The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

You can't tell how well a person can ride until you give him a horse that won't take people.

We are at our best when we are doing something we don't know how to do. We have to think.

Bottom's misfortunes, of course, make the man. Somewhere in the "rude mechanical" is a soulfulness that flowers in the face of an adverse circumstance (his enchantment by Puck), leading him into bed with the fairy queen and into a dream that is boundless: it "has no bottom.” As an actor, Bottom wants not only to play Pyramus but Thisbe and the Lion as well--indeed, all the roles: he is a one-man show. That same irrepressible imagination was present in Bill Hickey's acting and in his advice to students. Of himself, he said,

I like to be alone on stage without props and dead actors.

And to us,

Think of what Bette Davis would do and double it. Whichever way she goes, she goes fully. She doesn't make traffic violations-- she creates train wrecks.

I am not stepping across a puddle; I am swimming the East River with my hands tied behind me. I am climbing a ladder with my teeth. That's what acting means.

William Hickey was a stage actor of long experience on and off Broadway as well as a screen actor whose career reached its peak in l985 with the plum role of all the rakish characters he'd played: he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his portrayal of Don Corrado in John Huston's film Prizzi's Honor. David Denby in New York magazine, 24 June l985, wrote of the performance,

... William Hickey, as Don Corrado, the boss of bosses, is teasing his role. Best known for his theater work, Hickey nevertheless seems to have an instinctive understanding of the camera. Tiny, wizened, but with immense hands that flap alarmingly before his face, Hickey speaks in a small, hoarse voice that draws one closer to him. But Hickey, unlike the similarly hoarse-voiced Brando in The Godfather, could not be called a man of sober responsibilities and distinguished judgment. Many years of holding great power have only confirmed Hickey's Don Corrado in his essential rattiness. Hickey exudes intellectual enjoyment of evil; his semi- satirical work ... suggests that double-dealing is not a means to an end but an end in itself.

Hickey was 57 when he played the 84-year-old don. John Huston had ordered him a suit that was a size too large so that Don Corrado would seem in his old age to be shrinking. Hickey's experience of his own Irish family closeness went into his portrayal of the godfather, along with his patience and intelligence. Also present was his love for lunatic antics and double-dealing, the latter being a synonym for deception, as in acting. He once said to a class of students, I would steal anything from anybody for acting. But not in life.

Reviewing Prizzi's Honor for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praises the principal actors and then comments about William Hickey,

Controlling the destinies of all of them is the frail figure of Mr. Hickey's ferociously practical, wise, infinitely patient old Don which is the role and performance of Mr. Hickey's career to date. As one unforeseen lunatic event succeeds another, Mr. Hickey's dying Don, his intelligence unimpaired, seems actually to melt into his clothes, like the Wicked Witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

The Academy Award went to another "Don," Don Ameche, perhaps for sentimental reasons. Nevertheless, William Hickey had reached the big time in show business, a status that he appreciated, both because it amused and pleased him and because he needed $35,000 to buy his apartment at 79 W. l2th Street, corner of 6th on the uptown side. He shared his living quarters with Bucky, a mixed breed canine that was mainly sheepdog. When he got the role of Don Corrado, he spoke of that, as he did most things, to his dog. "Bucky, we've been in films before, but now we're in the movies." Then he reported the dialogue with his dog to his classes.

Bill was known for his appearances on and off Broadway long before his film career took shape. During the run of Small Craft Warnings, a play in which Tennessee Williams made a brief comeback to Broadway and in which the playwright himself debuted as an actor, Bill shared a dressing room with him. Williams was a gentleman, he said. Hickey was inclined to look for gentility in others. He was a gentleman himself.

When his obituary appeared in The New York Times (l/17/97, D22) the photograph accompanying it was from l985, the year Prizzi's Honor was released and while I was still engaged in studies with him at the Herbert Berghof Studio where he taught classes in scene study and acting technique until two weeks before he died. At the end of the two-column writeup was a comment from one of Hickey's students: "All my life I felt stupid and untalented, but Bill Hickey made me feel like the smartest man on earth." Hickey was adept at cultivating confidence in those who studied with him. He worked on the principle, There is nobody who lacks talent. It's a matter of knowing how to use it.

