THOUGHTS ABOUT STELLA ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON

At some point in 1976 my college girlfriend said to me, “Stella Adler is teaching a master class this summer in L.A. You should audition for it. I took it last summer and it was incredible.” I was a member of the Mulholland Tennis Club and I suggested to one of the older women in the club (I had directed her in a one-act fund raiser for the club) that we audition for the class. We did a mother-son scene from a beautiful little play called The Subject Was Roses and Stella, who took charge of the auditions herself, told us that we were in the class – and that we should bring the scene in the first day. Quite honestly, I was shocked. I expected her to suggest we take the more elementary class, but she wanted us in the advanced class. I look back with amusement on the scene. We had heard a rumor that Stella liked props, so we brought in half my friend’s kitchen. Years later someone, who had been in the class, remarked how brave they thought it was that we went first – and also how surprising it was that we had so many props. 

I loved the summer. I did another scene in the class with a friend from college. Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw. I had not realized at the time that Stella was obsessed with plays that had big ideas and to this day I can hear Stella’s voice: “Brilliant! Brilliant Shaw! Both of you!”

Towards the end of the summer there was a moment in class when Stella gave one of her speeches that some of us referred to as the sermon on the stage – where she looked at us and said, “If it’s the business you’re after, then you’re in the right place. But if it’s an art form you’re after, you must come East.” It was a fist in the gut moment for me. I had been working very successfully for the past six years, since graduating from college. I moved to New York the day after graduating from SMU in Dallas. One job led to another, including six months at Cambridge as the American Director of the Oxford-Cambridge Shakespeare Company. Through an accident of timing I was back at SMU when the Bob Hope Show was doing a TV special from the theater Bob had donated to the school. I ended up working for them for a week and they offered me a job in L.A. I spent the next five years working for the Bob Hope Show, which included four USO tours to Viet Nam – and two summer jobs with the Kraft Music Hall from London. Having the summer off from Bob Hope, I took a job (for $25 a week) as the assistant director on a production starring Lee Grant. We hit it off and she asked me if I wanted to work on a short film she was directing. She later got me a go-fer job on a film shooting in Barcelona and London – and then about the time I met Stella, Lee had me hired on a piece of shit film at Universal Studios, called Airport 77. 

This is all something of a background to explain that I was absolutely miserable. There was a point where I wondered if I were doomed to spend my life writing new lyrics to “Thanks for the Memory”. It was a bundle of mixed emotions. I kept pinching myself:  I was a kid from Texas who knew no one when I started out – and here I was at the White House having dinner (Richard Nixon's) with the Bob Hope Troupe that was en route to military bases in Vietnam over Christmas. And, to this day, I have fabulous dinner party stories of people I met and experiences I had … but, it’s strange. It wasn’t enough. I was twenty-nine, having had a surprisingly full show business life, and I actually recall being miserable. I was working my ass off, making money, driving a cool car  … and it all felt completely unsatisfying. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m a happily superficial person, but I think what bothered me is that I had worked myself into a life that demanded a kind of success that I didn’t really like or respect. Working on plays in Stella’s class that summer was completely fulfilling. So when she said that we should come East if we were looking for an art form, I realized what was missing from my life. Like the newly converted, I dropped everything in Los Angeles and moved to New York. I had a place to live, no job and no real game plan, except to study with Stella Adler, who seemed to have the answer to what I was looking for in my life.

I didn’t immediately go to class, however. With the money I’d made from Bob Hope and money I got from my father, I’d made a documentary about a dancer. This was one of my many unsuccessful projects. I was fascinated with the creative process and creative people – and I think I thought that with this little documentary I would figure out why people create. I had chosen a dancer as the first subject. I showed the film to a film company in New York, who immediately asked me to come work for them. Class would have to wait. The film company ended up producing a Tennessee Williams play on Broadway, which suddenly put me in another career place – and in this ridiculous scenario, Stella and I suddenly had a shared social group. We both knew Tennessee. I invited her to the opening, of course, and we would see each other periodically. The Tennessee Williams play was a flop. A major flop. I had a temporary meltdown, which lasted about five minutes: a primal scream in the middle of the night in the middle of Central Park, where I collapsed. I recovered quickly, walked home and the doorman at my building said, “Good evening, Mr. Justice,” and I felt like a person again. 

I enrolled in class the next Fall. I continued attempting to produce, but Stella’s classes were saving me. At the time I was taking Technique three days a week, Script Analysis and Scene Study twice a week. I had Stella about twelve hours a week. Maybe more. At one point she asked me if I would come home with her and serve her dinner guests. Something she often asked students to do. I agreed, but then it turned out I knew two of the people at dinner (a director and an actress), and I ended up joining them. 

It took awhile for me to put the pieces together. Based no doubt on a collection of failures. I did not learn easily. I had two extremely close friends in college. As consummate dreamers we used to say naive things like, “We’ll be on Broadway together by the time we’re thirty.” I’d already been on Broadway with the Tennessee Williams play by the time I was thirty, but the three of us landed on Broadway together at the age of thirty-one. Slightly behind schedule. Jack wrote it. Garland directed it. I produced it. And our college friend, John, designed it. As it happens, this play also flopped. The recovery from this failure was not five minutes screaming in the park. I pretty much didn’t leave my apartment for a month. 

