Up Till Now: The Autobiography

That rationale seemed absurd to me, but if it worked for him, hey, that’s all that mattered. The night of the broadcast he really was perfectly calm. This was just another acting job for him. We went on the air and the first act was progressing very well, right until the moment he walked onboard the ship and stepped into a bucket. His foot got caught in the bucket and he couldn’t get it off. The camera shot only his upper body so none of the viewers could see him madly shaking his leg, trying to get his foot out of that bucket. He was working so hard to get his foot free that he forgot his lines. And when he forgot his lines he began to sweat. The rest of us tried to feed him his lines, but that was hard to do because we were too busy laughing. It was like acting in a cartoon: Basil Rathbone had caught his foot in a bucket and was hobbling through the scene. It was a disaster. But fortunately it was seen by only ten million Canadians.
    Gloria and I moved to New York, right into the Golden Age of Television. Of course at that time nobody realized it was the Golden Age, a lot of people still considered TV a gimmick that would eventually fade away. But immediately I started working regularly. I was exactly the type of actor television producers were desperately searching for: I worked cheap and was always available. And I had substantial stage experience. TV was considered a very long step down from motion pictures, the theory being that if the audience could see you for free they wouldn’t buy tickets for your movies. So established movie actors wouldn’t risk their careers by working for a small salary on the tiny black-and-white screen. New York’s theater community disdained the medium but loved the work; actors could work on a TV show during the day and earn enough money to survive, and still be able to perform on the stage that evening.
    My experience onstage had taught me theatricality. I knew whatto do with my voice. I knew how to stand and how to walk and how to memorize lines. And I knew how to respond without panicking when Basil Rathbone got his foot caught in a bucket. I was dependable.
    I began by appearing regularly on the Sunday morning religious shows like Lamp Unto My Feet . There was sort of a perfect symmetry: these shows were the answer to a young actor’s prayers. They paid about seventy-five dollars and needed six to ten actors every week. These were Biblical dramas and they required all the actors to speak in hushed tones: St. John never yelled, St. Peter didn’t have a Brooklyn accent, and St. Matthew didn’t forget his lines.
    My first starring role on TV was in a play called All Summer Long on the Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1956, one of the many dramatic anthology series then on the air. Every major corporation seemed to be sponsoring its own series. These shows did an original drama, live, every week. The great television director Daniel Petrie had seen me on Broadway and offered me the role. After that I began working regularly. In the next decade I would play leading roles in more than hundred different TV dramas. I played every type of character imaginable, including blind U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, foppish Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney (who in reality is the swash-buckling Scarlet Pimpernel), a town marshal and a town bully, a priest and a physician, a killer and an attorney, an explorer and a terrified plane passenger. I played married men and single men, I even played a Burmese seaman. Very quickly I became one of the busiest actors in the city. It seemed like I was always working. Just about every morning I’d take the subway from Queens to the East Village, to Sixth Street and Second Avenue, to a famous rehearsal hall directly above Ratner’s Kosher Delicatessen. We’d rehearse all day and then I’d get back on the train and go home to Gloria. On air dates I’d do the show—and then get on the subway and go home. One show ran into the next; from week to week I didn’t know if I was doing a Kaiser Aluminum Hour, a U.S. Steel Hour, Studio One, or a Kraft Television Theatre . I suspect I’m one of the few actors to have starred in quirky dramas on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense, The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, and Boris Karloff’s Thriller. I did a scene from Henry V on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, I co-starred with Christopher Plummer in Oedipus the King on Sunday after-noon’s Omnibus, and I played Marc Antony in Play of the Week ’s