Shattered Love by Richard Chamberlain

Author:Richard Chamberlain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

THE FIRST MINISERIES

My agent, Flo Allen, called and said NBC was planning a mammoth twenty-five-hour miniseries dramatizing James Michener’s bestselling historical novel Centennial, which described America’s tumultuous early westward expansion. They wanted me to play Alexander McKeag, a Scots trapper who would dominate the first four hours. McKeag was a hardy, capable fellow who combined masculine prowess with a degree of sensitivity unusual on the frontier. The huge production was to be shot pretty much on location around the actual Platte River in Colorado, a far piece from New York.

I dreaded telling Martin about the job because it would mean leaving our home for months just when we were really getting close. And as I’d guessed, Martin was dead set against my going.

I agonized over the decision, but in my gut I knew I had to go. At that time I was my career, my career was me. It wasn’t clear to me then, but looking back I can see that nothing could stand between me and a great job. Without my work, which I had always felt was a kind of destiny, I simply wouldn’t exist.

Young Martin felt abandoned and hurt, but he didn’t bolt as I feared he might. When I returned home months later, he was there. Luckily, in New York he had his own career to pursue.

It’s my guess that underlying many highly successful careers is a kind of focused mania, a whisper of madness that requires constant achievement to stabilize severe inner imbalance.

At Pomona College, a professor of medieval art once interrupted his lecture to deliver this incisive pronouncement. Referring to the world’s most renowned artists, he warned us never to wish to be great. Greatness, he said, results from such severe emotional and mental distress that the artist has no choice but to achieve extraordinary creativity in order to balance his precarious inner anguish and remain sane.

I am certainly no Picasso, but I balanced the dark forces of my fears with the bright lights of creativity and success in a similar way. My career was ninety percent of my identity, leaving about ten percent of me for the rest of my life. By sailing off to do Centennial, I quite willingly jeopardized a relationship that was destined to enrich my entire life. And yet, given my love of acting and my intensely neurotic need for continual success and celebrity, I’m not sure I could have chosen differently.

Michener was not known for being terse. His novel covered nearly the entire sweep of American history. It began with the early frontier stories, and my character of McKeag advanced from young manhood to ripe old age in the first four hours. Near the end of shooting the fourth hour my fellow actors Robert Conrad and the beautiful Barbara Carrera, who played my one love, Clay Basket, began to be replaced by new stories and younger characters. We sort of faded from the future just like aging folks in real life. It was a bit eerie to feel the production continuing on without us, leaving us behind.

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