Okay all you non-entities, we know who you are. Why do you think no one
ever returns your phone calls or can ever remember your name? Do you think
it's an accident that no one accepts your invitations or asks you over for
dinner? Surely you don't think it's a merely coincidence that every time you go
to a party you end up in a corner by yourself? The fact is, you're boring.
You're principal colors are dreck and dull. Well, don't just sit there. Life is
not a dress rehearsal. Do something about it. Join an acting class!

It's half past nine on a warm Thursday night in June and upstairs at Eric
Morris's La Brea Avenue acting studio, some 20 students are sitting in the
battered theater seats which line the room on three sides. Eight floodlights
in the ceiling turn the carpet a rich deep blue, while over in the corner Eric
is conducting class from his customary chair.

Eric is tall, thin and surprisingly emotional. It's not always apparent
in normal conversation but let him get excited and something creeps into his
voice like the thin high cry of migrating waterfowl. He wears a thick short
beard and has a thatch of fading red hair which gives him the faint air of an
English explorer who's spent too much time in the tropical sun. Stroking his
mustache with his little finger, Eric asks a new student named Lynda to do her
first exercise ever--relating to Eric in a "socially unacceptable way." She
can do whatever she wants, explains Eric, except actually touch him.

"Oh God," laugh Linda, holding her head in her hands. She's in her
middle-twenties, 10 pounds overweight, with straight teeth and a wide nervous
smile. "Let's see," she says, looking for something to criticize. This is very
hard for her. Everything she says is mild, pleasant, even complimentary. After
a couple of minutes Eric stops her and pointedly asks what she thinks she's
doing.

"Being anti-social," she says?

"Then do it," says Eric, "don't stand around like some fat assed bitch."

Lynda looks stunned. Then realizing that Eric is merely trying to spur
her on to anti-social behavior, she responds by calling him a "dork."

"A dork? Oh my God, no!" Eric says if she isn't willing to do the
exercise right she ought to go home and talk to her cat.

"I don't have a cat. It's my sister's cat."

"I don't want to hear about your cat, you stupid bitch."

Lynda's eyes flare. "Fuck off, asshole." But then she can't help pulling
her own punch by allowing her voice to drop off meekly.

Eric tries another tack. "What do you do for a living?"

"I teach people."

"What kind of people?"

"Stupid people who slobber down their chins." Her voice is petulant. She
looks as if she's about to cry.

"I believe it . . . "

"I don't care what you believe."

" . . . that's the kind of job they'd give a retardo like you."

"Fuck off, asshole." This time she means it and she walks in circles,
clenching her fists.

"You said that already."

"I don't care."

Eric holds out his arm and sticks up his thumb. "Here, sit on this and
rotate, honey."

Lynda is so flabbergasted that she wanders off into the dark at the far
end of the studio, out where the sofa and refrigerator are. "Hey, come back,"
Eric says gently.

Lynda raises her arms in exasperation, then, letting them drop again, she
reluctantly returns to the center of the floodlights, looking angry and
embarrassed at the same time.

"How do you feel?" asks Eric.

"Shaky," she says in a tremulous voice.

Eric nods in understanding. "Welcome to the class."

For the most part, Eric's classes are at least as interesting as most
equity waiver plays with his exercises running the gauntlet from silly to
sublime. Eric, in fact, has a soft spot in his heart for silliness, contending
that it isn't until a student totally humiliates himself that he can at last
forget his foolish pride, drop the facade and get on with the important
business of learning how to act. If a woman feels weak or powerless, Eric
makes her jump in the air, fling our her arms and shout, "I am
SUPERWOMAN! I can do ANYTHING!"

To encourage people to feel more irreverence in their monologues, Eric
distracts them with everything from speculating about their
sex lives to sticking a pencil up his nose. When people have trouble
expressing their anger, Eric has them run around the room, screaming at their
enemies and beating the floor with foam rubber batons. If people feel
depressed, he makes them count their blessings. If they suffer from marginal
self-images, he makes them tell the class what they like about their bodies.

Tears and angry outbursts are common in class, as are intimate revelations. I
once saw a sensitive young man surprise himself by blurting out that he'd just
discovered he was gay. On another occasion, a 47 year old newly single
grandmother convulsed the class by describing how she brought home a guy she
met in a bar, made love on the living room floor, and then screamed so loud
when she came that she broke a blood vessel in her lungs.

I have come to Eric's class for several reasons, the first of which is
that I want to write a story. The heart of any story is conflict and Eric's
class is certainly full of that. The other reason is a more complex one and
has to do with a longtime feeling that in some fundamental sense my life isn't
working very well. All around me I see friends, relatives or former classmates
leading productive and apparently quite happy lives while I feel stuck in a
rut, marginally productive, often unhappy and curiously indecisive. Most of
the time I feel as if I'm only hitting on two cylinders. In social settings,
instead of coming across as the forceful man of action I believe myself to be,
I appear as some sort of bearded Ozzie Nelson--soft, fumbling and incapable
of surprise. I know I've always felt ineffective in organized groups. My voice
becomes high and thin. There's not a hint of what I consider to be my normal
warmth, wit and color and I stumble around forgetting my point and coming to
some lame conclusion, if I don't get cut off first.

Lots of people have these problems, I know, but I don't consider myself just
nyone and it's humiliating to find them happening to me. I don't know what,
if anything, Eric's class can do for me, but he does spend a lot of time on the
freeing of emotions. Week after week, I've seen him put his students on the
spot to express attraction, affection, hostility, anger, love. It is often a very
affecting experience. And on some evenings, there is enough sexual energy
in the room to arc-weld boiler plate.

Eric is delighted when I tell him I want to take his class (Up
till now I've merely been watching from the back row). He says I'll get a lot
out of the class since, in his opinion, I am "emotionally conservative,"
"articulate but enigmatic," and "emotionally uncomfortable" with "complex
undercurrents." I don't appear to be terribly happy. I'm vulnerable, but
terrified of expressing it. I've been "stifled" a lot. And he will have a
field day getting me to open up.

On this Thursday night, Eric starts the class with what he calls "a
getting ready to get ready to act" exercise. Everyone is to pair off, sit on
the floor and work to achieve some kind of "intimacy." "Now, I don't mean who
you've been fucking --I mean, you can talk about that if you want to-- but
what I really mean is your feelings, your jobs, your frustrations --what's
really going on inside. Most people are afraid of intimacy. They can't stand
not being in control. Or they think being intimate is going to open up a can
of peas. I want you to go all out. Go for the emotional jugular vein."

While most of the class does the exercise, Eric idly chats with a late
arrival about his cream colored Italian shoes. At the end of the group
workout, Eric begins the individual sessions by asking Judy to take the floor.
Judy works as a computer programmer during the day and takes both acting and
dancing lessons at night. She has small shoulders and small breasts but big
hips and heavy thighs. She is wearing pink plastic-rimmed eyeglasses and a
black and white striped shirt that makes her look like a basketball referee.
The deceptively simple sounding exercise which Eric has her to do is to
describe how she feels "on a moment to moment basis." Judy makes a valiant
stab at it, but after a few minutes she breaks if off completely. "Eric, I
have achieved a state of total non-being."

"I know," says Eric. "Your problem is you have theatrical expectations.
You want to have great things to say, wonderfully poignant and entertaining.
You've got to say what you feel."

"Yeah, but it might be boring."

"That's a risk you've got to run." Eric goes on to explain one of his
many theories, namely that reality is never boring, unless one interferes with
it. "This doesn't mean that everything that comes out of your mouth will be an
earthquake, but it won't be dull."

"But I go for earthquakes."

"I know, and that's your problem--you should be going for reality.

Eric is a method actor, which is another way of saying he believes the
best acting isn't acting at all and that in truly transcendental moments on
stage, the actors aren't so much simulating emotions as merely expressing what
they truly feel. Because Eric's exercises sometimes ruthlessly probe his
students' true feelings, he is occasional accused of being too tough--"Old
whips and chains Morris," he's "vicious," he's "crazy," his students run
screaming from his class.

Eric is more than a little hurt by such charges. While some of his methods
may seem harsh to outsiders, he says, their purpose is to help students break
through barriers and inhibitions which may have been stifling them their
entire lives. The problem is that many people don't understand what he's
trying to do. Even a psychiatrist friend he brought to class took him to task
for being too hard on a student.

"You don't understand," Eric told his friend. "I have their permission. This
isn't therapy. It's an acting class."

All an actor has to offer is his own unique self. If he's too emotionally constipated
to let his true feelings show, he might as well take up accounting or TV
repair. "I don't enjoy making people feel bad," says Eric, "but we're dealing
with an art form." How could Elizabeth Taylor ever do "Virginia Wolfe" if she
couldn't bear to shout at Richard Burton? Besides, says Eric, it's a bit
ironic to attack him now for being too tough when the truth is he was far
"saltier and more volatile" in his younger days. Now that he's older and more
secure he's actually rather "mellow."

