Up Till Now: The Autobiography

a deeper shade of red. Of course I didn’t know that, I couldn’t see my face, but it was the only thing every other actor could look at. And they looked at it with great wonder, this mammoth red golf ball growing on my face. This was a murder mystery but they couldn’t say two lines without breaking into complete hysterics. And naturally because the other actors were looking at something on my face and couldn’t stop laughing I became very self-conscious. I was trying to look down, which of course is impossible, but worse, it forces the viewers at home to look down too. The red pustule had become the focus of the entire show. And somehow we got through it. We always got through it, although there were some difficult times.
    For aging movie stars just trying to keep their careers alive by working on TV the hardest thing to do was memorize their lines. In the movies they’d only had to remember a few lines at a time and if they forgot them the cameras stopped and they reshot the scene. But this was live television, there was no going back. Paul Muni had to be fitted with an earpiece because he just couldn’t remember three sentences. I co-starred with Bert Lahr in a play called The School for Wives , Walter Kerr’s adaptation of a Molière comedy, on Omnibus . Bert Lahr! The Cowardly Lion himself, the great burlesque comedian. Sidney Lumet was directing. It was thrilling for me, for the whole cast. We were all nervous for him, we didn’t want to see him struggle with this new medium. When he came in to rehearsal the very first day we all sort of held our breath, all of us ready to help him. But he didn’t even glance at his script. He had memorized every single word. So while we were stumbling through the first reading he had already mastered the nuances. Well, this was great. The next day we came in and we’d all learned a little more and Bert Lahr forgot a couple of words. As we got closer to the airdate most of us knew large sections of the play and he was forgetting full pages. The more nervous he got, the more he forgot. By the time we went on the air he’d forgotten almost the entire play and we ended up ad-libbing large sections of the Molière comedy. I know there had to be peoplewatching that play and wondering why they’d never heard those lines before.
    One reason I was in demand was that I learned my lines very quickly. Those years doing a play a week in Canada were paying off. Only once did I have a problem. I was doing a two-parter called No Deadly Medicine for Studio One, in which I played a young doctor trying to save the reputation of an aging doctor no longer capable of practicing safe medicine. Lee J. Cobb played the older physician. At that time Cobb was probably the most respected actor in America. He had starred in the original production of Waiting for Lefty , the play I’d done at the Communist meeting hall; he’d created the role of Willy Loman in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. And he’d been nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in On the Waterfront . Every serious actor was in awe of him. And I was co-starring with him. It was the most important role of my career. And the fact that Lee J. Cobb was starring in a two-part show on television made it a major event, so we knew we were going to have a huge viewing audience. In one scene all I had to do was walk across the set. I took three steps and suddenly I remembered Basil Rathbone’s words, “There’s thirty to fifty million people watching . . .” And it hit me, thirty to fifty million people were watching me walk.
    More people were watching me walk across that set than had seen Julius Caesar in his entire lifetime. More people were watching me walk than the entire population of most of the countries in the world. And I became conscious of the way I was walking. Was I walking too fast? Were my strides too long? Did it look natural, was I walking like I really walked? Was I acting like I was walking or walking like I was acting? I felt my legs begin to tighten up. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting stage fright. Walking may well be the most natural of all movements—and I couldn’t remember how to walk naturally. It probably took me eight steps to get across the set, the longest eight steps of my entire life.
    Many years later I was narrating a documentary series entitled Voice of the Planet, for which I traveled around the world. For oneamazing shot a helicopter dropped me off on top of a