 Had I known that I was giving artificial respiration that day backstage to the future Penguin in “Batman” or to Sylvester Stallone’s official trainer in “Rocky,” I would have, perhaps, been a bit more professional. And, that’s not meant to undermine Burgess Meredith, the actor, who gave a dramatic performance worthy of the Tony, the Emmy and the Oscar. Not to even mention the Yellow Rose of Texas. Well, anyway you cut it, the whole thing was pretty bizarre, to say the least. Let me set the stage.
I first met Burgess Meredith when he walked up to me on the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas and asked for directions to the Baylor Theater. “I’m supposed to meet this Paul Baker guy over there,” he told me, “and I keep getting lost. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been living in New York for the past few years and all these wide open spaces can be a little confusing for a fellow like me.”
 I recognized Meredith instantly. He had long been one of my favorite actors on TV, but I had never seen him in person before. He seemed in such a jovial mood, I thought I’d have a little fun with him.
“Are you sure you want to meet this Baker dude?” I asked him, “He’s known in these parts as some kind of a radical maverick.” Meredith grunted, and smiled, then nodded his head. “Got to, my boy,” he said, “Otherwise, I can’t go back to New York. Do you know him?”
I confessed to Meredith that I knew him and he immediately looked toward the heavens and slyly grinned, as if thanking the thespian’s God up there for giving him a helping hand.
 “Tell you what,” he said, “why don’t we go have us a beer, or a cup of coffee and you can fill me in. You know anything about this ‘Hamlet’ thing he’s doing? Charles Laughton told me he saw Baker’s staging of ‘Othello’ and it was the most impressive theatrical Shakespearean production he’d ever seen. He also said this Baker guy was a damn genius. Now, coming from Charlie, that’s quite a compliment.”
Once I admitted to Meredith that I not only knew Mr. Baker but was a student in some of his classes and had a small part in “Hamlet,” he grinned like a cheshire cat, took a small pad and pencil out of his pocket and began taking notes.
I thought maybe I’d play the game, I was having so much fun. I asked him if he was one of those newspaper guys from New York who had come to Texas to interview Mr. Baker and find out what made him tick. “Naw,” he quickly admitted, “but I used to be a newspaper reporter. Sometimes, when I read what those guys write about me, I wish maybe I’d stayed in the newspaper business instead of becoming an actor.”
Meredith would have probably been a pretty damn good newspaper man had he decided to stay in the profession. He asked me lots of questions and managed to scribble down an ample supply of notes, which is something I never have quite managed to master too well in all my years as a journalist.
“Tell me about this experimental Hamlet production,” Meredith commented. “Charlie told me this Baker guy split up the role into three characters. What’d he go and do that for? I bet ol’ Willie Shakespeare must be turning over in his grave.”
I explained to Meredith that Baker thought Shakespeare’s theatrical dialogue was dramatic stuff but a little hard to understand by Texans who had not been exposed to such pomp and circumstance. Meredith grunted and muttered something under his breath that sounded like “baloney.”
The Baker concept of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” I explained to Meredith, was to divide the main character into three different personalities – the brute, the intellect and the lover. And, to have three actors playing the role, speaking the appropriate lines. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Meredith replied, “it might have kept me away from the bottle and all those wild women.”
 Meredith said Baker’s approach to Shakespeare’s play might be a bit unorthodox, but he respected anyone who had convictions strong enough to hang in there despite what the critics said. And, he added, even though most people in New York theatrical circles thought that Baker was some sort of a kook, Laughton had become enraptured with the man.
“Hell,” Meredith said, “for weeks, all I heard was praise about this Texas maverick who was kicking ass and taking names. I just decided one day to take a leave of absence from ‘Teahouse of the August Moon,’ and head down to Texas and see for myself what all the bullshit was about.”
When Meredith sat down to talk with Baker, the man known on the Baylor campus as “Prof” quickly made a believer out of him. And Meredith was just as charming and persuasive. They may have appeared to some to be “the odd couple” - Baker, a professor and son of a Presbyterian minister and Meredith, the former newspaper reporter turned actor - but they were destined to make theatrical history together.
Meredith cut to the chase and came straight to the point. “Charlie told me you had this Texas Shakespeare company down here in Waco,” Meredith told Baker, “and I just sorta had to come down and check it out. But, what are you doing in Texas? You oughta be in New York. That’s where the theater is.”
Baker remained silent for a moment and then replied, “The theater as America knows it today, may be on Broadway, but all that is gonna change pretty soon – if I have anything to do with it.” He motioned for Meredith to take a seat in one of the theater’s 65 leather swivel chairs, that looked more like the kind businessmen used in their offices instead of the uncomfortable, conventional seats installed in most NY theaters.
