of letters that he wrote, often to his son played onstage by Gordon MacDonald. There was, happily, no director by then, only an excellent stage manager and a workable set where I would make my entrance in near-fatal darkness back of screens showing film footage of the various disturbances of the 1940s when Dalton Trumbo fell afoul of congressional Red hunters with his sharp responses to their deeply un-American catechisms. For a long time while Trumbo was officially blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment, he wrote scripts under pseudonyms as well as many letters which I enjoyed performing. I had known Trumbo slightly in Rome where he had invited me to his splendid apartment overlooking the Tiber: he wanted to talk to me about the Byzantine Empire: the background to a movie he was writing for an Italian producer. He was obviously being well paid and I thought of the pluses of
not
having one’s name on a script particularly in an era like today’s when “focus groups” examine one’s every line for inadvertent lack of political correctness or its somber incubator unwanted originality. In the end I had the impression that Trumbo was enjoying his well-paid martyrdom not to mention special status since, as he liked to point out, nearly every distinguished film covertly made abroad was credited to him while the disasters—some of his own making—remained parentless. Finally, he was white-listed again and the Oscar awarded to one of his pseudonyms was finally presented to him. All in all a curious time. Whatever his talents as a dramatist he was a marvelous letter writer as I discovered reading them to appreciative audiences: he was witty, often wise, and sometimes moving. I played him seated at center stage. To my left were, always for some reason, the heavy laughers, to my right the more subdued listeners. Performance after performance the laughers found their preordained seats and the others theirs. Early on I had problems with one speech: a letter to the mother of a young man who dies in the war: Trumbo had been in the Pacific theater with him. He writes the mother a letter which, invariably, brought me to tears whenever I read it. Since the first law of acting is let the audience not the actor do the weeping, what to do? I finally got a pin so that whenever my voice quavered during the reading of the letter, I would stick it in my thigh and thus, distracted, betrayed nothing until the night when the audience to my right, always so reliably attentive, was silent: Had I lost them? A large woman on the front row started up the aisle. Were they
leaving
? Mild panic. Afterward, I asked the stage manager, “What went wrong?” He told me that the lady who had gone up the aisle was one of the producers who had seen half a dozen actors play Trumbo and she was sobbing. So was much of the right-hand side of the audience. As a hardened public speaker I knew how to make an audience laugh. But never before or since had I made one weep.
On the night when many of the actors in town come to see a play, I saw most of the cast of the recent revival of
The Best Man
as well as Elaine May and her gentleman friend Stanley Donen whom I knew from our days at MGM. Afterward, Elaine at her most Mayish, said: “I didn’t know you could do this.” “You never asked,” I was modestly precise. Stanley who had been making musicals at MGM for years before, during, and after the blacklist summed it up: “What you’ve done is prove that you can act, but the big surprise is that Trumbo could write.” There we were, freezing backstage, marooned in 2003 and it was like the great studio was still functioning and all was right with the world and, presently, Arthur Freed will find a musical for Donen to do and Elaine is still doing comic impressions with Mike Nichols while I…There are these strange slips in time, away from bleak present to a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live.
EIGHTEEN
In Rome I usually
not
having one’s name on a script particularly in an era like today’s when “focus groups” examine one’s every line for inadvertent lack of political correctness or its somber incubator unwanted originality. In the end I had the impression that Trumbo was enjoying his well-paid martyrdom not to mention special status since, as he liked to point out, nearly every distinguished film covertly made abroad was credited to him while the disasters—some of his own making—remained parentless. Finally, he was white-listed again and the Oscar awarded to one of his pseudonyms was finally presented to him. All in all a curious time. Whatever his talents as a dramatist he was a marvelous letter writer as I discovered reading them to appreciative audiences: he was witty, often wise, and sometimes moving. I played him seated at center stage. To my left were, always for some reason, the heavy laughers, to my right the more subdued listeners. Performance after performance the laughers found their preordained seats and the others theirs. Early on I had problems with one speech: a letter to the mother of a young man who dies in the war: Trumbo had been in the Pacific theater with him. He writes the mother a letter which, invariably, brought me to tears whenever I read it. Since the first law of acting is let the audience not the actor do the weeping, what to do? I finally got a pin so that whenever my voice quavered during the reading of the letter, I would stick it in my thigh and thus, distracted, betrayed nothing until the night when the audience to my right, always so reliably attentive, was silent: Had I lost them? A large woman on the front row started up the aisle. Were they
leaving
? Mild panic. Afterward, I asked the stage manager, “What went wrong?” He told me that the lady who had gone up the aisle was one of the producers who had seen half a dozen actors play Trumbo and she was sobbing. So was much of the right-hand side of the audience. As a hardened public speaker I knew how to make an audience laugh. But never before or since had I made one weep.
On the night when many of the actors in town come to see a play, I saw most of the cast of the recent revival of
The Best Man
as well as Elaine May and her gentleman friend Stanley Donen whom I knew from our days at MGM. Afterward, Elaine at her most Mayish, said: “I didn’t know you could do this.” “You never asked,” I was modestly precise. Stanley who had been making musicals at MGM for years before, during, and after the blacklist summed it up: “What you’ve done is prove that you can act, but the big surprise is that Trumbo could write.” There we were, freezing backstage, marooned in 2003 and it was like the great studio was still functioning and all was right with the world and, presently, Arthur Freed will find a musical for Donen to do and Elaine is still doing comic impressions with Mike Nichols while I…There are these strange slips in time, away from bleak present to a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live.
EIGHTEEN
In Rome I usually
Similar Books
