Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself Read online

  “They do, sir. But they do not represent me, sir, if I don’t instruct them to.”

  I kept throwing in “sir” with my eye on the stenographer. I was trying to sound ironic—like the lawyers in the movies. Later, when I saw the transcript, I was crestfallen to see that she had left out every “sir.” I sounded like a completely ordinary person instead of the orator from Inherit the Wind scathingly flinging out the honorifics.

  Finally, our lawyer asked the court for a summary judgment. That meant we’d go see a judge, let him look over the papers, and maybe he’d decide the case then and there without a long trial. We went downtown to the courthouse and were led into a small, cluttered office. A squat man who looked as if he should be playing the editor in a newspaper movie from the thirties took our documents from us and put on his reading glasses. He was in his shirtsleeves, and red galluses held up his trousers over a large belly. As he looked over their complaint, I thought of sections in it I had read so often that I knew them from memory. According to their document, I possessed “unique intellectual abilities.” I was irreplaceable. They would suffer severe financial harm if I didn’t fulfill the contract. The judge read for a few minutes, then looked up over his reading glasses and said, “Actors are so hard to find?” The lawyers for Seven Arts were a tough crew, but in that moment, I knew I had them. The judge found in our favor, and a couple of days later I was free of Ray Stark and in debt for six thousand dollars of lawyers’ fees.

  Eventually, a few more jobs came my way and our finances began to smooth out. In fact, the time had come, Marty felt, to incorporate myself for tax purposes. I had to choose a name for the new company. It wasn’t much of a company, but its name seemed to have tremendous symbolic significance for me. I thought about it for days. “You have a name for the company yet?” our accountant would ask me at the end of every day.

  “Not yet.”

  “We need a name.”

  Finally, I found one. It had been staring me in the face all along. It had been nine years since I had begun trying to find work as an actor. To scrape together a living during that time, I had been a cabdriver and a doorman; I’d colored baby pictures for a few cents an hour. I had been a waiter. I had sold mutual funds; I had gone to delicatessens and passed out twofers for Broadway shows. I had set up appointments to sell cheap jewelry in office buildings. All this, while making almost imperceptible progress each year toward a dim and hazy goal.

  I called it the Patience Company.

  I pictured a great, tall-masted ship making its way across an uncertain ocean toward an undiscovered land. Marty smiled when he heard the name, and a few days later, it wound up as an item in a gossip column: “This young actor is willing to take his time.”

  I was. I don’t know where I got the sense to look at it this way. But I thought of everything in terms of the long haul. A few weeks before we got married, I started to backtrack and put Arlene through a difficult twenty-four hours of uncertainty—not because I was uncertain about loving her, but because I knew this was a decision that would affect us all our lives. It wasn’t something we would ever turn away from. In the same way, I had hesitated in hooking up with Marty because I knew my relationships, even in business, were long-lasting.

  But after we’d begun to work together, I began to notice a little tension between Marty and me. He had a strong personality, and so did I. What was worse, I had bridled under my father’s controlling nature. Marty seemed to thrive on control. To get our finances in order, we had agreed to ask his permission for every purchase we made. Once, after I had gone to him and asked him if it was okay to buy a bicycle, I kept turning it over in my mind on the way home: Why am I angry at him? I agreed to this. The problem was that he had begun to stand in for my father. If we disagreed about politics, I couldn’t let it be. The Vietnam War began to heat up, and our exchanges about it grew sharp. It’s hard to find anyone now who thinks the Vietnam War was a good idea, but in those days, people were inflamed within seconds at the mention of the war. One day, we were standing in the middle of the floor in his office, angrily pointing fingers and yelling at each other. I blurted out, “Okay, fine. You’ve got a war. Now’s your chance to go fight.”

  He stared at me for a moment, glaring. “No, now’s your chance.”

  He held my gaze until I got it. I had forgotten his leg and the polio.

  I was too embarrassed to apologize. I sat down and didn’t bring up the war again with him.

  Most of the time, though, we laughed together. He knew how to tell a funny story and could make me chuckle at some of my own youthful excesses. I had become fascinated with circadian rhythms, and I was amazed that a person’s temperature varied several degrees during the day. I began carrying a thermometer around with me and recording my temperature every hour. Once in a meeting with him in his office, after I had stuck the thermometer in my mouth for the third time, he leaned forward and raised his voice about fifty-two decibels: “Are you nuts? Are you nuts? How am I going to get you a job if you walk in with that thing in your mouth?”

  I would sit for hours with my feet up on his desk, figuring out strategies with him about how we’d get me my next job. Putting my feet on his desk, I suspect, was a way to defuse the power I felt he had over me. A few years later, acting in M*A*S*H, whenever I was in the colonel’s office, my feet would wind up resting on his desk. My way of dealing with Marty became Hawkeye’s way of dealing with authority.

  After we’d been in business a long time, and I had outgrown some of my emotional immaturity, I was about to put my feet up on Marty’s desk when I hesitated a moment and said, “Do you mind if I put my feet on your desk?”

  He stared at me. “Now you ask me? Now? After twenty years of your feet on my desk? Now you ask me if you can put them there?”