Meredith rolled around casually in his theater chair in a 360-degree circle and seemed amazed that, instead of the usual proscenium stage used in most of the traditional theaters on Broadway, and the regular auditorium-type seating style in NY, the chairs at Baylor Theater were located in a “pit seating area,” engulfed on all sides by theatrical fare on five different stages.
As the actors rehearsed, Meredith observed that they were scurrying about in tennis shoes on a precarious raked stage, almost as gracefully as dancers in a NYC ballet production of “Swan Lake.”
Meredith was enthralled. He sat there with a grin on his face, dwarfed by some of Baylor’s giant football players whom Baker had recruited for crowd scenes in the production.
During a break in the rehearsal, Baker invited Meredith to test his reflexes on the raked stage. The actor responded quickly, leaving his seat and hopping up on the stage as adroitly as a Texas jack rabbit.
It was while Meredith was on the raked stage that Baker posed the question to the actor. “You know,” he said, “You’d make a great Hamlet. We could use the 3-sided Hamlets from our show as ‘shadow Hamlets,’ almost like a small Greek chorus. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Why don’t you get away from all that razzle-dazzle up there in New York and come back down here and have some fun? We couldn’t pay you much, but it’d be worth it to have the chance to eat my wife’s Sunday meatloaf. Not to mention her chocolate pie.”
Meredith stopped dead still on the raked stage and looked out over the imaginary audience. “Does she make a lemmon mirange?” he wanted to know. “The best,” Baker replied, “but I gotta warn ya, it’s got lots of calories and you’ll get addicted.”
Meredith laughed, and came back to his seat. “Well, I dunno,” he told Baker, “This three-sided Hamlet character may be dramatic stuff, but it’s a little out of my class. I’m not much of a lover, I’m too small to be a fighter, and I’m not very smart – particularly when it comes to women. I don’t think I’d be a very good Hamlet. Besides, Charlie would be jealous. I’d never live that down.”
 Baker scratched his head for a moment and then poised the question. “Well, maybe Charles would change his mind a little bit if I invited him to co-direct the play with me. If you tell Charles about the meatloaf and the pies, I betcha he won’t say no. Besides, Charles could read the Bible for some of our Baptist 'preacher boys' and give them a little insight in how to interpret what the Lord sez there in the Good Book. Some of them fellers are so narrow-minded, they think Shadrack, Meshak and Abendigo play for the Yankees.”
That was the beginning of what the national press later called “the most revolutionary and flamboyant chapter in American theatrical history.” It put Baylor Theater on the map, worldwide, and caused critics to talk faster and louder than Jerry Falwell or any of Baylor’s would-be preachers, studying for the Baptist seminary.
When Laughton came to the Baylor campus, it was a sight to behold. Baker had warned him about the by-god Baptist “preacher boys” who walked around campus carrying big ol’ Bibles under their arms and chastising him and his student-actors for practicing their sinful ways upon the wicked stage.
I remember the first time Laughton addressed Baker’s student-actors. Once, while demonstrating a point on the raked stage, the portly actor slipped, and rolled from the top of the stage to the lip of the lower level. Then he came to rest in sort of a huddled mass, and never said a blessed word. Baker and his students gasped, then remained silent, as if afraid something dreadful had happened to Laughton in their own theater.
 Finally, Laughton raised his head slightly, and opened one eye. He looked around to get his bearings, or maybe to see if his captured audience was taking everything all in, and then he rolled over and pointed a finger at Baker. “Damn it, man,” he bellowed. “You could have at least told me I might fall and bust my fat ass.”
The tension was broken. Baker’s students chuckled, but Laughton just sat there, rather unspectacularly on the theater’s stage. Baker walked over to him and offered a helping hand. Laughton shrugged him off.
“Come on Charles,” Baker said, “Let me help you up.” Laughton waved him away. “Damn it, man, I’m not about to move,” he commented, “I have wasted much too much energy to joke about it. If I’m gonna end up busting my butt, somebody’s gonna pay for it, and it might as well be the dumb-ass critics.”
None of those in attendance understood the brevity of his observation. But, when “Hamlet” opened on stage at the Baylor Theater – it became very evident. During Ophelia’s traditional “mad scene,” the actress suddenly stopped gesticulating and ran furiously from one side of the stage to the other.
Suddenly , as she abruptly turned around, she fell, and, you guessed it, rolled from the top of that raked stage to the very bottom, as the theatrical lights followed her dramatic decent.
Members of the audience were petrified with the dramatic scene. Some even left their seats and came up on the stage to offer their assistance. It was only when all the applause rang out – prompted by Baker clapping while standing at the rear of the auditorium – and the house lights dimmed, that the audience realized the true impact of the scene. Baker was chuckling. Laughton heard all the commotion on the little speakers backstage in the theater’s green room, and shouted “Bravo! Bravo!”