Because Eric believes that to be a good actor you must first feel good
about yourself, many of his exercises attempt to deal with self-esteem, as
when he tells Patty for her exercise one night to "get in touch with all her
wonderful qualities," make it "really big," and take "lots of chances."

Patty is a slim Irish girl with small white teeth, seductive green eyes
and bushy red hair. In any exercise where the guys in the class are asked to
express their physical attraction, she's one girl whom everyone always names.

As Eric expected, Patty initially has trouble naming any wonderful
qualities. "Shit," she announces. "I feel on the spot."

"Yes, and that's the problem," says Eric. "You may say good things about
yourself, but on some level deep down you don't believe them." Patty tries
again, this time mentioning her "freshness" and her "pride."

"Do you like the way you look?" asks Eric.

"I love the way I look.

"Do you like your face?"

"Yes."

"Do you like your body?"

"I like my breasts. They're just . . . perfect. I like the way they stand
up. They're just the right size." Surprised and embarrassed by her own
admission, Patty hides her face in her hands. "This is hard."

"I know," says Eric, who then goes on to explain that an actor can't very
well expect other people to like him if he doesn't like himself. Patty
masquerades as having a big ego. But in fact her ego has been "eroded,
corroded and chopped down. A big part of you says, 'I'm talented, but others
are better.' A big part says, 'I'm beautiful, but others are more beautiful.'
A big part says, 'I'm intelligent, but so what? --that and 64 will get you a
cup of coffee at Schwabs."

One night Judy is standing on the stage preparing to do her monolog when
Eric begins to chat with someone else. Since she's supposed to be playing an
abrasive character anyway, she tells Eric to go fuck himself. "Hey," says
Eric. "I'm really hurt."

Realizing that fuck you is hardly a damning retort in a class where some
people manage to work it into practically every sentence, Judy tries a more
subtle attack, saying that what she really meant to say was that Eric would
like to "fuck everyone in here."

"That's not true," says Eric smugly. "I'm totally monogamous."

Judy points an accusatory finger in his direction. "You'd like everyone
to want to fuck you."

Eric springs delightedly out of his chair. "Well now," he says, pointing a
finger back at her. "That's a totally different story."

For someone so apparently at ease with himself and other people, there is
a surprising naivete about Eric. His wife has only to tell him there is
marijuana in the brownies and his powers of self-suggestion are so strong that
a few minutes later he's beginning to feel high. Eric's anger appears so
suddenly, it's hard to believe it's real. I once saw him storm out of a class
because the students were taking too long to find their seats (he was back in
10 minutes, fully composed and sipping a cup of coffee). Eric's wife, Jesse,
says they have an unusually passionate relationship which is not diminished by
the fact that they fight over everything from what color to paint the living
room to whether or not the dog sleeps in their bed at night. Eric likes
expensive machinery (he drives a Turbo Porsche and a Cadillac Seville). And he
is successful enough at what he does to have a house in the Hollywood Hills
and another one at Lake Arrowhead. Despite his formidable collection of
firearms (which he keeps locked in a big steel safe with an eagle on the
door), his wife says his disposition is rather gentle and rather than kill a
bumble bee he'll spend l0 minutes shooing it out of the house.

Unlike intellectuals, who tend to learn by reading, Eric says he doesn't
really understand something until he hears himself explain it out loud (most
often on the freeway). In class he intersperses his instruction with jokes,
puns and good-natured innuendo. Articulate to a fault, he tosses opinions,
observations and instant aphorisms the way a Golden Retriever shakes itself
dry. I once heard him tell a student that his voice was so syrupy, Eric got
cavities just from hearing him talk. If he needs a word that doesn't exist,
he'll make up one on the spot, as when he tells his students to do their
exercises "bigglier," meaning bigger, more expansive and a whole lot more
expressive.

For his own part, Eric tends to project so well in public places that sometimes
his wife will ask him if he really wants "the waitresses to hear the conversation?
The cooks too?"

In fact, Eric makes a strong case for arrogance, which he considers a virtue and
he likes to tell a story about the time Dick Cavett introduced a distinguished
guest by saying "Everyone says that you are a genius." And the man answered,
"That's right, I am."