It seemed to me when I read the student's comment that there was far more to be said about Hickey as a teacher and mentor. The word mentor is taken from the Greek name of the wise guardian of Telemachus who makes an archetypal journey to find his father Odysseus. The concept of mentoring is rooted in the story of parenting, or filling in for the father, "godfathering" if you like (without the darkly humorous connotations of Hickey's now famous role, of course). Moving forward a few centuries from the Homeric epic, we pick up other associations by considering Socrates as a mentor, through whose teaching the word becomes filled with rich implications of artistry, imagination, and love (love, because teaching and learning are a form of coupling). Socrates was "in love" with the youths who drew near him to see themselves through his eyes.

Plato's Symposium describes the erotic force field that surrounded Socrates who, like all master teachers, including Bill Hickey, was gifted with the ability to see the neophyte. A good mentor practices both seeing and hearing (paying attention). By association, the novice becomes increasingly visible and audible, and then learns to see, and hear, differently. Eros is alive in such a relationship.

Fulfilling one's potential requires being seen. William Hickey's talent was discerned first by his mother who, as Van Gelder reported, encouraged her lively children to "show off" from an early age. Then Hickey found his own mentors, Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen, and eventually attracted the attention of John Huston. Hickey was a man with a calling, and he was fortunately perceived. He passed that perception on as a blessing. Here is a composite account of how the experience appeared to me.

On a Saturday morning one December in the early eighties, I left my apartment in Nyack and crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge to Tarreytown, where I caught a train bound for Manhattan, some twenty miles away. Outside my window, a gray sky sifted large snowflakes languorously into the Hudson River. The train ride and the snowfall created a mood for reflection. I thought about why I had come to New York from the South. New York was an unparalleled training ground for two vocations that interested me: psychotherapy and theater.

My college experience had convinced me wrongly that one is either a scholar or an artist, never both, and that one does not make a transition from one to the other. Having spent my early education on the scholarly side, I had arrived in New York with the intention of becoming a Jungian analyst, had done the preliminary work of my own analysis and had spent many hours attending lectures at the Jung Institute, still without applying to enter training there. I hesitated I thought because I did not expect to be in New York the seven years it would take to complete the training (as it turned out, I was there ten years). I had by then discovered the drama therapy program at New York University which would require only four years of classes. That satisfied the scholar. The fledgling artist in me had gradually emerged in amateur theater work and now made other demands.

The previous summer I had played the role of Titania in a production of Midsummer organized by a group of Nyack residents to raise money for restoring the old, long-closed Tappan Zee Theater. A number of Broadway stars, including Liza Minelli, had got their start there. For our production, we created a stage set on the side of a mountain where actual lightning and thunder sometimes lent the fairy world their special effects. After one performance Helen Hayes sent her regards to all of us, including my husband who was playing Oberon and our son who was playing Mustardseed, the role that had launched Miss Hayes' long career.

I have since imagined that the fairy queen's experience with Bottom must have had a salutary effect on her, much as it did on him. She entered his bottomless dream. My experience as Titania may have been what sent me in search of another Bottom. The catalyst for that was the elderly gentleman who had organized the production. He was a longtime stage manager for Broadway plays: he told me that if I wanted to study acting, I should seek out Bill Hickey. I had done that.

On this Saturday, at Grand Central Station I got a coffee with cream and dedicated my first sip to the great god Pan. Creature comforts are sacred things. The line came to me from Mr. W. H. (my private name for the man I was going to see, based on initials coincident with those of the mysterious person to whom Shakespeare dedicated some sonnets, according to Oscar Wilde's essay). My imaginary Mr. W. H. was something of a satyr, a satyr become actor become teacher--a Silenus, as I said.

I emerged from the station which was saturated in the aromas of coffee and spicy buns, herbed roasted fowls and meats baked en croute, all featured in open shops under the station's roof, like a Christmas spread designed by Washington Irving. Grand Central is the corridor through which commuters pass to make their daily deals in big business. Looking into the faces of the men and women as they paused in the station to gaze and sniff and taste, I saw the children we all are, sampling the banquet of a city appropriately called the Big Apple.

On 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue, I boarded the downtown bus. The snow by now had muffled the city. Near Washington Square I stepped down onto the snowcovered avenue and entered the park, eerily empty of the crowds of people who normally strolled or sat on benches, eating, talking, watching street performers. My footsteps, freshly printed into the snow, were muted as I crossed the park diagonally to the west of the University. A dog yelped and then the silence seemed even more profound.

