Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(22)
In January 1979, Chicago experienced a blisteringly cold winter with record amounts of snowfall. Steppenwolf rented the Hull House again and was set to perform the absurdist drama Exit the King during one of our hardest winters ever. Snow piled high throughout Chicago, over people’s heads in some places, and people literally rode snowmobiles up and down the street in front of the theater. We wondered if anyone would come to the play. In typical Steppenwolf style, we threw everything we had into the show, and after it opened critics reviewed it well. But given the cold nights and frosty streets, and perhaps the nontraditional tone of the play, hardly anyone showed up to see it. After the last show, we got together at someone’s apartment. Malkovich looked at me, and I looked at Malkovich, and Jeff looked at Terry, and Terry looked at Jeff. No one knew what to do or say. Steppenwolf was broke, completely flat out of money. It was maybe our lowest point as a company.
The winter ice thawed. In the spring, back in the basement in Highland Park, Steppenwolf somehow scraped up enough cash to put on another play. But in my quietest moments I began to have doubts about what I was doing and I wondered if I should take a break from the theater. Try something else. It was just so difficult to make acting a career. Did I actually have the stuff to make it? I decided not to be a part of the play. Instead, I could take advantage of the opportunity of my parents having a place to stay in California and give Hollywood a try instead. So Moira and I made a decision to take a break from Steppenwolf, move out to Los Angeles, and live with my parents for a while—and we also decided to get married. Mom was thrilled and jumped into wedding planning with Moira, but I could tell something was churning in Moira’s mind.
In Los Angeles, I worked with my dad at his editing business and tried to land auditions anywhere I could think of, but everywhere I went, I heard the same thing. Casting directors asked, “Where did you study?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t study. I started a theater company in Chicago.” And they said, “Go get some acting lessons and come back.”
Dad knew someone at the daytime soap General Hospital, so I landed a job for one day as an extra. It was a disco scene with the two stars, Luke and Laura, one of my first brushes with being on set. I danced in the background at a club while Luke and Laura played their scene. This was my first experience in Hollywood, just one of a dozen extras shaking my hips in the background. I felt like an idiot, and afterward I wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but at least it put a few bucks in my pocket.
A tiny Hollywood theater called the Met had placed an ad in the newspaper. They were looking for an actor to step into the role of the son in a play called Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard. Malkovich had performed the same show a year earlier in Chicago—not with Steppenwolf—and I’d seen it, so I was already familiar with the play. They were auditioning actors because the guy playing the son had been in the role awhile. It was an “equity waiver” production in a theater with only fifty-five seats. Equity is the term given to the theater actors’ union, and under an equity waiver contract, in theaters with under ninety-nine seats, equity actors can work basically for free and do four performances a week, a total of eighty shows of the same production, before a regular union contract needs to be negotiated. The Met theater wanted to keep the show running without going union. If you act in an equity show, you waive a salary, but you get paid gas money, with the chance that agents, casting directors, and film producers will wander into the show and see you. So I auditioned and landed the role of the young son named Wesley. Sally Kirkland and James Gammon, two well-known Hollywood staples, played the mom and dad. Wesley was a great part, a wild kid who is cursed and ends up going completely crazy. There is a live lamb onstage throughout the show, and toward the end of the play the wild kid walks onstage stark naked, picks up the lamb, and carries it offstage. My parents came to my opening night. Look, Mom! It’s me in my birthday suit. Yikes! We started doing four shows a week.
It was hilarious how poor we all were, how desperately we all wanted to make it into the movie business. Gammon lived across the alley from the theater in a tiny shoebox of a walk-up, and he’d done more than one of these equity shows. He’d become so used to doing the play that he simply hung out in his living room watching TV until his scene came up. He would then pop across the alley, do the scene, then amble off home again. I wasn’t quite this industry-weary yet. I was thrilled to be part of the show, and lo and behold, an agent actually came to see me and even landed me a few auditions. They were all busts.
But I had the play. Meanwhile, Mom was planning the wedding, and I was trying to figure out what Moira was thinking. One day, shortly before the wedding date, Moira told me she planned to fly home to Illinois to spend some time with her mom before coming back in time for the wedding. A couple days after she landed in Chicago, the phone rang.
“Gary, I don’t want to get married,” Moira said. “I’m not coming back.”
“Wh-what?” I said.
She paused, then added, “I can’t do it.”
“Wait! Invitations have gone out. We’ve got all this food ordered.”
“I know, but I’m not going to do it. I can’t. I just can’t.”
We were both young. We’d been through our good times and some difficult times, and looking back I’m not surprised at her reluctance to get married. Deep down, I think we both had some fear about making lifelong vows.