When I started in the business, there were certain arrangements between the actors’ unions and talent agencies. In California, due to some Byzantine rules, a “franchised agency”—one that was vetted by the actors’ unions—could not represent an actor in both commercials and “legit” work (stage, film, TV). So LA agents would send you off to another company, whose agents would rep you for advertising. In New York, that wall did not exist, and Bloom built a successful business exploiting that fact. While he repped great actors in theater, film, and TV, he also had a commercial and voice-over department that earned him a significant amount of money, and allowed him to develop up-and-coming theatrical clients. Bloom signed me after our initial meeting, knowing we had to wait out the soap contract before we could book anything under his watch. I kicked around New York during that period from August 1980 to October 1982 and periodically auditioned for films, plays, and voice-over jobs.
Bloom, while grandiose and self-promoting, was also patient and encouraging. He and his staff wanted their roster of actors, at least the ones they believed had any talent, to work in the theater. There were next to no real stars on their roster, so the flow of sarcasm could be irksome. At one point, Nevin Dolcefino, one of the agents in the theater department, said, “Pass me a roll of Alec’s résumé, I have to go to the bathroom.” It was around then that I think I got the message. I did a couple of showcases in tiny theaters, but serious work onstage in New York would not present itself for a while. Bloom, in an attempt to inspire me, took me to the theater regularly. In the summer of 1981, we drove to the Berkshires to visit Williamstown and the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. At Williamstown, we saw an adaptation of Euripides, Aeschylus, Homer, and Sophocles entitled The Greeks, directed by Nikos Psacharopoulos. The remarkable cast included Celeste Holm, Blythe Danner, Donald Moffat, Kate Burton, Edward Herrmann, Roxanne Hart, Jack Wetherall, Roberta Maxwell, Carrie Nye, Dwight Schultz, Josef Sommer, Emery Battis, George Morfogen, Pamela Payton-Wright, Jane Kaczmarek, a young Gwyneth Paltrow, and Christopher Reeve. It was as if Psacharopoulos attempted to put everyone who was great or would be great in the New York theater all in the same show. From there, we drove down to Stockbridge to see Hector Elizondo perform in Miller’s A View from the Bridge.
It was forty-eight hours of Bloom exposing me to great acting and great actors. He encouraged me to believe that, with enough work and some degree of luck, I could climb my way into their ranks. He had thoroughly instilled in me the idea that if you didn’t make your bones in the theater, your acting career was built on sand. Bloom’s encouragement meant the world to me. At that point, I had worked on the soap for nearly a year. The cynicism I initially felt toward the soap was gradually replaced by a commitment to use this to my advantage and to move ahead to jobs that provided greater challenges. As we sat parked in his convertible sports car, I thanked Bloom for his belief in me. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. Then he jerked me toward him and shoved his tongue in my mouth. He was strong and pressed me against himself, seemingly bent on devouring me. Stunned, I pushed him away and took a deep breath. Bloom, who’d been here before innumerable times, barely contained a sheepish grin. I turned to him and said, “You’re my friend, so I’m gonna let that go. But if you ever do that again, I’m gonna break every bone in your body.” He nodded, as if to say, “Got it,” and then we drove off back to New York. He never made a move on me again. And our real friendship was born.
I had gone to NYU with a guy named Gary Lazer. Right after we left school, we were roommates on 29th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, a nondescript block just around the corner from the Belmore Cafeteria, the twenty-four-hour restaurant and cabbies’ hangout featured in Taxi Driver. Lazer was a young stand-up comic and lived the life of one; by that I mean I think his mother paid a portion of his rent. At night, I would stuff the next day’s Doctors script in my pocket and follow Gary and a small cadre of his buddies around to the lesser clubs, where they would perform at open mike nights. They even got a booking here and there. Joints like Who’s on First and the Good Times were where I got my first good look at the clever and incredibly neurotic people who seek approval through laughter for a living. Gary was funny, and effortlessly so. Through him I learned that true comedic timing is a gift. If I could actually make Gary laugh, I had accomplished something. We’d go to clubs, he’d do his act, and we’d get buzzed. I slept on the couch in our living room most nights, as I had to be up at six a.m. to go to work, while Lazer took the bedroom in the back of our dumbbell flat, where he’d smoke a half a pack of cigarettes from one a.m. to three a.m. while he read books.
The women in our lives were instructed that if they left our apartment in the early morning, they should avoid going west on 29th to Park Avenue, lest they came upon the supermarket of hookers who were finishing off their last pieces of business at sunrise. Men sat in their cars with Jersey plates, their heads tilted back, eyes closed, while some brassy orange wig bobbed up and down at steering wheel level. This was New York in the ’80s, before the Internet and Grindr. Prior to the age of “broken windows” policing or the Central Park Conservancy, New York was pretty much a mess. There was graffiti on most of the subways and garbage strewn on the tracks. Most of the streetlamps in Central Park were busted, along with a lot of the benches. Living below Houston was a new idea. Every ad for real estate there underlined the “fixture fees” required to bring commercial, even light-industrial, spaces up to residential code. I dated a girl who was an artist and lived in Tribeca, which was a virtual outpost then. We’d wake up in her loft, and she would say, “Roll up the futon and help me put it in the closet.” The place was her studio, and if she got caught sleeping there, she’d be evicted. Politicians talked about preserving some of Manhattan’s last great manufacturing spaces and fought against the residential development of Soho. But no one was coming back to make thread or nuts, bolts, and washers. With remarkable speed, the pressure to convert the gorgeous cast-iron buildings along Prince and Spring, Grand and Broome, turned the market upside down. Suddenly everyone wanted to live in Soho, much like the Brooklyn influx of recent years.