Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (3 page)

On Thursday afternoons I went to my piano lesson. The teacher was a nice-enough man but not a very good teacher. He assigned me just one song, called, ironically, “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” I don’t remember if I ever told him about the troubles I was having with the other boys; I don’t think so. And I know he wasn’t that good a teacher to have purposely assigned that song to me as a way of using my unhappiness to help me play it better.

I wrote to my father and told him about all of this stuff, but he never showed any of those letters to my mother, I suppose for the same reason that I didn’t write to her about it.

At Thanksgiving I called my father and asked if I could come home for Christmas vacation. He said yes. When it came time to leave—for some reason I can’t explain—I needed to say good-bye to Jonesy. My bags were packed, and the bus was waiting downstairs, but I searched all over the second floor for him. When I finally found him, he shook my hand and said, “So long, pal.” Jonesy and I were never friends, and he was a jerk, but he never beat me up, and he had acne. I don’t know why I needed to say good-bye to him. I’m sure it wasn’t because he corn-holed me. I do remember that on one occasion he shared a box of candy with me that his aunt had sent him. Maybe it was because someone told him that chocolate wasn’t good for acne.

My father and Corinne picked me up at the airport in Chicago, and we drove back to Milwaukee. I had on my blue, sort of itchy dress uniform, but I wanted to be wearing it when I walked into the house and saw my mother again.

She was waiting in our living room. When I walked in, she hugged and kissed me. Then she asked me to play something for her on the piano. Oh, God. I didn’t think it would come that soon. I wanted to put it off. I made up some kind of flimsy excuse about not having practiced for several weeks, but she wanted to hear me play “just a little bit.” So I sat down at the piano and played “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,” and I played it terribly, with a hundred mistakes. She got up and went into her bedroom. I began to cry. My dad said maybe I should change my clothes and get ready for dinner. I took off my shirt and went into her bedroom to explain how I only had one lesson a week and how little time there was for me to practice, when she suddenly gasped. She was staring
at my body. There were black-and-blue bruises on my chest and arms. My dad finally told her some of the troubles I had described in my letters. She started crying and begging me to forgive her, until I finally went into her arms and she kissed my tears and kept repeating, “I’m sorry, honey. Please forgive me. I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”

I never went back to Black/Foxe.

*  *  *

When I was fifteen, I went to a downtown movie theater to see
Great Expectations,
but before the movie started, they showed a short subject called:

VINCENT VAN GOGH

I had no idea who Vincent van Gogh was—I’d never even heard of him. Twenty-three of his oil paintings flooded the screen, one after the other, in full color. I don’t know why they call it “dumbfounded”—I think they should call it “dumblosted,” because after seeing the paintings, I was lost. When I walked out of the movie theater I started thinking about my second-grade teacher, Miss Bernard, who used to put up paintings from almost all of the other boys and girls in my class on the classroom walls—paintings that she considered worthy—but she never put up one of mine. She never told me why or gave me an encouraging word, but I got the message: “You’re no good at art, Jerry.”

The following Saturday I took an early train to Chicago to see the van Gogh Exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. I could only stay for an hour because I had tickets for the two o’clock matinée to see Judith Anderson in
Medea
. My critical judgment wasn’t fine-tuned yet; I thought the play was just okay. Then I walked to a theater about a half a mile away to see the five o’clock showing of Laurence
Olivier’s film version of
Hamlet
. That was okay, too.
Hamlet
let out at 8:10
P.M.
so I ran—as fast as I could eat my hot dog—to see the 8:30
P.M.
stage performance of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
starring Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn.
That
was more than okay.

I think what I did was dumb—crowding all those great things into one day—but Milwaukee was a big “small town” in those days, and it would never have had a van Gogh exhibit or
Medea
or
A Streetcar Named Desire
with Uta Hagen. Today perhaps, but not in 1948.

My mother had wanted to be a pianist before she got married. When I told her about the van Gogh exhibit and how much I loved him, she gave me a little money to buy some paints. I took the bus to an art supply shop downtown and bought eight tubes of oil paint and two frames of stretched canvas, 18 × 24 inches apiece. The owner of the store helped me pick out a couple of brushes and advised me to take a small bottle of linseed oil. I also bought a print of a van Gogh painting for $3.50. It was called
Lady in a Cornfield
. When I got home, I set up shop in our basement, mounted the van Gogh print on a chair, and painted
Lady in a Cornfield
. My mother liked it so much that she had it framed and hung it on our living room wall, next to her piano. I’ve been painting ever since. So you didn’t win, Miss Bernard. You didn’t win.

When I was still fifteen, I auditioned for the Milwaukee Players, which was a very good community theater that put on big productions of classics and also gave lessons in makeup. I passed my audition, and the first play I acted in—in front of a paying audience—was
Romeo and Juliet
. I played Balthasar, Romeo’s
manservant, and I had only two lines, but I also had a fencing scene, which I loved. It wasn’t real fencing, of course; it was just sort of “try to make it look real” fencing.

My next part was the Messenger in
Much Ado About Nothing
. One evening, while we were in production, I got to the theater early and had just started putting on my makeup when one of the male dancers came in, very bouncy and cheerful. He had always been very friendly, but when he saw that we were alone, he started behaving strangely. I had never met a homosexual before—I had only heard Corinne talk about what were then called fairies—but this handsome dancer, who must have been at least ten years older than I was—started chasing me around the children’s classroom that we used as a makeup room. I dodged in and out of the rows of little desks, trying my best to make the dancer believe that I believed that he was just playing a game. Just as I was getting frightened, two other actors came in, said, “Hi,” and started putting on their makeup. I sat down at my desk and started putting on makeup again. I didn’t look at the dancer until he knelt down next to me.

