Read Online The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier - Free Book Online Page B

that they made me the understudy, but little did I know. On the night of the first major run-through, the one night a significant casting director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid they’d cast for the lead—a kid named Harry Belafonte—couldn’tmake it. I had to go on for him, and son of a gun, the casting director liked what I did and called me.
    “I’m preparing a version of Lysistrata for Broadway. Would you be available?”
    Are you kidding?
    Next thing I knew I was staring out into a sea of white faces from a Broadway stage, scared shitless as I fumbled for my lines as Polydorus.
    The word bad cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was BAD. The stage fright had me so tightly in its grip that I was giving the wrong cues and jumbling the lines, and within a few moments the audience was rolling in the aisles.
    The moment the curtain came down it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.
    The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so god-awful they thought I was good. They said they admired my “fresh, comedic gift.”
    If you saw this scenario in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? I saw it in real life, and I certainly didn’t. In my world, effort and reward were expected to settle into a natural balance. By any reasonable measure, I knew that I’d fallen short that evening. That was my critical assessment. That assessment, taken at its worth, created a big fat contradiction inside me. Maybe I just wasn’t up to this acting thing.Maybe the man at the little theater in Harlem was right. Maybe I should “go out and get a job I could handle.”
    I couldn’t shake the sense that failure was lurking somewhere in the wings, waiting to pick my bones if my doubts should become reality. Still, in the face of all that, I had to stay in charge of my life no matter how it all played out. Regardless of whatever (or whoever) else might have been looking out for me, I needed to know, first and foremost, that I was looking out for myself . Even when the dread of being shot down by failure twisted my insides into knots.
    Did I misjudge this new culture? Should all the glitter that now seemed only inches beyond my reach have been taken with a grain of salt? Maybe natural balances weren’t that easily found amid so much concrete and steel. Amid so many machines pushing automobiles, lifting elevators, pulling trains. Or maybe, at the very bottom, I wasn’t yet ready to accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
    The play ran only four days. But to my surprise, my “triumph” in Lysistrata led immediately to another acting job as an understudy in a road show of Anna Lucasta , a job that lasted intermittently for several weeks. Then, after a long, lean, and frustrating period, during which off-Broadway roles happened by just often enough to keep my meager skills alive, I found out quite by accident that 20th Century-Fox was casting for a movie called No Way Out , the film that would be the first that Reggie and Evelyn Poitier would ever see.
    My fingers touched the glitter with that first movie, and it was a mighty reach, I tell you. I knew full well how far I had come from those days in Nassau when I dreamed of being a “cowboy” in Hollywood.
    While I was completing that Fox picture in L.A., the film’s director, Joseph Mankiewicz, told me that when I got back to New York I should look up a producer named Zoltan Korda. I did, entering his office just as he was walking out. “No time to talk,” he said. “Can you come to London?”
    Next thing I knew I was on the Pan Am Clipper in a first-class compartment heading east across the Atlantic, bound for London and eventually