Brushes with Fame
By Michael Dare

I admit it, I want to be famous, though my desire for fame has less to do with any glorified ego trip than with a simple desire to never have to explain myself again to anyone new. If you’re famous, when you meet new people, they know who you are. Marlon Brando never has to say "Hi, I’m Marlon Brando" because everybody he meets already knows who he is. When normal people meet each other, they have to explain who they are, or they need others to introduce them. Bill Gates doesn’t need to casually drop hints about his employment into conversations with people he’s just meeting because, for the rest of his life, pretty much everyone Bill Gates meets is going to know that he’s Bill Fucking Gates.

One of the perils of fame is the loss of people ever taking you at face value again. You never have to explain yourself. No more "Hi, I’m Brad Pitt, I’m an actor." Of course you’re an actor. You’re Brad Pitt, for Christ sake. That’s where I want to be, not because my ego needs stroking, but because I want people to know who I am without having to explain. I’ve gone through too much. It’s just too fucking complicated. I never want to have to tell the story again.

When people meet each other for the first time, there’s usually an equal sense of give and take. But as soon as you’re famous, everyone wants something from you, if only to bask in your presence. Everyone you meet after you’re famous already knows who you are, so unless they’re famous too, you’re at a disadvantage because you don’t know who they are. All you know is they want something from you so you can’t necessarily trust them.

But I’m not famous so I have to keep explaining myself when I meet new people, which is really a bitch because I can’t explain me. You’re welcome to try, but I can’t. I have no idea how someone like me could have come to be.

I’ve known a lot of famous people before they were famous, and once you’ve seen someone right next to you, like a fellow student in high school, suddenly get plucked from the flock of obscurity into world wide fame, you can't help thinking that you're next in line. When I see Star Wars or Saturday Night Live or Jaws, I don’t see that big movie star up there, I see the real person that I used to know before they were famous. Now, when we see each other, I’m one of those special people who knew them before they were famous, the real them, not the icons. It's a special relationship for them because there aren’t many of us left

My brushes with fame started with Richard Dreyfuss, a fellow student at Beverly Hills High School. Saw him do Puck. We became friends. He was a senior, the king of the drama department, already getting small parts in Shaw plays at the Mark Taper Forum where he invited me backstage. I followed in his footsteps in school, starring in some school plays, directing others, and getting voted in as President of Thespians. Meanwhile Richard got cast as the lead in Line, a short play by Israel Horowitz produced at the New Theater for Now by Gordon Davidson.

Sure, he'd already played a small role in The Graduate, but Line is why Richard Dreyfuss is a star. He was the lead and he was phenomenal. I can't imagine any Hollywood producer seeing him in it and not wanting to immediately cast him as the star of their next film. Thirty years later, I remember it like yesterday.

The entire play is just five people waiting in line for God knows what. Like Waiting for Godot, it's an existential piece, taking place outside of time and space, a meditation on mankind's the competitive drive to be first.

A blank stage, a small white line, a woman waiting. The whole set.  Richard enters, walks around her, and finally says the first line of the play, something like "Boy, I didn't think anyone else would be here before me." It turns into a giant monologue, with Richard ranting and raving about how important it is for him to be first in line and how he had gone out of his way to get here REALLY early. Then someone else enters and Richard panics and gets in line behind the women, realizing that second is better than third. The new guy gets in line behind him. Eventually, two more enter and get right in line.

They talk about everything but what the hell it is they're in line for. There are arguments and brawls, and in the course of the play everyone gets to the front of the line at least once. Finally, out of frustration, Richard gets down on his hands and knees to look at the line. He sees it's a piece of white tape. He peels it off the floor and eats it.

Everyone panics. What are they going to do? Where will they stand? Richard gets sick and vomits up the line. Someone grabs it, puts it down on the floor and stands behind - beaming - the first in line.

Then Richard gets sick and vomits up another line. Someone grabs it and heads to another place on stage, puts it down on the floor and stands behind - beaming - the first in line.