It's another Thursday night in Eric's class and Carol is sitting on the
carpet preparing to do a monolog to an imaginary boyfriend. Carol is 19, looks
24 and acts about 12. On this occasion, she's wearing a purple shirt and black
pants. Her eyes are big and round and she has a little girl Lolita style
which, in small doses, is actually rather sexy. At the moment she is trying to
get herself in the mood to do an affecting monolog to her lover, but for some
reason, she's bored, the class is bored and nothing much is happening. "I'm
sorry," she says, breaking if off. "It's not working."

"Okay," says Eric, sweeping his gaze around the room while he gathers his
thoughts. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Yes," says Carol, earnestly nodding like a little girl.

Eric thoughtfully strokes his mustache with the tip of his little finger.
"Do you love him?"

"Oh yes, very much."

"Your boyfriend is dead."

Carol is startled.

"He's lying right there in front of you." Eric points to the floor. "And
he's dead."

Carol looks ready to cry.

"Say, 'Please don't be dead,'" says Eric.

"Please don't be dead," repeats Carol.

"Say, 'I love you. I don't want you to be dead.'"

"I love you. I don't want you to be dead." Her voice cracks and tears
roll down her cheeks. It's a very poignant moment and sitting in the gallery
at the back of the room, I find myself blinking back tears.

One afternoon when I drop by the studio, Eric demonstrates Sense Memory
to me. In this preparatory technique, the actor asks specific questions of his
senses in order to conjure up familiar objects such as a steaming cup of
coffee. With practice, the actor can experience any object any time he wants
to, and more importantly, the specific emotions associated with it.

Eric says that when he first discovered Sense Memory he became obsessed
with it, practicing "five, six, seven and ten hours a day" for three years
straight. He got so good all he had to do was work for a poison berry and he
would break out in hives. Another time he worked for heart palpitations, which
he thought was a great trick until he discovered that they wouldn't go away.
"I was saying, 'Okay guys, the party's over.'" After two increasingly alarming
weeks, he went to his doctor who cured him with tranquilizers. Now he says he
won't use Sense Memory on anything having to do with heartbeat or respiration.

"Would you like to see an example," he asks, explaining that he's going
to work for a block of ice and its associated physiological reaction. Pulling
up his shirt sleeves, Eric holds up his forearm. "Come closer," he says. "It
takes about three our four seconds."

Eric closes his eyes and grits his teeth. His arm shakes and his voice
strains. "I can't do it too long --it makes my teeth hurt." Suddenly there are
hundreds of goose bumps covering Eric's arm. It's just as if his bare forearm
were resting on a block of ice, which is, he explains, the image he was
working for. Eric seems to be under a great strain. "Oh Jesus." He furiously
rubs his hands and arms as if he's dying of a chill. "It goes through me like a
fucking knife."

When he recovers, he explains that he can also cause his palm to blister
by picturing it over a candle flame. "But that takes about ten minutes."

Eric asks if I would like to see the goose bumps again. "No, that's okay."
But Eric is already so deep into it he doesn't hear my reply. His eyes are
closed. He's holding his breath. "See it?" he gasps. "It's all over my body."
Suddenly, he flies out of his seat. "Oh God! I can't do that too long. The
cold goes right down my spine." Furiously rubbing his arms and sides he
finally takes a seat. "Well," he says, looking at me expectantly, "what did
you think?"

I'm a little taken back by the whole spectacle. "Gee," I offer, "that's
bizarre."

"No," he says. "It's craftsmanship."

In their more effusive moments, Eric's students describe him as a genius,
but as a child he was an exceedingly late bloomer. He found it so hard to
compete with his older brothers he never even tried. His schoolteachers thought
he was so stupid, they wouldn't allow him to graduate from grammar school until
he first promised to learn a trade. After taking machine shop and general
science in high school, Eric got a job at a phonograph record company running
the punch press and glue machine. In those days he had so little direction and
thrust that his father sent him to a psychiatrist. To his surprise, the tests
showed that Eric had a higher IQ than the psychiatrist did himself. Eventually
Eric enrolled in college to avoid the Korean War. There he saw a production of
Finian's Rainbow that completely changed his life. "I was 18 or 19 at the
time," says Eric. "I've never done anything since."

In 35 years of acting, Eric has appeared in some 150 equity plays, 50 TV
shows, a TV series ("The New Phil Silvers Show") and 120 feature films, the
most recent of which is "Wavelength," a low budget science fiction thriller in
which Eric plays the part of a naval officer surgeon who operates on extra-
terrestrials who land in Laurel Canyon.

