Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [20]
Most actors in New York City find themselves at HB Studio at one point or another. It was founded by Viennese director Herbert Berghof and his wife, actress and master teacher Uta Hagen. Her book Respect for Acting would become my bible for the next five years. Annotated with exclamation points and underlined words, it went everywhere with me. In the moment, objective, inner monologue. I was learning a new language, and it was revelatory.
Edward Morehouse taught the teenage class, based on Uta’s ten object exercises. A man of meager praise, he berated his students, often imitating them to make his point. He could be cruel, but he was always right, and I was hungry to learn. One Saturday after my third attempt at the fourth wall exercise, I waited at the front of the room for the usual onslaught of invectives. To my shock and that of the other students, there were none. As I walked back to my seat, his silence rang louder than any applause, and my face was hot with pride. I felt something stick that day, not just in my mind, but in my body. It was like a compass finding north for the first time; the needle would waver, but it knew where it was meant to land.
Soon he invited me to join his Adult Scene Study class. There, in a dark room off an airshaft, I found a world I loved as much as parties and prowling the streets with my friends. I may have had little in common with the others in the class—for one thing, I was much younger—but for the first time I found a kind of fraternity, the odd bond that exists among actors, those who are most themselves when they are someone else and most alive when they are telling stories in the words of others.
Perhaps it was the sober way Beryl Durham had said, “You won’t get what you need here,” but I knew not to speak of it at Brearley. I’d been in Seventeen magazine twice by that time—first in a two-page “makeover,” where I had a crush on the photographer but was horrified by the amounts of pink lip gloss and purple eye shadow, and then modeling Victorian lingerie for an article titled “Becoming a Woman.” This was a sort of infamy. Some girls smiled hard but behind the smile was, Why her and not me? An English teacher remarked with such sourness I thought it might cause permanent facial damage, “You might want to consider Professional Children’s School.” I kept it secret, along with the dance classes at Alvin Ailey and Luigi’s and the agents who sent me out on auditions. You won’t get what you need here.
The fall before he turned sixteen, John went to Phillips Andover, a newly coed boarding school in Massachusetts, and I saw less of him. When I did see him, it was with a mix of last year’s troops and some of his new Andover friends. We’d meet up at 1040 and listen to Exile on Main Street in his bedroom before heading out for the night. Invariably, with his fist as a mike, John would do his Jagger imitation. No longer a follower, he was loud, confident, all over the place. But I began to notice that when he talked to me, he got quiet.
My friend Margot and I were walking down Lexington Avenue after school one day, the street thick with bus fumes and grade school boys juggling pizza slices and their book bags. Margot linked her arm in mine, and we steered our way through the sea of blue blazers. She was trying to hold back a secret. “I have good gossip,” she finally confessed. “John’s in love. It’s serious.” She had it from a friend who’d heard it from a friend who knew someone who lived on his hall at Andover.
We stopped for a moment, the boys jostling around us, and sighed. Not because we pined for him—we had boyfriends and were consumed by those dramas—but because we were like so many East Side private school girls: We felt protective. Despite