DIFFERENCES THAT UNITE US

Karen Black was in my cohort at Northwestern University School of Speech.  Not for the whole time, because she disappeared.  At the time I had no idea why -- some people may have known.  Some of us assumed it was because Alvina Krause didn’t like her.  Maybe AK didn’t like Robert Benedetti, her roommate at the time, either, but he was a big smart guy no one pushed around and he found a way around AK.  He was just the kind of man she always tried to press into heroic parts, but he resisted and some thought that was why she resisted Karen Black.

Sometimes you can find more insight into someone through their dislikes than their likes.  There’s a great deal of information about Karen out there now because of her recent death, and that includes the memorial in Hollywood which can be seen in compilation at this link: http://vimeo.com/75189301   The best parts of the video are the beginning, which is a montage of clips from ALL her movies (quite different from each other) and the end, which is a montage of still photos from birth to death, some of them shocking and most of them seductive.  

I was fascinated to see Karen’s sister, who looks much like her.  You get a pretty good idea of a well-loved extravagant sweet non-intellectual child-woman who loved sex, cats, and -- well, long walks on country roads, sunsets, kittens, and . . . other corny stuff.  She could sing and compose.  She wrote plays.  She also very shrewdly played scary roles in horror films and was often funny.  There’s a good deal of intelligence behind that, which would exasperate some people.  It’s hard to know how much she was watching herself.

My basic theory is that AK didn’t like Karen because Karen scared her:  she was a person who had abandoned all caution, while AK had staked her life on prudence and discretion in relationships, academic life, and  -- well, she wasn’t always cautious when she taught acting.  In some ways she was as instinctive and as able to pick up on undertow and subtext as KB was, and everyone says KB was an ace at it.  But KB always supported and appreciated those inner springs, while AK wanted to analyze and shape them, which is what she understood to be the task of the actor, especially a traditional realistic proscenium stage actor trained to address tragedy and heroism.  Big ideas, subtly expressed.

Personally, AK had to have respectability because that was her safety.  She was a small, ambitious woman who grew up the youngest in a big family on a Mid-West farm and survived with a sonorous voice, a vigorous erect body, and the singlemindedness of a sword.  If she had been labeled a lesbian, her career would have ended.  She never risked acting professionally.   It would be going too far to say that she had a German northern temperament while Karen Black had a Mediterranean Jewish soul.  But not much.

Karen was a voluptuous, generously sensuous, man-loving person whose salvation was innocence.  She didn’t cling or demand or try to prove anything.  So far the only complaint I’ve seen her make is that she was treated badly on the set of “Day of the Locust.”  It’s a bitter, punishing piece of madness and somehow that got attached to her.

The career of Benedetti was quite different.  I haven’t had anything to do with either of them until recently and then only read Benedetti’s books, watched his movies, emailed a bit.  KB is on Twitter. The two lives went in quite different directions and yet stayed together in friendship, which was always KB’s policy.  Karen’s husband released the story of why she suddenly disappeared from our cohort and why she and Bene stayed such close friends: they conceived a child together at Northwestern.  http://karenblackactress.blogspot.com  Both biological parents have embraced this woman, who is an artist with family.

It’s hard to imagine either one of her bio-parents considering abortion and in those days it was probably illegal if not life-threatening.  The stigma, lack of social support, and theatre dreams of both youngsters made raising a child alone impossible.  The two families were local, proud, and who knows how they felt?  Or whether they knew.   Adoption in those days was rigidly private -- the government SWORE it would be forever hidden information.  

There’s no such thing.  

The State of Illinois has opened their adoption records so that the child made right under our noses -- I suppose some of us might have known, including AK -- found her bioparents, Karen and Bene.  No doubt results are mixed and such an enterprise is not always well-advised, but in this case all three had known about each other and tried to find each other.  It turned out just fine.  The Benedetti family, generous and warm Italians that they are, pulled her in -- along with her children and grandchildren.  She and Karen painted together towards the end and she helped with Karen’s care.  KB refused morphine as much as she could bear so as to absorb this happiness.

Benedetti has a strong social conscience with a special concern for African Americans in the South.  Karen was more of a “mom” who took care of everyone, regardless of who they were.  Whether the social constriction the two shared as the price of love was part of creating their ethic or whether their natural character saw them through the ordeal, I see it as a triumph in the end.  Integrity.

