Bob Dylan
I was born in 1940 and went to an American prep school, The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the ’50s. These were all white boys: no people of color, no Spanish, no Chinese, and it was all very organized and bound in tradition. Other children brought records to school by the likes of Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. To me, they looked like stylized crowns singing about a fake emotion, and I found them quite boring. I later fell in love with Tony Bennett, but it seems like he did not project that wonderful persona through his music.
The characters at the beginning of American rock’n’roll, like Buddy Holly and Elvis, were apparently aimed at me as a teenager, but I can not say that I was inspired by it. They did not change my lifestyle because I did not have a life outside of school. Music only played a role in my life in my early twenties, when I was introduced to folk music by artists such as Clancy Brothers, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. The popular revival was music you had never heard before. Joan Baez and Bobby Dylan talked about things I began to understand as a young man in the world.
My three parents
I’m happy to be the offspring of three amazing actors. My pa [John Cromwell] took me to the set of Anna and the king of Siam, which he led when I was about five, and I hid under the table with the Thai little children. He was best friends with Nigel – whom I knew as Willy – Bruce who played Watson on the radio in Basil Rathbone’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Uncle Willy’s laugh was contagious.
My mom, Kay Johnson, was Cecil B DeMille’s first wife when he switched from silent to audio films. She would go watch me on Saturday morning at the local movie house to see westerns or something that was not raised for the kids, even though we spend most of the time throwing popcorn and jujubes. She broke into some dialect while shopping and chatted with the butcher in Italian, which made the piss out of my shame.
My stepmother, Ruth Nelson, who I consider my second mother, was a member of the New York Group Theater. We saw her Mary Tyrone perform in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. When they announced her name, the audience rang, which was strange. At the end of the play, they applauded her standing.
Tennis
In the summers I played junior tournament tennis – not very good, I must say, but I had natural coordination and I looked good. The problem was giving back a backhand – or a forehand. I would probably just hit the ball out of every ten. I was incredibly hard on myself and there were a lot of rocket breakers.
I would go from tournament to tournament, be beaten in the first round and drive home. In the end, I just want to ask the people who run the tournament to place me for the first round for the first round, because I do not have to stay there that long. After beating me 6-0 in the first set, the other kid taught me what I was doing wrong, so I got a free tennis lesson.
A matter of morals
I went through my high school years through the skin of my teeth and went to Middlebury College, a very beautiful college in Vermont. My plan was to become an engineer. We had brotherhood, where out-of-control college students can work out all their manic stupidity. My dad came to visit a big party that day. There were broken beer bottles, vomit on the floor and women’s stockings on the wall. I think he was terrified. My stepmother suggested that he take me to Sweden at the age of 18 to see him direct a film – A Matter of Morals – with Eva Dahlbeck and [cinematographer] Sven Nykvist.
I was so enchanted that I left Middlebury and went to the Studio College of Performing Arts HB Studio in New York. That was the last thing my dad wanted. He said, ‘Well, do not be an actor. You’re too damn tall. ‘ [Cromwell is 6ft 7in.] I thought, ‘I’ll have to be a director.’ I tried to become a theater director for ten years, but got a job as an actor. Every year I go to a different theater and burn all my bridges; the next season I would go to another theater and burn them again from scratch.
Avoid the concept
I was delighted when I got my first job in the theater at the Cleveland Playhouse, even though I paid almost nothing: $ 25 every two weeks. Then I was drafted into the Army. I went to see a psychiatrist in New York named Arnold Hutschnecker, who was apparently Richard Nixon’s psychoanalyst. I said, “I am being called. Can you take me out? “He wrote a letter saying, ‘Give it to the inspector, but whatever you do, do not read the contents.’
We were all in our underwear – mostly black guys from downtown Cleveland – and the inspector announced, “Does anyone have letters?” I raise my hand, he comes off the line, reads my letter and says, ‘Have you had paranoid tendencies lately?’ Without even thinking, I said, “How the fuck am I supposed to know?” He gestures me to his office, writes on my induction slip that I am a manic-depressive schizophrenic with a destructive tendency that will harm himself or others, and says, ‘Give it to the man at the door.’ So it dropped me off blowing my ass off in Vietnam.
James Dean on screen and Burt Lancaster in the flesh
The first actor I remember I was just polished by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Giant and especially East of Eden. East of Eden just killed me because of the relationship of his character with his father, played by Raymond Massey, who just played in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, who directed my father. I thought Jimmy Dean was the best ever, with Marlon Brando and weird choices like John Ireland, whose persona I just really loved. I could see the other actors I now admire incredibly, like Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson and Wilfrid Lawson, until much later.
I remember walking Burt Lancaster down the street near the Museum of Modern Art in New York and walking toward me. I think he was the first movie star I’ve ever seen in any context outside of their movie or in a studio that shot a movie. He was very athletic, walked a lot and put on the most beautiful clothes – my mouth just dropped. I could not believe he was there. A movie star just walked past me.
• Operation Buffalo is available to stream on Acorn TV UK