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what the Master had to say.
     
    As long as I was with the other students in class, I felt safe. They all loved it when I took on the principal and argued with him, for hours, even after the school day was over. But when I was alone, I was vulnerable. The Demon would arrive and prod me until I bled from guilt—as if I had killed someone and left him to die alone. I no longer thought of my praying as holy . . . I hated it.
    Of all the courses, fencing was my favorite. I won the All School Fencing Championship after only six months. No first-year student had ever done that before. All my years of “pretend sword fighting,” and all the Errol Flynn movies I’d seen, had paid off. But when the principal got around to teaching more advanced acting—forexample, how to laugh onstage by letting all the air out of your gut and creating a gagging effect, or how to find a chair onstage without looking down, by feeling for it with your toe or heel—I decided to leave. I knew I would be drafted shortly after I got back to the States (this was near the end of Compulsory Military Training), and I wanted to study where they taught Stanislavsky.
    My sister had started acting classes at the HB Studio in New York, which was run by Herbert Berghof and his wife, Uta Hagen. Corinne invited me to come to New York and live with her and her family in Queens, so I drove from Milwaukee and enrolled at the HB Studio that summer.

chapter 7

SHADES OF GRAY
     
     
    I was drafted into the army on September 10, 1956. All I took with me were some underwear, a few pair of socks, and
Dear Theo
—the letters of van Gogh to his brother Theo. At the end of Basic Training, I was assigned to the medical corps and sent to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, for eight weeks of medical training.
    While I was at Fort Sam, I helped the officers’ wives stage-manage a variety show that they had written. The wife in charge of the production was married to a colonel, who just happened to be the commanding officer of Fort Sam Houston. At the end of my eight weeks—when I was about to be given the orders that would station me somewhere in the world for the next year and eight months—a letter from the commanding officer instructed the office in charge of issuing orders to allow me to pick any post thatwas open, anywhere in the country. I was glad I had helped the commanding officer’s wife. I chose Valley Forge Army Hospital, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania which was the closest post to New York City.
    When I arrived at Valley Forge, I was given a choice of work: sterilization of equipment, tubercular ward, etc. I chose the Neuropsychiatric hospital, which was across the road. I imagined that the things I would see there might relate more to acting than any of the other choices. I wasn’t wrong.
    On my first day at work, I was shown a short film called
Shades of Gray,
which showed the mental health of all of us as being at some stage of gray—none of us being completely white or black. If stress is too great, the gray becomes darker. If the gray becomes too dark, that person needs to be institutionalized. Watching the film, I felt a sense of relief that I really didn’t understand.
    I was assigned to a “locked ward,” which meant that the patients were locked in, with bars on the windows, to protect them and to keep them from escaping. All the young soldiers, and some older ones, had had psychotic breakdowns, not from war stress—this was peacetime—but from other kinds of stress. Every patient arrived in an ambulance, wearing a straitjacket—that was regulation—because some of these men had become violent when their emotional dam broke.
    One twenty-year-old boy who had lived on a farm for the first nineteen-and-a-half years of his life had a psychotic breakdown on his first day in the army when some burly sergeant yelled, “Hey, farm boy—lift your fucking duffel bag and get in the fucking line!” By the time they brought him to us, he was