I suspect that when KB looked at AK, she saw a path she could never take and wouldn’t want to.  All that caution, all that self-discipline and self-denial would have been impossible for her.  Conversely, I suspect that when AK looked at KB she saw a life she could never lead: all restraints dropped, all goals surrendered to fate and hard work.  I sat in the back of Annie May Swift auditorium, watching, and was more like AK than KB, but appreciated KB anyway.  Do we have to make choices? 

In some ways, AK’s choice betrayed her, because her fame and the emotional pressure she put on her students to break them out of their shells scared the corporate managers of the university apparatus so that they eased her out a little early.  She was wise to have the backup of Eagles Mere and then Bloomsberg where all the calls were her own and a certain amount of abandonment was part of the regime, so long as you got to rehearsals on time.  She and Lucy spent wonderful summer Sundays out in a little boat (it had to have been pea green) with big hats against sunburn. AK scribbled on a notepad, thinking furiously about the playwrights’ knots to untie for an increasingly savvy audience.  All the while Lucy in her faithful, rather stout way, rowed quietly along on the mirroring water.  KB’s idea of such intimacy might have meant stripping and plunging in, which would have ended local affection.  Except for the stalwarts who would heroically swim out to save her.

A writer’s game -- watching, making word pictures, passing judgment on people many have loved -- is a risky business.  Maybe more immoral that sharing physical pleasure when the opportunity arises.  Maybe more immoral than pressing youngsters against their own psychic thorns in hopes of awakening them.

In a way AK probably had something to do with KB’s development but I don’t know whether anyone ever asked either of them.  Sometimes it’s the people who wave us on who teach us most.  Like, not to waste our time on a fate that’s not ours.  Karen didn’t need Eagles Mere -- she was a natural film personality, not a stage presence, though she did well in New York.  It was the California climate that let her bloom, and we are grateful.

MEMORABLE ACTRESSES

http://eeditionmobile.latimes.com/Olive/Tablet/LATimes/SharedArticle.aspx?href=LAT%2F2013%2F08%2F12&id=Ar03501

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/10233540/Karen-Black-The-face-of-the-counterculture.html

Articles about Karen Black are accumulating on the Internet and probably will keep doing so for a long time.  She definitely had an impact on the culture, both the “low” and the “high.”  And I’m sure she was pretty vivid in the lives of those around her as well.  I think of the Flaubert quote I keep at the top of my computer:  “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  

Among the small cohort that has gotten back in touch via email since the years 1957 to 1961, the reaction to Karen has been helpful in understanding the role and contribution of the legendary Alvina Krause -- not because Karen was a protegée who achieved the stardom some were seeking, but because AK wanted nothing to do with her!  Was even mean to her!  So why?  (That’s what AK would ask, if she were being fair.)

Really effective teachers are like heart surgeons: intimate, incendiary, and relentless.  For some they are life-saving kindlers -- for others, they start conflagrations of identity that may need professional help to recover.  I can think of two -- maybe three -- who landed in hospitals, “decompensated” in the jargon of our times.  The kind of teacher who does incredible things is creating an instrument for acting -- not a star.  What makes such a teacher so dangerous is not so much their methods or intentions, but the hopes that the students bring:  “Oh, set me on fire, Miss Krause!  Make me burn with a fine clean flame!”  In other words, they handed their talent over to someone else instead of exploring it themselves.  She knew this.  She tried to tell them this.  Sometimes she went too far.  It is a kind of work that can be painful.

But she could not resist taking on a few of the riskier ones.  Karen was not one of “chosen”, but Paula Ragusa/Prentiss was.  Somehow, mostly because she had a prince of a partner (Dick Benjamin), Paula survived.  Her sister did not, but I didn’t know Ann.  

Karen also had a strong partner then:  Robert Benedetti (Bene to friends) http://robertbenedetti.com/Biography.htm , a formidable polymath whom AK tried to tempt into her more ambitious productions (“Oedipus,” “Lear”) with no success.  Both Karen and Bene withdrew from the AK camp.  They thought for themselves, found their own way with spectacular results.  Unconventional.

