The Humbling (3 page)

O
NE DAY AROUND NOON
a black town car pulled into the driveway and parked beside the barn. It was a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and the small white-haired man who stepped out of the back seat was Jerry Oppenheim, his agent. After the hospital internment, Jerry had phoned him every week from New York to see how he was doing, but many months had gone by without their speaking—the actor having chosen at one point to stop taking the agent's calls along with most everyone else's—and the visit was unexpected. He watched Jerry, who was over eighty and walked cautiously, negotiate the stone path to the front door, a package in one hand and flowers in the other.

He opened the door before Jerry even had a chance to knock.

"Suppose I hadn't been home?" he said, helping Jerry over the sill.

"I took my chances," Jerry said, smiling gently.
He had a gentle face altogether and a courteous demeanor that did not, however, compromise his tenacity in behalf of his clients. "Well, you seem all right physically, at least. Except for that hopeless look on your face, Simon, you don't look bad at all."

"And you—neat as a pin," Axler said, having himself neither changed his clothes nor shaved for days.

"I brought you flowers. I brought us a box lunch from Dean and DeLuca. Have you had lunch?"

He hadn't even had breakfast, so he merely shrugged and took the gifts and helped Jerry out of his coat.

"You drove up from New York," he said.

"Yes. To see how you're doing and talk to you face-to-face. I have news for you. The Guthrie is doing
Long Day's Journey.
They called to ask about you."

"Why me? I can't act, Jerry, and everyone knows it."

"Nobody knows any such thing. Perhaps people know that you had an emotional setback, but that doesn't set you apart from the human race. They're doing the play next winter. It gets awfully cold out there, but you'd be a wonderful James Tyrone."

"James Tyrone is a lot of lines that you have to say, and I can't say them. James Tyrone is a character that you have to be, and I can't be him. There's no way I can play James Tyrone. I can't play anyone."

"Look, you took a tumble in Washington. That happens to practically everyone sooner or later. There's no ironclad security in any art. People run into an obstacle for reasons no one knows. But the obstacle is a temporary impediment. The obstacle disappears and you go on. There isn't a first-rate actor who hasn't felt discouraged and that his career was over and that he was unable to come out of the bad period he was in. There isn't an actor who hasn't gone up in the middle of a speech and not known where he was. But every time you go out on the stage there's a new chance. Actors can recover their talent. You don't lose the skills if you've been out there for forty years. You still know how to enter and sit down in a chair. John Gielgud used to say that there were times he wished he were like a painter or a writer. Then he could retrieve the bad
performance he gave that evening and take it out at midnight and redo it. But he couldn't. He had to do it there. Gielgud went through a very bad time when he could do nothing right. So did Olivier. Olivier went through a terrible period. He had a terrible problem. He couldn't look any of the other actors in the eye. He told the other actors, 'Please don't look at me, because it'll throw me.' For a while he couldn't be alone on the stage. He said to the other actors, 'Don't leave me alone out there.'"

"I know the stories, Jerry. I've heard them all. They don't have to do with me. In the past I never had more than two or three bad nights when I couldn't recover. For two or three nights I would think, 'I know I'm good, I'm just not doing it.' Maybe nobody in the audience knew it, but I knew it—it wasn't there. And on those nights when it isn't there for you it's a labor, I know that, and yet somehow you get by. You can get very good at getting by on what you get by on when you don't have anything else. But that's something different entirely. When I had a truly wretched performance, I would lie awake all night afterward thinking, 'I've lost it, I have no talent, I can't do anything.' Hours would
go by, but then all of a sudden, at five or six in the morning, I'd understand what went wrong and I couldn't wait to get to the theater that evening and go on. And I'd go on and I couldn't make a mistake. A beautiful feeling. There are days when you can't wait to get there, when the marriage between you and the role is perfect and there's never a time when you're not happy to sail out onto the stage. Those are important days. And for years I had them one after the other. Well, that's over. Now if I were to go out on the stage, I wouldn't know what I was out there for. Wouldn't know where to begin. In the old days I'd do three hours of preparation in the theater for an eight o'clock curtain. By eight I was deeply inside that role—it was like a trance, like a useful trance. In
The Family Reunion
I was in the theater two and a half hours before the first entrance, working up to how to enter when you are pursued by the Furies. That was hard for me, but I did it."

