1226blog

All The World’s A Stage

I acted on the stage, although no one would rightfully call it acting, in one play in my life when I was in my late 20s and was living in Passaic soon after my marriage had collapsed under the weight of our combined refusal to look inside and outside of ourselves and to honestly assess our relationship. You could say my wife and I were acting on the grand stage of life.

Marlon Brando said of acting that whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we’re acting. “Most people do it all day long,” he said. Given that definition, my marriage was truly acting and judging by the outcome, there would be no Oscars for me.

While I was having the worst time of my life acting in a marriage that was suffocating before my eyes, I was cast ironically in “The Time of Our Lives,” a 1939, Pulitzer Prize winning drama by William Saroyan. I played McCarthy, an intelligent and well-read longshoreman, in a production that was directed at a community center in Passaic by a friendly, but somewhat self-absorbed, long haired, bearded would-be thespian named Charlz Herfurth, no doubt picking the unusual spelling of Charles to draw attention to himself as someone special. What happened to Herfurth in the ensuing years is unknown to me but I don’t recall seeing his name on the credits for any Broadway shows.

That I was cast in the show is a bit of a reach. I didn’t go looking for the role but at the time I was working for Gerald Goldman, the mayor of the city of Passaic, I knew Charlz through his work with student actors in Passaic and he was desperately trying to find people to act in the show, so I fit the bill though the closest I had come to acting as a youth was when I lied to my mother about stealing the dollar bills she had hidden under a brick next to the pot belly stove in our home. If she believed my lies, she never said. I had no idea what acting was and I read my lines with as much emotion as if reciting pages out of a dictionary but there was nobody to replace me, so I remained McCarthy for the five nights of the show. I can’t say the applause gave me a swelled head because there was none.

A thespian I was not, Marlon Brando I was not, though he has always been one of my heroes, even if his personal life was a shambles, what with having had at least 11 children, including five by his three wives, three by his Guatemalan housekeeper, Christina Ruiz, and three from other affairs and perhaps more. His son, Christian, served nearly five years in prison for the involuntary manslaughter of Tahitian banker who he thought was abusing his girlfriend; a daughter, Cheyenne, hanged herself. Sounds like a life of too much tragedy.

In spite of his questionable lifestyle, I’ve always been attracted to Brando because he showed through his life and his acting that living is not a simple affair and that nobody’s life, whether it is the beaten down prizefighter Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront”, the crass, cruel, angry factory worker, Stanley Kowalski, in “Streetcar Named Desire” or the uncompromising, quick with his fists, rebel biker, Johnny Strabler, in the “Wild One,” he would not be easily crammed into neat, well-crafted boxes because life is dirty and is filled with contradictions and deceptions, whether of the self or of others, and likely both.

So yes, I understand when Terry Mallow tells his brother, Charley “the Gent” that he could have been a contender for a boxing title if his brother had not convinced him to throw the fight so Johnny Friendly could make a killing. I too could have been a contender if I had made a few different choices. And I can identify with Stanley when he cannot accept the lies and deceptions thrown at him by Blanche DuBois because I abhor hypocrisy and I understood what Johnny meant when he was asked what he was rebelling against and he responded, “Whaddaya got?” because I too once rebelled against anything that pushed against me.

Brando showed me that to understand myself, I have to peel away the onion and the layers of roles that I have played and to understand why I chose those roles. That is no simple task but if it can be done, it is my responsibility to strip myself down, remove all the facades, and look at myself. That is the only way a person can really grow, so thank you, Marlon Brando.

Now, I also really liked Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” because his character, Private Eye Sam Spade, lived by his own rules and nobody was going to pull the wool over the eyes of Sam Spade. What’s more, Spade saw life for what it was, he had no illusions about men or women or about wealth and I could hear him laughing at the folly of an assortment of miscreants who were searching for the Maltese Falcon, which would turn out to be a worthless fake, just like the journey to find it. My role model.