Performing the role of Stanley took a real toll on me physically. I broke my knuckles while pounding the Kowalskis’ kitchen table (“Every man is a king. And I am the king around here!”), which I swear was made of hickory. After I injured my hand, I kept at it until the knuckles turned a blackish blue. I switched over to pounding the left side of my chest with my right fist, in a basic ape-like manner. Eventually, I crushed a nerve in my chest. One night, as I dropped down to do some push-ups offstage, my left arm just collapsed—my pectoral muscle was simply dead. To add to my problems, the stage of the show was pitched, or raked in Broadway terminology. If you turned toward another actor while opening slightly to the audience, you stood on a slight incline, one leg lower than the other. After six months of that, my back went out. I never had a back problem in my life until Streetcar, where I developed back pain that would eventually drive me nearly mad. I enjoyed saying those lines and being that guy, but I literally hobbled to the finish line. Having also added twenty pounds of weight, I finished the play injured, exhausted, and bulky. Rather than do what I could to take the weight off, I kept lifting as I turned thirty-five and then headed toward forty. One day, a guy in the gym said, “You work out like the Cowboys are gonna call you to carry the ball this season. I got news for you. They’re not gonna call.” Within a few years, age and a diagnosis of prediabetes made weight gain an issue in my life. The vanity that propelled me through Streetcar had its price.
On the opening night of the play, we all gathered at Sardi’s for the party. Many of us were tense in anticipation of Frank Rich’s review. Rich, the powerful and unsparing critic from the Times, occupied a place beyond the one Ben Brantley does today, as Rich actually knew what he was writing about. Brantley seems to serve a function for the Times similar to Page Six in the Post, insofar as his writing is random, uninformed snark. There was no digital edition of the Times then. The paper would hit newsstands in New York just past midnight. Kim and I headed home from the party and arrived near my apartment as the paper literally hit the shelves. “Don’t read that,” she said. “I mean, you don’t really believe that, do you? You don’t believe anything those people say?”
Rich had been kind to me just a couple of years earlier when Prelude to a Kiss was at Circle Rep. The commercial success of our production hinged on his review. But I caught Kim’s intention, which was to make sure I didn’t enjoy the evening too much. She had once told me, as a kind of self-penned letter of recommendation regarding her on-the-job performance in romantic relationships, “I am so ‘for’ the other person. You couldn’t be any more in the other person’s corner than I am.” Now, Kim had grown tired of bad publicity about Evian hair rinses and failed real estate investments. She seemed to demand that everyone be as miserable as she was. In 1992, I had the old Record-a-Call answering machine in my apartment. The morning after the opening, the tape was filled with the scores of congratulations from friends who quoted the Times review, as Rich was positive toward my performance. Elaine Aiken, who had helped to coax a bit of Stanley out of me, framed the review and hung it in her acting studio.
Jessica Lange is a tough woman, but the challenges of Streetcar tested her. When all the reviews came out (mixed for all of us, actually), Jessica must have been perplexed and certainly hurt. She was rather remote to begin with, and the response to her performance simply made her retreat while at the theater even more. But she was used to winning, so after our show, she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and went on to build a whole wing of her career dedicated to the theater. She did The Glass Menagerie in New York, Streetcar in London, and in 2016 won the Tony Award for best actress in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey. For me, Streetcar was also pivotal. McTiernan, not a dramaturge by any stretch, said that the Jack Ryan character’s story was essentially “a boy goes down to the sea and comes home a man.” He was right. I showed up at Paramount a boy and left Streetcar a man. It was in losing Hunt and gambling on Streetcar that I realized who I was, what I could do, and how little I cared about most of the moviemaking in the era I was working in.
In the fall of 1992, I went off to shoot Malice, a tepid thriller written by a young Aaron Sorkin and directed by Harold Becker, whom I enjoyed working with. Bill Pullman is a talented actor and a great guy, but the best opportunity the movie offered was the chance to be photographed by the great Gordon Willis, who shot a slate of Woody Allen’s richest films, not to mention The Godfather. Gordon’s signature chiaroscuro meant we were lit low. Very low. In one scene, I turned to Bill and said, “Do you think if we left here right now, anyone would even notice?” Gordon was tough, but what an honor it was to shoot with him.
At the end of 1992, Kim was informed that the producers of a film she had pulled out of intended to sue her. By the spring of the following year, her career and her finances would be sunk like the Titanic. In 1993, Kim would enter a courtroom and be mauled by opposing attorneys, the jury, and the judge. Years later, when we divorced, it was the lessons from this trial that she would apply in a concerted effort to have the last word, to control the outcome, and to effectively represent herself as the victim in any and all disputes, which is what Kim was used to most of all.
10
The Pink and the Gray
I had first met Kim in 1989 on the set of My Stepmother Is an Alien, a comedy she was shooting with Dan Aykroyd, while I was on the Fox lot to meet with Jim Cameron about a role in The Abyss. Her personal costumer, Linda Henrikson, thought that Kim, after a divorce from her first husband and relatively brief relationships with Prince and the producer Peter Guber, among others, was ready to meet someone. When I called Linda, whom I had worked with on Beetlejuice, and said I would be around for a visit, she arranged things, and the next thing I knew, I was in front of Kim as she was asking me, “You’re the guy in the boat movie, right?” referring to Hunt. I didn’t see her again for a few months, when we started the Neil Simon film. There was a playful side to Kim that prevailed in the early days. Wry one minute and awkward the next, with her angular features framed by her signature corona of blonde hair, Kim is a creature, an object like a leopard or an orchid or a magnificent mountain lake. At times, her attempts to dress down and disguise herself in public were laughable. Kim is Kim, from five feet away or five hundred, on the red carpet or in the grocery line.
If you’ve never been sued in a civil court in this country, particularly in California, you’re really missing something. Civil trials, like the ones I have observed in Los Angeles, provide you with insight into the darkest corners of human malice, greed, corruption, and cowardice. They’re like a hockey brawl, Bush v. Gore, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all rolled into one. You see judges posing with a mock certainty and air of control when, in reality, they are pawns in a game controlled by big law firms seeking profits.