel…”
“Oh, fuck!” Elton exclaimed, “I’m not going over there again!”
Accompanied by the class’s laughter and applause, Daniel asked, with a faint note of disbelief, about Elton’s speedy method of composition.
“It all comes down to a chord sequence,” Elton said. “I can be fiddling on the piano and just, you know, looking at the lyrics, and I’ll play two chords together and think, ‘Oh, that sounds really good!’ You stumble on things by accident. I can write a melody to more or less anything.” He scanned the upturned faces and continued, “If someone has a book, I could write something. Has anyone got a book? Come on, you’re actors!”
Scrambling through the briefcases and tote bags at their feet, the students came up waving a sea of books and papers. Elton beckoned Daniel forward, took the book from his hand, opened it, announced, “Peer Gynt,” and headed for the piano.
Seating himself on the piano bench, he put the book on the piano desk, wedging it open under the microphone. The students waited, transfixed, as he studied the pages. “‘Scene Two,’” he read, and looked up. “And the character’s called ‘Ase.’” With evident relish, he pronounced it “Ass,” commenting, “How appropriate.” Adjusting the microphone, he said, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen here, but I’ll make an ass of myself.”
Focusing on the book, he said, “It says Ase is flailing her arms and tearing her hair, which would not be a good thing for me to do at the moment.”
Elton played a chord, moved into a second chord, and began to sing and play. “Everything spites me with a vengeance, sky and water and those wicked mountains, fog pouring out of the sky to confound him, the water hurling in to drown him, the mountains pointing their rocks to fall—and those people, all of them out for the kill! Oh, no, not to die! I mustn’t lose him. The lout! Why’s the devil have to tease him?”
He paused and glanced at the students, reading the stage direction. “Turning to Solveig.” As the students laughed and applauded, he sang, “It’s hard to believe. God knows, he who was nothing but dreams and lies, he whose strength was all in his mouth…”
The piano accompaniment rolled on as he stole another glance at the students and said, “That’s a line I like!” then resumed the song. “…who’s never done work of any worth. That he—you want to laugh and cry…oh, yes, you want to laugh and cry.”
The structure Elton built in front of the enthralled students had a clearly defined musical form and, like all of Elton’s best work, a soaring melodic line, which came to a logical conclusion as he brought the scene and song to an end with a tumbling progression of chords. “See?” he said. “There you are.”
The audience erupted into an ovation that ended only when he had signed the student’s Peer Gynt, waved farewell to the audience and marched cheerily off the stage, leaving us with an extemporaneous creation that joins Robin and the pashmina as one of the two most astounding improvisations in the history of Inside the Actors Studio.
In the spring of 2005, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were at the epicenter of a perfect storm of media frenzy that had driven them into seclusion. During those difficult months, Angelina emerged for only one public appearance, on our stage on April 25, 2005. As the jackals prowled outside our theater, held at bay by our security team, Angelina walked serenely onstage to share her extraordinary young life with our students, a life that began with yet another gifted parent, Jon Voight, and another parental divorce when Angelina was six months old and left for New York with her mother, who, like so many other mothers saluted on our stage, belonged in our maternal hall of fame.
“You’ve called her a great lady,” I said.
“She is!” Angelina replied.
“What makes her great?”
“She’s just the most compassionate person I’ve ever met—very gentle, really loving, and never has a bad thing to say about anybody. Just, just, just love, you know? Just warm.”
“She was a product of the sixties, wasn’t she?”
“She was.”
“How did that reflect in her personal philosophy?”
“She was maybe more open with me. She understood me a little. My mom was raised Catholic, and maybe”—she laughed—“maybe it would’ve been a bit shocking to have me as a daughter if she didn’t experience the sixties.”
As the students laughed, I said, “So you’re the sixties side of her life.”
“Yeah, she had a really good balance.”
“Didn’t your mother provide you with a motto that began with the words ‘Be brave’?”
“Yeah, she did, she—” She broke off. “My God, is this where people cry?”
“You’re not obliged to.”
“‘Be brave, be true, be bold, be kind, be you,’” Angelina said. Angelina seemed to have taken her mother’s counsel to heart.
