Before They Were Kings: Part Two

Before They Were Kings: Part Two

Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, in 1930. His puritanical father worked on newspaper presses and restlessly moved the family to four states before settling in the backwater, corn belt town of Danville, Illinois. Gene dreaded hearing his mother say “Wait til Dad gets home.” He explains, “He always went too far. Laid it on pretty heavy.” Like Hoffman, Hackman went to a series of schools, but unlike his friend, he turned inward. In high school he never dated or went to a dance. At home in the basement, next to the coal bin, he built a cardboard house – “a place to hide. My own spot.”

His other sanctuary was the movie theater, where Jimmy Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Edward G Robinson were his favorites. Hackman says, “I loved the idea that somebody could convince me that they were a sea captain without being phony. I’d grown up shy – not unusual for actors. They want to show they’re more than that – people of import, substance. I think because I was shy I felt insecure, and acting seemed like a way of maybe getting around that. Getting to be somebody.” When Gene was 13, his father abandoned the family for years with just a wave of the hand to his son playing in the street. “It was a real adios,” says Hackman. “It was so precise. Maybe that’s why I became an actor. I doubt I would have become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child – if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”

His Mother moved in with his grandmother, who considered him a weak character. At 16, he served a night in jail for stealing candy and soda, and, on an impulse permanently escaped his life. He lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines, serving four and a half years in China, Japan and Hawaii. He rose to corporal but was busted for fighting. He also got a taste of show business as an announcer on Armed Forces Radio. After a serious motorcycle accident he was mustered out, and in 1951 he settled in New York, living at the YMCA and hoping to become an actor. In order t receive about $150 a month from the G.I. Bill as a wounded veteran; he had to go to school. The G.I. Bill refused to pay for acting classes; regulation required schooling that would lead to a job. However, the bill qualified “painter” as a profession and paid Hackman’s tuition at the Art Student’s league – drawing had always been a hobby – and then at the nearby school of radio technique.

In 1953, still afraid to commit totally to acting, Hackman tried television production, in Florida, and then back to Danville. He returned to New York in 1955. The next year he married his girlfriend, a bank secretary named Faye Maltese, and together they headed for California and the Pasadena Playhouse.

His quick dismissal from the playhouse only served to galvanize his determination. Thinking, I’ll show them, he boarded a bus with Faye back to New York. He managed to get an unpaid internship in summer stock at a theater in Bellport, Long Island, building sets, scavenging for props, setting up lights. In a two-week production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” there happened to be one uncast role, Marco, a strong, silent Italian workman. The director, Ulu Grosbard, from the Yale School of Drama, filled it with Hackman, whom he came to know as “A complex guy; Very intelligent; a generosity of spirit; socially charming; a lot going on in him; a certain sense of being tormented with past ghosts and things. That’s part of what he brings to his work.” Grosbard was the first theater person to encourage Hackman. Backstage after one performance he told him, “Gene, you have got to keep at it.” Hackman, his voice trailing off in recollected awe, exclaims, “He actually said that, and, God it was just like…”

Robert Duvall was the lead in that “A View from the Bridge, playing, at 26, Eddie Carbone, a sullen Sicilian longshoreman in his 40’s from Red Hook, Brooklyn, with accent to match…


(To be continued)


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