Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (66 page)

Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in fleabags,
abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters and on tenement rooftops, he shared
and wallowed in the nature and filth and degradation of the empty men of
his times.

For six weeks he
was
a tramp, a thoroughly washed-out hopeless
rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied hands and a weak bladder.

One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first day of casting for
Sweet Miracles,
the Monday of the seventh week, Richard Becker
arrived at the Martin Theatre, where he auditioned for the part in the
clothes he had worn for the past six weeks.

The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances, and Richard
Becker won the Drama Critics' Circle Award as the finest male performer of
the year. He also won the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of
the year.

He was twenty-two years at the time.

The following season, after
Sweet Miracles
had gone on the road,
Richard Becker was apprised, through the pages of
Variety,
that
John Foresman & T. H. Searle were about to begin casting for
House
of Infidels,
the new script by Odets, his first in many years. Through
friends in the Foresman & Searle offices, he obtained a copy of the
script, and selected a part he considered massive in its potentialities.

The role of an introspective and tormented artist, depressed by the level
of commercialism to which his work had sunk, resolved to regain an
innocence of childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his hands in
a foundry.

When the first night critics called Richard Becker's conception of Tresk,
the artist, "a pinnacle of thespic intuition" and noted, "His authority in
the part led members of the audience to ask one another how such a
sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a foundry-worker,"
they had no idea that Richard Becker had worked for nearly two months in a
steel stamping plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on
House
of Infidels
suspected Richard Becker had once been in a terrible fire,
for his hands were marked by the ravages of great heat.

After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two characterizations that
were immediately ranked with the most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever
witnessed, Richard Becker's reputation began to build a legend.

"The Man Who is The 'Method,'" they called him, in perceptive articles
and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, when questioned,
remarked that Becker had never been a student, but had the occasion
arisen, he might well have paid him to attend. In any event, Richard
Becker's command of the Stanislavski theory of total immersion in a part
became a working example of the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher
and stammerer, on a stage Richard Becker
was
the man he pretended
to be.

Of his private life little was written; he let it be known that if he was
to be totally convincing in a characterization, he wanted no intrusive
shadow of himself to stand between the audience and the image he offered.

Hollywood's offers of stardom were refused, for as
Theatre Arts
commented in a brief feature on Richard Becker:

"The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of footlights would be
dimmed and turned two-dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker's art
is an ultimate distillation of truth and metamorphosis that requires the
reality of stage production to retain its purity. It might even be noted
that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions, as opposed to the merely
craftsmanlike three of his contemporaries. Surely no one could truly
argue with the fact that watching a Becker performance is almost a
religious experience. We can only congratulate Richard Becker on his
perceptiveness in turning down studio bids."

The years of building a backlog of definitive parts (effectively ruining
them for other actors who were condemned to play them after Becker had
said all there was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a
Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications of Shakespeare
… a fiery Southern segregationist whose wife reveals her octoroon
background … a fast-talking salesman come to grips with futility
and cowardice … a many-faceted Marco Polo … a dissolute and
totally amoral pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own
sister into evil … a ruthless politician, dying of cancer and
senility …

And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken, the re-creation, in
the play by Tennessee Williams, of the deranged religious zealot, trapped
by his own warring emotions, into the hammer-murder of an innocent girl.

When they found him, in the model's apartment off Gramercy Place, they
were unable to get a coherent story of why he had done the disgusting act,
for he had lapsed into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating
about the blood of the lamb and the curse of Jezebel and the eternal fires
of Perdition. The men from Homicide East numbered among their ranks a
rookie, fresh to the squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the
fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny kitchenette; he
became violently ill, and was taken from the apartment a few minutes
before Richard Becker was led away.

The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him onstage, and the
jury did not even have to be sent out to agree on a verdict of insanity.

After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put on the stands, he
was not sane, and he was certainly no longer Richard Becker, the actor.

For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room 16 was a constant
involvement. He was unable to divorce himself from the memory of a night
three years before, when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry
Miller Theatre and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as the comical
Tosspot in that season's hit comedy,
Never a Rascal.

He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape and form of the
actor who had so immersed himself in The Method that for a time, in three
acts, he
was
a blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a
penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it onstage) "barratry
on the low seas!" Separate them from this weird and many-faceted creature
that lived its many lives in the padded cell numbered 16? Impossible.

At first, there had been reporters, who had come to interview the Good
Doctor in charge of Becker's case; and to the last of these (for Dr.
Tedrow had instituted restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said,
"To a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important. He was very
much a man of his times; he had no real personality of his own, with the
exception of that one overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world
around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the word. The world
gave him his personality, his attitudes, his façade and his reason
for existence. Take those away from him, clap him up in a padded cell—as
we were forced to do—and he begins to lose touch with reality."

"I understand," the reporter had inquired carefully, "that Becker is
re-living his roles, one after another. Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?"

Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man, and his fury at
this remark, revealing as it did a leak in the sanitarium's security, was
unlike him. "Richard Becker is undergoing what might be called, in
psychiatric terms, 'induced hallucinatory regression.' In his search for
some reality, there in that room, he has fastened onto the method of
assuming characters' moods he had played onstage. From what I've been able
to piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going back: from the
most recent to the next and the next and so on."

The reporter had asked more questions, had made more superficial and
phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr. Charles Tedrow had concluded the
interview forcibly.

