Love Life (20 page)

“I am!” he said. “We are doing an investors’ showcase at Sidmonton”—his estate—“soon.”

“Well
that
would be something I’d love to do,” I said. I had always thought Joe, played by William Holden, was one of the great parts in film history. If anyone could make it as good in a musical, it was Webber. It could be one for the ages.

The second act was beginning so we agreed to talk further. Later, after a few more attempts to put me in the coat of many colors, he finally offered me the part I wanted in
Sunset Boulevard
. But in the end, the dates conflicted with a version of Tennessee Williams’s
Suddenly, Last Summer
I was doing with Richard Eyre and Maggie Smith. And
as everyone today knows, you never renege on the dowager countess from
Downton Abbey
. I had to pass and it killed me.

But happily, as a result of training for the possibility of being a musical Joe Gillis, I had found a secret weapon to get my vocal cords in order. So now that I was on my way to the London stage for real, I decided to train for
A Few Good Men
as if it were a musical. If I could sing the show for eight performances a week, clearly I’d be able to speak it.

I remembered that back in the eighties, my pal Belinda Carlisle, of the Go-Go’s, used a vocal coach who was a cantor at Los Angeles’s biggest synagogues by day and voice coach to lead singers by night. I made an appointment to see Cantor Nathan Lamb.

For weeks, the cantor and I met at his temple office. He ran me through the same training that he used on his clients who had to sing to huge arenas night after night. We did scales. We did breathing drills. We worked on diction. But mostly, we worked on power. By the time I hit the Royal Haymarket stage, my speaking voice could bounce back to me from the farthest wall of the highest balcony. I was ready.

But first, I took Sheryl and the boys on a vacation—we landed in London on the morning of July 7, 2005. Arriving at baggage claim, the exiting passengers were met with a phalanx of terse-lipped, ashen-faced airline reps.

“The airport is on lockdown. No further flights in or out.”

Only text messages got us the news that was breaking just miles away: London had been attacked by terrorists. Fifty-two innocent people had been blown to bits by suicide bombers. The city braced for more.

By renting a car and driving to another airport, we eventually managed to escape London, but we returned for the first day of rehearsals two weeks later. The city was still on edge. Tourism had plummeted. Sheryl and I talked about the wisdom of moving our young family to a city so on the brink.

“I think the main threat is over,” I told her, without any evidence to back up my theory. “We’ll be safe.”

We moved into a beautiful flat on Eaton Terrace in Belgravia. I wanted my family comfortable while they supported me, so far from home.

Rehearsals took place in a steamy, dusty sweatbox and I loved every minute of it. After a full day of scene work or even after a full run-through, I always wanted to stay to work more. Aaron was right there with me. Minus the pressure-cooker personality parade that was
The West Wing
,
A Few Good Men
was easy, fun, fulfilling and focused solely on making something the best it could be.

Shortly before our opening, at our press conference in front of all of London’s media, I was asked if I ever thought of pulling out due to the 7/7 bombings.

I told them no.

“Look, on 9/11 and after, you guys had our backs. Now it’s our turn. I’m happy to be able to support London. I feel safe here, ’cause let’s face it, when it comes down to it, no one is tougher than the British.”

The next day, back in our rehearsal hellhole, I was standing in my underwear doing a fitting when our stage manager approached.

“Um, Mr. Lowe, you have a visitor.”

Figuring it was Sheryl, I threw on a towel and headed out of the changing room.

“Sir! You’d better put on some clothes,” he called. I noticed he was shaking.

I put my jeans and shirt on and walked into the rehearsal hall. Some of the actors were there looking around anxiously. No one spoke. The front door opened and my visitor arrived. It was the prime minister, Tony Blair.

He walked toward me with a smile, like we’d been friends forever.

“Rob! What a pleasure!” he said.

“Mr. Prime Minister!” I managed to say through my shock. I went to shake his hand, but he pulled me in close for a hug.

