Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Read online

  As for the parking tickets that awaited me, the bureaucratic side of New York City was dead serious. While I was at the University of Minnesota the Parking Violations Bureau was better than the Canadian fucking Mounted Police or Scotland fucking Yard, and it must’ve operated under the same slogan: “We always get our man.” They didn’t know I was in Minnesota, so instead they found my next of kin, which happened to be my poor mom in Washington Heights. They kept sending her harassing letters. They wanted to know where this Ron Perlman was so he could write them a nearly $8,000 check. They sent more and more letters and even called her and said they were going to put me in jail. I didn’t know about this while it was happening, but it was sad. My mom pleaded, “Please, don’t hurt my boy.” And she wrote them a check for $7,500 and change. (I expect to be all paid up with her a week from next Tuesday. I’m kidding. That’s a joke. And thank you, Mom, for letting me be a free man upon my homecoming.)

  What saved me from my first few weeks in NYC living the life of an unwelcomed squatter was the return to the city of my best friend, Burton Levy. He had visited me a few times in Minnesota, but of late he had been in Upstate New York trying to put together one of his many business deals. This guy became my Medici, my “sponsor of the arts” during the next five years while I pursued acting. I met Burton in college. I noticed him hanging around the theater. He had this kind of fascination with theater and saw it as a way to make money if you were able to produce a hit or make a film. His curiosity turned into something of a friendship between us, which burgeoned into something that will never be replaced again, an incredible bond we developed. Burton was the first guy I ever met who taught me what a stand-up guy is supposed to look like. He’s the first guy I ever met who taught me what it means to have someone’s back. It’s more than just the phrase, “I got your back.” He taught me what that was supposed to actually look like and that it was something people mean when they say it. I’ll tell you something, at sixty-three years old, that’s pretty fucking rare. Because I’ve heard a lot of people say it but have seen very few people mean it. Burton meant it, and it was the other way around as well.

  Burton had been a real character in Lehman College. Whereas most kids made ends meet by bussing tables, driving cabs, or working as camp counselors, Burton got a job as a concrete inspector. This was a fairly important position in the New York construction scene. No building got green lit in New York if it didn’t have concrete samples that passed certain standards. Burton was one of a handful of guys who were certified at either putting the kibosh on or giving the go-ahead to huge jobs. There might be ten concrete trucks waiting in line to pour a foundation, and all were on hold until Burton gave the thumbs up or down. Talk about sleeping with the fishes—there were an awful lot of people with an awful lot at stake riding on his decisions. It wasn’t the safest job, but Burton knew how to walk that tightrope.

  Subsequently he was the only guy I knew on campus who had his own money from a good-paying job. It wasn’t family money or inheritance money; he had money that he was pulling in on his own. There was a kind of exoticness to him that made me think, “Maybe this is a guy I need to get to know better.” It turned out—and I say this without exaggeration—that Burton Levy was the toughest Jew I have ever come across in my whole fuckin’ life. He grew up in Yonkers, in one place not mentioned too often in the book Where Famous Jews Came From. Burton got to be tough the hard way—on the mean streets of one of the toughest little suburbs of New York City.

  I remember one night when Burton, another friend of ours, and I went out to have a drink at this bar in Yonkers. Burton was kind of a controversial figure up there because he was one of these guys who told you how it was and didn’t make any bones about it. He had a lot of friends, but he also had a lot of enemies. So we walk into this one bar, and as we walk in a guy on his left and a guy on his right both punch him on the chin at the same time. It was like it was choreographed. It was like Busby Berkeley. Because Burton was blindsided and didn’t see it coming, it was the one and only time I ever saw him go down to one knee. As he was going down to the ground after being cold-cocked, somebody came up from behind and hit him over the back of the head with a bar stool.

