Dating : 1987

This is not my first rumination on Bobby Chambers. I cannot imagine anyone of a certain age who does not remember Robert Chambers, especially anyone who lives in New York City, but just in case: in the mid-eighties some well-heeled young people from the Eastside went clubbing. One young woman, actually a girl, as she was only seventeen, named Jennifer Levin hooked up with a waspy looking boy of nineteen named Robert Chambers. As it turned out, Robert Chambers was of lesser means, but he had practiced the part and optimized his Kennedy-esque appearance scrupulously and at length. These two kids drank too much at a trendy bar and went into Central Park for illicit sex. Jennifer Levin was found under a tree near a running path in the park the next morning strangled with her own bra; Robert Chambers ultimately confessed to “accidentally” killing her during rough sex. While he was out on bail, he was caught on tape in a bedroom with several other waspy teenage girls, doing some truly tasteless things to some Barbie dolls, clearly demonstrating that he just didn’t get it; thus, he found himself at the tender mercies of the State of New York for many years to come.

At roughly the same time I was in my mid-twenties: a gal I knew in passing had referred me to Michael Moriarty’s acting workshop, The Potter’s Field Players. I admit to not knowing at the time what a Potter’s Field was, but I did know that Michael Moriarty was a “movie star” of sorts; in fact, he was a compelling actor who’d appeared in some excellent movies and was a man my mother thought positively “dreamy.”

In fairness to Michael, I need to say that it was not merely the fact that my mother — whom I was desperate to please and impress as a young woman as though my survival depended on it, or so it seemed in my aching heart — it wasn’t only my mother’s giddiness over my working with him that made Michael’s approval so imperative to me.

Michael Moriarty was an actor of the first order. In 1973 he’d won an Emmy for playing the brother, Tom, opposite Katherine Hepburn in The Glass Menagerie. As I’ve learned over the many years here, the New York City theatrical community is as small and nepotistic as any coffee clutch in any small town anywhere in Texas; the only real difference is that people dress better and throw much better parties. Everybody knows everybody, often far too well. Michael’s co-star in that production of The Glass Menagerie had been Sam Waterston who would replace him as the prosecutor in Law and Order in the mid-nineties. Sam’s run would last for years without all the drama that any circumstance involving Michael necessarily entailed. And, of course, Michael had won another Emmy portraying a scary-believable Nazi SS Officer in another one of those groundbreaking TV miniseries, Holocaust, in 1978. That was also the first time we all saw Meryl Streep doing that thing she does: she, too, won an Emmy that year, and the rest is history. That is all by way of saying that my admiration, my adoration, for Michael was not wildly misplaced. Not purely based on my own compulsion to adore just anyone. He’d earned his props.

When I first met Michael, I was a mess; an adorable, sweetly coiffed, ambulatory disaster. At least that is what it felt like to me. Mike was tall and very Aryan, which accounts, in large part, for his turn as a Nazi. But it required something more to play the perfectly effective Nazi: Michael had that particular distant, aloof self-absorption that, were I the betting sort, I would wager landed him the part. Michael took my right hand in both his hands and stared so deep down into my eyes that he appeared to burrow into my thoughts. Inappropriately intimate but impossible to escape. At least, that is how it seemed to me. When I looked into his green eyes, it was not so much warmth I saw, as much as I experienced his processing me. He would figure out which role to cast me in, then perceive me through the lens of that role, no matter what. This was a familiar and uncomfortable place for me. I remember his holding onto my hand and gazing into my eyes for entirely too long, and I recall defying the impulse to pull away from him, at the time, criticizing myself for feeling that way. After all, this was the man my mother swooned over in Bang the Drum Slowly. If I wasn’t grateful for his attention, it must have been yet another of my shortcomings that I couldn’t be just tickled that Michael Moriarty had taken an apparent interest in me.

Why wouldn’t he, though? I was an actress and a model. I wore my black leggings and my pastel tunics. I had a stylist who’d shown me how to look like a professional who did this every day and in my sleep. I never came to class without my make-up on. Imagine that, I dare you. I would wear my shoulder length hair in a Laura Petrie flip with a headband or a ribbon in it. I was self-conscious and deferential to a fault. In hindsight, if I were guessing, I would guess that I fit nicely into Michael’s “Ophelia” box. I came to call it that only in the rearview because it never would have occurred to me to be that cynical about anything at the time; I could put a “cheery” self-deprecating spin on pretty much any disrespectful or rude thing anybody did back then as long as they told me it was for my own good. But I’ve gotten over that. And since being a part of Michael Moriarty’s little posse was one of the few things I’d done that actually thrilled my mother, I simply set aside my own misgivings about the value of The Potter’s Field Players in my own life, let alone my professional prospects. Whether I liked being there, or not, was irrelevant. I was in the room with Michael Moriarty.

The way the workshop was set up, students wrote their own material: we generally sat at the front of the class on a tall stool — or stood — while Mike sat in the back on a stool watching us over the heads of the rest of the class. I watched for a long time before I started getting up to do some very short pieces I’d written about not very much. Actually, I’d written much more substantial stuff, I just didn’t share it.

