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toilet for a few moments to try them on; and when he emerged, his good tweed
jacket and dark slacks over his arm, he was another man entirely. As though
magically, coarse stubble had sprouted on his sagging jowls. (It may well have
been there when he came into the shop, but who would have noticed? He was too
nice-looking a young man to go around unshaved.)
The hair had grown limp and off-gray under the squashed hat. The face was
lined and planed with the depravities and deprivations of a lifetime lived in
gutters and saloons. The hands were caked with filth, the eyes lusterless and
devoid of personality, the body grotesquely slumped by the burden of mere
existence.
This old man, this skid from the Bowery, how had he gotten into the toilet,
and where was the nice young man who had gone in wearing that jacket and those
slacks? Had this creature somehow overpowered him
(what foul weapon had this feeble old man used to subdue a vital, strong youth
like that) ? The white-haired
Good Women of Charity were frozen with distress as they imagined the
strong-faced, attractive youth, lying in the bathroom, his skull crushed by a
length of pipe.
The old bum extended the jacket, the pants, and the rest of the clothing the
young man had been wearing, and in a voice that was thirty years younger than
the body from which it spoke, he explained, I
won t be needing these, ladies. Sell them to someone who can make good use of
them. The voice of the young man, from this husk.
And he paid for the rags he wore. They watched him as he limped and rolled
through the front door into the filthy streets, another tramp gone to join the
tide of lost souls that would inevitably become a stream and a river and an
ocean of wastrels, washing finally into a drunk tank or a doorway or a park
bench.
Richard Becker spent six weeks living on the Bowery; in fleabags, abandoned
warehouses, cellars, gutters, and on tenement rooftops; he shared and wallowed
in the nature and filth and degradation of the empty men of his times.
For six weeks he was a tramp, a thoroughly washed-out hopeless rumdum, with
rheumy eyes and
palsied hands and a weak bladder.
One by one the weeks mounted to six, and on the first day of casting for
Sweet Miracles, the
Monday of the seventh week, Richard Becker arrived at the Martin Theatre,
where he auditioned for the part in the clothes he had worn for the past six
weeks.
The play ran for five hundred and eighteen performances, and Richard Becker
won the Drama
Critics Circle Award as the finest male performer of the year. He also won
the Circle Award as the most promising newcomer of the year.
He was twenty-two years old at the time.
The following season, after
Sweet Miracles had gone on the road, Richard Becker was apprised, through the
pages of
Variety, that John Foresman & T. H. Searle were about to begin casting for
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House of
Infidels, the posthumous script by Odets, the last he ever wrote. Through
friends in the Foresman & Searle offices, he obtained a copy of the script,
and selected a part he considered massive in its potentialities.
The role of an introspective and tormented artist, depressed by the level of
commercialism to which his work had sunk, resolved to regain an innocence of
childhood or nature he had lost, by working with his hands in a foundry.
When the first-night critics called Richard Becker s conception of Tresk, the
artist, a pinnacle of thespic intuition and noted, His authority in the
part led members of the audience to ask one another how such a sensitive actor
could grasp the rough unsubtle life of a foundry worker, they had no idea
that
Richard Becker had worked for nearly two months in a steel stamping plant and
foundry in Pittsburgh. But the makeup man on
House of Infidels suspected Richard Becker had once been in a terrible fire,
for his hands were marked by the ravages of great heat.
After two successes, two conquests of Broadway, two characterizations that
were immediately ranked with the most brilliant Shubert Alley had ever
witnessed, Richard Becker s reputation began to build a legend.
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