  My other friend and I started to jump in, but Burton put his hand up and said, “No.” That crack on the head with the barstool seriously pissed him off and only woke him up more. Burton was built like a bull, with calves the size of Montana and a neck the size of New Jersey. I watched Burton single-handedly beat the piss out of probably eighteen guys at once. He was a little disheveled when done, but he insisted we stay nonetheless. We sat at the bar and had a drink. He just wanted to let them know there was no question of who was the toughest muthafucka in that place. After he gave a fuckin’ sizeable tip, held down by our empty scotch glasses on the bar, he stood and casually straightened out his clothes’ creases and brushed off his clothes—and then we left.

  That was my best friend, Burton Levy, and eventually the godfather to my children. While in college Burton and I often went with Professor Ralph to the track. Burton also had a little taste for horseplay, and like me, he liked Ralph’s point of view about culture and the world. Burton and I started smoking good cigars and drinking the finest scotch. We went to Madison Square Garden and watched Muhammad Ali fight, and then Jerry Quarry fight, with Burton somehow always managing to get ringside tickets. All of a sudden Burton showed me how you could actually demand stuff out of life rather than have a backseat and just take whatever shit fell off the back of the truck. It was an empowering period for me: I didn’t have to accept borderline poverty as my family had been resigned to for generations. Burton and I dreamed together, me wanting to be an actor, with Burton thinking he might become a theater impresario and raise enough capital to make a difference in the theater scene.

  Burton Levy, who was my very first and always will be my one and only lifelong best friend. And when I say best friend, he’s been gone since the year 2000, so for fourteen years now, I’ve been without him. He’s still my best friend—he’ll never be replaced. I really don’t float the word around very much; I actually think there can be only one best. Burton never married, even if he had short-term things with a lot of different women. Although not the marrying kind, he loved kids. As the godfather to my children, he showered them with every single thing a godfather is supposed to shower a kid with. From gifts to ideas to “You can come to me if your father or your mom does something really fucking stupid—I’m your haven.” He became this shining symbol of safety for them, for both of my kids. Even though we lost him when my daughter was sixteen and my son, ten, to this day they’ve never had a figure in their lives who’s come close to the space that Burton occupied. He had a horrific time toward the end, and he died horribly and very young at fifty-two years old. He was an example of somebody who was too big for his own limitations. He was one of those stars that burn out the brightest and the fastest.

  Burton became my “sponsor of the arts” within a month of my return to the city. He had gone to Woodstock, an Upstate New York hippie town, and struck a deal to become partners with an older guy who owned an exotic jewelry/handmade handbag store on the corner of Eighth Street and McDougal, right in the middle of the hippest street in the hippest part of NYC. The guy was getting older and had nobody to leave the store to, so he took Burton’s offer so he could phase himself out. And because I needed a little income and wasn’t exactly knockin’ ’em dead in my quest to take the New York theater by storm, Burton enlisted me as a part timer.

  The store did great from the beginning, and I made enough to rent my first broom closet–size apartment in the Village. It was so small—are you ready for some small jokes? “It was so small, you had to go outside to change your mind.” “It was so small, you couldn’t laugh ‘Ha-ha’—you had to laugh ‘ho-ho.’” “It was so small, you put your key in the lock, turn the key, and you rearranged the furniture.” That’s how fucking small this fucking place was. But hey, the store paid handsomely
for Burton to keep indulging in his expensive habits and paid for me to keep my lights on while I pursued theater.

  I had been a professional student for the last eighteen years. Suddenly I found myself in the cold, hard world, needing to figure out quickly how to get work as an actor, and I began to plant some flags in the ground. I had no agents. I had no credits other than academic, which meant nothing. I basically started flat-footed and inert. I relied on two publications; one was called Show Business and the other, Backstage. I think Show Business folded, but Backstage is still around. These publications listed auditions a little bit for Broadway, a little bit for Off Broadway, but mostly for free shit, which was Off-Off Broadway. These publications would come out once a week, and I would circle every audition I could possibly go to. And that’s what I did. I did a lot of auditioning for Off-Off Broadway plays. Every once in awhile I would see an open call for a Broadway play, and I’d go to those as well. That marked the beginnings of me auditioning for musicals with a particularly mediocre voice and getting three bars into the audition and hearing somebody in the middle of this darkened theater go, “Thank you! Next.” That same thing, or the equivalent, happened for at least three hundred plays I auditioned for. It’s 99 percent rejection, and 1 percent of the time someone would say, “Yeah, come do this play,” but it was always for free. I was just good enough to not get paid. It seemed as if I was running in place as fast as I could while getting absolutely nowhere.

