Pictures at a Revolution (25 page)

Poitier himself could have chosen to make Fox's sloppy treatment of him public, but by the time his
Dolittle
deal came undone in April, he was probably happy to be rid of the film. The actor had not had high hopes for any of the three pictures that opened at the end of 1965, and he was right about
The Bedford Incident
and
The Slender Thread
, which received indifferent reviews and did little business. But the third movie, MGM's
A Patch of Blue
, was surprising everyone by becoming the biggest box office success of his career. Poitier had agreed to a substantial salary cut, taking just $80,000
⁴⁴
in exchange for 10 percent of the gross to star in director Guy Green's low-budget black-and-white drama about a black man who befriends a teenage blind white girl (Elizabeth Hartman) and then runs afoul of her slatternly, racist mother (Shelley Winters). His decision paid off handsomely when
A Patch of Blue
returned $6.8 million to the studio. In promoting the movie, MGM followed the
Lilies of the Field
playbook to the letter, selling the film as a parable of racial understanding in the press while soft-pedaling anything that could offend southern theater owners or audiences. Print advertisements for the film showed Hartman swinging gaily around the trunk of a tree, with a tiny head shot of Poitier placed as far away from her as possible,
⁴⁵
and MGM's endorsement of racial understanding proved to be somewhat flexible; the studio willingly cut eight seconds from all prints of
A Patch of Blue
that showed in the South,
⁴⁶
excising what would have been the first time a black man kissed a white woman in a major Hollywood film.

A Patch of Blue
turned Poitier into a first-tier national movie star. Despite
Variety
's concern that the film would have “possible limited appeal in Dixie,”
⁴⁷
the movie was his first to do big business in cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte,
⁴⁸
playing well in both black and white neighborhoods. Most critics felt that the mawkish material was elevated by the performances and shared Judith Crist's conviction that the movie showed Poitier “at the peak of his abilities…the embodiment of a man secure within himself.”
⁴⁹
But many also expressed impatience with seeing the actor forced into one more turn-the-other-cheek characterization. White liberals were especially eager to take on the mantle of black rage: “The caricature of the Negro as a Madison Avenue sort of Christian saint, selfless and well-groomed, is becoming a movie cliché nearly as tiresome and, at bottom, nearly as patronizing as the cretinous figure that Stepin Fetchit used to play,” wrote Brendan Gill in
The New Yorker.
“Negroes must find it extremely irritating.”
⁵⁰
“The implicit moral is that affection between a Negro man and a white girl is all right so long as the girl is blind, ignorant, undeveloped and 18 years old,” complained the reviewers for
Film Quarterly.
“We will have got somewhere when she's a bright 25-year-old who knows what she's doing.”
⁵¹

The critics who argued that
A Patch of Blue
's take on race relations was hopelessly behind the day's headlines never mentioned that the film had to be bowdlerized in order to play in half the country. Nor did they acknowledge that they stood an ideological world apart from some of their own colleagues. In the widespread shock that followed the Watts riots, some white commentators and cultural critics started to articulate a ludicrous position of evenhandedness, attempting to advance the notion that in 1966, the problem of antiwhite anger could be reasonably discussed in the same breath as the issue of civil rights for black Americans. Positioning itself above what it decided were the orthodoxies of both sides,
Saturday Review
praised
A Patch of Blue
for refusing to “imply that racial tolerance is wholly ‘one-sided'”
⁵²
(a message that is nowhere to be found in the movie itself). Meanwhile, members of the Ku Klux Klan were picketing the Memphis theater showing the movie, calling it “ungodly” and complaining that “the nigger's name [is] above the white woman's on the marquee.” The protesters were far outnumbered that day by moviegoers.
⁵³

In the winter and spring of 1966, Poitier, thanks in part to the persistence of Harry Belafonte, was becoming a more visible and audible political activist. He and Belafonte went to East Harlem to talk to four thousand grade school students for what was then called Negro History Week;
⁵⁴
the two men paid the bail for five protesters, including SNCC chairman John Lewis, who were arrested for picketing against apartheid at the South African consul general's office in New York;
⁵⁵
and Poitier made a guest appearance in
The Strollin' Twenties
, a CBS special produced by Belafonte that was a rarity for network television, a proudly Afrocentric history of entertainment in Harlem.

