Authors: Jerry Stiller
“You’re casting me on the phone?”
“You’re Artie. I’ll send you the script.”
The idea of being cast by the hottest director on Broadway without having to read blinded me.
Greg Mosher had called a week earlier and asked if I would be willing to read for him and David Mamet for
Glengarry Glen Ross
. I hated having to audition. I hadn’t seen either script, but Mike was now an icon. So I called and bowed out of
Glengarry
, disappointing Greg.
Two weeks passed, and I still had not received a script of
Hurlyburly
, or a confirming phone call to my agent. I was getting very uneasy and I finally worked up enough nerve to call Mike and ask if this was for real and when would I get the script.
“You’ll be getting it. We’ve lined up Chris Walken, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, and Cynthia Nixon. You’re set.”
I was dazzled to be part of this assemblage of the hottest talent on the block. Show business. Lots of crazy twists. One minute down, the next up. Mike Nichols wants me. “You’re the Jew” was ringing in my ears.
David Rabe’s long script arrived. It was two months prior to the start of rehearsals. I fought my way through it and found myself falling asleep. The characters made no sense. It suddenly occurred to me that everyone in the play was on drugs.
My part was that of Artie, a third-rate hack writer who makes his entrance delivering as a present to Walken and Hurt a “CARE package”—a sixteen-year-old nymphet who’d been living in a hotel elevator. This creep I’d be playing so repulsed me that I had to ask myself what Nichols saw in me as an actor that allowed him to cast me for the role without even a reading. I was equally upset at myself for not asking to see the script first before agreeing to play the role.
The other characters, I soon noted, were no better in their lifestyles than Artie. I found myself wondering how I would be perceived in this lowlife role. Rabe’s writing probed into places I was not comfortable with. I had to examine what kind of human being could deliver a teenager as a sexual present and still live with himself. I then had to ask myself why I’d want to play this Artie. Rabe had written a modern-day morality play.
We started rehearsing at the Manhattan Theatre Club, on East 74th Street. At the first reading, Judith Ivey knew all her lines. She never referred to the script. I had attempted to learn mine, but I never imagined I’d know them by rote at a first reading. I felt left in the dust.
Welcome to the brave new world of theater, I told myself. The fact that no one else except Judith knew his or her lines didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. The last time I’d encountered this unease was when I’d played the Second Murderer in
Richard III
for Joe Papp, and a newcomer from Missouri named George C. Scott knew every word at the first reading. It was a shock. I’d asked myself if Scott was for real and if he’d be able to pull it off in performance. He did.
The rehearsals of
Hurlyburly
—in which we just sat and read—went on for two weeks. Mike explained we were trying to understand the play. At times we were comatose, just reading it over and over.
“Let’s all have some pizza,” Mike would say. We were not under any pressure. There was no opening date, he said.
In my memory, as we read and reread the play, we became bored, then angry, at the slowness of the gestation process. The anger started to overflow into the relationships between the characters in the play.
One day Harvey Keitel offered me a ride home in his car. Harvey played Phil, a sociopath who was on a collision course with Eddie, the William Hurt character. As we kept driving toward the West Side, Harvey started discussing the play and his character. It soon dawned on me that Phil was enlisting Artie as his ally against Eddie. We were no longer Jerry and Harvey driving home, we were Artie and Phil in a sociopathic triangle
with Eddie. So much for not taking a cab. I was also learning a lot about Jerry Stiller. All the personal bilge that existed in my own cellar was beginning to manifest itself during the car ride.
Hurlyburly
was going deep.
Nichols was in constant search for what he called “The Joke.” “What’s The Joke in the scene?” he would ask. I learned that The Joke did not mean funny, like a piece of business, but making sense of the scene. This, to Mike, was The Joke.
Once we were on our feet, the relationship between me, Chris Walken, and Bill Hurt started to internalize. “You’re the Jew” slowly became clear. I was suddenly in touch with the part of me that hated myself and my being Jewish, feelings that were unconscious but not inaccessible. And I knew that I’d been cast in a role which, if played truthfully, was that of a parasitic, untalented piece of
dreck
.
