It's All In the Playing (11 page)

“That’s show business,” I said.

Colin smiled at the interplay between the two of us, registering every nuance that might be valuable on the screen.

“My God,” said Bella, turning and looking at herself in a wall mirror. “I’ll have to read my own lines, right?”

“Right,” I said. “And you’ve already okayed the script, so you can’t object to the dialogue.”

“God,” she laughed, “then I’m going to be more intimidated by you than ever.”

I smiled mischievously. “Then you’ll know how other people feel about you.”

“Be nice now.” She paused. “You know how I need you to be sweet to me.”

She gave me that pout that she knows always melts my heart. We both knew, but it worked anyway.

The phone rang. It was Stan.

“Hey,” I said, “everything’s going great. We’re reading for Bella now.”

“Okay,” he said. “When you finish with the Bellas, call me.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “We’re reading the real one.”

“You’re what?”

From across the room Bella yelled, “Call my agent.”

“Shirley”—Stan spoke determinedly into the phone—“you know what discipline this business takes, even for an experienced actress. How would
she
even know how to repeat the same scene over and over and retain the emotional pitch?”

I turned away from Bella. “I don’t know, Stan,” I said, “but she wants to try.”

“Okay. Call me when it’s over.”

I hung up and Colin and Bella and I went to work.

We picked up the script. I played myself. Bella played herself. And all the while each of us retained the emotional memory of the exact events as they had actually occurred. It was an exercise in recognized illusion. I have never had an experience that so thoroughly brought home to me the truth that we each
act
our lives, we each project the image we really wish to convey—the appearance of spontaneity notwithstanding. There were so many choices for Bella and me to make in expressing ourselves: the choice of wardrobe, hairstyle, makeup, body movement, all vital but relatively finite. But when it came to emotional intent, vocal tone, facial expression, and so on, to say nothing of what we did and said, the choices became literally infinite. I realized that if I were to invent a character like Bella Abzug, I couldn’t possibly do as definitive a job as she had done herself. Each movement of the strong hands, each wrinkle of the high-cheekboned experienced face were strokes on a personality canvas that she assuredly painted herself. And as I watched her
acting
lines she had actually spoken and heard myself doing the same thing, I had a kind of double vision in time. Which was the past and which the present? I was aware of how I had said these very same lines years ago. So was Bella. And both of us were also aware that we had been acting them then.

There we were, walking the lines through my kitchen into the dining room. The same dining room. She helped me set my table. The same kitchen, same table. She sat down as I tossed a salad. AU the while we read our lines; portraying ourselves, re-creating what we had done so many times together.

And as we indulged in this Pirandello adventure I slowly began to make a professional assessment. Bella in real life was too strong for “reel” life. It was astonishing. She was actually bigger than life—too much for an entertainment
piece. For news or documentary coverage she was perfectly in sync with her attuned image. But for a prime-time television entertainment miniseries, I knew it wouldn’t work.

The strangest part of it, though, was that she was very convincingly real in playing herself. There wasn’t a fake note in her performance—which is saying a lot for a politician! But the truth of the person she conveyed
as
herself was simply too strong for television. In fact I began to assess my own performance of myself in a different light. I had never been faced with this issue before. Was it possible to be too much oneself?
Too
real?

We finished the reading. Colin and I needed to talk together. Bella respected that.

“I know,” she said as she straightened her hat and strode toward the door. “Don’t call us—we’ll call you. I’ll see ya later.”

She let herself out. Colin went to the window.

“Strangest casting experience I’ve ever had,” he said. “Don’t know what to make of how good she was. But will she translate to television? The expression
too much for TV
may be apt here. She’s so great as a politician on TV. I’ve seen her. Strong, sometimes strident, but colorful and riveting.”

He thought a moment longer. “I know what it is that’s bothering me.”

“What?”

