After my lunch with Mary at the Westside Deli, the next four years passed with lightning speed. They were jam-packed with momentous changes for both of us. For a while we played a transcontinental tug-’o-war, struggling to choose between my life in New York and hers in Los Angeles. Mary took a sabbatical from UCLA to test the waters in Manhattan. She weighed job offers on the East Coast. We snooped around for a bigger Upper West Side apartment. One day my agent called. He’d made an appointment for me to read for a film based on John Irving’s bestselling novel The World According to Garp. At my audition, I read for the role of the transsexual Roberta Muldoon. Director George Roy Hill cast me as Roberta and I shot the film in and around New York. Halfway through the shoot, Mary was granted tenure at UCLA. This news abruptly ended our geographical tug-’o-war. She won. I was heading west. But before leaving town, Mary and I got married at City Hall, with nine-year-old Ian as my best man. Arriving in Los Angeles, I joined Mary in the apartment at the corner of Montana and Harvard. Ian became a frequent visitor. Mary gave birth to our daughter, Phoebe. Soon after, Garp was released. The next year, our son Nathan came along. We bought a house, minutes from UCLA (where we have lived ever since). Rick Nicita was my agent again and Walter Teller was now my attorney. Awards began to pile up for my performance as Roberta Muldoon. When I won the New York Film Critics’ Award, my old friend David Ansen gleefully called me with the news. Hollywood embraced me with open arms. After Garp, I played a back-to-back string of wildly different roles in major Hollywood films: Twilight Zone, Footloose, Terms of Endearment, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. Celebrity struck like an avalanche. I escorted Mary to the Academy Awards for two successive Oscar nominations. We barely knew what hit us. Our lives had been hurled into a completely new level of reality. If we hadn’t had each other we might not have survived our dizzying flight into the ozone. But we did. We had each other. And we’ve had each other ever since.
A cautionary tale? Indeed. But it is a cautionary tale with a difference. This cautionary tale has a happy ending, right out of O. Henry. It is an ending shot through with one blazing, life-affirming irony:
None of these things would have ever happened if I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my career.
Let us examine for a moment what my wife’s professorial colleagues might call “a counterfactual.” I choose Betrayal and I celebrate a gratifying success on Broadway. But look what I miss out on? I never meet Mary Yeager. I completely forgo my life with her. Phoebe and Nathan are never born. A thousand happy events in our lives never take place — birthday parties, school plays, graduation ceremonies, camping trips, foreign countries, Christmas mornings, Halloween nights, swimming lessons, bicycle lessons, weddings, baby steps, pets. My professional life is impacted as well. I never achieve that unique dual citizenship as a Broadway and Hollywood actor that has been my calling card ever since. Everything of substance that has defined the second half of my life simply never happens. Such an alternate universe is completely inconceivable to me. Each of these things I hold near and dear. They will live in me forever, long after everyone else has lost all memory of a hit Broadway play in 1979.
And what is the moral of this story? It is a truth at the heart of my whole life:
Acting is pretty great. But it isn’t everything.
Coda
Years after my father died, my thoughts continued to dwell on memories of him. The most vivid of those memories was that evening in 2002 when I first read him a bedtime story. As I relived that evening again and again, an idea gradually began to form in my mind. On that long-ago night, my mother, my father, and I made our deepest connection with each other. But that’s not all that happened. By chance, I also stumbled across a nugget of pure gold. The nugget was called “Uncle Fred Flits By.” That Wodehouse short story was a work of comedy genius, a fine-tuned machine for manufacturing riotous laughter. Best of all, it was a story that almost no one west of the Atlantic Ocean had ever heard of. I began to imagine a theatrical performance consisting of nothing more than “Uncle Fred Flits By” enacted by a single actor on an empty stage. It would be a kind of storytelling magic act. With nothing more than the actor’s sleight of hand, four settings, ten characters, and a parrot would all come to life in front of an audience. I would be the actor. And the story, for all its loopy hilarity, would be suffused with my own poignant history with it.
With no clear notion of what I would do next, I began to commit the story to memory. I printed it out on twenty sheets of paper. Each morning and evening I would take the family dog on long, leisurely walks, carrying the pages and running my lines. Passersby would see me staring into space, working my features spasmodically, and muttering to myself. They steered clear of me without a word. I assigned myself a single paragraph for each dog walk and wouldn’t return home until it was safely stowed in my brain. After a month, the dog was exhausted, but I could recite the entire story to myself from beginning to end.
I enlisted the help of Jack O’Brien, a good friend and a splendid stage director, to help me spin “Uncle Fred” into a piece of theater. Jack was uncannily suited to the task. He and I shared a distinct strand of theatrical DNA. As a young man, he had worked with several alumni of my father’s old Ohio Shakespeare festivals, so he felt an ineffable connection to my father’s legacy. Together we approached André Bishop, artistic director of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater Company. We asked him for a rehearsal room to try the piece out. André readily obliged. The three of us assembled a group of twenty friends and well-wishers. They arrived in the subterranean Ballet Room of the Vivian Beaumont Theater on a late morning in January 2008. They had no idea what I was up to.
I spent five minutes telling the little crowd my brief history with “Uncle Fred Flits By.” I told them about my father, my mother, and my siblings. I told them about Tellers of Tales. I had brought along our old copy of the book, and I showed it to them. I told them about the Amherst condo and the night I read to my parents. Then, with no set other than a table and chair and with no prop other than the old book, I sat down and began to read the story out loud to them. After a few paragraphs, I looked up, took off my glasses, placed the open book on the little table, and proceeded to perform the rest of the story by heart.
The little performance was a revelation. Our friends loved it. They thought the story was hilarious. They experienced the same sense of discovery that I had felt six years before when I had read it to my folks. But most of all they were captivated by my five minutes of introductory storytelling. They wanted to hear much more of it. After they disbanded, Jack, André, and I discussed how to expand the piece into a longer evening, something more suitable to a ticket-buying crowd. Judging from the response of our little audience, stories of my own family were clearly going to be my richest source materials.