"You can do it again," Jerry said. "You're forgetting who you are and what you've achieved. Your life has hardly come to nothing. Endlessly you would do things on the stage in a way I never expected, and over the years that was thrilling thousands of times for the audience and always thrilling for me. You went as far away as possible from the obvious thing that any other actor would do. You couldn't be routine. You wanted to go everywhere. Out, out, out, as far out as you could go. And the audience believed in you in every moment, wherever you took them. Sure, nothing is permanently established, but so is nothing permanently lost. Your talent's been mislaid, that's all."

"No, it's gone, Jerry. I can't do any of it again. You're either free or you aren't. You're either free and it's genuine, it's real, it's alive, or it's nothing. I'm not free anymore."

"Okay, let's have some lunch then. And put the flowers in some water. The house looks fine.
You
look fine. A little too slimmed down, I would say, but you still look like yourself. You're eating, I hope."

"I eat."

But when they sat down to lunch in the kitchen, with the flowers in a vase between them, Axler was unable to eat. He saw himself stepping out on the stage to play James Tyrone and the audience bursting into laughter. The anxiety and fear were as
naked as that. People would laugh at him because it
was
him.

"What do you do with the days?" Jerry asked.

"Walk. Sleep. Stare into space. Try to read. Try to forget myself for at least one minute of each hour. I watch the news. I'm up to date on the news."

"Who do you see?"

"You."

"This is no way for someone of your accomplishment to live."

"You were kind to come all the way out here, Jerry, but I can't do the play at the Guthrie. I'm finished with all that."

"You're not. You're scared of failing. But that's behind you. You don't realize how one-sided and monomaniacal your perspective has become."

"Did I write the reviews? Did this monomaniac write those reviews? Did I write what they wrote about my Macbeth? I was ludicrous and they said as much. I would just think, 'I got through that line, thank God I got through that line.' I would try to think, 'That wasn't as bad as last night,' when in fact it was worse. Everything I did was false, raucous. I heard this horrible tone in my voice and yet nothing could stop me from fucking up. Hideous. Hideous. I never gave a good performance, not one."

"So you couldn't do Macbeth to your satisfaction. Well, you're not the first. He's a horrible person for an actor to live with. I defy anyone to play him and not be warped by the effort. He's a murderer, he's a killer. Everything is magnified in that play. Frankly, I never understood all that evil. Forget
Macbeth.
Forget those reviews," Jerry said. "It's time to move on. You should come down to New York and begin to work in his studio with Vincent Daniels. You won't be the first whose confidence he's restored. Look, you've done all that tough stuff, Shakespeare, the classics—there's no way this can happen to you with your biography. It's a momentary loss of confidence."

"It isn't a matter of confidence," replied Axler. "I always had a sneaking suspicion that I have no talent whatsoever."

"Well, that's nonsense. That's the depression talking. You hear actors saying it a lot when they're down the way you are. 'I don't have any real talent. I can memorize the lines. That's about it.' I've heard it a thousand times."

"No, listen to me. When I was fully honest with myself I'd think, 'Okay, all right, I have a modicum of talent or I can at least imitate a talented person.' But it was all a fluke, Jerry, a fluke that a talent was given to me, a fluke that it was taken away. This life's a fluke from start to finish."

"Oh, stop this, Simon. You can still hold attention the way a big star actor does on the stage. You are a titan, for God's sake."

"No, it's a matter of falseness, sheer falseness so pervasive that all I can do is stand on the stage and tell the audience, 'I am a liar. And I can't even lie well. I am a fraud.'"

"And that is more nonsense. Think for a moment of all the bad actors—there are lots of them and they somehow get by. So to tell me that Simon Axler," Jerry said, "with his talent, can't get by is absurd. I've seen you in the past, times when you were not so happy, times when you were in psychic torment in every other way, but put a script in front of you, allow you to access this thing that you do so wonderfully, allow you to become another person,
and always it's been liberating for you. Well, that's happened before and it can happen again. The love of what you do well—it can return and it will return. Look, Vincent Daniels is an ace at dealing with problems like yours, a tough, canny, intuitive teacher, highly intelligent, and a scrapper himself."

