Up Till Now: The Autobiography

train tracks. Very early one morning a train stopping at the local station woke me. As I looked at a Pullman car somebody raised the blinds in a compartment and I saw, just as it might happen in the movies, it was a beautiful, nakedwoman. Well, in my memory she was beautiful, but I am sure she was naked. She saw me looking at her and closed the blinds and minutes later the train pulled out. California certainly is an amazing place, I thought. I’m sleeping on the beach and I look up to see a beautiful, naked woman. One thing became certain at that moment: I definitely was going to Hollywood!
    But my dream was to live in New York, to work in the theater with the greatest actors in the world. From the time I had started working at Stratford I’d been saving my money so one day I could move there. After a couple of seasons I’d managed to save five hundred dollars. That was all the money I had in the world. One of the good acquaintances I had made in Toronto was Lorne Greene, then a famous Canadian radio announcer who had been hired by Guthrie because of his stentorian voice to play a Roman senator, and who eventually became the star of Bonanza . Lorne wasn’t much of an actor, but he was a wonderful man. And almost every day he and this other actor used to go to the office of the local stockbroker to day-trade. They invited me to come with them one day and I’d never seen anything like it. It was a very small office with a moving ticker running across the wall showing the movement up and down of various stocks. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen: Lorne and this other actor would go into the trading room with a small amount of money and within a few hours they would come out of the room with more money. Every day! Well, this certainly was an amazing discovery. And neither of them had their degree in commerce from a prestigious university. I wondered why they hadn’t taught me about this miracle at McGill.
    They were speculating in options, commodities. In commodities trading you buy a contract on a commodity, anything from gold to pigs, with the hope or expectation that the value of that contract is going to increase. To purchase the contract you’re required to put down only a small percentage of the total value. If the value goes up you can sell the contract for a profit. If it goes down...I didn’t know, that didn’t seem to happen to Lorne Greene. All the two of them did was make money.
    I had my very hard-earned five hundred dollars. I had been guarding it with my life. I thought, I want to go to New York to look for work as an actor after this season. I’ll bet if I follow these guys, I can turn my five hundred dollars into a thousand. The way I lived I could survive in New York for quite a long time on one thousand dollars.
    In the summer of 1955 the hot commodity was uranium. Apparently it was the necessary material for atomic power, so naturally it was very valuable. So on a Thursday I went with my friend Lorne and this other actor to the stockbroker’s office and spent my entire life savings buying uranium futures. And I heard the voice of God, Lorne Greene, tell me, “You’re going to make a lot of money, Bill.”
    I thought, wow, I’m going to make a lot of money. I went to the office Friday morning to check out my contract and uranium was doing very well. But when I arrived at the theater Friday night Lorne came over to me and said, “I’ve got some news for you, Bill. It’s not good.”
    Not good? What about my savings?
    “The prime minister of Canada’s giving a speech tonight. Canada is going to stop buying uranium because they’ve stockpiled enough. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen to the market Monday morning.”
    We did three performances that weekend. And all I could think about was my five hundred dollars. On Monday morning uranium plummeted. I’d blown my entire life savings on uranium. And somewhere in the back of my mind was the feeling that the prime minister had heard about my investment and decided to get out of that market.
    So when Guthrie told us we were going to New York in Tamburlaine the Great , to the largest theater on Broadway, I was elated. I knew this was fate: even the collapse of the uranium market couldn’t keep me out of New York. We opened at the Winter Garden Theater in January 1956. It was a limited run, originally scheduled for twelve weeks. It was even more limited than that; we closed after eight weeks.
    This was one