Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (15 page)

A month later David’s mother started hinting, in the nicest way, that it might be nice if I adopted David and took him to America with me. David was one of eight children. His father was permanently disabled, and the family survived on welfare. His mother wanted David to have a chance in life. I talked it over with Jo and Katie, and they both said it was all right with them. I had the producer make some inquiries. The Irish government said yes, I could adopt David,
but
I would have to wait two years before I could take him out of the country, he would have to keep his own name, and he would have to be raised as a Catholic.

When I got over my anger with the Irish government, I took David for a picnic in the Wicklow Mountains—just the two of us—to find out if he would even want to come with me and live in America. After the most delicate probing, David said, “Naw, I don’t want ta do dat.” And dat was dat.

I had a scene in a pub where I get drunk on Guinness beer. I like beer once in a while, and I tried getting real Guinness down my throat, but it was so heavy and bitter that I just kept spitting it out. The man in charge of props gave me a stein of Coca Cola and then poured an ounce of Guinness on top. It worked.

When September came around, Jo and Katie had to leave for New York so that Katie could start school again. The weather in Ireland had been beautiful all summer, but by the end of October it became consistently dark and rainy, so depressing, that it could have driven a man to drink. If I had been a drinking man, with hardly any money and little opportunity to improve myself, I might have drowned my cares in beer, but under no circumstances would it have been Guinness.

After shedding my manure clothing and exchanging those rags for my New York look—which meant dressing myself in the way that I thought Cary Grant dressed, so that I could fool myself into believing, for a moment when I looked into a mirror, that I looked a little like Cary Grant. I flew back to New York and my reunion with Jo and Katie.

Katie became even more critical of herself and the way she looked. She wasn’t fat—she was just “ten years old chubby.” So was I at her age, and I was ridiculed by a few snotnose kids in grade school who used to call me Fatso. The scar remains.

Katie would ask if I thought she was going to be a fat pig when
she grew up. I told her—and meant it—that I wasn’t worried about her being too heavy; I was worried about her becoming too thin when she grew up. She had no idea what I was talking about. I kept remembering the little love note she handed me on the day we moved into our first home together: “I love Gene. He is thin. He is handsome.” That was when she was only seven and a half. I was a good prophet because when Katie grew up, she was thin and beautiful.

Another pattern started to become a habit. The night before a big exam at school, Katie would beg for help. I tried to reason with her.

“Honey, you can’t cram all this into your head overnight. This is something you needed to study two or three weeks ago, when they told you about the exam.”

“What good is that going to do me now? The test is tomorrow morning.”

“But what about the next time this happens?”

“I don’t care about the next time—I need your help now.”

“But what if the same thing happens next month?”

Then she would start to cry.

“WILL YOU STOP TALKING ABOUT THE NEXT TIME? ARE YOU GOING TO HELP ME OR NOT?”

So, Jo and I would take turns helping her—enough for her to get a passing grade, and to quiet her growing anger.

I’m not a disciplinarian. I understand the need for discipline, of course, but I’m just not good at it. I’m not talking about hitting—I don’t think any parent should ever hit a child—but about setting the rules and sticking by them. How to punish without taking away love—that’s the great art. I wished that I could do it, but I was trapped by the most ironic dichotomy: I was afraid that if I set
rules and drew lines and enforced discipline, Katie would take her love away from me.

Although I liked Roald Dahl’s book
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

“What’s bothering you?”

“When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself . . . but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”

“. . . Why do you want to do that?”

“Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”

Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn’t quite sure about this change.

“You mean—if you can’t do what you just said, you won’t do the part?”

“That’s right,” I answered.

Mel mumbled to himself, “. . . comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay!”

When I got to Munich—where the filming had already begun—Mr. Stuart showed me the entranceway to “Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” I had practiced my forward somersault on a gym mat for three weeks before coming to Munich. The Scenic Department had made three Styrofoam bricks that looked just like cobblestones, which they laid into my entrance walk. That way I wouldn’t have to hit the exact same brick with my pointed cane every time we did the scene. On the day they filmed my entrance, I did the scene four times, in just the way that we had planned. Then Mr. Stuart asked me to do
just one
without the cane. I took a deep breath, swallowed my better instincts, and did the scene without the cane. The next day, David Wolper—the head of the studio—watched the rushes of my entrance. As I was coming out of the commissary after finishing my lunch, Mel Stuart ran up to me.

“He loved it! David loved it!”

“What if he hadn’t loved it?” I asked.

“Well, I would have used that take without the cane.”

It’s not that David Wolper doesn’t have good artistic judgment—he does, and he loved what he saw. But if it had been Joe Levine who was bankrolling the film, I think he probably would have said, “What the hell’s that guy doing with a cane? Where the fuck does it say that Willy What’s-His-Name is a cripple?” I understood better why artistic control is so important to directors.

