The Books: “It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here” (Charles Grodin)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here, by Charles Grodin

I consider this to be required reading for young actors.

It’s so good on so many levels, but particularly good for young unknown full-of-hope actors. It’s not just an autobiography. It’s not even a How-To book, because if anyone has had an unconventional and, at times, very difficult career, it is Charles Grodin. But it is a Must-Read. I think definitely for actors it’s a must-read – but anyone interested in the business, and how it works (not how it appears to work, but how it actually works) – should also read it as well. The ups and downs, the callous decisions, the annoying co-stars (I love the chapter entitled “Breakthrough: I don’t accept an apology from Anthony Quinn”) – the craft itself – working on the SELF, as an actor must do … at the same time that you are trying to survive in a pretty brutal business. The book addressees all of these issues like no other. I think it should be handed out to actors in scene classes, or put on “suggested reading” lists of freshman-level acting classes. I read it from the cloister of college, where I was highly successful, and the thought of taking that out into the real world was exciting … but scary, too. Grodin’s book, on some level, says back to young actors, “Yeah. You should be scared. Toughen up, toots. Harsh world out there.” But it doesn’t JUST have a cynical tone to it (which is a huge turn-off) – it also is an honest look at his own journey, finding his way, leaping at opportunity when it knocked – but also missing some key opportunities for such and such reasons. Grodin also is notorious for his temper, and obviously his sense of humor – which often got him into trouble, when someone didn’t get the joke. But he wasn’t afraid to be disliked … that’s one thing … and yet at the same time, he NEEDED to be liked, in order to get his projects done. The classic dichotomy.

Grodin doesn’t just describe his own experiences – he then turns each one into a little “teaching moment” (sorry, don’t really like the Oprah terminology but in this case it can’t be helped) … Moments in your life where you realize, through the mess and chaos, there are actually are lessons to be learned – but God, sometimes isn’t it difficult to figure out what the hell lesson it is?? Grodin shows that there is a choice involved. You can choose a lesson that empowers you, or you can choose one that makes you bitter and self-righteous. Sometimes Grodin chooses one, sometimes the other – as we all do … and he is unafraid to call a spade a spade. There are people who were unkind to him starting out. Not even big-wigs at the time – just your basic casting agents, agents in general … saying horrible things right to your face with the utmost carelessness: “We’re looking for someone sexier …” Whatever, things that go right for the jugular. How do you keep your confidence up in the face of that?? It takes some serious mental maneuvering … it really does. You have to decide to make sense of it, rather than be victimized by it.

Grodin doesn’t come off like he has an ax to grind, or like “look how mean everyone was to me – yet I STILL made it!!” … It’s an honest look at the brutality of the business – and how people can say the most outrageous things and you have to somehow just survive it. Like the story he tells about the party celebrating the fact that the Broadway smash hit Same Time Next Year – which Grodin starred in with Ellen Burstyn – had been bought up by a producer and was going to be made into a movie – and Grodin asked the playwright’s wife why the playwright wasn’t there, and she replied blithely, “Oh, he’s off meeting with Actor X who we are really hoping will play your part in the movie.” !!! Unbelievable. Grodin reports this story, and it was years ago, but he obviously never forgot it … He forgives the playwright’s wife for her callousness (which he did not believe was malicious, just unthinking) … but says he still, to this day, kind of “ducks” when he sees her, afraid of whatever zinger she might throw his way. Grodin reports these stories honestly, you can still feel the emotion behind it – he’s not all Zen about these things and that’s one of the refreshing (and most human) things about this book. He also behaves in an unexpected way – and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it backfires … but there are great lessons in all of that for any young actor. Grodin admits that his humor sometimes doesn’t go over well … but then there are people like Mike Nichols who say of Grodin, “He’s the funniest man I’ve ever met.” (Grodin was actually cast as Benjamin in The Graduate, but it ended up not happening – Grodin blowing that opportunity for various reasons. Grodin, forever afterwards, was always nervous whenever he saw Dustin Hoffman, even if Hoffman was just walking on the beach. Grodin always believed that any sighting of Hoffman anywhere meant that Grodin was about to be fired.)

