Ernest
Borgnine died earlier this week at the age of 95 after a six-decade career that
included an Oscar for his starring role in Marty,
a hit TV series, McHale’s Navy, and
more TV and movie credits than you could shake a stick at.
In
reading the long Associated Press obituary, the line that jumped out at me was
that his sole formal training, for a profession in which he was manifestly
successful, consisted of four months’ study at the Hartford Academy in
Connecticut in the late 1940s. The Times obituary elaborated on his technique
with the following quote from a 1973 interview:
“No
Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I
did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally
emotions follow.”
How The Duke and Cary Grant Did It
Once
upon a time in Hollywood, just about all the actors learned the business like
that. John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper had little or no formal training
to speak of. What they had was a stage presence, or perhaps more accurately, a
camera presence — great faces, an ability to relax in front of the cameras, and
a sense of delivery.
After
that first wave, the business became more and more the province of actors who
had formally studied their craft in classes and with teachers. Marlon Brando
and Dustin Hoffman come to mind as examples, and now just about all the big
names have been through some sort of extensive formal training. We’ve gone from
stars who were actors to actors who might become stars. It’s hard to make
comparisons because the styles are so different, though the good ones of each
style are all good.
Pauline
Kael remarked on the difference in her famous article on the making of the
movie The Group, shot in the
mid-1960s when the shift had taken place. She noted that the actresses were all
trying to build their characters by extrapolating from the script. The great
actresses of the 1930s — Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Miriam Hopkins — would have
been more likely to try to project something of themselves into the roles
instead, she said.
It Isn’t Just Hollywood
Relying
on formal education, rather than learning by doing, has become pervasive. There
is no documentary evidence that Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway ever got a
degree in creative writing or attended a fiction writers’ conference. Quite a
few of the current crop of novelists do those things. I’m skeptical. It no
doubt works for some people, but talent (like judgment) can’t be taught and
will usually develop itself given the opportunity.
In
the business world it used to be unsurprising to see someone who started with a
company in a stockroom, fresh out of high school, and worked his way up to be
president. (It was always a he back then). If you don’t have at least an MBA
these days, your only hope of running the company is to start it — the way
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did.
My
old business, journalism, has undergone the same transformation. When I left it
20 years ago, it was unusual to see a job applicant without a journalism
degree; two decades earlier I got hired quickly without one. When I took my
first journalism class in ninth grade, I asked the teacher, Mr. McDonald, how
to write a news story.
“Read
the front page of the Los Angeles Times every day and do what they do,” he
replied.
That
was how I learned, and others could do the same. In today’s world, though,
they’re not likely to get the chance.
