Chapter Twenty Eight
Sports were never my forte. I never followed them.
Underneath everything I still wanted to act. To perform. To hear that roar of the smelly crowd. Feel the heat of the lights on my face.
I liked getting laughs. I liked the applause. I liked knowing I could make contact with an audience and touch their emotions, their souls, be inside them where they lived and be welcome there, too. It was not unlike a ministry to me.
No matter what I tried to do for money there was an underlying experience-gathering motivation to it that I could use somewhere along the line in the career I knew I would, one day, have.
I was never good in classroom situations. I learned by doing. I had to somehow translate theory into intellectual understanding.
When I was rehearsing my role as Christmas Morgan in The Unsinkable Molly Brown for the 1982 Dallas Summer Musicals, Mary Jane Houdina -the choreographer, taught me my dance steps and then was completely bewildered that I didn't want to go over them with her a few more times.
“Gypsies”, as dancers call themselves, almost live to rehearse. As characterization is to the actor, movement is to them. Performance is the reward.
I had told her I had to intellectualize the dance before I could do it properly.
Dancers don't understand non-dancers -–we’re sort of a sub-species-- and she was no exception. She shook her head and wandered off saying she'd be around if I needed her.
I thanked her and sat down and thought about what she'd taught me. Once or twice I noticed her staring quizzically at me as I sat there. It's not so much that I went over the steps in my mind as I just tried to understand the "why" of the dance: why do I do this here on this beat before switching to this on that beat while doing the other during another beat leading to there, where I stop for a beat, etc.
After about 10 minutes I called her back over and asked her a few questions about a little transition step and then sat down again.
I’m sure she must have wondered how I’d gotten cast in the first place, but she was the nicest person and her patience with me paid off.
A few more minutes and I was ready to try it out with her. I did it perfectly and she walked away scratching her shaking head.
J David Moeller Dancing ith Karen Morrow in "Unsinkable Molly Brown"
Karen Morrow played Molly Brown and she'd often ask me where we were in the count when she and I connected to finish out the dance number together. I was never wrong and I never miss-stepped.
Lesson: Even if he can’t, a good actor can act like he can sing and dance.
My semi-professional acting career began at Theatre Three in downtown Dallas in 1962, when I was 16, the year I went to Geneva. A schoolmate, Pam Gorman -the girl driving Julie’s car the day we me- had a part in a children's show and asked if I was interested in joining the group.
She introduced me to the director who wanted to know my experience. I’d performed magic shows in school, at church and private parties. It was just what she needed: a "traveling magician".
The play was Rumpelstiltskin and during intermissions I would come out, do a magic show and at the end I would produce scrolls from a “Magic Birthday Box” with the names of children in the audience who were celebrating that day.
I had a small set up that was easy to get on and off stage and the kids were always awed with my prestidigitational skills.
The show was a sell-out at every performance and I was a major hit.
It led to my first speaking role as a deputy in George M. Cohan’s melodrama The Tavern, the next main stage presentation at the theatre.
A few days after it closed I was in Geneva and aligning myself with the Theatre Circle.
When I returned to Theatre Three two years later I landed the role of the King in The Princess and the Swineherd. Also in the cast were William Utay, who played John Larroquette's balding, homeless lackey, Phil, on TV’s Night Court for many years; and J. Fredrick Bailey who eventually wrote screenplays for Roger Corman, King of the B-movies.
Norma Young, the theatre's founder, was surprised and pleased I'd lost my Texas accent while in Europe. I'd never known I'd had an accent!
Seems I'd lost it by speaking English to Europeans who spoke only a little and wanted to practice. I spoke slowly and distinctly and unknowingly trained the accent right out.
Also acting at Theatre Three at the time were two lovely teenagers, the McClenny sisters: Patsy and Cathy. Patsy is now known as the mega-glamorous Morgan Fairchild.
My theatrical odyssey continued during my first visit to Tucson.
I was doing Summer and Smoke at Tucson's Playbox Theatre on the weekends.
We were doing the "amateur" version of the play... which meant the curse words were removed for sensitive audiences.
I played the bartender and one of my lines was "No Snow!”
What the hell did that mean?
By the time we were in previews I'd figured it out and one night with a light smattering of friends in attendance I changed the line to its intended meaning and proudly blurted it for all to hear, "No shit!"
Gasps were audible all the way up on stage including a "What did he say?" from someone's grandmother.
Lesson: You have to know shit from snow in this business.
In the early years I didn’t have a desire to go to New York, even though I knew it was where you had to go if you wanted to make it in American theatre. For some reason, I was more interested in regional theatre.