“Who were the Kissy Girls?” I asked, and she exclaimed, “Oh, my God! As I reach for the water,” she added, taking a reflective drink, then continuing, “Oh, God. I was, um, I was very sexual in kindergarten—and, um, my mom often got called. I’d created something. Apparently, it was like kissing the boys, and we started making out, and we’d take our clothes off…and I got in trouble a lot in kindergarten.”
“This is a first. Eleven years and you’re our first kindergarten…whatever.”
“Am I? Hmm.”
“In the category of questions I never thought I’d ask, and answers I never thought I’d hear: How old were you when you and your boyfriend began cutting each other?”
“I was fourteen. My first boyfriend and I lived together for two years. We lived with my mom. Which was actually a very smart thing because I wasn’t sneaking around.”
“Right,” I said, for want of a more sophisticated answer.
“So, I was safe,” Angelina continued placidly. “I’ve always collected weapons since I was very little, and it was just one night that…do you really want me to get into this? ’Cause I can.”
Over a burst of laughter and applause from the audience, I said, “I think our students would like to hear it.”
“Yeah. It was that I had started having sex, and sex didn’t feel like enough, and no emotions were really enough, and nothing really felt like it was enough. There was always something you wanted to break out of—or you had to feel more connected to another person. Something more honest. And in kind of a moment of wanting to find something, I grabbed a knife and, and cut him. He cut me back, and we had this exchange of something.
“And then, somehow, covered in blood and feeling…my heart was racing, and there was something dangerous, and life suddenly felt more honest than whatever this sex was supposed to be, this connection between two people was supposed to be. So, I went through a period of, when I’d feel trapped, I’d cut myself because it felt like I was releasing something and it was, it was, it was honest.”
Angelina’s guileless candor was irresistible. I understood nothing and believed everything.
Angelina was as frank and articulate about her craft as she was about her personal life. Our students were surprised to learn that this young woman, who was only twenty-nine when she came to us, was another Strasberg alumna. In response to “When did you decide that you wanted to be an actor?” she said, “I went to the Strasberg Institute when I was sixteen. I was doing some really funny stage production we’d all put together with these crazy characters—something really bizarre—and I’m standing outside in the back alley, just waiting to go on, and there was such a wonderful feeling of friendship and that we were all going to express something and try something…it was just a great feeling, to be a part of something that was going to reach other people and communicate.
“I had a desperate need, which I think most artists do, to communicate, to feel that whatever it is inside me, whether it’s cutting, whatever that’s going crazy—that there’s something inside us. We want to reach out, we want to talk to each other, we want to throw our emotions and our thoughts out, and hope that we make some sense, or that we’ll get an answer.”
As she paused to catch her breath, I asked her, “What did they teach you?”
“When I first went to the Strasberg Institute, I was about twelve, and I found it really bizarre.”
“Where were you going to get your sense memories—”
“Exactly! Yeah, pull something from five years ago—”
“—when you were seven?”
“Yeah. A lot of the Method took me a while to understand—what it really was, and what it was for me. You actually have sessions where you’re sitting there for two hours and you’re trying to feel an orange! Do you know? You’re trying to like get the sense of something….”
As our Method students’ laughter threatened to drown Angelina out, I said, “Shocked! We’re shocked, shocked!”
“I was that person that was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I got it, I got it!’ But the orange never made sense. I still can’t feel the orange,” she confessed, and the students’ decibel count rose. “But,” she said thoughtfully, “that thing of the smell, or that feeling of holding the hand of a person that’s passed away—that does make sense, and that works for me.”
“Do you use what you learned there?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
When Angelina’s episode was aired, we heard a drumbeat of “I had no idea she was so intelligent, and so serious about her work!” from the viewers. It is the commonest reaction to the show, and, for me, the most satisfying.
Onstage, Angelina wasn’t through making waves. As we discussed the tattoo scene in Foxfire, I asked her, “For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, what do you do in that scene?”
“I tattoo myself and I tattoo the other women’s breasts. I loved doing it, and not just because it was sensual and fun, but there was something very interesting about it. We were actors, and we’d been working together for a very long time, and we hadn’t been naked in front of each other, and everybody’s got their own issues. And to be the first one to be bold, to take your shirt off and then look around, and your friend takes hers off, there was something very, yeah, sensual. But, really, you found yourselves looking at each other’s eyes, saying, ‘It’s okay, I’m with you and you’re beautiful, and stay with me and don’t be shy,’ And so, it was a very lovely time between women.”