But when it came to acting challenges that would take him in new directions, Poitier was, perhaps for the first time, as hamstrung by the restrictions he placed on himself as by the limitations of the material he was given. After fifteen years of being Hollywood's exception to the rule, he either would not or could not see himself as anything other than a role model. He could barely suppress his weariness with material like
A Patch of Blue
(“I don't think anyone familiar with American social life could construe [it] as being representative,” he said), but when opportunities to shake off his plaster-saint image presented themselves, he turned away. That summer, Poitier entertained an offer to play
Othello
in an NBC special, a role that surely would have been the most challenging of his career. After weeks of indecision, he dropped out, claiming defensively that the role “bored me”
⁵⁶
and that he didn't want to play a black man who was “a dupe.”
⁵⁷
“If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains. But I'll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game. Not when there is only one Negro actor working in films with any degree of consistency. It's a choice,” he said. “A clear choice.”
⁵⁸

I
n the mid-1960s, there were two kinds of young actors working in New York theater: the type that Hollywood's East Coast casting directors thought were handsome enough to recruit for movies and the type that weren't. Those in the first group—square-jawed, symmetrically attractive men like George Peppard, James Farentino, and John Phillip Law—were approached by the studios early in their stage careers and in many cases signed multifilm contracts and were thrown into one movie after another to see if the transplant would take. In rare instances, as was the case with Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, the bet paid off well enough to justify all the times that it didn't. The second tier of actor was understood to be a victim of genetic bad luck, someone who, whatever his talent, could never be groomed or reshaped or prettified into a movie star and was left behind to ply his trade in New York. The studios assumed that actors who looked or sounded like Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, and Alan Arkin would be of little interest to the American public; they might be useful in a comic or supporting role now and then, but nothing more.

Dustin Hoffman was in a third category: He was the kind of actor who couldn't get work at all. Hoffman had grown up on the West Coast; he dropped out of Santa Monica City College to come to New York in the late 1950s.
¹
Despite the fact that his parents had named him, aspirationally, after the silent-movie cowboy star Dusty Farnum, he had no illusions about the sorts of roles that he would be able to get. “At that time, there was not necessarily an anti-Semitic, but certainly an antiethnic code,” he says. “If you got
Back Stage
[a New York theater trade paper], the casting notices said Leading Men, and then Juveniles, and Leading Ladies, and then Ingenues. And then, next to that, it said Character Leading Men, Character Juveniles. And that word—‘character'—meant that you were not attractive: You were the funny-looking person next to the good-looking person in high school. And everybody knew it.”
²

For five years, Hoffman scraped together a bare subsistence living in New York City. He got a handful of tiny parts, mostly one-shot guest appearances on New York–based TV series like
The Defenders, The Nurses
, and
Naked City.
“And I only got those because Bob Duvall was a favorite with Marion Dougherty, the casting agent,” he says. “He would read for her, and I'd be waiting outside, and as he'd leave, he'd say, ‘Marion, cast him, he's good!' So I got a couple of little parts, but that was it. Bob, at least, got the lead as the villain on a lot of those shows. If I had a scene, I was lucky.”
³
Hoffman worked as a waiter, as a toy demonstrator at Macy's, as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and as the only male typist in the steno pool at the Manpower temp agency. When jobs got really scarce, he would sleep on Gene Hackman's kitchen floor.
⁴
And on the few occasions when he was able to get an audition, he was turned down every time.

“Dusty did something I could never do,” says Susan Anspach, a friend from those years, “which is that he kept hanging in there through rejection after rejection, year after year after year after year.”
⁵
That may have been due less to Hoffman's faith in himself than to his natural tenacity and unwillingness to back down. “I got kicked out of acting class when I was twenty years old because I screamed at the teacher when she started talking to me in the middle of a scene,” he said later. “I had a big fight with Lee Strasberg in my first class with him….. I have never felt unbrave.”
⁶

Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1965, Hoffman was twenty-seven, seriously demoralized by his inability to land an acting job, and considering a change in careers. He signed on to work for Ulu Grosbard as an assistant director and assistant stage manager on Grosbard's production of
A View from the Bridge
, which featured Duvall, Voight, and Anspach in the principal roles. “I had reached a point, when I was doing
View from the Bridge
, when I decided, I'm not gonna act anymore—to the extent that you can quit something you're not doing,” says Hoffman. “I thought, maybe I'm gonna become a director or something.”
⁷
But he couldn't quite let go of the hopes that had brought him to New York in the first place. Anspach, who met him during that production, recalls a lunch for the cast and crew of the play at which he told her with bravado, “‘You know, if I were older, I'd be playing Bobby's part.' And I said, ‘Sure, right, Dusty.' And he said, ‘What do you mean!? I'm fuckin' talented! Ask Bobby! He'll tell you himself!' I said to Bobby, ‘Is he putting me on? He's the sweep-up guy!' And Bobby said, ‘No, it's true, he's the most talented guy among all of us.'”
⁸

Hoffman impressed Grosbard, who told Arthur Miller that the actor might make a good Willy Loman one day. (In his memoir,
Timebends
, Miller wrote, “My estimate of Grosbard almost collapsed as, observing Dustin Hoffman's awkwardness and his big nose that never seemed to get unstuffed, I wondered how the poor fellow imagined himself a candidate for any kind of acting career.”)
⁹
When
A View from the Bridge
, a one-act version of which had failed on Broadway ten years earlier, opened, it began a highly successful two-year run that gave many of the people involved a degree of job security for the first time in their lives. “Ulu would let me leave to do other plays, and they'd flop, and then I'd come back,” says Anspach. “Bobby Duvall did the same thing.”
¹⁰

Grosbard encouraged Hoffman, who was now rooming on and off with Duvall, not to give up on acting and got him an audition for
Harry Noon and Night
, a play by Ronald Ribman that was to be staged in Hell's Kitchen at St. Clement's Church by the American Place Theatre, which was then in its first season. The role for which Hoffman read was Immanuel, a handicapped, cross-dressing German who was living with an American soldier in the ruins of Berlin after World War II. “He just walked in off the street,” says Ribman. “And we knew instantly he was Immanuel.”
¹¹

“I think I tended to relax a little after
View from the Bridge,”
says Hoffman. “So I did a very nutty audition—this hunchbacked gay Nazi guy with a limp. And I was outrageous enough to get the part. Wynn Handman [co-founder of the American Place Theatre] came up to me years later and said, ‘You put a lot of that into
Midnight Cowboy,'
and I said, ‘Hmm, maybe, I don't know.'”
¹²

The production, in which Hoffman costarred with Joel Grey, was small—the American Place could afford to give it a run of just three weeks, and “we did it with the understanding that it was not to be reviewed,” recalls Ribman.
¹³
But Hoffman, thrilled to have won a role at last, threw himself into preparing for the part with years of pent-up desire to prove what he could do if someone gave him a chance. Arthur Miller arranged for him to spend an evening with his daughter's German baby-sitter so he could find an accent for his character. “She was from Munich, so we got together and I suggested that she say all my lines into a tape recorder. I remember I used to continually make passes at her. Every once in a while as she was recording, I'd kind of get my hand going down her arm and try to sneak it over, and she would say, ‘I don't
need
dis ting!'” The baby-sitter was unyielding, but Hoffman did leave with a workable sound for Immanuel and, although he spoke no actual German, decided to try out his accent in the Upper East Side neighborhood then known as Germantown for its stretch of German restaurants, stores, and candy shops. “I'd go there, and I used to sit at a bar, and someone would talk to me in German, and I would say, ‘I'm sorry, but the only way I'm gonna learn English is to keep speaking it.' And it worked—they believed it.”
¹⁴

Despite the play's short run, Hoffman's performance generated considerable word of mouth among a small group of devoted theatergoers and professionals. Mike Nichols and Buck Henry both made a point of going to see him. “He played a crippled German transvestite, and I believed all three, no question,” says Henry. “It wasn't enough for either of us to say, ‘Let's get this guy for
The Graduate,'
but it was enough so that I realized, ‘Oh God, this guy can do a lot of stuff.'”
¹⁵
Ribman was excited by the play's reception and went ahead with plans that he had made with another producer to move
Harry Noon and Night
to a theater in the East Village for an open-ended engagement. But Hoffman, to everyone's surprise, decided not to continue with the show. “He never told me why he left,” says Ribman, “but it's my impression that maybe he felt he had a better offer.”
¹⁶
Joel Grey left the cast as well (he was replaced by Robert Blake), and
Harry Noon and Night
's commercial run lasted just four days, leaving Ribman angry at what he felt was Hoffman's ingratitude.

