Master of Ceremonies: A Memoir (19 page)

The conflict between Jo and me over her career reached a crossroads at about the time I got my first opportunity to be on Broadway. It all began when I received a call in the winter of 1961 from Charlie Baker, who told me to come east to audition for the replacement of one of the leads in Neil Simon’s first Broadway smash,
Come Blow Your Horn
.

Although we still had the house on Woodrow Wilson, Jo, Jennifer, and I returned to New York for this opportunity. The cast was filled with New York theater veterans such as Lou Jacobi (who played the father) and Pert Kelton (the mother). The up-and-coming young actor Ron Rifkin was my understudy (and became a lifelong friend). I never heard such laughter from an audience in my life. I played hundreds of performances, and each night the laughter was so intense I felt my eyeballs vibrate.

Not long after the play ended, I went to London where I saw Anthony Newley play the circus clown Littlechap in
Stop the World—I Want to Get Off
. I loved everything about the musical—the score, the pantomime, the character, and Newley. He and Leslie Bricusse had written the book, music, and lyrics. In the first act, Littlechap is a charmer, but through his cheating ways, he loses his wife and later his world. He sits alone at the end of the show in a single spot near the edge of the stage and sings “What Kind of Fool Am I.” It’s a showstopper and in the last minutes, all is forgiven by the audience.

Littlechap was one of those dark, deeply flawed characters, such as King Lear or Willy Loman, who are always magnets for actors. So when I learned that Newley wasn’t going on the national tour, I auditioned (in full makeup) and got the part, and I knew immediately it could be a career changer.

It was hard for me to play Littlechap exactly as Newley had. His version—in which he borrowed heavily from Marcel Marceau, the mime of the moment—was highly stylized. I, on the other hand, was essentially a New York–trained actor. My way of finding a character was to create a biography and have compassion for his flawed nature. It was easy with Littlechap. A clown, trying to be a success, wanting children, cheating on his wife, and feeling devastated after her death because he truly loved her? My identification was strong and immediate. During “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” one of the great ballads of musical theater, I regretted his mistakes and losses as if they were my own.

Over the eight months of the 1963 national tour of
Stop the World,
I found my own Littlechap, and it struck a chord with audiences and the press. “How is it that you always end up all alone on the stage in a spotlight?” asked an amazed Hal Prince, the renowned theater producer and director, who had come to see the play later that year in Westport.

My parents came to see me when I played
Stop the World
in LA.
Borscht Capades
was no longer running, but Dad put together a huge holiday show every year,
Chanukah in Santa Monica
, which was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Still, Mother was always looking out for his image. When they came to see me backstage after the performance, she ordered my father to “stand up straight, Mickey!” When Dad drew me in for a hug, I could also see that she had put very subtle pancake on him. That was something she did when she felt he looked too pale—that and insist he wear a hairpiece onstage.

Besides a chance to be with the folks, Los Angeles was a very important stop on the tour. The good reviews I got from the LA critics turned out to have some gravitas with the New York theater community. For the first time since
On Borrowed Time
, I was being taken seriously as an actor. I should have been happy, but I was far from it.

When I was touring with
Stop the World
, Jo auditioned for the Broadway musical
She Loves Me
, directed by Hal Prince. She was hired to be Barbara Cook’s understudy and given a small part of her own. So she stayed in New York with Jennifer, and again, we found ourselves working in separate cities, which I believed threatened our marriage. Families didn’t live separate lives, and I couldn’t stop worrying about us. My mind went crazy with thoughts of her having affairs—I knew what happened in the theater, that very sexy place. She would fall in love with someone else, leave me, and take Jennifer. I’d be left with nothing. I tried to talk myself out of how I felt, which I knew to be irrational and without basis. But my only life was the stage between 8:00
P.M.
and 11:00
P.M
. With the rest of my day empty, I filled it by worrying. The loneliness of the road reinforced my emotional state until it verged on depression.

When the tour stopped in Chicago for an eight-week engagement, I was near some sort of breakdown. In the days leading up to the opening night I grew emotionally frail. I withdrew from the life of the show, retreating from the cast even though I felt responsible to them. Weepy most of the time, I lost my appetite. I had daily sessions over the phone with the therapist I had been seeing for the past four years. Although I told myself that I had resolved the issue of my sexual identity, I continued to go to therapy to deal with challenges in my marriage as well as my career. Just like my father, I was always worried about work. Now, for the first time, I had a part that showed all the different sides of me as an actor, one that could bring me the recognition I had sought for so long, and I was destroying it with doubts about my personal life.

I panicked that I wouldn’t be able to perform. The thought that I might not be able to fulfill my obligation to the cast, producers, and audience kept me up at night. Littlechap rarely left the stage. Letting everyone down now would surely ruin my future. A perfect situation for the onset of stage fright.

When I called Jo the day before opening night in Chicago, I was having a full-blown panic attack and needed her right away. “I know I can’t go on if you don’t come,” I said. “I can’t do it. Whatever it is, neurotic or crazy. The truth is I’m lost without you and Jen.” In hindsight it was beyond manipulative essentially to force Jo to choose between keeping her job and keeping me from a breakdown. But in that moment, I really felt as if I was dying.

What could Jo do? She was on the first plane she could get. I was a blubbering, pathetic mess when she arrived. We talked way into the night, trying not to wake Jennifer, who was sleeping in the other room. Taking my hand, Jo said, “I can’t bear to see you like this.”

