The method, p.35
The Method, page 35
But even if no one could say what, exactly, the Method was, Method actors were appearing everywhere in theater and film, and the Method’s influence grew beyond acting to writing and directing as the decade wore on. In 1957, with the power of the blacklist waning, Martin Ritt became a film director. His first movie, Edge of the City, starred Method actor Sidney Poitier and American Academy of Dramatic Arts graduate John Cassavetes. Sidney Lumet, another Studio member, made his film directing debut the same year with 12 Angry Men, whose cast included Group alum Lee J. Cobb and Studio members Martin Balsam and E. G. Marshall. Arthur Penn, one of the Studio’s most devoted members, made his film debut a year later with The Left-Handed Gun, starring Studio member and Method actor Paul Newman.
Plays such as End as a Man, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Camino Real, and Hatful of Rain started as Actors Studio projects before going on to Broadway. In many cases, they were adapted for film, sometimes with their casts of relative unknowns intact. In 1957, Jerome Robbins, part of Bobby Lewis’s original class at the Studio, brought the Method to the development and direction of West Side Story, whose concept first came to him when helping his then lover Montgomery Clift work on a scene from Romeo and Juliet for the Studio. That same year, the Studio established its Playwrights Unit, run by Molly Kazan and William Inge. Its early members included James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Laurents, Norman Mailer, and Edward Albee, whose breakthrough early plays Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith began life at the Studio.
For much of the 1950s, the Method had been an insurgent movement. Now it was becoming a new establishment, open to a new, even harsher wave of backlash. When this wave struck, it would come not from across the Atlantic but from much closer to home.
CHAPTER 20
Truth, My Ass
“By 1957,” Bobby Lewis wrote in Slings and Arrows, “the ‘Method Actor’ was born. I have never been able to find out precisely what that meant but, depending on which camp you’re in, you hate him or you worship him.” Despite having been present at the Method’s birth in the Group, Lewis belonged firmly in Camp Hatred. A respected teacher with his own studio and a sinecure at Yale, Lewis was exasperated by what he saw as the Method’s distortions of both Stanislavski and the actor’s art. He decided to stage an intervention, booking eight consecutive Monday nights at eleven thirty at the Playhouse Theatre on West Forty-eighth for a series of free lectures, titled Method—or Madness? In order to attend, you simply had to send him a request in writing. The theater, which seated 865, quickly sold out.
Method—or Madness? began with a cathartic airing of Lewis’s animadversions against the Method, which “had become a Style of American acting recognized by a distinctive slouch … a curious lope … and a callous disregard for the playwright’s lines.” This style was supposed to be reflective of “truth,” but it had swiftly become a new cliché. Or, as Lewis put it, “Truth, my ass!” Although Strasberg and the Studio are never named in the lectures, Lewis saw himself as intervening to save the “system”—and Stanislavski—from both, as Stella Adler had done twenty years earlier.
He was also concerned that the Method’s popularity was creating widespread fraud. All sorts of people claimed to have been trained in the Method and to be able to teach it. Some of these teachers had direct connections to the American Lab Theatre and the Group. Sidney Poitier, for example, was taught the Method by Paul Mann, a former Group member who opened his own studio in 1953. But some of them were, as Lewis put it, the “friend of a friend of a former student of someone who was thrown out of an early 1930 class given in the summer by Mme Ouspenskaya!”
Lewis toured his audience through Stella Adler’s pipe-organ diagram of Stanislavski’s “system” in order to put each component in its proper place. The internal, Lewis argued, should always relate to the external, and the whole machine must be powered by action. Most important of all was something the Method seemed to have forgotten: The purpose of an acting technique was not self-discovery; it was to enable the actor to perform a role in a play for an audience. It doesn’t matter how beautifully you feel, or how truthful you are, if the audience can’t hear you. “Workshop training should also always be related to playing and not carried out in an academic vacuum,” Lewis said, and he decried actors who claimed that they couldn’t do something onstage unless it felt true. “Who cares?” he wanted to yell at them. “It’s the audience which is supposed to feel it!”