  Here’s the dynamics of what actors have to do to break in. If it’s an open call, they post what time to be at the theater. Because they are seeing people who are unrepresented, without appointments, you need to get there really, really early. It’s first come, first serve. You might need to be there at ten in the morning, and you don’t get your chance to be seen until 4:30 in the afternoon. At least one hundred, maybe two or three hundred show up. Most of the time you stand outside the theater in a line that snakes along the sidewalk and around the block. If it was the middle of winter, they might put you in a big room or cram the hopefuls into the lobby—it’s called “a cattle call” for a reason. But you went and took a chance because you have to run out every single ground ball and go after every long shot. I did auditions for Evita, Hair, and whatever was playing in the seventies. Most of the open cattle calls were for musicals. Rarely were open calls for a straight play. For that, you had to be sent to the audition by somebody who had vetted you and signed you as a client. You needed a bona fide agent, but I didn’t have an agent the first three years I was in New York. The plan was to throw shit against the wall and hope that something would stick. I always stayed busy with Off-Off Broadway plays. They paid nothing unless the piece was being played out of town, and then at least you’d get a fuckin’ dump of a room and food money.

  You could not have a straight job with set hours if you wanted to become an actor. Auditions could be anytime and for however long it took. Same for rehearsals. That’s why many aspiring thespians wait tables, bartend, or have jobs with somewhat flexible hours. And that’s why Burton and his store became my “sponsor of the arts.” I might go on these out-of-town runs for a week or for three months, but when I came back Burton always welcomed me with open arms. He gave me enough of a salary to get groceries and keep my lights on in my apartment. My place was a ten-minute walk to work, close to the subway entrance, and the best setup I could’ve wanted. Burton was encouraging, and on top of it, we still talked about how we’d break into theater or cinema in big ways as we did in school. I didn’t have to drive a taxi or bus tables, thanks to Burton.

  At this time Joe Papp became a big star in New York and in all of theater. He went from doing this neighborhood shit, going from doing Hamlet in underprivileged neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, the Lower East Side, or Alphabet City, to Elizabethan plays in the summertime in Central Park. Suddenly the mayor of New York gave him this amazing fucking building on Layette Street for a $1 a year. It was the former Astor Library converted by the city into a theater. He called it the Public Theater, and it is, to this day the most important laboratory for new plays and playwrights in all the country. That was Papp’s rent—a buck. So Joe Papp becomes the impresario who Burton and I had been talking about becoming ourselves. We saw it was possible for someone to culturally capture the imagination of the most important city in the world and then become somebody who physically changes the landscape of and how theater is talked about in that city. This only stoked our dream to a greater degree. It became like, “Here it is. This is the guy doing exactly what we’re talking about doing.” I am, in fact, still kindling this dream, as you’ll see when I talk about Wing and a Prayer.

  The rebellion of the sixties transformed into the golden era of the seventies when incredible stuff was happening in theater and cinema. In 1972 The Godfather Part I was released, and that, for my money, is the greatest movie ever made, for a variety of reasons. But the main reason is that, unlike the two Godfather movies that followed, which are perfectly great, this one had a historic, high-water-mark performance by one of the most significant figures in film history, Marlon Brando. He was always good, but there were three times when he was exceptional, when serious students of the art of acting like myself couldn’t begin to dissect and deconstruct how he did what he did because there was just too much magic involved. One of those three performances was Vito Corleone, in The Godfather.

