Theo: An Autobiography

10: Peregrinations

I T WAS EVIl)ENT TO ME THAT AMER.ICAN AUIJIENCES love talent, love performers, even lllake a fetish of some of thelll. There are no kings and no aristocrats in America; Americans find their royalty elsewhere -among the wealthy, the powerful, and the talented. Tycoons and others who walk the halls of power are essentially out of reach. Performers, on the other hand, are falniliar faces on th'e stages and movie screens and especially in living rooms. Radio was illllllensely important to almost every American, and TV was rapidly becon1ing lTIuch lllore so. I entered the world of television very soon after llly first job in the Alllerican theatre had ended. There was a tension in television work that was not much different fronl the angst of working on the stage. No film, no tape. This was live TV, no retakes to correct lllistakes, no editing to make the product look better or luore coherent. If you fluffed your lines, too bad-whatever you did, mistakes and all, is what the audience of millions saw. And, unlike the theatre, there was no second night after the opening, no "Ah, well, it'll be better tomorrow ." The rehearsal process itself was very much like theatre; you spent some three weeks to get a ninety-minute show on its feet, you rehearsed in a ballroom, and hit the studio floor only days before the telecast. The difference was that, even in the ballroom, toward the end of the rehearsal period a bunch of technicians followed you around, weaving in and out, coming closer and retreating as the cameras would eventually do. You had to get used to that; there was no "fourth wall," the presumed line between stage perfornlers and audience. I liked the challenge. The in1nlediacy of perfornling right there and then before the audience created a sense of excitenlent, even though you had to do it in a void, as it were, for an audience who did not laugh at your jokes, at least not so you could hear their laughter. Nor could you hear the collective intake of breath when they were n1oved. That aspect of it was possibly worse with nl0vies: In live TV at least you knew the audience was there the night you did it. Make a filnl and you work for a laugh or a tear that nlay-or Inay not-conle six nl0nths later. In the live TV days you still had the advantage of developing a play and your character in it because you started at the beginning and went through to the end. Later, after tape started to be used, it was not so n1uch fun. You still had all the rehearsals to cope with, and you nlight get to tape an act at a tinle, but then they started to tape bits and pieces out of sequence, alnlost like filnl but under greater tinle pressure. There was sonle interesting nlaterial for a performer on TV, sonle not so interesting, and sonle downright garbage. The trick was to avoid the garbage and go for the classy nlaterial; that is, if you could afford to do that and still eat and pay the rent. It was then that I discovered the ultinlate usefulness of n10ney: It allows you to say no. By and large I chose well in those "live" days. I did The Brid~e (?f San Luis Rey, The Dybbuk (directed by Sidney Lunlet), George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (with Maurice Evans, Raynlond Massey, and Genevieve Bujold, directed by George Schaefer), and Julius Caesar (directed by Daniel Petrie). It was in Caesar that the pitfalls of doing live television were especially in evidence for nle. It was the nliddle of sun1nler, and we used a studio on Ninth Avenue that had no air conditioning. The crowd scenes were particularly unconlfortable; all these bodies en1anating heat and sweat. I played Caesar. After being stabbed by all the daggers, I was lying dead on the ground while Brutus and Marc Antony delivered their orations. I had no way of knowing at what point the canleras would be on n1e, and I had to take care to pretend not to breathe at all. I was able to control that part better than nlY perspiration glands. A sweating corpse would surely tax the audience's suspension of disbelief. But I hoped we would get away with it. However , the crowd had been directed by !)an Petrie to react to Brutus favorably and...