This miraculous body of work was the result of a unique good cop/bad cop management partnership at the top of Joe’s organization. The good cop was his producing partner, a genial and warmly persuasive man named Bernard Gersten. The bad cop was Joe himself, a charismatic, irascible, fearless, mercurial, and frequently impossible man to deal with. He had a kind of genius for throwing people off guard and bending them to his will. To that end, he cultivated a complex love-hate relationship with everyone who worked with him, including even Bernie Gersten himself. The first time I met Joe had been years before, at a Shakespeare audition in a rehearsal room at the Public. In front of six or eight staffers, he greeted me that day with a booming voice, cigar in hand:
“John Lithgow! The son who has outstripped his father, as every son must!”
Zap! By some sixth sense, he had found my emotional sore spot and plunged a needle straight into it. I was stunned and confused. On the one hand, he was complimenting my nascent success. On the other, he was airily dismissing my father’s entire life’s work, without knowing a thing about my relationship with him. I was frozen in place, caught somewhere between flattery and outrage. Just like that, Joe Papp had me right where he wanted me. A man like that is incredibly hard to say no to.
And there I was, years later, caught between Bob Whitehead and Joe Papp, between Broadway and downtown, between Harold Pinter and Thomas Babe, between Betrayal and Salt Lake City Skyline. I twisted myself into knots trying to decide between the two jobs. I spoke on the phone with Bob Whitehead, who was incredulous that I would even consider turning down Betrayal. Then I spoke to Joe, who did a classic Joe Papp number on me:
“Whaddya wanna do another English play for? That’s all y’been doing! You’re an American! You should be playing an American! Everybody thinks you’re a limey!”—(this, notwithstanding the fact that Joe Hill was a Swede). “That Harold Pinter thing’s already been done! That’s all the Broadway crowd wants! Something that’s already a big deal in London!” (pronouncing the word as if it were week-old fish). “That’s safe stuff! It’s soft! Come on down here and show everybody you’ve got some balls!”
Never the most decisive actor in town, I was a reed in the wind, blowing this way and that. The deciding vote was cast by my agent at William Morris. This was a young man to whom I’d recently been relegated after my longtime rep, Rick Nicita, had decamped for an upstart agency in Los Angeles called CAA. My new agent took the Joe Papp line. Let’s go with the bold choice, he proclaimed. Let’s be daring. Let’s take Salt Lake City Skyline! So I did. I called Bob Whitehead and told him my decision. To Bob it sounded as if I had chosen dirt over gold dust, but without a trace of ill will he wished me well.
Anyone might have guessed the outcome. With a full production in the Public’s churchlike Anspacher Theater, Salt Lake City Skyline wilted into an inert and preachy bore. The reviews said as much. My brother barely recognized it from that exhilarating play reading six months before. We played for three weeks to half-empty houses. Joe Papp had sat through half of a dress rehearsal and had never been heard from again. At a desultory party on our opening night I learned the reason that my new agent at William Morris had so strenuously urged me to choose the Babe play: he also represented its director.
And Betrayal? It opened halfway through our brief run, with Raúl Juliá in the role of Jerry. The show was an unqualified success, hailed as one of Pinter’s greatest works. It was the talk of the town, destined to play to sell-out crowds well into the following season. In every bio of Robert Whitehead, it is listed first among his many great successes. Since that hit Broadway premiere, there have been hundreds of revivals of it all over the world. Gallingly, I’ve been asked to play Jerry in it, three or four more times. By contrast, Salt Lake City Skyline was never performed again. In the next thirty years, the two plays would come to symbolize the biggest professional mistake I ever made.
A few nights before we closed, Bob Whitehead and his wife, Zoe Caldwell, came downtown to see our show. Afterward, they made their way to my makeup table through a crowd of half-dressed actors in our cluttered common dressing room. Bob was aglow with his recent Broadway triumph. In possibly his most gracious moment, he complimented me warmly on my performance. He said that, while he’d been baffled by my decision to pass on Betrayal, having seen me in the role of Joe Hill he could understand why I’d chosen it. Fred Gwynne slouched nearby, listening to the exchange. After the Whiteheads left, he put a hand on my shoulder, shook his head, and looked at me with a world-weary smile on his long, mournful face. He didn’t have to say a word.
But that is not the end of this cautionary tale. There is another chapter.
While the cast of Betrayal merrily continued their sold-out run on Broadway, I ate my heart out with self-recrimination and regret. But because Salt Lake City Skyline had closed so abruptly, I was available for other work. Before long, another job did indeed materialize. I was hired to play a small supporting role in a live network TV production of The Oldest Living Graduate, a recent play by the Texas writer Preston Jones. Headlining the show would be Henry Fonda, Cloris Leachman, and George Grizzard. The play would be broadcast from the campus theater of SMU in Dallas, but the cast was scheduled to rehearse for three weeks in Los Angeles prior to the live performance. This modest job was a far cry from a leading role in a hit Broadway show, but I was happy to put a few thousand miles between me and the thrumming New York success of Betrayal. In the month of March 1980, I flew west to begin rehearsals. It was a trip that was destined to completely change my life.
Soon after my arrival in Los Angeles, I called up Walter Teller. Walter and I had been good friends for a dozen years. I had met him on the night that Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, in November of 1968. That was the month when I’d sneaked home from England to direct As You Like It for my father in Princeton. Walter’s parents and mine were part of a crowd of Princeton friends who had gathered for an election-night party at the house of a gung-ho Democratic couple. Walter and I had tagged along with our parents, the only members of our generation in attendance. He was smart, cynical, and funny. Like so many of my college friends of that era, he was highly educated and totally directionless. I took to him immediately. We spent the evening skulking in the basement of the house, playing pool, drinking beer, bemoaning the ascendancy of Richard Nixon, and hatching a lifelong friendship.
In the years between that election night and my West Coast trip, Walt had gone to law school at Berkeley, had turned to entertainment law, had moved to Los Angeles, and had joined a booming law practice there. This career path had put a continent between us. We hadn’t connected for ages. When I reached him in his L.A. office, he was delighted to hear from me. We arranged to have supper the following night at El Coyote, a clamorous Mexican restaurant on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood. That evening, over enchiladas, beans, and beer, I spent an hour bringing Walter up to date on the events of my last couple of years. It was a pretty gloomy narrative, but it was leavened by Walt’s usual drollery and wry perspective. At a certain point, I paused for a breath and a swig of Dos Equis. Walter chose that moment for a twinkly pronouncement.