During this period of mourning I kept harkening back to classes with Stella when she talked about the conflict between art and business. I began to attend Stella’s classes in earnest. While working a terrible part-time job in the mornings and going to classes in the afternoons, I was finally feeling as if I were getting to who I really was. About the same time my friend Jack wrote another play which opened at a not-for-profit theater and was getting a lot of attention. When the not-for-profit production closed,  they asked me if I would like to open it commercially. I did and it ran for five and a half years, becoming the longest running play in off-Broadway history. Stella came to the party for the fifth year celebration – and was in fabulous form. A few years into the run of the play Jack (the writer), Garland (the director) and I bought a house in Sagaponack, just down the road from Stella’s house in Water Mill. [An eight bedroom house on half an acre - $135,000 - imagine!] I didn’t see Stella all that much, but if I called to say hello, she would always invite me to dinner.

Once I committed to work in Stella’s class, I was extremely focused. By that time Stella and I had become “friends”. I put it in quotes because I don’t think that was really one of the things one became with Stella. She liked going places with me because I wasn’t any trouble and I knew how to subtly bring up topics for Stella to talk about. I would be invited to dinner at her apartment no doubt because I could hold up conversation on the other end of the table.  On one historic occasion, Eddie put together a surprise birthday party for Stella and I was invited and informed that I was to keep Stella entertained during the dinner part of the celebration downstairs, while guests were filing into the townhouse where the party was taking place upstairs. He would let me know (after dinner) when everyone was there and I was supposed to simply say to Stella, “Why don’t we go upstairs.” As we came up the stairs I saw Warren Beatty sitting and talking to Leonard Bernstein. The whole party was like this. Everyone of cultural notoriety in New York was there. A very Stella Adler Event. 

Although I never admitted it, and even though I knew that Stella liked me, and enjoyed spending time with me, ... she never really took my acting seriously. It wasn’t that important to her really. She had many acquaintances that weren’t actors - and I was a successful New York producer, so it was fine. But it wasn’t quite enough for me. There was a moment at the end of a semester when I did an extraordinary amount of work on an exercise. I don’t think anyone could have done this exercise better in the history of the Stella Adler Conservatory! At the end of the exercise you were meant to be shot from a helicopter and die. To this day I love demonstrating what I did for this in class because the juxtaposition of this intense exercise, which including wading across a swamp and going through a barbed wire fence and signaling for help, was followed by the pissy little shriek I made when I got shot from the helicopter. It was beyond laughable. Almost pathetic. At the end of the exercise Stella said with full force, “Darling, you’re a good actor. The thing that’s going to keep you from being a great actor is that you’re so goddam middle class, you think it’s unmanly to scream.”

Proving her wrong was my mission for the next year. It was torturous. I really had grown up in a household that was so goddam middle class that no one yelled, no one confronted, and any variation in behavior was met with a belt. It was huge to even figure out how to do it. But for the last class the next year, I did a monologue from an Arthur Miller play in Stella’s Scene Study class. It was political and strong with committed big ideas, all of which I connected to. At the end of the monologue, Stella announced, “Well, you did it!” And there was fun dramatic pause before she added, “And it’s about time.” She then told a Marlon Brando story, which was always a good sign. The next weekend I had dinner at her house in Water Mill and as she walked me to the car (and I can still see completely the visual of this), she very quietly said to me, “You must want it very badly. Because I never thought you’d get it.”

There is no question that I learned to act for Stella’s approval. It’s not the best reason to do something, but I confess it was mine. I pretty much didn’t care what anyone else thought about my work. The most remarkable thing is that she knew I was a teacher long before it even occurred to me that I could do it. I’m guessing it was about 1988, by which time I had won an Oscar and an Emmy and decided I should move to Los Angeles and explore more career options. Stella’s Los Angeles school had just opened and she was giving a master class again, which I attended. I had been working with an actor who’d been cast in the stage play version of “On The Waterfront” and I decided that he should do the scene for Stella. I knew the scene was successful, since she invited both of us over for dinner after class. About a week later I got a call from the dreaded Irene who said that Stella would like to see me. She asked me what I planned to do while I was waiting for my producing career to take off and I confessed I hadn’t thought about it. She said simply, but with force: “I want you to teach for me.” The funny thing is when I went back through all my notebooks from her classes I realized that all my notes were the kind of notes someone makes when they’re a teacher. Actors always only take notes on things that they specifically think will benefit them. My notes were different. They were based on specific concepts that could be passed on to any actor. I’m still amazed that Stella knew I was a teacher. As it turns out it was exactly the answer I was looking for during all the uncertainty about what to do with my life.

I think my biggest contribution as a teacher, aside from an ability to distill concepts of acting down to something practical and usable, is something that only could have come from Stella: the necessity of plays being about ideas. I worked with an older woman back before Covid and one day after my class she commented, “I’ve worked with many teachers and you’re the only one who has ever talked about Ideas.”

And that is Stella!

Thoughts about Stella on a Thursday afternoon. A funny epilogue. There is a student at the New York Adler School, who came across my life and I’ve started working with him. He’s only nineteen and therefore has absolutely no life experience to draw from (especially since he’s from Las Vegas), but I’m trying to save him. He was trying to figure out about his other teachers and this is a text I sent him earlier today.

I’m not sure that your teachers are just trying to protect their jobs, I think they are just limited in their knowledge. Teaching is a skill … a craft … a talent. A passion. I consider teaching to be the highest form of giving to other human beings. It’s not just something you do because you can’t get acting jobs. Stella knew I was a teacher long before I did. I don’t know how she knew, but she recognized it. For the first eight years of teaching, I didn’t feel entitled to call myself a teacher. I knew how big it was. I hadn’t earned the right to call myself one. Mark Ruffalo reminded me recently that I started teaching him 35 years ago. I know what I know … and I know that I know it better than anyone else doing it. It’s not ego. I’ve earned this.

I’m supposed to be studying French for a lesson this afternoon. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing this. Much more than learning verb conjugations.

Best to you.

Milton