Eric first began to teach acting in 1961. At the time he had been taking
method acting classes from Marty Landau. Landau had studied under Lee
Strasberg, who in turn had studied in Russia under Stanislavsky himself. Under
Landau's coaching, Eric's talent rapidly flowered. He had a couple of acting
jobs every month and was earning at the time what was a respectable $6,000 a
year. But the 1961 actor's strike broke his momentum. Afterward, not only did
he find it harder to get work, but Marty Landau, who also preferred acting to
teaching, left teaching for a year to work on "Cleopatra."

Eric was so devastated he didn't know which way to turn until a friend and
fellow actor suggested that, if he cared to teach an acting class himself, she
for one would be more than willing to work with him. For Eric, teaching was a
real revelation. He was 30 at the time and had not yet discovered his place in
life. Suddenly his life was changing. Not only did he discover that he had an
"innovative mind," he was able to use it to bridge what he now was beginning
to see as serious gaps in The Method. According to Eric, the main problem with
The Method is, as Stanislavsky himself admitted, only 3% of all actors are
fully able to make use of it. Eric's contribution has been to extend,
systematize and clarify The Method, inventing dozens of new approaches,
exercises and strategies with the result, says Eric, that The Method is now
accessible to anyone --"I could take the first 10 people walking down
Hollywood Boulevard and make actors out of nine of them." (I remind him of
this figure sometime later. "Not nine," he says, taken back a bit by his own
audacity. "Maybe six.")

Roselyn may be among the 40% that Eric can't help. She's a middle-aged
woman with varicose veins, bright orange hair (the sale color as her
Corvette), green eye shadow, and numerous bracelets and rings. Whenever Eric
criticizes her, she coyly stamps her feet in girlish indignation. Despite all
the time she's spent in class, she doesn't understand Eric's most fundamental
principle, namely that the best acting isn't acting at all, but merely
expressing what you truly feel. Instead she invests her monologs with sweeping
gestures and melodramatic shifts in intonation and pitch. She unconsciously
but continually drives Eric crazy by asking him for special consideration, as
she does on this occasion when, before starting her exercise, she asks to
leave at the l0 o'clock break because her shoulder and leg are sore from
playing tennis. "Do you get sympathy when you injure yourself?" asks Eric.
"Anyone who injures himself as much as you do must get something out of it."

"I really apologize," says Roselyn, who is wearing a white pants suit with a
jade figurine. "I have to get up at five thirty."

"Don't apologize," says Eric wearily. "It only takes more time."

After her monolog, a highly theatrical version of the character Medea,
Roselyn composes herself and asks Eric if he thought it "worked."

"Well," says Eric, "to some degree," though she didn't really surrender
to her sub-personality and there was an unfortunate overlay of leadership and
manipulation. Suddenly he stops and stares at Roselyn. "Are you listening?"

"Yes."

" . . . Or are you just thinking about what you're going to say? Because
if you think about what you're going to say, you miss fifty percent."

Roselyn tries to explain but she gets confused and Eric cuts her off.
"See," he tells her. "You don't listen. I'm champing at the bit to help you. I
want to help you. But you don't listen.

For the last six weeks I've attended Eric's class as an observer, but this
evening is the first time I've ever been a member of the class. All week
I've been so nervous my stomach feels like a bowl of minnows. As it is
Eric's contention that you overcome fear by acknowledging it (Eric calls
it "dealing with demons"), every few minutes while I'm waiting for my
turn I find myself saying "my stomach a bowl of minnows." Surprisingly,
it works --for about five minutes. Then you have to do it all over again.

Because I've observed enough of Eric's classes to know that he always
starts out beginners by having them talk about themselves, I have loosely
rehearsed lots of interesting things that I might say. Instead, when Eric
calls my name I find myself saying the most banal things about growing
up In Pennsylvania, going to school in New York, chasing submarines in
the Navy and learning to write by working as a local reporter for Time.

"I feel a little embarrassed," I tell Eric at one point. "As a writer I
feel I ought to have lots of interesting things to day. Instead, I find myself
saying pretty much the same things as everyone else."

"How do you feel?" asks Eric. "I feel like there's a bowl of minnows in
my stomach."

Eric brushes his mustache with the tip of his little finger. "Where is
your father?"

"Pennsylvania."

"Do you love him?"

"Yeah."

"What do you call your father? Do you call him daddy?"

"Not since I was six."

"Say, 'Daddy, I love you.'"

"Daddy, I love you."

"'I've always loved you.'"

