Читать книгу Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art - Gene Wilder - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWhen Corinne was twenty, she went to act at the Reginald Goode Summer Theater near Poughkeepsie, New York. You had to pay ninety dollars a week for food and lodgings. In return, you got the privilege of acting with the famous sixty-eight-year-old Australian actor, Reginald Goode, in front of a real summer stock audience, six nights a week.
A call came to our home in Milwaukee. Mr. Goode suddenly discovered that he was one man short for his acting company. (I assume that some guy didn’t want to pay the ninety dollars.) Corinne told Mr. Goode that her brother was an actor, and he told her to get me to Poughkeepsie immediately. I had just turned sixteen.
I was thrilled, of course, but my father wasn’t – unless they waived the ninety-dollars-a-week fee they charged for the privilege of acting with Mr. Goode. After a lot of bluster, Mr. Goode agreed. I was on the train the next day.
The playhouse was a beautiful old barn converted into a theater. It held about five or six hundred people. All of the actors, except me, slept and ate in Reginald Goode’s private house, across the huge lawn that separated the house from the theater. I was assigned to a unique bedroom inside the theater, just off stage left. The bedroom was about as big as a walk-in closet.
When I went to bed that first night, it was a little frightening. It was so dark when I shut off the one lightbulb and there were strange sounds all through the night. The old wooden barn was dancing with the wind. As I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, I saw a name carved into the wall beside me, just above my head: “KT Stevens.” I knew that name; I had read about her. She was a famous actress from fifteen or twenty years ago, and she must have slept in this same bedroom, probably in this same bed, and carved her name into the wall next to me, so that years later other actors would remember her. I ran my fingers over her carved name and whispered, “Good night, K. T.,” then turned off my lightbulb and fell asleep.
The first play I acted in at the playhouse was The Late Christopher Bean, by Sidney Howard. I think I got more laughs than Mr. Goode had expected. When the two of us were alone onstage and the audience started laughing at something I did or said, he would lean down and whisper, “Wait for it…. Wait for it.”
The play was so successful that he held it over for another week (or else he had to hold it over because he didn’t have the next show ready, which was probably more likely).
The next play was The Cat and the Canary. Henry Hull had played the lead on Broadway; Bob Hope played it in the movie. Now I was playing the same part, but no one told me that “old” Mr. Goode was married to this gorgeous twenty-three-year-old red-haired actress who was going to play my romantic interest. Her name was Rita. She explained to me, privately, that when we had our kissing scene, it shouldn’t be a “real” kiss – which might throw both of us off – it should just look like a real kiss, by putting our lips on the side of the other person’s mouth, just close enough so that it looked real. I thought, Well – that must be how real actors do it.
Mr. Goode worked in a bizarre way. After the evening performances we all made sandwiches from a big roast ham that was set out each evening on the kitchen table. We drank milk or soda (no alcohol), and then we rehearsed most of the night, until just before the sun came up. That’s the way Mr. Goode wanted it. I loved it. For me it was very romantic. For Rita, too. Forget that “on the side of the mouth” business – by the fourth day of rehearsal, she started kissing for real.
Remember Seema Clark? The young Rita Hayworth with the fake angora sweater, who made me feel like a disgrace to God and my mother for trying to touch about half an inch of her breast? Because of her I still hadn’t tried to touch a girl’s breast. Kiss a lot, yes, but breasts were too dangerous. Of course, if Seema Clark had liked what I was doing and made some lovely sounds of encouragement … who knows?
We rehearsed The Cat and the Canary for five nights, and then, on the sixth night, before dress rehearsal and after strong signals from Rita, she and I drifted off towards the riverbank. We knew there would be a long break while they were changing the sets, so we lay down on the grass, near a little brook, and kissed and kissed. No breasts. No penis. While we were lying there, she said,
“Take me!”
“Take you where?” I answered.
I knew very well what she meant – I wasn’t that dumb – but I wasn’t prepared for the big time yet. I think that if Rita had been more aggressive on that particular night, my life would have taken a very different path. But she was careful where she touched me.
Later, after rehearsing till 5:00 A.M., I had just gotten into bed when I heard a knock at my door.
“It’s me,” Rita whispered.
I opened the door, and there she was, in her nightgown, looking as beautiful as a fantasy. She got into bed with me, and we started kissing. After about four minutes she said, “What do you think would happen if I touched you … here?” pointing to the bulge underneath my pajamas. Before I could answer, we both heard Reginald Goode calling out from somewhere on the lawn, near my bedroom door.
“Rita …”
He wasn’t hollering, and he wasn’t whispering. It sounded more like a father calling out to his daughter who had stayed out too late one night, but now it was time for her to come home. I felt that he didn’t know for sure if she was actually with me but that he assumed she was. Rita got under the covers and wiggled down towards the bottom of the bed, so that if Mr. Goode did burst in, he wouldn’t see her. I was scared to death. I do mean death – I imagined a shotgun.
“Rita?” he called again.
