An Improvised Life (6 page)

The company became so successful that we bought the building next door to try longer, more experimental works. The first production in the new theater was a musical, a Chicago-based version of
The Threepenny Opera
, again brilliantly composed by Bill Mathieu, and it was done without
a book. It had a written scenario a few pages long that the company improvised upon for several weeks, and it became a solid hit. I played MacHeath (Mack the Knife), and stayed with the show for the first couple of months. Then they hired an actor to take my place, since the first company, which now included me, would soon be leaving for New York and Broadway.

During one of my last performances (with Sills spending the days rehearsing my replacement), I came to the theater, went on, and found that I was in the wrong play. I struggled through the first act and at intermission held an impromptu meeting with the cast. “What the hell is going on?” I asked. “What play are we doing?” They told me that during the rehearsal with my replacement that afternoon, Sills got tired of the way the show was going and decided to change the story. To rewrite it. Nobody had bothered to tell me. I pleaded with the cast to do the second act as we’d rehearsed it, since I hadn’t been informed of the changes and hadn’t been at the rehearsal. After reviewing my desperate situation, and since Sills wasn’t around that evening, the cast grudgingly agreed to do it the old way until I left Chicago, which would be a few days later. But for an hour, in front of hundreds of people, I had been in one play, the rest of the cast in another. It was the first of several classic actors’ nightmares that I’ve lived through. There were more to follow.

CHAPTER SIX

We did not take New York by storm. We lasted on Broadway for only about three months, but during that time we developed a devoted group of fans, one of whom was Charlie Ruben, a restaurateur, who liked us so much that he decided to open a club for us in Greenwich Village. He found a place a block away from New York University, we opened, and we were an instantaneous success. We got rave reviews everywhere—newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio—and since we were a block away from New York University we had a built-in college audience right in the neighborhood. The NYU crowd was our kind of people.

A few months into our run we received another TV invitation, this time from David Susskind, who at the time had a hugely successful talk show. He wanted to devote an entire hour and a half to us, using our own format, and staying completely out of the way. We did his TV show and the next night, at the theater, we had a packed house, reservations for months to come, and a whole new uptown
audience, less intellectual but with more money and better clothes. They laughed at all the right spots—all the literary references, our raised eyebrows, the pregnant pauses, the catch phrases that were the flavor of the month in local magazines or newspapers, whether they had any specific relevance to the scene or not. Being a complete snob, I left the stage one night after what seemed like a particularly self-congratulatory audience, and said in a huff, “I hate this damned bunch of pseudo-intellectuals. They don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, they’re only laughing because they want us to know how smart they are. You mention the name Thomas Mann and you get a laugh.” My next scene was with Severn Darden, one of our resident geniuses. It was a scene in which he was a sales clerk in a men’s store and I was a customer trying on some clothes. Halfway through the scene I mimed putting on a new jacket, turned to Severn for his approval, and said, “How do I look?” “Wonderful!” Severn replied, and then, with a smirk, “You look just like Thomas Mann!” The audience went wild, but I felt I had been trumped by Severn, and I seethed through the rest of the evening. It was a strange new kind of experience.

One night, several months later, about five minutes before the first show, Charlie Rubin came barreling backstage. He was sweating and panting, his eyes were bulging out of his head, and there was a huge grin on his face. “Guess who’s out there!” he bellowed. “Who?” we asked grudgingly, not caring all that much. “Groucho Marx!”

Now normally we didn’t care a whole lot about the celebrities in the audience; most of us were still wearing our iconoclast suits, or trying to. But Groucho was different. He was the original iconoclast. Breaking rules was his stock and trade. Not only that, but he’d been improvising before anyone in this country had ever heard of the word, so we were both honored and terribly excited to hear that he was in the audience, and we bolted onstage with a tremendous burst of energy. We wanted to perform for Groucho, one of our few mentors.

Throughout the first act, the show went wildly well. The audience was having a terrific time, I’m sure in great part from seeing Groucho enjoying himself. About halfway into the second act there was a scene that had been part of our repertoire for months. The country was in the middle of the cold war, Kennedy and Khrushchev were going at each other hot and heavy, and our scene consisted of the two of them fielding questions from the audience as if they were conducting a press conference. Andrew Duncan, the company’s political expert, played Kennedy; he was knowledgeable, intelligent, and witty. Zohra Lampert played a wonderfully complex Jackie. And I played Khrushchev, wearing, for some reason unknown to anyone including me, one of those peaked cab driver’s hats. I suppose I felt it looked proletariat. As Khrushchev, I was able to avoid making any kind of intelligent political statement by speaking only in Russian gibberish. In that way I could emote my brains out without knowing a thing about politics, a topic
that interested me not at all. Severn was my translator, and it became his job to interpret my rambling histrionic nonsense and somehow make it relate to the audience’s questions. That’s the way it was supposed to go.

We trooped out onstage, and after Andrew made his usual introductory remarks we opened the “press conference” to the audience for questions. Immediately Groucho’s hand went up. Having not much choice, Andrew pointed to him. Groucho said, “This question is for Mr. Khrushchev.” I nodded. “Where did you get that hat?” he asked. I answered in my fake Russian; Severn said something in English, I think it was “Bloomingdale’s.” The audience laughed.