The Method, Lewis argued, left the actor ill prepared to actually act. The use of specialized language created a dogma that directors were expected to understand and obey. He bristled at the new norms against line reading, the practice of a director’s performing a line to demonstrate for an actor how it should be delivered. The internal focus of the Method led actors to show their work, obsessively concentrating on themselves “regardless of the particular amount of concentration needed.” A great deal of acting is being able to accomplish simple tasks like walking or pouring a glass of water convincingly, but the classroom emphasis on major emotional beats made it seem as if big emotions were all that mattered. Making emotion “a fetish for its own sake” led actors to disregard “the complete demands of the play.”
He reminded his audience of the Pushkin aphorism: The purpose of acting was the truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings, experienced in the given circumstances. If you have the given circumstances but no truth, the result is “indicating,” or showing what your character is feeling rather than feeling it. If you have the truth without given circumstances, you have “personalized feeling,” which is of little use to a production. But if you have both, you have “truth that is really experienced, but artistically controlled.”
The lectures were a smash, covered in New York’s newspapers and published on both sides of the Atlantic as a book with an introduction by Harold Clurman. The book, well received in the press, came with blurbs by everyone from Helen Hayes to Truman Capote. One blurb in particular surprised Lewis. It was from Lee Strasberg: “We have needed a book like this for a long time.”
At the Studio, Strasberg’s response to Lewis took the form of a multipart lecture on the history of Stanislavski’s “system.” But these lectures were never delivered to the general public or adapted for publication. Their observations and ideas came buried within Strasberg’s trademark thickets of verbiage. Years later, a friend of Lewis’s sent him the lectures. Lewis responded that they were “better than Seconal.”
Bobby Lewis’s accusation that the Actors Studio neglected the practical was correct, but this was a deliberate choice that could be traced to its founding. Despite the incorporation paperwork, the Studio was not designed as a school; rather, it was meant to be a gymnasium for the working professional actor, a place where actors could continue training and improve their abilities between jobs. Working actors were supposed to know the basics already, including how to move their bodies and project their voices. At the Studio, they could focus on other matters, particularly the mysterious and vital art of perezhivanie. When an actor of ability incorporated Strasberg’s teachings, the results could be extraordinary; but sometimes, as Estelle Parsons put it, an actor might get cast because “somebody saw him working at the Studio,” only to learn that the actor “could only do it for Lee. He had none of the skills or the discipline to create something eight times a week. I have seen people who had really good reputations at the Studio, and when it got to the seventh or eighth take [on a movie], didn’t have anything left.”
For Parsons, though, this did not diminish the value of what Strasberg was offering. “What Lee talked about is ideals,” she said. “He talks about looking ahead, opening yourself up to new things all the time.” Perhaps no single career more fully embodies both Strasberg’s Method ideals and Lewis’s problems with it than that of the great actress of the 1950s, Kim Stanley. While today the Method is almost completely associated with men, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of its most famous practitioners were women. Sandy Dennis, Geraldine Page, Carroll Baker, Eva Marie Saint, Anne Bancroft, Lee Remick, Jo Van Fleet, and Shirley Knight were all regulars at the Studio, all held in high esteem by their peers, and all noted actors on the stage and in film.
But by 1957, Stanley towered above them all. As the actor and director Austin Pendleton described it, “Kim Stanley remains the best actor I’ve ever seen onstage. She was a great technician, and the richness of that woman redefined the word ‘immediacy’ to me.” Given Stanley’s ability to erupt with emotion, her idiosyncratic acting choices, and her occasional disregard for the written words of the playwright, her contemporaries often compared her to Marlon Brando. But unlike Brando, Stanley made only six films, and she left behind scant record of her achievements. Her best work—her stage performances—live on only in people’s memories, and not all of her live television appearances survive.