She didn’t make any big declarations about the future but said she would quit the show and stay with me. That was enough for me. I had spent so much time and energy carefully constructing a narrative of the perfect family—beginning way before I had even met Jo, during those early therapy sessions in Gertrude’s garden office. Anything that countered that narrative threatened my existence.

Jo made a big sacrifice to reunite our family and let me finally establish myself as an actor in the theater. Even though I hadn’t yet originated a role on Broadway, my performance of Littlechap on the road was a great success. I vowed to use the opportunity my wife had given me to do good things and make her proud.

Meanwhile, Jo decided she wanted another child, but it was too risky for her to go through another pregnancy because of the previous complications. Undeterred, she began exploring adoption, a gutsy act that wasn’t very common back then. As she did all the research, locating agencies and a lawyer, she became convinced of the urgency of transforming the life of a child born under sad and dark circumstances. I was conflicted. I was unfortunately swayed by the old prejudices and fears of the problems that can come when claiming a stranger’s child as one’s own. Yet adopting a child would give Jo a purpose other than acting.

Then in September of 1964, the adoption lawyer called out of the blue with the news that a baby boy was about to be born in LA to a sixteen-year-old girl who was all alone in the world. When the infant arrived, I was afraid to go to the hospital. I didn’t think I could go through with this. But as soon as the nurse in the maternity ward pointed through the glass to this helpless little baby, I nearly collapsed with emotion and then immediately went into rescue mode. “Let’s take him and go,” I said to Jo. We named our new son James Rico—his middle name in honor of the artist Rico Lebrun, who made the large drawing she had bought years ago.

James was a beautiful addition to our wonderful family. But the bigger and better parts that I thought were going to follow my success in
Stop the World
never came. It wasn’t that the offers I received weren’t good enough; I didn’t receive
any
offers at all. Zero. Zip. It was confusing. There had been real motion to my run as Littlechap, fueled by a lot of heavy-duty acknowledgment from the theater community. But instead of being seen as a Broadway commodity, it was as if I had become invisible. And it wasn’t just in the theater but also in movies and TV. There was
nothing
on the horizon.

I had always had financial ups and downs throughout my career. That is generally the actor’s lot. Very rarely does something happen (such as a hit television series that runs for years, tantamount to an annuity) that keeps a performer from ever having to worry again. That was certainly never my experience, and at this point, while faced with a new baby, a four-year-old daughter starting nursery school, and absolutely no prospects, I found the economics of art troubling.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1966 that I finally got a job. It was a God-awful job, but I had to take it; we needed the money. I played a pirate—a comedy pirate—in an outdoor spectacle posing as a musical.
Mardi Gras
played seven long nights a week (rain or shine) at the Jones Beach Marine Theatre, outdoors on Long Island, where a small body of water separated the stage from the audience.

To call this mess a musical would be an insult to the art form. The jokes were bad; the lyrics were banal; the music was derivative. Louis Armstrong was the draw. That meant that at some time during Act 2, he was brought on to sing three or four crowd-pleasers that had nothing to do with the story, which was not very complicated to begin with.

Every day at three in the afternoon I boarded a bus that went out to Jones Beach as if I were on my way to work in the coal mines, depressed by the knowledge that I would not be on the return bus until two in the morning. Sitting in the inevitable and excruciating traffic on the Long Island Expressway, I tried to figure out just how I had ended up here.

I wanted to be in the theater to shock, expand, make life more interesting. With Wynn Handman, a former Neighborhood Playhouse member who carried on the teachings of Sanford Meisner, I performed in one of the first experimental plays of his new theater. In
Harry, Noon and Night
, a wild and woolly play written by Ronald Ribman, I played an American soldier in Berlin opposite Dustin Hoffman, making his debut, as a transsexual German. As an actor I love to surprise, and the audience was surprised—to say the least—when I tied Dustin up in a blanket and sat on him.

And now I was doing a poorly executed, badly staged soft-shoe as a hokey pirate in a show where most had paid the price of admission only to hear the great Satchmo sing “What a Wonderful World.” Was I just not good enough to do anything better?

On the bus ride home along the choked expressway, while the rest of the cast slept, I started to rethink all of it. Maybe the theater wasn’t my destiny after all. I had a wife and small children who deserved more than a comedy pirate as a husband and father. Tomorrow I would lay out all the possibilities—an art gallery owner, an agent, a hand model, a tummler in the Catskills. Anything other than this.

“There’s a part I think you’ll be just swell for.”

CHAPTER NINE

Even though it was two in the afternoon, I was asleep when the phone rang. Depressed, I considered not answering. A few days earlier,
Mardi Gras
had closed, and though I was grateful not to be battling traffic on the LIE or playing a crappy pirate, at least it was a paycheck. Now, facing financial as well as artistic trouble, I was plunged into a state of despair.

“Hello,” I said.

“Joely!”

“Hal?”

Hal Prince was the only person in the world other than my aunt Jean who called me by that name.

“What’s wrong?” the theater director asked. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I’m all right, just a little under … You know, same old, same old … Work.”

“Well that’s good. Then I get to be the bearer of good news. This is perfect timing, pal! Remember last week at Downey’s, I told you I’m working on a new show?”

“
I Am a Camera
. I saw Julie Harris in it, in ’51.”

“Exactly! Well it’s happening!”

Hal—who had already established himself as one of the top musical-theater producers, changing the shape of the genre with the likes of
Fiddler on the Roof
and
West Side Story
—went on to say that my old friends Fred Ebb and John Kander had written a brilliant score. Joe Masteroff, who had won a Tony nomination for his musical comedy
She Loves Me
, had written the book. The young choreographer Ron Field was set to stage the musical numbers.