Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(24)

With no roles yet available in Steppenwolf, I heard about an audition for a role with another company called the Wisdom Bridge Theatre. The role was a paying gig, in a play called Getting Out. I landed the larger supporting role, playing a drug-addicted pimp named Carl. For playing Carl, I received my first award nomination, called the Joseph Jefferson Award. The nomination was for Best Supporting Actor, and I won.

I loved Chicago. In Hollywood, I was a dopey disco dancer in the background with Luke and Laura. I was a loser guy on the beach. And I’d been thrown off the lot at Warner Bros. and was told by a casting director to come back when I’d had some acting lessons. I couldn’t get ahead no matter how hard I tried. But back in Chicago, I went to work as an actor almost right away, got paid for it, and won a recognized award—all within six months.



Steppenwolf remained superbusy, moving at a tornado’s pace. In the fall of 1980 we did a great production of Balm in Gilead. It was a huge hit with a huge cast—twenty-eight characters in all—and did so well we did it again the following summer, this time at a larger theater in Chicago called the Apollo.

Balm in Gilead is about misfits who hang out in a street corner diner in New York City. Every character is a hooker, pimp, drug addict, or alcoholic, and I played a junkie-druggie stage manager. Malkovich directed and used some cool music—Rickie Lee Jones and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits—to backdrop the whole show. I’d grown my hair out long, so I could really get into my character, and most days I walked around wearing old ripped jeans, a T-shirt, a red bandanna, and sunglasses.

Moira finished nursing school in California, yet she never worked as a nurse. She moved back to Chicago in 1981 and rejoined the company, and we formally rekindled our relationship. Somewhere in the middle of the revival production of Balm in Gilead, Moira and I took a good look at each other, shrugged, and said to each other: “Hey, let’s get married.”

So we did. We’d been dating for five years. The morning of July 21, 1981, we got a quick blood test because you needed one in those days to get a license, then made an appointment with a judge for later that same day. This time, there were no invitations or appetizers or monogrammed napkins. It was the total opposite of the kind of wedding that had been planned a couple of years earlier in California.

Moira and I didn’t even have any rings. We’d been living together in a basement apartment on Montana Street, not far from the Apollo Theater where Balm in Gilead was playing and right down the street from the Biograph Theater (gangster John Dillinger was shot and killed in the alley there). Just before we went to the judge, I dashed down the street from our apartment to a Woolworth’s five-and-dime store. I found two small rings in a plastic bag—a buck sixty-nine for both rings—and ran back to Moira. We invited a few friends to join us—Laurie Metcalf, Jeff Perry, Jeanine Morick, Moira’s sister Lois, and one of Lois’s good friends. We jumped into a cab and headed to the courthouse.

The judge was a diminutive African American woman. Maybe five feet tall. Moira and I stood before her desk and she asked, “Okay, you ready?” We both nodded. I’d taken off my bandanna and sunglasses and slipped into slacks, a light-blue shirt, and a blazer. Moira wore a black blouse and a short skirt. The judge pulled out a little music box and wound it up. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” drifted out of the music box and we all grinned and hummed along. When the song finished, the judge walked us through our vows. We took our rings from the plastic bag and put them on each other’s fingers. (Within three weeks, our fingers turned green, and we never wore those rings again.) I kissed the bride. We were married. The ceremony lasted maybe two minutes, tops. We took a few photos; everyone hugged and headed out of the judge’s office for an early wedding celebration meal at Carson’s barbecue joint. After dinner, I went home, changed clothes, and headed off to do the play that evening, while Moira left with her sister and friends for a little more celebrating.

Later that evening, after Balm finished, I told the cast that Moira and I had tied the knot, and I invited everybody to come on over to our apartment for a party. Everybody was always up for a party, so I brought the whole cast and crew back. Only one problem: Moira wasn’t home yet—and it was late. I started calling around, trying to find her. A lot of theater folks hung out in a nearby bar called the Old Town Ale House, so I called them up, and sure enough, Moira and her sister were there—and they’d been there for a while.

“Honey,” I said into the phone, “I brought the cast over. Let’s have a party. It’s our wedding night!”

Moira, sounding slightly tipsy, said, “Okay. I’ll be home soon.”

Cast members were drinking heavily in our apartment, doing all sorts of party stuff, when Moira returned half an hour later. Everybody was tipsy by then. As soon as she came through the door, Moira’s emotions slid all over the place. She laughed hysterically one minute, cried like a baby the next. I have a photo of Moira, Malkovich, and me hugging while Moira sits on John’s lap on a chair in our kitchen, laughing with mascara running down her face. Very passionate, very drunk, like everyone else there. That was our wedding night.

Despite the general insanity of our lives, I was later able to see and be grateful for the many positive things that happened during those early years of Steppenwolf. We faced many challenges and made many messes, yet those years set the table for so much good to happen later on. A lot of party stuff happened back then: beer, booze, pot, coke, magic mushrooms. And while not everybody we knew participated heavily, it seemed that every night, after every performance, someone threw a party. This wasn’t just happening at Steppenwolf. Less than a year later, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi was found dead of a heroin overdose at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles. It felt like nearly everybody in those days—my whole generation—was going a bit crazy as we tried to find our way, grow up, and figure out our stuff. But onstage, we were serious and committed, and we left the partying for after our work was done. For Steppenwolf, this jumble of emotional childishness and passion infused its way into a lot of our early work, coming together in such a way that over-the-top emotion, commitment, and passion became signature characteristics of Steppenwolf.