But he didn’t knock on my door, which I was terrified he was going to do. He listened for another minute or ninety seconds. While I held my breath, I could hear him breathing – he was that close. And then he walked away. After three or four minutes Rita jumped out of bed, took a quick peek outside, and then ran across the lawn to the big house, just as the sun was coming up. Mr. Goode never brought up this incident to me.
Margie interrupted. (She rarely did, but we were now in our second year together, and I was used to it.)
“Now wait a minute, Mister Wilder …” (She started using that little twist on Mister to emphasize whatever comic irony she was about to “epiphanize” me with.)
“… Did you fondle her breasts?”
“No.”
“Did she ever suck you?”
“No.”
“Did you ever fuck her?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t have a reason that makes sense.”
“Then give me a reason that doesn’t make sense.”
“… I thought it was wrong. I don’t mean for anyone else, just me. I think I might have enjoyed it too much.”
“Why would it be wrong if you enjoyed it too much?”
I lay motionless for almost a minute, searching for the answer, but I didn’t know the answer.
Margie wrote something in her pad.
NO TIME FOR COMEDY
When the season at the Reginald Goode Theater ended, Corinne and I went to New York and saw Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Even after I had started studying acting with Mr. Gottlieb, I didn’t know that acting could be this real – it was as if what I was watching was actually happening. Until that night I had thought often about being a comedian, mostly because I had seen Danny Kaye in Up in Arms and then Jerry Lewis on television and then – for me, the king of them all – Sid Caesar, on Your Show of Shows. But after seeing Death of a Salesman, I had no more thoughts of being a comedian – I wanted to be an actor; perhaps a comic actor, but an actor, not a comedian.
I went back to Milwaukee and made a one-hour adaptation of Death of a Salesman. I played Lee J. Cobb’s part, of course – a sixteen-year-old Willy Loman – and, along with two of my acting friends from school, we performed at churches and women’s clubs all over Milwaukee and then in front of two thousand students at my high school. I also began reading An Actor Prepares, by Constantin Stanislavsky.
One afternoon, while we were performing at some women’s club, I came to the scene where Willy Loman is trying to plant seeds in his backyard at night. I was very relaxed. I don’t think there was any tension in my body or my mind. There was no actual earth, of course, only a wooden floor, but when I started planting …
ME (AS WILLY LOMAN): Carrots … quarter inch apart …
Suddenly I was in a backyard, not an auditorium, planting seeds. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I heard everything that I was saying and what the other actors were saying. I knew I was acting in a play … but I also knew that I wasn’t acting.
Corinne had gone to the University of Iowa during my high-school years. It was reputed to have one of the five best theater departments in the country. I drove from Milwaukee to visit Corinne in Iowa City several times. We’d go to a football game together, and then I’d see her in one of the university productions. When I was seventeen, I saw her play the part of Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest. After the show I met her stage director, whom I liked very much. He looked at me for a second and then said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
Corinne was invited to a party that someone was giving after the show. She told the host that she would like to bring her kid brother along. We walked into an old Victorian house, stuffed with college students. There were all kinds of things to eat and drink. Corinne introduced me to her roommate, Mary Jo, who had the most original lips I had ever seen – except perhaps for those of the French actress Jeanne Moreau, whom I had seen in a movie called The Lovers. She and Jeanne Moreau must have traded lip secrets. I wished that Mary Jo was going to my high school so that I could date her, but since she was a college student and I was what my father would have called “a high-school pisher,” I honestly didn’t think she would give me the time of day after we were introduced. I wasn’t particularly handsome, and I certainly wasn’t very experienced – especially when it came to the opposite sex – but, to my surprise, Mary Jo stayed with me during the whole party.
We sat down on a small sofa and ate hors d’oeuvres and watched everyone else in the room either kissing or drinking beer, or both. I don’t know if I kissed Mary Jo first or if she kissed me – maybe it was both at the same time – but we started kissing. And we kept on kissing. I don’t remember anything we said to each other – I just remember the kissing and the look in her eyes, where a small beam of light was reflected from a street lamp. When the party broke up, we said good-bye.
I slept in my used car that night and drove back to Milwaukee the next morning. The memory of Mary Jo’s eyes stayed in my dreams for a long time.
As a high-school graduation present, my mother and father let me go to New York to see plays, provided I stayed at an inexpensive hotel. The old Taft Hotel on Fiftieth and Sixth Avenue fit the bill.
I saw Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Carol Channing. During her performance I was particularly curious how she could keep using her throat to make the guttural sounds she used, in her talking and singing, without going hoarse. After the show I stood at the stage door with a few other people, waiting for her to come out. When she did, she signed some autographs and then came up to me, expecting me to give her a program to sign. I don’t know where I got the nerve to say it: “Miss Channing – does it hurt your throat when you talk and sing in that special way that you do?”
She looked at me as if I were some kind of country bumpkin and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She gave me an autograph. I thanked her, and she left.
One evening, instead of seeing a play, I went to the Paris movie theater and saw Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. More than any other movie I’ve ever seen, City Lights made the biggest impression on me as an actor. It was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.
That fall I went straight off to the University of Iowa, acting in the first production of the year, The Winslow Boy, directed by Corinne’s director, whom I liked so much and who had said, “When are we gonna get this fella?”