To survive, amoral Artie has to make it with the
goyim
. No more perfect pair ever existed to accommodate Artie’s neurosis than Bill Hurt and Chris Walken as Eddie and Mickey. My bestowing a sexual gift was the equivalent of what the actor and teacher Michael Chekhov described as the psychological gesture.
All of this character-probing was overwhelming my capacity to perform freely. Had I fully grasped whom I was playing when I jumped into this play? I had no idea it would set off so many unresolved issues in my own life, feelings about my marriage, Judaism, sex, and on and on. Did I really need this? Was this a good career move? What career, I immediately asked myself? Stiller and Meara were no longer performing as a team. Was there a marriage without a career? Before I met Anne I was an actor. And before Anne and I joined hands she wanted to be an actress. The stage was the real bond between us.
Yes, I told myself, I’m still an actor. And as Paul Muni said, “An actor must act.” I could play this guy, but I must find out what in myself would not allow me to play a character I disliked so intensely.
We were now in Chicago rehearsing for our New York run. As we got closer to opening night Mike and David Rabe had opposite views about whether Phil should be allowed to beat up Donna, the sixteen-year-old played by Cynthia Nixon, in full view of the audience. Rabe said it was the way he wrote it. Mike said it would make the audience walk out. Mike agreed to rehearse the scene, but not immediately put it in the performance. A violent argument took place in front of the cast. I thought Mike
might actually get hurt. I felt loyalty toward Mike going back to the first time we met, but couldn’t let Harvey, Bill, and Chris think I was sucking up to the director. Artie and Jerry were intersecting in this drama within the drama.
The next day Mike cut many of my lines. I was shocked. That’ll teach me, I thought. The hammer falls on the loyal subject, I told myself. I’d signed on to this, had given up a shot at
Glengarry
, which by then was a big hit on Broadway and was up for a Pulitzer, and here I was in Chicago in the middle of a pit fight while my role was disappearing.
I wondered if I should quit the show. I asked myself whether I had compromised myself by getting sucked in by the name Mike Nichols. What did this say about me, my desperation? Mike Nichols knew that I was perfect for the role of Artie.
Artie’s character became even more clear when, during a rehearsal of one of my scenes, Mike shouted, “Schmuck bait!” That was The Joke when it came to Artie. A schmuck was, among other things, someone who could be manipulated. Mickey and Eddie tore into this and were now given the handle on how to mind-fuck Artie. They already knew that making it with
goyim
was my subconscious need. Oddly enough, “schmuck bait” was a phrase Mike had used when he and I were in
The Liars
back in the ‘50s.
The night before we opened at the Goodman Theater, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, and Judith Ivey wrote their own feminist version of
Hurlyburly
and Mike threw a party for the cast in his penthouse at the Delaware Towers.
We played four weeks to quiet audiences. At the end of that run, the question of whether we would open in New York had still not been answered. Was this another joke? But after our final performance at the Goodman, while in the van returning to our Chicago hotel for the last time, Mike quietly asked, “Where do you think we should open—on or off Broadway?”
There was a moment of silence. Was he kidding? Were we voting in a bus? What a way to learn that we were actually opening in New York. We threw around names like the Barrymore, the Royale, the De Lys, etc. The final decision came weeks later, when we were back in New York. We were to open at the Promenade, a four-hundred seat Off-Broadway house.
As the New York opening got closer, I became more and more conflicted
with the character I was playing. During the first preview I started blowing my lines. I was in a panic mode. Why was I afraid to play a man who offers the services of a sixteen-year-old girl? After all, it was just a show, and I’m an actor.
I realized that this role was unmasking me. My first performances were ragged. I blew more lines, two nights in a row. I thought Nichols would fire me. He didn’t. I was back on track by the third performance. Had I actually gotten in touch with what was bothering me? My guilt about portraying a bad Jew in front of an audience had blocked me psychologically. At that moment I knew that in taking part in
Hurlyburly
I had learned more about myself by
being
an actor than I’d ever learned about acting. I suddenly started feeling comfortable with Cynthia Nixon, who would lie on the floor with me before our entrance, as if we were together in the elevator. In some way, Cynthia sensed all my angst and was going through it with me. What a nice girl she was. Being in touch with my conflict loosened me up.
We played a couple of sold-out months at the Promenade and then moved to the Barrymore on Broadway, where Ron Silver replaced Chris Walken.
When the show moved uptown, I learned that the audience loved Artie, at least on Saturdays. I was very attractive to the matinee ladies. It inspired Ron Silver to say that on Saturday afternoon the show should be called “Jerry’s Girls.” For some reason amoral Artie had turned into a sex symbol. Those matinee ladies loved me.
Opening night on Broadway brought all my fears to the surface—the fear that I would be unmasked and discovered not as a king but a pretender, that I’d be found unworthy of applause, that failure would bring humiliation to Anne, Amy, and Ben. For the first time in my life I was in touch with those feelings and aware that a play illuminates more than the audience. It also enlightens the actors.
I was aware that I was competing with everyone in the cast, down to sixteen-year-old Cynthia. Next to the rest of them, I felt invisible. So it was a great moment when Enid Nemy, who wrote the Broadway column in The
New York Times
called to say, “I want to do a profile on you for Friday, and Al Hirschfeld wants to do your caricature.”
“How about the others in the show?” I asked.
“We want you,” she repeated.
During the run of
Hurlyburly
I invited my father to come see the show.
“Come see me, Deddy.” He was retired now, after driving the bus for more than twenty years. His enjoyment came from riding free on a bus pass that was good for a lifetime. He and his third wife, Marsha, also a bus-pass recipient, would hop a cross-town bus, ride a couple of stops, change for an uptown. “I can ride anywhere,” he bragged playfully.
They were like world travelers. I’d never seen him so happy.
He made a matinee performance. I knew
Hurlyburly
was not my father’s cup of tea as far as entertainment. He loved comedy. Olson and Johnson’s
Hellzapoppin
’ thrilled him. But this was a chance for my father to see me onstage with some great actors. At the conclusion of the matinee I met him in the lobby.
“I’m gonna take the subway,” he said.
“I can call a cab.”
“No, I’ll take the subway.”
We were walking toward the subway entrance. I waited for some word about the show, my performance. Then, out of the blue, in a non sequitur, he said, “Harvey Kite-le.” He had mispronounced Harvey Keitel’s name; it now had a vaguely Yiddish inflection, to rhyme with
title
.
“Harvey Kite-le,” my father repeated. There was a smile in his voice. He liked saying it: “Harvey Kite-le.”
“You liked him?” I said.
“Very good.” My father had put his stamp of approval on an actor I was working with. He never mentioned me, for which maybe I should be grateful. Zero Mostel once told me, “Don’t ever ask anyone for an opinion of your performance, they’re liable to tell it to you.”
We got to the subway entrance kiosk.
“I’m going up to the Bronx. I got my pass,” he said. He started down the steps, turned to say good-bye, then disappeared onto the platform. I stood for a minute. Why was I hurt? I thought Harvey was fine. Was I jealous?
I remembered the night in the late ‘60s when I introduced my father to disk jockey William B. Williams when Anne and I opened for Charles Aznavour at the Royal Box in New York. The press said we stole the show.
“How do you like your son, Mr. Stiller?” Williams asked.
“He’s okay, but she’s great!”
He was telling the truth. What else did I expect from the man who
took me as a kid to vaudeville and said of a no-talent comic on the bill, “He’s a faker.”
It took years, but I also learned that despite loving Anne onstage he never approved of our marriage. But he never said a word about it to me.
At age ninety-eight he and Marsha, his wife for over twenty years, separated. I had to arrange for him to enter an adult home, a retirement hotel outside the city. He would spend almost five years at the hotel. Between
Seinfeld
shoots in Hollywood, I would visit him. I wanted to close the distance between us.
After each
Seinfeld
, he’d ask, “Jerry, when will I see you again?”
“In a couple of weeks, Deddy. You know I work in California.” I didn’t mention
Seinfeld
. I had never mentioned any of the shows I’d been in since
Hurlyburly
, I had stopped looking for a thumb’s up.