In the Village not many people had left their lairs. One who perhaps didn't have a lair was a panhandler crouching beside a cold stone wall. He wore a red boggin. I noticed that he had arranged his layers of clothing so that holes in the various fabrics didn't overlap. When I came near him, he put his hand out, palm down at first like a greeting. Then, clearly importunate, he turned his palm up. To celebrate the singularity of the day, I broke my streetwise habit of ignoring requests for money. I removed a glove, pulled from my jeans pocket a dollar and placed it on the outstretched palm. He displayed his gums and their two or three teeth in a smile, and as I moved away, he called out, "Nice ass."

It was a William Hickey move. If the beggar had been an actor about to improvise some routine expression of gratitude, Hickey would have whispered in his ear, Go for the opposite. A Pan moment. Pan in New York. Panhandling.

Pan is the god whose appearance is always startling. Within the entourage of Dionysos whose cult lives anywhere there is theater, Pan rules the moment of surprise. I did not look back, but my thoughts entertained a conundrum: who are the needy in New York? The panhandler's response to my gesture shocked me out of my role as benefactor and reminded me that we all have our places of poverty, homelessness, and neediness. That insight would soon be expanded. Mr. W. H. put the question this way: Your super objective is in your life force. What are you out for? I was out to fill my hollow spaces with images of the gods. I was on the lookout for extraodinary moments. Often, as in this case, I was surprised at where I found them.

I turned left onto Bank Street and soon entered the Herbert Berghof Studio, a cluster of three buildings between a street and a river both named after Henry Hudson. Berghof opened the studio in 1945 and had built it to an enrollment of 5,000 at the time I studied there. He ran the Studio with his wife Uta Hagen, herself a Broadway legend and author of a widely read theater text, Respect for Acting. In l948 Hagen had re-invented Blanche DuBois for a national tour of Streetcar with Anthony Quinn and then succeeded Jessica Tandy as Blanche for a year's run on Broadway. She starred in Othello with Paul Robeson and Jose Ferrer (her first husband) for two years, and, in l962, she created Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , a role that brought her a second Tony award. In l985 she had returned to the stage, after a long absence, in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession. A full page article in the Times referred to her on that occasion as "one of the glories of American theater." She received a lifetime achievement Tony award in l999. At the Herbert Berghof Studio, Geraldine Page and Sandy Dennis were on the faculty along with Hagen and Berghof--and William Hickey.

Downstairs I waited with others outside the studio classroom where a red light bulb, when turned on, signaled that it was not appropriate to enter, that a class was in session, that Bill Hickey would by God chew your nice ass if you interrupted the players at work. When the light went off, we moved through the door by which the previous class was leaving and found places among the folding chairs on the near side of the room. In front of the chairs was a stretch of open floor for performances and beyond that, behind a back wall, were set pieces and properties for creating scenes. Furniture helps you change your balance, he'd said.

To the far right was his table. He stood and stretched, turned and nodded, sat down again. I was not born to sit at a desk. Next to one, maybe. I scribbled in my steno book while I was watching others work, listening to his comments, waiting my turn.

There was something Panfeatured about Mr. W. H. He had a shock of gray hair, rudely cut above ears whose tops twisted goatlike away from his skull which featured high cheekbones above a square chin. He was not "tiny and wizened" as the film review described Don Corrado. He was tall. His face was gaunt, his body slender, his clothes wrinkled like his skin. Beneath thick, dark brows his eyes exhibited the zenlike quality of relaxed alertness, his wide mouth as content with silence as with utterance. How you send and how you receive are equally important, he told us. He reminded us that Ruth Draper, master monologuist, received so intently that she took time in performances to make "behavior" in her imaginary characters.

In class, a person named as key student assisted him by scheduling scenes or monologues. Stage lights came up. He watched and listened from his position by the table at the edge of the performing space. Then the lights were adjusted so that the actors, seated near him now, could see him while he gave his comments.

His way of giving a critique was generally courteous.

I haven't been able to criticize you and I've got to find a way. I thought Ah! they're going so strong, and I started to yell out something and then I said NO. I have to help you do the character the way you want to.

Or he might say, Something happened in the scene. Your firm hold on things relaxed.

