Authors: Jerry Stiller
“Would you like to come to a meeting this Thursday night?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why don’t you keep the Bible.” It was very hard to say I didn’t want a Bible, so I took it.
“Could you make a donation?” she asked.
“How much?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“I can give you ten,” I said.
“We’ll accept that.” She gave me a receipt and a notice of the next meeting. I thanked her. “You’ll be getting
The Watchtower
in the mail,” she said, and as I left she added, “The Jews were the chosen people.”
The next day I was again assigned the Inwood section, but I didn’t have the heart to knock on another door. I ended up going to a movie,
Duel in the Sun
.
The next day another person claimed they had never received their subscriptions. I called the sales manager and said, “We have to talk.”
At the office I said, “I can’t go on selling when people aren’t getting their magazines. Are people getting their magazines?”
“The trouble with you, Jerry, is you ask too many questions.”
“Well, I quit. I can’t sell knowing they’re not getting what they paid for.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna be an actor,” I said. If I could sell magazines I could sell myself.
“You’ll never have a better job,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re leaving.”
So I took the subway down to Greenwich Village wondering what I was getting myself into.
Off-Broadway theater was a new concept in 1947. It wasn’t Broadway, but it was theater. The Cherry Lane, a small, old theater on Barrow Street in the Village, seemed an easy mark. I was sure that there I could find something with no trouble at all.
There was a young fellow outside sweeping the street. He was the producer. I asked if he knew whether they needed actors. “Can you paint scenery? I can’t offer you any money,” he said, “but if you want to make yourself handy, you might also be able to play a couple of roles during the season. I’m the producer.”
Al Hurwitz was a cherubic, sweet-faced guy fresh out of Yale. He led
me into a tree-filled yard and introduced me to a barrel-chested, shirtless man in shorts with a paintbrush in his hand. “This is Rod,” Al said. “This fellow’s going to help you backstage, Rod.” Then he left.
“What’s your name?” Rod asked.
“Jerry,” I told him.
“So you want to be an actor, Jerry?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Have you ever worked in theater?”
“Henry Street,” I said. “I played Hsei Ping Kwei in—”
“Have you ever painted a flat?”
“No.”
“Up and down, up and down. You paint it sideways, it looks like scenery. Up and down, it looks like a wall. This is a dutchman,” he said, running a strip of glue-soaked canvas between two flats. “You paste it over the hinges. That way, the audience doesn’t notice the break in the wall.”
“You’re an actor?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I wondered why anyone with ability would stoop to painting scenery.
“Here,” he said, handing me a paintbrush.
At that point someone yelled, “Rod, telephone for you.”
“Okay, I’m coming,” he yelled back, handing me the brush. “Just remember, Jerry, up and down.”
So Rod Steiger taught me to paint my first flat. He returned a few minutes later, shoving his shirt into his pants. “I gotta go,” he said. “Nice meeting you, Jerry.”
I asked him where he was going.
“I’m playing Christ at the Rooftop Theater.”
The Cherry Lane is losing one hell of a set painter, I thought.
I struck up a friendship with a 6-foot-2 Texan lady while we were both painting. She was several years older and a full eight inches taller than me, but painting scenery must have made me attractive, because one night she invited me to her Greenwich Village flat. As I watched her frying chicken she looked at me with kind, motherly eyes. I was going to be fed before being led into the bedroom.
Her cooking was wonderful. The chicken was heavy with breadcrumbs, dipped in batter, then drowned in hot grease. I kept wondering
what I was doing there and how I got into this. I was an aspiring actor, working on Barrow Street for no money. This was the payoff.
When we finished our chicken, she looked at me languorously. Her lids grew heavy and seemed to say,
Now
. It was my turn to do my stuff. She took me by the hand and led me into the small, darkened bedroom. A cot with a madras spread over a thin mattress loomed in front of me. Her towering body slowly sat, pulling me next to her. I sat, saying nothing, waiting for something to happen. She removed her blouse. I slowly got up and unbuckled my pants. She lay back, pulling off her blue jeans, revealing her panties. Her shoes were off. I was acting as if I knew my way. I was upon her. Her eyes looked at me with the expectancy of a woman experiencing a seasoned lover. It was over before it began. I looked at her sadly and thought,
All that wonderful chicken, and for what?
