Читать книгу Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art - Gene Wilder - Страница 16
Оглавление“See you in New York!”
I said that to Joan so many times when we had our baby-sitting dates on Saturday nights, watching George Goble, kissing during the commercials, standing in the doorway for a last good-night kiss, and then … “See you in New York!”
Joan had written to me once while I was in the army, just to let me know that she was studying singing at the Ansonia Hotel and that I could see her in New York. She gave me her address.
I hadn’t seen Joan for over a year, and now I’m riding on a train from North Philadelphia to New York with a condom packed as carefully as I could place it in my wallet, and it was burning a hole in my brain because I kept thinking, What if there’s a tiny hole in the condom because I inserted it next to my plastic driver’s license and the train is jostling back and forth and side to side and up and down? Jesus, it sounds like the condom is making love already. On its own! I wish it could – then I wouldn’t have to figure out how to do it. Twenty-two years old and still a virgin? Why? Could it be that if I made love – not hugging and kissing, but actually putting my penis inside a woman’s vagina – I would somehow be betraying my mother? That’s crazy. Or is it because God has more important things for me to do than to fuck around with pleasure? Oh, excuse me – that’s not crazy? I feel like I’m talking to one of the patients on the locked ward. Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy. Maybe I should be on the locked ward with them. But if I can say that – then I’m not crazy. That much I learned at the hospital. Acting seems so much easier than life. When I’m on stage, I feel safe. “‘They’ can’t get me.” (Careful, son … you’re talking crazy again.) But onstage, everyone listens to me and watches me and – if I’m any good – applauds me. And when I’m taking my bow, I have the belief that I’ve earned my feeling of grace – as if God were saying, “You did something worthwhile, so I won’t punish you … for a few days.”
Then I heard the conductor shout, “NEW YORK NEXT! LAST STOP – NEW YORK CITY!”
ME: DO you know who Katharine Cornell was?
MARGIE: Never mind who Katharine Cornell was – did you make love to Joan?
ME: I don’t know.
MARGIE: What does that mean?
ME: No kissing, no hugging –
MARGIE: Wait a minute, Mister Wilder – kissing is what you majored in. Don’t tell me there was no kissing.
ME: Yes, we did a little mitsy-bitsy “Hello, how are you?” kind of kissing, but there wasn’t any real kissing. No touching. NO LAUGHING! I think that was the biggest problem. I’m guessing Joan was also a virgin – I don’t know. I thought I was the only virgin in New York. But I think she was just as afraid of messing up the “ideal” as I was: “If you’re too aggressive, what will she/he think of me?”
MARGIE: What happened?
ME: We got into her bedroom. She turned off the lights and took off her clothes and lay down on this little narrow bed. No talking. I think she must have been as nervous as I was. Then I took off my clothes, trying to hide the condom from her because I thought it wasn’t romantic. I held the condom in one hand while I tried to get out of my pants and underwear. Then I put the condom on my penis and got into bed with her. All I could think was, If I lose my erection, will the condom fall off? When I felt her naked body against my legs, I figured that I had better put my penis into her vagina while I still had the erection. I got halfway in and … boom!
MARGIE: You shot your wad.
ME: Thanks for putting it so delicately.
MARGIE: You’re welcome. And after “boom”?
ME: I’m an actor…. I acted a migraine headache. I told her I should never have tried making love under the circumstances, but I didn’t want to disappoint her, and how sorry I was, but I just felt as if my head were going to burst, and that I’d better go. I remembered thinking of poor Roger at Valley Forge – the patient who got those terrible headaches every time he danced with a girl. I had much more compassion for him now. Joan was very sympathetic. Maybe she was relieved, I don’t know. We sort of kissed good night, and then I left, feeling like a fool. That was five years ago, and I still feel like a fool. So, how do you think I did?
MARGIE: Well, I wouldn’t call you Don Juan, but … not bad, for the first time. So what about Katharine Cornell?
ME: I’ve heard that she used to be so nervous before a performance that she had to throw up … then she’d step out on stage and be brilliant.
STEPPING INTO LIFE
I got out of the army two years to the day after I was drafted and went to New York. My time in the army qualified me for unemployment insurance – thirty-five dollars a week. That was to pay for rent, food, and entertainment. Not much, but it helped, and I had saved a little from my monthly salary at Valley Forge. I found a tiny loft in the artificial flower district on Thirtieth Street, near Lord and Taylor’s department store, for one hundred dollars a month.
I got a scholarship to the HB Studio, so I was able to study acting full-time: Monday nights with Herbert Berghof and Thursday afternoons with Uta Hagen. I’d rehearse for two or three weeks with one acting partner during the day, and a different scene with a different acting partner during the evenings.
The odd thing is, I never did comedy scenes in class. I knew that comedy was my talent, but I wanted to learn “Stanislavsky” – real acting – so I always chose dramatic scenes. Of course, my thinking was schoolboy logic. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t have learned just as much by doing comedy scenes – which are all the funnier if done by actors who are playing them for real. I just didn’t know that yet.
In Uta’s class I did a scene from a Kafka short story with a lovely girl named Jessie. The work was good, but Jessie was better. She became my first actual girlfriend. I suppose it happened because we got to know each other before there was any physical intimacy. She worked as a freelance fashion designer, so we would rehearse at all hours, and then have either lunch or dinner together – something very inexpensive. We also laughed a lot. I couldn’t afford my tiny loft any longer – cheap as it was – so Jessie asked me to move in with her.
Physically, it was “Heaven on a stick” – for me, since I was the stick. But I didn’t know how to make her as happy as she was making me – how to touch her, where to touch her, with my finger, with my tongue. Eventually her frustration drove us apart. I felt like an imbecile again.
The compulsion came and went, but not so often anymore, and not in the same way. Now it would take something special to set it off, and it was always something I’d read or a picture I’d seen – someone who was doing something noble and unselfish to help others, and usually the noble person was making a sacrifice. Compulsion is doing; obsession is thinking. Instead of compulsive praying, the Demon – when he did come – took the form of obsessive thinking.
BEING A PROFESSIONAL MEANS YOU GET PAID
I got my first professional acting job playing the Second Officer in Herbert Berghof’s production of Twelfth Night, at the Cambridge Drama Festival. We performed in a huge tent alongside the Charles River. Herbert wanted me, I’m sure, because he needed a good fencing choreographer for the comic duel. And I was a good one.
Then the famous Cuban director José Quintero asked me to stay on and do the fencing choreography for Macbeth, with Jason Robards, Jr., and Siobhan McKenna. During rehearsals – when Mr. Robards was exhausted after a heavy emotional scene – he’d sit in the theater and watch the other actors rehearse scenes he wasn’t in, while he tried to catch his breath. It was during those short rest periods that I would go over the choreography of his sword fights, each of us holding a pencil instead of a sword, and going through all the movements in miniature.
