Screen Classics

My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act

Jeff Corey, Emily Corey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813169859
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Jeff Corey (1914–2002) made a name for himself in the 1940s as a character actor in films like Superman and the Mole Men (1951), Joan of Arc (1948), and The Killers (1946). Everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Corey refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted, which forced him to walk away from a vibrant livelihood as an actor and embark on a career as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors.

In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Corey recounts his extraordinary story. Among the actors who would soon fill his classes were James Dean, Kirk Douglas, Jane Fonda, Rob Reiner, Jack Nicholson, and Leonard Nimoy. In 1962, when the blacklist ended, Corey was one of the industry's first trailblazers to seamlessly reboot his acting career and secure roles in some of the classic films of the era, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), True Grit (1969), and Little Big Man (1970), in which he starred as the infamous Wild Bill Hickok.

Throughout his life, Corey sought to capture the human heart: in conflict, in terror, in love, and in all of its small triumphs. His memoir, which he wrote with his daughter Emily Corey, provides a unique and personal perspective on the man whose teaching inspired some of Hollywood's biggest names to star in the roles that made them famous.

Part I

How to Live

Loss is unendurable until it becomes a fact.
—Don Gordon

1

Dreams of Acting

As a teenager, I saw the film The Private Life of Henry VIII starring the great Charles Laughton. The movie had a huge influence on me. As I exited the theater and walked through the streets, I tried to incorporate the stride, demeanor, and posture of the porcine sixteenth-century monarch I had just seen on the screen. I attempted not only to capture the outward mold of his character but also to absorb the moods, feelings, and attitudes of his personality. This was probably my first conscious brush with acting, and the energy and excitement of it stayed with me. After that, I spent many hours daydreaming about what it would be like to have people film me. I never shared these daydreams with anyone—it would have been too embarrassing—and I certainly never made my dreams of being an actor known to my family or friends.

My parents, Nathan and Mary Zwerling, were Orthodox Jews, and it was important to them that at least one of their sons received a proper Jewish education. My older brother, Lou, who was a bohemian from the day he was born, technically should have attended Yeshiva instead of me. But Lou would have none of it. He kept running away from home, searching for a better life beyond Borough Park and Brooklyn, so I was forced to attend Yeshiva in his place.

It was a remarkable yet utterly Dickensian experience. If you dropped a book on the floor, you had to say prayers. If you spoke back to a teacher, you had to say prayers. If you did anything unconventional, you had to say prayers. I felt very close to God but was bored by most of what was taught. I learned about gett, which is a divorce document in Jewish religious law. I didn’t know what the word divorce meant in English—no one where we lived in Borough Park was divorced—so it was difficult to concentrate on something that had absolutely no meaning to me. I learned Aramaic and Hebrew and studied the Talmud, and though in retrospect it was a fairly stunning classical education, I was an all-American boy and all I wanted to do was go outside and play baseball. My parents wouldn’t budge. My failures in the Yeshiva hit a tipping point: by tenth grade, my grades were a shambles and I had developed a nervous tic.

My mother was an immigrant from Latvia who was self-educated and full of strong opinions. No one in the family was fond of crossing her. When it became obvious that my tic was not going away and, in fact, was getting worse, she decided to take me to a specialist. I don’t know how she found him, but together we took the subway to Manhattan and entered the dark, quiet office of a Freudian psychoanalyst.

Psychoanalysis was still in its early stages, and it was incredibly forward-thinking of my mother to take me there. His office was a world away from anything I had ever seen before and certainly far out of my mother’s reality as well. Sadly, I do not remember his name, but I do remember his kindness. He spoke to my mother for a few minutes and then asked her to leave the room. The two of us sat and talked for a while. I was restless and unsure but finally felt safe enough to tell him I felt like a failure. When we finished talking, he called my mother back in and said, “This is a marvelous boy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him.”

My mother stared at him quietly for a moment. “Send him to public school and he’ll be fine,” he said, staring back at her. We left the office without saying a word. The next day, she enrolled me in New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn.

I was not a particularly good student at New Utrecht, either, and spent much of my time staring out the window between the buildings to the cargo vessels and ocean liners that sailed through New York Harbor. I was enamored of the plays that were performed at the school, but it never occurred to me that I could audition for one.

The only class that made sense to me was English, when, on occasion, I would be asked to recite a passage from Shakespeare. One I remember clearly was Marcellus’s speech in the opening passage of Julius Caesar. I blasted out the opening lines with fervor: “Wherefore rejoice? What conquests brings he home?”