I finally got on stage that summer in Auden and Isherwood’s
The Dog Beneath the Skin.
I played a guy swinging a little girl on a swing. As I was leaving the theater that night, a man stopped me at the stage door. “I saw you up there on stage,” he said.
“Did you like my performance?” I asked.
“Forget the performance, what happened to those magazine subscriptions you sold me?”
I knew by then that I had to study to learn how to become an actor, so I returned to the Henry Street Settlement Theater and asked Esther Lane for advice.
“Where do I go to become an actor? I got the GI Bill.”
Mrs. Lane said, “Go to Syracuse. They’ve got a wonderful teacher—Sawyer Falk.”
So, in the fall of 1947 I entered Syracuse University. The glut of students on the GI Bill created housing problems. For many months I lived in barracks on the state fairgrounds and had to be bused to and from the campus many miles away.
Auditions were held for a university production of
Blossom Time,
and I went up for the role of Papa Kranz. I was confident, sitting outside the rehearsal room, waiting to read, knowing I would get the part.
The audition was presided over by Professor Frederick Schweppe, a giant of a man whose manner was theatrical in every way. He had toured
for the Shuberts and been a protégé of Mary Garden, the famed opera star. After I’d read a few lines, he broke into a crackling laugh and ran from the room, saying, “I found him!” to everyone on the floor. During the next several weeks, I took courses by day and rehearsed at night, commuting between the fair grounds and the campus.
“Schwep,” as he was affectionately called, teamed Barry Mendelsohn (later known as Julian Barry, who wrote
Lenny
) and myself as the low comics. In rehearsals Schwep would give us stage business that he knew from his early days with the Shuberts. There was a particular shtick he said would guarantee applause if we did it right. Barry and I were to exit the scene imitating a choo-choo train. The whole thing started with my sneezing, saying, “A-Choo!” It built from there, with Barry moving behind me and putting his hands on my hips, after which the two of us, in lock-step, made like a locomotive picking up steam, going “Choo-choo-choo …” Just as Schwep had said, it got great applause.
It was the first time I realized that applause could be manufactured. As Papa Kranz I wore grotesque makeup that included a putty nose, a cutaway coat, and an application of zinc oxide to my hair, which gave it a silvery glow. I penciled my eyebrows to twice the normal size, and in a Viennese accent emphasized each word as if it were a punch line. I exaggerated my walk and hadn’t the slightest feeling of self-consciousness about what I was doing.
We opened, and the downtown Syracuse newspapers said I had stolen the show. Professor Schweppe said I would someday be a star if I continued on the right track. Making me a star was his goal during my three years as an undergraduate at Syracuse. Being “made over” by a teacher was probably the highest form of stroking I’d ever received.
On occasion the professor would take Bernie Piven, Bette Wolf, Carmine Albino, and myself to Kiwanis luncheons, where he’d introduce us as performing students. We’d do ten-minute scenes from
Blossom Time
and then Schweppe himself would do a great rendition of “Old Man River,” which put the audience away. We students each ended up with ten bucks, which made us feel like pros.
He cast me as Gieber Goldfarb, the cab driver, in
Girl Crazy,
at the Civic Theater on Salinia Street. To this day, it remains my most exciting moment on stage. My need was simply to make people laugh, to be another Eddie Cantor. Though my work was praised, I was told by one faculty member that my characterization made fun of Jews. I was hurt, and
protested that Willie Howard and Fanny Brice used Yiddish accents. I just wanted the audience to love me.
In those musicals I learned firsthand what happened to my emotions when I heard an audience laugh. It was like being alive for the first time. My need to hear laughter became addictive. I wasn’t holding back, and the audience loved it. I never looked at the other actors on stage. They didn’t exist. I played everything straight out, and the audience ate it up. I worked with some good people: Sue Benjamin, who became Sue Bennett, the host of a TV show in Boston; Bill Clotworthy, who became the head censor at NBC and later an executive at Benton and Bowles.