Richard vomits up two more lines which are grabbed by the other two characters, leaving Richard in the middle, the only one not first in line, the only one not beaming. Then he gets sick one more time, vomiting up another line for himself. He looks around, smiles, looks at the audience, holds out the line at arm length, drops it, then walks off stage. Blackout.

I kept running into him over the years as he got more and more famous, and at one point I was tempted to pitch him something. He very intensely told me not to, that absolutely everybody in his life was pitching something at him, that if I wanted to be a friend, like in the old days, just hanging out, he would have to know that I didn’t want anything, otherwise I’d just be another asshole trying to get him to look at their project. It was quite a speech, one punctuated by a joint and a drink, and I took him at his word and didn’t try to pitch anything.

As a result, he's still famous and I'm not, despite starring as Charlie Brown in the Beverly Hills High School production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, directed by Michael Tolkin, who went on to write The Player and numerous incredible books.

Next there was this very funny, skinny little girl at my high school named Laraine, a sophomore when I was a senior, whom I directed in a school play. She was a mime intent on studying with Marcel Marceau, and she seemed to have a crush on me, which was cool but confusing. She voted for me in Thespians and hung out with me after school. We did homework together, alone in the house, but I was a virgin and didn’t have any idea what to do with her.

It was getting close to the end of the year, so a friend, Larry, asked me who I was taking to the prom. I told him I’d probably take Laraine.

Instead, a junior named Shelly saw me do a monologue from Boys in the Band, decided that she didn't want me to be gay, and promptly fucked me. Of course I didn’t do Boys in the Band because I was gay but because I wanted to stretch as an actor, show how liberal I was, but I didn’t bring that up to Shelly, who added quite a spark to my senior year at Beverly.

So I asked her to the prom, which was only proper. It would have been downright rude not to go with the girl who fucked me. But one day during lunch, Larry came up to me and said "Hey, I talked to Laraine and she said she’d go to the prom with you."

"What?" I gasped in horror. "I’m not going to ask Laraine, I’m going with Shelly."

Oh shit. I didn’t know how to deal with this. Laraine and I were in a play together. There was no avoiding her. For the next week, during rehearsals, I saw her smiling at me, giddy, waiting for me to pop the question. Finally, on the night of the final performance of the play, she couldn’t stand it any longer and she cornered me in the green room. "Who are you taking to the prom?" she asked.

I tried to be cool. "Shelly" I said, "Why?"

Laraine’s heart was broken. She started crying and ran from the room, not speaking to me again for the rest of the entire semester. I graduated and didn’t see her at all until ten years later at a party after she had just spent a decade in New York as one of the stars of Saturday Night Live. She was a media goddess. Laraine entered the room and everyone turned. She was definitely the biggest star in the room. She looked around until she finally saw me standing at the opposite end. She marched across the room till she was standing right in front of me, stared me down for five seconds, then finally said "You blew it, buddy," then turned and walked back across the room without another word. Perfect revenge.

Love you Laraine.

1969 was the worst year in American history to be an 18-year-old male graduating from high school. The war in Vietnam was raging, the draft at an all time high, and every day hundreds of soldiers were being brought home in body bags. The only hope for kids like me was a college deferment, even though colleges at that time were their own form of battle ground.

The problem was I wanted to be an actor, and college was not the way to go, Lee Strasberg was. If you were serious about acting, you had to join the ranks of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe and Al Pacino and study at Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio in the Village in New York. Fat chance for any aspiring actor, so I was flabbergasted to hear during my senior year that Lee Strasberg was having auditions for the Actors Studio right here in L.A. I was determined to get in.

I was a straight looking kid just graduating from Beverly Hills High School. How would I be able convince Lee Strasberg that I was good enough to study with him? And if I skipped college to go to New York to study with Lee Strasberg, my college draft deferment would go bye-bye. Not a nice prospect in 1969, the year in which more civilians were drafted than at any other time in US History, with a sizable percentage of them coming home in body bags. I did NOT want to go to Vietnam, but that didn’t stop me from auditioning.

