A Life in Parts Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Scribner eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Kyle and Amy: We made it. A life worth salvaging.

  For Robin and Taylor: You made it a life worth living.

  One man in his time plays many parts.

  —William Shakespeare, As You Like It

  Walter White

  She stopped coughing. Maybe she’d fallen back asleep. Then suddenly vomit flooded her mouth. She grasped at the sheets. She was choking. I instinctively reached to turn her over.

  But I stopped myself.

  Why should I save her? This little junkie, Jane, was threatening to blackmail me, expose my enterprise to the police, destroy everything I had worked for, and wipe out the financial life preserver I was trying to leave my family—the only legacy I could leave them.

  She gurgled, searching for a gasp of air. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I felt a stab of guilt. Goddamn it, she’s just a girl. Do something.

  But if I stepped in now, wasn’t I just delaying the inevitable? Don’t they all at some point end up dead? And poor dumb comatose Jesse, my partner, lying beside her. She’s the one who got him on this shit in the first place. She’d kill them both, kill us all, if I stepped in now and played God.

  I told myself: just stay out of it. When he wakes he’ll discover this tragedy—this accident—on his own. Yes, it’s sad. All death is sad. But he’ll get over it in time. He’ll get past this like every other bad thing that’s happened to us. That’s what humans do. We heal. We move on. A few months from now he’ll barely remember her. He’ll find another girlfriend, and he’ll be fine. Fuck it. We all have to move on.

  I’ll just pretend I wasn’t here.

  But I am here. And she’s a human being.

  Oh God. What have I become?

  And then, somehow, as she was fading, she wasn’t herself anymore. I wasn’t looking at Jane, or Jesse’s girlfriend, or the actor Krysten Ritter. I was looking at Taylor, my daughter, my real daughter. I wasn’t Walter White anymore. I was Bryan Cranston. And I was seeing my daughter die.

  From the moment she was born in 1993—a bit premature, shy of seven pounds, impossibly beautiful—I felt an instant, radical, unconditional love that redefined love. I had never allowed myself to imagine losing her. But now, I was seeing it. Clearly. Vividly. She was slipping from me. She was dying.

  That was not the plan. When I do the homework for such a delicate scene, I don’t make a plan. My goal when I prepare isn’t to plot out each action and reaction, but to think: What are the possible emotional levels my character could experience? I break the scene down into moments or beats. By doing that work ahead of time, I leave a number of possibilities available to me. I stay open to the moment, susceptible to whatever comes.

  The homework doesn’t guarantee anything; with luck, it gives you a shot at something real.

  It was real fear that gripped me—my worst fear. A fear I hadn’t fully expected or come to terms with. And my reaction is there, forever, at the end of that scene. I gasp, and my hand moves to my mouth in horror.

  When the director, Colin Bucksey, said, “Cut,” I was weeping. Deep racking sobs. I explained to the people on set what had happened, what I had seen. Michael Slovis, our cinematographer, embraced me. My castmates, too. I remember in particular Anna Gunn, who played my wife, Skyler. I hugged her. I must have held on for five minutes. Poor Anna.

  Anna knew. As an actor she has a fragility at her core, and she often had a hard time shedding her character’s emotions after shooting difficult scenes.

  That will happen in an actor’s life, and it happened to me that day. It was the most harrowing scene I did on Breaking Bad, and really . . . ever.

  It may seem odd. It may even seem ghoulish. To stand in a room packed with people and lights and cameras and pretend I’m letting a girl choke to death. And then to see my daughter’s face in lieu of that girl. And to call that work. To call that your job.

  But it’s not odd to me. Actors are storytellers. And storytelling is the essential human art. It’s how we understand who we are.

  I don’t mean to make it sound high-flown. It’s not. It’s discipline and repetition and failure and perseverance and dumb luck and blind faith and devotion. It’s showing up when you don’t feel like it, when you’re exhausted and you think you can’t go on. Transcendent moments come when you’ve laid the groundwork and you’re open to the moment. They happen when you do the work. In the end, it’s about the work.

