Ringo’s Drum Roll

“thellfish! ” (We were getting near the end.) As for me, I had never been so stirred, so affected by a movie before. It was as if someone had glimpsed the inside of me and put it on the screen. The music, the lighting, Brando in that long coat, it made me long for another life. It made me want to be an actor. (It was only years later that I understood I wanted to be in the movie, literally, as opposed to being “in the movies.” Big difference.)

I saw the movie thirteen times, Marlon Brando lying on the floor of an apartment in Paris, talking about his childhood (“We had a big black dog named Dutchy. She used to hunt for rabbits in that field . . . ” ), and I thought, I can do that too. All I need is a camera and a girl like Maria Schneider.

So that fall, buttressed by a small inheritance, I hopped on a plane and flew to New York. I took a long-term room in the Chelsea Hotel and signed up at a pretty good acting school, the H. B. Studio down on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. But what became clear to me very soon was that I was surrounded by authentically talented people. They didn’t just have a “dynamic personality”; they could sing, they could dance, they could do breathtaking imitations of Al Pacino (a school alumnus) and Steve McQueen (another alumnus) in the washrooms and hallways. What I could do, what I could only do, was sit in front of a scene-study class, frozen with terror, and recite Ibsen in a voice not my own—all of which gave me, so my drama coach said (in tones I now reserve for children), a “certain intensity.”

The coup de grâce came a few weeks later when I took a “break” and flew back to Toronto. I was going to stay for the weekend, but one thing led to another and five or six days later I was still in town. It was early November. I was taking a shortcut through the university campus when I ran into a young man, my age, who had graduated from university with me. He had grown a red beard since then and developed a slightly English way of speaking, jerky, as if he were tripping, almost involuntarily, from one brilliant aperçu to the next. “A bit of a theatre man,” he was now. What was I up to? In a few moments I described an actor’s life in Manhattan which didn’t in the least resemble mine. (Mine consisted largely of reading show-business biographies in my hotel room.)

“Do you know Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker?” he asked. “We’re looking for somebody to play the older brother.” Did I want to give it a go? I agreed on the spot to “give it a go.”

I was, after all, a “New York actor” with seven scene-study classes to my credit. I bought two paperback copies of the play and hurried to see my nephew. He was younger than me and still very impressed with me. A perfect person to rehearse with. But when I arrived at his second-floor apartment above a pizza parlour, he wasn’t there. His roommate was, though—a burly, unkempt young fellow known around town as “the Bear.” I quickly outlined my good fortune, explained my haste; the audition was the following day. Could he, the Bear, give me a hand? He shuffled over to a ripped armchair (beside which stood a tower of paperbacks) and sat down. “Okay, you’re going to play the tramp,” I said, “and I’m going to play Aston, one of the brothers who brings the tramp back to his flat to stay for a few days. Got it? ”

“Why does he bring him home?” the Bear asked.

“Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” We started, the Bear hesitantly. Jesus, I wondered, can the guy even read? But soon we came to a small speech where the tramp talks about why he left his wife. “Fortnight after I married her, no, not so much as that, no more than a week, I took the lid off a saucepan, you know what was in it? A pile of her underclothing, unwashed.”

Something curious was happening. I began to feel that I was in the presence of a sour, deceitful, slightly crazy loser. But when I looked up, it was just the Bear hunched forward in his chair, holding the book between his legs. We went on. “Who was this git to come up and give me orders? We got the same standing. He’s not my boss,” the Bear growled. And as he read, it seemed as if he was growing in stature, in weight, whereas when I spoke there was a sensation of diminishment, a small unconvincing voice that might well have been saying, “Hey kids, we can have the party here!”

To mollify my escalating discomfort, I suggested we switch roles; I’d read the tramp, he could read the brother. We began. Suddenly from across the room I heard the voice of a mean-mouthed prick. I understood in a flash why the brother had brought the tramp home. He was a recreational sadist; it was for entertainment. The Bear had shown me! Me, a New York actor, slumming in a college production. I had been in the presence of talent before but I had never had so precise, so unexpected a brush with it before that afternoon.