So. Who are you going to believe? Which interpretation do you go with? Or can you be okay with the fact that some people just won’t “get” you? Grodin’s entire career seems to have been about that. Some people will “get” you, others won’t … you have to keep working anyway.

The title of the book comes from an anecdote during the filming of the disastrous 11 Harrowhouse. Grodin’s career had exploded (in a good way) with The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May.

I don’t think Grodin got one bad review for that film. He says that people still come up to him on the street and talk to him about that movie. Anyone who asks him for an autograph, even now, still say, “I loved you in The Heartbreak Kid …” So awesome, right? He hit the big time! Yay! But this is why this book is so important: the next movie he did was a movie called 11 Harrowhouse and it very nearly killed his career for good. You would have thought he would have the pick of the crop … but no, things dried up immediately. To quote Heidi Klum, “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.” But anyway, the title of the book comes from an experience he had during filming 11 Harrowhouse. Just a year before, Grodin had become a big star, a hot new actor, desirable, wanted, praised.

Candy Bergen and I were filming the movie 11 Harrowhouse in a castle outside London. We were sitting in a room off the main hall where the cameras were being set up. After a few minutes an Englishwoman appeared. I don’t know who she was, but she acted as though she had a duchess-or-something title. She said, “Did someone ask you to wait in here?” “No,” we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: “Well, it would be so nice if you weren’t here.”

A master of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching of any given story … Grodin turns these mainly unpleasant memories into “teaching moments”, as well as a revealing memoir about his own development. We learn sometimes by watching others. There is no such thing as a done deal. Grodin thought he had it in the bag with The Heartbreak Kid and while that film will probably be what he is remembered for (that and Midnight Run) – that’s not all there is. There were TV specials (including a highly controversial one with Simon & Garfunkel), late-show appearances (he was notorious), directing, plays … Grodin figured out early on that he would not be happy just as an actor. The point was to stay in the business, by any means possible.

The book is quite funny, and there were times it made me laugh out loud. Any young actor, too, will recognize himself … in the descriptions of the early days of Grodin’s career in New York, taking classes with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, and trying to get cast in something – the whole obsession with headshots (“Did you get your pictures?” “I’m getting my pictures….” “I like my pictures.” “Can I see your pictures?”) is just so dead on … so universal … and there are also moments where Grodin makes mistakes (many many moments) – like the time he disagreed with a bit of Roman Polanski’s direction during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby. Or the time he refused to accept Anthony Quinn’s bullshit (in my opinion) apology. The time he almost got into a fistfight, defending Marlo Thomas’ honor and reputation from a heckler who told her she should be “ashamed” of herself and that her father “would be ashamed”.

I liked the VOICE of the book, too. It’s cynical, sure, but there is a lot of warmth there, too.

It’s an act of generosity, this book … and I am grateful I read it when I did in my life. It was a dash of cold water, in many respects – but at the same time, Grodin doesn’t condescend, he doesn’t roll his eyes at someone who wants to “do this” as a career – He’s not a know-it-all. He makes fun of himself (his stories of working with Robert DeNiro are HYSTERICAL) – but he’s also interested in passing on what he has learned.

I found this book to be invaluable at a time when I really really needed it.

A must-read.

The excerpt below has to do with Grodin’s experience directing Lovers and Other Strangers on Broadway in 1968.

EXCERPT FROM It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here, by Charles Grodin

As much as I feel for the actors’ discomfort in auditioning, the people putting on the project have so much time and effort invested in it that these auditions become necessary to try to avoid making mistakes. The exception to this, of course, is if you’re hiring someone to do something that everyone involved has seen him do before. I say “everyone” because in most plays everyone has cast approval – writer, director, producer, and, sometimes, the star. It’s not that easy to get everyone to agree on anyone. I believe that casting is everything, and if you don’t have the right actors, all the writing and directing in the world won’t do it for a play. Fine comedy actors, in my opinion, must be as good at serious acting (reality) as they are at comedy. Because of those demands, this is a relatively small group of people.

