Martha Graham.
“I don’t like this dress; it’s so plain. Can’t I have one like theirs?”
“Why?”
“Because they’re pretty.”
She turned a terrifying face toward me. “Pretty? Pretty? That’s what you want?”
Her face was mask-white, her hair black, her black brows frowned in a V, her mouth red.
“Ugly,” she emphasized, “is better than pretty!”
I stepped back. She held my look. I ran to the stairs and burst into tears. Why was she so angry? What line had I crossed? What did she mean?
Pretty
was one of my mother’s favorite words.
I was not pretty in my Salem-witch-trials-brown jersey dress. Is angry better than nice? How could ugly be better than pretty?
Sandy gave me an improvisation. He paired me with a boy in class.
“You two have been going together,” he said. “You, Lee, want to break up with him. You want him to leave. You”—he pointed to the boy—“want to stay!”
Conflict. I tried to get him to go. He wouldn’t. The more he wouldn’t, the more a storm built up inside of me, in places within myself that were new to me, foreign to me. Uncontrollable rage erupted from somewhere deep inside me and swept me away, until I pushed that boy, beat that boy out of my room. Ugly. I had a really interesting ugly side. Sandy’s eyebrows were raised slightly.
“Well,” he said. “Well, well, well. What have we here?”
Was that ugly better than pretty?
An actress I met much later in the Actors Studio, Vivian Nathan, was famous in our small circle for being able to cry on cue. If the script said,
She cries
, Vivian had tears falling down her face.
The rest of us have to work for the real pain that comes, the real grief that suddenly makes available our emotions, unlike the tears ofMerle Oberon and Norma Shearer, which rolled down the perfect faces on the black-and-white screens of my childhood.
All the restlessness, the intensity, the unnameable swirling storms, now had a place to go. And it was not only safe; it was worthy. There was a name for it. I would act. In a theater. From the time I was in the children’s ballet troupe at the Metropolitan at the age of four through the Art Students League, Music & Art high school, and voice at Juilliard, my poor mother had doused me in every art form she could. She had finally hit on the right one, and this one was mine, mine alone.
When I played Electra almost two decades later, there was a place in me I knew I could go to as an actress. And a way to pour all my life experience into her.
Acting was to become my religion. A holy, safe place, a process that took place inside of me and that was to be protected at all costs. Nothing ever was allowed to get between me and the process I had given myself, to create in my own way, with the tools Sandy Meisner had given me. My truth. I had at last found my holy grail.
• • •
T here is a time in a young girl’s life, and a young boy’s, too, when you are a perfect pervert magnet. Dreamily sitting in the front seat of a double-decker bus, I became aware that across the aisle a thirtyish man seemed to be stabbing himself between the legs. I looked. He smiled. His stabbing was fierce. I suddenly screamed and ran, calling for the driver. The man ran past me down the stairs and out the bus.
I stopped taking the bus home from the Playhouse. On the subway was a facsimile of the same man, big, angry, smiling, whacking off between cars.
In my second year at the Playhouse, sitting in my crowded seat on the subway, I became aware of a man standing over me. His newspaper was open. He seemed to read it. He concentrated on one spot. Irealized this man had been this near me before. The next day I found a seat in a car in the front of the train. The following day, he was standing over me. I ran out at the next stop and took a local.
I was late to Sandy’s class. It was past nine a.m. No one was allowed in after nine a.m. I sat outside by myself. I needed to catch my breath. I went up
“I don’t like this dress; it’s so plain. Can’t I have one like theirs?”
“Why?”
“Because they’re pretty.”
She turned a terrifying face toward me. “Pretty? Pretty? That’s what you want?”
Her face was mask-white, her hair black, her black brows frowned in a V, her mouth red.
“Ugly,” she emphasized, “is better than pretty!”
I stepped back. She held my look. I ran to the stairs and burst into tears. Why was she so angry? What line had I crossed? What did she mean?
Pretty
was one of my mother’s favorite words.
I was not pretty in my Salem-witch-trials-brown jersey dress. Is angry better than nice? How could ugly be better than pretty?
Sandy gave me an improvisation. He paired me with a boy in class.
“You two have been going together,” he said. “You, Lee, want to break up with him. You want him to leave. You”—he pointed to the boy—“want to stay!”
Conflict. I tried to get him to go. He wouldn’t. The more he wouldn’t, the more a storm built up inside of me, in places within myself that were new to me, foreign to me. Uncontrollable rage erupted from somewhere deep inside me and swept me away, until I pushed that boy, beat that boy out of my room. Ugly. I had a really interesting ugly side. Sandy’s eyebrows were raised slightly.
“Well,” he said. “Well, well, well. What have we here?”
Was that ugly better than pretty?
An actress I met much later in the Actors Studio, Vivian Nathan, was famous in our small circle for being able to cry on cue. If the script said,
She cries
, Vivian had tears falling down her face.
The rest of us have to work for the real pain that comes, the real grief that suddenly makes available our emotions, unlike the tears ofMerle Oberon and Norma Shearer, which rolled down the perfect faces on the black-and-white screens of my childhood.
All the restlessness, the intensity, the unnameable swirling storms, now had a place to go. And it was not only safe; it was worthy. There was a name for it. I would act. In a theater. From the time I was in the children’s ballet troupe at the Metropolitan at the age of four through the Art Students League, Music & Art high school, and voice at Juilliard, my poor mother had doused me in every art form she could. She had finally hit on the right one, and this one was mine, mine alone.
When I played Electra almost two decades later, there was a place in me I knew I could go to as an actress. And a way to pour all my life experience into her.
Acting was to become my religion. A holy, safe place, a process that took place inside of me and that was to be protected at all costs. Nothing ever was allowed to get between me and the process I had given myself, to create in my own way, with the tools Sandy Meisner had given me. My truth. I had at last found my holy grail.
• • •
T here is a time in a young girl’s life, and a young boy’s, too, when you are a perfect pervert magnet. Dreamily sitting in the front seat of a double-decker bus, I became aware that across the aisle a thirtyish man seemed to be stabbing himself between the legs. I looked. He smiled. His stabbing was fierce. I suddenly screamed and ran, calling for the driver. The man ran past me down the stairs and out the bus.
I stopped taking the bus home from the Playhouse. On the subway was a facsimile of the same man, big, angry, smiling, whacking off between cars.
In my second year at the Playhouse, sitting in my crowded seat on the subway, I became aware of a man standing over me. His newspaper was open. He seemed to read it. He concentrated on one spot. Irealized this man had been this near me before. The next day I found a seat in a car in the front of the train. The following day, he was standing over me. I ran out at the next stop and took a local.
I was late to Sandy’s class. It was past nine a.m. No one was allowed in after nine a.m. I sat outside by myself. I needed to catch my breath. I went up
Similar Books