"I've always loved you." I'm suddenly ware of my fingers, which are
overlapped and intertwined like those of little girls when they're dealing
with difficult and embarrassing questions of life and love.

"I want you to try something," says Eric. "I want you to suppose and
imagine that your father has died. And you've flown back and you're standing
in front of his coffin --you and he alone. And I want you to accept and
imagine that he's truly dead. And I want you to tell him all the things you
never got a chance to tell him when he was alive."

Despite Eric's instructions I begin to talk to him as if he's still alive. I mention
a mathematical calculation I sometimes make. "you're 65 years
old. I only see you once or twice a year. If you live another six years, then
at best I'll only see you 12 more times." I then go on to say I was sorry that
I wasn't around as he got older and he needed someone to lean on a bit, keep
him company and drive the truck.

Eric gently suggests some dialogue. "'I love you daddy.'"

"I love you, daddy."

"'I wish you weren't dead.'"

"I wish you weren't dead."

"'Please daddy don't be dead.'"

"Please daddy don't be dead." I find to my surprise that a strange quiver
has entered by voice.

"Say it again."

"Please daddy don't be dead."

Eric stops the exercise. "Take a deep breath. Okay, how do you feel?"

"Like crying a little bit."

"There's vulnerability there, isn't there?"

"Yes." Eric offers me his evaluation, which is that I "did very well for
a first exercise." I expressed a lot of emotions. I showed surprising
vulnerability and affectability. As I get better at embracing my emotions and
being vulnerable and expressing everything I feel, he says, my life will
change so dramatically that if someone ran into me on the street without
having seen me in a year they'd be hard pressed to recognize me. These
exercises, he goes on, will "enrich your writing. It will enrich your personal
relationships. It will change your view of the world beyond what I could
possibly describe."

Sitting in my seat after the exercise, I'm disappointed that I didn't
find anything more profound or affecting to say. Despite Eric's kind words, I
feel as if I've disappointed him and the rest of the class (I wanted to dazzle
them). As a result I am astonished when a long time student and part-time
belly dancer by the name of Anne comes up at the end of class to say how much
I moved her and even more surprised when Steven later remarks that my talking
about my father brought tears to his eyes.

It's another Thursday night and Linda is doing her monolog. Linda may be
the most talented and intelligent student in class. She's certainly the most
skittish and high-strung. She has such frizzy curly hair I half suspect she
combs it with a salad fork. She dresses in ways that are striking if not
totally bizarre. She looks as if she bought all her clothes at a flea market,
carried them home in a paper bag and didn't have time to iron them yet.
Sometimes she wears woolly red socks with big red plastic earrings or a long
dress with basketball sneakers. I don't think I've ever seen her in the same
outfit twice. Linda talks the way she dresses, which is to say, arrestingly
and well, if slightly off center. She's always interesting to watch, even when
she's simply standing there chatting about her life. She's honest, smart and
emotional to the point where you worry about her well-being.

On this occasion, Linda finishes her monolog and then looks to Eric for
his evaluation. Instead, Eric just sits there. "I'm waiting," laughs Linda.
Then anxiously. "Aren't you going to say anything?"

Not only does Eric not answer, his manner suggests grave disappointment.
If's as if he's saying, "We worked so hard and I expected so much and this is
what you give me?"

I'm astounded at Eric. I thought Linda was terrific. There were times
when I've disagreed with him in the past but never so dramatically as this.
Linda is getting angry. "Are you going to say anything?"

Eric makes a kind of ambiguous half-shrug.

"Okay," says Linda. "I'll sit down." She goes to the rear of the room,
takes out a Kleenex and blows her nose.

At this point, Eric finally turns in his chair and asks her how she
feels. Linda's voice is shaky and upset. "I don't want to talk about it."

"The reason I did that . . . "

Linda angrily cuts him off. "I don't want to talk, okay?" Then she bursts
into tears.

Eric watches for a second and then calmly turns back to the class and
calls the name of another student to begin the next exercise, whereupon Linda
grabs her purse and runs sobbing down the stairs. At first Eric continues as
if nothing has happened, but then realizing perhaps that he owes us an
explanation, he explains that what he did to Linda was an "experiment." Her
work this evening was the best he'd ever seen. "It had more color, more depth,
more unpredictability than anything I'd ever seen her do before." Linda's
problem was she had no confidence in her own opinion. Eric was merely trying
to teach her to trust her own judgement more and not depend so much on his
approval.

Eric's administrative assistant, Anne, goes downstairs and brings back
Linda, whereupon Eric explains what he was doing and why. Although Linda
accepts it all graciously, I feel somewhat offended, as if this time Eric has
gone too far.