Mike wasn’t much of a teacher; he regaled the class with convoluted critical diatribes that could go on seemingly endlessly, which was an interesting counterpoint to the occasions when he would come to class with something he’d written. He used a lot of words but Michael’s twists and turns and intellectual pirouettes fell into absolute order, driving to definitive peaks and valleys and resolutions. All very Henry James. Really, exquisite. The trouble was that, while he could channel all that out onto the page in his own work, he could not speak with any particularly useful clarity about anybody else’s work. I got the sense, as time went on, that it was supposed to be enough for us that we were fortunate enough to be there, enough that Michael had anything at all to do with us.

But once in a while — once in a big blue moon — he’d nail something. He’d say something that actually had to do more with the student than with the amorphous narrative unfolding in his own mind. One night he said to me, “You are so lovely and so afraid of getting caught in the light.” Boy, did he stumble into something there. I blushed. I was that embarrassed that he’d said something real that I could not evade. My face was hot and, while I appeared absolutely still and looked directly into his eyes, I was, in fact, flailing madly for a place to hide. Perhaps, in time that emboldened me to risk something, or maybe it just pissed me off, though I would have been constitutionally incapable of articulating it as such at the time.

Intuitively, I never trusted Michael’s motives. I always felt as though he were gathering intelligence on me for future use; something to use against me. And I resented his putting me on the spot. I don’t remember exactly when, it was so long ago, but sometime within the next few weeks I sat on the stool in the front of the room, perfectly coiffed and motionless, in my peach smock and my black leggings with my hands neatly folded on my lap. I held for everyone’s undivided attention. I held for Michael’s undivided attention. Then I began a piece I’d written called, Bobby Chambers… Bobby Chambers….

It was framed as an internal meditation I’d had about an imaginary guy in another class who looked much like Robert Chambers. By this time Robert Chambers had been sentenced to prison for killing Jennifer Levin, so we pretty much knew how the story ended, at least for the time being. My monologue contemplated whether this doppelganger realized how much he looked like Chambers; whether he liked it; whether he worked it to his advantage. Did he hang out in bars hoping to fulfill rich beautiful women’s dark fantasies? Was Jennifer Levin his first choice? Or was she the one he settled on that night, because there were no older women available? Women who had their own money, or access to someone else’s money, with whom he could have played rough with to much greater gain? Obviously, he’d done this before; it seemed doubtful that he’d routinely chosen such young partners as very young women are exponentially more troublesome: was she what he wanted that night? Or was she what he settled for that night? Did my Bobby Chambers’ proxy like Central Park at night? I thought it was intended to open it up to conversation — to question — a sort of performance piece, exploring exactly that: do we all have it in us? More specifically, more frankly, do I have it in me? Can I set in motion a series of events that actually culminates in something that no one had in mind when the evening began? Or did he have that in mind? The questions are more interesting than the answers most of the time. At some point the answers do become more interesting than the questions, though, and I was wondering openly about when that happened? Where was the point of no return?

What I didn’t anticipate was that the class would find it so damned funny. I didn’t think of myself as funny, let alone hysterical. I didn’t know this was comic. I was asking those questions in earnest, but the straighter I played it the harder my fellow thespians laughed. The harder they laughed, the straighter I played it. I recited the words I had written as the class was falling out of their seats in a laugh riot.

When I stopped speaking, Michael sat on his perch in the back of the room smiling in my direction in that way that’s not really smiling. For a long time. Then, when he finally did say something, it was totally inscrutable to me.

“The things you say simply should not come out of someone who looks the way you look,” he said. I was oddly crushed. I felt like I had failed Michael personally, like I’d dishonored the Ophelia box.

When I’d first arrived in this rehearsal space — this performance space — I had so earnestly, so naively, so humbly sought direction. Legitimate guidance: a mentor. Real discourse about what drives these characters, discourse about what drives me and about how I develop these ideas. That is what I thought I wanted, anyway. I mean, this was Michael Moriarty; did he seriously not have anything more constructive to say? But he didn’t. He actually seemed angry with me, I speculate for not playing the part in which he’d cast me. Or for being a young woman who looked the way I apparently did to him while I addressed those darker urges. The ones he clearly had his own issues with and that showed up in strange, sexually repressed brothers and dedicated Nazis. The urge to go into the woods in the dark with a stranger. The urge to fuck to the death. He flatly abandoned me and all my complexities right there.

That’s kind of how that ended. Nothing more or less: not very much. Disappointingly unimpressive. Decidedly nothing special and kind of limp. The whole “Potter’s Field Players” sideshow just faded away as soon as Michael got cast as ADA Ben Stone in Law and Order. You think when you’re out there looking at other people’s lives, other beautiful people’s lives, other legendary people, other gifted people, other myths and icons, and your life is so seemingly banal, you think that if you can be around those people that maybe they will shine the light on you. As it turns out, a whole lot of brilliant actors are brilliant specifically because they are functionally dysfunctional human beings.