"I know his name," he told Jerry. "But I've never met him. I never had to meet him."

"He's a maverick, he's a scrapper, and he'll get you back to contending. He'll put the fight back in you. He'll start from scratch if he has to. He'll get you to give up everything you've done before if he must. It'll be a struggle, but in the end he'll get you back to where you should be. I've been to his studio and watched Vincent work. He says, 'Do one moment. We're only dealing with the single moment. Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go on to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment. The job is to be in that moment, with no concern about the rest and no idea where you're going next. Because if you can make one moment work, you can go anywhere.' Now it sounds, I know, like the simplest notion, and that's why it's hard—it's so simple that it's the thing that everybody misses. I believe that Vincent Daniels is the perfect man for you right now. I have complete faith in him for you in your predicament. Here's his card. I came up here to give you this."

Jerry handed him the business card, and so he took it at the same time that he said, "Can't do it."

"What will you do instead? What will you do about all the roles you're ripe to play? It breaks my heart when I think of all those parts you were made for. If you accepted the role of James Tyrone, then you could work with Vincent and find your way through it with him. This is the work he does with actors every day. I can't count the number of times at the Tonys or the Oscars that I heard the winning actor say, 'I want to thank Vincent Daniels.' He is the best."

In response Axler simply shook his head.

"Look," Jerry said, "everyone knows the feeling 'I can't do it,' everyone knows the feeling that they will be revealed to be false—it's every actor's terror. 'They've found me out. I've been found out.' Let's face it, there's a panic that comes with age. I'm that much older than you, and I've been dealing with it
for years. One, you get slower. In everything. Even in reading you get slower. If I go fast in reading now, too much of it goes away. My speech is slower, my memory is slower. All these things start to happen. In the process, you start to distrust yourself. You're not as quick as you used to be. And especially if you are an actor. You were a young actor and you memorized scripts one after the other after the other, and you never even thought about it. It was just easy to do. And then all of a sudden it's not as easy, and things don't happen so fast anymore. Memorizing becomes a big anxiety for stage actors going into their sixties and seventies. Once you could memorize a script in a day—now you're lucky to memorize a page in a day. So you start to feel afraid, to feel soft, to feel that you don't have that raw live power anymore. It scares you. With the result, as you say, that you're not free anymore. There's nothing happening—and that's terrifying."

"Jerry, I can't go on with this conversation. We could talk all day, and to no avail. You're good to come and see me and bring me lunch and flowers and to try to help me and encourage me and comfort me and make me feel better. It was tremendously thoughtful. I'm pleased to see you looking well. But the momentum of a life is the momentum of a life. I am now incapable of acting. Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to. Things go. Don't think that my career's been cut short. Think of how long I lasted. When I started out in college I was just fooling around, you know. Acting was a chance to meet girls. Then I took my first theatrical breath. Suddenly I was alive on the stage and breathing like an actor. I started young. I was twenty-two and came to New York for an audition. And I got the part. I began to take classes. Sensememory exercises. Practice making things real. Before your performance create a reality for yourself to step into. I remember that when I began taking class we'd have a pretend teacup and pretend to drink from it. How hot is it, how full is it, is there a saucer, is there a spoon, are you going to put sugar in it, how many lumps. And then you sip it, and others were transported by this stuff, but I never found any of it helpful. What's more, I couldn't do it. I was no good at the exercises, no good at all. I'd try to do this stuff and it never would work. Everything I did well was coming out of instinct, and doing those exercises and knowing those things were making me look like an actor. I would look ridiculous as I held my pretend teacup and pretended to drink from it. There was always a sly voice inside me saying, 'There is no teacup.' Well, that sly voice has now taken over. No matter how I prepare and what I attempt to do, once I am on the stage there is that sly voice all the time—'There is no teacup.' Jerry, it's over: I can no longer make a play real for people. I can no longer make a role real for myself."