Kim Stanley disliked acting in movies, and by the late 1960s, mental illness and alcoholism kept her from pivoting to film work more seriously. But being a woman in mid-twentieth-century America shaped her career as well. Like Stanley, Brando caused his collaborators unending headaches, disdained Hollywood, slept around, and was an outspoken eccentric. Nonetheless, Brando still managed to have a long film career, win two Academy Awards, and become a legend. It’s tempting to consider a world in which Kim had a battering ram like Stanley Kowalski or Terry Malloy with which to break apart the clichés of female screen acting, but those roles did not exist. Neither, as she aged, were there the kinds of roles that help bridge a career from ingénue to elder stateswoman. Jo Van Fleet, whose performances in Kazan’s East of Eden and Wild River vibrate with a Shakespearean power, could not, as a woman in her forties, find regular work worthy of her talents. According to Kazan, “Jo stagnated and, since she knew it, became bitter. She waited, wrote letters to producers and directors, pleaded with agents to help her … to no avail.”
But we can see glimpses of what might have been in The Goddess, Kim Stanley’s 1958 film debut. Written by Paddy Chayefsky, who knew Stanley from live TV, The Goddess told a thinly veiled fictionalization of the life of Marilyn Monroe. Stanley’s Emily Ann Faulkner is an ambitious hick who dreams of becoming a movie star. In her late teens, she escapes her neglectful, distant mother by marrying a tormented GI named John Tower (Stephen Hill). But she soon tires of marriage and motherhood and flees both for Hollywood. She changes her name to Rita Shawn and breaks into the industry after marrying retired boxer Dutch Sawyer (Lloyd Bridges). Rita’s fame grows and the marriage goes south. By the end of the film, she’s a beloved movie star, the goddess of the film’s title, but she can find neither happiness, nor peace, nor love. She’s sexually exploited by the powers that be at the studios, and descends into addiction and madness. No one can help her, not even John Tower, who still cares about her after all these years. The film’s concluding scenes wander through a fog of helplessness. “I can’t bear this life no more, John,” Rita says. But she cannot escape it. Rita’s secretary explains to John that “we got her to a psychiatrist for four months,” but he said she was incurable. “I’ll take her back to California,” the secretary says, “and she’ll go on making movies, ’cause that’s all she knows to do. And whatever happens after that happens. But I kind of love her, and I’ll take good care of her.”
Chayefsky wanted Kim for the role of Emily/Rita. He had to convince both the film’s producers, who hoped they could get the real Marilyn Monroe, and Stanley herself, who shared with many of her Method compatriots a hostile suspicion of the movies. “They don’t care about quality acting,” she once said, “all they care about is that you know your lines. If you just say your lines right and they can hear you, they say, ‘Print it.’ ” She also did not want to be told what to do, and fought so heatedly with Chayefsky that she eventually had him banned from the film’s set.
There’s no trace in The Goddess of Stanley’s discomfort with the medium, or her lack of practice in shooting a role out of order. She traces a twenty-seven-year arc for her character, taking her from a naïve teenager dreaming of a better life to a woman as desperate as she is alone, without the help of makeup or special effects. The film is structured like a rock skipping over the surface of its story, and thus calls upon Stanley to fight, or rage, or break down, or weep, or scream every ten minutes, but the performance never feels repetitive. Stanley brings to the film a formidability Monroe could never muster. She is solid and forceful; her bones seem denser than a normal human’s. But when the material calls on her to reach out like a wounded child for something to hold on to, a complete transformation takes place. Her voice climbs into its upper register, and her body seems to collapse on itself, a house imploding under too much pressure. Like any good Strasberg pupil, her character is always thinking, and her eyes seem alive at all moments to some special purpose.
