The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Unknown and the General
| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 2 Number 1 • 2008 • In Memorium: Norman Mailer: 1923–2007 | » |
Stephan Morrow
Abstract: An experienced actor recounts his memories of working with Norman Mailer on the productions of Strawhead and Tough Guys Don’t Dance, both directed by Norman Mailer.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08morr
My black T-shirt feels painted onto me with sweat and my fingers are slippery inside the black leather motorcycle gloves as my chest heaves from the exertion, desperate for oxygen. I am going eighty mph on my Harley—and giving it to Marilyn at the same time. Her back is arched to get as much of me as she can and as she hits a peak, belts out, “Gee Rod, it’s like fireworks on the Fourth of July.” This is how it goes in my mind. Except this is no dream. I’m in a church. No. It’s not a church anymore. It’s been converted into a theater: The Actors Studio. And I have just finished performing in a scene from Norman Mailer’s play Strawhead about Marilyn Monroe.
There is a pause before the next scene begins, as if everyone, audience included, has to take a breather after what just unraveled before them. And into this gap rises a husky matron who, with a piercing voice, suddenly launches into a loud harangue: “You don’t know she did that. How dare you? What right have you to take such liberties? I was her first roommate in Hollywood. I was her best friend. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
It is Shelley Winters. She seems ready to ream Norman at full blast for quite a while, but before she can completely bring the performance to an untimely halt, an older, bull-necked man with a pronounced nose in a long, deeply lined face, also stands up, turns to her full face, and says “Shelley. Shut up. Sit down.”
And, instantly, she does. It is Elia Kazan, the moderator of the Playwrights and Directors Unit. So we continued that afternoon and finished the fragment of the play we had prepared. But the next time we presented it, at just about the same moment, another heckler stood up and started a harangue repeating Shelley’s rant almost verbatim and the play again broke down.
Except this time it was Norman who had written it—he had planted her in the audience and was now investigating that uneasy but fascinating theatrical territory of where make-believe ends and reality begins. Talk about turning a disaster into a victory. Whew.
I’M SUPERSTITIOUS, I ADMIT IT. Or I’m at least given to paying attention to signs—when I see them. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when about a week before Norman was supposed to show up in L.A. for a book tour, I was traveling around back of the group house I live in with other, mostly thwarted souls obsessed with filmmaking of an independent sort, to pick a lemon off of our tree, when something orange caught my eye nestled among its roots. Lo and behold, it was a copy of Norman’s Ancient Evenings that in some bizarre way had found a resting place there. A thousand pages of Egyptian arcana, embalming procedures, and cavorting of various Egyptian gods and demons. I confess, I had read some but not all of it, yet out of some weird sense of loyalty, I couldn’t leave it there and picked it up, brushed away the less crusted dirt and dropped it off at my workbench area where it would receive its own embalming at some later date. So there it was. And exactly the next day I got the call from Judith, Norman’s most loyal assistant whom I had gotten to know over the last decade, and who was now inviting me to attend a talk Norman was giving and afterward join him and his party for dinner.
At that time, there had been quite a splash in the press about his long and illustrious career as a writer spanning fifty years, and his anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time, had been respectfully received, but almost nowhere was there more than a scant line or two mentioning his writing and directing in theater and film. This was dismaying to me, both because that was, in fact, how I had come to know and work with him, but also because—through my experiences with him as a performer—I knew firsthand that as a writer and, more particularly as a director for the stage and screen, he was first-rate. Yet for some reason, he never seemed to receive his just due in these endeavors. His theatrical and film projects, though admired by some, were criticized mercilessly and scoffed at by others. Sometimes I wondered if there weren’t some secret cabal that had decided the gods had dropped enough manna on him already in the form of his talent for prose, and to ask for more was offending to them, so he paid accordingly. If some praised his work for the stage and screen, others slaughtered it. But to me, as an actor who was working cheek by jowl with him as a director and interpreting the lines he would give me—I was always flying. When I would hear someone excoriate something we just had finished performing, for example, at the Studio, I would wonder if they had seen the same piece I had been in. To me, the dialogue was always rich, and the scenes were powerful—outrageous maybe, and certainly male in their impulse, but juicy to perform in, they were a hell of a dance, and never, ever, boring. Norman was always pushing the envelope of conventional behavior. He was always interesting.
