How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am Read online

  Anyway, the playwright’s wife was at this party, and I asked if her husband would be joining us. She stared at me and said he was meeting with someone he hoped to get to play my part in the movie. The play had been sold to the movies for a million dollars. That was how I heard I wouldn’t be asked to play the role. The playwright’s wife seemed to thoroughly enjoy giving me the news. Not wanting to give her any satisfaction, I casually asked, “Oh, who’s directing?” And she, to rub it in, said, “Oh, if we get this actor, anyone would direct it.”

  The director of the play, the brilliant Gene Saks, wasn’t asked to direct the movie, even though he had directed several hit movies, so maybe they had a beef with Gene and me, which is really ironic, because the play of Same Time, Next Year was the hit of the writer’s life in the theater.

  Ellen Burstyn, who played her role in the movie, has always given me a lot of credit for the success of the play, but evidently the playwright and his wife saw it differently. In fairness, I’m sure their feelings are as genuine as mine, but I wish that the playwright had at least made me aware of them when we were working together.

  I was recently telling my friend John Gabriel, as insightful a man as I’ve ever met, the story about the playwright and his wife, and he said something quite startling to me, which I now believe. He said, “They weren’t upset with you about your input. How could they be upset with you for helping hand them their biggest hit?”

  He said that, like the producer, they were upset with me because I was leaving their standing room only hit, no doubt shortening the run and costing them money. It ran a total of three years, but I guess they felt if Ellen Burstyn and I had stayed longer, it might have run five years. I don’t believe they were angry at Ellen, because they knew she left only because I did.

  That never occurred to me, but John is probably right, because the producer was so angry we were leaving he refused to throw a party for Ellen and me, so we threw it and invited him. He came, too, and had a good time!

  Until John Gabriel said that to me, it had never occurred to me in more than thirty years, even though there was a pretty obvious clue in the producer’s attitude. What I take from that is even though you’re positive you understand something, you may be dead wrong! Politicians, beware! Of course, if John is right, then the playwright’s wife’s hostile behavior toward me seems moreoffensive.

  A few performances before the opening night of Same Time, Next Year, in the middle of a scene, a voice called out from the balcony to me saying, “I like your robe.” Security guards removed Ellen’s former husband Neil from the theater. Needless to say, the rest of that performance was not up to our usual level.

  I later learned that Neil committed suicide by jumping out of a window. So many people tragically have no idea what drugs can do to them, even though it’s in the news every day that people are dying from drug abuse.

  The year after the play I did the movie Heaven Can Wait, which I believe is as good a movie as I’ve ever been involved with, mostly because of the stunning performances of Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

  My first connection to Julie Christie was when I overheard her talking on the phone in the Palo Alto, California, mansion we were filming in. I heard her say some nice things about me, and since I was available, as evidently she was, that was enough for me to ask her out. She had gone with Warren years earlier. Julie Christie and I sat in a restaurant, and she said, “I have no idea what I’m doing here with you, I have all these houseguests.” I honestly can’t remember what I said to that, but at least she didn’t walk out on dinner. A few days later she invited me to a pool party at the house she had taken for the filming. I was the only male there, and Julie and all the women were walking around bare-breasted. At one point, Julie came over to me and said, “Don’t be bothered by this.” I said, “I’m not bothered.” Frankly, the writer in me was trying to figure out why they invited me. I wasn’t able to—still can’t.

  That’s all I remember about Julie on location. After the picture I was sitting with Warren in some club on the Sunset Strip and Julie came by and suggested we join her and a friend to go somewhere, but we stayed where we were.

  In my experience, Warren Beatty is one of the sweetest, most appealing, and most gifted people I’ve ever met. My closest female friend of almost forty years, Ria Berkus, and I once followed Warren in his car as he took us to the Playboy mansion, where we’d never been. Warren went to the call box and seemed to be waiting a little longer than you would expect for the gates to open. Ria, who is the single funniest woman I’ve ever met, said, as though she were speaking from the mansion to the call box, “Sorry, Warren, you’ve had your share of girls for the month.”

  Warren’s legendary success with women leads me to believe he knew how to talk to girls while the rest of us were still being toilet trained. I believe Warren realized before most of us, if we ever did, that some women are as interested in sex as we men are. That neveroccurred to me.

  A Most Formidable Woman

  —or Something

  For a time in the seventies I was going out with one of the most formidable women I ever knew. She has achieved quite a lot in her life in areas beyond acting and is known all over the world for her strong feelings about many things. The first time I asked her out she said, “I’ll go out with you, but do something dazzling.” Dazzling, I thought. Right. Yeah. Good luck!

  The best I could come up with was to take her to dinner at a really out-of-the-way place that had been around for hundreds of years. I felt she would be impressed by that, and she was. I remember she ordered a Manhattan, which impressed me. Afterward I took her to meet some friends of mine she had worked with, who were also very accomplished. I felt she would be impressed that these were my friends. She was. I don’t remember impressing her much after that, but we continued to go out. I could make her laugh, and that seemed to get me a lot of points, but most of the time she wasn’t laughing but debating me on… well, you name it.

