Authors: Jerry Stiller
Anne’s performance that night was remarkable. Joyce’s words were no longer book stuff. Anne’s reading filled the theater with sensuality.
God
, I thought,
is that Anne talking or is it Molly Bloom?
Molly’s fantasies affirm every Jewish mother’s admonition about boys who marry Gentile women. Suddenly I was Leopold Bloom, asleep next to Molly.
I was watching Anne turn on the world, and it was okay.
When the reading ended at 3
A.M.
—“Yes I said Yes I will Yes”—the viewers and listeners, some of whom had followed the text on their laps, disappeared into the night.
“You were wonderful,” I told my wife.
“Was I? I lost my place a couple of times.”
“I never noticed it.”
“I did it in less than three hours.”
“I don’t care. You got me excited,” I said.
A week later I was in Baltimore shooting the film
Hairspray
. I ordered room service and turned on the TV.
Charles Kuralt’s
Sunday Morning
billboard cited “Bloomsday” along with George Abbott’s one-hundredth-birthday celebration. The wide-angle shot showed Malachy McCourt, David Margulies, John Rubinstein, Stephen Lang. No Anne. I began to get nervous. I remembered watching the TV crew during Anne’s reading. There had seemed to be technical difficulties. The sound people were suddenly talking to one another. My worst fears were that they had somehow run out of juice after seven hours, and Anne’s stuff would not be on the air.
As Charles Kuralt was about to wind up the segment, he said, “Last came Anne Meara reading, for three hours, Molly Bloom.”
A long shot of Anne. The camera dollied in, and Anne’s face was now clearly in view during the final speech. “Yes,” she said about her willingness to love the man lying next to her. “Yes” again. The word “Yes” was like a drumroll. In my mind she was telling her people, my people, everyone, that I was her man. Her voice was saying all of that through Joyce. She’s my Molly, I’m her Leopold.
I suddenly thought,
This marriage is beginning to work out.
At that moment I felt close to Anne personally, but careerwise it was clear that what I wanted to achieve as an actor was no longer connected
to her. Our paths had taken us in different directions. In mid-1985 I had recently come off what I felt was my best work, playing Tamkin in the screen adaptation of Saul Bellow’s
Seize the Day
. The chance to play this role had come two weeks after I had agreed to play a bit part in the same film. The cast included Robin Williams as Tommy Wilhelm. When the producer, Robert Geller, a winner of several Peabody awards and producer of the award-winning PBS
American Short Story
, called to ask if I’d be willing to read for Tamkin, I could feel excitement fill me. The audition for director Fielder Cook and Chiz Schultz turned into a performance. That night I was told the role was mine, with rehearsals beginning the next day. The rehearsal ritual was at best a familiarization process, with me stumbling, script in hand. Robin and I were chosen so that Bellow’s remorseful characters would somehow have a comic edge to lift them from the somberness of the novella. Williams’s poignancy was heightened by a sense of his being a decent
nebbish
. Tamkin is a self-licensed psychoanalyst and amateur inventor who preys on troubled and naive minds. He entices Tommy into a commodities scheme while treating him as a patient. The role is wonderful. Cook’s direction was to keep Bellow’s work dramatically alive by showing Tommy caught in a web of uncertainty in his desperate search for security.
The message of the film was “Seize the Day,” live in the now, this moment.
Seize the role
, I whispered to myself. Do it, grab the golden ring. I was aware that this opportunity was not accidental. I had made steps in my work. Someone other than myself thought I could play this role. I asked myself if I could cut it. I was alone with Robin in scenes that ran whole pages.
In one of the scenes, set in a restaurant, Tamkin’s greed and gluttony become apparent to Tommy.
The table was filled with food.
“I want you to eat during this scene,” Fielder said. I rebelled against the eating. I could have played the scene convincingly without eating the food but I listened to Cook.
“I want you to eat with your hands, do everything, gorge yourself. Go to the moon with this. I want you to go all out, the bigger the better.”
Bellow’s script has Tamkin, a hog of a man, shoveling pot roast and red cabbage into his mouth and biting huge chunks of watermelon as he psychoanalyzes Tommy with unerring accuracy. Between the lines I dunked chunks of French bread into my soup and stuffed them into my
mouth. My fingers were drenched and the soggy bread dripped down my chin. “Perfect,” Fielder said.