Andrew asked the audience for another question. Groucho’s hand went up again. What were we to do? Andrew pointed to him. “How much was the hat?” he said. Gibberish from me. Severn said something, I forget what, but we could begin to feel where this was going and we were helpless to do anything about it. We were trapped up there. Groucho’s hand went up again. “What’s the material?” he asked. “Is that a wool gabardine?” Gibberish from me. Severn said something, but the handwriting was on the wall. We were beginning to come apart at the seams, and the audience loved it. Groucho kept asking question after question about the damn hat I was wearing: “Would it come in a seven and a quarter?” “Would you consider selling the one you’re wearing?” By around the sixth question the audience was hysterical and so were we. We were unable to keep ourselves
intact. We were all turning into Jell-O. We soon found ourselves laughing harder than the audience and finally just ran offstage in surrender. Luckily we managed to regroup in the next scene and finished the evening with a semblance of professionalism, very happy that Groucho didn’t give us any more help.

He came back after the show and all of us sat with him for a couple of hours in the empty club, mostly listening to his stories in joyous rapt attention. In spite of the botched Khrushchev-Kennedy debate we seemed to have pleased Groucho, and completely out of keeping for us we actually delighted in the fact that he’d turned the show into a shambles. It was an evening none of us will ever forget, and I’m proud to say that after that night Groucho became a friend. He’d often come to see me when I was in a show in L.A., and invite me to his house for dinner, or out to a nearby restaurant. His presence was an endless source of delight to anyone who approached him. He joked with waiters, busboys, maître d’s, everyone in the restaurant who came over to say hello. And more than almost anyone I’ve met in this business, he was inquisitive about everyone and everything. He never stopped asking questions. Once I tried to tell him of the joy he’d given me over the years and how greatly I admired him. He waved me off. “I was nothing without my brothers,” he said. “Without them I wouldn’t have amounted to anything.”

The club in Greenwich Village stayed successful for a long time. The group, most of whom had been native Chicagoans, slowly adjusted to living in New York, and, predictably, offers for work on Broadway and in film and TV started coming in. We had considered ourselves iconoclasts and rebels, and we were a pretty tight, if dysfunctional, family. But as offers came in, things began to change. The new possibilities that were offered to some of us represented too many unspoken hopes and dreams, dreams of financial security, of greater personal recognition, of less pressured work, and the group started changing. People started leaving, new blood came in, and Second City started its long climb into becoming an institution and a success machine.

Forty years later there was a celebration and reunion in Chicago, and those of us, the early members who were still alive, climbed haltingly onstage to receive standing ovations from the crowd. We were treated like pioneers. Pathfinders. We looked at each other with our mouths open in disbelief. We had started out in Second City, all of us, because there was nowhere else to go. We were mavericks, misfits, almost unemployable. Most of the original members of the group had come out of the University of Chicago, where the dean had said publicly, “Get a general education. Don’t specialize. You’re all smart people; you’ll end up on your feet.” They took him at his word and as a result the University of Chicago produced a generation of brilliant people who wandered and floundered without
finding specific work to do, all of them prospective Second City cast members. I fit right in. If anyone had told us that we were founding a dynasty, that three-quarters of the comic talent in the country for the next five decades would come from our ranks, we would have laughed in their faces. Now people join the cast in order to “make it.” We did it to survive.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After being with Second City in New York for a year, I was offered a part in a Broadway play. It was called
Enter Laughing
, from a book written by Carl Reiner. It was my first Broadway play, I had the lead, and I was never offstage. We opened in the middle of a newspaper strike, but in spite of the blackout and a complete lack of newsprint publicity, we got enough raves via television and word of mouth to turn the show into a smash hit.

The night before the reviews came out, my name was in small letters at the bottom of the ads. The next day I was over the title. As glamorous as that sounds, and as much of a dream as I thought it would be, it backfired. For the first time in my career there was no avoiding the fact that
I
was present onstage. And because the reviews singled me out, much of the audience was coming to see my work. Like it or not, I was now a celebrity, and in a couple of ways this put me under new pressures, onstage as well as off.

For the most part I had become an actor so as to hide, to find my identity through pretending to be other people. Now there was no getting around the fact that it was
me
up there in front of an audience. When I made my first entrance the audience applauded, but they were applauding the actor playing the role, stopping the show with this generous acknowledgment, a tradition in the theater but confusing and uncomfortable for me, and from that moment on I could not help feeling caught between myself and the character; I couldn’t find any balance, or my way back.

In addition, I was an improvisatory actor, and not only because of the two years I’d just completed at Second City; improvisation seemed to be central to my nature. Anything else felt boring and rigid. Where was the creativity in doing a part exactly the same way every night? I know it makes sense for the playwright to have a performance set in stone; it gives the writer a feeling of security. It also makes sense and is good business for the producer—this coming Tuesday people will see the same performance they saw a year ago last September. I could see the logic in it, but I didn’t want to do it.

In
Enter Laughing
, as the months went by, and as my anxieties about
being present
mounted, I also felt inhibited by the rigidity of the form. I found myself getting stale in certain parts of the play. I’d try to change the blocking just a bit, to get my juices flowing, and found that other actors onstage would actually look for me at the spot I had been the night before, where I was “supposed to be”! Then afterward
there would be the inevitable notes from the stage manager, admonishing me for not sticking to the blocking.

This is a terrible confession to make; I’m aware of it. Actors are supposed to know that the play happens over and over again until the audience stops showing up. That’s a given. But I can’t help but ask, “Why?” Some actors are fed by the reactions of the audience, by the tiny nuances that they can add to a show over the years, by the hope of catching fire once in a while and disappearing completely into the role, by the passion generated by another actor’s catching fire, by the hope that someone important will be in the house that night. Others are made secure by having someplace tangible and safe to go to instead of facing the anxieties of a random and fragmented day. None of this worked for me. Well, some of it did, for a while, in Second City, where we knew that in three months’ time we’d be doing a whole new show. And yet as happy as I was at Second City, working at the top of my abilities, I was driven to explore outside that arena in the supposed magic of “Broadway.” I wanted a bigger success. The irony is that I found it, and all it did was make me unhappy.