“I wanted to come and thank you for what you said about our country,” he whispered. He looked at me with a sincerity that deeply touched me. I was taken aback by his gratitude and warmth. A moment later, he was gone. His visit was never made public.

I truly believe that anyone can be good and possibly even great acting in movies or TV. Obviously, to be
consistently
good requires a true actor, but with the army of people involved in making a film actor successful, even a loaf of bread could deliver a decent performance. You have multiple takes, you have directors to guide you and an editor to cut to you (or away from you) as needed. There are some actors whom editors cut away from multiple times on the same line of dialogue! (Start looking for that, you’ll notice it more than you think.)

Not so onstage. It’s all you. You can’t make the viewer look elsewhere when you want, you can’t take a plodding scene and sex it up with fancy cutting. You can’t hold people’s attention with anything but your own work. You have no second chances; it’s you, and only you, in the driver’s seat. It’s lonely and it’s exhilarating. Those who do it well are acting’s true professionals.

You can’t go onstage without being functional in the craft of the theater. And besides vocal ability, the number one area to be mastered is, not surprisingly, memorization. For film acting, you can play fast and loose with memorizing. Forget a line and it may be slightly embarrassing, but everyone does it and you just do another take. Forget your lines onstage and you have a serious problem.

I’ve been memorizing lines the same way I did when I was nine
years old and appearing in local theater in Ohio. No one taught me, I had no special tips, I just did what I did through trial and error. Read the line, cover it with my hand, try to remember it, remove my hand and check my success. Pretty rudimentary, but this method got me through a lot of movies.

But when Sorkin casually mentioned that Kaffee has as many lines as Hamlet, I figured I better step up my game. I tried a method that Allison Janney used each day on
The West Wing
. Supposedly she picked it up from a friend who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company. With this new method, I had this massive part down cold within three weeks, working every day in twenty-minute blocks, four or five times a day.

Here’s how it works:

Take a piece of paper and pen. After reading the line you need to memorize, write the line out
using only the first letter of every word
. Include all punctuation. For example, here’s Kaffee’s big courtroom speech to Colonel Jessup that begins the famous “You can’t handle the truth” sequence:

KAFFEE

Your Honor, these are the telephone records from GITMO for July 6th. And these are 14 letters that Santiago wrote in nine months requesting, in fact begging, for a transfer off the base.

(to Jessup)

Upon hearing the news that he was finally being transferred, Santiago was so excited, that do you know how many people he called? Zero. Nobody. Not one call to his parents saying he was finally getting out. Not one call to a friend saying can you pick me up at the airport. He was asleep in his bed at midnight, and according to you he was getting
on a plane in six hours, and everything he owned was folded neatly in a footlocker and hanging neatly in a closet. You were leaving for one day and you packed a bag and made three phone calls. Santiago was leaving for the rest of his life, and he hadn’t packed a thing, and hadn’t called a soul. Can you explain that?

(pause)

The fact is, Santiago wasn’t going anywhere, isn’t that right, Colonel?

If you were to stumble during this one, the play would be over.

Here’s how it should look using the memory technique:

KAFFEE

Y h, t a t t r f GITMO f J 6th. A t a 14 l t S w i n m r, i f b, f a t o t b.

(to Jessup)

U h t n t h w f b t, S w s e, t d y k h m p h c? Z. N. N o c t h p s h w f g o. N o c t a f s c y p m u a t a. H w a i h b a m, a a t y h w g o a p i s h, a e h o w f n i a f a h n i a c. Y w l f o d a y p a b a m t p c. S w l f t r o h l, a h h p a t, a h c a s. C y e t?

(pause)

T f i, S w g a, i t r, C?

By writing it out you add an additional brain function. By reducing the word to one letter, you are programming your brain beyond what you would if you wrote the full word. When finished, you have a
one-letter cue to help your memory, but your mind still needs to fill in the word. It is a perfect mix of being prompted and having to struggle. I found it reduces memorization time by half. At least.

Unfortunately, it didn’t help me on opening night.