“You know I was just joking around, don’t you?” he whispered.

“Of course! Are you kidding?”

I wish I had acted in
Much Ado About Nothing
as well as I did for the dancer.

When Corinne was twenty, she went to act at the Reginald Goode Summer Theater near Poughkeepsie, New York. You had to pay ninety dollars a week for food and lodgings. In return, you got the privilege of acting with the famous sixty-eight-year-old Australian actor, Reginald Goode, in front of a real summer stock audience, six nights a week.

A call came to our home in Milwaukee. Mr. Goode suddenly discovered that he was one man short for his acting company. (I assume that some guy didn’t want to pay the ninety dollars.) Corinne told Mr. Goode that her brother was an actor, and he told her to get me to Poughkeepsie immediately. I had just turned sixteen.

I was thrilled, of course, but my father wasn’t—unless they waived the ninety-dollars-a-week fee they charged for the privilege
of acting with Mr. Goode. After a lot of bluster, Mr. Goode agreed. I was on the train the next day.

The playhouse was a beautiful old barn converted into a theater. It held about five or six hundred people. All of the actors, except me, slept and ate in Reginald Goode’s private house, across the huge lawn that separated the house from the theater. I was assigned to a unique bedroom inside the theater, just off stage left. The bedroom was about as big as a walk-in closet.

When I went to bed that first night, it was a little frightening. It was so dark when I shut off the one lightbulb and there were strange sounds all through the night. The old wooden barn was dancing with the wind. As I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, I saw a name carved into the wall beside me, just above my head: “KT Stevens.” I knew that name; I had read about her. She was a famous actress from fifteen or twenty years ago, and she must have slept in this same bedroom, probably in this same bed, and carved her name into the wall next to me, so that years later other actors would remember her. I ran my fingers over her carved name and whispered, “Good night, K. T.,” then turned off my lightbulb and fell asleep.

The first play I acted in at the playhouse was
The Late Christopher Bean,
by Sidney Howard. I think I got more laughs than Mr. Goode had expected. When the two of us were alone onstage and the audience started laughing at something I did or said, he would lean down and whisper, “Wait for it. . . . Wait for it.”

The play was so successful that he held it over for another week (or else he
had
to hold it over because he didn’t have the next show ready, which was probably more likely).

The next play was
The Cat and the Canary
. Henry Hull had played the lead on Broadway; Bob Hope played it in the movie. Now I was playing the same part, but no one told me that “old” Mr.
Goode was married to this gorgeous twenty-three-year-old red-haired actress who was going to play my romantic interest. Her name was Rita. She explained to me, privately, that when we had our kissing scene, it shouldn’t be a “real” kiss—which might throw both of us off—it should just
look
like a real kiss, by putting our lips on the side of the other person’s mouth, just close enough so that it looked real. I thought,
Well—that must be how real actors do it
.

Mr. Goode worked in a bizarre way. After the evening performances we all made sandwiches from a big roast ham that was set out each evening on the kitchen table. We drank milk or soda (no alcohol), and then we rehearsed most of the night, until just before the sun came up. That’s the way Mr. Goode wanted it. I loved it. For me it was very romantic. For Rita, too. Forget that “on the side of the mouth” business—by the fourth day of rehearsal, she started kissing for real.

Remember Seema Clark? The young Rita Hayworth with the fake angora sweater, who made me feel like a disgrace to God and my mother for trying to touch about half an inch of her breast? Because of her I still hadn’t tried to touch a girl’s breast. Kiss a lot, yes, but breasts were too dangerous. Of course, if Seema Clark had liked what I was doing and made some lovely sounds of encouragement . . . who knows?

We rehearsed
The Cat and the Canary
for five nights, and then, on the sixth night, before dress rehearsal and after strong signals from Rita, she and I drifted off towards the riverbank. We knew there would be a long break while they were changing the sets, so we lay down on the grass, near a little brook, and kissed and kissed. No breasts. No penis. While we were lying there, she said,

“Take me!”

“Take you where?” I answered.

I knew very well what she meant—I wasn’t that dumb—but I wasn’t prepared for the big time yet. I think that if Rita had been more aggressive on that particular night, my life would have taken a very different path. But she was careful where she touched me.

Later, after rehearsing till 5:00
A.M.
, I had just gotten into bed when I heard a knock at my door.

“It’s me,” Rita whispered.

I opened the door, and there she was, in her nightgown, looking as beautiful as a fantasy. She got into bed with me, and we started kissing. After about four minutes she said, “What do you think would happen if I touched you . . . here?” pointing to the bulge underneath my pajamas. Before I could answer, we both heard Reginald Goode calling out from somewhere on the lawn, near my bedroom door.

“Rita . . .”

He wasn’t hollering, and he wasn’t whispering. It sounded more like a father calling out to his daughter who had stayed out too late one night, but now it was time for her to come home. I felt that he didn’t know for sure if she was actually with me but that he assumed she was. Rita got under the covers and wiggled down towards the bottom of the bed, so that if Mr. Goode did burst in, he wouldn’t see her. I was scared to death. I do mean death—I imagined a shotgun.

“Rita?” he called again.

But he didn’t knock on my door, which I was terrified he was going to do. He listened for another minute or ninety seconds. While I held my breath, I could hear him breathing—he was that close. And then he walked away. After three or four minutes Rita jumped out of bed, took a quick peek outside, and then ran across the lawn to the big house, just as the sun was coming up. Mr. Goode never brought up this incident to me.