Darenet #11
May 1, 2000

This week is the 25th anniversary of the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam, a fitting time to finally reveal the strange and shameful manner in which I avoided the selective service, and…

How Lee Strasberg Saved My Life
by Michael Dare

Part One
How I Got Into the Actor's Studio in the First Place

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. 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 1) I didn’t register and 2) I 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.

Part Two
How Lee Strasberg Actually Saved My Life

The first day of class at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio was an eye opener. Strasberg asked for volunteers and everyone’s hands shot up, little knowing that this would be a demonstration for the audience that would do the volunteers no good whatsoever. Once on stage, the volunteers were asked to silently mill around. If they had eye contact with another volunteer, they were to break it off and keep moving. We watched this for ten excruciatingly dull minutes.

Then Strasberg stopped them and told them to do it again, only this time at the end of ten minutes, he was going to ask each of them to name every single movie they had seen in the last six months. Go.

They continued walking around only something remarkable happened. The stage was alive. Nobody was talking, but it not only wasn’t dull, it was fascinating. They were no longer milling, they were walking with a purpose. When they had eye contact, no matter how brief, thoughts seemed to be exchanged. It was hysterical. We felt their pain and started laughing - thoroughly entertained for the whole ten minutes.

Then Strasberg stopped them and said "That’s it. You can leave the stage now. I don’t really want to know what movies you saw. This was for the audience." He turned to us. "What was the difference between the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes? The last ten minutes there was thought going on in people’s heads. They were working on something. You knew what they were working on and it made you laugh, but even if you had come in in the middle and hadn’t known what they were working on, you would have been interested in what was happening on this stage. Why? Because it doesn’t matter what you’re working on while acting, as long as you’re working on something related to your personal life. It doesn’t have to be related to the text you’re saying or the actions of the play you’re in at all. The simple act of going through a genuine thought process is all you need to give a performance of quality that will interest an audience."

He then told us to imagine biting into a lemon. Just thinking about it brought saliva to my mouth. "There," he said. "Didn’t that make you salivate? You weren’t really biting into a lemon, but the sense memory had an actual physical effect upon you. Anybody, even a non-actor, can make themselves salivate by thinking about biting into a lemon. What we’re going to do is mine your past for similar memories that evoke other emotional and physical responses. I call these affective memories. You’re going to keep a list of these affective memories that you will carry around with you for the rest of your professional life, and whenever a role calls for a particular emotion, you will work on the particular memory that elicits that response. You should have hundreds of affective memories to call up as part of your emotional repertoire as an actor."

Though there were dozens of other lessons, this was the heart of the Strasberg technique. For the next several months, we worked on developing our affective memories and writing them down.

Everyone started with the same exercise - taking a shower. This was not mime. The purpose was not to convince an audience that we were taking a shower, the purpose was to actually physically feel the water pouring down our body, to feel the sense of isolation, of privacy. One at a time, we would be invited to the stage to just stand there, feeling the spray on our heads, singing to ourselves, whistling, humming, doing all the things we do when we know that no one is watching. Once Strasberg was convinced we were totally in the moment, he would ask us to say words, any words, a monologue from a play, song lyrics, anything not the least bit connected to the act of taking a shower. We were not to think at all of what the words actually meant, just concentrating on the physical feeling of the shower while allowing the words to come out of our mouths. Though the words would mean nothing to us on stage, they would inherit a meaning through the audience who would be unaware of our process, never knowing that in our minds we were a rock or a tree or taking a shower during a performance.

Marlon Brando is one of the greatest practitioners of the method. He gets so deep into his affective memories that he literally can’t remember his lines. At his mother’s funeral in Last Tango in Paris, his head is hidden as he weeps at her funeral, but then he looks up for one remarkable moment and we see total anguish, the tears pouring down his face. Why was he looking up? Because he couldn’t remember his lines and they were taped to the bottom of the coffin lid.

Armed with my new skills, I headed off to my first Broadway audition. I had a good lead. Back at Beverly Hills High School, I had directed the school’s senior play, Tom Stoppard’s Albert’s Bridge, which was entered into a statewide contest for high school drama departments. We lost the contest, but soon afterwards, I was approached by Ken Handler, a Broadway producer who had seen the show. "I’m going to be doing a new show on Broadway next year and I think you’re very talented. If you want to come to New York, I’ll guarantee you some sort of work on the show."

I gave him a call and he invited me to his apartment on Fifth Avenue where he talked to me about the play. He was currently having auditions, so he read me for some of the parts, and asked me to come by the theater the next morning to meet the director. If he didn’t cast me, I could definitely hang out and watch, and possibly get work as some sort of production assistant.

Just as I was leaving he said "Oh, by the way, I’m a pervert."

"Excuse me?"

"Yeah, in high school I sucked off the entire football team. You ever been sucked off by a guy?"

"Uh, no."

"We do it better than girls, we know what feels good. You’re very attractive, and I would have a very hard time working with you unless we were lovers. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to suck you off?"

"No thank you, I’m straight."

"That’s too bad. Let me explain something to you."

He went on to tell me that his parents owned Mattel Toys, and that the Ken and Barbie dolls were named after him and his sister. They were the most popular dolls in the world. When he got married, his parents came out with a doll named after his wife, and when their daughter was born, a doll came out named after her.

He started pacing the room. "Millions of children play with miniature replicas of me and my sister’s bodies," he cried. "They take the teeny clothes off the dolls, maybe they put them in bed together. Me! In bed with my sister!"

