Sometimes Rock would go even farther. In one scene halfway through the script, he and Julianne were locked in a passionate embrace. It was first shot from an angle that favored Rock. His face was nicely framed as he embraced and kissed her. Next the camera and lights were reset for an angle that favored Julianne. As Rock embraced her with his back to the camera, he lifted his shoulder, covering half her face. Paolo cut the take and mentioned to Rock the little problem with the shoulder. Rock assured him that he would make an adjustment on the next take. The camera rolled again. Once again his shoulder rose up, and once again Julianne was blocked, tilting her face backwards as she struggled to be seen. Paolo repeated the same note. Rock cheerfully acknowledged it. Take three. Up went the shoulder. Another note, another nod, another take, and once again the shoulder went up. The three of them danced this little minuet five or six more times. The tension on the set approached the boiling point. Everyone felt it but Rock, who remained relaxed, affable, and eager to help out. At last Paolo gave up and moved on to the next setup. Another round had gone to Rock.
A year later when the film was released, there was that embrace up on the screen. It plays in only one angle, with Rock’s ardent face nicely on display and Julianne seen from behind. You can see the editor’s dilemma. Why feature a shot in which a beautiful young starlet looks like a drowning woman, struggling to come up for air?
As the shooting went on, I watched all of Rock’s moves with a kind of queasy wonderment. I was a starry-eyed innocent with the scales falling from my eyes. Confronted with all of these elaborate mind-games I began to self-protectively develop a few of my own. I made myself into Rock’s guileless disciple, peppering him with questions about his technique as if I had never set foot on a film set. I figured the more I was attentive to him, the less he would ambush me. For his part, Rock relished the role of crusty mentor. He would take me into his confidence and share with me his crafty wiles.
One day on a city street, Rock and I were shooting a scene where we simply walked out of a building and climbed into a car. Paolo was covering the two of us in a broad master shot, followed by a closer shot of Rock as he got behind the wheel. Rock wanted to be sure that the closer shot would end up in the final edit.
“Watch this,” he told me.
As we shot the master, he would do something slightly wrong on every take. He would trip on the curb, drop his briefcase, bump the fender of the car, or fail on his first attempt to open the car door.
“You see?” he said.
“See what?”
“Now they’ll have to use the closer shot.”
“That’s incredible, Rock!” I said. “What do you call this?”
Rock grinned and winked at me.
“Trickery,” he growled.
Despite all of this on-set gamesmanship, Rock’s demeanor was amiable, courteous, and masterfully disingenuous. Anyone visiting the set of Interdit would have envied us the privilege of working with such a gracious, considerate star. But movie crews are a cynical bunch. They’ve seen it all and they catch on fast. In no time they became aware of every hoary trick Rock was playing. He was fooling no one, least of all Paolo and his editor. By the end of the shoot, everyone on the set was referring to him behind his back by the pet name they had coined for him. They called him “Mr. Pleasant.”
Interdit was released in the U.S. under another name. Its French title had not survived the rigorous market testing of its American distributor. It had a middling success in the States but did little to revive Rock Masters’ career. It was the last substantial leading role he ever played in films. But I took no pleasure in his decline. I’d actually liked the man. In fact, I was pleased for him when he recently scored a modest triumph in his late seventies, playing a small role in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. In retrospect, his strenuous self-aggrandizement during the filming of Interdit strikes me as sad, self-deluding, and almost poignant. He was clinging to a Hollywood that no longer existed. He was playing by rules that no longer applied. Teaching me those rules was his version of an actor’s generosity. Working with him had been an education all right. But it was an in-depth tutorial in how not to act in a movie.
While we were on location in Europe, three of Paolo’s friends paid him a visit. By chance these three men had gathered in a nearby city to work on the script for a film that they would shoot in New York City the following summer. One of these friends was a screenwriter, one a director, and one an actor. Among them they were in the process of reinventing American movies. Their film would be dangerous, disturbing, and brutally real. It would be one of a handful of 1970s films that would shake Hollywood to its roots. It would be called Taxi Driver. The screenwriter was Paul Schrader. The director was Martin Scorsese. The actor was Robert De Niro. Their presence made poor Rock Masters look like a dinosaur nearing extinction.
[26] Broadway Baby
© Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. www.alhirschfeld.com.
For me, the 1970s was Broadway. From The Changing Room in 1973 until the end of the decade, I acted in a dozen Broadway shows. It feels as if half of my waking life in those years was lived within the ten square blocks of the New York theater district. To be sure, I occasionally worked elsewhere. I did a couple of plays off-Broadway, one in D.C., one in San Francisco, and another one back at the Long Wharf. I directed two or three more times. I played smallish parts in a few more movies, one of which even took me back out to Hollywood for a month. But Broadway was my gravitational center, and I spent the overwhelming majority of my time there.
How do you distill a decade of work on Broadway without sounding like a tedious windbag in a theater bar? Describing each one of those dozen plays would be like describing all the marching bands after a parade has passed by. Each band may have its own distinctive look, sound, and personality, but in retrospect they all become one big clamorous blur. How can I persuade anyone that there was anything special about any of my twelve Broadway shows in the seventies, or that they were even worth seeing? Theater is of the moment. Breathless self-praise, no matter how descriptive, can never recapture its impact after the fact. Simply put, you had to have been there.
And yet each of those shows was a formative and memorable chapter in my own history. Those twelve directors, those half-dozen playwrights, those nine different playhouses, those scores of fellow actors, those endless hours of rehearsals, those hundreds of performances, those tens of thousands of spectators, that army of drama critics and their reams of theater reviews — all of these played a role in shaping me as an actor. I have always felt that my early Broadway years were an incalculable gift, a priceless part of my actor’s education. By the end of that decade I knew who I was onstage. I had learned what I did well and, more to the point, what I did badly. I had my successes and my failures, my rave notices and my withering pans. But nearly all of this took place in the friendly confines of the theater district. My hits and misses were watched not by the vast American film and television audience but by a comparatively tiny population of demanding yet forbearing New York theatergoers.
To sum up my 1970s career—“Turning the accomplishment of many years / Into an hourglass”—let me offer a kind of scorecard of my Broadway credits during that time. It is a portrait in numbers, a list that tracks the gradual evolution of a stage actor’s persona. From this shorthand history I emerge as a fully formed actor at the dawn of the eighties, ready for the famous and infamous showbiz events of my later life: