Acting My Face: A Memoir

By Estate of Anthony James

Actor Anthony James has played killers, psychopaths, and other twisted characters throughout his Hollywood career. In the summer of 1967, James made his motion picture debut as the murderer in the Academy Award-winning Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night. His role in the 1992 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, Unforgiven, culminated a unique, twenty-eight-year career. Behind his menacing and memorable face, however, is a thoughtful, gentle man, one who muses deeply on the nature of art and creativity and on the family ties that have sustained him.

James's Acting My Face renders Hollywood through the eyes and experience of an established character actor. James appeared on screen with such legendary stars as Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, Gene Hackman, and Sidney Poitier, and in such classic television shows as Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, and The A-Team. Yet, it is his mother's heroic story that captures his imagination. In an odyssey which in 1940 took her and her newly wedded husband from Greece to a small southern town in America where she bore her only child, James's mother suffered the early death of her husband when James was only eight years old. In the blink of an eye, she went from grand hostess of her husband's lavish parties to hotel maid. But like the lioness she was, she fought with great ferocity and outrageous will in her relentless devotion to James's future. And so it was, that on an August morning in 1960, eighteen-year-old James and his mother took a train from South Carolina three thousand miles to Hollywood, California, to realize his dream of an acting career. They possessed only two hundred dollars, their courage, and an astonishing degree of naiveté.

After his retirement in 1994, James and his mother moved to Arlington, Massachusetts, where he concentrated on his painting and poetry. His mother died in 2008 at the age of ninety-four, still a lioness protecting her beloved son. Acting My Face is an unusual memoir, one that explores the true nature of a working life in Hollywood and how aspirations and personal devotion are forged into a career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626742192

Estate of Anthony James

Anthony James has appeared in nearly thirty motion pictures and sixty television shows.

Book preview

PREFACE

After my retirement from film and television in 1994, friends, acquaintances, and often strangers occasionally suggested that I write a memoir. They thought that the account of my mother and me taking the train from South Carolina to Hollywood to realize my dream of an acting career with only two hundred dollars, our courage, and an astonishing degree of naivete, would make a highly interesting, poignant, and entertaining story. I kept insisting to everyone that I was not a celebrity, just a sometimes-recognizable face, and no one would be interested in the events of my life or career.

Nevertheless, as I considered the notion of a memoir more seriously, I thought of the Hollywood mythos as being seen not through the usual celebrity perspective but through the eyes and experience of a working actor, one who appeared on screen with stars like Clint Eastwood, Bette Davis, Gene Hackman, Rod Steiger, and Sidney Poitier, and who also interacted with them on and off the set during the shooting of a film. I thought that this might be a fresh and unusual take on an otherwise stale overview of Hollywood, especially when interwoven with my mother’s heroic story. It was an odyssey that in 1940 would take her and her newly wedded husband from a warm upper-middle-class family in Greece to a small southern town in America where a star-crossed fate awaited her behind every door.

When I eventually made my commitment to the daunting task of reviving and recording selected events of my life, I knew from the outset that there were two aspects of my memoir that would not be addressed. One was that I would not speak of my romantic relationships because of my respect and care for the privacy of the women with whom I had shared those relationships. The other was that I would not speak ill of anyone with whom I had worked. The rest would be an attempt to wrestle time to its knees and compel it to speak.

Acting My Face

PART ONE

Marika

No latitudes or longitudes

compass or north star

only your voices my beloved ones

resounding in the swoop and swell

of gulls and tides

the glint of fins and horizon line

the country of my birth

tumbling backwards in my wake

lost in the evening spray

the distant lights of a new land

rising in my eyes

ONE

My mother, Marika Palla, was born in 1913, in Xanthi, a small city in northern Greece. She was raised in a close-knit upper-middle-class Greek Orthodox family with a brother and a half-sister. Her father was stern but fair and affectionate; her mother, warm and loving; her brother, a beloved protector; and her half-sister, a great friend. When she was fourteen, she declared that she wanted to become a nun and dedicate her life to God. Her parents, though highly appreciative of her religious devotion, refused to allow it, not wanting to lose her cloistered in a convent. I believe it was at that moment of her life that she lost her true purpose in this world. She was heartbroken but respected her parents’ wishes.

