An Improvised Life Read Free Page B

drinking. His work was a prod into a life of courage, a life embraced totally with all its pain and all its challenges, and for many years I felt that I almost couldn’t live without his music. Had I been afraid of what Beethoven’s music evoked in me I think that fact alone would have given me reason to listen to it, to try and decipher my fears and attempt to understand and get beyond them.
    Around this time, while I was still in high school, I went to see a film that had won its star an Academy Award. The work was a theater classic, translated into a film for the star, and like millions of other people I came out of the theater enormously impressed by his performance. But along with being impressed, I left the theater also feeling jealous and inept, and then hating myself for those feelings, and then hating the actor for piling on more feelings of inadequacy and depression. “What the hell was wrong with me?” I wondered. “Why couldn’t I simply enjoy the man’s work?” Here was obviously a great actor doing the part of his life, giving a performance that had gotten him enormous attention, awards, accolades, and all I could do was grouse about it and hate him for it. I stayed feeling depressed and inadequate for days.
    A month later I saw Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster . This time I left the theater walking on air, filled with a sense of delight and joy and possibility. I stopped in my tracks. “What was the difference?” Two performances,
seen weeks apart, both considered great. One fills me with gloom, jealousy, and despair; the other makes me feel alive and buoyant.
    I thought about it for weeks. I compared the two actors endlessly and finally came up with this realization. In the first instance, the actor who’d won the Academy Award was trying to impress me. He was demonstrating how beautifully he spoke, how well he articulated the lines, how beautifully he phrased them, how rich was the musical tone in his voice, how well he moved. And what I came to realize was that in spite of all the attention he received, the audiences had not been given a genuine experience. They were applauding their own intelligence at recognizing the actor’s technical prowess. The actor was congratulating himself, and the audiences were also congratulating themselves. But in his performance I couldn’t find that injection of experience that I needed so badly, that hypodermic connection that bonded me to the actor and would make his experience mine. I wasn’t allowed to be the character, and I started to wonder whether anyone had actually been affected by his work or whether that sense of narcissism was all anyone wanted from an actor. It slightly revolted me. I finally decided that his Academy Award had been given as an act of self-congratulation by the Academy, people applauding their own perceptions. Walter Huston on the other hand presented me with the gift of a whole person, fully articulated and realized, un-self-conscious and completely filled with his own joy at doing the work. I wanted to be like Walter Huston.

CHAPTER THREE
    All of my performances in the plays throughout high school were successful. I got laughs, I got applause, I got very good comments after the shows, and in this one arena I started to have some small stature in a school completely dominated by its athletic program. But after each performance—no matter how well my work seemed to go, no matter how much applause or how many laughs, no matter how well I was able to manipulate the audience into feeling things and focusing on me—afterward, in the dressing room, I would inevitably feel depressed. Cheated out of something. I didn’t know what it was until in my senior year of high school, when I began studying with Benjamin Zemach.
    Benjamin taught small classes in Hollywood, a two-hour streetcar ride from where we had moved to in Highland Park. Benjamin was a tiny giant of a man who lived and breathed theater, and his classes were warm