Читать книгу Cloris - Cloris Leachman - Страница 10

When I was fifteen years old, I had done a reading for a women’s group in Des Moines, and after it, Daddy put me in a cab and sent me home. It was a snowy, blizzardy night. The cabdriver and I exchanged only a few words, and he seemed a pleasant man. But when we came to my street, he didn’t turn. He went right past it.

He continued driving in silence, and we were getting well away from my neighborhood. I began to feel cold and frightened, and after a few more moments, I said, “You’ve gone past my street, and my mother’s waiting for me.”

“Well, we’ll get there,” he said.

Pretty soon he pulled onto a dark little avenue, with no streetlights and only a couple of houses down at the far end. There was no one else around. I saw only the heavy snow falling in front of the headlights. The driver opened his door and got out, took off his hat and coat, put them on the front seat, closed that door and opened the back door, and came in and sat beside me. He went right to work, grabbing me and touching me all over. In a strident voice, a kind of voice I’d never heard before, he said, “Kiss me! Kiss me!”

I was still a young girl; I wasn’t even fully developed. I had no idea what he was going to do, and I had no idea what I should do with this grown man pushing himself all over me. I was having trouble breathing. Suddenly something erupted in me, and I shouted, “You take me home right now!”

It was as if I’d hit him with a club. He stopped. Here were the two of us sitting silently side by side in the backseat, the snow falling in a hard slant outside. I was terrified. The man seemed to morph—I don’t know how to describe it—to come back into himself. He opened the door, got out, walked to the front of the cab, opened the door, put on his coat and hat, got back in, and started driving me home.

When I got into our house, I fell into Mama’s arms, and the emotions poured out of me. I tried to be coherent as I told her what had happened, but I was so full of disbelief and fright that everything came out jumbled. My little sisters were listening upstairs. There was high drama in our household.

Mama held me and spoke soothingly and calmed me. While I sat at the kitchen table, she made me some hot chocolate. She told me that what had happened was a terrible thing, but that what was important was that I was back home and safe. I remember being proud that I had memorized the number of the cab, 146. Mama said she would call the cab company and tell them what had happened.

The next night, when Daddy came home from work, I had to tell him about the incident. It was uncomfortable, and I didn’t have the words to tell him in detail what had happened. His reaction was minimal. He didn’t say much. He asked me a few questions so he could get a complete picture. I don’t know for certain what he did the next day, but I heard that he didn’t call the cab company. He went over there and confronted the management about what had happened. No one told me exactly what transpired, but my impression is that Mama and Daddy agreed to a settlement. They didn’t want a trial, because they didn’t want the matter to be made public, and they didn’t want me to have to revisit that night again.

This incident got connected to a very different one eight years later, when I was in New York. On a rainy afternoon, I was in my apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, sitting at the window, watching people dodge in and out of doorways to avoid getting wet, when the phone rang. It was my agent, Bill Liebling. He said the first thing he wanted me to do was write down the address he was about to give me. I got a pencil and took it down. He said I should go to that address the next day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, to meet Elia Kazan and to have a scene prepared to perform for him.

In those days, Kazan was the monarch of the New York theater. He had directed most of the recent stage hits and nearly all of Tennessee Williams’s plays, including the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando. In 1947 Kazan had forged an exclusive group whose members included the cream of young New York actors. He’d called it the Actors Studio. Liebling was very smart. I took his advice about everything, and so the next afternoon I was at the building where the Actors Studio was housed.

I had decided to do a scene I already knew, and I brought along Bob Quarry, the actor who had done it with me before. When we arrived, Kazan introduced himself. He said he’d seen me in A Story for a Sunday Evening and Come Back, Little Sheba, and he’d heard from other people how talented I was. He said we could start anytime we were ready. We stepped up onto the little stage and launched into our performance.

The scene we acted out was about a husband coming home after being away for an extended period of time. He’s just come through the door, and he and his wife are in each other’s presence and in each other’s arms for the first time in many months. They are passionate, and they start to get into things in a sexy way. Bob and I performed it artfully.

When we finished, Kazan said that he thought what we’d done was excellent. He particularly liked the passion in me when locked in my husband’s embrace, I said, “Kiss me. Kiss me.” That, Kazan said, had had real emotion.

I had used what we call a “sense memory” when I delivered that line. I had brought to it everything that was in that cabdriver’s voice when those words came out of him in the backseat of the cab that blizzard-filled night. This may sound odd, but I did it without reliving the fright I’d felt that night. I was an actress. I had command of my emotions, and I could select out of the past only the part I wanted, only what was useful to me.

I was welcomed into the Actors Studio, and was in the company of the best young actors in the country: James Whitmore, Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Marlon Brando, Steve Hill, Maureen Stapleton. I learned from Kazan. He was a true man of the theater. I’ll talk about him and the Actors Studio farther along. I want to pause here to talk about another man, who, though I didn’t realize it then even though he was my father, perhaps laid the most crucial sculpting hand of all on me in my growing up years.