Not long afterwards, her brother, John, had become friends with a young Greek man named Nikos, whose family had immigrated from Turkey. They had come as refugees, leaving their home and all their belongings behind, bringing with them only what they could carry. They were part of the great exchange after World War I when basically all Greeks were forcibly deported under international law from their Turkish homeland to Greece and the Turks in Greece to Asia Minor. During this devastating exchange of over 1.5 million people, there were horrendous atrocities perpetrated on both sides.

John, like most indigenous Greeks, had great compassion for these immigrants and introduced Nikos’s family to his own. The two families developed a close relationship, visiting each other frequently, going on outings, and spending holidays together.

On one occasion, Nikos’s oldest brother, George, who had lived in various parts of the world, spoke seven languages, and as a United States citizen, had served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, was visiting the family after years abroad. He had established a home and business in a small town in South Carolina called Myrtle Beach, which he believed one day would be a grand resort.

George became a close friend of the family and began to show a considerable amount of attention to the fourteen-year-old Marika. Her mother and father came to adore him and he fell in love with my mother. Eventually, George asked her father, Demetrius, for his daughter’s hand in marriage. But Demetrius knew that George’s home was now in America and if he married his daughter, they would lose her to a foreign land thousands of miles across the ocean. He said no. But my mother’s heart said yes and even though it would take thirteen years, George was destined to be my father.

My mother was a beautiful, spirited young woman with an open heart, and her love for my father was pure and forever. For thirteen years, my father would travel back and forth from America to Xanthi trying to change her parents’ decision. My mother, on the other hand, would not allow any other man to court her. During one period, she had not seen my father for several years, communicating only by letter. Finally, seeing my mother at the age of twenty-seven, still adamant about her love for George, her parents relented and gave their consent. The wedding was on.

George and Marika were married on a surprisingly snowy day in May of 1940. It was a grand wedding, but her mother, devastated with grief by the impending loss of her daughter, begged her to change her mind up to the last minute.

My mother, trembling in her luminous white wedding dress, told her that she loved George and was going with him to begin a new life. Then she threw her arms around her mother sobbing, saying, I love you, Mama. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Her father took my father aside, saying, I am entrusting you with my daughter’s life. You are taking her to another world far away from her family and the only life she has ever known. Aside from you, she will have no one else in that new world, an ocean separating her from her father, her mother, her brother, and her sister for God knows how long. None of us will be there to know what is happening to her from minute to minute and year to year, whether she is happy and well or in great distress or danger. We will have to live with that blindness and helplessness continuously in our hearts. But there is one thing I need for you to remember; Marika has the spirit and pride of a beautiful wild horse, break her spirit and she will die.

My mother’s parents did not want to lose their daughter to God in a convent but they lost her to my father in America. They never saw her again.

TWO

As my mother and father stood arm in arm upon the upper deck of their ship, my mother watched the last foggy traces of her country’s coastline disappear, her fate as unknown to her as that of whatever alien creatures moved anonymously along the ocean floor beneath her.

Although homesick already, she was thrilled to be sailing across the seas to her new home with her new husband who loved her so deeply he was willing to wait thirteen years to marry her, have children with her, and be with her for the rest of his life.

During the journey most of the passengers were frightened of powerful storms that could capsize the ship or of German submarines torpedoing the luxury liner—with all its brilliantly lit ballrooms, restaurants, opulent lounges, and the charming captain in his perfectly white uniform—to the bottom of the sea.

When a black storm crashed down upon them, the winds howling, the passengers huddled in their elegant state rooms, my mother would stand on the upper deck holding her raincoat tightly wrapped around her, mesmerized by the massive beauty and slashing spume of the dark waves, now a mountain range rising and falling. Later, when others asked her if she had been afraid, she answered, Afraid of what? It never occurred to her in those days that something bad could ever happen.