Lily Tomlin (who has won a Best Actress award on Broadway) likes to tell the story of her audition for me. When she finished, I asked her if she’d ever acted before. She was crushed, she said, and ran to a phone booth to tell a friend how terrible she must have been. I always remind her that the reason I asked her that was because she had been recommended to me by the director of a musical review (Sandy Devlin, the musical stager from Hooray) she was in, and I thought she was a musical performer, even though I thought she gave a good acting audition. But, whatever my rationale, I inadvertently was as insensitive to Lily as others had been to me.

In any event, we ended up with a magnificent cast.

Eventually, the first day of rehearsal finally came for the play, which was called Lovers and Other Strangers. There were a lot of people gathered on the stage that day: ten members of the cast, many of whom had distinguished themselves in other Broadway shows; four or five understudies covering all the parts – also excellent people, any of whom could play the parts they understudied unusually well; of course, the writers, Renee and Joe; Renee’s mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler; the producer, Stephanie Sills; top scenic costume and lighting designers; highly experienced stage managers; a number of assistants – a lot of people. I started to welcome everyone, and suddenly was acutely aware that all eyes were on me. I wanted to tell them how excited we were to have them all, and how I saw the play and all that, but I realized I was very, very nervous. I had learned how to deal with rejection but now I had to learn to deal with having authority – which also, unexpectedly, was nerve-racking. I had auditioned and approved every single member of the cast, but now, sitting there in front of all of them, I realized that many in the company were older and more experienced than I was. My directing experience consisted of one show that had run three weeks. (I couldn’t go around telling that costumes-were-stolen story to everyone I met.) As soon as I realized my voice was shaking, I shifted gears and switched my speech to a short introduction of Renee’s mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler, a short, extraordinarily warm woman with a lisp and a lot of guts, who always enjoyed making a statement. Mrs. Wechsler basically said how happy we were to have everyone there and how we all felt that, with hard work, we could have a success – pretty much what I would have said if I could have spoken.

Lovers and Other Strangers dealt with love, romance, and marriage. I don’t know if it was life imitating art, or what, but as soon as this company got together, all kinds of romances broke out. I gave notes after each rehearsal. Sometimes one of the performers would be able to leave early because I had said all I had to say to him. His lover would sit there fidgeting, looking furiously at me to give her notes and let her get the hell out of there and into the arms of love. All the romances were topped by Renee and Joe calling me to a private meeting one day to tell me they were expecting.

We opened in the fifteen-hundred-seat Fisher Theater in Detroit to rave reviews and sellout business. It was a complete triumph. The papers were raving about Renee and Joe, and even me. Renee’s mother told some of the movie people from Hollywood who had descended on us in Detroit that we wanted five hundred thousand dollars for the movie rights. When they looked faint, she whipped out a rave review from Variety and read the entire thing to them as they stood and nodded and looked increasingly nervous.

The road to Broadway was not entirely smooth. It was concluded at some point prior to the Broadway opening that one of the young women in the cast should be replaced. I was the only one against it, yet it was considered my job, as director, to tell the young woman. It seems unfair now; I should have said to the others: “You want to fire her? You tell her.” I didn’t want the job. But some kind of tradition was being followed, I guess. When I did walk over to the actress, it took me so long to get to the point that she thought we were just having an idle chat. As I got closer to saying what I had to say, I started to develop chest pains, which turned out to be tension. I had to lie down. She got me a glass of water, and as she was trying to calm me, I told her she was fired. It was doubly difficult for me because I couldn’t tell her how much I disagreed with the decision and how good I thought she was. I thought that would be disloyal to the others. I know she felt like lying down herself, but she kept applying cold compresses. Two days later, the whole section that the young, talented actress had been in was cut from the show, and two additional actors had to be let go. But it was certainly easier to be dropped from the show because the scenes you were in were cut. Personally, I don’t believe in firings unless it significantly affects the show. And I’d venture to say that more than the overwhelming majority of the time it doesn’t. This time it didn’t.

