Read Up Till Now. The Autobiography for Free Online

it was surrounded by the audience on three sides. There are no wings. All entrances and exits are made at the back of the stage. So when you’re onstage you’re almost in the audience. If you forget a line there’s no way somebody can feed it to you—unless it’s a member of the audience.
    There were twenty-five hundred people in the audience, including most of the critics who had originally reviewed the play. Apparently they had learned that an unknown understudy was going on and didn’t want to miss what promised to be a memorable night in the theater. Finally the lights went down and I walked out onto the stage to begin the most important performance of my life. Whatever happened in the next few hours, if someday I ended up in the Ottawa River, I would have had this one night.
    I looked around the theater and...
    This is where we should pause for a word from our sponsor. I’ve spent so much of my life on television that I’m used to building to a first-chapter climax and cutting to commercial. However, as this is a book we haven’t sold commercial time. However, there will be space available in the soft-cover version.
    . . . and felt exhilarated. I had been doing a play a week for three years. I had learned the lines of hundreds of characters. I had been a comedian, a charlatan, and a convicted con man. That night I was ready to be a king.
    Perhaps the proper word to describe the way I was feeling is stupefied. I was completely calm, in the zone, Zenned out, at one with the stage and the audience. It came together in a way it never should have. A few years later I would be working for Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone, a place where unimaginable things happened for which there could be no explanation. Like my performance that night. I was “Once more into the breach, dear friends”-ing as if I had been playing this role for seasons. “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
    A stage actor needs a minimum of ten performances in front of an audience to understand the timing, because the response of the audience has to be incorporated into that performance. Audiences react in unexpected places, and you learn where to leave room for the audience to respond. You don’t want to walk into their reaction with your next line, which might be key to the plot. So the audience becomes a character in a play, but you don’t see that character until you are in front of the audience.
    Except for that night. I took from the audience an internal strength that made me capable of an inexplicable performance. Until near the very end, the last few lines, only seconds away from perfection.
    The play changes character for the last few scenes. After all the grander and marshal speeches, Henry has some playful scenes with the French princess and the play is over. I got through all the breaches, all the blood of Englishmen, after the battle of Agincourt, all the way to the brilliant repartee with the princess. And then it hit me.
    The French princess entered and I went totally blank. And I’m standing onstage with twenty-five hundred people looking at me with rapt expectation and there was nothing. A dead pause. The hopelessness of my situation began to hit me. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to go, what to do, what to say. It was the equivalent of being at an important business party and starting to introduce your wife to your boss and suddenly realizing you can’t remember your wife’s name. Into that breach, dear friends, flowed the tidal wave of panic.
    I looked across the stage, hopelessly. I have met so many thousands of people in my lifetime that sometimes it’s difficult to recall the names of people I’ve known for years. Yet as long as I live I will never forget Don Cherry. Don Cherry, with blondish hair and the longest blond eyelashes I’ve ever seen. There stood salvation. Don Cherry had a photographic memory. He knew the entire play! Every line. During