One day in class Eric surprises me by casually mentioning that he has
been feeling depressed lately because his agent just sent him a letter saying
he didn't want to represent him anymore. "So I went out and got myself two new
agents," says Eric. "I didn't play Hal Humble with them. I just went in and
told them how terrific and fantastic I was and they bought it."

Eric's confession, I find, makes me feel embarrassed for him. Despite his
cheery demeanor, it has to be a major humiliation for someone with so much
experience to find he has no better luck with agents than some rawboned
amateur. When I later ask him what happened, he explains that he had just
come back York and found this letter waiting. His agent was as nice about it
as he could possibly be but the fact was he couldn't find work for Eric and he
didn't want to represent him anymore. Television, the agent wrote, was made up
of handsome young men, lovely young ladies and heavies. Eric wasn't right for
a heavy. And as for the other roles, more established actors got them. It had
gotten so bad that the agent didn't even think of Eric for roles anymore. It
wasn't fair to Eric and it wasn't fair to the agent. Besides, wondered the
agent, what did Eric want to be an actor for anyway? He was known and
respected as a coach. People spoke his name with reverence. He did a lot of
good. Why did he still want to act?

"And that really hurt me," says Eric. "I called him up and said, 'Harry,
I'm an actor. Do you just stop being an actor when that's your whole life?'"

This isn't to say, says Eric, that he's in any way ashamed of being an
acting coach. Teaching is a gift from God, the top rung in the ladder of
endowments. Eric loves to teach so much he'll be driving down the street and
he'll see someone mowing the grass and it's all he can do not to stop the car
and show him a better way. "My wife says, 'Maybe they don't want your help.'
But I can't help myself.

"I'm inspired when I teach. It's the biggest part of my life. It's done
so much for me. I feel privileged to do what I do." But the fact remains that
teaching is his second love and not his first. Acting is what he lives for.
Let a good role come along and he'll drop everything in a second --"My bags
are packed. Everyone knows that."

It's another Thursday night and Roselyn is working herself up into the
appropriate mood for her monolog by describing her neighbor who she says
drives her so crazy sometimes she just wants to pull out his mustache one hair
at a time.

"Do you really hate him?" asks Eric.

"Yes."

"I don't believe it."

Roselyn starts to explain but Eric interrupts to ask if he can ask a
personal question."

"How old are you?"

For Roselyn, this is a touchy and traumatic area. "I'm just as old as you
are," she says defiantly.

"How is your marriage?"

"Okay."

"And how is your sex life?"

"Okay." Her voice is very small now.

"Do you ever get frustrated, get the feeling that life is passing you by?
You're 51. You've lived a lot longer than you've got to live." Eric is really
rolling now. "Do you ever look at other men? Do you ever get bored with your
husband? Do you ever get up in the morning and feel terrified? Do you ever
feel that you've sold out?"

Roselyn slowly nods her head yes. "Well, then," thunders Eric, "you've
got to stop fiddlefucking around with your neighbor's mustache! You have
programmed yourself right of your feelings. If I'm going to pay $36 for a seat
in the Broadway theater, I want to see someone's guts hanging out. If you put
your ass on the line, I'm willing to watch. But I'm going to rub your nose in
all the sell-outs and cop-outs and all the treaties you made and all the
compromises. And when you're really willing to believe, come in and we'll do
the piece. Roselyn's face contorts in tears. For once she doesn't have an
answer and for once she doesn't try to explain. Instead she looks like a
mature woman, suffering and full of grief. Eric is strangely touched. "Now you
look more compelling." He turns to the other students. "See her face at the
end of the exercise? Now that was worth paying for."

My next couple of exercises in Eric's class go quite well. In the first
he asks me to conduct an imaginary monolog with someone I'm very angry with.
Just two weeks previously, I'd had a confrontation with some Manhattan Beach
playboy over seating at volleyball court. At the time, I considered it beneath
my dignity even to respond to him but afterward I began to feel bad, as if
I'd let one more arrogant bastard with a Coppertone tan and a Tom Selleck
mustache get the best of me. So when Eric asks me to confront that person in
class, I suddenly find myself accusing him of driving a Porsche and thinking
he owned the sand. "You don't own the sand," I scream. "I didn't like you
before I met you and now that I've met you I like you even less."