We had been whizzing through previews with full houses and a great response. The whole cast was on fire, and I was confident and ready for our opening, where, unlike Broadway, all the critics would come to that one performance (in New York they could attend any show during the preview period). This makes the stakes higher. The play’s future is judged on one single show.

Weird, but good, things were happening all night. At one point the circular emblem on the judge’s lectern fell to the stage with a loud thud in the middle of a scene. It then rolled ridiculously slowly all the way across the stage while both the cast and audience stared at it. I walked over, picked it up and reattached it in front of the judge.

“I believe this is yours, Your Honor,” I ad-libbed. The audience applauded.

In the middle of the second act there was a moment that we had never quite executed. It was nothing overly dramatic, just a crisp exchange between me and the actor playing Corporal Kendrick. For the first time since we began rehearsing almost six weeks previously, he and I got it right. There was a nice reaction from the crowd. He and I stole a quick smile at each other.

This night of “happy accidents” going our way, I allowed myself a private moment of acknowledging how well the show was going. This while in the middle of a cross-examination scene.

When actors get too comfortable onstage, it can be dangerous. They are in peril of being on a kind of autopilot. You might suddenly think, “Oh shit! I forgot to call my brother back last night!” right in the middle of delivering a monologue. It is always a fatal mistake.

Suddenly I was aware of my fellow actor staring at me, pop-eyed. Beads of sweat sprouted across his brow. Quickly, I understood his horror. In the split second I had taken my mind off the scene, I had jumped almost
four pages
ahead! This was problematic because those four pages contained vital plot points crucial to the play’s outcome. Although no one in the packed opening-night crowd knew it, I had just fucked up the entire show.

As it does in all horrifying events, time slowed to a crawl. My fellow actor’s face was now drenched in sweat. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the rest of the cast in the courtroom, stealing glances at each other, trying to hide their rising panic.

Years ago, hosting
Saturday Night Live
, I blew the setup for a punch line that Phil Hartman had that would end our scene. Without the setup, there was no joke; without the joke there was no ending to the scene. We were live, and we were screwed. But the late, great Phil looked me in the eye like, “Dude. Easy does it. We got this,” and guided me through an ad-libbed improv to an even better joke than the one that had been written. It took this near miss to learn an important lesson of acting live. The audience doesn’t know you’ve screwed the pooch until you show them you have. So don’t.

I gave the actor sitting in the witness box the look Phil Hartman gave me. I then stopped the scene cold and walked to the absolute front of the stage. Now I could
really
feel the other actors trying not to freak out. I milked the moment; I let the silence play out until it was painful. I used the time to plot my way back into the scene, to focus on the story points I needed to get to. But because I did it with purpose and confidence, making this long beat part of my performance, it played.

“Mr. Kendrick, I want to take a moment to circle back on a few items.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then, slowly, I wove my way back to the text. Soon I had folded all the information needed into my improv. I could tell that no one in the house had any clue about what had happened.

“No further questions, you may step down,” I finished, turning away from the audience and facing my upstage cast mates. I made a cartoon face of “Holy fucking shit!” to them as I approached, but I was also feeling that unique adrenaline-fueled victory that only comes from competing in the public arena. I felt even better when I learned that Sorkin had missed the whole thing. He was calming his nerves with a cigarette at the time, which will go down in history as the world’s most healthy smoke. Because sitting through my line-bungle adventure would’ve given him a heart attack.

You really do see it all during a long run of a show in the theater. Not just blown cues but other things as well.

Apparently, it is well-known within the West End theater community that there is a notorious couple that likes to have sex right there in the audience. I had originally called bullshit on this tale, figuring it was a chance for the all-British cast to “have a go” at the Yankee interloper.

Then came a rudimentary midweek matinee.

In the better theaters in London, there is always a special, private box reserved for the queen. Most of the time it is either empty or sold to VIPs. On this particular day I noticed in passing that it was occupied by an attractive young couple (I was always aware of who was in the house for any given performance).