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A Studied Madness

The Permanent Press

One of the first things I did on becoming an actor was to begin planning the movie which was to commemorate my fiftieth year on the stage. I thought of it as a prestige short subject, the kind that is shown in little East Side theaters before the French film. It begins with the title, Broun—the name conjures up more than could any elaborate quotation—superimposed on a shot of the famous hands. They are gnarled, of course (I will be eighty-one after fifty years on the stage), but the wonderful expressiveness which has delighted millions rivets our attention as the fingers move with a sort of fragile grace over a rich green velvet surface which will be revealed when the camera pulls back as the smoking jacket I wore in the revival of Raffles. While some Beethoven-y music plays (Emperor Concerto?) the hands climb indomitably up from buttonhole to buttonhole until, to the sound of massed horns, the shot widens, and we see, still majestic despite many wrinkles, that wonderful face, the sensitive chin supported by the long fingers. The music respectfully dies on a long cello note, which somehow continues on. We realize that it has become my voice welcoming the audience with the thrilling intimacy that has made massed thousands believe I was performing only for one person, and each one thought it to be himself. An interviewer (who is never seen) asks me to show some of my memorabilia, and we have a guided tour of my perfectly appointed home. Using, with beautifully controlled sensitivity, my silver-mounted ebony stick, I point out a lot of stuff that I have used on stage or which has been given to me—medals, awards, scrolls, and the like—while with winning modesty I pay tribute to the many humble folk—supporting actors, stagehands, directors, and producers—who have helped me. In a stroll through the garden I chat informally about acting secrets and give a lot of valuable tips to those who would follow, however distantly, in my footsteps, and then we withdraw to tea in my library. Here, while the firelight plays marvelously over my face, I display some of the scripts I have revived or helped to make famous. Several times I give the famous grin which is made all the more disarming by the gray, snaggly teeth which I never had capped. (Even in imagination I don't get to the dentist.) As the talk continues the audience sees that the old gentleman is growing drowsy and in the last shot the camera gently draws back and we see me, a scrapbook of favorable notices in my lap, in repose in my thronelike chair beside the fireplace. The music takes up an elegiac strain and the interviewer says, "Goodnight, Sweet Prince, we shall not look upon your like again, for you were a fellow of infinite jest and the noblest Roman of them all." There is a swell of triumphant music and darkness.

I don't know that there is going to be any great demand for this picture, but it is as well to be ready. All of us, like the young man maddened by his liberal education, come into the theater with tremendous aspirations. I don't suppose that everybody who goes to work in a bank dreams of being Secretary of the Treasury, and I know that newspapermen don't dream of becoming editors. Ugh! But the theater is such a difficult and heartbreaking place that there is no point in entering it with the modest dream that you may get to be second character man in a repertory company within walking distance of a good, cheap boardinghouse.

It's hard to keep the dream intact. I haven't given much thought to my movie in recent years and I imagine that I will celebrate fifty years on the stage by going out to try to find a job which will support me through my fifty-first year on the stage, but just typing the words of the précis still gives me a wistful glow. The dream is kept in a sort of psychological strongbox to be taken out and looked over at propitious moments. There aren't, goodness knows, many of these. Work is sometimes more destructive of the actor's dream than unemployment, although better than being arrested in Windsor. Still, a young person nourished on Shaw and Ibsen sometimes finds it a bit depressing to do the available work, which more often than not consists of something like running through a crepe-paper jungle pursued by a TV camera and shouting, "Look out! It's a big white gorilla!"

When you are not working at all you can kid yourself that the big call may be coming at any moment, but when you are fleeing the gorilla, or recovering with unbelievable rapidity from stomach distress in a commercial, or playing a stockroom boy in one of those Broadway satires on advertising designed to please the agency trade, then you do wonder uneasily sometimes whether the theater is a place for grown-ups to work, or a big, disorganized nursery school sandbox which the cats are using too.

Still, there are good plays and good parts in them, and somebody has to get the good parts, and why not me who is the best actor—or actress—in the world? And once, we all believe, we have been seen we will never be forgotten and part will follow part in quick succession. Sometimes, of course, they do.

Hazlitt describes us as lovingly and as unsparingly as anyone. Actors, he says, "are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. Today kings, tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter's call, they wear the livery of other men's fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it were, trainbearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second hand in them: They show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be."

It is, of course, as playwrights have found out, dangerous to lard your work with quotations from your betters. Rice pudding without raisins is more bearable than gummy grains hard on the heels of a couple of plump muscats. Still, the actor who cannot show himself off will try to show off some agreeable side of his nature, such as his erudition. There will be more quotations from my betters as we go along.

