It's All In the Playing Page 12

  Gerry bent over one of the bookshelves.

  “I have your letters secreted away in various books here,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to part with them.”

  He reached for a book.

  “No, Gerry.” I stopped him. “That’s okay. I don’t need to reread my letters. I’m having enough déjà vu reenacting my relationship with you on film.”

  Gerry straightened up and smiled. He threw back his shoulders and thrust his hands in his pockets. It was decidedly a gesture of pride and self-congratulation. It was then that I understood that the role he had played in my life was pleasant and satisfying to him. And the role he played in my book, and now on film, was a testament to the timelessness of our relationship—books and films being the sincerest form of flattery and recognition.

  Double vision prevailed for me as I observed him. I had adjusted to believing that Charles Dance was Gerry for weeks now. I had made that quantum leap in my imagination, putting the real Gerry somewhere out to pasture. Now as I stood before him I began to wonder who I was! Or put more precisely, what reality was. I was living an experience that proved I could make reality anything I wanted it to be. I thought of Akira Kurosawa’s classic movie Rashomon. Reality was in the eye of the beholder. Definitive truth didn’t exist. Truth was relative. If I needed an actor to be Gerry for three months so that I could emote sincerely, then I would do it. Gerry had only played a part in my life anyway. But what hit me with some impact now was that I had played a role in my own life, and was still doing it. I stood in front of Gerry fully aware of how I looked and what I was doing. I knew the emotional buttons to push in him and what would trigger a response. It was no different from the professional exercise of acting. And each of us did it every day, every moment of our lives, except probably when we were sleeping. Even then we were probably getting direction for the next day’s scene from the greatest director of all: our higher selves.

  Then, as I gazed at Gerry, listening to him reminisce about us, in a kind of fugue, I found myself wondering something really bizarre. If each of us creates our own reality, then perhaps each of us creates the characters who people our reality. In other words, perhaps Gerry was my creation, existing only in my dream. Perhaps he didn’t exist for anyone else at all! It was a really weird feeling, a kind of shift to some other reality. Perhaps this room, these drapes on the window, these love letters of mine stuffed between the covers of political books, were only an aspect of my dream. Maybe Gerry was the stuff dreams are made of, like the movie we were making; a player in my play, and now someone else had stepped in to play him. Perhaps Gerry had, from the beginning, spoken lines only I had wanted to hear. Were pieces of my past, my present, and my future reflected in Gerry as he moved about the room being himself? Was he wondering if I was real? No. Not Gerry …

  I came to with a jolt. We sat down next to each other on his couch. The sun had broken through the hazy clouds and dusty sunbeams slanted through the window across our laps.

  “What did you think of Out on a Limb, Gerry?” I asked, trying to ground myself into an earth plane reality.

  He turned and searched for words as he gazed out the window. “I couldn’t read it all at once,” he said haltingly. “I read bits and pieces before I went to sleep. Some of it is beyond my understanding.” He paused a moment. “Do you still believe in those spiritual things—souls and everlasting energy and things like that?”

  Now I was very matter-of-fact.

  “Yes, Gerry, more than ever. I think the world is in the mess it’s in because we are spiritually ignorant.”

  Gerry shrugged defensively.

  “But,” he said, “these are religious wars which are causing the mess.”

  “I know,” I replied. “That’s the point. Religion doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with spirituality. Each religion thinks it has a hot line to God. When the truth might well be that we are all attached to God. We are all part of God.”

  Gerry sighed.

  “I don’t believe in God. I believe in my work.”

  His words smacked the air. Charles Dance had just rehearsed those same lines with me that morning.

  Gerry went on. “I don’t believe spiritual ignorance is the problem in the world, even with all the religious wars.”

  “What is the problem then?” I asked.

  Gerry straightened up.

  “Nuclear proliferation,” he said. “We’re going to blow ourselves up if we don’t stop.”

  I looked out the window. Birds shook themselves in the sunlight on a nearby branch. I heard a child laughing on the street below.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t think we are going to do that and I think the more afraid of it we are, the more we contribute to the energy of its possibility. So it won’t be part of my reality.”

  Gerry looked pleadingly into my face. It was a moment of moving confusion on his part—he who was always so sure of the rightness of what he believed. He genuinely wanted to understand the outrageousness, to him, of what I was saying. Charles Dance was playing the part the same way. Charles himself was more open-minded about metaphysical truth, but still there was a legitimate confusion about the unknown that he had not dared to contemplate. The actor and the understudy were well cast in the New Age illusion of my play. I sat there wondering how I was playing myself. More importantly, why had I chosen to go back over this reality I created for myself?

  Gerry and I talked about the world, Gorbachev and Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher, Terms of Endearment, and life itself. It was all happening again—the same interplay, same attractive chemistry, same intelligent sensuality. But he had a budget meeting and I had a rehearsal.

  We stood facing each other. I finally decided to question the future.

  “What would you do if you gave up politics?” I asked.

  His eyes glided over every inch of my face. I could feel him want to include me in that future.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said discreetly. “There will be something wonderful for me to do. I love the world and the people in it.”

  We stood, delicately facing each other down.

  “May I have your new phone numbers?” he asked shyly.

  “They’re not new,” I replied. “That hasn’t changed either.”

  He understood. Quickly he wrote out his new numbers and handed them to me. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. The action was identical to that of our first meeting. The feelings were, too.

  “Remember me when you’re in Sweden,” he said unnecessarily.

  “That’ll be my job, Gerry,” I answered. “Somewhere under every inch of that silent snow I’ll feel you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  We parted and I knew we were still—and always—a part of each other’s lives. I had no idea then how strange an impact our interweaving would have on me later.

  I was late for the afternoon rehearsal with Charles Dance.

  “Where were you?” he asked, enacting Gerry’s tendencies to a T.

  “Oh,” I said, “I had a meeting with someone who reminded me that all of life is a movie and our progress is measured by how we play our parts.”

  Charles looked at me quizzically. Then he picked up his script to fulfill my illusion of his Gerry.

  Our company invaded Stockholm, Sweden, the next day. We had wanted snow, but our schedule had us arriving a little early in November for such cold.

  The English camera crew would now work side by side with Swedish grips and lighting technicians. Swedish actors would play the parts of the Swedes who first introduced me to trance channeling in my book. And we would actually film a trance channeling session in Swedish with the trance medium playing himself, and Ambres, the spiritual entity and teacher, playing himself. It would be the same process as with Kevin Ryerson and his entities, except it would be in Swedish.

  I was deposited at the Sheraton-Stockholm Hotel, which I noticed was adjacent to a railway station. I wondered if our company manager had changed the current on m
y sound machine. I decided to trust that he had, even though I remembered that Sweden matched no other current or amps in the world.

  After rehearsing well into the night with our Swedish actors, I retired to bed knowing I had to get up at 6:00 A.M. I closed the windows to my room as I heard a train streak by. I hated to close windows because I love fresh air. I got under the covers and turned on my sound machine. It obscured the train sounds very well.

  But it wasn’t long before I smelled smoke curling from my bedside table. I looked over at it. The sound machine was on fire, silently smoldering from within. And it was the only one we had. I could see the handwriting on the wall. This movie shoot was going to be about reliving illusion and the reality of a sound machine that never worked.

  I sat bolt upright in bed, fully aware that I was about to make a scene. It was 2:00 A.M. I got up, put on my robe, and marched down to Stan’s room and then to the room of the company manager. I woke them up and proceeded to read the riot act to them about the entire success of our film depending on the technological perfection of my sound machine. I told them that if I couldn’t sleep I was a terror and I wanted them to see the first act of my terrorism. It was effective. They were properly terror-struck. The machine was fixed in due time.

  As I lay in bed listening to the sound of Fast Surf Number II over the railway station below, I wondered in all seriousness why I had created the reality of that machine’s burning up. Clearly it had something to do with testing my sensitivity to terrorizing others. I had not passed the test very well.

  The word was out the next day regarding my sound machine. Several members of the crew inquired curiously about why it was so essential to me. I tried to explain “motivational suggestion,” and much to my surprise, not only were they interested in how that worked but they also expressed private interest in what I had written about. More than a few of them had had a grandmother or relative who professed to have been into the spiritual stuff for decades. Each crew member was interested in a different aspect of it. Some were intrigued with the reincarnation aspect, some with the eternal energy (the more technologically advanced related to this), some with the philosophy of “knowing we are all connected to the God-force,” some with the laws of cause and effect. I would have expected a California-based crew to resonate to the material in the script, but when I heard the English and Swedish crew members profess the same personal interest, I was once again reminded of how universal our individual searching was. Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where do we go when we die?

  As the television shooting hours unfolded I realized that making a miniseries was a way of life, not a project. There was time for nothing else, particularly when shooting on location. We quickly became a family attempting to survive the tick of the clock together. Sometimes we shot so long into the night that there was no food. I took to stuffing my tote bag with fruit and cheese and Danish, which the Swedes provided as a businessman’s breakfast adjacent to the morning elevator in the hotel. During the days there were jokes about “bagging” the pigeons instead of feeding them, or at least to save bits of bird bread for the crew. A kind of long-suffering gaiety actually developed out of the extended working hours and the universal difficulty of obtaining edible nourishment.

  The English production manager, an affable gentleman named Alex de Grunwald, whom I had worked with before, was lovingly dubbed the new president of Weight Watchers. They joked that he carried five weeks’ worth of food for the crew in his briefcase. Alex went to the crew and said Bob Geldof was on the phone wanting the crew to donate their leftover food to Ethiopia. He told them that two “sparks” (lighting technicians) were taken to the hospital suffering from cuts and abrasions while fighting over a peanut. He added that if Jesus appeared and offered to turn stones into loaves and fishes, he would personally put a stop to it. No one was to preempt his function….

  Alex came to us one night to plead with us to work another few hours with the promise of soup as a reward. He then produced spoons with holes in them. His time clock had tape plastered over the face of it. Many times he came to me to forgo my twelve-hour turnaround. (The Screen Actors Guild mandates twelve hours’ rest between working hours for its members.) A crew member yelled that he could offer me another picture after this with four weeks in Moscow, five weeks in Finland—no catering. I remember that Alex had been the production manager on Gandhi. I asked him if he wanted us all to look like that.

  Show business stories kept us going into the night as cold pizza and warm beer were scavenged from a local restaurant owned by an Italian-German couple. There were war stories about Bob Mitchum, Richard Burton, and even myself. Some of the crew remembered stories about me that I had forgotten long ago. They also remembered stories that never happened. I enjoyed them all—and had a few to tell myself. All in all, we were an excellent working group.

  We were supposed to see our English location dailies the first week in Sweden, but they didn’t get there until we were nearly finished. They were put on a plane bound for Tunisia. Instead, we got some interesting dailies called “Wet in Tunisia” while a bunch of Arabs were looking at my spiritual search.

  So we were literally shooting in the dark, as the saying goes, not knowing what the footage, makeup, hair, wardrobe, or acting looked like, which led our cameraman, Brad May, to hold up a white Styrofoam coffee cup for a light-meter reading in front of my face.

  “I may have to ask you to play your part as a coffee addict,” he said, “just to make sure there’s enough light on the subject.”

  The final shooting days in Sweden involved the scene with our Swedish trance medium. Most of the crew was looking forward to it. Others were uneasy. All knew they had a professional job to do regardless of their personal beliefs.

  Sturé Johansson, the trance medium, had been my first introduction to spiritual channeling years before, when I had come to Sweden to rendezvous with Gerry. Sturé channeled an ancient spiritual master called Ambres.

  The scene was set. The actors were rehearsed, the extras were present as the lights dimmed, and we all prepared for Ambres to come through, using the body of Johansson as an instrument. Three cameras were prepared to shoot simultaneously, and we had a well-stocked tape system for sound recording. Sturé said that Ambres knew his lines and the subjects he should address himself to. The hired actors would ask the rehearsed questions of Ambres and he would answer them as he had answered them ten years previously.

  Butler called for quiet and then yelled, “Roll ’em.” All the cameras turned over as Sturé began to go into trance. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was being recorded visually and with audio.

  We all sat mesmerized as we waited. Suddenly Sturé’s right hand began to vibrate. It was Ambres’ energy about to make its entrance. I looked over at the sound engineer. He was staring at the dials on his machine in front of him. He turned them in a frenzy. Then he switched on to another auxiliary machine. His hand flew to his earphones as though he was hearing more than what was happening on the set. I looked around at each camera. The operators gave me the high sign. So far so good.

  Then Ambres was in. He stood up with a hunched-over posture and immediately pronounced a benediction on everyone in the room, including the crew. Sture’s right hand ceased vibrating.

  The first actor asked a rehearsed question, which was about the nature of creativity in regard to creation itself. Ambres explained that we each create our world with every moment that we live. He said creation is a natural expression, that to be alive is to be creative. He expostulated on that subject for a while, sticking to the script remarkably well, until someone asked about the meaning of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh. Here he diverged from the script somewhat, explaining that the Pyramid is a Bible in stone, that it stands at the epicenter of the earth’s land mass, and that we will learn to read its true message before this century is gone.

  As he was explaining the Pyramid, as though on cue, every church bell in the surrounding area began to chim
e. The church bells continued until he was through with the subject. I could see the sound engineer was still disturbed by what he was hearing through his earphones.

  The questions continued, scripted according to our first session together. Ambres was acting the part of himself, just as I was. He was precise, economical, profound, and clear.

  The cameras, almost simultaneously, ran out of film. The sound man needed to reload too. Butler yelled “Cut” and then turned to me to ask Ambres to “hold his thoughts” while we prepared for more filming. Ambres had other ideas on his mind. He came straight toward me and began to speak—in Swedish, of course, which was immediately translated by an assistant of Sturé’s. I wondered what his urgency was all about. The translation went something like this:

  “You have greatly expanded your knowledge,” said Ambres. “But now your inner wisdom must come into balance with it. You must be doubly careful now because you have seen so much of the hologram of life so quickly.”

  “What do you mean ‘so quickly,’ Ambres? And why are you concerned?”

  He paused to rejuvenate the energy around Sture’s body.

  “In the ancient esoteric schools we used to use the needles, too, when the student desired to see the past and future more quickly. But the swiftness exacts its price.”

  “The needles?” I asked.

  Ambres nodded.

  “Yes, the needles,” he said. “You have written of the needles in your new book in English.”

  Then it hit me. He was referring to Dancing in the Light, which had just been published in America. I had not mentioned it in Sweden because it hadn’t been translated into Swedish yet. The final chapters of that book dealt with a marathon ten-day psychic acupuncture experience I had undergone in Galisteo, New Mexico, with a superb spiritual acupuncturist named Chris Griscom. Acupuncture can be used to open certain channels that assist in past-life recall. With the acupuncture needles placed in strategic positions, I had “seen” many past lives of mine in conjunction with other people—which helped to clarify some of the conflicts we were experiencing today in this present lifetime. Ambres was referring to the effects of the acupuncture needles.