"Gee, that’s too bad," I said, nervously eyeing the door.

"Have you ever seen my doll with it’s clothes off?"

"Not that I can recall."

"It looks just like my sister’s doll with its clothes off. It doesn’t have any genitals. Well I’ve got genitals. Look at this!" he savagely declared before flopping out his wanger and pumping it up to its full majesty.

I was too stunned to move. I sat there frozen while he mysteriously tried to continue carrying on a normal conversation. "How do you like New York so far?" he remarked, casually, without missing a beat. "Have you seen any shows?" He invited me to join him in his extracurricular activities. I declined as I dashed out the door. "I’ll see you at the theater tomorrow," he said. I didn’t shake his hand. I didn’t show up at the theater. I continued studying with Strasberg but I didn’t go to any more auditions. My first was too traumatic, and I couldn’t stand the thought of any more casting people wanking off in front of me.

One year later, 1971, Strasberg relocated to Hollywood, so I took the opportunity to continue studying with him by moving back home with my mom and getting a new job at a nearby burger stand.

One day I came home to find two FBI men in my mom’s living room. Apparently my mom had done a bit of kvetching to my sister Sandy about my moving back home, and my sister had told her husband Herb about it. He was an ex-Marine, so when he found out that I was also evading the draft by not registering, he decided that I was a no-good hippie bum, that the army would do me some good, and he turned me into the Feds.

My mother was crying in the next room. She knew as well as I did what this meant. Herb had signed my death warrant. There was no way I would make a good soldier. My prospects of getting out of Vietnam in one piece were about equal to those of Private Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. I had a long history of lack of respect for authority. This was the absolute height of the Vietnam War and our soldiers were being slaughtered daily. There was no doubt I’d be drafted, no doubt I’d be sent overseas, no doubt I’d come home in a body bag. Herb had betrayed us.

The FBI men both wore the same gray suit and tie. They explained that not registering for the draft was an accumulative crime - that every day I didn’t register, since the day I turned 18, I was actually committing another felony. They told me they could put me away for a long time, but they’d give me one more chance. They would call the local draft board the next day at noon, and if I hadn’t registered, they would come back to arrest me. They smile at each other before leaving.

Now I had a choice: A) register and face the music, B) go underground, or C) flee to Canada. A might get me killed but B and C definitely would put a crimp in my plans to become a world famous actor. The next day I headed to the Federal Building, registered for the draft, and waited for my notice.

One week later, I received my Order to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination. I panicked, but luckily there were organizations around to help. The anti-war movement had escalated to such an extent that the papers were full of ads from law firms offering free assistance to those facing the draft. I went to one and was informed that first thing I wanted to do was change draft boards because the one in L.A. was notoriously difficult. They told me the one I wanted was in Oakland, good thing too because I had an aunt in Oakland who allowed me to give her address as my own. My case was transferred.

My next hope was the lottery. After years of accusations of unfairness in the selection process, that year the draft board was instituting a random selection of birthdates to decide who would get inducted. I was informed that my lottery number was 63 and that anyone under 125 was in the First Priority Selection Group. I was ordered to report to the Oakland Draft board the next week.

I showed up for my physical about 15 minutes late. The guy behind the desk told me that I could either go in then or wait till the next line-up that afternoon. I asked him what the difference was and he gave me a fantastic piece of information. That morning was all inductees. That afternoon would be all enlistees. It was a subtle difference. In the morning, the doctors would be looking at men who were all trying to get out. In the afternoon, they would be looking at men who were all trying to get in. The doctors would have a different form of skepticism that could work in my favor.

I showed up in the afternoon, took off my clothes, and got in line. I was definitely the only one with long hair, a red bandanna, and tennis shoes made out of an American flag. The physical examination went normally. I was as physically fit as the next guy. It was during the psychiatric exam that I’d have to convince them they didn’t want me.

I searched my papers and saw that there was no mention of the fact I was an inductee, so my goal would be to pretend that I had enlisted, that I really wanted to get in, but that I was a liar hiding something important. I answered all the questions the way I knew the psychiatric Sergeant wanted them answered. Yes, I loved using guns. No, I’d have no problem following orders. No, I’d have no problem killing someone if ordered to do so. Then came the big one. "Have you ever had a homosexual experience?"

And suddenly I was on stage at Strasberg only I wasn’t taking a shower, I was in that apartment on Fifth Avenue and Ken was showing me his dick. I did what Strasberg taught me, worked on my senses, felt the material on the sofa, the temperature of the air, the view out the window, saw the look on Ken’s face and realized that yes, this was an experience, and yes it was homosexual, but it wasn’t really what the question meant, and I couldn’t admit it, no way, I had to say to the Sergeant "No, of course not, why do you ask?" but instead of a Sergeant I saw Ken sitting there, asking me to touch it, and the Sergeant looked at me for a good ten seconds and he could see I was lying, that I had had a homosexual experience and I was extremely disturbed about it.

One week later I received notice that I was "found not acceptable for induction under current standards." I was classified 1-Y, whatever the hell that means. The war in Vietnam would have to go on without me, and it did for another four years.

I was never quite sure about the doll story until years later when there was an article about Mattel toys and the Handlers in the Los Angeles Times. There was Ken’s picture, standing with his arm around his sister, a man driven to expose himself because his doll had no genitals. Little did he know that his putting the moves on me, combined with Lee Strasberg’s acting technique, would some day save my life. It was an affective memory all right.