“And one of them falls in love with you in the film.”
“Yeah.”
I faced the students. “Angelina, who knows how to stir up a bit of a fuss, said during the promotional tour that she had fallen in love with someone during the filming.” I turned back to Angelina. “Do you remember that?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“With whom?”
“Jenny. I got very close to Jenny.”
“Were you just promoting the film, or were you talking from the heart?”
“No, I would never do something like that! No! I thought she was a beautiful, magnificent woman, and I just said it because it was what I felt.”
“Not for its shock value.”
“No, no. I still always find it strange that people get shocked by something like that.”
Needless to say, the students applauded her. So did the quondam mec.
Since Angelina had received a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Emmy nomination for her performance in Gia, the harrowing account of a drug-addicted model who died of AIDS, I asked her, “Why did you initially turn the part down?”
“Because she felt too close to me. There were a lot of things I just didn’t want to confront, you know? That desire to feel a real sense of self, rather than the very superficial things in this world, and the need maybe for all of us to feel that we are understood and loved for who we are. I don’t think I’m so unique in that. And Gia’s addiction,” she added. “I know addiction as well.”
“You know addiction.”
“I know addiction in all forms. Yeah.”
“Drug addiction?”
“I know addiction in all forms, yes,” she repeated firmly.
When Angelina appeared in Girl, Interrupted, in the role that would ultimately win her an Academy Award, Roger Ebert, with his usual prescience and precision, wrote that “Jolie is emerging as one of the great wild spirits of current movies, a loose cannon who somehow has deadly aim.” Knowing how Angelina works, I asked her, “How did you decorate your trailer while you were playing Lisa Rowe?”
“No!” Angelina protested.
“I peeked,” I replied.
“With lots of porn.”
“Photos.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Why?”
“Because it made me feel provocative and open and sensual. It just did something for me. Transport loved my trailer.”
“I’ll bet. This is how you’ve described Lisa. ‘She lived too big, was too honest, too hungry, too full of life.’ Those sound like virtues, not sins.”
“Yeah. They are absolutely virtues.”
Since the students and I enjoy listening to our guests’ Oscar experiences, I asked Angelina about hers. “What did you say in your acceptance speech?”
“I don’t remember. I know I said I loved my brother—’cause everybody lost their minds.”
“I assume that you and your brother did not have sexual relations.”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay.”
“But it’s a fair question—because of all that. But we did not.”
“You were implying that you did.”
“I was not implying that we did!”
“Oh? That’s the way the world took it. Come on!”
“The world is sicker than I would imagine.”
Relishing the debate, the students chuckled, and I persisted. “Sometimes you’re a provocateur.”
“But I’m really not! I mean, if you knew me in my life…I just speak very bluntly, and I really don’t see anything so bizarre about half the things that are always taken in such a way. I know if I’m being honest about something—if somebody asks me about cutting myself, then I’m gonna be honest,” Angelina concluded, summing up herself and an astonishing evening.
In the course of that evening, two of my favorite subjects came up. The first was flying. “When did you decide you wanted to fly?”
“God, as far back as I can remember.”
“When did you make up your mind to get behind the yoke?”
“I started training a year and a few months ago.”
“How long did it take you to solo?”
“About seventy hours.”
I asked her how it felt, and she glowed. “It’s the best feeling! They say it’s better than sex. It is so much better!”
“You say it’s better than sex?”
“Oh, my God, yes!”
“Wanna go flying?”
“Yes.”
The second of my predilections to come up with Angelina was tattoos.
“Ah!” she sighed.
Feeling the wave of melancholy that always surfaces when the subject is broached, I said, “It is well known to my students that I am not allowed to have a tattoo. I keep thinking that one of these nights Kedakai’s going to get the idea. What tattoos do you have?”
“I have H for my brother. I have a prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages, which is Tennessee Williams. Got it with my mom. I have a thirteen which I got with my brother when he turned thirty and we wanted to confront all the things that maybe you’re superstitiously afraid of. I have ‘Know your rights’ across my neck, which is something I believe in very much. I have ‘Strength of will’ in Arabic, which I got in Egypt. I have a big black cross here.” She pointed at her loins. “I got it right before I got married the first time. It’s actually a cover for something I got in Amsterdam with a very long tongue—that wasn’t appropriate the next morning.”