  Every day on Breaking Bad I’d wake up about 5:30 and have coffee, take a shower, get dressed. Some days I was so tired, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.

  I’d drive the nine miles from my condo in Nob Hill to Q Studios, five miles south of the airport in Albuquerque—ABQ as the locals call it. I’d be in the makeup chair by 6:30. I’d shave my head anew. Knock down the nubs. It didn’t take too long for makeup. By 7:00 a.m. we’d see everyone: the other actors, the crew. Then we’d start rehearsing.

  The allotment was a twelve-hour shoot. Plus a one-hour lunch. So a normal day was thirteen hours. It was very rare that the day was shorter. Occasionally, it was longer. Some days went seventeen hours. A lot of it had to do with whether we were on location.

  If it was just a minimum day, we’d wrap at 8:00 p.m. Then I’d grab a sandwich and apple for the road. I didn’t want to take the time to stop. I’d call my wife, Robin, from the car. How are you? Yeah, long day. I’d see how she was doing. I’d ask about Taylor. I’d still be talking to her when I walked into the house. I’d say goodnight and then have that sandwich while looking over what we were doing the next day. I’d take a hot bath with a little glass of red wine. Then I’d hit the sack.

  But even before the drive home, every night after we finished, I’d go in the hair and makeup trailer and take two hot, wet towels that my friends in the makeup department had presoaked, and I’d drape one over my head and I’d wrap the other over my face. I’d sit in the chair and let everything soak off, feeling all the toxins drain away. I’d sit until the towels went cold against my face, leeching myself of Walter White.

  That day I saw Jane die—that day I saw Taylor’s face—that day I went to a place I’d never been, I opened my eyes and stared through the scrim of the white towel into the light above. I’d put everything, everything, into that scene. All the things I was and all the things I might have been: all the side roads and the missteps. All the stuttering successes and the losses I thought might sink me. I was murderous and I was capable of great love. I was a victim, moored by my circumstances, and I was the danger. I was Walter White.

  But I was never more myself.

  Son

  My parents met like most people do: in an acting class in Hollywood.

  My mother was born Annalisa Dorthea Sell, but she was always called Peggy. Peggy was an impulsive girl, fun-loving, a flirt. In her youth she had a genuine innocence about her. She was one of those blond, blue-eyed cuties always told she ought to be in the movies. And so after a two-year stint in the Coast Guard and a failed starter marriage to a man named Easy, she left Chicago for Los Angeles, the land of empty promises, and she flung herself into auditions and acting lessons.

  The litany of states where my dad, Joseph Louis Cranston, grew up was so long I could never quite remember them all: Illinois, Texas, Florida, California, New York. As a kid, I imagined that he hailed from a family of grifters. Only outlaws could be so . . . rootless. Being the new kids in school every few months, my d
ad and his brother Eddie were often picked on, so my grandfather taught them how to fight. Not street brawling, but the acceptable method, in the boxing ring. The Cranston boys had the gift. My father earned a boxing scholarship to the University of Miami. He fought up and down the East Coast—in and out of the ring. In all my early memories, my dad was scrapping with someone or something.

  And he could tell a story.

  The handsome pugilist and raconteur and the blue-eyed flirt fell for each other in a hot flash. It’s easy to do that in an acting class. And after a couple of years, they tied the knot at the Little Brown Church in the Valley on Coldwater Canyon Avenue in Studio City. My mother became a 1950s wife: everything she had she threw behind her new husband and his goal to become a movie star.

  They bought a modest tract home and followed the script. My brother, Kim, came first in 1953, then me in 1956, and finally my sister, Amy, in 1962.

  We lived in Canoga Park in a single-story home at 8175 McNulty Avenue, close enough to Hollywood in physical distance, but a world away: the Valley—maybe best known for its lazy-tongued, sunbaked drawl. Seasons in the Valley were subtle. In the warm months, when the air pollution level was deemed dangerously high, our outdoor activities were restricted. We had smog days rather than snow days. We’d lie on our backs making smog angels in the yellowed grass.

