Next would be the “song” exercise, where the student would stand center stage and belt out a song all on one note, each word drawn out as long as possible. Something about the note being extended on that long breath caused emotions to surface and play across the voice as though it were a harp string. The voice might begin to quaver or crack, faces and bodies would tremble, and Lee would, in his calm, nasal voice, encourage the student to keep going and to relax different parts of the face or body. This exercise was to teach actors how to use focused relaxation to enable them to go on with a scene even when powerful emotions threatened to overcome them.
After that part of the exercise, students would continue the song while flinging themselves about the stage like limp bean bags: jumping, leaping, and swinging their arms.
It was fascinating, but at the time I didn’t understand the point of it. I knew that my father felt nothing but disdain for acting classes in general and Strasberg’s Method in particular. He didn’t believe acting could be taught, and to him the Method was self-indulgent rubbish that allowed untalented actors to feel they were interesting and deep. As I sat there in class, I wondered if maybe he was right. It was all so easy to ridicule.
The second (and last) class of the week was scene day, when students would perform a two-person scene they had chosen, after which Lee would make his comments. I watched actors and actresses I thought were extremely talented, like Lane Bradbury, Ellie Wood, Lou Antonio, and others whose names I don’t remember. Many had had small parts off Broadway or on live television shows. Some waited tables; others modeled, like me. I was struck by Lee’s ability to home in on whatever it was they needed to work on. Sometimes he was easy on the actors, especially the prettier women. Sometimes he was harsh and impatient. Clearly he’d had some of the students in his classes for years, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and was frustrated when they weren’t able to move forward with the work. For me, the most frightening aspect of the class was the thought of being critiqued by Lee in front of the other students. Even worse, he sometimes asked students to comment on the work of their fellow students.
I decided that before I quit the class I should at least try to do a sense-memory, and I chose drinking a glass of fresh orange juice as my exercise. I was still living in my father’s house at that point. Early every evening when I’d get home from a photo shoot, I’d squeeze oranges and sit in the library with a glass, focusing as hard as I could on every aspect of the sensory experience.
One day Dad came home, found me working on this, and said, “What the hell are you doing, Jane?”
“Practicing a sense-memory exercise for class,” I answered, wincing at what I knew was coming.
He looked at me with pure derision, shook his head, and walked off muttering, “Jesus Christ.”
But I persevered. “Persevere” happens to be our family motto.
A whole month and a half after entering his class, I finally told Lee that I was ready to do my first exercise. The following week he called on me. Sitting on a chair center stage, I was as nervous as I’d ever been in my life. It seemed to me there were many more people than usual in the class that day, and I figured they were there to see me fail. But I launched in, placing my fingers around the imaginary glass of chilled orange juice. I closed my eyes and before long felt myself alone in a world of sensation; the nerves in my fingertips felt the cold. I opened my eyes and lifted the glass slowly, testing its weight until I could feel it in my hand, and as I brought the glass to my mouth, the taste buds on my tongue woke up in anticipation of the sweet, acidy wetness. For the first time I was experiencing something unique to actors: I knew I was on a stage before an audience, pretending—yet at the same time I was all alone and totally in the moment.
What happened next was the most important moment in my life up until then.
Lee was quiet, looking at me. Then in a low voice he said, “I see a lot of people go through here, Jane, but you have real talent.”
The top of my head came off, birds flew out, and the room was bathed in light.
Lee Strasberg told me I was talented. He isn’t my father or an employee of my father’s. He sees actors all day long every day. He didn’t have to say this. I know he’s not one to “make nice.”
In that moment my life did a flip-flop, though I didn’t understand at the time why it had such a powerful effect on me. When I walked outside after the class, the city felt different, as if I now owned a piece of it. I went to bed that night with my heart racing, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew why I was alive, what I wanted to do. There is nothing more exquisite in life than being able to earn your living doing what you love (that, and being capable of love). All I’d needed was for someone who was a professional—and who didn’t have to—to tell me I was good.
Characteristically, I went at it full-throttle. Instead of the usual two classes a week that everyone took, I took four. Instead of one scene every few months, I’d do double. I don’t think I fully understood the Method, nor do I think I really knew how to apply it in my professional work when that time came. What the classes did for me, however, was provide the confidence I so sorely needed. I knew there’d be those who’d say I’d gotten my breaks because I was Henry Fonda’s daughter. At those times I needed to be able to say to myself,
I’m studying hard to develop a modicum of technique. I’m not a dilettante. I don’t take this for granted.
Before Dad ever got to Broadway or starred in a film, he’d played in hundreds of summer stock productions and road shows. They had served as his classes, where he could develop his craft. In the late fifties, when I came along, the business was far more competitive; there were many more actors looking for work, and because I was Henry Fonda’s daughter, there was more attention paid to me and fewer opportunities to fumble and make mistakes incognito. For my niece, Bridget Fonda, and now for my son, Troy Garity, the field is even more competitive and challenging. Perhaps you can’t teach acting
talent,
but you can learn the tools to bring that talent out in the face of what are often challenging circumstances. Dad was wrong to have thought the classes were a mistake—not for me they weren’t. Years later, Troy studied acting at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and he says it saved him just as Lee Strasberg saved me.
As a girl who had grown up denying my feelings, with a father who thought emotions “disgusting,” I was unaccustomed to people fully expressing themselves even to the point of looking ridiculous. So the work in Lee’s classes was revelatory, a balm to my soul. Sally Field captured what acting did for girls like us who grew up in the fifties when she said, “I guess it was a way for me to release all the feelings that I had in some acceptable terms, so that I wasn’t responsible for them.” Through acting I could probe new parts of myself—sorrow, anger, joy—and feel safe exposing them. I felt I was appreciated for the fullness of my self rather than for some “good girl’s” proper façade. I had never been so happy.