It would be in the new world that the jungle would rise up thick and wild around her, the feral nights resounding with animal cries and the circling growl, the branches and bramble cracking under the weight of slavering beasts roaming for prey. It would be here she would find herself as a lioness alone, her husband’s body rotting behind the trees, her son’s hand in hers; a lioness fierce in the hunt, merciless in battle and always between me and the scent of slaughter.

THREE

My parents’ honeymoon began with a train ride to Athens, continued on a long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City, and ended in a southern wasteland with one paved road and few streetlights. My father was relieved to be home. George Anthony was a well-respected businessman with many friends, both Greek and American, and a member of various organizations such as The Elks, Masons, and Shriners. My mother was horrified. He had described Myrtle Beach as a sophisticated city with a large Greek community and a Greek Orthodox Church. What she found was a dark, lonely town and a few of my father’s rather shady cronies. He had exaggerated or blatantly lied to convince my mother to leave her home and family and cross the ocean with him.

They settled in the large and beautifully furnished house on the main road surrounded by woods and empty lots. My father fell back into his daily routine of work at his small but successful restaurant, The Seven Seas. He would leave in the morning, return in the early afternoon for a short nap and return to work until closing time, finally arriving back home around 2:00 a.m.

My mother was left in the empty house, pacing up and down the empty rooms, alone with her homesickness, day after day. At times, she would receive a visit from a neighbor or neighbors, but they would just sit in silence, staring at each other, my mother not knowing English, they not knowing Greek. After a few awkward hand gestures and smiles, they got up and left. Her bright, childlike spirit began to fail, drowning in this void, this new life for which she had sacrificed everything.

Six months later, she received a letter from Xanthi, announcing the death of her mother. She had died of a broken heart. I don’t think my mother has ever truly come to terms with the guilt she has felt about her mother’s death. I think it tormented her all her life. Some years later, her father died.

Even though my mother had inherited and accepted the clearly defined roles of husband and wife of her time and culture, she saw them as equal in importance, if different in duty. She also had her own personal psychology with which to resolve the inevitable conflicts in the labyrinthine contract of love and marriage.

On a particularly humid summer day, my father was having lunch at the kitchen table as he always did before going back to the restaurant to prepare for the dinner hour. He attempted to sprinkle some salt on his food but because of the humidity not one grain would exit. His frustration mounted with each vain shake until, in his unbearable annoyance, he got up, went from the kitchen to the glassed-in back porch, opened the back door, hurled the insolent salt shaker into the backyard, and then returned to the kitchen table to continue his lunch.

My mother watched without a word. Calmly, she opened the cupboard holding the best china, removed a small stack of dishes, walked to the back door, opened it, and began to sail the dishes into the backyard, one by one. My father leaped out of his chair and ran to my mother yelling, Marika, what are you doing? Stop! What’s wrong with you? My mother, holding on to the next dish in line, said, Well, George, you know how much I respect you and always want to learn from you, so I was just following your example. My father looked at her for a moment and then smiled. She smiled back. He returned to his seat at the table a wiser man. He got the message. Marika style.

By 1942, the year of my birth, the invincibility of my mother’s spirit began to waver as the black waters of her melancholia deepened. Now she had a new and profound concern—to protect and nurture her son in this dark and lonely world. My father had hired a maid named Georgia, who quickly became a member of the family and my mother’s dearest friend and confidant. She taught my mother more English in several months than she had learned in the past two years. My mother was no longer alone and now had a reason to live. Me.

I was a shy, introspective child. I understood early on that my mother felt my pain as her own and out of my love for her I spared her my pain by hiding it safely behind the actor’s mask. A mask I would eventually be unable to distinguish from my face.

My mother’s homespun psychology took a gentler turn on my behalf. To inspire my lack of appetite, she made pancakes in the shapes of cowboys and Indians. To encourage me to drink milk, she put the milk in Coke bottles. And to deter any fears I might evolve regarding thunderstorms, she integrated a bit of Greek mythology with a bit of Christian theology. She told me a thunderstorm was the result of Jesus riding across the heavens in his chariot; the thunder I heard was the pounding of his horses’ hooves, and the lightning, the sparks flying off his chariot wheels.