I chose a character who was as far from me as possible, a street junkie named Dopey in a play by Lanford Wilson called Balm in Gilead. Wilson wasn’t famous yet. I found the play at Samuel French, and it was as obscure as you could get. I studied the New York accent relentlessly, buying books on how to do them, knowing I’d have to get it right if I wasn’t to be laughed off stage.

At the theater, they called my name and I stumbled onto stage in character, pretending to be high on heroin. The play takes place on a street corner in New York. Dopey is a local sleaze bucket who often steps out of the play and talks to the audience. I did a rambling monologue complaining about the cockroaches in my apartment and the impending bomb and how the roaches would still be around, which really griped my ass. I gave it my all, talking right to them, definitely getting their attention, then left the stage in a huff, just the way it was written.

The bad news. I didn’t get in. The good news. I didn’t get drafted either because I 1) didn’t register and 2) went to college.

The LACC drama department was a far cry from Lee Strasberg, and there was only one other guy in my acting class who seemed to notice it. His name was Mark Hamill. We became friends because we were mutually convinced that everyone else in the school was full of shit, especially the teachers. He was better at hiding his disgust than me. I kept cracking up the class and making fun of their whole philosophy of acting, which made absolutely no sense to me. How could they have a written final in an acting class? The worst actors in the world, many of whom were miraculously in our class, could get a good grade on a written exam, whereas Mark and I, who could blow away the whole class on stage, could easily fail a written exam. Which I proved by failing the class so dramatically that I was asked to leave the department.

"What are you going to do now?" asked Mark.

"Go to New York to be an actor," I answered.

Mark Hamill stayed behind to audition for George Lucas. Wise move. I ran into him years later and told him that if anyone had pointed to him back at LACC and told me that some day my son would be putting together a jigsaw puzzle of his face, I would have said "Naaah."

I convinced my high school chum Larry to drive to New York to become an actor with me. His brother was in Philadelphia, which was as far east as he had ever been. We took the southern route, bypassing Denver, which was the farthest east I had ever been. We took three days, arriving in Manhattan in the spring of 1970, checking into the Chelsea Hotel, which scared the shit out of Larry, who immediately jumped in his car and drove all the way back to L.A., leaving me alone in New York. It was 30 years ago this very week. I celebrated the first Earth Day in Central Park.

I checked the papers, filed at a temp agency, and immediately got hired by the security services department, proxy section, of First National City Bank, giving me enough to check into a boarding house at 39th and Park, the Grosvenor Club, sixty a week, sharing a room with two others, two meals a day, one pay phone in the hall.

Once I was ship shape, I headed to the Village towards Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, approached the front desk and said, "Hi, I’m Michael Dare, I want to study with Lee Strasberg."

The woman behind the desk stared at me. "Don’t I know you from somewhere?"

I told her I had auditioned in L.A. about a year ago but didn’t get in.

She stared at me harder. "Did you do a piece about cockroaches?"

"Yeah," I told her, "It was from Balm in Gilead by Lanford Wilson."

"You’re not from New York?"

"No, I was doing an accent."

Her eyebrows went up. "That was a monologue?"

"Yeah."

"We thought you were just someone who had stumbled in from the street. As soon as you left the stage, we all turned to each other and said ‘Who let HIM in?’"

Unbelievable. I hadn’t come out and introduced myself in my normal voice, saying "Hello, I’m Michael Dare, and now I’d like to do a monologue from Balm in Gilead," I came on stage in character, as I figured Lee Strasberg would have me do. Apparently I succeeded too well.

"You’ve got to be kidding me. That was a performance," I said. "It was from a play. I memorized it, rehearsed it, and performed it, once, for you."

"You’re in," she said.

And so I passed my audition for Lee Strasberg one year after I gave it, only when they realized that I had been acting.

I learned a lot there, becoming a better actor, not achieving fame but something else pretty important. One year later, when the FBI caught up with me for draft dodging, Lee Strasberg's technique would save my life.

How Lee Strasberg Saved my Life