Up Till Now: The Autobiography

“Androgyny is overrated.”
    I do remember that at the cast party following our opening, John Kenley insisted on the first dance—with me.
    Nobody was even pretending I was going to be a star anymore. Those days were over. I had made the transitions from young male lead to leading man to guest star and character actor. When I got back to Los Angeles at the end of the first summer I went to work doing guest-starring one-shots. I appeared on all the popular series; I was a mean drifter on The Virginian , an arrogant doctor on Medical Center and a dedicated doctor on Marcus Welby , a burglar on Ironside and a criminal kingpin on Mission: Impossible. I was an undercover policeman on an episode of Playhouse 90 and a private investigator on Hawaii Five-0 . When the phone rang I said yes even before I answered it. I did Efrem Zimbalist’s The F.B.I., Mannix, The Bold Ones, Kung Fu, Ironside, The Six Million Dollar Man . Name a series, I appeared on it. Barnaby Jones . I did the movie pilot for Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law with Arthur Hill. I was working for paychecks: I became a frequent guest X on the quiz show The Hollywood Squares . I was a celebrity guest on the well-known psychic show The Amazing World of Kreskin .
    For several weeks after returning to L.A. I lived in a motel, but finally I rented a small and inexpensive apartment on the beach in Malibu. I wanted to be near the beach so when I got my daughters on Sundays we could play in the sand together. The apartment was quite reasonable—perhaps due to the fact that my landlady was absolutely insane.
    I saw true madness. This was an older woman occasionally visited by demons. Suddenly my front door would fly open and she would rush screaming into the apartment waving a hammer and chasing a being or an animal that only she could see, then seconds later she’d turn and rush out of the apartment. All without even acknowledging my presence. It was crazy, it was a life out of Arsenic and Old Lace —but without the laughs. And then every so often I would come home to find the closet door open and a hole smashed through the drywall in the back, leaving a view of the ocean, or I would find a small object smashed to smithereens. There was an element ofdanger to this apartment, but I just wanted a safe place to live, a place my daughters could visit. Instead I’d walked into someone else’s breakdown.
    I worked regularly, but without any satisfaction. Most of these programs are long forgotten, especially by me. On occasion one of these programs is shown on late-night cable but I never watch them. In fact, I’ve rarely watched any of the shows I’ve done; a performance is made in the editing room and an actor has no control over the editing process. By the time a show is broadcast there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my performance; someone else has already decided what the audience should see. I don’t have the objectivity to simply be satisfied with my performance, so rather than risk frustration, I simply don’t watch. I’ve never seen myself as the Big Giant Head and at most only a few minutes of being Denny Crane.
    But every once in a while a very special role came along, a role that poked me in the heart and reminded me why I so loved this profession. A role that allowed me to be an actor. A decade earlier George C. Scott had starred on Broadway in The Andersonville Trial, the true story of the post–Civil War trial of the commandant of the particularly horrifying Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. At Andersonville thirteen thousand Union prisoners had died of starvation and exposure; the survivors had been forced into cannibalism. This was the first soldier ever tried for war crimes. Much of the dialogue came from transcripts of the trial. PBS had hired George C. Scott to direct a television version of the Broadway show, and he picked me to play the role of the Union prosecutor that he’d created on Broadway.
    I’d met George Scott when I came to New York in Tamburlaine the Great . A talented actress named Colleen Dewhurst was a member of that cast, playing a minor role as a native girl. I don’t think she had any lines. She introduced me to the man she was dating, a tough-looking, growling New York actor. Eventually they married and divorced and remarried, and at this point Scott was at the very top of his career, having just won—and rejected—the Oscar for Best Actor for Patton . So he picked a group of working actors he respected to