Up Till Now. The Autobiography

Springford, a woman who had directed me in several college plays, was the director of a summer theater, the Mountain Playhouse. Having seen my work, she hired me as the assistant manager. The company was performing mostly one-set Broadway shows like Roman Candle and The Seven Year Itch. In those days playwrights were writing shows with minimal scenery and sets, knowing that if their play was successful on Broadway the number of companies that produced it in local theaters—and paid those royalties—would depend greatly on how many sets it had. Generally those plays were light comedies featuring a young guy—often a shy or bumbling young guy—with an innocent smile big enough to reach the back rows.
    I was a terrible assistant manager. A disgrace to my commerce degree. I kept losing tickets and mixing up reservations, which were basically the only responsibilities I had. Actors were easily replaceable, but the survival of the theater depended on getting the ticket sales right. Most actors get hired; to save the theater I was fired into the cast. I began playing all those happy young man roles.
    These were Broadway shows coming to Canada; the audience was ready to laugh. My talent was knowing my lines and waiting until the laughter stopped before speaking. I had no formal acting training, I never did. I would read about actors in New York City studying The Method. Well, I had my own method, I said my lines as if I were the character. I learned how to act from acting. The audience taught me how to act. If I did something and the audience responded, I did it again. So this experience of working every night, learning new roles, studying lines, experimenting with movements and expressions, that was my acting class.
    A few years later, when I was a member of the company at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, they held classes in technique and voice production and even swordplay for the young actors. The problem was that we were working much too hard as actors to find the time to take classes to learn how to act. By the time I hadlearned technique we had already opened our second show of the season and were in the middle of rehearsals for the third show. But at Stratford I did work with classically trained actors, among them James Mason and Anthony Quayle. We worked with experienced actors every day, we rehearsed with them, we played small roles, we understudied, and when we weren’t onstage we watched them. I learned to act by watching other actors, reading about acting, and living with actors. I studied my craft, but I learned acting by acting.
    I was a serious actor, I knew I must be a serious actor because I wasn’t making any money at it. Those days prepared me very well for much later in my career when I would be a well-known television actor and wasn’t making any money from it. I still dreamed of one day earning one hundred dollars a week, but that seemed far away. At least once a day, sometimes more, I spent twenty-seven cents for a plate of fruit salad at Kresge’s lunch counter. I lived on fruit salad and grew to hate fruit salad. My one luxury was my forty-dollar car. That’s what I paid for it, and it was worth that price. The driver’s door was jammed shut, so to get in and out I’d have to climb through the window, and it burned so much oil that every forty or fifty miles I’d stop at a gas station and pour used oil into the crankcase. In those days you could buy oil that had been drained out of other cars very cheaply, which was my price. Generally I’d pour in oil once a day.
    When that summer ended Mrs. Springford recommended me to the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa—as their assistant manager. Again my uncanny ability to lose tickets and mix up reservations—although sometimes I would mix up tickets and lose reservations—ended up with me joining the cast—at a salary of thirty-one dollars a week!
    During my second season in Ottawa a woman contacted me and told me very seriously that a company was being formed to perform Shakespeare in Stratford and invited me to join the company. I thought she was kidding. Give up a secure job that paid thirty-one dollars a week to go to some little town and become a member of someShakespeare company I’d never heard of? What did they think I was, an actor?
    “Thank you,” I said, “but I have a regular job and I’m going to keep that one.”
    The Stratford Shakespeare Festival opened and within months had become celebrated throughout