  She very much liked to go to the theater, and I didn’t. There was one particular play she wanted to see that I had been told by friends would drive me screaming into the night with boredom. Not to say it wasn’t any good; I’m sure it was, but let’s just say it wasn’t my cup of tea. She said, “If you don’t like it, we’ll leave at intermission.” I said, “Really?” She said, “Absolutely.” We went to see it. It was everything I thought it would be, which meant I wanted to leave at intermission. She then said, “We can’t leave. People from the cast know we’re here.” I looked at her for a long moment and reminded her of our deal. She again said, “People know we’re here.” I stayed.

  After the play, as we walked up Broadway, we debated what had happened. We were going to meet some friends of mine, and one of them was an official with Amnesty International, an organization that looks into human rights violations. Not that sitting in a theater past the point where you want to leave would in any way be considered a human rights violation, but I thought presenting our cases to an Amnesty official might inject some much needed humor into our latest debate. When we got to my friend’s apartment, I said we’d had a disagreement and wanted to present the story for her judgment.

  At that point my girlfriend piped up and said she was agreeable to this, if she could be the one to describe what happened. Not the first one to describe, the only one! In other words, I would get to say nothing. My Amnesty friend gently said that didn’t seem quite right. I honestly don’t remember what happened after that.

  She liked to refer to me, I think affectionately, as having “exotic neuroses.” I don’t remember her ever acknowledging that she wasn’t exactly the girl next door. We eventually went our separate ways, but whenever I run into her over the years, we always have some laughs. Of course, we chat for only a few minutes.

  Some relationships just work better that way.

  It must be obvious by now that in some of these stories I name names and in others I don’t. Some people deserve to be named, and others deserve the
respect of not having that happen.

  The All Knowing

  I was going out to dinner with a friend of mine in the late 1970s, and I couldn’t help but notice he seemed more muscular. I asked him about it, and he said he had run into a guy at a gym who was a trainer, and the fella was training him. He gave me his name, and the trainer started to come to my apartment to train me. While I had been reasonably athletic as a teenager, that was quite a while ago, and I hadn’t worked out for years, if ever.

  This guy jumped right in and started to work me as though I had told him I’d decided to go for the decathlon. I figured he must know what he’s doing (a notion I’ve long since gotten over about people in all fields), so I went along, even though I couldn’t help but notice that after the hour with him, I would just stare vacantly into space for about twenty minutes, having no desire to even consider standing up.

  This went on for a couple of months. This is a good lesson learned about the importance of being skeptical, which, given my penchant for questions, I’m amazed didn’t inform my judgment when I was forty-five years old!

  Eventually, I was so messed up, I couldn’t even stand up to get out of bed. I called the trainer and told him what had happened. He suggested he still come over to “tone me up.” I’m still not quite sure how you tone up someone who can’t move, but I just let it go and thanked him for everything. I always try to be nice, even in circumstances when logic doesn’t call for nice. It felt like it never for one moment occurred to this all knowing trainer that he had been very damaging.

  My next call was to a doctor who suggested I come see him. I said, “I can’t move.” He said, “Have an ambulance bring you over.” I said, in a nice way, of course, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Another character who doesn’t see how all knowingly nuts he is.

  I found a doctor who suggested that the ambulance bring me to a prominent New York hospital. The next day they wheeled me down the hall. Through my drugged haze (I had gotten myself prescription painkillers because I was in a lot of pain even lying still.) I asked where we were going. A nurse said, “The doctor has scheduled a myelogram for you.”

  That’s a procedure where they inject you with a dye to see exactly where on your spine they’re operating. Someone once told me that dye can give you a headache for about twenty years. I had no way of confirming that, but I looked up at the nurses through my haze and said, “I haven’t agreed to surgery.” The nurses gave me a strange look and wheeled me back to my room.

  The doctor, a very nice guy, came to my room and kindly said, “I understand you don’t feel you’ll need surgery.” I said, “Since I’ve been in the hospital, I feel the pressure on my lower back has let up a bit, as I’m in a different position than I was at home, as well as now being in traction.” I think he already thought I was nuts, so I chose not to tell him I had played a doctor in the movie Rosemary’s Baby, and even though I played a gynecologist, I felt I knew a little something about backs. Most of the time when I do jokes like that, people think I’m serious.

  He took a position at the foot of the bed, bent my leg, and slowly moved it toward my chest. I remember how his eyes widened as he bent it way more than he thought he could, before I asked him to stop.

  He then graciously said, “Well, I’m always willing to learn,” and it was decided to give bed rest and traction a try. As the days went on, I still wouldn’t even attempt to stand, but I felt I was improving.

  I asked the night nurse if my girlfriend could visit me after work, which would be around seven p.m. She said that was past visiting hours. I felt that since I had a private room I should be allowed to have a visitor. She glared at me and suggested I could take it up with her supervisor. I did, and the supervisor said that would be fine.

