The dream and reality for a veteran actor

Actor Eli Wallach was trying mightily to revive his career after serving five years in the Army during World War II when he had a dream. The scene was a courtroom, Wallach the accused. Wallach “cannot,” bellowed the prosecutor, contribute anything to the theater -- for he is “a self-centered, hubristic charlatan.”

No, cried the defense lawyer, “This actor’s only crime is his desire to open his heart to the truth, to enrich your lives, to turn the mirror, as it were, up to nature. He wants to bring you joy, pleasure.” The jurors, eyes glistening, rose to their feet to applaud the actor. Awakening from his dream, he was “determined now more than ever to get into the theater,” Wallach, now 89, recalls in his new memoir.

It shows clearly what makes Wallach tick: He loves the theater and he truly believes everything that defense lawyer was saying.

“The Good, the Bad, and Me” is a simply written, effective tale of an ambitious and hardworking American actor trying to make his dream come true.

Born Dec. 7, 1915, he tells of his origins in working-class Brooklyn, N.Y., where his parents -- immigrants fleeing Poland before World War I -- open a small store. Young Eli’s siblings, prodded by their father, turn to teaching. Eli gets the acting bug early, bitten by his imagination.

From Brooklyn’s Erasmus High School he went to study acting at the University of Texas at Austin, where tuition was $10 a year. That is where he picked up a Texas accent to overlay his Brooklynese in addition to more acting experience. When the university raised tuition to $100 a year, Wallach returned to Brooklyn. And it was there, during the 1930s, in the depths of the Great Depression, that Wallach joined the Neighborhood Playhouse, an acting school founded by idealists of the theater who were politically left-leaning.

The school was an outgrowth of the Group Theatre, the American stepchild of Russian theater genius Konstantin Stanislavsky and his Method school of acting. Stanislavsky sought to replace 19th century artificiality in acting with truer emotions drawn from the actors’ own feelings and experiences. If you’ve seen Marlon Brando act on stage or screen, you get the picture. He was there, along with Wallach, Elia Kazan, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg -- and just about all the actors who would entertain and move us for two generations.

Wallach’s book is the most impressive when he writes about his career beginnings. He conveys both the pull of the theater on him and his firm resolution to obey the demanding and often fickle demands of his craft. The pleasure and pride he took from his career, and his affection for his theatrical friends, are the dominant notes in this long look backward.

Two small clouds shadow his landscape. One was his frequent and sometimes long absences from home, his wife, actress Anne Jackson, and their three children while he made movies.

The other was his behavior during the bad years, the era of the Red scare about communists dominating in motion picture industry and theater in general. It was a time of congressional investigations. Wallach watched his friend Kazan name people associated with the Group Theatre to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Some of their friends protested Kazan’s action. Wallach writes that he didn’t like what Kazan did, but that because he desperately wanted to appear in Tennessee Williams’ play “Camino Real,” which Kazan was directing, he took no stand. “I felt stuck in the middle,” he writes, confessing that he felt “like a coward.”

Wallach has appeared in about 100 movies, creating memorable characters in “The Godfather Part III,” “The Misfits” and Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

In effect, the durable actor is saying take me or leave me, here I am. As he approaches his 90th year, having done a screen turn as recently as Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning “Mystic River,” most readers will probably be content to take him just as he is.

Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.