But, the fireworks had only started. In the production’s final act, a dramatic dueling scene took place between Hamlet and Laertes. Trap doors at the top of the raked stage had been opened and “decorated” with sandbags, to symbolize a grave. The play’s script called for Hamlet to jump down into the grave and eventually do battle with Laertes.
What the audience didn’t know was that there was a “tunnel” constructed under the stage leading to one of the theater’s wings where I was stationed with my sound effects crew. While the action was captivating the audience on stage, Meredith crawled through the tunnel on his hands and knees and “collapsed” at my feet. He told me to call the doctor, he was having a heart attack.
  Up top, a young actor named Clu Gulager, playing the role of Osrick, (who was later to star as Billy the Kid in “The Tall Man” television series), sensed something out of the ordinary was happening. He immediately jumped down into the grave, picked up Hamlet’s sword, and continued to battle with Laertes.
Because of the complexity of the three-sided shadow Hamlet staging devised by Baker, members of the audience never knew the difference. It was all great theater as far as they were concerned, and when the scene was over, they jumped wildly to their feet as a body and cheered loudly like crowds at a Baylor football game.
While all this dramatic business was happening on stage, I had my own little backstage drama. Meredith was moaning and groaning and many of Baylor’s most devout drama students were on their knees praying for his recovery.
After the medics came and we hoisted Meredith onto a stretcher and into the ambulance, enroute to the hospital, I remember going backstage to the telephone and calling the newspaper guys. It was Laughton who told me what to say.
“It’s no big deal,” he told me. “Just tell those guys Burgess had a little heat stroke, that’s all. And, tell ‘em, before they ask, that the show went on as usual.”
The next day everybody on campus was talking about Meredith’s big exit scene. Everybody but Meredith. It was a few years later before he finally got around to telling me what really happened.
 At the press conference during the premiere festivities of the “Batman” television series. Meredith motioned to a crowd of media guys and told them he had a good story to lay on them. Then he introduced me and suggested I fill them in on the day he “ducked out” of the Paul Baker-Charles Laughton “Hamlet” production at Baylor Theater.
“This guy here was giving me artificial respiration like he thought I was gonna die on him,” he laughed, “but actually, I was just fooling around.” As the press guys waited anxiously for the punch line, he looked at me and grinned.
“They had this press guy in Texas named John Rosenfield,” he told them, “who had earned quite a reputation as a theatrical critic. His normal procedure was to drive to Waco from Dallas and catch the theater’s dress rehearsal and then critique it for the Dallas Morning News so the review ran before opening night.
“This Paul Baker guy at the Baylor Theater got pissed that this Rosenfield fellow wouldn’t play ball by his rules,” Meredith said, “and he told Rosenfield that if he wanted to see his production of ‘Hamlet,’ he’d have to see it on opening night just like all the rest of the critics. He might be a pretty important dude, he told ‘Rosie,’ but he didn’t give a damn who he was, no newspaper critic was gonna review his play except on opening night.
 “Well,” Meredith continued, “needless to say, that didn’t set too well with Mr. Rosenfield, who promptly went back to Dallas and wrote a scathing article about this pompous Mr. Baker guy (whom he secretly admired for his intellectual tenacity). When ‘Hamlet’ opened at the Baylor Theater, Mr. Rosenfield came back, okay, and was ushered, politely, to his customary seat on the sixth row, despite Mr. Baker’s objections.
“Charles Laughton told me later about what had happened,” Meredith recalled, “and we made this vow right then and there, that we would never perform on stage again in front of that pompous ass, no matter how respected and renowned he was. So, when one of Mr. Baker’s ushers came back stage at intermission and told me that Mr. Rosenfield was in the audience, I didn’t even think twice. Boom, just like a bolt of lightning, I was out of there in a flash.
“This poor guy here, he thought I was gonna die on him,” Meredith told all his media hounds. “It was all I could do to keep from laughing. But I never had a heat stroke. That was Charlie’s idea from the git go. I spent the night in the hospital to make everything look legitimate, then I went looking for a little dive where I could get myself a beer. And, believe me, that is no easy task in Waco, Texas. But, hell, I pulled it off.”
So, that’s the story of what really happened at the “Hamlet” production at Baylor. There never was much doubt in my mind that Meredith was one of America’s great actors, Anybody who could pull off that stunt and get away with it should receive some lofty accolade. Somehow, meatloaf and lemon mirange pie, no matter how good it was, just doesn’t seem quite enough.
Oh well, that’s show biz, baby.
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“The gay lifestyle is so popular in Hollywood, I hear the real estate developers are promoting new high rise condos with walk-in, come-out closets.”
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