We finished our highly successful run in Detroit and prepared to move to Broadway. The stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York was considerably smaller than the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit. When we moved the scenery to the Brooks Atkinson, it seemed that our four large sets would come rolling in and out on tracks that were awfully close together. I went to the head stagehand and said, “Are you sure there’s no chance at all that these sets could sway a bit, and one coming in quickly could hit one going out quickly?” He stared at me as though that was the dumbest question he’d ever heard. When I persisted, saying, “Forgive me, it’s my first Broadway show, and I just don’t know about this,” he said, “Kid, I’ve been in this business thirty-five years. Trust me.” Always being an optimist, I did. When we started to preview, the sets regularly crashed into each other. Starting right there, until the present, I became kind of an optimistic skeptic.

When we opened on Broadway we got the biggest laughs I’d ever heard in the theater; they were like thunderclaps. In spite of that, the play received mixed notices. The New York Times loved it, which is supposed to be enough; but there was a certain amount of vitriol on the other side. The phrase “Neanderthal theater” sticks in my mind. The play was bold and maybe a little ahead of its time in the sexual-humor department. So, alongside the people screaming with laughter, there was a certain group heading up the aisles in the middle of the evening. The questionable sexual dialogue – and that’s all it was: dialogue – represented far less than 1 percent of the play. The biggest laugh of the evening came when a woman turned to her husband in bed and asked demandingly: “Are you gonna make love to me or not?!” The man thinks a second and says, “I owe you one.” It was the biggest laugh, and also a line that offended a lot of people. It neither made me laugh nor offended me. I was a much bigger fan of Renee and Joe’s nonsexual humor, which was 99 percent of the play.

Business was in trouble from the start. We’d had the theater on what’s called an interim booking, meaning another play was booked into the theater six weeks after us (my old friend Dustin Hoffman in a play called Jimmy Shine);and since we had the money to move it (it would have cost twenty-five thousand dollars), we felt we should. The movie rights had been sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Today, that would be equal to a million dollars. The writers got 60 percent of that, and the production 40 percent, which meant that the production had a hundred thousand dollars from the movie sale. Business increased from the first week to the sixth week by 150 percent. We had tried everything to keep going. The actors went around to the various ticket brokers and asked them to do what they could to steer people to the show since the brokers had liked it. I spoke to other producers who had loved the show in an effort to get them to take it over. Joe Bologna and I would stand in front of the theater where our Times review was blown up and comment, as though we were passersby: “I hear it’s very good.” A few people overheard us and bought tickets. Renee and Joe rounded up about fifty relatives and gave them money to buy tickets. They formed a line. We said to our general manager: “Look, we’ve got a line!” But Renee and Joe ran out of relatives before that plan could work. None of our plans worked. Heartbreakingly to all of us, the play was allowed to close when our six-week booking was up.

I felt very strongly that the producers should have spent the twenty-five thousand dollars and moved Lovers and Other Strangers to another theater. We had more than doubled our business from the first to the sixth week, we had a rave review from The New York Times, and, most significantly, the show, overall, was loved by the audience and had great word of mouth. A lot of people felt that if it had moved it could have run for two years. Its longevity possibilities, I believe, were proved in that it still is being performed regularly, some twenty years later, all over the country in amateur and stock companies.

Those people responsible for the money always feel they have total control and owe no explanation to anyone, even though in this case most of the money was raised, of course, by a series of backers’ auditions performed by Renee, Joe and me. I’ve always resented this autocratic attitude of “money people”. I think that when people work very hard for the better part of a year for little money, they are owed every chance and consideration. While, conceivably, by trying to go on running, money may be lost, work and effort going down the drain to me is worth more than money. The producers had actually wanted to close the play sooner, but I did some figuring, and got Renee and Joe to join with me (against the advice of their business manager) to indemnify the producers against any losses they might incur to finish out the six weeks. We would be responsible for any losses, and also share any profits. We ended up making eleven thousand dollars in profits for the remaining weeks. Recently, I was at a gathering, and one of the producers (a nonvisible one at the time of the play who had raised less than half the money and been influential in persuading Stephanie Sills to close the show) came up to me, introduced himself, and said: “I put up the money for Lovers and Other Strangers.” I controlled myself for a moment, and the politest response I could come up with was, “Well, not all of it.” He seemed taken aback. I wonder what he would have felt if I’d told him what I really thought of him.

I’ve always been proud of the successful movie that was made out of the play and of how the play continues to be done regularly all over the country to this day, and probably will for the rest of our lives.