  I laughed, and I saw in that moment the patience he had. The immense patience. I understood how he could take months to romance a deal.

  He had an even longer view than I did. When we made the contract for M*A*S*H, he asked for very little in salary, along with a small piece of the action. The studio was glad to agree because they almost never have to pay off on a share of profits. The unique bookkeeping practices in that part of the world do not anticipate that there will ever be any profit. And then they make sure there isn’t any. Miraculously, they stay in business year after year without a dollar in profit. This is because they have a definition of profits that has no connection to anyone else’s. When children run a lemonade stand, you hope that along with having fun, they come to understand the basic notion that when they subtract the cost of the lemons from the money they take in, what’s left is a profit. It’s a simple idea. You can say it without taking a second breath. The studio, on the other hand, had a “definition of profits” that was thirty pages long. You had to sign it and signify you agreed that everything they identified as a cost was in fact a cost. I read all thirty pages and realized there wasn’t anything that didn’t look like a lemon to them.

  What they hadn’t expected, though, was that the show would do so well that even under the terms of their crazy definition, there actually would be profits, and they had to share them.

  That was probably the most important factor in my being able to have the professional life I’ve had after M*A*S*H. I was able to do what interested me, to grow in my work, and to not take jobs just to pay the rent. Marty’s skill at negotiating, and his wisdom about the long view, added something to my life I’d never have had without him.

  And he was a master negotiator. He knew how to apply pressure to the other side without threatening an outcome he couldn’t deliver. It would all be by indirection. Everything he did was by indirection. He’d call me on the phone and he’d be so indirect, I’d hang up the phone completely puzzled and Arlene would say, “What did he want?” and I’d say, “I don’t know. Maybe he’ll call back and tell me.”

  But applying pressure was his true art. Sometimes on our way into a meeting he’d say, “Let’s do a Thomashefsky.�
� Boris Thomashefsky was a great Yiddish actor from the nineteenth century, and when Marty said we should do a Thomashefsky, we would turn on the juice, and emotion would flow from our acting glands like borscht from a beet. In those moments, we weren’t really negotiating; we were outraged at this threat to decency, justice, and the rights of humanity. The other side would usually become speechless.

  With Marty I seemed to find my voice. Before we met, whenever a producer would try to steal from me or otherwise wrong me, I would become angry, and afraid of my anger, I would retreat into silence. In time, I developed an original but strange technique. I would suddenly begin speaking in a low, ominous tone. I would say enigmatically, “I can forgive or I can forget. Which would you like?” This would cause them to look at me oddly while they tried to figure out how, exactly, I could separate these two functions. No one ever expressed a preference for my forgiving or forgetting, but I think I sounded so crazy that they chose not to cross me anymore. With Marty, I learned the slow process of working with people until you had an agreement. And no matter what pressure he hinted at, he always worked with them.

  Somehow, he did it without premeditation. He relied on inspiration; he improvised. Once, the day before an important meeting, I asked him what he was going to say. What was our plan, what line of talk would we pursue? “I don’t know,” he said impatiently. “I’ll find out when we get there.”

  I found this a little unsettling, but no matter how uncertain I felt at times like that, he was always someone I could depend on. He made sure the agents were looking out for me; he marshaled the lawyers. He was the brains and the strength behind every deal we made. Working with him, I began to understand why heads of state have diplomats and why people who sell houses have real estate agents. If the two principals go head-to-head, there’s no room to maneuver. Everything you say is your final word. It’s more difficult to hint at disaster. And hinting at disaster, I discovered, is a much more powerful tool than threatening it. When Marty would tell a producer, “If you put that in the contract, you’re going to have an unhappy actor,” it was much more effective than telling the producer I would walk. Especially if he was arguing against a point in the contract that I would have lived with anyway.

  Even after M*A*S*H had hit its stride, he still had the long view. Offers for movies weren’t coming in; or if they were, they weren’t very interesting. One of them was baffling. My agent took me out to dinner and gravely told me that a producer wanted me for an R-rated version of The Taming of the Shrew—which seemed to be heavy on rolling in the hay naked in iambic pentameter.

  Marty and I decided I had to make my own film career. He encouraged me to work on a screenplay, and I began writing the script that three years later would turn out to be The Seduction of Joe Tynan. My working title was The Senator, but at the last minute, after the movie was shot and cut, the chairman of Universal Studios, Lew Wasserman, decided that there was too much sex in a movie centering on a U.S. senator. He was sure that if we called it The Senator, everyone would know that I was really writing about his friend Edward Kennedy. I hadn’t been, but Wasserman was insistent. Marty and I delayed while I came up with lists of names that neither of us thought were any good. Finally, we wound up with just an hour or so to decide what the final title of the movie would be. We sat in the back of a car, tossing titles back and forth at each other, each one worse than the other. After a long silence, I said, “This guy is seduced by everything in his life. Money, sex, power. Let’s call it The Seduction of Joe Tynan.” We looked at each other blankly. It sounded like a completely stupid title, but we couldn’t think of a better one.