After The Goddess, Kim Stanley built a reputation as an actor of both uncompromising brilliance and maddening unprofessionalism. When acting in Harold Clurman’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet on Broadway in 1958, she tested the limits of what an actor can get away with. Clurman approached Stanley with a tolerance that meandered toward indulgence. At one rehearsal, she refused to say the word “cute,” arguing that it was anachronistic and a nineteenth-century character would never say it. Even after someone fetched a dictionary and established that “cute” was in common usage in the 1820s, she still refused, and Clurman caved. Once the show opened, she called out sick with alarming frequency. Some of this was almost certainly the result of problems she was having with her co-star, Eric Portman, who, like Stanley, drank to excess. He was capable of great anger and cruelty, and she accused him multiple times of really slapping her during a moment of stage combat. Still, problems with Portman cannot fully account for her absences. Stanley even once left in midperformance, stranding her co-star Helen Hayes onstage while her understudy got into costume.
Hayes and Stanley disliked each other even more than Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando had, but for the same reasons. Helen Hayes was such an eminent member of the theatrical old guard that A Touch of the Poet opened in a Broadway theater named after her. She dismissed Clurman’s analysis-and-subtext-driven approach as “a college seminar, not a rehearsal” and said that Stanley “drove herself mercilessly to discover ‘the dramatic truth’ of whatever character she played.” If she failed in this search, “the fault had to be the playwright’s, not hers.” But Harold Clurman, who had worked with Stanley before on William Inge’s Bus Stop, later wrote of Kim that her “idealistic thirst for perfection—impossible of realization—on and off stage, is the source of the intense anguish and anger within her.”
It was this drive for perfection, the ideal that Stanislavski and Strasberg set as the sign of artistic excellence, that drew Hayes’s ire. If you are meant to be experiencing the role each time you walk onstage, there is no room to give a merely competent performance or to fit yourself into the needs of a show. Just as many of the Moscow Art Theatre members had found Stanislavski’s constant perfectionism exhausting, Hayes grew weary of her co-star’s “striving for [an] opening-night level of performance—even on rainy Thursdays.”
When Stanley was told that Hayes had said this, she replied, “I would never want to go back and repeat it as on opening night. I’d expect it to be better.”
In August 1962, four years after The Goddess sent a fictionalized Marilyn Monroe into addiction-fueled collapse, the real Marilyn died of a drug overdose. Her final film had been The Misfits. Written by her husband, Arthur Miller, and directed by John Huston, The Misfits co-starred Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, and Montgomery Clift as a group of cowboys orbiting a recent divorcée named Roslyn Tabor (Monroe) in Reno, Nevada. By the time he appeared in The Misfits, Clift was more walking shade than man. Five years earlier, he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and plowed into a telephone pole. His injuries necessitated several surgeries and months of recovery, and he never looked the same again. In constant pain, stupefied by alcohol and drugs, and partially paralyzed on one side of his beautiful, expressive face, Clift lost his gift for public solitude. He could never again fully let go and be unselfconscious, and his performances became increasingly odder and more alienating. Kazan used this to incredible effect in Wild River, in which Clift’s inability to relate to those around him is his character’s central conflict. In The Misfits, though, Clift is a miscast and off-putting presence, particularly in one extended shot in which one of his eyes suddenly wanders ever farther to the side.
Instead of pretending that Monroe could make an early morning shoot, Huston moved her call times to after ten. She would often not be ready to film at all until around noon, at which point she would arrive accompanied by an entourage that included Paula Strasberg. Paula consulted with Monroe before each take, and as Monroe and Miller grew apart, she stayed with Marilyn and tried to keep her pill consumption under control. Sometimes Monroe would not show up on set at all. Sometimes, due to the side effects of the pills, her eyes wouldn’t focus properly, which meant she couldn’t be filmed. At one point, production had to be halted so she could dry out, and the press was fed the typical story that the film’s star suffered “from exhaustion.” Monroe’s voice, always soft, now registered ten to fifteen decibels below those of her castmates, and the film’s sound department struggled to compensate. The film was shot on location, which meant that boosting microphone levels too far risked picking up large amounts of background noise, which would in turn render the audio unintelligible.
