THE SELF-EVIDENT EXCEPTION

A Six-Year Record of Inevitable Victory

By Michael Moriarty

IV

My wife Margie remarked on how a few of our flowers are blooming in winter and that they’ll die before they see spring.

I often feel like a winter blossom. I arrived in New York from Detroit with an extraordinary education – Jesuit High School, Ivy League College and Fulbright Scholarship – ready to "make it," but on the old rules of America, the ones my father taught me: individual freedom, industry, responsibility and achievement under the Golden Rule.

I entered Liberal Manhattan, made a big mark my first year and then, the post-modern critics pilloried me, Pauline Kael and her coterie of worshippers in particular. That the opinion of Marlon Brando, a genius I’d been compared to in 1973-74, had everything to do with Kael’s own opinion of all new actors was… well, that was it for a Hollywood big screen career. Riding high on the success of Last Tango in Paris, Brando ruled American film acting in those days like The Godfather he portrayed so brilliantly in the 1972 blockbuster. It’s not a good thing to be compared to anyone, certainly not to Brando. Marlon’s teacher, Stella Adler, said in People Magazine, that I was "one of the greatest actors of the 20th Century." Later on, Harold Clurman, Brando’s first major stage director, compared my "unforced truth" to Brando’s. Hmmm. Well, thanks for the favor, kids.

It was, I suppose, prescient of the New York Marxists to know categorically that I couldn’t buy their idea of a revolution. In those days, only the tough Italians of New York represented the "People." It was the heyday of Martin Scorcese’s tributes to Mean Streets, Taxi Drivers and Raging Bulls. They always viewed me as some kind of an Ivy League dweeb.

I didn’t give up, though. That’s one thing my father, a Detroit surgeon, taught me. Never give up.

I did four horror films with Larry Cohen, then two projects with Titus Productions: The Deadliest Season (a film about hockey, co-starring Meryl Streep) and Holocaust (for which Streep and I received Emmy and Golden Globe Awards). I’d already won a Tony Award on Broadway in ’74 and an Emmy Award for The Glass Menagerie that same year. Clint Eastwood cast me in Pale Rider because he liked my work. Eventually, Law and Order came along and the four Ben Stone years began.

Then I was roped into a meeting with President William Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, and the increasingly freezing winters of American hypocrisy began. With still many years of work on Law and Order ahead of me, I said: "No, that’s it. This cannot hold. I will not live in a country that has been so transformed by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The Clinton Third Way is a Third Reich. Abortion is simply the Maoist Population Control Policy mandated to America by a Supreme Court Politburo. I realized that the same perverted science that drove the Nazis’ human experiments was still setting the tempo for female supremacy advanced by Eugenics. I can now safely predict a collision between the African-American Patriarchs or Male Supremacists (Barack Obama and company) and the African-American Female Supremacists (among them, Oprah Winfrey, and the late Coretta King and her friends in Planned Parenthood).

Knowing all this, I feel a bit like Spencer Tracy, to whom I was compared by Katherine Hepburn. Tracy rose to greatly deserved Hollywood recognition just before the Soviets were injecting Brando and other Soviet icons like Warren Beatty, into power. I’m sure Tracy saw the hopelessness of even protesting. He slowly drank himself to death. I was about to do the same thing but, well, between nine years of going in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and a strange sense that something could be done to save America, I just up and stopped drinking on February 1, 2004.

I still feel like a Winter Blossom at times, you know, that writer of this book’s preface who’ll hit a "blackout" where the lights won’t ever go on again, but then I remind myself: "No self-pity, no impatience, no competing and no regrets."

I avoid the self-pity by not sympathizing so easily and readily as I used to with other people’s tales of woe. AA teaches you that. You only enable them and drag yourself into mutual misery. It’s also very American, very "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and not by the charity of others."

Of course, the Hypocrite’s Empire of the Socialist Federations of the World could eventually win, but it will never drive me back to a homelessness I’ve already experienced, because I’ve found a home in AA.

I’m sure the buds and blossoms Margie is worried about will face the still cold rains of Vancouver’s Lower Mainland but… oh, well, they did have their moment and I was there to applaud them. No one will ever forget Spencer Tracy, so I’m pretty sure no one will ever forget me.

'Cause I am the motherfucking winter blossom!