But even now, as he sat across from Richard Becker in the quiet office, he
knew that almost nothing the reporter had conceived could rival what
Becker had done to himself.

"Tell me, Doctor," the florid, bombastic traveling salesman who was
Richard Becker asked, "what the hell's new down the line?"

"It's really very quiet, these days, Ted," the physician replied. Becker
had been this way for two months now: submerged in the part of Ted Rogat,
the loudmouth philandering protagonist of Chayefsky's
The Wanderer.
For six months before that he had been Marco Polo, and before that the
nervous, slack-jawed and incestuous son of
The Glass of Sadness.

"Hell, I remember one little chippie in, where was it, oh yeah, hell yes!
It was K.C., good old K.C. Man, she was a
goodie!
You ever been to
K.C., Doc? I was a drummer in nylons when I worked K.C. Jeezus, lemme tell
ya—"

It was difficult to believe the man who sat on the other side of the table
was an actor. He looked the part, he spoke the part, he
was
Ted
Rogat, and Dr. Tedrow would catch himself from time to time contemplating
the release of this total stranger who had wandered into Richard Becker's
cell.

He sat and listened to the story of the flame-hipped harlot in Kansas City
whom Ted Rogat had picked up in an Armenian restaurant, and seduced with
promises of nylons. He listened to it, and knew that whatever else was
true of Richard Becker, this creature of many faces and many lives, he was
no saner than the day he had killed that girl. After eighteen months in
the sanitarium, he was going back, back, back through his acting career,
and re-playing the roles; but never once coming to grips with reality.

In the plight and the flight of Richard Becker, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw a
bit of himself, of all men, of his times and the thousand illnesses to
which mortal flesh was heir.

He returned Richard Becker, as well as Ted Rogat, to the security and tiny
world of room 16.

Two months later he brought him back and spent a highly interesting three
hours discussing group therapy with Herr Doktor Ernst Loebisch,
credentials from the Munich Academy of Medicine and the Vienna Psychiatric
Clinic. Four months after that, Dr. Tedrow got to know the surly and
insipid Jackie Bishoff, juvenile delinquent and hero of
Streets of
Night.

And almost a year later—to the day—Dr. Tedrow sat in his
office with a bum, a derelict, a rheumy-eyed and dissipated vagabond who
could only be the skid from
Sweet Miracles,
Richard Becker's first
triumph, twenty-four years before.

What Richard Becker might look like, without camouflage, in his own body,
Tedrow had no idea. He was, now, to the most agonizing scrutiny, the seedy
old tramp with the dirt caked into the sagged folds of his face.

"Mr. Becker, I want to talk to you."

Hopelessness shined out of the old bum's eyes. There was no answer.

"Listen to me, Becker. Please listen to me, if you're in there somewhere,
if you can hear me. I want you to understand what I'm about to say; it's
very important."

A croak, cracked and forced, came from the bum's lips, and he mumbled, "I
need'a drink, yuh go' uh drink fuh me, huh …"

Tedrow leaned across, his hand shaking as he took the old bum's chin in
his palm, and held it fixed, staring into this stranger's eyes. "Now
listen to me, Becker. You've got to hear me. I've gone through the files,
and as far as I can tell, this was the first part you ever played. I don't
know what will happen! I don't know what form this syndrome will take
after you've used up all your other lives. But if you can hear me, you've
got to understand that you may be approaching a crisis point in your—in
your life."

The old bum licked cracked lips.

"
Listen!
I'm here, I want to help you, I want to
do
something for you, Becker. If you'll come out for an instant, just a
second, we can establish contact. It's got to be now or—"

He left it hanging. He had no way of knowing
if-what.
And as he
lapsed into silence, as he released the bum's chin, a strange alteration
of facial muscles began, and the derelict's countenance shifted, subtly
ran like mercury, and for a second he saw a face he recognized. From the
eyes that were no longer red-rimmed and bloodshot, Dr. Charles Tedrow saw
intelligence peering out.

"It sounds like fear, Doctor," he said.

And, "Goodbye, once more."

Then the light died, the face shifted once again, and the physician was
staring once more at the empty face of a gutter-bred derelict.

He sent the old man back to room 16. Later that day, he had one of his
male nurses take in an 89-cent bottle of muscatel.

"Speak up, man! What in the name of God is going on out there?"

"I—I can't explain it, Dr. Tedrow, but you'd better—you'd
better get out here right away. It's—it's, oh, Jee-zus!"

"What
is
it? Stop crying, Wilson, and tell me what the hell is
wrong!
"

"It's, it's number 16 … it's …"

"I'll be there in twenty minutes. Keep everyone away from that room. Do
you understand? Wilson? Do you understand me?"

"Yessir, yessir. I'll—oh Christ-hurry up, Doc …"

He could feel his pajama pants bunched around his knees, under his slacks,
as he floored the pedal of the ranch wagon. The midnight roads were jerky
in the windshield and the murk that he raced through was almost too
grotesque to be a fact of nature.

When he slewed the car into the drive, the gatekeeper threw the iron
barrier back almost spastically. The ranch wagon chewed gravel, sending
debris back in a wide fan, as Tedrow plunged ahead. When he screeched to a
halt before the sanitarium, the doors burst open and the senior attendant,
Wilson, raced down the steps.

"This way, th-this way, Doctor Te—"