My ardor stunned my classmates, and after that I would often be greeted in the hallways with stentorian recitals of “Wherefore rejoice?” This small, random event made quite an impression and elevated my social stature, particularly with the coeds, who took a new interest in me. I had always been shy around girls, and my newfound fame was exhilarating. More important than my social status, my recitation had made an impression on Mr. Rosenswieg, my English teacher and the chair of the Drama Club. Mr. Rosenswieg had always wanted to direct a production of Goethe’s Faust but had never found his leading man.

One day he announced I was the only student in the school who could play Mephisto. I was intoxicated at the thought and threw myself into the role, forgetting all else. The weeks of rehearsal were exhilarating, and the camaraderie of the cast and crew and the lessons in stagecraft gave me a quick glance into what life in the theater might be. Faust was a tremendous success, and I was hailed as a hero. Overnight, I went from relative obscurity to being known by everyone in school. This newfound popularity gave me an inner strength I had never felt before.

Regardless of my reinforced identity, when I graduated in the fall of 1932, I was eighteen years old and my options were slim. In spite of my theatrical victories, my schoolwork had continued to slip, and I didn’t have the grade point average to attend City College, much less a university. With the success of Faust under my belt, I boldly auditioned for Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre. Eva had been a star on Broadway but was devoted to the idea of theater as an art form rather than a business. She managed a 1,100-seat repertory theater slightly off the beaten path of Broadway. Her work paved the way for off-Broadway theaters to thrive in years to come. I was asked to prepare Malvolio’s soliloquy from Twelfth Night and young Treplev’s speech to Nina in Chekhov’s The Sea Gull. I threw myself into the audition, rehearsing each line with the same fervor I had put into Faust. But to no avail. I was not hired.

Undaunted, I used the same material a few weeks later to apply for the Milward Adams Scholarship at the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts on West 57th Street. The Feagin School was one of the best acting schools of its day and turned out “real” actors. The award was named for Milward Adams, who had managed the Chicago Symphony and the Auditorium Theatre and was considered one of the movers and shakers of the theater world. The renowned lyrical poet Sara Teasdale was one of the judges of the competition, as was Hugh Miller. Miller was a well-known British character actor who had come to the United States in the role of Alfred Jingle in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. I was intoxicated to think of performing in front of such an illustrious gathering. It was a national scholarship, and I knew the competition would be fierce. I threw myself into my role, and to my delight—and utter relief—I won the two-year scholarship. Overnight, everything in my life changed.

On my first day of class at the Feagin School, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt closed the banks. It was the height of the Depression, and while I was deeply aware of the financial hysteria going on all around me, I was equally thrilled by my good fortune and opportunity. In no time at all, I decided to be the most profound theatrical artist on the continent. I took on a quasi-British accent and lowered my voice to its deepest decibels. My first role was the Constable in A. A. Milne’s Perfect Alibi, a rather charming murder mystery. Milne was more famous for his children’s books Winnie-the-Pooh and Now We Are Six, but he wrote over twenty-five plays in his lifetime.

Hugh Miller himself was to direct Perfect Alibi. Miller had been particularly complimentary about my audition pieces, and I wanted to impress him. At the first reading, I employed my newfound voice. Miller stopped me in my tracks. “Dear boy,” he said amiably, “you must get out of that awful minor key. Everything you say sounds like ‘Please pass the poison!’” My face flushed red, but I instantly understood what he was saying. Miller quickly moved on with the rehearsal in the most professional way possible.

Frankly, I was a bit relieved. On the spot, I excised my posturing and gimmicks and returned to my normal voice. As we rehearsed, Miller helped me take measure of my own indigenous capacities. It was the beginning of my finding myself as an actor and discovering that, indeed, I had a voice that was mine alone and that imitating anyone else’s stance or performance was completely unnecessary.

The Feagin School had been founded in 1915 by Lucy Feagin. Lucy herself had studied with Milward Adams, the esteemed namesake of the scholarship I was in the midst of enjoying. Our curriculum incorporated the best of traditional dramatics, including the Delsarte Method, an approach to acting that promoted gesture as the “direct agent of the heart.” The Delsarte Method was introduced in America by Steele MacKaye, a prominent actor who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte himself. We learned a full array of postures and what were supposedly the physical manifestations associated with each emotional state.

The gargantuan and splendid Jolson Theatre was just around the corner from the Feagin School. It was built by the Schubert brothers in 1921 as a gift to the singer Al Jolson, who at the time was America’s most famous and highest-paid entertainer. After the crash, the Jolson, like many theaters in New York, was forced to close its doors. During my first year at the Feagin School, the great English actor and director Percy Vivian rented the vast venue, sitting empty and gathering dust, for a pittance. He renamed it the Venice Theater and founded a Shakespearean repertory company. Percy’s company consisted of a group of very reputable British actors who had been stranded in New York in the early years of the Depression. Most had been members either of Sir Phillip Benson’s traveling company or of the Sir Ben Greet Players, both great theater troupes of their time.

