A Fortunate Life

Chapter one
HAMLET AND ME

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

A wise man once remarked,"If you do the thing you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life."

I did, and I haven’t.

I am a creature of the theater, in all its forms, from radio and stage to movies and television. The acting bug bit me when I was four or five, living with my mother and her parents on the second floor of a stucco house at 1826 West Broadway in Minneapolis. That was when my mother used some early form of phonics to teach me the most famous dramatic utterance in the English language, the"To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, a meditation on the meaning of life and death by the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare.

I remember standing facing Mother as she sat almost motionless in my grandfather’s wooden rocking chair, repeating the words in a rhythm that locked the soliloquy in my brain forever. When I finally knew all the lines and could recite the speech from beginning to end, she said,"Now you are an actor." And that’s when my destiny was forged during a hot summer week three- quarters of a century ago.

I guess the expression we used back then to describe the kind of person I became is"a show- off." But from that summer on, I did everything I could to try to understand what this pretending to be someone else was like, and how to do it so people would pay attention to me. I’m sure a shrink would have much to say about the process (little of it positive). But it all made me mysteriously, completely happy.

Of course, as a child of five, I had no idea what Shakespeare’s gorgeous language, so encrusted with metaphor and fraught with feeling, was all about. All I knew was that the words seemed to make people smile and applaud whenever I recited them at my mother’s instigation. And recite them I did, in venues that included Fourth of July celebrations, picnics in North Commons Park, .re house parties, Catholic church socials, Easter and Christmas doings, and family gatherings. No wonder those thirty-five lines remain imprinted in my brain to this day.

I was six in the summer of 1939 when I traveled on my own for the first time, journeying to Chicago on the mighty Twin Cities Hiawatha train with my name, address, and telephone number written on a piece of Captain Marvel stationery pinned to my short- sleeved shirt. I was beside myself with excitement. Mother had sent for me so that I could meet the man who would be her new husband and my stepfather, John Ladd Connor. (She and my father, radio actor Walter Vaughn, had separated some six or seven years before.) Mother and John had just finished several seasons acting with the Chicago Federal Theatre, the regional branch of the first and only government- subsidized theater in American history. But the Federal Theatre Project had been abolished that June—alas—mainly because of Congressional umbrage over the alleged Communist sympathies of the writers, actors, and directors it employed.

In that final season of Federal Theatre, John Connor and Ian Keith had alternated in the Shakespearean roles of Othello and Iago—the noble, misguided hero and the mysteriously malignant villain. This was quite a coup for John. Keith was a nationally acclaimed actor, widely considered the most brilliant American player of Hamlet in the first half of the twentieth century with the sole exception of the great John Barrymore (himself remembered today, if at all, merely as the grandfather of Drew rather than as the towering figure he was). When Keith played the role of the melancholy Dane, John Connor played his uncle Claudius, while my mother played Gertrude. (In an earlier production at the Minneapolis Federal Theatre, she had been Ophelia.)

So Hamlet was in the air around me as I was growing up, if not in my blood. But by that summer of ’39, with the Federal Theatre a memory, John and Mother were broke, keeping the wolf from the door by tending bar and hostessing a popular dice game called 26 at a bar on Division just off State Street, Chicago’s main drag. And that was where I joined them during that steamy late- Depression summer, excited to glimpse the grown- up big- city world of Chicago and the theatrical crowd among whom my mother and her husband- to- be moved.

It so happened that, that same summer, a little opus titled My Dear Children was occupying the Selwyn Theatre in Chicago, and starring in that production was none other than Jack Barrymore himself. He’d been on the road for nearly a year with the show, selling out theaters in nearly every burg he played. The play itself was eminently forgettable; the sole attraction was Jack’s freewheeling, moderately drunken interpretation of the leading role, which found him sitting on the front apron of the stage, chatting amiably with the audience and telling slightly off-color jokes.

Audiences seemingly couldn’t get enough of the celebrated movie star’s booze-soaked meanderings, and when he finally left the stage he inevitably received a standing ovation.

With Barrymore the play’s single great asset, the producers knew that protecting his value called for prudent planning. They’d hired a six- foot-six male nurse named Karl whose job it was to escort the star on his nightly crawl of the near- Northside bars, finally delivering him in the wee hours to his splendid digs at the famed Ambassador East Hotel, where an oxygen tent that Karl was licensed to operate had been installed as a precautionary mea sure.

The bar on Division Street was one of Barrymore’s favored spots. One particularly warm August night, I accompanied Mother there as she delivered a large bowl of Irish stew—one of the few dishes she could cook—for my stepfather’s post- midnight supper. Jack and Karl were holding forth among a crowd of admirers at the bar. Barrymore, seemingly unaffected by the sweltering heat, was wearing his black cloche hat and a black opera cloak and brandishing his FDR- size cigarette holder. It was my first glimpse of the great man whose name I’d heard mentioned so often in tones of hushed reverence.

Fortified by a Tom Collins or two, Mother decided that this would be the night that Jack Barrymore would get to see her little son’s Hamlet act.

She grabbed me by my tiny shoulders and thrust me forward at the feet of the legendary star."Go ahead, Robert," she prodded. The circle around Barrymore grew still; the great man himself leaned toward me, an indulgent smile on his face. All eyes were on me. It was a feeling I was already learning to recognize . . . and to like.

Leaning against a bar stool, I struck a dramatic pose and launched into the great speech with all the dignity and pathos a six- year- old could muster:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune . . .

And so on, through all those ringing, memorable phrases—"To sleep? Perchance to dream,""The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,""The undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveler returns," and all the rest. When I concluded with the words"And lose the name of action,