  Mom was an Avon Lady, a volunteer at the Braille Institute for the blind, a Tupperware representative, a team mom for our Little League, and a member of the PTA. She hand-made our Halloween costumes every year.

  Dad was our coach in Little League. He loved baseball. So I loved baseball. And I do to this day. I went to a Dodgers game with Dad when I was four or five. The Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn to LA, but they didn’t yet have a stadium, so they played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for four seasons, from 1958 to 1961. The Coliseum was built for football and track and field, so the dimensions were strange for baseball—an enormous right field and a shallow left field—like Fenway Park in Boston. They put a high screen over the left-field fence in the Coliseum. To get a home run, a batter had to clear the screen. Even though left field was short, that screen was dauntingly high. Forty-two feet. Fenway’s world-famous Green Monster is thirty-seven.

  A player named Wally Moon, who hailed from the cotton fields of Arkansas, developed a knack for hitting home runs over that net. He’d switch his swing to an uppercut and whack it so high you thought he might punch a blue hole in the smoggy cloud wall: home run. People took to calling those soaring hits moon shots. I’d watch the ball hang in the sky—a pop-up, really—for a moment of breathless suspense, and then elation. Glory. That captured my imagination: swinging for the impossible, shooting the moon.

  Even after the Dodgers moved to their permanent home at Chavez Ravine in 1962, and even after things at my house started to fall apart, I knew I could depend on the smell of fresh-cut grass, Vin Scully’s dulcet voice calling the game on the radio, and the clean symmetry of the baseball diamond. The sense of hope you could dare to have with runners at the corners and no outs.

  My dad would take us to the movie and TV sets where he worked as an actor. Once he surprised us with something inside a trailer hitched to our car. He opened it up and we peered into the dark, dung-scented metal box. A donkey! I remember that donkey so well. His name was Tom. My dad let it roam around our backyard for a time. All the boys and girls in the neighborhood came over to admire him and to go for a ride. We had him for a while. Maybe a month or two. And then he went back to wherever he belonged. Bye, Tom. Nice knowin’ ya.

  My dad also brought home props for my brother and me: infantry helmets and badges and uniforms. Later I realized he must have “borrowed” them and then returned them the following week. Props on a set are tracked carefully; they’re not toys. But for us they were great treats.

  When my dad brought prop guns home, we loved to play war. All the boys in the neighborhood were always battling the Germans or the Japanese or the American Indians. We didn’t really understand history or war or why these people were our enemies. That’s just the way things were.

  And then one day an announcer came on TV and said, “We interrupt this program to bring you a special report.” Every time I heard that for years to come, I clenched.

  Walter Cronkite was on the screen, somber. “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at one p.m. Central Standard Time.” I remember how Cronkite took off his glasses. He wasn’t a stoical journalist anymore. The mask came off. He was just a man, overcome by the size and shock of the loss.

  There was a gasp and then a panic. My mother was weeping and clutching herself. And then she was locked in on the phone, as if my brother and I had disappeared. The adults couldn’t get enough news. My dad came home, solemn, and the neighbors stopped by. They needed to tell each other it was going to be okay. I don’t know how much I understood, but I felt the gravity of it. And now we had a new president. Lyndon Johnson. He talked funny. I don’t know that I’d ever heard that deep of a Texas drawl. And I thought his wife had a strange name.

  Our parents were devastated. We were learning life and death and fear and grief and succession. We didn’t know what to do. A neighbor kid declared: “We are not playing with guns anymore.” We loved guns, but we tossed them aside, imagining that we could somehow alter the course of things with our gesture. It didn’t last long. The urgency diminished and normal life resumed. It was a new normal.