By the end of November I was glad to get back to New York, but, like most actors, the glow of having just completed a big job wore off quickly and I wondered if I would ever be asked to do another film. I began writing my second screenplay,
Tough Guy
. It was about a B picture movie actor who plays a very cool tough guy, fighting against crooks, but when he comes up against some actual crooks offscreen, it’s a little different. That script was never produced.

I was asked to do publicity in Chicago for the release of
Willy Wonka
. Chicago was only ninety miles from Milwaukee, so I went home to see my father and his new wife, Belle. She and her husband had been good friends with my mother and father before her husband died. After my mother died, my father couldn’t even raise his arm high enough to comb his hair—bursitis, he said—but when he started dating Belle, you’d think he was doing commercials for a hairbrush company.

The night I arrived in Milwaukee, Belle cooked a delicious brisket of beef. The next morning a huge limousine drove up in front of my father’s small house. All the homes in this quiet neighborhood were small, but attractive, middle-class homes. My father couldn’t believe the size of the automobile that was parked in front of his house. He got in, and we were driven to Chicago. He had never ridden in a limousine before.

Paramount Pictures was distributing
Willy Wonka
, and they provided a beautiful suite at the Ambassador East Hotel—home of the famous restaurant, the Pump Room. We weren’t staying in Chicago overnight—the beautiful suite was just for interviews with the journalists. When work was finished, I took my father to dinner at the Pump Room. My stepmother’s daughter and her husband lived in Chicago, so I invited them to join us. It was a beautiful dinner, ending with a flaming dessert—everything paid for by Paramount Pictures. My father couldn’t believe all of this splendor.

I held my father’s hand on the ride home that night. After about half an hour of cheerful bantering back and forth, he got quiet. Then he said, “I always told you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Since you were a little boy, I warned you not to put all your eggs in one basket. Now I’m glad you did.” What I didn’t have the
heart to tell him was that
Start the Revolution Without Me
and
Quackser Fortune
had both failed at the box office, and if
Willy Wonka
also failed, I didn’t know where my next job would come from, or even if there would be a next job.

I took the opportunity of this sweet ride home to ask my father one question that had always bothered me.

“Daddy, you remember when I was sixteen and had just come back from the Reginald Goode Summer Theater and wanted to buy some ham when you stopped at a delicatessen? Why did you put up such a fuss over buying a little piece of ham?”

He took a long pause.

“I was only eleven years old when we came over from Russia. When we settled in Milwaukee my mother used to tell all of us kids that if we ate pork we’d get sick and vomit.”

“But you
did
eat pork.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Whenever we went to Mammy’s Restaurant . . . you and I would always have the spareribs.”

“So?”

“So where do you think spareribs come from?”

“A cow.”

“Daddy, it said on the front of the menu, ‘Pig on the Cob—our specialty.’ ”

“Well—that doesn’t count.”

“Well what about when you made bacon for us on Sunday mornings?”

“Well bacon is different. That’s not really pork.”

“What do you think it is, Daddy?”

He grew silent for awhile; then he said, “Jerry . . . my mother didn’t know from ‘spareribs’ and ‘bacon’—she didn’t even know how to speak English—she only knew about pork chops and
ham. I never thought about getting sick from eating spareribs or bacon because she never said those words.”

I squeezed his hand a little tighter and wished that I had asked my question a little earlier.

The next day I got a call from Woody Allen, at my father’s home in Milwaukee.

“I want to do a remake of
Sister Carrie
,” he said. “I’m thinking of either you or Laurence Olivier in the man’s part, but instead of a woman in Jennifer Jones’s part, I want to use a sheep.”

He had my number—both my father’s phone number and my acting number. I knew before reading the script why he wanted me—an actor who could believably fall in love with a sheep and play it straight.

Before I left for Los Angeles to do Woody’s film, I found out that
Willy Wonka
had failed at the box office. It seems strange now to think that Roald Dahl’s morality story wasn’t embraced. I was told that many mothers thought the lessons in the movie were too cruel for children to understand. As the years since have proven, children don’t have any trouble understanding the movie—they crave to know what the boundaries are. It was the mothers who had a little difficulty.

By now I had three commercial flops in a row. Four, actually—
The Producers
suffered because of a bad review from a reviewer named Renata Adler, who wrote for the
New York Times
, so Joe Levine sold the movie to television to get more money to advertise his other movie,
The Graduate
. Renata Adler called Mel Brooks’s movie “black college humor.” She left the
Times
after a short stint, but it was too late. She did go on to an illustrious career at the
New Yorker
, but I wish she had left the
Times
a year earlier.

Struggling to be a genius is endemic to young artists who are
starting their careers, but after being bloodied a few times, they just hope that they won’t be ridiculed in the press or on television by those few who have the power to coronate them or tear them down.

I remembered a quote from Gary Cooper: “I need one movie out of three to be a hit.” I was leaving for California to do Woody’s film in hopes of resurrecting my career.

Apart from “Good morning” and “Good night,” Woody said only three things to me during all of the filming of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
.