I say generally courteous because he occasionally showed his temper. He threw a tantrum when someone blundered in past the red light or made a habit of tardiness (he occasionally quoted Elaine May's comment--acquired during her nine years in psychoanalysis, he said--that lateness is a form of hostility). He made a succinct comment to anyone he caught posturing instead of working on stage: QUIT GRIMACING.

I saw him perform in Harrison, Texas, a trilogy by Horton Foote, produced by the HB Playwrights Foundation and directed by Herbert Berghof. I studied how Hickey embodied some of the precepts he'd given us, sound acting principles and advice that he had no doubt absorbed from Berghof and Hagen and blended with his own unique perceptions: Acting is handmade work, he said. What do you do before you make your first entrance in a play? That is the most important part of characterization. Great acting is based on moments. The future and the past can come rushing into the present moment.

You have to make the biggest investment in an off-stage beat, before you start the whole thing.

Make discoveries onstage rather than in the wings.

We discover things when we speak to others. We realize things. Emotional adjustment happens while we are talking to each other. Closeness doesn't have to be in the words; it can be in our sense of each other.

Pacing and rhythm are in the heartbeat. Find the inner pulse of the situation.

The verbal objective is to change someone else's way of thinking or at least add something to what they're thinking.

You can't just be, you must do something, accomplish something. An action without an objective becomes an attitude. That's what you have in sitcoms.

Desire a specific reaction from the audience (to frighten them, to make them wish they had known the character).

What do you want the audience to feel? Make them feel that they owe you something. If they don't give it, something will happen to them. Create warnings, challenges, plead with them. Seduce and dazzle them with the human dilemma.

Despite all Hickey's stage, film and television work, his profile was higher among actors than among the general public. Actors who attended his classes included Sandy Dennis, Judd Hirsch, George Segal, Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, Christine Lahti. When Jack Nicholson met Bill prior to filming Prizzi's Honor, he "confessed" that he had sat in on a couple of Bill's classes before going to California. And Bill, feigning ignorance of the actor's success, replied "Oh? And how did it [the trip to the West Coast] go?"

For Bill Hickey, the way to become an actor was to work on being oneself. As a teacher, he began with the premise: We are all players who have come here to play. He meant what has sometimes been called "high play," an improvisational activity in which our minds stretch into new territories of comprehension and insight, as well as animal play, in which the thinking mind puts itself in the service of the body-centered self, on the alert for nuances of mood and gesture to communicate character. To improvise is to search for a moment where you can find a gesture or a movement.

Like Pan, he knew the animal world, and he drew from it examples for instruction: Babies and animals don't know the words, but they can tell you plenty, he said. Another time: You look in a pet shop window and you see O'Neill characters. Still another: Singers and dancers are of the animal world. Animals celebrate. Ah! There's the enemy! The lion communicates: You know, I really am a lion, and you are a dead man. He identified spontaneous behavior with the human "animal" self expressed most clearly when we are children. That is why any actor is reluctant to appear in a scene with a child or an animal, where there is the certainty of being upstaged. What children and animals have going on is always more interesting than anything else, he said.

To display a vivid character, Hickey said, You've got to be in a state of change or ready to change all the time. Ultimately, his teaching objective was this: I'm trying to get my students to be like my dog who does whatever he damn well pleases and when.

He taught us to imagine outrageous "as if" situations: Do the scene as if you had peanut butter and jelly on your body, as if your eyes were starched, as if you had thorns in you (you have no pain but you don't want to cause any), as if your bones are like chalk, as if you are a girl with a giraffe on the end of a leash. As if's are not scenic facts--they are just as if's, to give flavor to a character.

We played what he referred to as a parlor game: You don't know who you are but you know who the other person is--you have to find out who you are by what the other person says. Example: Marilyn Monroe and Cardinal Spellman meet in the U.N. lobby. She knows who he is, but he doesn't. She goes over and kisses his ring. He knows who she is, but she doesn't. He says, "I'm surprised to see you here." The actors go on improvising until they discover their role identities by paying attention to each other.

With great parts it's not necessary to do anything except what the author has given you, but you're going to get some flat parts.

Character can't be put down on paper, only dialogue. Take the character out of the play and see who she is when she doesn't have a set of lines to play.

We are not aware of our habits. Facts need a certain amount of embroidery in mood and habit. Find the music of your character--as a car, as a dog. Read a menu as if it were War and Peace. "A Danish" then becomes a big moment.