It felt as if I were falling off a cliff. I was so angry I was almost hysterical.
It not only frightened me, I could see some of the other students wincing
in their chairs. Eric, of course, was very pleased and some of the other
students later told me they were stunned by my "power."

The following week for my exercise Eric tells me to be totally and
completely silly. "Do you want a demonstration?" he asks. "No," I tell him
confidently. "Okay," he says, but with rising inflection, as if to say, it's
your funeral.

I've never had any trouble being silly. I pull my hair, I jump up and
down like a hyperventilating ape. I scream like a banshee. I grab my crotch
and jump across the room like a 200 pound toad. I remember hopping with my
finger in my ear and one foot in the air when Eric calls a halt, telling me
how surprised and pleased he is and explaining that when he first gave me the
exercise he thought it would be like "pulling teeth."

At this point, I'm beginning to be very pleased with myself. Three
exercises in three weeks and each one better than the one before.

For the fourth week, Eric asks me to try "scary feedback," by which he
means go around the room and ask the other students questions which will
elicit answers I might not really care to hear.

I start out with Jennifer. Her hair style gives her a forties's look. She
always sits in the same seat and brews hot tea in a thermos bottle during
class.

"Do you find me physically attractive?" I ask.

"No."

"How come?"

"You're overweight."

Although I've never been attracted to Jennifer, I find her answer leaves
my angry and hurt. Furthermore, I think she's unfair. For her to call me fat, I
feel, is like the stove calling the pot black.

Next I try Robert, a with-it sort of guy with an attractive non-nonsense
style. "How would you rate me on a scale of one to ten," I ask, "with one
being a non-entity and ten being Mr. Charisma?"

Robert thinks about this for a second. "About a four," he tells me.

Feeling disappointed but not knowing what else to ask him I move on to
Denise. Unlike most of the students in the class, Denise is actually a working
actress. Personally she is a big woman with a booming voice and a friendly but
outspoken style. "If you had any advice for me," I say, "what would it be?"

Well, she answers, it irks her that a big broad-chested guy like me has
such a small squeaky voice.

A small squeaky voice??? What the hell is she talking about?

Finally, I stop at Linda's chair. Good old Linda with the frizzy hair
piled high on her head and shoes that look like some of leather french rolls.

"What," I ask her, "do you think of my personality?"

Linda, as it turns out, doesn't think much of it it at all. She holds her
thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart to show how much personality I
have. Furthermore, she adds, when I sit in my chair watching other people do
their exercises, my manner is "condescending."

Eric stops the exercise at this point to ask me if I have learned
anything.

"Yes," I say. The truth is I'm stunned. "I was surprised by how negative
the comments were. I thought people had a higher opinion of me."

"What hurt you the most?"

"Linda's comment that I had no personality."

"I thought so."

I've always liked Linda. I liked her from the first time I met her. And it hurts
to hear her tell me I have no personality and my manner is condescending.
AlthoughEric assures me that he for one doesn't agree with Linda. But despite his
reassurances, that night when I leave class I'm still angry and hurt.
"Actually, I ought to be glad," I tell myself bitterly. "I always wanted to get
to the point where I didn't care what other people thought of me. And now
after this evening's class that's exactly how I feel--they can all go to hell
and take their scary feedback with them."

Eric must have realized that the exercise hurt me for the following week
he asks me to talk about it some more.

I'm fine, I tell him. I'm not even mad anymore. It was my own fault for
getting delusions of grandeur. "I'd done so well the first three weeks and
people had said they were real impressed and how much they liked my work that
I was beginning to think, well maybe I was this natural actor with vast
reservoirs of emotion and power.

"You do have vast reservoirs of emotion and power," says Eric. "And so
does everybody else." The problem is they are so protected and insulated it's
not easy to get at them. In any case, Eric wasn't worried. "It took you 30
years to build up your defenses. You can't expect to break them down
overnight."

It's another Thursday night and Eric is having a new student named Jim do an
anti-social exercise. Jim is a nice looking blond fellow with a quiet voice
and a deferential manner. The idea of being anti-social frankly leaves him
petrified.

"Would you like some help?" asks Eric.

"Yes," says Jim, nervously.

"Okay, I'll give you an example." Eric leans forward in his chair and
looks down the row at Linda.

"Linda," he tells her derisively, "if your nose was filled with nickels,
you'd never have to work again. Where did you get the idea you can act?
The only acting job you'll ever get is the bride of Frankenstein."

The class laughs. Linda rolls her eyes toward the ceiling, and
Eric turns back to Jim.

"See," he says, "there's nothing to it."