If I may quote myself, however, I want to say to the unbelieving ears of other actors and the unhearing ears of the world that acting ought to be a pleasure, ought to be, to use a debased word, fun. If it isn't intensely enjoyable, more enjoyable than almost anything else in the world, why bother to be a part of the rather nasty world of the theater? An actor, when acting, ought to have such a feeling of joy that he can carry it and taste it through the months of not acting, be able to touch it like a talisman while he is being subject to the casual rudeness of the administrative branch of the theater, a rudeness so pointless and habitual that it does not even give the actor the dignity of martyrdom, a rudeness which can be sharpened to an edge of malevolence if it is questioned or deplored.

When the curtain goes up everything belongs to the actor. It is for the privilege of owning the small world inside a theater that an actor surrenders so much in the way of dignity, security, and structure in his life. What surprises and depresses me is how many actors don't enjoy acting.

"A devotion to truth is incompatible with pleasure. Art is too serious for so frivolous a word as fun. The self-revelation which is a part of a serious actor's equipment cannot give enjoyment to him. After all, how can you enjoy self-revelation? Do you know what you're really like? If you want to kid around you go ahead, but I'm dedicated, and dedication is not enjoyable. It hurts. It ought to. That shows that it is a real dedication and not a self- indulgence."

I've heard all that and lots more. Indeed, since actors desire approval, I have spent some time simulating appropriate gravity so nobody would think I was indulging myself, but why are we all so afraid of indulging ourselves?

It seems to me that our penance, if penance is needed, has been done in producers' waiting rooms, unemployment insurance lines, on park benches, in answering the eternal question, "What are you doing these days?" with the jaunty negative, and in consenting to keep trying to make a shape to life out of such odd and often repellent pieces as we can pick out of the flood that continually threatens to drown us.

When the time of fulfillment comes, and several hundred people are sitting still for us, answering in overflowing measure the basic cry, "Hey, look at meeee!" it's time for all the self-indulgence that the size of the part allows. If that phrase seems disagreeable, try gusto, a word which can cover the solemn zest of a great tragic performance as well as the simple joy of comedy. But all of us might take a lesson from Cavanagh the great English athlete, of whom our friend Hazlitt said, "The noisy shout of the ring happily stood him in stead of the unheard voice of posterity!"

In what follows I may seem sometimes more jaundiced than this opening flourish would justify, but none of the acid has to do with how I feel onstage.

Once, when a producer sacked me from a wonderful part during the out-of-town tryout of a play, I spent the afternoon staring sightlessly at a bad movie and debating whether I shouldn't just stay in the movie house till boredom mercifully carried me off, or try for some simple repetitive work, like sorting nuts and bolts or molding plastic—if that's what they do to it. That evening, when I was returning to New York, I ran into the producer, shuttling home on some errand. Since we could not avoid each other, we murmured inaudible politenesses, and he said he was sorry that things had turned out as they had. Standing in the aisle of the train, I thought of an answer to it all.

"Thank you," I said, "but I feel the theater is such a wonderful place that if things like this didn't happen, everybody would want to be in it."

I was pleased with the answer then, and it will do for now. I don't think the theater is a fabulous invalid which will survive all the ineptitude, greed, and cultural pretensions which hang, like weighted fishhooks, from its heart. We can kill it, all right, and I've been in some of the plays which have driven spears into its side. The parade of peep shows, black masses, spongy satires, and obscurantist finger paintings grows longer, and massed against the future of purposeful theater it makes a terrible army, an army without banners, an army which marches to the beat of an adding machine and the penny-whistle piping of anxious chic.

Every year the invalid is a little feebler, and every year it deserves to be. Still, every year there are plays that every actor wishes he were in, plays which everybody ought to see, and until the last cast puts on the last of those plays, the theater is still a wonderful place.

In my first play I got a break that I've never had since. I got to write my own lines. The occasion was a medieval pageant on the lawn of a progressive school in Croton, New York. It was the climax to a year of doing the Middle Ages in everything from colored paper to plain song on the ocarina.

The actor-writer team consisted of about twenty ten- to twelve-year-olds who drew lots for characteristic thirteenth-century types and then wrote what the child psychologist Piaget calls "a group monologue." Afterward, the teachers pushed and hauled our contributions into something on a par with those plays with which southern towns relieve their present dullness by recalling their lively colonial past.

