“All I want to do is feel the warmth” Christopher Walken of The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center by Norma McClain Stoop from After Dark (U.S.A.) May 1973 I immediately notice the pair of white shorts, framed and under glass, on the wall of the study adjoining the living room in Christopher Walken’s apartment, but though I ache to ask, I don’t. All things come to those who wait. As he takes my coat, I mentally photograph his slender body, his navy blue jersey and slacks, his - jazz shoes! “Yes,” he confirms this clue, “I had studied jazz when I was a kid, and when I got out of school that’s what I did for four or five years. Dance. On Broadway, on tours, things like that. And in a nightclub act with Monique van Vooren! You know, I had two brothers who were actors when they were children - Glenn kept on and was in Much Ado; the other doesn’t act any more. And I acted a little bit, too, as a child, but I had no interest in it. I liked dancing, and was in High Spirits, Best Foot Forward, Baker Street and a couple of tours of West Side Story, which is where I meet my wife, Georgianne, who was dancing in it too.” “So when did you start acting?” “About six years ago, I was dancing in Baker Street in New York and I was called to audition for The Lion in Winter and got the job. I never danced after that.” “But what made them think you could do it?” I ask, knowing that for his first straight acting role, King Philip of France, he won the Clarence Derwent Award. Walken’s strange, narrow, smudged eyes lead his lips into a smile. “I have no idea. I was once told that somebody involved thought I resembled the person they were looking for. That they had a picture in their minds and I happened to look like the idea. The whole thing terrified me, I didn’t know anything about acting and I’d never studied acting. I don’t know how I act - I just act, that’s all, and though I’m a native New Yorker who loves the city, I spend most of my time acting elsewhere - in Canada - Stratford, Calgary, Toronto, Alberta - in Michigan, Chicago, San Diego. In a lot of regional theater.” His smile broadens. “That’s where I get to play those parts - my only excuse for being an actor. There doesn’t seem much reason for me to spend my time being an actor unless it’s to act in extraordinary plays. The Broadway hit sort of thing? I don’t like to get involved in anything that will contractually tie me up for a long time, because in the course of a year I can usually do a half-dozen good parts, and it’s better to do six plays a year than to do one.” Christopher Walken is now playing a fine part in an extraordinary play: Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice for The Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. Earlier, he did Enemies and The Plough and the Stars for them, but Merchant will be his last show there. His words fall swiftly in clipped syllables - pebbles dropping on other pebbles on the road of his conversation. “Now, in the case of The Merchant of Venice, where you decide to play the two figures, Antonio and Bassanio, as having had a relationship, it seems perfectly valid, and it should be, to the audience, something they just look at and it’s there, nothing special in any way - except to the play, where it makes a valid point.” Walken pulls at the ends of his down-turned moustache. He thinks a minute. “I suppose I think of the man I’m playing as bisexual, and I suppose that’s how I think of myself, too. I’d hate to think that I was harnessed to heterosexuality. I mean, my life is heterosexual, but I like to think that my head is bisexual, and I think it’s a good idea for everybody to start getting used to that notion, because that way one becomes aware of a lot more things. Anyway, I’ve noticed that people are getting healthier in their thinking. The air is getting worse,” he chuckles, “but people’s heads are getting better! It’s a much more intelligent time than it was when I was a teen-ager in the Fifties, which seems to me to have been one of the most stupid times. The Fifties,” he states flatly, “were one of the dumbest things that ever happened to America.” “And has your way of thinking changed, too, since then?” I ask. “Oh, yes. Sure.” Walken’s answer begins before my question ends. “Different things change my way of thinking all the time. Like I read in the Times Book Section lately about ‘a poet annihilates himself every day,’ and I think one should encourage oneself to be a poet. That doesn’t mean writing poems. But I think the poetic point of view is a good one. I mean,” he says earnestly, “the idea of annihilating oneself every day is a good one. It means travelling light. It means not harnessing yourself with answers to questions. “Another thing ....” He gets up and strikes a pose, easily identifiable as that of a man about to release an arrow. “I’ve studied - I know a little about the art of Zen archery, and I’ve found it enormously important in my acting. The idea being that when one is a Zen archer, there’s a thought and an action, whereas the Western idea tends to be a thought, a decision and an action, and I believe that acting has a great deal to do with cutting out that middle period. There’s something non-verbal about Zen archery: when you pull the arrow back, it goes - and it goes exactly where it’s supposed to because you know how to do it. There’s no judgement involved. It’s not ‘Was that a good shot?’ Like,” his voice, heightening in excitement, is no longer falling pebbles, but water rushing over the fallen pebbles, “when you’re acting on the stage, it has nothing to do with ‘Oh, did I do that well?’ It’s much more important that you did it than that you did it well. But,” he shrugs, “I’m not seriously bound up in Eastern thinking. In anything. I wouldn’t want to be harnessed to anything. Including that.” “The word harness,” I remark, “certainly keeps coming up in your conversation.” “Yes. It comes up in my life, too.” “Well, you are married,” I jab. “Isn’t that a sort of harness?” “No. Not at all,” Walken insists. “I think marriage, if anything, is a liberating thing.” He seems to digress. “There have been periods in my life - well, he explains, “I spent a time as a sort of religious fanatic, for instance - a moon-worshipper.” “Whatever got you into that?” “The moon,” he smiles slyly. “What else? Well,” he goes on, “I spent several years with that, and then it passed. I remained very close to the moon but I don’t make myself miserable about her any more. Moon cultures are maternalistic, and,” he admits, “I’m a tremendous feminist. I look for the women in wisdom very much. Women,” and now I realize he isn’t really digressing after all, “have provided the momentum for enormous steps in my life. And I don’t know what they think - there’s a great mystery involved and maybe that’s what I like. Moon cultures,” his surrealistic logic is becoming more and more apparent, “are much more ancient than sun cultures, and I think of myself as a sort of pre-Christian person.” “I had a discussion with a man just the other day,” I interrupt, “about whether there are Druids in the world today.” “Oh, there certainly are,” he laughs. “You can give him my phone number.” One of his two cats, Burmese and black, lies weightlessly on my lap. “They don’t even have any names,” Walken tells me. “They just walk around and feel very wonderful about themselves.” “You feel like that , too! You have tremendous self-confidence, don’t you?” “Yes!” It’s an explosion. “But I have heroes, too. It seems to me that all the good things that have happened to me in my life have begun by having heroes. Someone I looked at and wanted to get close to. I feel that way about many performers in many fields: Laurence Olivier, Rudolf Nureyev. I feel that way about Muhammed Ali. About Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who plays the piano like you wouldn’t believe. And it seems that one excuse for being an actor is to get close to Shakespeare. And certainly Shakespeare’s one of the greatest men who ever lived. Imagine,” his eyes widen and shine, “being able to come close to somebody like that, who’s been dead all this time! Come here a minute.” He leads me into the study and points to the framed white boxer’s shorts on the wall. “Those are Muhammed Ali’s. Autographed. Taken off right after a fight. And never washed,” he adds proudly. “You see,” he says as we settle down in the living room again, “I’m very interested in athletes. I find I always learn something about acting when I watch them. It has to do with the focus of their minds - control, you know. The idea of having to do what you do within a very small period of time - and preparing yourself for that moment. And being so much in control that thought about it vanishes. One just does it. Of course, when I talk about getting close to people I admire,” he stresses, “it’s not because I want to understand them. That has to do with wanting to know the answers, and as a person I’m not particularly interested in knowing any answers to anything. All I want to do is feel the warmth. Whenever I go for answers, I feel very second-rate. I’d much rather not have to answer the question, but just appreciate it. The idea that the notion could cross your mind is so encouraging. And it sort of sits there. You know it’s not going anywhere; that, sooner or later, all the things you touch in life combine to maybe a twenty year answering of that question. And, if you’re lucky, he adds softly, “maybe the question may lead to another question.” Another question comes to my mind. “Does your performance tend to change from night to night, or does it remain constant?” “My performance changes, but only within the structure of it. I like to think there’s a kind of architecture - a very steady one - built when I do a part. But within that there are many flexible things. It seems to me to be an unarguable fact that freedom only happens where there is discipline. And freedom,” he enlarges his idea, “is really a very personal thing which has to do with one’s spirit. Freedom and obscenity and film ratings and all that have to do with the question of who gets damaged. I don’t think that people are really that fragile. Including children. I think it’s very important for everybody to be able to look at anything.” His green eyes (“pre-Christian eyes,” he calls them) squeeze into laughing slits. “and it occurs to me that maybe the reason people go to those 42nd Street porno houses is because that’s the only way they can get to see that kind of film! Perhaps I’m luckier, because I know people who show them all the time. On the sides of iceboxes. Well,” he goes on, “you know you get a very fine picture on the side of an icebox - extremely clear. You know, pornos are like looking through a keyhole, and it seems to me maybe that’s what all movies are all about.” Walken, who has made films - The Anderson Tapes and The Happiness Cage - explains his point. “There’s something about a camera whirling away when you’re emoting - one always has to keep in mind what’s eventually going to happen: that’s just the machine looking at you, but the machine makes it possible for others to look at you. Getting back to freedom,” he says, “there’s always a group of people who want so badly not to harness themselves to anything that they go through life letting things hit them. But in that case, the element of structure and control is missing. You know, it’s possible to have discipline and also to keep oneself available to change. It happens to me many times where I don’t want to change because I’m happy as I am and fear that if I change I won’t be happy any more. Then I just have to face facts; if I’m going to move ahead, I’ve got to change. Got to. Got to give things up in order to take other things on. “I really don’t have any goals,” he admits, “because it seems to me that if I did not getting them might disappoint me. Your goals are always extremely convoluted, and who knows what’s waiting there! I have lots of interests - I paint, and I write poetry, short stories, plays. Just for me. Maybe one of these days, I’ll make that part of me public,” Christopher Walken predicts, a bit hesitantly, seeming to surprise even himself with this affirmation of his own availability to change. PICTURE CAPTIONS: (photos not shown) Christopher Walken turned his talents from dancing to acting when he was cast as King Philip in “The Lion in Winter.” (Photo by Jack Mitchell) In the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center’s recent production of “The Merchant of Venice,” Christopher Walken (in white) added his own particular intensity to the role of Bassanio. (Photo by Martha Swope) Walken’s versatility as an actor was well displayed when he joined Martha Henry in “Scenes from American Life,” a dissection of the Country Club set by A.R. Gurney, Jr. The play premiered at The Forum at Lincoln Center in 1971. (Photo by Martha Swope) Transcribed by Carolyn Hinton