There was another element Lee brought to his classes and to the Actors Studio (for which I auditioned and to which I was accepted the following year), and that was the sense of theater as great art. The Actors Studio had grown out of the Group Theatre to carry on the tradition of actors working together to achieve a high level of truth and reality. Those of us privileged to study with Lee could feel this sense of history and commitment to an ideal, and it was inspiring.
Lee was a voracious reader, and the walls of his spacious but unassuming apartment on Central Park West were ceiling-to-floor books. That apartment became a haven for many of us, a place to sit in the kitchen, drink tea in Russian glass cups, and discuss theater. I was unaccustomed to sitting in kitchens engaged in endless discussion, being asked for and giving opinions. Another stray that seemed to find her place in that culture-laden apartment was Marilyn.
The need for Lee’s method of teaching actors seemed very clear to me, and the clearer it became, the more I understood why my father put it down. Musicians use instruments to express themselves through sound. Painters, with time and solitude on their side, use paints and brushes to express themselves on canvas. For actors, their canvas, their instrument, is their
very being,
and for theater actors in particular, instead of in solitude, they are creating before an audience. It’s not easy to ensure that your very being is on call, ready, willing, and able to perform to its utmost. The only thing analogous (which I would become conscious of later, during all those years of watching Atlanta Braves baseball games with Ted Turner) is the athlete up at bat, say, with the bases loaded at the bottom of the ninth. The world is watching and either he comes through or he doesn’t; it’s all him up there. There is another critical element the athlete and the actor share: the essential need to be relaxed.
Lee once said, “Tension is the occupational disease of the actor.” I have watched carefully the not-quite-great baseball players when they strike out and walk back to the dugout, shaking their heads, swearing, and sometimes pounding their bats on the ground. The great players, on the other hand (I’m thinking particularly of Chipper Jones and Greg Maddux), take that walk as cool as a cucumber, as though nothing had gone wrong. They have found a technique to maintain physical and mental calm. You can’t do most things well without being relaxed, not in sports, not in lovemaking, not in acting. Where it differs for actors is that relaxation is needed, not to swing a bat well or run swiftly, but so that the body’s energetic flow is unimpeded and inspiration can rise and express itself through the actor’s spirit: in eyes, voice, and movement . . . the body as instrument. But it’s not as though you can get up in front of an audience and say to yourself, Relax, dammit! You can
pretend
to be relaxed, but pretending isn’t going to address self-doubts and hangups, often unconscious, that block the creative process and keep you from doing what you want to do in a scene.
Some actors become famous right away and go from role to role, often being asked to play the same qualities that made them famous, over and over, until they are imitating themselves. In fact, stardom can be the death knell of an actor’s best talent. Lee would sometimes say that actors develop their careers in public, but their art develops in private. It is a terrible feeling to be famous but have lost the fire in the belly and not know where it went or why. Something’s wrong, but you don’t know how to fix it. That’s where class comes in. It is in the private sanctuary of a class, not on the job, that an actor can try things, take chances, fall on his or her face, learn how to make his or her instrument perform wholly and fully in all the ways needed,
when
needed. To achieve this goal, we must become conscious of what makes us respond the way we do in real life, in certain relationships and situations. We must confront inhibitions, fears, all of our emotional processes and what triggers them, all the things that can cause us problems without our knowing what is happening. The techniques Lee used were aimed at enabling the actor to become aware of and remove these internal barriers. He had no rigid set of rules that applied to all actors. On the contrary, he made comments and suggestions based on each actor’s individual issues—and one of mine was the need always to be perfect. That made me tense, wanting constantly to prove my talent by being very emotional (something that has always come easily for me). So Lee would have me do scenes where I’d play rather dull, slow-speaking, slow-moving characters. Doing nothing was what I needed to learn.
The other big challenge for an actor is how to find inspiration. You know how some days every nerve in your body is alive and vibrating, while other days you’re dull and sluggish? That’s not great in civilian life, but if an actor has a critical scene to play (often, in filming, at impossible hours like 6:00
A.M.
or midnight) and is “dead” inside, what to do? That’s where technique is critical. By working with a variety of exercises, from the sense-memory kind to private moments, and by trying different scenes that you may never be asked to do professionally but that work on the psychic places you tend to block, you can develop an arsenal of tools to use when the need arises.
Of
course
my father would have hated the Method: It was all about being able to plumb your depths and expose yourself spontaneously on a personal level, especially in class, so as to become conscious of how your instrument functions. He lumped it together with all the other things he disdained: religion, therapy, anything that expressed need, the antithesis of the rugged individual. “Crutches, all crutches!” he would say.
Decades later we were filming a scene in
On Golden Pond
when, standing in the water next to his boat, I tell him I want to be his friend. We had rehearsed many times, and I had stifled the urge to touch his arm, wanting to save it for when it would matter most: his close-up. Dad very rarely had tears on camera, and I wanted him to have tears in this scene, which meant so much to me on a personal level. When the moment came and the camera was rolling for that close-up, I reached out and placed my hand on his arm as I said, “I want to be your friend.”
What I saw amazed me: For a millisecond he was caught off guard. He seemed angry, even:
This isn’t what we rehearsed.
Then the emotions hit him, tears came to his eyes, then anger again as he tensed up and looked away. All this, though barely visible to the camera, was palpably clear to me, and my heart went out to him. I loved him so much just then. It amazes me what a great actor he was in spite of his fear of spontaneity and real emotions. I remembered reading something that Leora Dana, who starred with him in the play
Point of No Return,
once said: