Song of Brooklyn by Marc Eliot

Author:Marc Eliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767929998
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

JOHN KARLEN: In Brooklyn, guys jumped from the rooftops of six-story buildings, across alleys, just to prove how tough they were. Not even on a dare. Just on an existential level, just to do it. If they didn’t make it and they fell to the ground, they were dead. That meant in retrospect they were not tough enough to live in Brooklyn. I did it three or four times. Macho bullshit made me, and luckily I was fast and could jump, or I’d be dead now.

When I was eighteen my best buddy went into the air force. He was stationed in Denver, Colorado, and sent me a letter telling me about how great the food and the women were. That was it for me. I joined the next day. Before that I had been out of Brooklyn once in my life, for one week, in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, with two friends while I was a teenager. I got on the Long Island Railroad and went there and I couldn’t believe it. The smell of the country, being able to catch a fish—I caught a turtle on a hook. And yet, when all was said and done, I couldn’t wait to go home. At the end of the day, it was Brooklyn, not Ronkonkoma, that gave me life.

I got out of the air force in 1955 and went back to Brooklyn. Fucked around for a year and a half, met Judy Schoenberg, who finally convinced me to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill. When guys used to “get angry” as actors in a workshop, I’d say to myself, what the fuck, they don’t even know what anger is! In Brooklyn, I was angry all the time! And it was acting led me out of it, and my experiences as a kid growing up in Brooklyn made me good at knowing how to “play angry.”

Acting became my real ticket out of hell. I always drew 100 percent on my upbringing in Brooklyn. I did a lifetime worth of roles before I landed the part as Harvey on Cagney and Lacey. We had a seven-year run; that’s a lifetime if you’re not a horse player.

The comedic side of me took a little longer to come out, I guess, because it was all bullshit to me, all that TV canned laughter and unfunny writing. I used to see guys who came out of my class making $300,000 an episode on some dopey show who couldn’t act a lick. And Brooklyn, that became some sort of airwaves Shangri-la of laughter, family, harmony, racial equality, and I don’t know what else. It certainly wasn’t the Brooklyn I grew up with. Even though it might look like Brooklyn—which, incidentally, to me it never does—it isn’t Brooklyn.

Despite everything, I remember going with my father to Nathan’s, having a hot dog, maybe two, making sure the roll was soggy, that made it ten times better, drinking an orange soda or a root beer and sitting on a park bench.

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