The Measure of a Man Read online

  I also drew some conclusions about the educability of human beings. I had tended to believe in the essential nobility of man, had seen man as Noble Beast, and had thought that education could bring about change. Anything good and necessary that wasn’t happening was missing. I had thought, because of someone who didn’t understand yet. But I came to believe that, while there are in fact some people who haven’t yet been shown, there are far more who are never, ever going to see, regardless of what they’re shown, and how often.

  I also concluded that what it is we need to see—that Big Answer we all seek—is even more complex than it appears to be. More than a value system and its opposite held in degrees by various people. More than the vague but persistent sense that somewhere in ourselves lie hidden such answers as would be appropriate to questions we’re not yet fearless enough to ask. Questions like, for instance, How much truth is there in the lingering suspicion that Nature is fooling with us? Are we principal players with pivotal roles in her scenario (as we fervently hope) or merely inconsequential afterthoughts with not the slightest impact on her agenda (as we often fear)?

  Why do we spend most or all of our lives searching for balance between the bewildering variety of opposites designed in Nature’s nature? Why do we struggle so hard to find a comfort zone between up and down, in and out, here and there, this and that, him and her, us and them, high and low? Ever present is this duality, and ever present is our need to articulate ourselves betwixt the various poles.

  I concluded, finally, that in the juxtaposition of energies, Nature’s intent was major: the idea of the Other. The definition of self by its opposite: “I am not that.” I further concluded that if such duality in so many aspects of her being was necessary to Nature’s sense of herself, her sustenance, her continuance, her survival, then duality must be a fundamental circumstance in her overall design. It must represent a basic, basic truth: that collision is essential, that opposites create an energy, and that maybe nature has no preference for either of the opposites. (What arrogance we possess, then, to think that there’s a preference in favor of our side!)

  Instead, Nature waits for us to discover that her focus is on the energy that ensues from the coming together of yin and yang, and the coming together of high and low, and the coming together of this and that, and the coming together of us and them. All that blood on Wild Kingdom—we accept it in the animal world. In our world we say, “It’s dog eat dog,” and it sounds like a bad thing; but we talk about the “food chain” on the Serengeti Plain and give it civilized acceptability with polished terms like zoology.

  During a bull session one evening, wrestling with this issue over after-dinner coffee, my buddy Charley Blackwell said to me, “You know, we’re not talking just about a process in nature, we’re talking about a process that might be Nature itself.” I took this to be a warning for us not to take ourselves too seriously. We were, after all, just two guys with little more than a fair amount of curiosity trying to stretch our minds by chewing on an issue light-years bigger than our bite, he seemed to be saying. I signaled my accord with that cautionary sentiment, and also its use as a ground rule to cover the deeper discussion that was likely to come.

  At that point he reached into his knapsack and hauled out his trusted little tape recorder, positioned it on the table, and said, “Okay, let’s see where this Nature’s-use-of-opposites thing leads.”

  “You first,” said I.

  “Okay,” said he.

  “Let’s look at it in the same light as if it were the New Testament/Frank Capra/USA/Judeo-Christian dream that sustained us growing up and for a great deal of our adult lives. Then we found out that the dream was a dream, that it was inaccurate and incomplete. But we also discovered that that dream, and the inaccuracy of it, had kept us alive and allowed us to survive. All of us believed in John Wayne. Later on we said, ‘Well, he’s a conservative.’ But the essential ‘winning through,’ and ‘By God, we’ll get there,’ and ‘Over the hill, huh?’ and ‘Work hard and you’ll get there,’ and ‘Be true and loyal,’ and all those other things—that’s what kept us going. Now, knowing that—that (a) the dream kept us going and (b) it isn’t true—what do we tell the children? Do we tell them to keep the Capra? Let them find out the truth for themselves? Or do we tell them—?”

  Here I interrupted. “Would what we now perceive as truth be so tough for them to handle?” I asked. “Why not share with them what we’ve observed? Tell them it appears that Nature doesn’t give doodley-squat about the whites and the blacks and the browns and the blues. That on the evidence, she looks to be operating in her own best interests, and we, as best as can be told, are a part of how she operates and not vice versa. That we believe her to have no preference between opposites but feel that her focus falls sharpest on the clashing of opposing forces in mutual annihilation. If we speak of basic facts, truths, constant realities that are forever there, then of course a lot of dreams will be stripped away, sending Capra and John Wayne right out the window. But how bad is that? If the children hear our thoughts about opposing forces in mutual annihilation providing energy by which Nature perpetuates herself, and they learn, thereby, that the browns, the blues, the whites, the blacks, and whatever combinations there are will continually go clash! flash! slash! wham! bang! boom! and not know why—then those children will be the better for it. Otherwise, they might grow up to hear each other exclaim, ‘Oh, my God. Jesus Christ, these people don’t understand! Why can’t we get them to learn? Why can’t we get them to see? We’ve got to show them.’ And they would remain unaware that Nature sees all, while her interest encompasses only the sparks that fly.”

  “Right,” Charley conceded. “But if you’d known that truth when you were a kid, before you left for Nassau, would that truth have taken away from the hope that kept you alive? What we’re really talking about is Santa Claus. We know there’s no Santa Claus, but we’re grown up. We’re talking about when we let the children become aware that there’s no Santa Claus.”

  “Hope, Charley, is always born out of the same womb. It doesn’t matter what your level is. If you’re a child, your hope comes from the place where your imagination and your little bit of knowledge tell you that things are most favorable. Where you get comfort, warmth, kisses; where you get cared for. Where you get fed. Your hope is all intertwined with that. With the people who do the feeding, when they feed you, how they feed you, how they protect you from the elements, and so on. But—take that child to ten or twelve years old and share with him our adult speculations about Nature, about what Nature does and how it operates, and that child—then—would have to begin to articulate his or her hopes and dreams on the basis of that understanding.”

  I paused for breath. “In other words, hopes and dreams are necessary tools to the survival instinct. With the acceptance of new truths, hopes and dreams become subject to rewriting according to the needs of the new reality. On the other hand, hopelessness sneaks about on the periphery of our lives, waiting to close in on us behind certain truths. It’s watched and held in check at a safe distance by our instinct to survive. Of course, when hopelessness succeeds in narrowing the distance enough to infect hopes and dreams and slowly sap their strength, then the instinct to survive falters. Begins to wear down. And if it’s ever subdued to a point where it can no longer churn out the stuff from which dreams are spun to give flight to hope, then one resigns oneself to what follows. And, over time, hopelessness lays claim to another victim. But, as the old saying goes, ‘As long as there’s life, there’s hope.’”

  “Is that an assumption?” Charley asked.

  “As long as there’s life, there’s hope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you have to quality the line,” I said. “As long as there’s a chance for the life you envision—and so on.”

  “And hope isn’t planted in us?” inquired Charley. “It isn’t a vision given to us as we grow up, by surroundings such as movies, patriotic books, attitudes of people around u
s, you know?—what Studs Terkel called the ‘good war’?”

  “Yeah, it’s planted some, but it’s there from the beginning too. I think it shares a primal bond with pleasure.”

  “I’m talking about general, basic hope,” said Charley. “You know, Hope 101. The hope that is a kind of belief that things, people, conditions, whatever can get better.”

  “That hope is constant, Charley, but let’s examine what we mean by ‘things.’ And what do we mean by ‘better’? We have to define ‘better’ as well.”

  I took a moment to marshal my thoughts. “Let’s go back to the time when we were unaware that Nature might be operating the way we now suspect she does. At that point, hope was qualitatively different. But now, when we assume, as we do, the possibility that Nature doesn’t give doodley-squat beyond the flying sparks that are important to her sustenance, we then say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What is it that I want? The hell with Nature; she’s getting hers. What is it that I want? Well, I want a better life.’

  “Okay,” I continued. “Before you can achieve a better life, you’ve got to be able to spell out what a better life means. What it means for you. Not for your neighbor or the white guy across the tracks. For you. You’re probably going to say, ‘A better life is more comforts. And those comforts are of a great variety. I want to be more comfortable emotionally. I want to be more comfortable physically. I want to be more comfortable psychologically. More comfortable with myself. With my neighbors. In my consciousness of myself and my existence. Aside from comfort, I want to feel good. I want to feel good about things.’”

  Charley nodded agreement and poured another cup of coffee.

  “Okay, what things?” I pressed. You might say, ‘I want to feel good about what goes on around me. I want to feel good about the way I’m thought of. The way I think of myself. Good about how my friends see me and how they feel with me and how they accept me. I want to feel good about the things I do. For myself and for my children, for my wife, my friends and my community. I want to feel good in other ways too. I want to feel pleasurably good. Ideally, I would like life to be as close to an orgasm as it can get.’ And who wouldn’t?

  “So my call is this: hope essentially is goal-oriented. And however else one may define hope, there’s no denying the likelihood that comfort, feeling good, and pleasures are basic ingredients in the stuff that hope spins into dreams. Therefore, when hope attains an occasional goal, a dream or part of a dream is realized, causing us to feel that much ‘better’ about our lives. How much is due to hope implanted by books and movies and how much to inborn urges and instincts whose natural orientation is toward the pursuit of pleasure? If a harder look at ‘things’ and ‘better’ doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer, it should at least give us a clearer view of how hope matches up to reality and how dreams keep us keeping on.”

  Charley looked at me a moment, then asked, “Now that we’re here, looking back across our years—the children; what shall we tell them about our journey? What shall we tell them about ourselves?”

  “The truth,” I said without hesitation.

  “That life is tough?”

  “Life is tough, damn right!”

  ELEVEN

  THE MEASURE OF A MAN

  IN THE PROFESSIONAL theater, audiences are known to have been swept out of their individual realities and transported to imaginary places and to imaginary times that appear as real as any place or time out of their own experience. I once was well acquainted with such occurrences. On more than a few such occasions I was present, on one side of the footlights or the other, when actors and audience conspired to make magic. Time and again I witnessed some unknown force take hold and keep us transfixed to the evening’s end, then release us gently and send us home with gifts of remembrances to last for a lifetime.

  For me, over the decades, much of the purity gradually faded from that process, giving way to a tolerable sameness. I had a film career to manage, as well as a directing career, a family to raise, business to take care of. And as I grew older, the events on my calendar began to take on a more retrospective flavor. Testimonial dinners and award ceremonies, sometimes for colleagues, sometimes for myself, documentaries and interviews as film historians and others looked back to recapture some essence of my time in Hollywood. It was as if I had become a living repository, and not much more.

  Then, a few years ago, on an early spring evening at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the magic of theater returned in full bloom for me. Actress Anna DeVere Smith was onstage in a solo performance, and as I sat mesmerized, I surrendered completely to her craftsmanship. She had so captured the imagination of the audience that we were all a living part of the world she had created on that Mark Taper stage. She had convinced us that all the magic laid out in front of us was real.

  When the final curtain fell, I was elated. In addition to the pleasure of the experience, I also felt a hunger—one that had lain dormant for years—suddenly begin to gnaw inside me.

  Out of the power of her artistry, one actress alone populated that stage with a variety of characters and brought to life settings that could be seen only through the eyes of the imagination and touched only by the finger of wonder. Throughout the evening she had complete command of my senses. And for good reason: she had taken me back to times that had slipped from memory.

  Early in my struggling years as an actor I had no knowledge of the word pantomime. When I was introduced to it in an acting class, I was intrigued by its complexity. To tell a story without words—to convey physically all the nuances of tragedy, comedy, and drama (nuances that would ordinarily be illuminated by words)—appeared to me to be creativity of a very special kind. It wasn’t long before I began to devise comic pantomimes and present them in acting class, with encouraging results. Soon I had developed a repertoire good enough to roll out at parties as entertainment for friends. My confidence at pantomime would grow steadily in the following two years. I actually began fantasizing about honing my sketches into a nightclub routine.

  Soon enough, however, the idea of pantomime and nightclubs was abandoned in the wake of a gathering film career that would eventually absorb my focus to the exclusion of all else. Left beneath the swirling shadows of Hollywood’s intoxicating promise, such notions withered and faded, slowly slipping from memory’s reach to lie dormant for decades. Then, that night at the Mark Taper, they suddenly reawakened as part of a creative explosion at the center of my consciousness. They came to life in a cluster of long-forgotten, unfulfilled desires that I had abandoned and left to perish, along with once-strong urges that had been either unmet or ignored so long that they too had faded or crumbled into dust. “So much had been dreamed of,” I thought to myself. “So much had been left undone.”

  Then, like a bolt out of the blue, came a realization. It was something I never, ever should have forgotten. A credo, a deeply held conviction, a challenge in waiting. For most of my life in films and theater I had believed that an actor should repeatedly seek to have his measure taken by challenges inherent in his craft. Every actor should aim always toward earning a place among those privileged members of his profession who are considered by most to be creative, artistic, and suited to their calling. I had always known that the very best way for me to improve self and craft was to continually test my limits. And I knew, on that evening of my realization—I was in my mid-sixties at the time—that the ideal way to do that would still be to walk out onto an empty stage, face an audience alone, and for two hours spin words, talent, skill, and craft into magic enough to seduce that audience into my imagination, and have them invite me into theirs.

  All through my career I had been driven by a huge need to stay on my toes, in life as well as on the stage. Backed by the brashness of youth and a recklessness of thought, that need was translated into a warning that was always with me: “Don’t be as good as, be better than; raise the risk level.” Vague recollections suggest that I even managed, on occasion, to forge discipline out of resolve.
r />   But looking back from the distance of that early spring evening at the Mark Taper, I realized that I had forgotten all that. I had tarried too long in places where success had tempted me into lowering my risk level. But at least I could still feel the need to rattle this cage of my own making. Before the evening was over, that need came rushing forth as the powerful urge to step on a stage, face an audience, and test my limits once again. Revitalized and pulsating, the old theatrical impulse I had first met at the American Negro Theatre came charging upward to flex itself in the presence of all the magic it sensed being spun everywhere around us. It also came to take a look at me and once again vibrate through my body. And in that reawakening, the impulse was as forceful as I had ever known it to be—which was, of course, a reassuring surprise.

  There it was, that old compulsion standing in the wings. We recognized each other instantly. It hadn’t changed, as far as I could tell. It was still dangerous. I knew that it would demand of me the same commitment it had required years before. In looking each other over, we both could see that I had changed. With age I had grown increasingly cautious, and over time I had conveniently forgotten about that old bond between us. How could I have forgotten how much we had in common? Forgotten how often I had been attracted and repulsed at the same time? Forgotten how often in my dreams we had teamed up and scored? Now that old compulsion had returned to stare back at me from the center of my consciousness. I felt its power reaching out to me. Trying to take hold. Yet I felt comfortable in my distance. Still capable of standing my ground.

  In the magic of that evening, the flirtation began exactly where it had left off when I was young and unafraid of looking inward in search of whatever I might find—when something living in the darkness was discovered tugging at the sleeves of my imagination. And our flirtation moved quickly to action, as flirtations often do.