Prelude taught me something profound about the true nature of love. Like Craig Lucas’s other work, it shows us unusual people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. The story of Rita and her soul-swapping journey with an elderly man was a big hit when we played at Circle Rep. The theater was small, so the show sold out easily every night, particularly after Frank Rich’s rave review ran in the Times. Norman René directed, as he had Craig’s other plays, and the cast of Prelude was phenomenal; Larry Bryggman, John Dossett, the incomparable Debra Monk, and Barnard Hughes all shone. Barney, though, came to us seriously injured, fresh from falling off the stage during a performance. He fell again, this time down the stairs at the 96th Street subway stop, just two weeks into our rehearsals. In the dressing room we all shared, our names were taped along a wall to mark our space. I wrote “Keith Richards” in Barney’s spot.
The star of Prelude was Mary-Louise Parker, who was like no other woman I’d worked with before. Mary-Louise, already on her way to becoming one of the princesses of the New York theater, was the darling of not only Norman and Craig but also, apparently, all who came in contact with her. She was quirky and, like Joe Maher, also bent a line here and a pause there to reshape her performance again and again. She was unpredictable. With her big eyes and lanky frame, you weren’t sure if she was a ballet dancer or a murderer. However, my prevailing memory of the show is of walking out onstage every night and, without fail, actually falling in love with her over and over again. The play, both in its writing and direction, made those feelings inevitable. The music made an enormous contribution as well. I can never hear Toni Childs’s song “Walk and Talk Like Angels” without starting to cry.
The show was successful enough that Fox Studios, which was headed at the time by Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum, bought the film rights. But before that, the show went to Broadway and the producers approached me about doing the role again. After ten years in the business, work seemed abundant and economic security wasn’t an issue. Yet I chose not to go to Broadway, seduced by the prospect of my first million-dollar payday to act in Neil Simon’s The Marrying Man. It was a devastating mistake, and without a shred of doubt, the single decision I made that changed my career and my life forever. I had followed my instincts from the beginning and they had served me well. Now, I walked away from a play that was considered for the Pulitzer Prize to go shoot a very forgettable film for the money. I allowed myself to be sold on the idea of ignoring my own beliefs to spin the wheel in the game of movie stardom.
Once you abandon your instincts and begin polling people about your choices, once you attempt to reshape yourself into someone you are not, it affects nearly every decision you make. You begin to see your entire life through a distorted prism. After I chose The Marrying Man, I completely lost my sense of who I was, and so many things went wrong. Within eighteen months, my self-loathing about this decision played a big part in my one grand attempt to set things right again.
8
Back to One
Moviemaking is a profoundly collaborative process. The goal, therefore, is to work on a movie set with a great group of people, top people who are recognized as among the best in the business. Props, sets, accounting, publicity, locations, wardrobe, music, production design, stunts, writing, camera, continuity, direction, acting—they all blend together to make a form of magic. Watch The Godfather, a movie in which all of those things come together magnificently. Nearly every frame is a work of art.
The actors and actresses who are invited to join those productions are talented, but luck plays a big part, too. There are men and women throughout movie history whose performances are but one component of a vast undertaking. The force of their personality doesn’t drive the film. Their acting choices are simple and clear. They’re not Gary Oldman playing Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK or Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln or Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. Movie stars are, more often than not, simple men and women who project strength and integrity on film. You can call it heroism or character. The list of actors who are invited to front big studio films is short. And once you get on it, you will do almost anything to stay there.
In the spring of 1990, I headed to LA to shoot The Marrying Man. Neil Simon is, of course, a legend. His plays and films have sold more tickets than you can count. When you begin to study acting, Simon’s writing is a station of the cross, right up there with that of Shaw, Williams, Miller, Mamet, and Shepard. In 1990, Neil was only sixty-three, five years older than I am as I write this, but he seemed older. During The Marrying Man, Simon looked tired at the table reading of the script he attended, while collecting the expected laughs, tributes, and signs of approval. When the reading ended, the leading lady on the picture, Kim Basinger, asked Simon a couple of questions that hinted at how sexist and dated she felt some of Neil’s writing was. She was right. The Marrying Man, set in the 1950s, was based on a real-life story about Harry Karl, who was later Debbie Reynolds’s husband. Karl married a lounge singer he met in Vegas. There was a lot that was funny in the script, but some of it felt stale. The director, Jerry Rees, was a sweet young guy out of Disney animation who didn’t have the nerve to opine about the script.
Kim, on the other hand, had plenty of nerve. We had just met, and I was already struck by how candid she was. Visibly flustered by Kim’s questions, Simon gave her a tense smile. Later on, one of the producers, surprised by Kim’s boldness, told me to keep in mind “what Simon was used to.” He went on, “Always try to remember what people are used to in this business. Simon is used to everyone laughing, then he gets a big check.” As we filed out of the table reading, Neil approached me and thanked me for doing the film. He was, in every respect, the perfect pro. I asked if the “notes” he had received troubled him. He smiled and said, “We’ve got lightning in a bottle with her. It’ll all be fine.” He had probably faced far worse in Hollywood and on Broadway. Putting a picture together is a lot of work. You don’t take it apart without a good reason. Eventually, Neil incorporated a few of Kim’s comments.