smCOLUMN SIXTY-THREE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
SECTION ONE
PAGE FIFTEEN
sm
COLUMN
SIXTY-THREE, SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
XV.
Jane
began seeing a psychiatrist soon after she began acting.
She let her father read about it in a newspaper article.
"When he found out,
he told me that I need it like a hole in the head," she said. "And actually,
he made up all kinds of reasons why it would be bad for me to go into analysis.
I kept saying, 'Listen, I'm selfish enough as it is. All T need to do is spend
fifteen minutes a day talking about myself and I'm finished." Meantime, I kept
reading books, I kept asking people about it and there was a guy I knew that
kept talking to me about it and telling me that he thought I should be in
analysis.
"And
then I did Tall Story, which was really a pretty disturbing experience
for me, and I started reading about Freud and identifying with everything in the
book. And it was the first time that I realized how much pain I could cause
another human being and that kind of frightened me because I've always felt
that I was very innocent.
"I mean I didn't that I was a mean person and
when I realized that I could be mean and malicious, that really kind of
frightened me. So as soon as I got
back to New York, I asked Susan if she knew
of one. And she said the only one
she knew of is a child psychiatrist. So
I went to a child psychiatrist to ask him to tell me who to go to and he sent me
to a doctor who's the doctor I've been with."
Norman
Mailer believes that analysis turns woman into a cancer.
"There
are some people," she told me, "certain actors, certain talents who,
without any technique, without any training, without any thought, have an
instrument that is totally free of bonds, free of inhibition, free of problems,
and they're very fortunate and they're very rare.
Most people have blocks, it's particularly subtle in an actor.
"Because,
like a violinist---and all you have to do is get a good violin and tune it up
properly and have the proper catgut and all of that kind of thing and then you
can play. An actor's violin is
his body, inside and outside, and when every time you play it's flat, you say,
'Well, better know why is it flat? And
what do I do to tune it up again?'
"Now some people can do it just by time, by experience. I, left alone to my own resources, would be unable to tune it up. My background is such---I was brought up in such a
A
good actress has to go onstage
and hang out her laundry,
clean or dirty
restricted
kind of a way, you know, one doesn't raise one's voice, one never shows what one
feels, one is always polite. If
someone says something to me that I don't like, I will never show it.
"You
want everyone to like you. God forbid someone should not like.
Me. Now, any good person is hated by some people and loved by others, or
there's something wrong. I'm not
saying that my father taught me, I'm just saying that this came along with my
whole, my being. Now, this makes a
great deal of difference. It's a
great impediment to acting because to be a good actress you have to go on stage
and, to use a clich?, hang out your dirty laundry, or clean laundry, or
whatever it is. But it's got to be
yours from the bottom up and I am always censoring myself, putting
up defenses, showing only what people are going to like.
"And
it's not the things that people like that makes someone move. It's the things
that they don't like and things that they recognize in themselves and, if they're really truthful, then they become moving and
it's the really truthful thing that's very, very difficult for me or for
anybody to show. And I feel that the more awareness that you have of instrument,
the thing that you have to play upon, the more able you're going to be. Now, I
agree that if it becomes a thing solely up here in the head, then you're in
trouble because then everything becomes mechanical and thought out and
intellectualized and that's wrong.
"And
I've gone through a period of that. I
still have some of that. I think
it's something that I will get over, but for me it's an essential thing for me
to go through. For example, the
things that people criticize about my performances, they say that it's all too
worked out, every moment is planned. And
it's true and it's very important for me. Because before then it was all very
naturalistic. It was simple.
It didn't cut into anything, it wasn't incisive."
She
had been preparing a salad in the kitchen and we were now sitting in her living
room drinking wine. A Christmas
tree was in the corner. On a shelf,
almost crushed among books, was a phrenologist's head, a birthday gift from
Voutsinas. Photographs posters,
drawings, paintings and prints, all of them expensively framed, covered the
walls, some of them at knee level. On
an end table, there was a photograph of her mother and father, smiling, with
herself and her brother as little children.
"In other words," she said, "I've discovered, partly by analysis, that the problems of the actor are exactly the problems of the actor as a human being. And the better human being I can be, the more fulfilled woman I am, the better actress I can be. ##
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