For me, the shoot was three weeks of bliss. The best of the best were all at the screening, including Glenn Close, Bill Hickey, Chris Walken, and Jack Rollins, who was now Robin Williams’s manager. When the film ended, I could feel my entire life, my hopes and my dreams, at that moment made worthwhile. It validated me in the eyes of everyone who had ever hired me—on some intuition that someday I’d be someone. I remembered Morris Carnovsky’s words to me: “Someday I’ll pay money to see you.” I remembered Jerome Moross, who composed “The Golden Apple,” saying “Someday …” and my Uncle Charlie, at my Bar Mitzvah saying, “Someday, you’ll play the Roxy.” I wanted to cry. I was asked to stand up. I stood up and took a bow as my peers applauded. Anne embraced me.
Was that me?
I asked myself. I’d never need to act again; I told myself I’d done it, I’d proved it. It was a lock on my life. It didn’t matter what would happen to this picture. They could play it in a schoolroom. I didn’t want any more than this. I suddenly felt all my jealousies of fellow performers dissolving. I pictured critics who had been unscathing in their criticism of me suddenly having anxiety attacks in the middle of the night and printing retroactive apologies for being overly critical of my work.
Director Fielder Cook, whom I love to this day, then made an impassioned plea to the audience that the movie should not become lost forever in public television. It should have a theatrical run. Roger Ebert wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times
about the screening of Seize the Day at the 1986 Telluride Film Fest:
TELLURIDE
, Colo. Saul Bellow is one of the great novelists of his era, but that certainly hasn’t brought Hollywood knocking at his door.
The premiere here this weekend of
Seize the Day
, an intense tragicomedy starring Robin Williams, Joseph Wiseman, and Jerry Stiller, marks the first time a Bellow novel has been filmed. Although many Bellow novels have been on the bestseller lists, not even a star with Jack Nicholson’s clout has been able, after ten years of trying, to find financing for a movie version of Henderson the Rain King.
Even now that
Seize the Day
has been filmed, it seems headed for television instead of the big screen. In the case of
Seize the Day
, there’s
the added possibility that a theatrical run could win Oscar consideration for Jerry Stiller’s supporting performance, his best film work in a long time, as the con-man who steers the hero into the stock market.
My own feelings were that no matter what happened to the film, I had met Robert Geller, a great filmmaker who believed in me, and somehow I had been fortunate enough to work with a comedic genius in the person of Robin Williams. Robin had given of himself to me in every conceivable way. His purity, his creative fairness, allowed me to be the character fully and truly. What a mensch. “Don’t be afraid,” he’d whisper before each big scene. I wanted to kiss him. This man, whose talent was so big it extended to the moon, could also share the aesthetic pie.
Alas, my thought that I never need act again after
Seize the Day
was short-lived. I was asked to play a role in
Hairspray
, which was filming in Baltimore, director John Waters’s hometown. Sonny Bono and Deborah Harry were also in the film.
I agreed to do Wilbur Turnblad, the husband of Divine. Pia Zadora played a ‘60s beatnik and Ricki Lake played my daughter. The word “crossover film” was heard in the industry. The script had all the makings of a sleeper.
John Waters introduced himself. He was then forty-one years old. He joked about his pencil-thin mustache. “I think I saw it on some actor in a B-movie and decided to try it,” he told me. He was funny; I liked him. I’d chosen to be here, in a John Waters movie. It was like nothing I’d ever done. Was this a career move? Nothing made sense. You do your best work, and who knows.
Live this moment
, I told myself. Seize the day. I’m in Baltimore in a movie. I’m alive. I’m acting.
“You’ll have fun,” John said. “See you on the set.”
I was getting into costume and makeup when I met Glenn Milstead, known as Divine, for the first time. He too was getting ready to shoot our first scene. He was wearing a housedress and adjusting his wig.
“How’s Anne?” he said in a very soft, womanly voice. I knew immediately we’d be perfect together as husband and wife.
“We’re ready to shoot,” someone said.
