Before They Were Kings: Part Six

VANITY FAIR 2004: Hoffman, Hackman and Duvall deal with rejection>>>

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Hoffman liked to provoke. He made a behavioral laboratory out of his job in Macy’s toy department, where Hackman would sometimes visit. Hoffman remembers, “We had a thing where we would outdare each other to see who was going to be more outlandish.” One day Hackman brought in his 18-month-old son, Christopher, and the two friends decided to test the Christmas crowd shopping in a glazed-eyed trance. Hackman put Christopher on the counter, and Hackman hawked him as a walking, talking doll, with real hair, $16.95. A woman said, “I’ll take it,” then touched real flesh and shrieked.

Hoffman, demonstrating hockey games, has his eye on Elaine, a sexy salesgirl selling tape recorders. He hatched a plan to impress her. While customers watched in shock, a badly dressed Hackman came on to her as a brain-damaged creep. The pint-sized Hoffman interceded, pushing Hackman out of the way and hustling Elaine down the escalator. Wearing a dopey grin, elbowing through the Christmas crowds like a big bear, Hackman followed them into the cafeteria, grunting, “UH, UH, UH.” Everyone stopped eating and watched as Hoffman shoved Hackman and yelled, “get your ass outta here big fella, and stop bothering this girl.” Saying, “Ok, Ok, take it easy,” and followed by Hoffman, Hackman backed into the men’s room, where they pounded on the walls and yelled and splashed water on themselves, then emerged disheveled, with Hackman holding his eye and Hoffman shouting, “Now just get out of here.” Next, says Hoffman, “Gene did the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” Groaning, he staggered up the down escalator, getting nowhere. Elaine began to cry, screaming at Hoffman, “How could you do that? That man is sick!” Taking pity, Hackman came back and tried to explain, but Elaine ran off sobbing. Hoffman says, “You have to understand we were frustrated actors out of work, and there we had an audience. This was a solid one-acter. It held.”

Stocking their hoard of behaviors was one thing, but the chance to use them on stage was quite another. “No one starts at the top in the theater, and the bottom is a very ugly place,” says Hackman. Describing the ritual of auditioning for roles, he says, “You’d be on a bare stage reading with the stage manager, and there’d be two or three fuckers sitting in the 15th row of a dark theater, and you couldn’t see them. And then there would be this voice – ‘thank you very much’ – and you’d just leave. Or they’d say, ‘Uh, could you read the part of Jim in the third act,’ and I’d say, ‘OK,’ and you’d have to cold read for them. Or they’d say, ‘Uh, could you hang out for half an hour. We’d like to put you with someone else.’ And you’d go through this process – and already you’re thinking, since they didn’t send me away right off, maybe, just maybe… And in the end they would say, ‘Uh, very nice, really very nice… well…um… we’ll let you know.’ And you’d never here anything.”

Sometimes there were open calls, where no appointment was needed and hopefuls showed up by the hundreds. “It was madness, says Hackman. “A cattle call, they called it. A lot of people would get physical about where they were in line, and who had to go to work, so let me in front of you so I can get the hell out.” Gene Kelly once held an open call for a musical he directed. After Hackman stood in line and sang for a part, Kelly came to the edge of the stage and told him, “Nice try. Musicals are hard.”

Hoffman says, “The actor who go the part was always a piece of shit.” Those were the ones who immediately gave a full-out performance, which never became deeper and richer. Duvall called them salesmen. “The producers and directors,” says Hoffman, “are scared, see?” They want to see what you’re going to be opening night.” In radical contrast, the trio’s acting philosophy dictated giving very little at first – suppressing the acting of the character, waiting for the portrayal to arrive internally, instinctively. In addition, their lack of leading man looks made them hard to categorize. “I was trouble,” says Hoffman. His size and physiognomy made him seem un-castable. Duvall once called him Barbara Streisand in drag. Friends from that era, meeting the movie-star Hoffman, have said, “You were the last one I expected to make it.”

The three reacted differently to rejections. For Hackman “it was more psychological warfare, because I wasn’t going to let those fuckers get me down. I insisted with myself that I would continue to do whatever it took to get a job. It was like me against them, and in some way, unfortunately, I still feel that way. But I think that if you’re really interested in acting there is a part of you that relishes the struggle. It’s a narcotic in the way that you are trained to do this work and nobody will let you do it, so you’re a little bit nuts. You lie to people, you cheat, you do whatever it takes to get an audition, get a job.” He and Duvall occasionally made rounds together, and when agents refused to see them they slipped their photographs and meager resumes under the office doors. “We both knew we would never get a job,” says Hackman. “I gave a casting person a resume that was bullshit. I had no resume. He looked at it and said, ‘I see you played in such and such two years ago. That’s interesting. I was in that play and I don’t remember you.’”

To Hoffman, rejections meant that he had no talent. When he was told “You’re not right for the part,” he would sometimes yell, “You’re right!” and flee. When a mumbling stage manager was flat in his line readings, Hoffman was known to fling the script pages into the air and walk out. What particularly enraged him were casting directors who chose to read the lines looking down at the script instead of watching him. When Hoffman returned home after two, three, four failed auditions, he sometimes stalked around the apartment chanting, “I’m a great fucking actor. I’m a great fucking actor and nobody knows it!”

Despite the praise he received from teachers and the status he held in his circle, Duvall suffered from self doubts. After one of his first off-off Broadway performances, in George Bernard Shaw’s MRS WARRENS PROFESSION, he received a lethal review in the NEW YORK POST. The paper reported that the revolting romantic lead was “made even less palatable by Robert Duvall, whose spine tends toward a figure S, whose diction is flannel coated, and whose simpering expressions are moronic.” Reading it on a bus, he felt so sick that he had to get off. Duvall fled home to his parents in Virginia for three months, returning to the wars only because Ulu Grosbard kept reassuring him. Duvall says, “Thank goodness I had a good friend like Ulu, who still had, you know, faith, in what maybe I could do.”

Looking back, Duvall can say, “Each day is different. There’s a general frustration, but you’ve got to weather that and go on. You gather with guys like Dusty. We used to go to Cromwell’s drugstore on Rockefeller Plaza, make lots of jokes – gets you through the day. Downey’s steak house at night. That fills the day with a certain camaraderie, which is good.” One night Hoffman told Duvall, “We’ve got to talk about something besides women and acting.”

Television roles were rarely discussed. Tennessee Williams and Chekhov and Ibsen were infinitesimally dissected. Brando stories were swapped. Those sidewalk colloquies among the three sometimes devolved into battles over whose acting teacher and technique was right. The trio hewed to different versions of Stanislavski’s holy writ, which required reliving emotions and re-experiencing the five senses onstage. Hoffman describes Duvall exploding, “Bullshit! What do you man, you sit there for an hour trying to feel hot or feel cold!” Hoffman explains, “We were almost like religious fanatics. Our craft was the most important part of us.”