The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest of the clothing the young man had been wearing, and in a voice that was thirty years younger than the body from which it spoke, he explained, “I won’t be needing these, ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of them.” The voice of the young man, from this husk.
And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he limped and rolled through the front door into the filthy streets, another tramp gone to join the tide of lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a river and an ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a drunk tank or a doorway or a park bench.
Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in fleabags, abandoned warehouses, cellars, gutters, and on tenement rooftops; he shared and wallowed in the nature and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.
For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly washed-out hopeless rumdum, with rheumy eyes and palsied hands and a weak bladder.
One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first day of casting for Sweet Miracles, the Monday of the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin Theatre, where he auditioned for the part in the clothes he had worn for the past six weeks.
The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances, and Richard Becker won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award as the finest male performer of the year. He also won the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the year.
He was twenty-two years old at the time.
The following season, after Sweet Miracles had gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through the pages of Variety, that John Foresman & T. H. Searle were about to begin casting for House of Infidels, the posthumous script by Odets, the last he ever wrote. Through friends in the Foresman & Searle offices, he obtained a copy of the script, and selected a part he considered massive in its potentialities.
The role of an introspective and tormented artist, depressed by the level of commercialism to which his work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his hands in a foundry.
When the first-night critics called Richard Becker’s conception of Tresk, the artist, “a pinnacle of thespic intuition” and noted, “His authority in the part led members of the audience to ask one another how such a sensitive actor could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a foundry worker,” they had no idea that Richard Becker had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping plant and foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had once been in a terrible fire, for his hands were marked by the ravages of great heat. After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two characterizations that were immediately ranked with the most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever witnessed, Richard Becker’s reputation began to build a legend.
The Man Who IS The “Method,” they called him, in perceptive articles and interviews. Lee Strasberg of the Actors’ Studio, when questioned, remarked that Becker had never been a student, but had the occasion arisen, he might well have paid him to attend. In any event, Richard Becker’s command of the Stanislavski theory of total immersion in a part became a working example of the validity of the concept. No mere scratcher and stammerer, Richard Becker was the man he pretended to be, on a stage.
Of his private life little was known, for he let it be known that if he was to be totally convincing in a characterization, he wanted no intrusive shadow of himself to stand between the audience and the image he offered. Hollywood’s offers of stardom were refused, for as Theatre Arts commented in a brief feature on Richard Becker:
The gestalt that Becker projects across a row of footlights would be dimmed and turned two-dimensional on the Hollywood screen. Becker’s art is an ultimate distillation of truth and metamorphosis that requires the reality of stage production to retain its purity. It might even be noted that Richard Becker acts in four dimensions, as opposed to the merely craftsmanlike three of his contemporaries. Surely no one could truly argue with the fact that watching a Becker performance is almost a religious experience. We can only congratulate Richard Becker on his perceptiveness in turning down studio bids. The years of building a backlog of definitive parts (effectively ruining them for other actors who were condemned to play them after Becker had said all there was to say) passed, as Richard Becker became, in turn, a Hamlet that cast new lights on the Freudian implications of Shakespeare…a fiery Southern segregationist whose wife reveals her octaroon background…a fast-talking salesman come to grips with futility and cowardice…a many-faceted Marco Polo…a dissolute and totally amoral pimp, driven by a loathing for women, to sell his own sister into evil…a ruthless politician, dying of cancer and senility…
And the most challenging part he had ever undertaken, the recreation, in the play by Tennessee Williams, of the deranged religious zealot, trapped by his own warring emotions, into the hammer-murder of an innocent girl. When they found him, in the model’s apartment off Gramercy Place, they were unable to get a coherent story of why he had done the disgusting act, for he had lapsed into a stentorian tone of Biblical fervor, pontificating about the blood of the Iamb and the curse of Jezebel and the eternal fires of Perdition. The men from Homicide numbered among their ranks a rookie, fresh to the squad, who became desperately ill at the sight of the fouled walls and the crumpled form wedged into the tiny kitchenette; he became violently ill, and was taken from the apartment a few minutes before Richard Becker was led away.
The trial was a manifest sadness to all who had seen him onstage, and the jury did not even have to be sent out to agree on a verdict of insanity.
After all, whoever the fanatic was that the defense put on the stands, he was not sane, and was certainly no longer Richard Becker, the actor.
For Dr. Charles Tedrow, the patient in restraining room 16 was a constant involvement. He was unable to divorce himself from the memory of a night three years before, when he had sat in an orchestra seat at the Henry Miller Theatre and seen Richard Becker, light and adroit, as the comical Tosspot in that season’s hit comedy, Never A Rascal.
He was unable to separate his thoughts from the shape and form of the actor who had so immersed himself in The Method that for a time, in three acts, he was a blundering, maundering, larcenous alcoholic with a penchant for pomegranates and (as Becker had mouthed it onstage) “barratry on the low seas!” Separate them from this weird and many-faceted creature that lived its many lives in the padded cell numbered 16? Impossible.
At first, there had been reporters, who had come to interview the Good Doctor in charge of Becker’s case; and to the last of these (for Dr. Tedrow had instituted restrictions on this sort of publicity) he had said, “To a man like Richard Becker, the world was very important. He was very much a man of his times; he had no real personality of his own, with the exception of that one overwhelming faculty and need to reflect the world around him. He was an actor in the purest sense of the word. The world gave him his personality, his attitudes, his reason and his facade for existence. Take those away from him, clap him up in a padded cell—as we’ve been forced to do—and he begins to lose touch with reality.”
“I understand,” the reporter had inquired carefully, “that Becker is reliving his roles, one after another. Is that true, Dr. Tedrow?”
Charles Tedrow was, above all else, a compassionate man, and his fury at this remark, revealing as it did a leak in the sanitarium’s security policy, was manifest. “Richard Becker is undergoing what might be called, in psychiatric terms, ‘induced hallucinatory regression.’ In his search for some reality, there in that room, he has fastened onto the method of assuming characters’ moods he had played onstage. From what I’ve been able to piece together from reviews of his shows, he is going back from the most recent to the next and the next and so on.” The reporter had asked more questions, more superficial and phantasmagoric assumptions, until Dr. Charles Tedrow had concluded the interview rudely.