Opening night, they gave me two encores for my singing of George and Ira Gershwin’s “But Not for Me.” In the number I did impressions of Chevalier, Peter Lorre, and Jimmy Durante. If only my mother could see me now. The impressions must have been terrible, but I did them all-out. When I went home that night, I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake myself up each time I dozed off. I was reliving my performance. I entertained the thought of having my mother and father come up to Syracuse to see me. The love I was getting onstage had been mind-blowing. I couldn’t wait to do it all over again the next night. The footlights were for me. I’d march out like a conquering soldier, accepting this warm glow that bathed me in love.
Larry Parish, whose father, Mitchell Parish, wrote the songs “Deep Purple” and “Stars Fell on Alabama,” was one of my roommates. Larry knew show business. That night he woke me up to say, “You were great tonight, Jerry.”
Syracuse, the hometown of the Shubert brothers, was reputed to be the toughest show-business town in America, but the next night I again stopped the show. I called my mother and father in New York and told them to take the train up to Syracuse. They arrived on the Empire State Express the following Saturday in time for the matinee.
So, there my parents were in the audience for the Saturday matinee, and I’ll never forget this: It was the first time the audience didn’t laugh. It was like playing in a vacuum. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I did everything the same way, but nothing came back.
When it was over I brought my father and mother backstage and introduced them to the cast and to Professor Schweppe. A pall had fallen over the place, but everyone acted properly, as if at a funeral. The gloom was palpable. I wanted to disappear.
“Let’s go eat,” I said to my parents.
We found a Waldorf cafeteria and grabbed some food. Not many words were spoken. I knew they’d be leaving on the next train, but I wanted to know how they felt, seeing me up there. I didn’t expect much praise, if any, but I was hoping for something.
Finally I asked, “How did you like it?”
My mother looked up and said, “We were sitting behind the Mills Brothers.”
I knew the Mills Brothers were playing at Andre’s, the big-time Syracuse nightclub.
“Did they like the show?” I asked.
“They were asleep,” my mother said.
The Mills Brothers were asleep? They must’ve had a tough night, I thought.
When we finished eating I saw my parents off at the train station and went back to the theater for the evening show.
Schweppe came backstage, his face less bright but not discouraged.
“What happened, Mr. Schweppe?”
He looked at me and said, “It was a matinee. Matinees are different.”
I couldn’t understand why.
I
wasn’t different, but now I could feel a loss of faith in myself. I couldn’t control everything the way I had the night before. At the evening performance, the laughs came back, but not as strong.
My performance in
Girl Crazy
brought me to the attention of Professor Sawyer Falk. He and Professor Schweppe were dramatic opposites. Schweppe was showbiz while Falk was academia. As the first president of the National Theater Conference, Falk had been instrumental in establishing theater as a course in the Syracuse University curriculum, separate from the Speech Department. His leadership set the precedent for drama courses at Yale, Harvard, and Northwestern. The surprising thing for me was to learn that, after watching my performance in
Girl Crazy,
he thought I might one day become an actor. Obviously, he’d missed that matinee.
Falk’s Syracuse class, Drama 101, dealt with the origins of theater in ancient Greece. Sawyer Falk was fluent in Greek. He could speak it, but never did so in front of his students. He kept all his notes in Greek. In class we talked about catharsis, a connection to feelings hidden deep within oneself that rise to the surface while one watches a great play or listens to a great joke.
Oedipus Rex,
Professor Falk kept saying, was a play
you should read every year, because each year you will understand more about its description of the human condition.
The theater was his religion. Soon it was to become mine.
For the first time I understood theater was not just a place to entertain. I learned that theater was a battlefield to capture people’s hearts and minds. I was now reading Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus. Professor Falk used words like
proscenium, perioktoi,
and
stykomythia
. Suddenly I realized theater was not just a place to get laughs, but could also be a way to connect to myself. Professor Falk said that through artistic integrity we’d learn personal integrity. I wondered what this had to do with learning how to act. He had us read Edith Hamilton’s book on Greek mythology, then had us adapt
Hamlet
into a Greek tragedy. Wasn’t this getting heavy?