By Ron Fassler . . .
When Laurence Luckinbill made his Broadway debut in 1963 as a replacement in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons he was twenty-nine years old and had already endured the hardships of growing up poor in the late 1930s and 40s in rural Arkansas, been a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, and a medical school dropout. His acting career had notable ups and downs, and perhaps now his claim to notoriety best lives with the fact he is the sole surviving cast member of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking The Boys in the Band. Having recently published a memoir, Affective Memory: How Chance and the Theater Have Saved My Life [Sunbury Press], Luckinbill is ninety years old, and a lot has gone into the forging of his career as an actor, playwright, and director. Not fit to stop there, he digs deeply into what it means to be a husband, father, son, and brother. It’s a brutally honest read that is far more insightful than your average showbiz autobiography. Luckinbill takes a sometimes-painful look into himself and yet manages never to veer into self-flagellation. He keeps things real and, as he told me in a recent interview, “Autobiography is the place to tell the truth.”
Here then are portions of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity:
Ron Fassler: I thoroughly enjoyed Affective Memory and one of the best things about your book is the advice it offers based on your nine decades on this earth. A favorite quote is this one: “If you have to do something you really believe in, do it. Even when it hurts. Just be sure you are the only one it hurts.” Did you write the book as a way of imparting a number of these life lessons?
Larry Luckinbill: Yes, but I never thought of it like that. It started by my daughter saying to me one day, “Daddy, we know a lot about mom’s family, but we don’t know anything about yours” [Luckinbill’s wife of forty years is Lucie Arnaz, whose parents were Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball]. So, I sat down with a legal pad and a pen and said to myself, “Now what can I say about my family?” And I didn’t really want to say anything about my family at that point, as you can tell from the book, but the interesting thing was that two words came to me: my father.
RF: It’s not a jaunty stroll down memory lane by any means. But through the ups and down, I marvel at your ability to make so many of the stories you tell feel so fresh.
LL: Well, I’ve come to realize I have a photographic memory. Funny in that I played a character with that capability on The Delphi Bureau [an ABC series that premiered in 1972]. I didn’t put a cork board up, I didn’t make any outlines, I just kind of went for it. And as I got deeper into it—it took ten years—it was a scouring of my own personality, and I realized I had to tell the truth about myself or what’s the point in writing an autobiography. So, I went deeper and deeper and tried to figure it out and say who was at fault and, ultimately, I took the whole blame. Well, not the whole blame but the responsibility.
RF: Exactly.
LL: The responsibility for what I owed to my family.
RF: The pure honesty you put out there is something I came to really appreciate. Also, there’s a good deal of profound poetry in your writing.
LL: Thank you. Other people have said that, and I didn’t know what they were saying until I began to go back and look at the book more objectively. I think it’s the emotion that I have still in me for discovery; the discovery that actors go through. And if you have a classical bent, which I do, you will always be in a discovery state from those great plays of the Greeks and Shakespeare which have really stuck with me, even though I did a lot of TV and commercials—those things you do to stay alive.
And as with the writing of this, which took ten years, it was my wife, Lucie, who said, “You have to end this.” And here’s the thing she said after that which made it really legitimate. She said, “You’re not living anymore. You’re writing.” And I knew what she meant which was you’re not living with me, we need to have our relationship refurbished. I mean, I spent hours and hours in my office.
RF: She wanted you back and your family wanted you back.
LL: And she got it in spades! (laughs)
RF: Towards the end of the book, you write, “My struggle has been not to lose affective memory, my belief that the arc of history bends towards justice.” That hit hard for me because of what we’re currently living through.
LL: Yes, yes.
RF: So, what do you hope readers will carry with them after they’ve finished reading your book?
LL: Ah, good question. I’ve read lots of what people have been writing about it . . .
RF: Did you also read reviews as an actor?
LL: I did and I’m still sad that I did (laughing). “No Turn Unstoned” as Diana Rigg cleverly said [the actress’s book that compiled the worst ever theatrical reviews].
RF: So what has reading reviews of your book taught you, if anything?
LL: A couple of them made me respond, “Well, fuck you!” So, there’s that (laughing). I prefer when people write me personally and share their thoughts with me. Look, writing autobiography is the place to tell the truth. It’s like taking a lie detector test because if you lie to yourself, then you’re really in trouble.
Affective Memories by Laurence Luckinbill is available wherever books are sold.