“We’ve written Bella as a friend and foil for Shirley. It’s about Bella’s reactions to Shirley’s metaphysical and spiritual search. And those reactions are earthy and comic. Now it’s true that that is how she is. But in real life she is so much more than that. Since we are portraying only
that
reactive comedic aspect of her, essentially the grandness and stature of her political personality overwhelms the limitations of the character we reduced her to be. In other words, she’s overqualified for the part.”

I looked at him and gulped. “Great,” I said. “But how do you tell a person they can’t play themselves?”

“Very carefully,” he answered with a grin.

I went to my den to retrieve John Heard. I could see he had almost finished the script. He looked up at me with an expression of sheer disbelief on his face. Maybe he hadn’t been lying after all. Maybe he was experiencing for the first time the full impact of a script about trance channeling, reincarnation, extraterrestrials, and spacecraft that land. He spoke first.

“I’m supposed to be in love with an extraterrestrial?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “Maybe not love in the sexual sense, but certainly in the sense that she changed your life.”

John didn’t chuckle. He just stared at me.

“But I’m a Catholic,” he said finally.

I could think of no sensible response to this and we returned to the living room. We finished reading. He was so uncommonly talented at reading the metaphysical lines, it was as though he understood them. True, they had an Irish Catholic ring to them, but that was what made it human. Colin and I were enthralled. John himself seemed to be enjoying the impossible. He understood that the dialogue was unplayable except by an actor with a profound talent for throwing meaningful platitudes away. He read the stuff as though he were reciting a laundry list, and it worked.

He interspersed some funny sarcastic comments such as “Lake T-I-T-I-C-A-C-A? I’m supposed to say
Titicaca
and not break up? The fathers in the dorm won’t like that at all.” Then he’d imitate one of the priests right out of Barry Fitzgerald’s Hollywood.

Every now and then John would extract a Lucky Strike cigarette from a rumpled pack, light it with ceremony, and take a long comfortable drag. He’d blow tiny little rings while he stared at his feet, tilted his head, and
thought. Then he’d say, “I could be down at the bar, or skiing.”

I didn’t realize it then, but John never said anything that wasn’t symbolic. I mean, you had to learn his language even to carry on a conversation with him, but then I had been weaned on Robert Mitchum and Debra Winger. It was basically the language of artful paranoia which provided tidbits of apparently irrelevant remarks slung into the conversational mix and usually relating to something on their minds. If you plucked one of the tidbits and held it close, you might find you had grabbed yourself the brass ring. On the other hand, before you could properly be aware of it, you might be left holding a hot steamy turd. The game was to use human beings as a sounding board against which to experiment with humor, hostility, fear, sadism, and even fun and wit—the intent being to inveigle others into the game but not to divulge the rules. The originators of the game are the only ones who know. That left several options: if the game wasn’t proceeding according to their wishes, they could always deny that a game was even in progress. If they got tired of it or felt outclassed, they simply became colorfully incoherent and soon you realized you were playing symbolic Ping-Pong with yourself. The whole exercise was meant to disorient the fellow player so as to expose his weaknesses and insecurities. The result was that the artful paranoiac would be armed with more personal knowledge of his opponent while divulging no such personal information himself.

But when the practitioners of this form of super one-upmanship know you’re on to them, it can really be fun. That was the case with John and me. I had sort of learned after rehearsing with Mitchum and Winger how to be honest about the buttons they pushed in me, yet without actually divulging much personal information they could wield against me. (In fact, the personal information was in the public domain, but part of the game is
spontaneity, subjective reaction, a kind of dare—to themselves as much as anyone.)

So, after John would say things like “I could be down at the corner bar or skiing” (I don’t think he’d ever been on a pair of skis in his life), he’d look at me and say, “Did you really write this stuff?” or “So you think Ronald Reagan is walking in the light?” I’d quickly regroup my reactions and tell him how stunned I was at how skillfully he brought even difficult dialogue “into the light” and “Yes, Ronald Reagan would benefit from that too.” He’d do his silent chuckle and blow more smoke rings and tilt his curly head and smile at his black Reeboks.