The students were riveted.
“I see something peeping out there,” I said, pointing to the gap between her cardigan and jeans.
“That’s the cross. And ‘What nourishes me also destroys me.’”
“It’s in Latin.”
“That’s in Latin. And then I have a tribal tattoo of a prayer, protection for my son that was done in Thailand. And then I have a very big tiger that was recently done in Thailand. Part of my work in Thailand is conservation, and a tiger was killed. I got the tattoo around that time, so it’s for that, and it’s also for Maddox.”
“You used to have a window on your back, too, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I closed it.”
“Did you really?”
“Yeah. I didn’t need it anymore. I used to have the window because I had this restless thing of wherever I was, I was always staring at windows. I was always wanting to go out the door. A few years ago if I’d been in this room, I would’ve been at that exit—just out, out, how do I get out? I’d be talking to a lovely friend, lovely conversation, and staring at the window thinking, God, there’s gotta be more out there. Now I live outside the window, and I don’t need it anymore.”
When Johnny Depp was with us, I discovered that he had ten tattoos. Turning toward wherever Kedakai was hiding in the audience that night, I pleaded, “One little tattoo…?”
She shook her head.
“No?” Johnny said to her. “Maybe?”
Kedakai didn’t budge.
“On your right arm, what does it say?” I asked Johnny.
“‘Wino Forever.’”
“But you’re not a wino.”
“How do you know?”
Although it is a matter of public record that “Wino” is all that is left of his romance with Winona Ryder, I elected to change course. “You have an Indian head. What does that celebrate?”
“That’s the first tattoo I got, when I was seventeen. It’s in honor of my grandfather.”
“The Cherokee heritage.”
“Yeah.”
“On your left arm there’s a heart. Whose name is in it?”
“Betty Sue. My mother.”
“What do you have on your right index finger?”
“Three little boxes. They represent various periods in my life.”
“And on your right ankle?”
“A tattoo that myself and some friends got. It’s a skull and crossbones, and it says, ‘Death Is Certain.’”
“And on your left hand, there’s something that looks like a three.”
“It’s the number three. A friend of mine did it. I sat down at his table and said, ‘Put a three here.’”
I looked out at Kedakai. “See? It’s so easy.” No dice.
It turned out that Nicolas Cage has a tattoo of a lizard in a top hat. “It’s kind of a show-biz lizard,” he explained. “Tattoos to me are the outward symbol of the inward change within my soul. Whenever I’ve gone through a major change in my life, I somehow wind up getting a tattoo. I think it helps in some says.”
I looked at Kedakai. She shook her head.
The night Charlize Theron was with us, I said, “Unless my eyes deceive me, I see a tattoo.”
“Which one?”
“You have more than one?
“Yeah. That’s a little flower. This is a Japanese koi.”
Always looking for allies, I said, “The reason I ask is not out of curiosity but because I’m not allowed to have a tattoo.”
“Says who!” Charlize demanded.
“My wife will not allow me to.”
“I would recommend that you both go together and get one.” The theater exploded in applause. “It’s great—and you don’t have to be drunk or anything like that, you know.”
Later, at Elaine’s both Charlize and Gerda tried to persuade Kedakai, who sat serenely under her naked Paris Review poster, unruffled and unswayed.
Mark Wahlberg revealed that he had an entire gallery of tattoos. “I have a tattoo of Bob Marley on my shoulder here. And my family’s name. And my parents’ initials. And a rosary tattoo around my neck.”
“Don’t you have Tweety and Sylvester?”
“I was getting to that. I had a gang shamrock tattoo on my leg when I was twelve. I hid it from my mother for a long time—until the first time I got busted. I got way too drunk, and one of my friends and I got into a fight over a girl, and he stabbed me in the hand and the leg. We made up after.”
Over the students’ laughter, he said, “I called my mother and said, ‘Ma, I got stabbed. Come pick me up.’ That’s when she discovered the tattoo. So, it was a week before I got to see the outside again.”
“And I’m not allowed to have any tattoos!” I growled, dripping irony and staring into the audience at Kedakai.
“Is that your wife who isn’t letting you?”
“Yes,” I said, shameless by now—and hopeless.
Mark looked at Kedakai. “You don’t want him to have a naked lady on his arm?”