  The night the picture opened, I drove by a theater where it was playing. I got out of the car and walked up the block past hundreds of people standing in line to see one of the pictures playing in that theater. This is good. I thought. We can get their spillover when they sell out. I wondered what movie was doing so well. I asked someone in line, “What are you waiting to see?”

  “We’re waiting to see you.”

  Tynan was the first picture I’d written. We had made it for pennies, and it made the studio a lot of money. But it was a success, in part, for a reason I’d never have been able to predict. The research showed that 15 percent of the people who came to the theater came because of the word seduction in the title. Maybe the guy with iambic nudity had a point.

  As we made movies, Marty and I were partners and made all our decisions together. Yet because I hadn’t worked out my feelings for my father, I still smarted under what I thought of as Marty’s controlling nature. Little things drove me crazy.

  I would give him the first draft of a script that I had spent months on, and a couple of weeks later, I would get it back with little marks at the margins.

  “What’s this mean?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “This ‘O.’ The letter ‘O’ in the margin. What does ‘O’ mean?”

  “That means omit.”

  That was it: omit. No explanation. No tender question, like “Do you really need this?” Just omit. I wanted to strangle him. But I called on patience and stuck it out. I might have left in a fit of righteous pique, the wounded author, but every time I came close to leaving, he softened and begged me to stay. He knew when to implore you and when to come at you with his guns blazing.

  And he was usually right. Marty had produced, and was the driving force behind, a string of powerful movies. With films like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Scarface, he was becoming known as a tough bull of a producer, while I was becoming known as Sensitive Man. He was supposed to be the strong one. Yet there were times when we had to fire somebody, and he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even talk about it. He would tell me he’d take care of it, and the event would never take place. He simply couldn’t fire someone. I would be the one who would walk into their office, explain why we had to let them go, and then lower the ax.

  But he was no softy when he disagreed with you. Casting the movies was often painful because we both thought we knew best. It was at its worst when we’d cast a leading lady. He was certain that he, and only he, knew what sexy was. We were friends and we always worked it out, but it took forever.

  “Why can’t we hire her? She’s a terrific actress.”

  “Of course she’s terrific. We need someone sexy for this.”

  “She’s not sexy? Of course she’s sexy.”

  “Please. I know sexy.”

  When my back would go up, he’d explain patiently, almost sweetly, “Look, we have an agreement. We can each veto a decision.” It sounded so reasonable, so democratic. But when had we made such an agreement? Never. The agreement took place entirely in his head. On one picture, we kept vetoing each other’s choices until we had turned down an entire generation of Hollywood’s leading ladies.

  But he didn’t just know sexy, he knew acting. And in this case, he really knew it. He loved actors and respected them. Actors were a group of people toward whom he was exceptionally sensitive. When we were casting The Four Seasons, an enormously talented actor came in to see us. We needed someone for the part who was in good shape physically, and this actor looked as though he had started to put on weight. Marty casually asked him if he still worked out. “Oh, sure,” he said, “all the time.” Marty wanted to see him with his jacket off, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask for something so embarrassing. As we chatted, Marty left the room to get a drink of water. It was a spring day, but for some reason, after a while, I noticed it was getting warm in the room. I thought, The building should switch off the boilers for the warmer weather. At one point, the temperature climbed to about eighty degrees, and the actor started to perspire. Finally, he couldn’t stand the heat and took off his jacket. Marty turned to me with a look that said, I knew it. He’s out of shape. We ended the meeting as all meetings like that end, full of pleasantries, and after the actor was gone, Marty went right back to studying his casting list. I said, “You know, it’s good it got hot in here, or we’d never h
ave known what shape he’s in.”

  Marty didn’t even look up from his papers. “While I was out of the room, I turned up the thermostat.”

  Slowly, I was resolving my feelings for my father, and in time, I learned to love the contradictions of the people who lived in Marty. He seemed sometimes to be sensitive, sometimes a tyrant, sometimes an artist, at times a hard businessman. He seemed able to be ethical, principled, relentless, and a cold-blooded softy all at once. Above all, he fought hard and loved deeply. And he was loyal.

  I might never have known him this well or learned what I did from him if we hadn’t stuck it out. He gave me a better sense of time. And time gave me a life I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

  In 2001, Marty’s daughter, Marissa, was finishing high school, and she asked me to speak at her graduation. I was touched by that. Marty and his daughter adored each other, and when she was little, every time we took a plane someplace she thought I was taking him away from her. As we pulled off in a car once when she was five, she stuck her tongue out at me. She would never have remembered that moment, but when she asked me to speak at her commencement, I felt that somewhere in her heart she’d forgiven me.

  During our time together, Marty and I have made good use of patience. But patience was more than a road to success. All by itself, patience gave some depth to my life. With patience, I could pause in my headlong rush and get a sense of where I was, who I was. Instead of racing from one thing to another, leaping across the surface like a frog jumping from one lily pad to another, I could dip down to where the roots, the values, were. All this was in my head when I got up to speak at Marissa’s graduation.

  A few years ago, the Internet was flooded with copies of a graduation speech the great writer Kurt Vonnegut had just given at MIT. It spread across the country in a few hours. It was quoted everywhere. I’d like to read some of it to you.

  Here are a few words for the class of 2001: