Authors: Jerry Stiller
by Brooks Atkinson
Let it be said that the production of “The Tempest” is an improvement on “Julius Caesar,” and has several things to recommend it…. Best of all, Roddy McDowall plays the difficult part of Ariel with genuine skill…. Count also on the credit side Christopher Plummer’s romantic Ferdinand. Mr. Plummer is one who can speak up like a man even when the dialogue is verse. He makes a splendid hero. There is an amusing jester in the Shakespeare idiom by Jerry Stiller. He is small, compact and wide-eyed—all good things in a wag. With Rex Everhart as the drunken butler and with Jack Palance as a clumsy, sinister Caliban, Mr. Stiller manages to play the low comedy scenes with some talent.
Maurice Evans, one of America’s most popular classical actors, now a producer, came backstage after seeing
The Tempest
and offered me my first speaking role in a Broadway show, one scene. T. Hambleton and Norrie Houghton let me out of my obligation to the Phoenix so that I could take part in the new play,
No Time for Sergeants
.
Long story short: I was fired from
No Time for Sergeants
on my first day of rehearsal. The five-day tryout period, which allows a producer five days of rehearsal to decide on a cast change, was finagled in my case. Because I was in only one scene, I was brought in on the fifth day to rehearse.
I never met the cast or sat in on the first read-through. Script in hand, I read my scene with Myron McCormick. When I finished I was told to go home; I wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the day. Upon arriving home, I got a call from my agent (whom I’d acquired in the months since my audition for John Burrell) asking what had happened.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“They let you go.”
I couldn’t believe it. I explained that I never got to rehearse. “I came in on the fifth day.” It seemed so unfair.
No Time for Sergeants
opened on Broadway and made a star of Andy Griffith in the lead role.
The shock of being fired rocked me. Emotionally, I was in Siberia. Anne and I had moved from 11 Cornelia Street in the Village and were now living on West 67th Street in a five-room, sixth-floor walk-up, sharing a bathroom in the hall with a nice family. They had a French name and a Coca-Cola route.
“Sharing the bathroom, you can’t get any closer than that,” Anne said.
We’d moved from a $55 three-room Greenwich Village back apartment with a courtyard to a $65 five-room railroad flat. “Why did we move there?” I asked Anne years later.
“You wanted more space,” she said.
I must have been depressed for weeks. Something happened between Anne and me. We fought over something that neither of us can now remember. The fight seemed to spring out of the realization that our lives were going nowhere.
One night things came to a boil. We couldn’t stand each other, and we decided to split. The question was, who would leave whom, and what would become of our kittens, Squeaky and Sniffles? There was nothing else to be divided.
After hours of talk, Anne said, “I’ll call Dolly”—the actress Dolly Jonah, who had recently split with
her
husband, Norman Fell—“and ask if I can move in with her.” Dolly lived on Bank Street in the Village. Since I had no one to move in with, I agreed. I could also feed the cats.
Anne packed two suitcases with her belongings. It was now about midnight.
“How are you getting downtown?” I asked.
“I’ll take the subway.”
“At this hour?”
“Yeah.”
The subway wasn’t safe. “Let me walk you to the station,” I said.
She agreed.
I carried one of Anne’s suitcases to the 66th Street IRT station. It was very quiet on the street, and I started to worry.
“Let me ride downtown with you.”
“You really want to?” Anne said. “I thought we were breaking up.”
“We are,” I said. “But I’ll ride down with you.”
We arrived at the Christopher Street / Sheridan Square station in the Village. “Let me walk you to Dolly’s. You can’t lug two bags.”
“Okay,” Anne said. “But we are splitting.”
“Yes,” I said, “we can’t go on like this.”
We reached Dolly’s house, a walk-up on Bank Street. We schlepped the bags upstairs, knocked on the door, and Dolly answered. Dolly was a girl we’d both met in Uta Hagen’s acting class, a comedienne brought up in Philadelphia. (Her father had invented the wall panel you see on every light switch.) Dolly was a shoot-from-the-lip person who could say wonderfully caustic things and still make you laugh. She didn’t have a bad bone in her body.
Now Dolly’s raspy voice, exacerbated by cigarette smoking, welcomed Anne, me, and the suitcases. “What, are the two of you moving in? I can only take one. Make up your mind. It’s almost midnight. Why don’t you come inside and have some coffee?”
We couldn’t help laughing.
“Yeah, I’m breaking up with Norman. I know what it’s like. But you two? What’s going on? Drink some coffee,” she said, pouring cups for both of us.
We talked about everything and nothing. It seemed to me that Dolly’s therapy was bringing people’s lives together. People like us. Her own life was another story.
During the next two hours she took no sides. “Do you want to go on together or do you wanna go your separate ways? What’s better for you?” she said, puffing away.
We had been married only three years and things were falling apart. I had just been fired. I had no job. I was so sad I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I figured the only thing that kept our lives afloat was that we were both working, and when the work was gone, so was our marriage.
Could show business be the only reason Anne and I were together? If there was something else, I couldn’t figure out what it was at the time.
Looking back, it was one of the many tests that we were to meet in staying married.
At one point, maybe three in the morning, Dolly said, “I want you two to go back and work it out. I’m kicking you out of here.”
Anne didn’t seem to object, I wasn’t too happy over the prospect of occupying five rooms with two pussycats, and so our marriage was saved, at least temporarily, by Dolly Jonah.
One day soon after, Dolly herself was wavering over whether to marry Will Holt, the wonderful actor/singer/composer with whom she was then doing an act. They played the same circuits Anne and I did, singing Brecht and Weill and Holt’s own compositions. They finally got married. One day Will wrote “Lemon Tree,” and they lived happily ever after until Dolly died. But Dolly was something.
Anne and I never planned a career together. We were dreamers, but there was certainly no Lunt and Fontanne in our dream factory. Certainly not a Burns and Allen comedy act. It was just nice to have a job, and jobs did come our way, but never playing opposite each other in the same show.
After the
No Time for Sergeants
debacle I replaced Eddie Lawrence, the comedian known for his character of the old philosopher, in the long-running smash-hit
The Threepenny Opera
at the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel) on Christopher Street. I played Crook Finger Jake and read a newspaper while guarding a brothel. Lotte Lenya sang “The Black Freighter.” The cast included John Astin, Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Tige Andrews, Jo Wilder, Joe Elic, and William Duell.
I was in the show for thirteen weeks; that allowed me to compile and combine enough weeks for unemployment insurance the following year. Mr. Rector, who worked at the unemployment office in the West 90s, loved actors. He was a genius at combining the twenty weeks of eligibility necessary for collecting unemployment benefits. The laws of the states varied, but Mr. Rector would often read through manuals until he nailed down the rule that would insure us actors our thirty-five bucks a week.
I hated standing in line and waiting to sign up. I felt that everyone would know I was an out-of-work actor. I remembered my mother and father turning down Home Relief during the Depression. They’d battle
each other rather than accept the shame of a handout. Mr. Rector knew that unemployment insurance money was an entitlement that came from what actors had earned, that it wasn’t a dole. He removed the burden of shame.
Being in
The Threepenny Opera,
I decided to show my gratitude. While still working, I paid him a visit at the unemployment office. I said, “Mr. Rector, I’m in a show,
The Threepenny Opera,
down in the Village.”
He said, “Congratulations.”
“I’m inviting you down to see me in it. I’m leaving two tickets for you, all paid for, for the Saturday matinee at the Theater de Lys. Can you make it?”
He thanked me.
“Be sure to say hello after the show,” I said. “I’d like to buy you dinner.”
That afternoon, following the final curtain, I waited for him to come backstage. He never did. I figured he either hated the show, hated me, or both.
Some months later, once more unemployed, I was on Line C, Mr. Rector’s line, to sign up once again. He took out my file and did the paperwork. Finally I said, “Mr. Rector, did you get to see me in the show?”
He said, “No, Jerry. I never see actors when they work. I just like seeing them here.”
Morton DaCosta, the director of
No Time for Sergeants,
told me, “I didn’t cast you, Maurice [Evans] did. I’ll call T. and Norrie at the Phoenix and ask them to take you back.” He was as good as his word, and they did take me back. I appeared in seven of their productions over two seasons. I will forever be grateful to those two world-class mensch-like producers.
