Bob Dylan
I was born in 1940 and went to an American preparatory school, The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s. They were all white boys: no colored people, no Hispanic, no Chinese, and everything was very organized and linked to tradition. Other children brought records to the school by people like Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. To me, they looked like stylized crooners singing about some false emotion and I found them very boring. Later, I came to like Tony Bennett very much, but at that time he didn’t seem to project that wonderful personality through his music.
Early American rock’n’roll figures, like Buddy Holly and Elvis, seemed to have been directed at me as a teenager, but I can’t say that I was inspired by them. They didn’t change my lifestyle because I didn’t have a life outside of school. Music was not part of my life until I was 20, when I was introduced to folk music by artists such as the brothers Clancy, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. The folk revival was a song that you really hadn’t heard before. Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan talked about things that, as a young man, I began to understand that were happening in the world.
My three parents
I am fortunate to be the son of three incredible actors. My dad [John Cromwell] he took me to the set of Anna and the king of Siam, which he directed, when I was about five, and I hid under the table with the little Thai children. He was Nigel’s best friend – whom I knew as Willy – Bruce, who played Watson in Basil Rathbone’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the radio. Uncle Willy’s laugh was contagious.
My mother, Kay Johnson, was the first protagonist of Cecil B. DeMille when he switched from silent cinema to sound. She took me to Saturday morning shows at the local cinema to watch Westerns or something designed not to irritate the children, although we still spent most of the time screaming and throwing popcorn and Jujubes. She violated some dialect while shopping and spoke to the butcher in Italian, which made me very ashamed.
My stepmother, Ruth Nelson, who I consider my second mother, was a member of the New York Group Theater. We went to see her play Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. When they announced her name, the audience booed, which was strange. At the end of the play, they gave her a standing ovation.
sneakers
In the summer, I played junior tennis tournaments – not very well, I must say, but I had natural coordination and looked good. The problem was to return a backhand – or a forehand. I would probably only hit the ball in each of the ten. I was incredibly hard on myself and there was a lot of racket breaks.
I would go from tournament to tournament, be defeated in the first round and go home. In the end, I would only ask the people who organize the tournament to place me as number 1 in my first round, because that way I wouldn’t have to stay there for long. After he defeated me 6-0 in the first set, the other boy taught me what I was doing wrong, so I won a free tennis lesson.
A matter of morals
I got over my high school years by the skin of my teeth and went to Middlebury College, a very good college in Vermont. My plan was to become an engineer. We had fraternities, where uncontrolled university students could represent all their manic stupidity. My father came to visit me the day after a big party. There were broken beer bottles, vomit on the floor, and women’s socks hung on the wall. I think he was shocked. My stepmother suggested that he take me to Sweden, at 18, to see him direct a film – A Matter of Morals – with Eva Dahlbeck and [cinematographer] Sven Nykvist.
I was so ecstatic that I left Middlebury and went to the performing arts college HB Studio in New York. It was the last thing my father wanted. He said, “Well, don’t be an actor. You are very tall. ” [Cromwell is 6ft 7in.] I thought, “I think I’m going to have to be a director.” I tried and failed for 10 years to be a theater director, but I got jobs as an actor. Every year I went to a different theater and burned all my bridges; next season, i would go to another theater and burn them all again.
Avoiding Draft
I was delighted when I got my first theater job at the Cleveland Playhouse, although I received almost nothing: $ 25 every two weeks. So I was drafted into the army. I went to see a psychiatrist in New York named Arnold Hutschnecker, who turned out to be a psychoanalyst for Richard Nixon. I said: “I’m going to be called. Can you get me out of here? “He wrote a letter and said,” Give this to the inspector, but whatever you do, don’t read the content. “
We were all standing in underwear – most of them black from the city of Cleveland – and the inspection officer announced, “Has anyone received a letter?” I raised my hand, he went down the line, read my letter and said, “So have you had any paranoid tendencies lately?” Without even thinking, I said, “How the hell am I supposed to know?” He referred me to his office, wrote on my induction card that I was a manic-depressive schizophrenic with a destructive tendency that would hurt himself or others and said, “Give this to the man at the door.” So that saved me from having my ass popped in Vietnam.
James Dean on screen and Burt Lancaster in person
The first actor I remember being polished was James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Giant and, especially, East of Eden. East of Eden just killed me because of his character’s relationship with his father, played by Raymond Massey, who had just starred in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, directed by my father. I thought Jimmy Dean was the best of all, along with Marlon Brando and quirky choices like John Ireland, whose personality I really loved. I couldn’t see the other actors that I now admire incredibly, like Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson and Wilfrid Lawson, until much later.
I remember walking down the street near the Museum of Modern Art in New York and walking towards me was Burt Lancaster. I think he was the first movie star I saw in any context outside of their film or in a studio shooting a film. He was very athletic, had a great walk and had the most beautiful clothes – my mouth just dropped. I couldn’t believe he was there. A movie star just passed me.
• Operation Buffalo is available for broadcast on Acorn TV UK