I drew the Kindly Friar ("Do not be cruel to Little Brother Chicken") and the Irrepressible Jester ("Marry come up, sirrah, how now is it that, that I know not how," etc.).

I suppose the whole thing was a nightmare to the audience, but I loved every minute—every minute I was performing, that is—as I have later loved every minute of a number of things which were nightmares to audiences.

Indeed, our pageant was in one way superior to many professional enterprises I've been with. If the social historians are right, we had a documentary authenticity, since, like real medieval people, we were small, hysterical, and dressed in colorful but ill-fitting clothes (we made them between bouts of writing).

The pageant was the first step on a long, circuitous trip to the professional theater. In the twenty-one years between the pageant and my first paid appearance, there were thirty- one more amateur shows, a couple of abortive careers, and the war, in which I played four and a half years in a walk-on role. My amateur theatricals did bear some small but delicious fruit in these army years as I earned a number of three-day passes by putting on officers-club shows employing stolen night-club material.

As a high-school boy I reached heights which I don't suppose I'll ever manage again. As a bearded, international criminal I brooded over the unconscious form of the hero and then, almost in time to the metronome ticking in the bomb beside his head, spoke my all-time favorite line: "In five minutes, my friend, you will be in Kingdom Come. You, Sir William, the girl, and the papers. And a very pleasant journey to you all!" A sweep of the cloak which almost dislodged my beard, a sinister, gliding walk to the door, and my first exit hand.

Later, veteran actors explained to me that if you delay your exit long enough, audiences are forced to applaud, as they can be forced to it by a tap dancer repeating a step. But this was the real thing. This was catching the pass in the big game, breaking five minutes in the mile (I went to school a long time ago), or winning all the scholarship prizes and the poetry competition too. At least, I imagine it was, since I never actually did any of those other things. I know I can hear that applause still, and sometimes while I am sitting in a producer's waiting room an hour beyond my appointed time, I give a little push on the swell pedal and add a few bravos to the ghostly sound.

Another waiting-room recipe which I commend was that employed by Talleyrand when, after the fall of Napoleon, he was kept kicking his heels for hours in the drafty corridors of the British Foreign Office. "He waited," said his biographer, Duff Cooper, "with a tolerance born of scorn." This is a wonderful formula. Sometimes I get feeling so superior and scornful over my detective story that I am quite sorry when the secretary finally says, "You can go in now, Mr. Brown." Scorn is then struck to earth by the sharp sword of Anxiety.

In a college musical I reached another high point when, for the first—and last—time, I sang with, and to, the Girl. It was a real girl, too, and none of your football players fitted out with grapefruit halves.

It was a catchy number called "Tarzan, King of the Apes," and included the couplet: "I swing from tree to tree, won't you come and swing with me." My only regret is that I never had myself photographed in the leopard-skin outfit.

The direction of college musicals is rather loose and divided, and I found that after appearing in the first act, I was to direct the second. I mention this because the star whom I got to direct in a splendid impersonation of Groucho is now one of America's most distinguished psychiatrists. For the peace of mind of his patients I shall conceal his name, but I must say when I see him on TV talking gravely about the stresses of our times, I keep waiting for the bobbing eyebrows and the flicked cigar.

In my last year of college I got caught in the fantasy of the lovable professor, the fascinating don, the teacher whose lectures are "better than a show." I decided that I would spend a couple of years at Oxford or Cambridge and then return with some beautiful tweed jackets, a fund of stories about Dr. Johnson, and a reputation for learned wit that would get me a teaching job at a small, rich, coeducational college. I saw rows of girls hanging, moist-lipped and adoring, on my polished performances on the lecture platform—pretty much the same girls who were not paying any attention to me as a witty and polished undergraduate. After class, groups of students would come to my rooms to hear my philosophy and drink rather special sherry sent over by the pipe from an old London firm.

Because of the war, Oxford and Cambridge became unavailable before the dream got very far, but I still think teaching is a splendid substitute for the theater, although a number of academic friends tell me that they think the theater is a wonderful substitute for grinding literature into the slack-jawed faces of girls who conceal knitting behind their notebooks and boredom behind their eyes. The boys don't even get any knitting done.

The question of who is better off occurred to me also when I got a job on a newspaper and was writing my first story. Having made this smooth connection with the previous paragraph, I now have to stop for a little exposition, like the modern playwright who, deprived of the maid-butler device, has to scatter his background like sand through the whole custard of his play.

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Excerpted from A Studied Madness by Heywood Hale Broun. Copyright © 1965 Heywood Hale Broun. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
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