Of him as a director—they knew nothing at all. I suppose, in these days when the worth of a director is gauged by how many commercial hits he’s had, Norman didn’t loom large on the landscape of Godzillas, but I think that this may be a reflection of the times we live in, rather than a reflection of his merit as a director. Because if it’s true that being a good director is related to some psychological zone of leadership, as it happened, Norman had it in spades. In his presence there was an amazing aura of commitment—one had the feeling of participating in something of great import, ground-breaking, historic even, and you gave one hundred and ten percent of your stuff as an actor. I can’t speak for others of course, but I never heard too much of the common griping or bitching during our stage-run of Strawhead at the Actors Studio, or during the shoot of Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Norman often used the metaphor of a general marshalling his troops to describe the work of the director, but I always thought he was more benevolent and inspirational than any military man I had ever heard of. Rather, he seemed to have something more like the inspirational power of a preacher or rabbi, maybe.
I think it would be a great disservice to his work to have this sound like just some sort of epistle of adoration, so I’d like to go back to the beginning of our work together, our first encounter, and then chronicle some episodes from the projects we did together that might be illuminating. Apparently I’ve been privy to some moments that not too many others have, and if I can re-create some of them, maybe I can give my opinions some basis. There’s nothing better to stir up the creative juices than a damp, cloud-hooded day in the Apple. The fruity colors of the garbage spilling out of the cans stand out a little stronger against the gray cement in an especially attractive funk, the smells are mostly just wetness—the gods are about to make their move in the arena above—one’s nerve-endings start trilling with expectation, and it makes me, for one, feel alive and especially capable. And I needed an extra dose of spunk, because on a day like that, I would cross paths with Norman Mailer.
The floors of the Actors Studio were being shellacked, and so the theater was unavailable, but rather than canceling the session it was relocated. Nobody seemed to know exactly where, as if it were a secret place, so the entire entourage of maybe three dozen wandered up Tenth Avenue from Forty Fourth Street, as if guided by an invisible hand. Maybe they were afraid that if people knew, they wouldn’t show. Anyway, on we went, and it was still Hell’s Kitchen then (not “Heaven’s Gate,” which is what I call it now) and the slums and dark alleys we passed were good enough for me—they fed me, “preparing,” as I was, to play a young Scottish gang leader in Dundee, who was trying to get out of the endless rounds of “bovvers” (gang brawls where kicking was the main jab) and go straight. As I stalked up the avenue, I found myself hunching over, like a boxer, protective of my psyche, not very chatty, irritated by everything—from the steady honking and screaming sirens approaching and then fading, to the kid who somehow managed to trip right in front of my feet (I admit I was tempted). But these fumes wafting around my brain gave rise to the unmistakable feeling that a claw was slowly tightening around my skull—and the deeper it gouged, the more I wanted to bust out—perfect for the part I was about to play. In short, Stephan, the actor, was having a good day. We ended up on the eighth floor of what was nothing less than an empty warehouse building. Yes indeed, no lie. A few scoop lights at one end over what was apparently the playing area, and a few dozen folding chairs facing it, made up what would be our theater for this event.
To say that this dusty industrial space had the surreal quality of a Fellini movie would not be an exaggeration. Not just because of the barrenness amidst the scattered pools of light, but because sitting in those few wooden chairs was a roster which included the likes of: Arthur Penn, Joseph Mankewicz, Ellen Burstyn, Elia Kazan, Joseph Heller, Pete Masterson, A. R. Gurney, Harold Brodkey, Jonathan Reynolds, and Norman Mailer.
Though I had worked hard on my character, I didn’t expect to find that playing a character with an accent, or this particular accent was, in some mysterious way, terrifically liberating. Perhaps the distance it created from my own personal reality gave me a mask, behind which I could leave my particular self behind, and be free. Though not a Scot by blood, I felt as if some atavistic tribal chord of Scotland was throbbing inside of me—unless it was the terror I felt in front of such an audience of heavyweights—that put an extra zing into my performance. Suffice it to say, if there had been any scenery to chew I would have had a feast. A spirit of heroic proportions flew into my chest like a madman on wings and lodged there with steel talons. I couldn’t have shaken it even if I had wanted to—it was bigger than I was. And when it was over, with people milling around the way they do after a main-event bout, I knew in my bones, that it was one of those times in my life where it had, indeed, been my night. Now it was fortunate that I felt this because I happened to catch sight of a large flock of white hair next to me. It was Norman inviting another cast member to play Arthur Miller in a play of his about Marilyn. Since that actor, though capable enough, was a soap opera actor, an occupation held in rather low esteem by some young stage actors, I naturally felt that I might also be worthy of such an invitation. The adrenalin pumping through me that night, had given me a little more bravado than I might otherwise have had.
Works Cited
- Mailer, Norman (1983). Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little Brown.