Movies were an early influence on Kline, and he admits to having serious crushes on actresses and thinking that being a movie actor might be a way to meet them.
"When I was very young, I saw Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap, he recalled. "There were two of her -- she played twins. She was just wonderful. And Hayley Mills just did it for me. Suddenly I simply had to meet her. That's when I thought, 'Well, the only way to do it is to go to Hollywood and get in the movies.'
"The irony is that, a few years ago, I was at a party at [the playwright] Peter Shaffer's house, and I bummed a cigarette from this woman. I said, 'Excuse me a moment, can I bum one of your cigarettes?' She said, 'Sure.' And it was Hayley Mills -- but I didn't know that until I got home and was talking about the party, and someone said, 'Yeah, didn't Hayley Mills look great?' I said, 'Hayley Mills was there? My dream girl?' 'Yeah. She was sitting right next to you.' And I said, 'Oh, my God! That's the one I bummed the cigarette from! She's the reason I'm in show business today.' God, what a moment missed!"
Early in his career, Kline earned a reputation as a ladies' man. His name was linked with, among others, Patti LuPone, Donna McKechnie, Mia Farrow and Linda Ronstadt. But his marriage five years ago to the actress Phoebe Cates and the birth of their children -- Owen, 3, and Greta Simone, 7 months -- has matured and stabilized his life.
"I'm really a one-woman man," he told me when I asked about his marriage. "And when I was in relationships, they were monogamous, however brief. This is turning out to be a rather longer one.
"I never made promises to women that I didn't keep," he added. "And I never kept promises I didn't make. Marriage is a different thing. It's a promise I made. This is not dating. This is not, 'Well, maybe I'll see you tomorrow.' There are vows and commitments and things. There are little children I have to raise and protect and guide and give the best of me."
I asked how he and Phoebe met.
"We just kind of met here in this building at a script reading of The Big Chill*," he replied, smiling. "It was just 'hi' and 'hello,' and that was it. About three years later, Phoebe was doing a play here, and I was upstairs rehearsing Henry V. And we used to bump into each other.
"I met someone who was working for Phoebe as a part-time assistant, and she asked me if I knew of any other part-time jobs. I said, 'Well, I could use a personal assistant. In fact, you're hired, and your first job is to get me Phoebe Cates' phone number and find out if she has a boyfriend and if she'd go out with me if I called.' So, within a week, I got a part-time assistant and a date with Phoebe Cates. Not bad.
"Phoebe was so beautiful, I just liked looking at her. And she was funny. This was 10 years ago. She was very young [Cates is now 31], and that was very scary to me. I could hve adopted her or dated her. Those seemed to be the options. It was a little disconcerting at first -- but, obviously, eventually it didn't bother me. I'm a very lucky man. I'm blessed. The most important things to me are my children and my marriage. Only after that comes my work."
Kline got to combine work and marriage when he and his wife starred together in the film Princess Caraboo.
I asked him about acting and about his occasional doubts as to its value.
He thought a moment, then said: "I look at the world, and I see beautiful things, whether it's from ignorance or narrowness of vision. And I know you can have a beautiful life -- all it takes is a lot of care. I know you can't save the world, but you can try to reach out to individuals you come in contact with, one at a time. Maybe that's how you try to save the world. Actors think: 'If there's just one person in that audience I can reach tonight, if I don't blow it and can get through to them, I'll achieve what I'm supposed to.'"
"I believe you have to have realizable goals," he continued, "and I feel as an actor I can influence, in my own modest way, the world by what I choose to do and how I do it. Because, by choosing to do something, you are endorsing it, whatever the morality of the movie or the play. So I try to choose something that I believe in, that isn't a lie -- something that has contained in it something that is life-affirming, that is morally worthwhile, that is not mind-rotting and immoral or spiritually diminishing.
"I believe you have to give back to the society and culture, you have to give it its due," he said quietly. "And I try to do that. Think of what it gives us and how we owe it.
"There's not a lot an actor can do to make things right. And yet, you think: 'Well, this is how I can contribute. I can't solve the homeless problem or cure a disease, but if I can give people hope, if I can make people laugh, if I can make people feel, if I can humanize our dehumanized condtion for a couple of hours, maybe that's how I can contribute.'
But, all the time, I wish I could do more."
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