The Phoenix Theater brought in two Shakespearean productions from the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford. John Houseman and Norman Lloyd were directing. I got to do Barnadine in
Measure for Measure
and Biondello in
The Taming of the Shrew,
playing alongside Nina Foch, Hiram Sherman, Ellis Rabb, Morris Carnovsky, Arnold Moss, and John Colicos.
All of them could handle verse. I was never entrusted with poetic passages. But playing Shakespearean clowns was becoming my bag, and the clowns never spoke poetically.
When I was at school in Syracuse, Charles Laughton had visited the
university and Sawyer Falk had invited him to conduct a class. Mr. Laughton confided to us that he was turned down by the Old Vic because the bigwigs there said he could not speak in iambic pentameter—a circumstance which had motivated his departure to Hollywood. I found myself wistfully identifying with the great Charles Laughton. Clowns and bumpkins need only speak prose.
At the Phoenix, Norman Lloyd encouraged me to be inventive. As Biondello, I did six pratfalls just walking across the stage once. At dress rehearsal I fell into the orchestra pit, an eight- or nine-foot drop, and was shaken up. Rehearsal stopped.
Norrie Houghton and T. Hambleton had me on the couch in their office.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“We can call a doctor.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“How did this happen?” they both asked.
“Trying to be funny,” I said. “I had a good time on the way down.” A few minutes later I was back onstage and grateful I hadn’t broken anything.
In the summer of 1957 I received a call from Joe Papp, who asked if I’d be willing to join his fledgling New York Shakespeare Festival, touring parks in the five boroughs and ending up in Central Park. “Very little money,” he said. I’d be working off a flatbed truck with a side panel that let down so the truck could open into a stage.
Where’s this glamour I’ve been dreaming about? I asked myself.
Joe offered me Peter in
Romeo and Juliet
and the Porter in the Scottish play, known to playgoers as
Macbeth
. The salary was thirty-five bucks a week, a comedown from the $55 at the Phoenix and the $125 at Stratford, but Joe had a kind of messianic look in his eye. I felt connected to Shakespeare in the Park because of Joe Papp. He was the kind of wild-eyed young guy who had the balls to fight. He’d been a CBS-TV stage manager whose ambition to direct on network television was thwarted by his being blacklisted for his politics. He too was adrift and trying to stay afloat. Central Park to him was the battlefield of Agincourt, and he was Henry V leading his ragged little army in battle against that all-powerful enemy—who turned out to be Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.
Moses opposed performances in the park, one reason being that they
would ruin the grass. Papp overcame Moses’s objections by getting the public behind him.
Our first stop was an amphitheater in Corlears Hook Park, where I had once played softball. I was three minutes from where I had lived in the Vladeck Housing Project, and here I was, wearing a codpiece and leotard, suiting up to do Peter in
Romeo and Juliet
.
The mostly black and Hispanic audience sat silently in the amphitheater. As the sky darkened, actors in Elizabethan attire traipsed on stage carrying torches, recreating the atmosphere of the Globe Theatre in London. From a makeshift tower that tottered precariously, Bryarly Lee crooned to Stephen Joyce, “Romeo, O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Someone with a Spanish accent yelled, “Give it to her, Pepito! Give it to her good!” There was laughing and a couple people yelled, “Hey, shut up.” Shakespeare, born again.
After playing in four of the boroughs the show arrived in Central Park. Critics said we had reinvented Shakespeare. Walter Kerr wrote this nice review in the
New York Herald-Tribune
.
New York Herald-Tribune
“‘Romeo and Juliet’ Opens City Tour in Central Park”
June 28, 1957
by Walter Kerr
… There is a further small miracle to report. That lout Peter is funny. Peter is the go-between who is unable to read the messages he is supposed to deliver and who is not a bit quick to defend the Nurse’s honor. You probably remember him. I doubt, however, that you have ever really laughed at him. In Jerry Stiller’s playing, the long-buried comedy of the role rises easily and lightly to a surface bubble, then happily explodes. Nor is this a matter of added “trick” business; we have finally—and simply—met the character.