Up Till Now: The Autobiography

twenty-thousand-foot-high glacier and left me there alone. “Don’t move,” the producer warned me. “There could be a fault line here somewhere covered by snow. You might step into a crevasse and no one would ever know it.”
    “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m not going to move.” Move? I wasn’t so confident about breathing too deeply. The concept was that the chopper would rise slowly to the top of the glacier and suddenly see one man standing there, the only living thing in this vast sea of snow. It was a great idea—until the helicopter took off and left me there more alone than I had ever been in my life. That feeling of loneliness was absolutely incomprehensible. I kept reminding myself that soon the helicopter would be coming back to get me off and I’ll be with my friends and we’ll go down to the village and eat and drink and laugh and talk about what a great shot we did. But then I looked down and realized the helicopter’s landing pads had left two deep impressions in the snow, which would spoil the shot. I’ve got to move just a few feet, I decided.
    I moved several inches at a time, small, tentative steps, testing the snow before I put my weight down. It took me at least ten minutes to move about twenty feet.
    And that’s exactly how I felt walking across the set on Studio One. It was an extraordinary time, we were creating television on a weekly basis. The only rule was that there were no rules, you could do anything you could get away with. Most of the TV studios were converted live theaters, and we also did a lot of filming on city streets. It was all very seat-of-the-pants. We didn’t have trailers, we changed our costumes in restaurant bathrooms or even telephone booths. We froze in the winter and sweated in the summer. We dealt with whatever problems occurred. For example, I was shooting a Studio One on a midtown street and the script required me to bump into someone, which led to a fight in which the other actor fell and hit his head and was killed. There were no such things as permits and shutting down streets; you got a camera and went outside and you shot the scene using available light. It was important to film only thebacks of pedestrians so the producers didn’t have to ask them to sign a release, so most of the time we had to walk against the flow. So I bumped into the other actor and started the fight and suddenly I felt people grabbing me and trying to break it up. What could I tell them, we’re not actually fighting but please let me kill him?
    On a weekly basis I was working with legendary movie figures like Alfred Hitchcock, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Ralph Bellamy, and even Billy Barty, as well as talented young actors just beginning their careers, such as Lee Marvin and Jack Klugman, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. I worked with Steve McQueen in a classic legal drama titled “The Defenders” on Studio One . Ralph Bellamy and I played father-and-son lawyers defending McQueen on murder charges. At the conclusion I used a courtroom trick, fooling the only eyewitness by planting a McQueen look-alike in the spectator section, to get him off—at the cost of my father’s respect. I remember watching McQueen work and thinking, wow, he doesn’t do anything. He was inarticulate, he mumbled, and only later did I understand how beautifully he did nothing. It was so internalized that the camera picked it up as would a pair of inquisitive eyes. Out of seemingly nothing he was creating a unique form of reality.
    The show was so well received that CBS decided to develop it as a series, offering the leading roles to Bellamy and myself. We both turned it down. I was too smart to get caught in that trap. Serious actors didn’t do a TV series. Instead E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed starred in the show, which has been recognized as one of the great courtroom dramas in TV history. Among the young actors who worked on the show were Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, James Earl Jones, Martin Sheen, and Ossie Davis.
    I also turned down several commercials for the same reason: serious actors did not do commercials. I couldn’t imagine the audience accepting an actor in a dramatic role after they’d seen him selling cigarettes or laundry detergent. A serious actor has to draw the line. I was adamant, I would not sell laundry detergent!
    I had become one of the leading men of television. There were few roles that I wanted and didn’t get. It was magical. I