I'm Not Dead... Yet! (4 page)

I began writing this book two weeks from the day
the anesthesiologist asked me to count backwards from 100 and moments later, the surgical team was sawing down the middle of my chest (for the 4
^th
time), blossoming my rib cage to get to my veteran surgically repaired heart. I imagined the past surgeons leaving graffiti-type notes on my heart saying things like: ‘How’s it going?’ ‘My email has changed.’ ‘Good seeing you at the Heart Conference in Vegas.’

One can look at open-heart surgery as life’s defeat; a reminder that we are so mortal and moments away from death; a morose and painful time that marks the end of the best years of our lives.

Or, one can experience this as a chance to live on borrowed time, because in truth, aren’t we all living on borrowed time? Sometimes it takes a life and death situation to remind us how lucky we are. For me, I feel like I’ve experienced a chance to live on as I approach the best years of my life.

I hope once the pain subsides, you see your experience as a rebirth, because it is a miracle that I can sit and write this and then go for a run. Maybe I’ll see you there… and we’ll nod to one another—as if we’ve been on the same spaceship together.

54 years-old, two weeks out of my fourth open-heart surgery,

about to swim in the Atlantic.

This can be you!

You may be a lot better looking and a better swimmer,

but
this can be you.

This song is a bit corny, but... why not?!

I had a great childhood,
but I was a sickly kid (and didn’t really know it). As an infant, I needed a metal brace between my legs to force the bones in my ankles to straighten. As a toddler, I was under an oxygen tent and I remember my dad bringing me the coolest little cars to play with—the hospital didn’t seem like such a bad place. One of my earliest memories is of a doctor telling my parents when he listened to my heart he heard a murmur. I thought that was pretty cool. He reassured my parents, telling them I’d grow out of it—that I’d live a long life and would probably never have to worry about the murmur in my heart.

My life as an actor began when I was very young. By age eight I was a pro. I was schooled ‘old school.’
As Oliver, the starving urchin in
Oliver
, I was malnourished in between shows (my choice). I was trained by wise and experienced performers in both summer stock and on Broadway. And my mother was a brilliant actor and my dad was an extraordinary writer-director. Both taught me old school.

Instead of watching Saturday cartoons, I went to the movies—foreign films at the art houses, classics at the revival houses—it all fascinated me. I was hired to dub children’s voices in many movies: from
Godzilla
films to the 1968 release of the Russian
War and Peace,
and Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 film,
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
.

Cast at twelve years old,
I made my Broadway debut in 1969 in the straight play
Zelda
with Ed Begley Sr. and Lilia Skala at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. The guidance and artistic education I was given represented everything I adored about theater. Theater was like sports: there was a brotherhood; teamwork; the implication of a traveling family. I eventually took on the work and the billing of a star, but I always believed in parity; equality. When actors are on stage or in front of a camera, we are all
equals
.

I was taught (never complain!) nothing mattered before the curtain went up or before ‘Action!’ was called.
The show not only must ‘go on,’ but you must
never
allow others to witness anything but the best performance possible.

I was taught (some may say ‘programmed,’ but that’s a bit harsh) by a different set of rules, one of them being: ‘Not showing or acknowledging pain or discomfort is virtuous; noble!’

I was a trained circus animal. I didn’t mind. I loved it. (And was proud of it:

Look, I can stand on my trunk! Longer than anyone!)

Since ‘life was a performance,‘ I could never let on
how it affected my heart. And I’ve learned:

Everything Affects Your Heart

Zelda
opened to a standing ovation. It got creamed in the
New York Times
and the following day there was a total of fourteen people in the audience. The show closed a few days later.

If everything affects your heart, I believe we need a way to quantize and calibrate the things in life that make our hearts sing; and at the other end of the spectrum, the things that do damage to our hearts. Although my journey is mapped with show business stories, it is similar to everyone’s journey—our hearts respond to stress, to refuge; to abuse, to safekeeping; to hate, to love. We are all on our own journeys. This is mine.

Because I was so introverted,
things that felt like family were very appealing to me. One of the beautiful similarities between track and field events and acting is you are on a team with others, but it is really your inner will that propels you forward to a significant goal. And I believed the goal was not financial success, but artistic and creative perfection and since that is a rarity, it’s a great goal because you’re always trying to summit that creative Everest without oxygen (in my case…).

In sports, it meant only one thing: winning. I would die on a basketball court before I’d let someone beat me playing one on one. If I could walk off a football field after the final gun, then I did not give my best effort. If I were doing eight shows a week on Broadway, every show had to be better than the show before. That can be trickier because we are now discussing the art of acting and that doesn’t necessarily mean exertion, it may mean complete control down to not batting an eye for an entire scene. When my dad told me the Australian track team ran up sand dunes to train for the Olympics, I ran the stairs of my high-rise—every night, up and down 30 floors, over and over again until I came back into apartment 28-D with no energy to shower and collapsed on my bed. Even though I was an athlete, I remained in the best shape possible because my heroes were Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the body is your tool to make people ‘believe’ you as an actor. If I got a huge laugh in a show on a Tuesday, I would work all week to understand each audience so that I could finesse rather than repeat my performance, thus ‘earning’ that laugh.

If I were to audition for a movie and knew I had the first appointment of the day, let’s say 9:00 a.m., I would get there at 7 a.m. and sometimes fall asleep until the door was unlocked. If I were asked to come prepared to ‘read,’ I would memorize the scene and go one step further, I’d memorize
every
scene—then if I were asked to read another scene, I could put the script down and say, “Whenever you’re ready, sir.”

The laughs I’d earn made my heart sing. The games we’d win would make my heart soar. The behavior I’d witness and be a part of as a very young person in an adult world, earning an adult salary which came with the stress of an adult job, would make my heart... sore. “I did my best” was considered an excuse.

Even though I was a good student,
I loved show business because going to work or auditions was a ‘Get Out Of School Free’ pass. Making a living at such an early age taught me responsibility and everything that came with earning a paycheck.
During my audition for
The Rothschilds
, we were paired in groups on a Broadway stage. I was in a group with a bigger boy who was snotty and always an ass, no matter where our paths crossed. We were asked by the director to get into a minor shoving match. This bully shoved me so hard that I forgot I was at an audition and tried to take his head off. How I got the part of young Solomon Rothschild, I’ll never know. But I did hear someone say, “He has the spunk we’re looking for.”

I worked eight shows a week in
The Rothschilds
, simultaneously, played Bruce Carson in the soap opera,
Search For Tomorrow
, and was on the basketball and track teams at school. I was also a latch-key kid; my parents trusted me and allowed me to be independent. I took the bus or subway home alone every night after the show (at midnight) from the seedy 1970s Broadway theater district. New York City at its most violent. The bus stop was in front of a porn theater. The subway was less exotic, more dangerous, but a quicker ride. (Odds were, I took the bus home more than the subway.)

I was jumped half a dozen times coming home in the subway, and one time was mugged and stabbed in my right hand. I was afraid to tell my parents—my dad was a Texan with quite a temper when it came to injustice; I thought he would go out hunting for the kids who jumped me or try to kill the kid who stabbed me. So I learned to eat with my left hand, and no one noticed.