The other actors looked on balefully. An assistant scribbled directions for me and set about booking a table at Scandia on Sunset Boulevard. Terry went back into the office to wrap up his interviews and I took off, avoiding eye contact with any of my dour rivals. I drove around for an hour through the leafy avenues of Beverly Hills north of Sunset, browsing the garish mansions as if they were so many baroque paintings in a museum. It was an unimaginable display of affluence. At the appointed time, I pulled up to George Segal’s Tudor-style manor and rang the bell at the massive wooden door. Terry lugged the door open and greeted me again, as warmly as the first time. He led me into a spacious, gorgeously appointed living room where a handsome German shepherd lolled on the ample sofa. Terry told me to pour myself a drink and to give him ten minutes. He was just finishing a meeting with his casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, in the next room. When he was done, he said, he would bring Lynn out and introduce us.
Lynn Stalmaster! I didn’t know much about Hollywood, but I knew about him. The dean of movie casting directors, Stalmaster’s name was attached to several of the best films the industry had produced in recent years, the closest thing there was to a superstar in his arcane field. And in a few minutes, Terrence Malick, the hottest young director in town, was going to squire him in to meet me, in the living room of George Segal’s house. I poured myself a crystal tumbler of scotch and settled into the soft cushions of the sofa, stroking the German shepherd affectionately like the lord of the manor. This was unbelievable. I had reached the sensual core of Hollywood success. I had drawn a full house. All I had to do was play my cards right.
Terry strode in. With him was Lynn Stalmaster, a slight, spiffy man in white shoes, white pants, and an aqua shirt.
“Lynn,” said Terry, “I want you to meet John Lithgow. He’s the best actor I’ve ever seen in my life.”
My heart swelled. The whiskey shot pleasurably to my brain. I goofily deflected the lavish compliment. Lynn Stalmaster was impassive.
“So what have you been doing recently?” he asked blandly.
I had heard this question forty times in the past month. It was the standard casting directors’ opening. The information requested was secondary. Mainly they just wanted to see what happened when you actually talked. It was the equivalent of a horse breeder examining the teeth of a thoroughbred. I launched into my practiced reply, exuding suavity and confidence.
“Well, there’s Dealing, of course. I’m out here doing some ADR for it and meeting a few people, but mostly I’ve been doing theater in New York, blahblahblahblahblah…”
Terry beamed with pride, like the owner of a prize-winning whippet at a dog show. Stalmaster stared at my eyes implacably. As I gabbled on, my mind raced with dreams of glory and with the pragmatic matter of whether I could change my flight back to New York without paying a penalty. Things couldn’t possibly have been going better.
And then something horrible happened. The German shepherd lumbered off the sofa and walked to my side, hungry for more affection. He batted my hand with his snout and I scratched his ear, stupidly thinking that this manly gesture would only enhance my performance. The dog rubbed his shoulder against my knee. I continued my patter. Terry and Lynn continued to listen and nod, gazing at me attentively at eye level. The dog became more ardent. Clearly I had befriended him far too much. He wrapped his two front legs around my thigh and with all his considerable strength proceeded to hump against it. His slick pink phallus made an alarming appearance. My efforts to push him off seemed only to heighten his ardor. Through all of this I kept on talking, but my polished narrative became halting and fragmented, and my forehead bubbled with sweat. Both men seemed totally oblivious to the humping dog. Their expressions turned quizzical, then concerned as if they worried that perhaps I had suddenly taken sick.
Terry finally took notice of the sex-mad canine’s rape attempt and summoned a houseboy to haul him out of the room, the retreating dog scrabbling madly along the marble tiles of the foyer. The hound was gone but I was rubble. My dream casting session had ended up a nightmare. Lynn Stalmaster excused himself, unimpressed. Terry ushered him out with the air of a man who had given a broken toy to a child. Later that evening, dinner at Scandia involved six other strangers. I contributed barely a sentence to their manic babble. I drank too much and drove back to Venice Beach, weaving along the Santa Monica Freeway in a state of woozy self-disgust. Two days later I was on a plane back to New York with the strong sense that I never should have left in the first place. As for Days of Heaven, it came out seven years later. By that time I had long since repaired the Hollywood-inflicted dents in my battered ego. The film was magnificent, yet more evidence of the brilliance of my old friend Terry Malick. My part was beautifully played by the severe, silent playwright Sam Shepard. Up until then he had never acted in a movie in his life.
[23] A Fork in the Road
I was back in New York. Dealing was behind me and I had descended from the hallucinatory ether of Hollywood. I’d come home to no work and no prospects, as if none of the heady promise of the movies had ever existed. And this time, unemployment brought a whole new set of complications. My wife was pregnant.
A pregnancy has a way of grabbing your attention. It was a cause for celebration, of course, and for enormous relief as well, since we had barely recovered from the loss of our firstborn child. But Jean’s pregnancy also considerably ratcheted up my anxieties about money and jobs. The two of us had been living simply in a small apartment at West End Avenue and One Hundredth Street. We had good friends, good times, and a few occasional inexpensive luxuries. Our economic status was far from dire. But we were ill-prepared for parenthood. Our Upper West Side life was entirely supported by Jean’s modest salary. In an era that predated the concept of paid maternity leave, that salary would shortly disappear. And besides that scary prospect, our one-bedroom home barely accommodated the two of us, let alone a family of three. The gauzy unreality of moviemaking quickly gave way to the hard facts of joblessness and impending fatherhood. I had to find some work.
By this time I was a little more seasoned in the New York job market. I had an agent. I knew some key casting directors. I’d learned not to bother with Backstage and Equity open calls. But in terms of actual results, things hadn’t gotten any better since I’d traveled north for my movie and west for my Hollywood baptism. Sifting through my own history of that period, it is startling to recall that, in over two years, I never got a single acting job in New York City. Movie meetings were infrequent and fruitless. Ad-agency clients continued to spurn me. New York theater, on Broadway and off, was a closed shop. I couldn’t even manage the most likely entry-level job: despite my LAMDA pedigree and all the Shakespeare in my lengthy résumé (or perhaps because of them), Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival showed no interest. My hardships, of course, were not unique. Acting jobs in New York were hardly abundant. They never are. But the ones that came along always went to a tiny cadre of actors who never seemed to be out of work. Try as I would, I couldn’t break into that circle. Envy and disappointment clung to me like a bad smell.
So I took stock and began to think strategically. I looked farther afield. I made a short list of all the notable regional theater companies within striking distance of New York City. The list included Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario; Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut; and several others. McCarter Theatre was the only one I left out (I was determined not to swim back to that nepotistic safe haven). To each of the targeted companies, I sent a picture and a résumé. I also included a cover letter. It stated that I was heading their way, that I would like a general audition, and that while I was there I would like to buy a ticket for their current production. Intent on not seeming too eager, I waited for a week after I calculated that each letter had arrived. Then I telephoned the office of each theater’s artistic director to follow up on the letter. I rarely spoke to this person, but in most cases there was someone on the staff who would make arrangements for me. Off I would go in my aging VW station wagon, trying my best to treat each long-shot outing as a colorful adventure. Some of them were major treks (it took me nine hours to reach southwestern Ontario), and none of them yielded immediate results. But I met a lot of directors and I saw some pretty good theater. And, most important, the trips left me with the feeling that I was doing something, something to plant a seed and make a green shoot sprout in the unyielding soil of the acting profession.