The Hardy Har Joke Shop actually exists. It’s in a blue-collar area and sells things like dribble glasses and cans of doggy-doo. That day, it had been commandeered for a shoot. I sensed this was Waters’s favorite
scene. He worked with childlike enthusiasm. He confided that the Hardy Har owner had been told to put a stop to the selling of snot. He hadn’t been given a reason. But the owner said he could get a fresh shipment if someone needed it right away. John put his hand up to his nostril as if to demonstrate.
“Do you want to meet the guy?” Waters asked.
“I’d rather not,” I said apologetically. “I always feel a little funny about meeting people I play.”
“I understand,” Waters said.
Divine, Ricki Lake, and I squeezed tightly in a doorway as the last-minute lighting changes were made. The scene deals with Divine and myself—mama and papa—describing the wonders of the whoopie cushion to our recalcitrant daughter, whose ambitions lie in other areas.
“Lock it up,” said Dave Iselin, the cinematographer.
“Speed. Sound rolling. Action,” Waters said.
The six-week shoot was fun. Lots of location shots around the city. The Baltimoreans lined the streets awaiting Divine’s entrance. When we emerged from a trailer, the mostly blue-collar fans applauded. It was like a Hollywood movie, only on the other side of the tracks.
When we wrapped, the cast and crew had a final lunch together. A nice party. Divine and I sat next to each other.
“I can’t wait to meet Anne in New York,” he said. “I’d love to meet her. We’ll have to get together.
“I’m so nervous,” he said. “I’m going to Salt Lake City tomorrow to do my act for the Mormons. I know they’re going to stone me.”
“Not at all,” I reassured him. “They’ll want to laugh. If you have any problems just say you’re a friend of Donny and Marie.”
“What do you mean ‘friend’? I’m one of them: Donny, Marie, and Divine Osmond.”
About a year later the film was released. John asked me to do some publicity, so I shuttled to and from radio shows, touting
Hairspray
. The film was selling out, and I was staggered by the reaction. At a press screening, I was upset at the silences during most of the film. My scene demonstrating a whoopie cushion to Ricki Lake had been cut. When the screening ended, I’d escaped to the street and walked up Broadway to our office. Why had they cut the scene? was all I could think about.
I was also preoccupied with the results of a recent sigmoidoscopy. Doctor Belsky had found polyps and now recommended a colonoscopy,
which was to take place in a few days. For two weeks I had avoided calling for an appointment because of fear that the polyps might be malignant. I had not told Anne of having to go in to have polyps removed. I’d deliberately set the appointment for the week she would be in Los Angeles doing
Hollywood Squares, Alf, and Win, Lose, or Draw
, plus writing a script on spec for Bette Midler.
Deep within, I knew I was clean, and that message in itself became powerful for me. I had safely kept Anne away from the polyp situation until just before she left. She’d opened the mail on our bureau and come across instructions for the colonoscopy.
I berated myself for not hiding the instructions, and attributed it, rightly or wrongly, to wanting her to discover what was going on. She looked at me in a soft, pained way.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. “Why do we have to play games? This macho shit doesn’t work. It’s an insult.”
I knew she was right and that I was very lousy at pulling it off.
“When do you do this?”
“Next Monday. It’s done in an office, not a hospital, so it can’t be too bad. You’ll be on the Coast. I’m okay, I know it.”
Sunday morning, Anne left for L.A. and I prepared for my procedure the next day. No food for twenty-four hours.
I also squeezed in the press lunch for Divine at
Spy
magazine. I arrived at
Spy
headquarters. The room was filled with people. Most were gay. At two separate tables sat Divine and John Waters. The tables were crammed with food. I could see breads, salads, and wine. I was getting hungry. Waters saw me and stood up and gave me a big hug. Divine, at his own table, sat there smiling. A ridge of blond hair circling his scalp gave him the appearance of a Trappist monk. My own hair had turned pink. It had not been dyed in a month and had oxidized.
“What happened to your hair?” Waters asked.
“It’s pink. It’s changing color as you watch it,” I said. The line seemed appropriate for
Hairspray
, I thought.
“Stick around,” John said. “Have some lunch.”
“I can’t,” I said.
A part of me wanted to say, “I’m having my polyps removed in a couple of hours. I hope they’re benign.” Just to see his reaction. I held back the temptation. The party was on a high.
John said, “
Time
magazine gave us a great review. So did
New York
magazine.”