Sure, I yearned to be great and famous. Hadn't I tried various pathways to fame and fortune? Wasn't I still on the road to discovery?
We all have our own paths laid out for us somewhere in the cosmos, I believe, and there are myriad variations and detours to be encountered along the way.
And many of us don’t finish the trip.
The a.m. never encouraged me at anything other than being a lawyer. She always told me that's what I'd be good at.
Especially every time we'd get in a fight. She'd say I had remarkable argumentative powers.
As a little boy I learned to always answer the "when you grow up" question with "A Lawyer!" lying through my teeth and knowing it. I had no desire to argue the fate of murderers and robbers and rapers.
I was going to be an actor! An entertainer! A performer! I just wasn't interested in going to New York to do it.
I did play a lawyer, though; District Attorney Topanabee, in the syndicated TV series of famed attorney Melvin Beli’s Guilty or Innocent.
Close enough.
I had thought radio was going to be a career for me, but the arguments I had with program directors and management over what I was going to do on my shows was too much for me.
I knew it was their station to do with as they pleased, but I was the one they had hired to build their ratings and I was the one who best knew how I could do that.
Phil Gibson, the PD at my first radio job at KIXL, had told me he'd been warned by one of his mentors that I was the type of announcer you either got rid of right away or you left completely alone.
He told me I had the uncanny ability to actually sway the other more experienced announcers on the air to subtly begin copying my style; and that was a talent, he said, not held by many.
He said when he listened to each announcer's work after my arrival at the station he began to hear a noticeable shift in their own style had taken place. Each announcer still retained his own unique sound, but there was a hint of my delivery and attitude present that was unmistakable.
I took that as not only a compliment but an omen.
Radio, like theatre, is ego-driven.
Step on a powerful ego and you've got trouble.
As a result of my experience at KOKE in Austin with the spinster Maury, and the philosophical arguments I got into at other stations, I became not only frustrated, but bitter as well.
I was bitter most of all over the fact that I knew I could be a creative force in the medium. I knew listeners responded positively to me and my humor.
I was only interested in entertaining them and giving them something to chuckle about with their friends.
"Did you hear The Mole yesterday? He gave away an entire city to the third caller in his "Dialing For Nothing" contest! It was a hoot!"
Dialing for Nothing was just what it says: Nothing. I hyped it like any other contest: "Be the (something-th) caller and Play...Dialing forrrr Nothiiiing! ! !"
"Hello! You're the thirteenth caller! What are you doing?"
"Nothing", came the reply.
"Congratulations! Do you know what you've won?"
"Uhhh, Nothing?"
"You're ab-so-lootly right! You've won absolutely Nothing from KQIZ and The Mole! What are you going to do with all that?"
"Nothing, I guess."
And so it went. And the phone lines would light up like crazy each and every time I'd do it. But, believe it or not, management thought it might lead to poor audience relations.
They said listeners would get upset over a contest that didn't award them a prize: whoever heard of such a thing?
Well, my listeners had heard of it and it made for some fun times over the phones, too. To appease management, I once gave a “winner” the city of Cleveland, Texas.
My audiences expected the irony I tried to inject into my show. They couldn’t get it anywhere else.
But I still got flak for it and over the years it made me reject radio as a home the way radio management rejected me.
Theatre was where my heart lay, anyway. I could take the words of a playwright and bring them to life. And I believe the genesis of my real professional life was in Austin at The Melodrama Theatre.
Now, I wasn't going to do melodramas all my life, but it's a form of theatre that'll hone the skills of any actor.
The style is understandably broad which builds the actor's confidence in reaching toward the back row of the house with his face and body and voice; collectively, his instrument.
It builds further confidence by teaching the actor to stay in character as gallons of popcorn are hurled upon the stage in the course of an evening's entertainment.
One time, while playing Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Melo-Carol, I had to sing a cute little number, with a tango beat, called "Bah! Humbug! Ole!" The last word of the song is "Ole" but it's held: "0-0 LAAAAAAAAAAAAAY" for 8 beats.
As I hit the note I was standing down center stage. The audience in the front row sits at tables that abut the stage with the second row no more than a couple of feet behind them. These two rows could throw their popcorn onto the stage -and actors- with no trouble at all.
So there I am, my mouth wide open, holding the note when a single piece of popcorn, lit brightly by the spotlight, made a perfect arch right in front of me.
Without moving my head it landed perfectly on the tip of my tongue; and, without breaking the note, I finished the song with a flourish and swallowed the still visible morsel -all to a thundering, hooting, standing ovation that lasted for several minutes.
Lesson: If they love you they will feed you.
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