“No,” Kedakai replied.
“I understand completely,” the traitor said.
“But what if it’s that naked lady?” I protested. “Then it’s okay, isn’t it?”
“If it’s okay with her, it’s certainly okay with me,” Mark said, turning mediator. “I’ll give you the tattoo.”
The students whooped, sensing victory—and perhaps some relief from this subject. In bed that night, I reminded Kedakai that the tattoo would be free. It didn’t impress her. “Just your face!” I explained. She turned out the light.
Jamie Foxx had an idea. “We’ll get ‘Playa’ put on you.”
“I thought I was already a playa.”
“Yeah, you are. That’s why you need to get this.”
I shook my head. “Johnny Depp failed, Mark Wahlberg failed, everybody’s failed.”
Later, at Elaine’s, Jamie pleaded the case for ‘Playa.’ Kedakai concentrated on her pasta.
When it comes to tattoos, Angelina’s former husband Billy Bob Thornton shares the record with her. When I asked him how many he has, he replied, “I got a bunch of ’em. Eleven, something like that. And I want to get two new ones.”
“What are you going to get?”
“I’ve been thinking about getting a hawk on my back, and another hawk on my head.”
“And I can’t even have one little tattoo on my arm!” I groaned.
“Yeah, you should let him have one, anyways,” Billy Bob said, to deaf Japanese-Irish ears.
On January 31, 2005, I received a letter from Tucson, Arizona, that began with the attention-grabbing “I cannot stand to watch another episode of Inside the Actors Studio that features a guest that has a tattoo. The pain and envy that I see in your eyes and in your soul is unbearable.” Clearly, a kindred spirit. The correspondent, who identified herself as “Heather Nathanson, Operations Manager of the world’s largest manufacturer of TEMPORARY tattoos,” wrote, “I thought I could help you out…AND keep you out of trouble with your wife,” and offered to custom-design some tattoos for me.
She attached a plastic bag bulging with striking TEMPORARY tattoos, but, sad to say, I still long for the real thing.
In July 2006, a Benedict Arnold wrote, “I agree with your wife. Stay pristine.” The appended “P. S. Love your show!” was cold comfort. And to make matters worse, she enclosed a cartoon in which a man says to his wife, “I’ve been thinking of a tattoo. Maybe a snake or a dragon on my arm. How do you think that would look?” To which his wife replies, “Like a snake or a dragon on the arm of a recently divorced guy living in his car.”
It will come as no surprise that I didn’t show the letter to Kedakai.
A few days later, Shanghai Kate Hellenbrand (sic) wrote, “I think I might have a solution that would be agreeable to both you and your wife. In Japan there is a style of tattooing which is called ‘invisible tattooing’—applied totally with white pigment. It is an erotic form of tattoo, and relies on the skin tone actually changing in order to become visible. The skin changes color by a reddening either through emotional heightening (as in sexual arousal) or some other capillary action. As the skin becomes pink, the white lines of the tattoo then become apparent against the skin.”
Leaving aside the obvious perils of insulting the partner by not turning pink and white in the midst of sexual congress, I think I still prefer a tattoo that reveals your bold interests rather than your inner stirrings. But all in all, I must admit the controversy has turned up some fascinating new friends.
I have heard strangers at the theater, on the street, in Bloomingdale’s, exhort Kedakai, “Let the man have a tattoo!”
Twenty months after Angelina Jolie was on Inside the Actors Studio, at the party after the premiere of The Good Shepherd, as Kedakai and I approached Angelina’s table to congratulate her on her performance, she sprang up from her place next to Brad Pitt, and embraced Kedakai with a warm but emphatic “Have you let him have a tattoo yet?”
When not even the embrace turned the tide, I took Angelina’s arm and indicated a small, discreet tattoo. “Look, Kedakai, just like that. But it would say, ‘Kedakai.’” Angelina and I waited, and when Kedakai remained cordial but as inscrutable as Miss Scarlet, Angelina generously played a final card, turning to reveal her back, naked and exquisite from shoulders to waist, framed in a glittering gown and adorned from top to bottom with the tattoo-er’s art.
After peering back over her shoulder at Kedakai for a long moment, she turned to me with a shrug and an apologetic smile.
Perhaps these pages will make a difference. But given this doleful history, I doubt it.