When I Stop Talking You Read Online Free PDF Page B

going to do?"
    "I don't know, but whatever I do, I will do it well, the way you taught me to do everything."
    It might sound like a sad scene, in which a father tries to pass a tradition on to his son and his son turns away, but it was not like that at all. It was joyful. I respected and loved my father, but I did not want to live his life-and he understood that, and let me go, and, in a sense, in going my own way, I was actually following his example, which was to find my own way, freestyle, packaging and selling my own Star of Ardaban, checking the number in the right pocket against the number in the left.
    I decided I should go back to school, but I was not sure what kind of school. I looked over the list of colleges covered by the GI Bill. Cornell, Haverford, Colgate. I could not picture myself carrying a philosophy text across some leafy campus. I had trained in the South, stood up to bullies, had breakfast with a member of the Klan, sold suits in the tundra-I was just not ready for that kind of college. I decided to audition for the Neighborhood Playhouse School instead. This was one of the acting schools that taught the Method pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavsky, wherein you don't pretend to be a character so much as become that character. In the age of Marlon Brando, everyone wanted to slouch his shoulders and mumble, "Not my night? Oh, Charlie. I could've taken that bum with one hand tied behind my back." I chose the Playhouse because, yes, I liked acting, I loved attention and being on stage, but also because I figured the Playhouse was an ideal spot to meet girls-all those hopefuls fresh from the suburbs and farms of America with dreams of making it on Broadway.
    The school was on West Fifty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was run by Sandy Meisner, the legendary acting teacher. I went up a flight of stairs, gave my name, and just like that was alone on stage for a tryout, with light pouring down, being studied by Mr. Meisner and his assistant Sydney Pollack, who would later become a great friend of mine. I read some lines, acted some scenes, threw my arms around and shouted, a street kid from the Bronx spewing dialogue from one of those great midcentury plays about the nobility of suffering.
    Mr. Meisner stopped me in the middle of my monologue.
    "What the hell are you doing?" he asked.
    "What do you mean? I'm auditioning."
    "Yeah, but you're no actor."
    I just stared at him.
    "Okay," he said, "walk across the stage."
    I walked across the stage.
    "I like how you walk," he said. "You walk like John Wayne. But you're still no actor."
    "Yeah," I said, "but maybe I will be."
    He whispered back and forth with Sydney Pollack, then said, "Okay, you're a big, good-looking kid. Maybe you're right. Maybe you will be. You're in."
    I had moved out of the Bronx by then, and was living with two hookers above P. J. Clarke's on Third Avenue. I had met them one night when everyone was drinking and the air was filled with smoke. I followed them home. I started having an affair with one of them, and they moved me in. I was in class most of the time anyway. The school was a powerhouse, packed with talent. James Caan, Dabney Coleman, Brenda Vaccaro, Elizabeth Ashley-they were all at the school around this time. I remember doing an improvisation with James Caan, the two of us getting so mixed up between the real and the make believe that we came to blows on stage. It ended with me sitting on him, shouting, "I'll kill you, I'll kill you!"
    I was not going to be a movie star, that much was clear. I did not have the passion for it, or the talent. "You're no actor." Well, Mr. Meisner was right. In my life, I have only been comfortable playing one role: Jerry Weintraub. Still, I had not made the wrong decision. I learned things at the Playhouse School that have been invaluable. About actors and artists for one, what drives them, what terrifies them (this is often the same as what drives them), what they need. (Managing talent is my