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"I couldn't stand it any more and I just gave up," Scott says. "I seemed to have reached a point of no return." What brought him back again was an ad by a semiprofessional troupe casting Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. He joined the company, acted at night and worked on construction projects during the day. Once again Scott got married, this time to an attractive ingenue named Pat Reed, and once again he took off—this time for New York. Pat held down a secretarial job; Scott worked nights in a bank, then made the daily rounds between agents and auditions. He was also drinking heavily. Eventually Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, gave him his first break by casting him as Richard III. For that bravado performance he got enthusiastic reviews, the help of Jane Deacy, an adept personal manager, and the beginning of a professional career. As that career progressed, Scott found that the years of continual rejection had exacted a price. For him, the payments seem endless. "Acting changes the inner spirit," he says. "It's fulfilling, but psychologically very costly. You can't steal enough money in a lifetime to make up for the damage. I'm ashamed for the bitterness it created in me, but it exists. Even when you're successful it's hard to rise above it. It's like a growth." He went from Richard III into television, then a production of Children of Darkness by Jose Quintero at the prestigious Circle in the Square Theater. "I played a wife poisoner who's put into Newgate Prison, the greatest third-act part that's ever been written —a real zinger." There the familiar pattern began to recur.
Scott met Actress Colleen Dewhurst during rehearsals. "Jack Barrymore used to call these meetings bus accidents," Scott says. "Colleen was married and so was I. But we wanted to be together." Shortly afterward, Scott put his fist through a backstage mirror at the Circle in the Square, "probably because I didn't like what I saw in it." That night he played the entire third act of Children of Darkness wearing a rubber glove that was filled with blood by play's end.
The liaison led to a divorce from Pat and marriage to Colleen. The role of the wife poisoner led to his first shot at Broadway. The play, Comes a Day, passed unnoticed save for Scott in the role of a psychopath who decapitates birds and throws an epical epileptic fit in the third act. "I was goddamned near crippled from throwing myself around so much," he says. "The part was killing me, and I was delighted when the play closed after 28 performances." His growing reputation won him more stage roles (The Andersonville Trial and The Wall) and some movie work (a small part in The Hanging Tree, the visiting prosecutor in Anatomy of a Murder, which brought him his first Oscar nomination). But word of his personal behavior was spreading just as fast.
Pursuit Across Europe