Colin Higgins had a different reaction. He was a straight person, sensible enough not to bother wasting time with the kind of imaginative child’s play that could lead to nothing but overtime and overbudget problems. That was one aspect, and he could cope with that. But the other was the manipulative quality of artful paranoia. Colin was an honest man who deplored insidiousness. Yet I think the irreverent audacity of defying convention with such sleight-of-hand techniques was a method he himself might have secretly admired, yet felt too timid to employ. Whatever—Colin observed John’s reading and behavior as a perturbed headmaster would regard an obstreperously canny-shrewd schoolboy.

I felt myself wanting to play with John yet not caring to isolate Colin, which was one of John’s pranksterish maneuvers—divide and conquer.

Fortunately the reading came to an end and John was in the position of wondering whether he had gotten the part. Regardless of the labyrinthine lengths to which he would go to be undetected, it still came down to “Do I go to work?”

Colin and I had another appointment, so John ambled out of my apartment, patting the script under his
arm as the symbolic signal that he really wanted to play David.

When the door closed, Colin said, “That guy really pushes my buttons. I wonder why. I think I’m supposed to learn a lot from this….”

He gazed out the window and fidgeted. “We come from the same Irish Catholic background.” Colin took a stance with his legs far apart and folded his arms in front of him as he counted the available cabs on the street below.

“One thing for sure. The guy can really act. He makes the playing so real.”

I stood beside him. A weird sense of perspective came over me. “I get the feeling that all of this is an act right now,” I said. “That we’re all playing in this play within a play.”

Harold got a sly inexplicable smile on his face. “So,” he said, “is John Heard just going to help me play myself better?”

I retired to the kitchen for a drink.

“One thing else is for sure,” I said. “He’ll show us how phony we are.”

“What do you mean?” Colin yelled after me.

“I’m not real sure. But I just think he will.”

The phone rang. Not more than two and a half minutes could have gone by since John left. It was his manager calling.

“John tells me he doesn’t think he gave you what you wanted. Is that true?” asked the manager.

I was shocked. “Are you kidding? He was brilliant. Tell me, had he read the script?”

The manager laughed. “Who knows? You know John.”

“‘You know John’? What does that mean?”

“It means: who can figure him out, least of all him?”

That was to become a refrain echoed around North
and South America by a small band of people trying to make a movie about unseen and alternative realities. Then and now, I knew he was what we needed—and what the film needed. Figuring him out was
his
problem.

“Listen, Bill,” I said. “He’s more terrific than we ever dreamed. He is totally unpredictable, and what he gave us is not what we expected, that’s all.”

“Well, he just wanted to know.”

“Did he call you from a phone booth on the corner?”

“Why?”

“He just left.”

“Well, as you probably picked up, he’s an anxious fellow.”

“Anxious to please?”

Silence on the other end.

“No,” said Bill. “I’d say you
will
be pleased, but that’s not what he’s anxious about.”

“What
is
he anxious about?”

“Oh, you know John,” he replied.

You might say John had the right manager….

Chapter 8

   C
olin and I returned to California to inform ABC of our John Heard decision. A deal was made. We also decided that in the interest of legitimate reality, Kevin Ryerson and his entities should play themselves. A real actor could get more out of the scenes but what we’d gain in performance would be lost in credibility. We wanted the show to be as real as possible since we were venturing into such new terrain. Besides, why not have television’s first real cinematic trance channeling experience? We then proceeded to read prospective Bellas. Each woman who came to read had something to offer and each woman was understandably pressured by Bella’s real-life image, since she was so availably well known.

Anne Jackson, however, was the best. She was funny, earthy, not too broad, and of course an experienced actress who caught Bella’s rhythms and punches perfectly for the small living-room screen.

Bella’s reaction to Anne’s playing her was not so perfect. I heard the Washington politician at work as she lobbied for herself on the telephone.