I CAN’T COUNT THE NUMBER OF TIMES I’VE BEEN ASKED how my brief but brilliant career in The Theater began. Mainly because no one’s ever actually asked me, per se. But as an multi-hyphenate actor-writer-producer looking through the lens of a life now in the…mid-morning of its autumnal days, I can only hope, only dream of…only imagine that one day—soon—maybe sometime in the next, I don’t know, decade, if I’m lucky, some well-meaning soul; a journalist, or a graduate student, perhaps one of my children, composing an essay chronicling scenes from my errant and precipitous life, might pause in their interview, press the REC button on their Voice Memos app and say, “Tell me how your brief but brilliant career in the theater began.”
Funny you should ask…
By the spring of nineteen and seventy-eight I’d been in Nashville a little less than two years. Murphy and I had been married for close to one of those two, though as I look back now, how or why she stayed even that long is quite beyond my reckoning. At twenty-eight I was a veteran bullshit artist, and like all con men of any skill and repute, I’d convinced her I was the best hope we had of climbing out of the snakepit I’d pulled us both into. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.
In that relatively short span of time, I’d managed to have the AMC Pacer I’d driven from Denver repo’d, and Murph evicted from the townhouse she’d lived in for three years. Four months later, in the dead of night, we were skipping out on another, our lives packed and wedged into my brother-in-law’s ’71 El Camino. In the haste to depart, I made the decision to leave behind a black 27-inch RCA Color Floor Model Television Console I’d acquired from the Rent-A-Center on Gallatin Road in Madison, intending to contact one of their always helpful Customer Service Representatives at my earliest free moment while on the lam and provide them the landlord’s telephone number. In hindsight, this proved an unwise course of action on my part; one I learned some days after our flight into the night had me wanted by the Rent-A-Center on Gallatin Road in Madison along with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department on a Theft of Rental Property warrant. Putting way too fine an edge on things, I was running an occasional ounce or two of renegade blow to cover our expenses, you know, but I’d been, well…I’d been blowing all the profits and was in the hole a little more than a grand to the… wholesaler.
All of which, when you lined everything up end to end, made for an aspect of newly-married life Murph probably hadn’t anticipated. Events of my own making coursed and colluded around us like a perfect storm of idiocy and bad luck, keeping me running maybe three steps ahead of the law and the man both, and making staying in TwangTown that spring of nineteen and seventy-eight kindly a deal-breaker.
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We holed up in a rambling old farmhouse in Marshall County with Murph’s sister, JoLynn and her husband, Danny; every stick of everything we owned packed into a back room and not a dime between us. I took part time labor gigs on construction jobs when Danny’s foreman needed another shovel, and borrowed a few hundred scratch from Ernest Ford to keep us alive, but neither was enough to keep the wolf at bay. Jobless, rideless, homeless, wanted by the authorities and hiding out from a dental hygienist with an alternate line of income and associates who practiced rearranging teeth, I wasn’t yet thirty years old, pregnant with our first child, and by my own hand, staring into the open maw of abject failure.
I desperately needed to make a change, find gainful employment and right the boat. I needed a path, a way to atonement…and I needed about three grand. My credit score was likely being circulated with a mugshot. I’d come to Nashville for the music business, but hadn’t booked a gig in months. I had no real training in a hireable skill in the real world and I needed a real world gig…position, rather—something in management, perhaps, something wherein I could capitalize on the skills I did possess. Surely someone somewhere needed a moderately talented, part-time entertainer and construction worker with a solid pedigree. Someone practiced in the art of gaslighting. Someone who could convince almost anyone he was someone he wasn’t.
When the answer came to me, it came on page three of the Sunday Tennessean’s Entertainment section; a small, one color, two-column, four-inch notice buried deep in a printed mosaic of club acts, Opry lineups and Cineplex ads that leapt off the newsprint like a page in a pop-up book. In the seconds it took me to read, scan and reread this simple rectangular block with a Bold Helvetica headline and eight lines of body copy in Times New Roman 10pt, I knew instinctively that I wasn’t merely reading a one color, two-column, four-inch notice buried deep in a printed mosaic of club acts, Opry lineups and Cineplex ads.
I was looking at my destiny, my salvation.
I was looking at a casting call for Community Theater.
The Circle Players, Nashville’s preeminent theater troupe and house were auditioning; holding an open call for the Richard Nash staple, The Rainmaker. I knew this play, I’d played File when I was boarding in Carmel, what? Ten, eleven years earlier? My God, I thought, already putting the plan into gear, if I could land a part in this, all these I’m-at-the-edge-of-the-abyss-so-get-a-real-fucking-job-now plans would have to be tabled. For a month at least, maybe two. I wouldn’t make a dime, a couple of hundred dollars at best, but this…this was something I could do. Something I could make. Something I could be.
I dug out an old headshot and resume, wheedled another few hundred in a wire from the old man, and the keys to the El Camino from Danny, and three days later, the big Holley four-barrel wide open, I made the run to town while Murph hung with JoLynn at their Mother and Daddy’s.
I couldn’t recall the last time I’d auditioned for anything. I’d done a summer season at the Perry-Mansfield Academy after a run as Maitland in The Glass Menagerie in Monterey in ’68. But that was ages ago, darling. I hadn’t trod the boards in years, and wasn’t at all sure I could even make the callback cut. I’d checked out a book on American Theater at the library in Lewisburg, and crammed on a condensed version of the play; anything to give me an edge; I was a new kid on the block, Circle vets’d be reading; polished, known, marquee names in Nashville theater, and I needed to be firing on all cylinders. I needed to be an actor.