Endowments [as if's] are to help you put your heart into it, he said. Endowments are only little acting tools. They are not ABC's. We go into private life to take things to put us more passionately into the play. An endowment is not necessary. Use it only as you need it, because it turns you on, so to speak. Acting is a real reaction to an imaginary stimulus. Words are the result of an experience.

He reviewed what he called the Blessed Trinity of Acting: the Mechanical part (lines and blocking), the Character part (objectives) and Me (what does this mean to me?): I am doing it like somebody, but I am doing it. Don't be less sensitive than you really are. You can give characters all your sensitivity, strength, intelligence, even though you're saying 2 plus 2 equals 5. Surely, that's how he must have built the character of Don Corrado.

In his classes, we played at being ourselves. When I direct, I will ask the actors not to work on the character first. If they can't do it as themselves, I won't let them do the characters. In an exercise where you do it from two points of view, I should not know which one is not you.

Don't dim your own colors for the sake of the character. If you don't like something, your character doesn't either.

First, we had to find our colors.

When I went to study at HB Studio, I was already a seasoned though formally untrained actor whose work--not on the greater Broadway of Manhattan but on the lesser Broadway of Nyack--had won considerable praise. I'd had leading roles in plays by Shaw and Shakespeare, Noel Coward, Moss Hart. I was at that time cast in a community theater production as Irene Livingston in Hart's Light Up the Sky. On the third or fourth night of playing Irene (a fictional name for Tallalulah Bankhead), my director came to the dressing room at the first intermission and said, "Where is she?" "Who?" I asked. "The STAR, he said. "I don't know," I said. "I'll get her back." And I did. But I was now conscious of a failing attention that revealed a need for training.

People retreat into places where they feel safe (even though they aren't), where they can make things the way they want them to be, he said once. Security is mortal's chiefest enemy, he said, quoting "someone whose name begins with S."

Bill had spent seven seasons with the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut, and he carried the plays in his head. He had played in Twelfth Night with Katherine Hepburn and Bert Lahr. He referred to himself, even in his role as teacher at the Studio, as playing the Fool to Herbert Berghof's King Lear. Yet his knowledge of dramatic literature, both ancient and modern, was remarkable even for a man who for decades had performed in plays and attended to scenes and monologues presented by students.

When I joined Bill Hickey's class, I felt as if I had come home to my heart and my intellect, a place where I was welcome to be myself and to become more than I had imagined. I trusted this man and the environment he constellated. I became visible to him.

At first I performed monologues and scenes drawn from a series of graceful and intelligent women of the sort I was used to playing, like Hermione Hushabye in Shaw's Heartbreak House. He watched me patiently. Instead of announcing right away that I might want to sample life off the pedastal, Mr. W. H. fell in with my fantasy of being the grande dame. I felt Bill responding with the eyes and ears of Bottom the Weaver, and like the fairy queen, I fell in love.

All poets and artists are trying to cast some kind of spell over the world, he said. He suggested other similar roles: Queen Hermione in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, Lady More in a play about Thomas More.

Paint the colors, he said of my Lady More. Don't let it be muted. Think of a breath of uncanny wind blowing across her soul.

I loved it, he said of a scene with another actor when we played the Brangwen sisters from Lawrence's Women in Love. More importantly, I felt that he loved me. Which me? The shy, insecure woman who, emboldened by language, could speak her speech trippingly on the tongue.

Then we did a scene from The Glass Menagerie.

Reverse the ages of Amanda and Laura, he said.

When I give you an adjustment, first repeat what you did. We are trying to add something.

We're not here to see how scenes are to be played, but to learn how to become more flexible, looser, how to juggle with the moment between the lines.

We are not looking for growth but something more like a new deal on cards: shuffle the cards and other cards come out.

Be able to be loud or coarse or cruel for the sake of flexibility.

He assigned me to work on the role of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. After my scene, he nodded his approval. You gave it a legitimate low-key version. They are rather courtly even as peasants. They are poetic and colorful. Then he went on to tell me what I needed to add to what I'd done.

Color is information, he said. In spite of poverty, how clean, how colorful. Work to celebrate because of richness of spirit. Loss of dignity is the worst thing. Talk of what you don't have as if it's an accomplishment. Make it a pleasant realization. Self-discovery all along. There are people who manage poverty and make it glamorous. Drama is a celebration of how we overcome trouble or live through it.

He did not know then that he was talking to someone who had clothed herself in grandeur on stage to escape painful memories of the very poverty he was extolling for its virtues, to a milltown girl who had discovered when she played Queen Esther in a church pageant that she could move about at ease among the courtly, all by altering her voice and her bearing. Or maybe he did know. Maybe he read the signs of my having abandoned too much of my own earthiness.

Then he assigned me Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." It had been a long time since I'd talked Southern. As I worked on the role of the Mississippi postmistress whose story is a long monologue that has a life independent of her intentions, I started to laugh, a deepdown laugh that rocked the pedastal on which I'd placed myself. In performing the monologue, I felt like Keats' nightingale, singing in full-throated ease. Mr. W. H. welcomed me back to earth.

He agreed to let me interview him for a theater class I was taking at New York University. From the Studio we walked to Hudson Street past the White Horse Tavern, famous for having supplied many of the shots of whiskey that kept Dylan Thomas intoxicated while he was in New York, "shots" that eventually killed him.

To return to my Greek images for a moment: the cult of Dionysos congregates in the tavern as well as the theater, where conventional values can be sloughed at the door, where talk warms up and becomes scintillating until it sometimes becomes stupid. Intoxication. The return of the repressed. Mania. Creativity. Imagination. Poetry. Love. Death. All play their part in the Dionysian seductiveness of New York.

The history of the White Horse goes back to the previous century when sea captains and sailors came there to drink and play checkers. In the decade before I arrived in New York, a singer performed at the White Horse among commemorative pictures of Dylan Thomas and changed his own name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan.

I had joined a group one Sunday morning, when the bar was normally closed, to celebrate Thomas' death day (November 9) by reading his poems in the tavern.

The hunchback in the park/ A solitary mister/ propped between trees and water .../ eating bread from a newspaper,/ drinking water from the chained cup/ that the children filled with gravel/ in the fountain basin where I sailed my ship,/ slept at night in a dog kennel/ but nobody chained him up.

My choice of a poem to read reflected my fascination with the outcast and with the music Thomas gave to the image of the hunchback, comparable to the colors Bill Hickey found in his many roles that could be called, like a circus sideshow, oddities on parade.

Hickey had lived in an apartment over the White Horse when Dylan Thomas visited America. "Those were happy days--a bit too happy maybe," he said. He recalled the poet as both a gentleman and a slob, crusty but kind, wanting money and not wanting it. "He was a real drunk. I never saw him sober." An observation, not a criticism. Bill Hickey, too, was devoted to the god of wine.

At the moment, Bill was "on the wagon," he said. We bypassed the White Horse and went to a cafe where he ordered a Brown's cream soda. He told me that now and then he still went on binges of drinking cheap champagne. I wondered if that's what he sometimes transported in a plastic soda bottle and pulled out of his knapsack to set on his "desk" at the studio. If so, it did not dull his perception.

My interest in Mr. W. H. had intensified considerably one smokehazy afternoon during my first semester with him when I was sitting among other students, close enough to see emerge from the breast pocket of his rumpled shirt, a moving creature the size of a watermelon seed. It crawled along the table toward the knapsack from which he had unpacked his sandwich and his bottle of murky spirits. Without missing a beat in the scene he was watching, he reached out and retrieved the roach, slender forefinger and rough thumb closing gently upon it like the mouth of a mammy alligator, and moved it safely back into the nest of his pocket. That is when I knew I had come upon a man of unusual parts.

Item of conversation: why does every artist need as companion an Old Silenus, who keeps wine in his waterjug and something loathsome on his person?

I thought of the poem that I had read aloud in the tavern. Like the hunchback, Mr. W. H. would have been (temporarily) at home in a dog kennel as long as no one chained him up.

He told me about past troubles, including a skull fracture that caused him to lose his hearing in one ear and to go half blind in both eyes. I took "slipped while walking" from my notes, but what was that he said about a wreck in the Lincoln Tunnel? There were times when his daimon had driven him into danger. He seemed glad he had lived to tell about it.

We are assigned our lives ahead of time, he said. WILLIAM HICKEY THE RAKE. People who don't have a calling, he said, have to resort to hobbies or entertainment.

We are writing our lives as we live them, he said, without contradicting himself. He meant that we are born with certain tendencies but that we have a the freedom to make choices.. We are certainly not following scripts. We have the power of decision. To change one's way of living is exhilirating--to claim one's freedom.

We talked show business. He said Zoe Caldwell was so good at being herself on stage that she didn't "play" Medea until the curtain call. Then she stepped forth as the queen. Instead of bowing, which would have been unregal, she held her royal fingers above the heads of the audience and then commanded the presence of the cast.

Bill mentioned his mother many times in class. When he was a boy and cried after an argument with another boy, he said, she rushed to the scene and shouted to the culprit who had challenged her son, "You can't talk to him that way!" He commented, "They ask me why I am a Mother's Boy. Well..." His mother's music was that of a cat, he said. She alternated between the screech and the purr.

His father died when Bill was a month short of eleven from "a heart attack brought on by fear." He said his father was in the linen business during the depression when people weren't buying household stuff. He went out into the business world on his own and then feared his venture wouldn't go. Bill reported that his father had said to his mother the night before he died, "If it does fail, we've still got the children." She didn't answer, he said, and she regretted that. She went to work in a factory. Later, she told Bill she was glad they didn't have much money. "If I didn't have to work, I'd go crazy."

He lived with his mother until she died when he was 48. Mourners with sorrowful faces crowded him at the wake, he said, asking, "Is there anything I can do?" He delivered his answer to one of them as if he were Bucky snarling at an offending stranger, "Yes," he barked, "you can go get me a hamburger!"

Still, he believed in consolation offered unsentimentally, heart to heart. I believe it was his sister he reported to have said, "You know how Nana always used to hate getting up in the morning? Well, she doesn't have to anymore."

He told me about going to Coney Island with his folks whose ghosts, he said, still lingered there. He had recently taken a role as a Coney Island barker in an action film. He said he warmed up for his scene by lip-synching Barbra Streisand's "Don't Rain on My Parade." That's the kind of stretch he enjoyed: himself as Barbra Streisand.

On another day I met him downstairs at his apartment building to accompany him on his walk with Bucky along Twelfth Street. "My dog thinks I'm much stronger than I am," he said, as Bucky pulled him into a reluctant fast-step.

We shared anecdotes about teaching and talked about what it's like not to be bored, about instincts, about hostility. He had worked with Bucky at the mirror, he said. "I couldn't get him to see himself," he added, as if that were remarkable considering how human the dog was in other respects.

"Sometimes," he said, "I think, not only can I not teach, but they [the students] can't learn." He told a dream in which he was teaching and there were some auditors: a mother, father and two children. He didn't know who they were. In the dream, Bill kept saying to them over and over, "Get out. I don't want you here." The father said, "We've been listening to you rant and rave. You get out." His dream answer was this: "If you get out, you can have your money back. If I get out, there is no class." Bill said to me, "I didn't know I felt like that."

He asked me questions about myself. I told him about my studies at NYU in drama therapy. I think it amused him to have a doctoral candidate in his classes. He was personally shy about his lack of formal education, though that fact did not subtract a smidgen from the confidence with which he spoke of his art.

I told him what I valued in him as a teacher, that he seemed to know how to focus on exactly what each student needed in order to take the next important step, and that he gave his critiques with sensitivity, providing fierceness or gentleness as required. I said I approved of his calling nonsense by its right name as much as I appreciated his civility to actors who were really working.

He mentioned that he professed Christian Science, which condemns both hostility and personal attachment. He could control the former, he said, but not the latter.

At the end of our walk, he patted Bucky's haunches while he spoke to me. "I guess I'll have to watch out for you now," he said. "You know where I live." He was quoting a line from Whoopi Goldberg's one-woman show that we both had seen on Broadway.

I've compared Bill Hickey to Pan, and I've mentioned a connection to Socrates through Silenus whose statue opened to reveal figures of the gods. Another image of Socrates, a portrait, resembles a mask of a Greek comic actor and by association, Bill Hickey, whose mouth, like the one on the comic mask, was so wonderfully large and flexible that he could manage his cigarette entirely with his lips while he gave lengthy responses to student work.

Greater than the physical parallel to Socrates is the philosophic one. Socrates imagined himself as a midwife, as one who brings to birth what is already present in the mind of the pupil. Here's how Mr. W. H. put it. The only thing acting school can do for you is to let you know what you always were. You don't know how good you are. I do.

Did Mr. W. H. love his students? Listen to this. When I go home at night, the faces of the people I dealt with come back in another way. I am not haunted by them. I remember everybody but me at the end of the day. I remember you.

I returned to the South in l987 and worked on my dissertation in drama therapy, closing my theater career with a few summers of storytelling at Zoo Atlanta. Then I began to write. Nothing that I had learned from Mr. W. H. would be lost. What he said about acting applies equally to writing. A generality will cause you to run out of gas. Go for something specific.

In l995 I went to New York to receive my Ph.D., and there I visited him at the Studio. I arrived with a friend while the red light was on, and when it went off, we slipped into the back of the dark room and listened to Mr. W. H. give critiques:

How I tell you something is based on what you are, he said to the young man who had been working. I want to be looking at your life and believe it.

What was difficult if anything? How did you arrive at that?

Don't be a victim.

Anger is the least interesting of the emotions.

Is there anything you don't like about what you did?

Don't let it be so somber.

You don't get up to suffer but to make others feel something.

The only observation I can make is that there are no silences. When the lines come too easily, work on the idea that your character does not know what to say. A mechanical thing. Set it up so that your character anticipates something else than what is said. Go to the opposite.

Drama is based on the unfulfilled wish.

Look for the extremity. Show the troubles, conflict, struggle. What is my character craving?

You have to want something or need something. That's the bedrock of acting.

Acting is a gift we give. If you can't give anything with it, then you have to scratch it.

LET THINGS MOVE IN ON YOU IN SILENCES.

The room was nearly dark. Had it been even darker, we could have made him out by watching the glow of light that appeared each time he wrapped his lips around the cigarette and sucked, briefly spotlighting eyes that glistened underneath monstrous large dark brows. From that thin face shrouded by thick gray hair, he spoke to us about what we needed to hear, individually and severally, eloquently finding the words, holding them, shaping them into analogy, metaphor, and anecdote, moving us to see by seeing us, and teaching us to see through the dullness of spirit, the wrongheadedness, and above all, the failure of courage that aborts the artist's dream.

At the end of the class when the lights were up, he turned, saw me, and opened his arms wide. "She's back!" He moved into those moments we had shared a decade earlier as if they were an ongoing present experience.

I've felt with a few people that we are in soul together. Once we've lived imaginatively in each other's lives, it no longer matters much that we live a thousand miles apart. Geography does not separate hearts engaged in the work (or play) of their calling. Nor, I think, does death.

I learned that Bucky had died, and that Bill's sister Dorothy, knowing how much he loved the dog, had arranged for him to have Bucky stuffed. "Bucky's still with me, at the foot of the bed," he said. Of course, Bucky had entered his imagination so completely as not to require stuffing. But it must have been a comfort to stroke the familiar fur.

When it was time to part, Bill turned to my companion and raised both hands to clasp him on the shoulders. The hands hovered near my friend's ears. My own eyes performed the magic: I saw my friend's ears turn pointy and tilt away from his face. Pan in New York.

For me, Bill's photographic images and sayings are enough to keep alive his memory, which is not, after all, only a memory. I imagine him frequently as the Coney Island con man he played in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. It is a brief scene, lasting perhaps a minute. Remo, the warrior-in-training, walks through the park with his mentor, the Chinese master of quick moves. They approach a ring-toss game. As the talker, Hickey rattles off a spiel he is obviously tired of. He is so bored by his job of reaching out to seduce the public that he does the opposite: he turns away from the approaching marks, and his patter trails off. When the Chinese master, played by Joel Gray, suddenly unleashes a volley of precise ring tosses, the lackadaisical talker does a swift and effective double take.

The character has appeared in my stories as a carnival talker and as a medicine show doctor. He entertains me. So I have brought Mr. W. H. home to the rocky hillsides of Georgia where Pan lives just as surely as in ancient Greece.

A life lived abundantly contains moments that sing of immortality. In soul, in the imaginal world, in art, William Hickey is still a lively presence, not only to me but I am sure to many others of the several thousand who sat in his classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. Only a few have gone on to fame in the movies, but many experienced in his classes a quickening of heart and mind. Ears hear, eyes behold, mind comprehends, heart awakens. Is this not what we all long for? If and when we find that, we celebrate. He embodied for me the qualities of a touchstone: by striking my soul on his time and again, I found some gold. Now when I think of William Hickey, my imagination produces a glass of premium champagne and a song of praise.