The actors who made up the eclectic troupe Vivian gathered for his theater at one time or another had shared the British stage with the most legendary actors of the nineteenth century, including Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Sir Henry Irving. The Feagin School encouraged its students to play minor roles in Vivian’s productions, and we were delighted to chip in. During rehearsals, we young up-and-coming actors would test our betters by randomly tossing out opening lines from Shakespeare’s plays. In unison, these old stage icons would resoundingly summon up the remaining dialogue with an articulate brilliance and artistic finesse that was awe inspiring. I used to get to the theater early, and I’d often see Percy sweeping the cyclorama himself. That made a deep impression and seeded in me a lifelong belief that it is important for an actor to get his hands into the manual work of a theater—set building, lighting, and, certainly, sweeping the stage when it was needed.

My first role was the First Citizen in Julius Caesar. Not completely cured of my desire to be the greatest actor on the continent, I played the First Citizen with such flagrant energy that Charles Dingle, one of the most prominent actors of the group, asked Percy, “Please tone down that young man who occupies upstage center as though he owned it.”

Occasionally Percy would slip me two bits—that’s all he could pay—but most of the time, I worked for free and was happy to do it. There was a glorious actor, Ian Maclaren, who had most of the leading roles. Watching him work was invigorating and set me on a lifelong love of Shakespeare.

Along with the Delsarte Method, my daytime training at the Feagin School included phonetics, foreign accents, soft-shoe dancing, art history, set construction, fencing, pantomime, stage lighting, and makeup. We put on plays before large audiences at least twice a month. That first year, after Perfect Alibi, I had roles in Death Takes a Holiday, which had been produced with great success on Broadway; the Greek classic The Trojan Women, by Euripides; Coquette, by George Abbott; and Hermann Sudermann’s Magda. It was intoxicating for a young artist to have such a variety of roles to work with and to be so deeply immersed in his craft.

During my first summer break I worked in a factory at the Depression salary of eight dollars for a forty-eight-hour week. I put together laminated cardboard signs advertising the new beer companies that had emerged after President Roosevelt ended prohibition. My boss offered me a franchise for something called Schlitz’s Beer for the entire borough of Brooklyn. I turned it down because they were going to pay only seven and a half cents per case, and I didn’t think I could sell more than twenty cases a week. I would not have been a very good beer tycoon anyway. I was fine embossing signs and daydreaming of a more creative life.

One day we heard President Roosevelt was to drive in his open car down Fifth Avenue to celebrate the passage of the National Recovery Act. The parade was to end at Union Square. Our factory was on West 16th Street, a mere hundred yards from Fifth Avenue. Al Jolson himself was to walk in front of the president’s car.

I was selected by my coworkers to approach the factory owners and ask for a twenty-minute break to watch Roosevelt’s entourage pass by. The owners unequivocally said, “You stay at your workbenches!” I gloomily went back to my laminating chores. Then the rebel in me was activated, and I said to myself, “The hell with the bosses.” I shouted out to my coworkers, “Let’s go!” As my best Faustian voice resounded through the cavernous warehouse, one by one my fellow workers left their stations and gathered at the door. All nineteen of us proudly walked the short distance to Fifth Avenue.

The great Al Jolson did indeed walk just twenty feet in front of the president’s touring car. He was carrying an American flag. Behind him was the elegant Roosevelt, waving right at us. For one quick moment, our eyes met. It was thrilling to be so close to him. He had the handsomest visage I had ever seen. After his car passed, our group silently walked back to the factory. Slowly, each one of us settled back to work. Whatever dread we felt at what was waiting for us upon our return was negated by the excitement of seeing Jolson and Roosevelt in person. We were quite proud of ourselves for defying our superiors. As we settled back down to our workbenches, we heard nary a complaint from our employers.

After Labor Day, I returned to the Feagin School. I was assigned the role of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. I got in touch with my buddies from the factory and invited them to a dress rehearsal. Most of them had never been inside a theater. They were very impressed with the building that housed the Feagin School. Our main playhouse occupied the second and third floors and had a commodious orchestra pit and balcony. The basement and ground level were owned by Stillman’s Gym and were used by the world heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey as their workout space.

I greeted my work buddies outside the building and led them inside. As we stepped onto the elevator to the fifth floor, where we were to perform Twelfth Night, we encountered the statuesque models engaged by the Russian avant-garde painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, whose studio was on the top floor of the building. None of us could take our eyes off these beauties. When we got out of the elevator, I pointed my friends to the theater door and made my way backstage. They loved the play, and the entire experience made quite an impression on them. They all asked if they could come back again. I in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Usage
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Call to Act
• Part I. How to Live
• Part II. How to Act
• Part III. Études—The Acting Exercises
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Jeff’s Recommended Reading List for His Students
• Index