the
force--and he's a follower of Stanislavsky."

The beat cop who'd reported the D.O.A. whipped around at the door. "A
Red?"

* * * * *

I let Lou Pape explain what the Stanislavsky method of acting was,
while I sat down on the one chair and tried to apply it. Stanislavsky
was the great pre-Revolution Russian stage director whose idea was
that actors had to think and feel like the characters they portrayed
so they could _be_ them. A Stanislavskian works out everything about a
character right up to the point where a play starts--where he was
born, when, his relationship with his parents, education, childhood,
adolescence, maturity, attitudes toward men, women, sex, money,
success, including incidents. The play itself is just an extension of
the life history created by the actor.

How does that tie in with the old woman who had died? Well, I'd had
the cockeyed kind of luck to go bald at 25 and I'd been playing old
men ever since. I had them down pretty well--it's not just a matter of
shuffling around all hunched over and talking in a high cracked voice,
which is cornball acting, but learning what old people are like
inside--and these cases I talked Lou Pape into taking me on were
studies in senility. I wanted to understand them, know what made them
do what they did, _feel_ the compulsion that drove them to it.

The old woman on the bed, for instance, had $32,000 in five bank
accounts ... and she'd died of starvation.

You've come across such cases in the news, at least a dozen a year,
and wondered who they were and why they did it. But you read the
items, thought about them for a little while, and then forgot them. My
interest was professional; I made my living playing old people and I
had to know as much about them as I could.

That's how it started off, at any rate. But the more cases I
investigated, the less sense they made to me, until finally they were
practically an obsession.

Look, they almost always have around $30,000 pinned to their
underwear, hidden in mattresses, or parked in the bank, yet they
starve themselves to death. If I could understand them, I could write
a play or have one written; I might really make a name for myself,
even get a Hollywood contract, maybe, if I could act them as they
should be acted.

So I sat there in the lone chair, trying to reconstruct the character
of the old woman who had died rather than spend a single cent of her
$32,000 for food.