  Now I had an enemy in the night nurse, who always acted as though she owned the hospital—all knowing with a chip on her shoulder, and she made no effort to conceal her feelings. I remember trying jokes with her like, “I don’t want an enemy giving me a enema.” She didn’t think anything I said was even remotely funny. I was supposed to rest and relax there for three weeks, but because of the tension with the night nurse, I chose to have an ambulance take me back to my apartment.

  My nice doctor offered to move me to a room at the other end of the floor, but I declined. I didn’t want to think about that nurse showing up in my new room and confronting me while I was lying flat out. That wouldn’t have been a good idea for me or for her. She should have been fired.

  Herb Gardner came to the hospital to accompany me in the back of the ambulance, where he and a guy in a white uniform chatted. Herb, I’m sure trying to amuse me, asked the ambulance attendant to share different code descriptions of patients in ambulances. I remember LRGDNR, which means last rights given, do not resuscitate, and LOB, liquor on breath, which also didn’t apply to me, which I would have found funny if I hadn’t been in pain from the ambulance hitting bumps in the road. Back home, with a lot of help from my girlfriend and two former girlfriends, each doing eight-hour shifts, I was up and around in about a month.

  Today I have no back problems at all, but I do have problems with trainers or anyone else who thinks they know everything and with hospital personnel who are hostile to people who can’t stand up, or even those who can.

  Actually, as I’ve said, I have a lot of problems with know-it-alls on any subject and a lot of problems with anyone expressing hostility in or out of hospitals.

  Too many people everywhere foolishly consider themselves authorities. Many years ago I had a meeting with a top executive at a talent agency that represented me. I wasn’t working all that much. With full certainty he said, “If you don’t make it by the time you’re thirty, forget it.” I chose not to tell him I was thirty-two. Early in their careers, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds were both dropped by Universal Studios, Burt because they said he couldn’t act, and Clint because they said his Adam’s apple was too big, and then of course there was the talent executive’s report on Fred Astaire, which read, “Can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little.”

  Of course, I’d have to include in this category the executive producer of the Simon and Garfunkel special who pronounced it “not air worthy,” and then the next day “the best rough cut I’ve ever seen.”

  I’ve never heard anyone more all knowing than Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio. There almost never seems to be any doubt that what she’s saying could possibly be anything less than 100 percent right. Even though she only talks to people for a relatively brief period of time, she and, of course, others are more than willing to tell them what to do about something that could impact the rest of their life. Leave your husband, leave your wife questions? No problem, here’s what you should do.

  It doesn’t seem to ever occur to these psychologists that the picture they’re getting may not be the full truth. Most people describing a problem can’t get the full truth out in five minutes, if we are ever capable of seeing it.

  Dr. Laura once made a lot of working mothers furious by suggesting they couldn’t possibly work regularly and be Dr. Laura’s concept of the right kind of mother. Oh, she tells us it can be done if mother and father take off from their jobs and share the responsibility for their children. That comes under the heading of “nice work if you can get it.” Dr. Laura, of course, controls where she works, so she can properly look after her children. For me personally looking back as a kid, I don’t think I’d much want someone around who seems to know everything about everything, and if I did have someone like that, I sure wouldn’t want them around all the time.

  There doesn’t seem to be anything these people don’t know. I once heard Dr. Laura tell a caller that “when most people do sit-ups, they really work their hip muscles instead of their stomach muscles.” Perish the thought.

  Somebody should call and ask, “What do you do if you live with someone who acts as though they know everything about everything?” That’s an answer I’d like to hear.

  I drove by a sign on a preschool
the other day that said it was for children 2.6 to 6 years of age—2.6! It reminded me of a story I heard years ago from some friends who were trying to get their child into a preschool. The little girl was rejected because the instructor said her hand-eye coordination wasn’t where it needed to be, and it wouldn’t be fair to the child to put her in with a group of kids with superior hand-eye coordination.

  When my friends asked how the instructor knew this about their child, he showed them a drawing she was asked to do of a kangaroo. It didn’t look much like a kangaroo, but when my friends asked to see the other children’s drawings of kangaroos, they didn’t look much like kangaroos, either. Their child later became one of the top female athletes in the state.

  In preschools, and just about everywhere else in life, don’t believe everything you hear.

  Part of the know-it-all epidemic is the instant e-mail voting on cable television. A question that was raised recently was, “What countries do you feel should help in Liberia?” Who’s doing all this voting? Are they experts on Liberia, or just on Africa in general?

  An earlier one was, “What do you think we should do about nuclear weapons in North Korea?” These are questions that the most informed experts wrestle with daily, and yet thousands of people instantly vote on this, and the results are given as though they tell us something.

  There are an awful lot of people out there who are willing to give you their opinion on anything, whether they know much about the subject or not, so obviously be skeptical, but—forgive me for digressing a moment—accept all compliments.

  In the 1970s, I was filming a movie in London. We were on location, shooting outside the campus at Oxford University. One night I went to dinner at a restaurant by myself. I sat at a small table for two and faced the wall. To my right and left were the same size tables, only about a foot away from mine. To my right there was a middle-aged couple, the man facing the wall as I was. To my left there was a mother and her daughter in her twenties.