The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Unknown and the General: Difference between revisions

<blockquote>To whom it may concern:  

To say that I was impressed by his thoughtfulness is insufficient for a gesture of such generosity, not to mention the mood of hope it put me in. Not every actor can brandish a letter of recommendation from perhaps our greatest living writer. Witness the following scene: I’m in a meeting with a casting person for some project or other, or maybe it was a super-agent, my memory fades. Upon reading the letter, this young woman whose instinct makes her eager to please, says something like: “Oh, Ryan O’Neal—I ''love'' him ...” (Pause. Noncommittal. It was not a blockbuster.) “I heard about that show,” she continued. “And Norman ''Mailer''. Oh yeah, we read him in high school.” (Her inflection might describe the oldest pair of shoes in her closet.) Then, with much enthusiasm. “I loved that famous play of his: ''Death of a Streetcar''. It made me cry.” Me too. So much for letters of recommendation from literary giants in the film capital.

This brings me back to distinguishing between acting in front of a camera and on stage. For a performer, when the play begins, everything is in his hands and the theater gods. There’s no medium between him and the audience, just a raw experience where people are either moved or they’re not. An entirely different trip from what happens on a film set. That’s why I call what goes on in front of a camera re enacting, rather than acting. It takes a certain number of psychological skills to get primed, that’s for sure: there’s no audience, if that’s your fuel, and that’s a magic that’s not particularly easy to find. But sometimes I liken it to a vast costume pageant where people parade around and go through the motions of the civilization they’re representing. Put a rifle in your hand, a soldier’s uniform on you, tell you where to charge and you’re on. “Yes sir, we’ll get it.” Cut. A costume pageant. It is different on stage where the actor has developed a character by making a myriad of choices on his own, let it mulch around in the hopper, and then let fly with no safety net under the frisson of the performance. There’s no second take. Either you channel something extraordinary or you don’t—so either the energy that flows back and forth between audience and actor launches the entire congregation—with its roots in religion, I can call it that—into experiencing the mysteries of the cosmos in a visceral way—or it doesn’t. In any case, it’s either a sublime experience or as deadly as watching paint dry. (There’s nothing worse than a play where nothing is really snap, crackling, and popping on stage. And nothing better when there is.) Norman has a different take on theater versus film, though, from the point of view of the audience. It’s stuck in my mind and goes something like this: “You might find yourself going to a play with a couple of martinis under your belt, but you wouldn’t do that at a film. A couple of joints maybe. That’s because film is closer to dreams and death—and theater is closer to a feast and a fuck.”  

As I sat there taking this all in, I thought: Christ, this is even better than the Roundtable at the Algonquin. And not just pretentious litterateurs. In addition to Mickey, there was Ronnie, a black raconteur, who regaled us with a story about hustling in an airport to get out of Rome, and from there it led to the high point of the evening. All in all, it was a great night. I felt as if I had been to the Garden on a night Ali was fighting.

If I describe Norman as a brontosaurus, there was another dinosaur that I would come to know who could only be described as the toughest of the tough guys, and who must have had tyrannosaurus in his genes—the legendary Lawrence Tierney. I can’t recall exactly how we hooked up in L.A. a couple of years after the film, but we became, dare I say, best friends for a while, if such a term could be applied to Larry—at war with the world as he was, even at eighty-three. But I was always flattered that he sanctioned what I did in ''Tough Guys'' and so never felt the whip of contempt with which he could so easily lash out at someone. That would include even someone who had given him a chance to act: like against the young Quentin Tarantino, who had just made ''Reservoir Dogs'' with him. It made sense really. Larry had rubbed shoulders with the criminal element like it was breathing. A self-described video geek, as clever as he might be, wouldn’t hold much water with the original Dillinger. Norman, I might add, he thought OK—and that was saying a lot in his book. So there I was, meeting Larry’s fellow denizens in the middle of the kind of brouhaha you would expect from ex-addicts and parolees in a halfway house, which was where he was residing when I first knew him out there. As near as I could get from him, the story went like this: when he was filming ''Reservoir Dogs'', and playing the godfather of a crew of professional bank robbers, somehow a real gun had ended up in his room and it had gone off with the round going through the wall and almost decapitating someone sitting in the next room it just missed. Did I mention that the gun was in Larry’s hand? So he ended up in the valley in a group house. The occasion for my being there was that I was taking him out to a gathering of some fellow actors at the famous Jerry’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard. When we arrived, one of the bunch who fancied himself a cut above the rest because he was an aficionado of old films was struck dumb when I introduced Larry. “You mean, ''the'' Lawrence Tierney,” as if he’d seen someone from the dead. And God knows he could’ve been back from Hades, because as Larry once put it, “Ahh. I lost five careers to the bottle.” And meant it. But I confirmed the young actor’s suspicion. Yes, no impostor, this was the man himself. So for a few minutes Larry basked in the adulation that an icon is given recognition in the film capital. Then the conversation went on to other things, as is the wont among young folks in Hollywood, to mostly career considerations. So Larry faded off, flirting with a young redheaded actress. Suddenly, someone was tugging at my sleeve. She had returned and was very nervous, whispering that I might want to check on my ward—I don’t know if that’s how she put it or I did, but that’s certainly what it felt like shepherding Larry around. So I went into an adjoining banquet room that was empty and there he was: stuffing mustards from the tables into the large pockets of his garment of choice—a dark raincoat. I got us out of there ASAP. There are more memories of Larry I have and not all of them quite so pungent, but which would occasion a longer piece on him alone. Some people break ground by writing, others just break the ground. Let’s just say, it was one of God’s little jokes that he would pass peacefully from this plane in his sleep.

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