Finding My Voice

By As told to Kate Novack

From the age of 4 1/2 to 14, I rarely spoke. That's because I am a stutterer--even now, after a long career as an actor. I understand there are some wonderful techniques used today to solve a problem like mine, but in my day I just had Professor Crouch. Donald Crouch was a professor who had known Robert Frost and had taught at some of the same Midwestern universities. He retired to this small community in Brethren, Mich., where my high school was--and he couldn't stand it. So he dropped his plow--he was a farmer--and came down to our little agricultural high school because he knew we were trying to deal with Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Professor Crouch discovered I was writing poetry on the sly. One day he read one of my poems and said, "Jim, this poem is too good for you to have written. So to prove you wrote it, get up in front of the class and say it by heart, out loud." And I did. I wanted to prove that I wasn't a plagiarist!

The poem was called "Ode to Grapefruit." It no longer exists, even in my memory. But I do remember that the last line was written in the cadence of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "and-my-bel-ly-full-of-grape-fruit." I don't know whether Professor Crouch did it as a trick, but he got me to talk. He had a conviction that if you like words, you should be able to say them out loud. Reading my poems out loud helped me to speak and to deal with my stutter.

Once I learned how to talk and to appreciate words, I became interested in acting. I was onstage for the first time in high school. I played the aft end of a horse in what we called a "horse opera." I liked it because I didn't have to do much talking.

Still, the stutter was just one thing I had to overcome on my way to becoming an actor. Another was that my family disapproved of the profession. When I started to discuss acting with my grandparents--my mother's folks, who raised me--they didn't want to hear about it. That's because my father had left our family to become a prizefighter in New York and later an actor. I was never part of his family really, and it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I had a relationship with him. He played one of the Nubian slaves in a version of Caesar and Cleopatra, that sort of thing. In high school once, I saw a picture of my father in Look magazine, performing in a play by Lillian Smith called Strange Fruit. I was quite proud of that.

My mother's family didn't appreciate what my father did. They did not respect him because he was not steadfast as a father, and they couldn't understand how someone could make a living as an actor. You farmed for a living. You went to work on the railroad for a living. My family couldn't imagine going to college--and especially spending money to go to college--for anything except doctoring, lawyering or engineering. They made it very difficult for me to ever see my father, and they forbade me from ever talking about being an actor.

I went to the University of Michigan on a premed program. I chose medicine because in high school I was quite interested in science. Then I went into the Army, expecting that I might stay there. I became Catholic, with the idea that I might become a priest. And I came from a farm, so there was always that. But I continued to think about following my father as an actor.

While I was mute, I became a better listener. But mainly I appreciated wonderful things that could be said. I still read the Dylan Thomas poem "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" every night before I go onstage. I know it by heart now. In the last lines I see a tribute to my father, who's still with us: "And you, my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray." --As told to Kate Novack