Hoffman's better offer wasn't for a new role, but simply for a steadier and more reliable income from working in the theater, a luxury he had sought for years and wasn't ready to abandon for a part in a play that might not last. He went back to work for Grosbard, who offered him a new job on his production of Frank Gilroy's
The Subject Was Roses
, which had won the Tony Award for Best Play in the summer of 1965. Grosbard gave Hoffman the chance to stage-manage the production and also to serve as standby for the young male lead (a role originated by Martin Sheen and then being played by Walter McGinn).

In the fall, Wynn Handman began planning the American Place Theatre's 1965–1966 season with the company's co-founders Michael Tolan, an actor, and Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal priest who felt his mission was to bring theater to St. Clement's Church. Ribman was working on a new piece called
The Journey of the Fifth Horse
that would be ready in the spring, but the first play they planned to produce that season was William Alfred's
Hogan's Goat
, a drama about an Irish family in 1890s Brooklyn. Handman and director Frederick Rolf were struggling to cast the female lead, the angry, maltreated wife of the play's main character, when a striking actress with high cheekbones and regal bearing walked in to read for them. “We saw a lot of actors,” Handman says. “Among them was this woman, Faye Dunaway. When she auditioned, I thought she was very talented and beautiful. The director said, ‘She'll do this when it's a movie, but not onstage.' I said, ‘No, let's give her a call back.'”
¹⁷

Dunaway, an intensely ambitious and volatile young woman, projected a glamour that was almost entirely self-invented; she was the daughter of an army man with little money who had moved his family from Florida to Arkansas to Texas to Germany to Utah when she was growing up. She had arrived in New York in 1962 as a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Boston University and had made herself known quickly. Within two days, she had signed a year-long contract as a replacement in the cast of the Broadway play
A Man for All Seasons;
soon after, she met Lenny Bruce, who was beginning his skid into legal battles and drug abuse, and began a brief affair with him. In 1963, Dunaway auditioned for Elia Kazan and made such a strong impression on him that the director invited her to join the repertory company he and producer Robert Whitehead were forming at Lincoln Center. When Kazan directed Arthur Miller's play
After the Fall
, about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, on Broadway in 1964, he chose Dunaway to understudy his own wife, Barbara Loden, as Maggie, the play's female lead. Dunaway would study Loden's performance every night from the catwalk, wondering if she could match it and if she would be given the chance to try. She started to feel anxious and depressed and went into analysis.
¹⁸
“I thought that I had talent…but I was frightened that I wouldn't be able to shape it into something that was exceptional,” she wrote in her autobiography. “The very things that drove me to succeed as an actress—my need and wish and desire for perfection—were also the things that worked against me in trying to find my own happiness.”
¹⁹

During its two years under Kazan's stewardship, the Lincoln Center rep company, which also included Martin Sheen, Frank Langella, Hal Holbrook, and Jason Robards Jr.,
²⁰
was a hothouse of talent, tension, and neurosis, as thirty actors working closely together committed themselves to the idea of ensemble work but also chased the spotlight. “In those days, all the Method actors, the Actors Studio people, would say, you have to experience everything,” says John Phillip Law, a member of the company. “To assign somebody to do a scene with somebody else was almost to say, ‘Jesus, go home and fuck 'em, and then come back and try to make something real happen.' And of course, Faye shows up for our scene one day and says right off the bat, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you last night!' So we had our little roll in the hay. But it was no big deal—it was just how things worked then.” Law, who went on to act in
The Changeling
and
Marco Millions
with Dunaway while they both worked for Kazan, remembers her work as extraordinary. “Faye was a little jealous of Barbara Loden, who she felt was getting her parts because of Kazan. But even then, it was clear she was a wonderful actress.”
²¹