So that’s one circle of this complex.  There might be other people in it.  I won’t name names for the other circles.  There were individuals (writers, observers) who belonged to no group.  Given that most of us were not yet 21 and given the slow awakening in the larger culture, it was not too surprising that there were groups based on sexuality, including homosexuality.  Perhaps it is more surprising that the gay men shared with “sisters,” who mostly just hadn’t decided.  (I was saving myself for Montana cowboys.)  Those gays didn’t really know what it meant yet.

Another group was a professional set of people whose families were Broadway actors but who for some reason didn’t choose the Stella Adler/Lee Strasberg classes, so they came looking for AK, who was considered an equally good Method acting teacher.  This group wasn’t looking at Hollywood.  They stayed on Broadway and in the touring companies and summer repertories that spin off from Broadway.  Still acting today.

Those with an academic perspective split into two groups:  those who were Ph.D. analytical people who could get into trouble if they challenged AK.  Of course, challenge is at the heart of a Ph.D. candidate -- questioning is the name of the game.  But AK never got a doctorate and never absorbed the ethic.  To her it was defiance.  Others, who aligned themselves with her more loyally, were sometimes drawn into a kind of family relationship, as though they were the sorts of sons who would become vicars in the estate’s parish.

People who were invited to Eagles Mere, AK’s repertory company in a tiny Pennsylvania resort town on a pristine lake, were another group, overlapping the previous.  Working under the influence of that intoxicating drug No-Sleep, we did what we considered to be amazing work while AK used every trick she had and rejoiced when they were effective.  Certainly we learned our limits, which usually turned out to be a lot farther out there than we might have guessed -- even for me, who was only a costumer.

Like everything else in the great cultural sea-change that roared through the world in the Sixties and Seventies, theatre transformed, veering into absurdism, dada, spectacle, and shock-performing in the actual laps of the audience, maybe sans costumes.  At the same time on television the series were creating the image of a strange Stepford happy-families way of life that has since boomeranged into vampires and zombies.  All the while the actual world was far more like “Five Easy Pieces” and “Easy Rider.”  If we were lucky.

The “Method” was created in Edwardian times for an Edwardian kind of theatre: prosceniums, realism, mimesis of gentry -- very “Downton Abbey” with an echo of Shakespeare and Greek theatre, which were all the rage in the Fifties when I went to high school.  Well, they don’t wear out, do they?  I loved the movie “Being Julia,” which hit all the stops in the kind of work AK understood: an elocution base, a comedy skill, and a thread of darkness.  No need to get either nude or screwed.  At least not onstage.  But if Karen Black were persuaded it was necessary, she would.  With style.  So would Paula -- if she were in the mood.  Both women were a helluva lot more intelligent than they seemed.  

This little cohort remembers a lot of indelible moments, mostly hilarious.  I would have loved to have seen Karen play a scene with Paula.  Both women turned out to be effective in front of a camera.  Method acting is really powerful when handled skillfully in close-up acting where the flicker of an eyelash expresses a major realization.  AK never addressed film acting, but her Method was effective anyway because it had a sound base. 

I think it was important to AK to keep theatre at a genteel cultural level, the sort of respect one once gave to a well-traveled Chautauqua speaker like Dean Dennis who recruited her and supported her career.  She was afraid of side shows, burlesque, carnie downscale stuff, because she needed the respectability -- the assumption of Christianity -- in the first place (she was, after all, from a small Midwestern town) to distinguish this acting from the kind that was a euphemism for prostitution.  At the same time, her roots were in progressivism, aspiration to the highest level, idealism.  In the Fifties film was in love with Bergman, Russian realism, and French Cinema Veritée -- all of them still hanging onto the aftermath of war.  Some of the students loved it dearly, but though she never said so, AK was not one to appreciate the gutter.  Or even nihilism.   Oh, maybe Chekhov.  She wanted to be serious and despised Helen Hayes for her sentimentality.  And girly curls.

Extraordinary people are generally more many-sided than monolithic, but no one can be all things to all others and much of life is a matter of finding one’s niche.  There’s really no NEED to see Karen Black as a protegée of AK or anyone else.  But those of us who knew both of them at NU have not forgotten either of them, one way or another.  They both knew how to seduce.  Far more than just sexually.