But all the stewing and fretting was for naught. The moment I walked into the theater I knew instinctively I’d leave with a part. Scene after scene, the director released actor after actor, until, at the end of the afternoon, seven of us remained. We’d simply been colleagues when the day began…new friends. When the auditions ended, we were a cast. Wesley Paine as Lizzie. Wayne Armstrong as Starbuck. James Watson as HC. Bill Shick as the sheriff. Bob Tidwell as File. Val Perkins as my little brother, Jim, and me--Dallas Cook--as Noah.
Stay with me.
I tore up the stairs when we broke and grabbed a payphone, slugging quarters in to call Murph at her folks’, and give her the good news. The next few weeks were going to be frantic, I told her; rehearsals, blocking, wardrobe fittings, set construction…and PR.. “They’re gonna promote the show the week before opening,” I told her. “All three locals and both papers!” I was swelling with pride. I was going to carry on the family name and make my father proud of me at last.
The silence on the phone was so complete, I thought for an instant we’d been disconnected. Then, through the earpiece, the sounds of her family receding, and she, sotto voce: “What if someone recognizes you?”
I was frozen with fear. I was going to go to jail and my father would disown me at last. My psyche split into two halves, one, an already-seasoned thespian, positively glowing at the prospect of recognition, the other, a hardened criminal, stricken to mute silence at the prospect of recognition. Then, Murph again, her voice muffled, her hand likely cupping the mouthpiece: “What if you used a stage name?”
The sheer artfulness, the genius of the idea was radiant. My God, this was a brilliant woman. Brilliant and cunning. A stage name. It was perfect…and De rigueur for all the most fashionable actors in the theater and the cinema both. I needed something with some brio and panache, something tough and memorable… a man’s name, but with a...I don’t know…a flair of theatricality.
What I needed was an alias for two months, and in another moment I can only call inspired, I took the first name of the hottest series on TV and my brilliant and cunning wife’s family name, and by the time we hung up, I’d become Dallas Cook.
Genius.
The next few weeks, as I’d forecast, were helter-skelter. But God, I felt like I’d been baptized and born again. I’d found a place for myself, and maybe a future for Murph and I. Two talent agents had already come to a handful of rehearsals, and I knew as clearly as I knew my own name—both of them—that I was pinging on their radar. Every rehearsal brought me closer to the character of Noah and to this family; I began to slide into him as effortlessly as it felt to work with this cast; gifted, intuitive actors all…and all as panicked and flush as I when I’d learned Dad was going to be in town for a commercial shoot and had bought tickets to opening night for him, his manager, Red Loakes, and my brother, Brion. The news all but cemented me with Circle Players. I was in the gang, now… I was an actor.
As hackneyed and trite as it sounds, I felt like I was home.
Which was where Jerry, the Customer Service Representative from Rent-A-Center who swore the Theft of Rental Property warrant out on Jeffrey Ford was when he recognized Dallas Cooke’s headshot as it came up on his own 27-inch RCA Color Floor Model Television Console in a 30 second spot for the show the night before the curtain rose.
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On Opening Night, that ‘perfect storm of idiocy and bad luck’ made landfall at the Circle Theater, arriving in the lobby in the form of two plainclothes detectives, only yards behind Brion, Loakes, and my old man (who, thank God, was completely in the dark) armed with a warrant for my arrest (now including a charge of using an alias to avoid prosecution) and no real taste for legitimate theater.
In the Green Room, we were fifteen minutes from Places when the buzz broke from Dad entering the theater. They’d made it to their seats when Brion muscled his way backstage to wish me luck, and to tell us all how excited he and Dad were to see the show. But he’d only barely opened his mouth when Henry, the stage manager, lurched into the Green Room, his face a kabuki mask of urgency and fear, his hands wringing. “Buck….there are two…two men here,” he said.
We were five minutes to Places.
In less than three, Brion had absorbed the entire story, told all of us to break a leg, followed Henry out and made his way through the wings and out to the small anteroom where the detectives waited for me. Marching up to both, he extended and shook each of their hands, and introduced himself. Less than two minutes later, he’d convinced them that arresting me before the show was out of the question, and finagled them two seats a few rows behind Dad, who still had no clue.
In the Green Room, the small light blinked on the header above the door, and Henry leaned into the frame. “Places!” he said.
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For the next two hours, we mounted a show that would run for four weeks, and be named Best Play of The Year, with Wesley Paine earning Best Actress for the year. Completely beguiled, both detectives became Circle regulars, waited until Ernest Ford left the theater, and allowed me to travel to booking untethered after the doors to the theater had been closed that night.
But when I arrived, I was not alone. I stepped into the precinct to find myself surrounded by my fellow cast members, our Director, Michael McClendon, our stage manager, Henry, and the Circle’s resident attorney, all there linking hands for Dallas; Dallas Cooke.
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After some maneuvering, both charges were eventually resolved and the record of both cleared from my file. It took a little more tap dancing, but eventually I covered the contraband nut—with interest.
Ernest Ford? Never had a clue.
And that, dear reader, was the real theater.