  The other films this magic came through was in On the Waterfront and Streetcar. Those are the three times when he really let loose. Having worked with Marlon and been up close and personal in the little bit of time I had with him on the set of The Island of Doctor Moreau, I got a rare chance to really observe him. Like so many actors of my generation, I had such an obsession with the guy and such an incredible unquenchable thirst to get a glimmer of where that kind of genius comes from. But Marlon never wanted to talk about the craft. He talked about politics, about religion, about child rearing, but the unwritten law was that the minute you ever asked him a question about acting, you were excommunicated. And if you knew that unwritten law, you knew not to ever go there. And because that’s the only thing I ever gave a shit about, I just didn’t have much to interact with him about. So most of my time spent with him was in observance. And the one thing I was able to observe about him—and this is not just true of him but also of a couple of other geniuses—was the inexplicable need to never be pinned down.

  If you ask any actor who lived after 1950, there’s Marlon, and then there’s everybody else. No one—no one—will disagree with that. A couple of the old-time guys might make fun of him because he mumbled and he scratched himself and he was self-indulgent. If they had studied him like I did, even they would have marveled at the depth he was able and willing to plumb. He bottled that magic in The Godfather, when Francis Ford Coppola made a perfect film from beginning to end, not just in terms of storytelling but also in cinematography, music, production design, and performances. Every single actor in that movie—most of whom were obscure, including Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard Castellano, Abe Vigoda (the guy who played “Fish” on the television show Barney Miller)—all became movie stars as a result of appearing in that one movie. That’s how much of a game-changer that film was. John Cazale, Lenny Montana, Al Lettieri, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire—every single actor who appeared in that movie did a different kind of work from what they had ever done before or would ever do again. So there was something; it was a promontory. It was like Mount Olympus in terms of what it achieved as a movie and the visceral way that it affects you from beginning to end. You can never really put it into words because when you try to explain the story, the dynamic, and understand it intellectually, what is missing is the feeling that you get (or don’t get) when you watch it.

  Human condition. That’s what made this movie one of the greatest events in cinematic history, because the movie got that on film. It comes from Brando’s unbelievable performance and his transformation into Vito Corleone. He captured, as the patriar
ch of his mob family, a range of emotions—vulnerability, ruthlessness, and intense loyalty, sense of family, of being responsible for the greater good, of moral compass. All these things wrapped up in one character that was also so Italian that you could believe he landed on Ellis Island and pulled himself up by his bootstraps from nothing with only a kind of sense of direction.

  The seventies were an extremely exciting period for movies because the work of Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, to name a few, came as close as we had in decades to producing a new golden era in cinema. It was if they had absorbed what was magical about the first forty years of movies, starting in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. These guys were spewing back in a lens what was paved for them by the John Fords, the George Stevenses, the George Cukors, the Preston Sturgesses, the Frank Capras, the Alfred Hitchcocks. What Brando and Elia Kazan did in On the Waterfront can be marked as a departure point in the entire way storytelling is done on film. Yes, there’s plot; yes, there’s story; yes, there’s a lot of the other things that all movies had. But there’s one thing that no other movie had prior to that: this kind of neighborhood behavioral, very primal feel that you get as a result of what the actors were trying to do. Brando, Clift, and Dean were America’s answer to Constantin Stanislavski’s famed “method acting.” Kazan showed you in living black and white and, every once in a while, in living color how much deeper storytelling can go.

  As good as the seventies were—my absolute favorite era in movie history—truly the golden age of cinema was the thirties and forties. Then it was simple storytelling and big personalities. Those filmmakers surrounded themselves with authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Odets, and Earnest Lehman—the greatest writers in film history were doing their thing in the thirties and forties. That was an exploration of the human condition in all of its grandeur. In spades. And it was looked at from every angle and in such a way that, even as they were incredibly entertaining, they were also so much more. Those movies were instructive: every single thing I learned about what kind of man I wanted to be didn’t come from going to school or from hanging out in the neighborhood; a lot of it came from watching the way Bogie handled the situation, the way Duke walked through some trouble, the look that overcame Gary Cooper as he made a decision, how Tyrone Power figured his way out of a situation, what kind of crap Clark Gable had on his heels when he wanted to charm his way in and out of stuff. Watching those movies taught me that kind of character-building shit.