Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda. Hutchinson, 224pp, £17.99
Alan Alda is a showbiz baby; his father, Robert Alda, was a travelling burlesque singer - he warmed up audiences with a song before the strippers came out. Baby Alphonso made his stage debut at the age of six months, sitting in a high chair during a sketch with the show’s comics. At three, Alda says, he was like a pet to the strippers and chorus girls, who “always brought me up to their dressing-room. They talked with me; they patted my cheek and combed my hair. They were affectionate.”
Young Ali enjoyed the gypsy life, but his father being around naked women put a strain on his parents' marriage. The opening chapter of this thoughtful, sometimes dramatic and caustically funny memoir describes the time when he was six and his mother tried to stab his father with a paring knife, accusing him of adultery. A few weeks later Ali brought up the subject and his mother laughed and denied it had happened. His father just looked away and said nothing. "I came to learn that not speaking about things is how we operated."
Years later, when Alan brought the woman who would be his wife home, his mother’s irrational behaviour put him into such a rage that he shouted obscenities at her until she left the room. His reaction left him shaken: “I was trying to learn in those days how to call on my emotions on the stage, but it troubled me that I could be overtaken by anger like this without wanting it.”
Robert Alda's ticket out of burlesque and vaudeville was a long-term Warner Bros contract. His big break came when he was cast as George Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue, one of the big money-makers of 1945. Robert never did make it to the front rank of leading men (though he had some sizeable successes on Broadway), and in the mid-1950s hit the European trail, first to do a TV series shot in Amsterdam, and then to Italy. Europe was also an escape from his increasingly unstable wife, whom he eventually divorced.
Though he followed his father into acting, and achieved undreamed-of success in TV, movies and theatre, Alan first saw himself as a writer. While still in his teens, he answered a classified ad looking for sketches for an off-Broadway revue. The producers accepted Alda's sketches and offered him the chance to act and direct as well.
He recalls hearing the laughter from the audience on the first night - laughing at something he had written. “A cocktail of sweet, tingling hormones shot through my brain.” He was on a writer’s high - until he read the next day’s review of his first professional writing effort: “Backward children in a school for the retarded wouldn’t have been proud of what happened last night.”
At the peak of his popularity, during the 12-year run of the TV series M*A*S*H (he played Hawkeye), Alda sold his first screenplay and starred in the resulting film, The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), a subtle, unshowy study of the corrupting effects of political power. He had already written several episodes of M*A*S*H, and was creator and principal writer on another (short-lived) series, We’ll Get By. In the 1980s he wrote, directed and starred in four increasingly mild feature films - the first, The Four Seasons (1981), is the best.
As he puzzles the great questions of life, Alda covers a lot of fascinating ground: his complicated relationships with his mother (sometimes loving, always exasperating) and father (loving, later competitive); his childhood bout with polio; the curious incident with the family dog that gives the book its title; a long, apparently solid marriage to a professional musician; the slog to professional success; creativity; his dogged, futile campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment; a harrowing near-death experience while working in Chile.
Readers will immediately notice the lack of a single date - not the year Alda was born (1936), the year he married (1957), or the years his iconic TV series ran (1972-83). Alda is so determined to pick and choose from his life and avoid writing a standard gossipy celebrity autobiography that the book becomes a bit irritating.
He devotes an entire chapter to the harrowing experience of making a tough TV film about prison life on location in Utah State Prison, but never reveals the name of the film (The Glass House) or the fact that one of the authors was Truman Capote. I longed for more details about his early, little-seen movies and some anecdotes about working with Woody Allen, who has cast Alda in three films, most notably Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which earned Alda a Bafta nomination and several US film critics awards for his superb, comically oily performance as Allen’s nemesis.
The Crimes and Misdemeanors success came at a sticky time in Alda's career, as his own films as actor/director/writer were finding less favour with the public. Since then his name has moved well down the cast list in mostly forgettable features (Murder at 1600, What Women Want, etc), though he received a surprise Oscar nomination for his sixth-billed performance in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004).
Now 70, Alda remains a potent name on television, thanks to his role as a right-wing senator and presidential candidate on The West Wing. And last year he was nominated for a third Tony Award, this time for his memorable portrayal of the pathetic Shelley “The Machine” Levene in a Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.