  The Outlaw Frank James

  Whereas I was a goof as a kid, my brother Kim had a serious streak; he was introspective. He was smarter than me, not as athletic. But we were aligned in almost every other way. Brothers in every sense. And we both inherited the acting gene. Kim became my first director. He wrote and mounted the McNulty Avenue Garage production of The Legend of Frank and Jesse James, then cast me as Frank James. For Jesse, he looked next door to the Baral household. The Barals had five boys, and my brother chose Howard, the middle child, to play the heartless outlaw. Kim cast himself as the sheriff, several victims, townspeople, the coroner, and a newspaperman. I’m not sure why he didn’t cast others—there were plenty of kids in the neighborhood. Maybe he wanted them to pay their nickel like everyone else.

  We draped white sheets over storage boxes, and they became snowcapped mountains. We fashioned a blue plastic tarp into a raging river. A stuffed alligator snapped at our heels. Alligators abounded in the Old West. Of course the denouement was a fateful shoot-out. We were boys, pretending to kill each other, playing with glee and abandon.

  My first venture as a professional actor was a family production, too. My dad wrote, directed, and produced a series of ads for the United Crusade, which would later change its name to the United Way. I guess invoking a blood-soaked religious war wasn’t the vibe they were going for as a charity. My dad cast me as the lead. I was seven. The story went I was playing baseball with friends on a sandlot when a foul ball rolled into the street and I gave chase. Look out! I got hit by a car, put into an ambulance, rushed to the ER, and put into a head-to-toe body cast. Weeks later the cast came off, and I started physical therapy on the parallel bars and in the pool to learn how to walk again. In the last scene I held hands with a woman pretending to be my mother as we joyfully walked out of the hospital. Healed.

  I remember shooting every one of those scenes. I remember feeling that there was something special about what I was doing. Maybe it was just the attention. But I think it was something more. A sense that I was part of something greater than myself.

  Son

  I especially loved acting for my dad. He was a big man in my eyes—barrel-chested with striking black hair that gave way to distinguished salt and pepper before he turned forty. He always seemed so tall to me, but as he aged, I realized that he was just shy of five feet nine at his high-water mark.

  My dad wanted to be a star. No doubt. No compromise. Nothing else would do. He wanted the home run. But there were bills to pay. When he wasn’t working as an acto
r, my dad wrote scripts and did some directing and dabbled in businesses. Over his lifetime there were a lot of businesses. He started a company that offered a video assist to help golfers perfect their swing. He opened a recreational trampoline center and then a bar and coffee shop. He had plans for a catamaran cargo ship company. He ran a magazine for Hollywood tourists called Star’s Homes. At one point, he operated a tour of Liberace’s gilded house.

  The man did not lack for ideas. He approached each venture with vigor, but seldom found success. He had more ambitions and brainchildren than business acumen. His failures mounted and ate at him. And yet he never gave up. That was instructive. He kept at it.

  His was the typical actor’s life—uncertain employment, a little kismet, lots of hard luck. As a child, I never really felt the difference when the family was flush or flat broke. But my parents sure did. We got a brand new car one year. A while later, we sold it, and got an old car. A little elbow grease and it’s just like new! Another year, my parents (really, my dad) decided to go to the great expense of installing a built-in swimming pool in the backyard. Everyone in the neighborhood came to our house that summer, and we laughed and swam until our fingers were shriveled and our bloodshot eyes cried uncle, and then we beached ourselves bellies-down on the warm concrete and recovered.

  The following summer my mother told us that we wouldn’t be able to swim because we couldn’t afford the chemicals. As a result, our pool turned a murky green, like a pond somewhere in the deep woods.

  My dad did have some moderate success as an actor. He was featured in several TV shows, a handful of films. He cowrote the script for The Crawling Hand, a movie about an astronaut whose dead hand goes on a rampage targeting beachgoing teenagers. He also cowrote The Corpse Grinders, a trash flick that was part of a triple-feature release (which also included The Embalmers and The Undertaker and His Grisly Pals) still fondly recalled by drive-in purists.