When Jesus was gone, whatever child had not been afraid would find a present left by him in the refrigerator. I was never afraid and would always find a comic book, a candy bar, or a toy lying next to some lamb leftovers or a bowl of pudding.

After one storm, my mother didn’t have something to leave that I hadn’t already seen around the house, and so she improvised. When I bravely opened the refrigerator for my present from Jesus, I found a new can opener.

Unfortunately, the best of virtues, when taken to extremes, can be damning. A child always needs love and a sense of security from its parents. But my mother was so overly protective and in perpetual fear of my coming to harm that I began to perceive the outside world as a danger. What was it out there that was so scary? I was soon to find out.

FOUR

My father’s dream in the late 1940s was to sell his small restaurant and open the finest and most sophisticated restaurant in the county. And he did. It was called The Mayflower and its interior design was based on that of a seventeenth-century sailing ship. He was, perhaps, the first restaurateur in South Carolina to have Maine lobster flown down for his menu and a Chinese cook solely for the Chinese cuisine. It was a monumental success.

During the building of The Mayflower, my mother begged my father to build an apartment over the restaurant so that we could live there. It would relieve some of the great fear and isolation my mother felt living alone in that big empty house in the woods. He promised he would and she accepted his word in good faith, seeing finally an end to her agony. But on opening day there was no apartment. My father apologized, saying that it had just been too expensive. I think after that day, my mother’s trust in my father was never the same. The blade of betrayal had lodged in her heart forever.

I loved my father deeply and he indulged me to a fault. Whatever I asked for appeared magically before me. I was mesmerized, watching him shave and getting dressed in the morning, the sharp scent of Old Spice cologne spiking the air. On his way to the restaurant, I would walk with him down the path and

Reviews for Acting My Face

[claireh18 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'd like to thank the author and publisher for the advanced reader copy I received via netgalley in return for an honest review. In all honesty, I had never heard of Anthony James prior to receiving this book. I enjoy reading autobiographies as a rule, even if I have limited prior knowledge of the author. Unfortunately, this book just didn't grab my attention. I really tried to persevere with it and give it a fair chance, but I quickly got rather bored. The timeline of the story jumps about all over the place, and this, combined with the very poor grammar, really annoyed me. I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately I found the title the most interesting thing about it.

[phillipfrey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Okay, I admit it, I like stories about actors and the Hollywood film industry. James was often cast in Westerns as scary, sleazy and disgusting villains. In his first film, James is especially memorable as the hateful racist diner counterman in the outstanding "In the Heat of the Night." His long career in film and television brought him close to many celebrities, a career that ended in retirement just after his last film: Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven."

[myrt-4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Myrt's ReviewActing My Face by Anthony JamesSo Much More Than a Pretty FaceThis autobiography by Anthony James, actor, painter, poet and now, writer is an interesting look behind his 'mask'.  Mr. James' face is a familiar one. You know you have seen him somewhere but you're probably not sure where but you suspect he was the bad guy.  And you're right.  Anthony James consistently appeared in films and on television starting in 1967 when he debuted as the villain, Ralph Henshaw in 'The Heat of the Night' to 1982 when he played Skinny, the whorehouse owner in Clint Eastwood's 'Unforgiven'.  I also had that same familiar feeling when I saw Anthony James' face on the cover and recognized him from various roles.  Mr. James lets the readers know up front he won't be revealing any information about his personal romances out of respect for the women he was involved with and he won't be sharing negative stories about those he worked with.  However, James' book is a tribute to love, the love of a son for his mother. Through his mother Marika's love, strength and positive example while under extreme conditions she encouraged and supported her son to stand up for himself and go after his dreams. Mr. James' Hollywood story is a well written description of the life of a strong character actor working his stereotypical villainous looks.  He gives many entertaining anecdotes of the impressive cast list of people he worked with as well as the reactions over the years his bad guy looks have received. Bette Davis played a part in promoting his current career as a successful painter.  James has also written a book of poetry.  James is the antithesis of the characters he played and shares his story and his mother's story with an honesty, sensitivity and humor.  This is a lovely book and well worth enjoying!I received this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.