To get where he is today, Kevin Spacey had to lie, cheat, and... well, do something very wrong to a sleeping old lady - now that he's made it, is he still so driven? Trish Deitch Rohrer joins him on a long night's journey into day.

It was for Eugene O'Neill that Kevin Spacey became a mail thief and a menace to Miss Moneybags. He tells you this long ago story in the middle of the night, on a couch in a trailer in an empty West Coast parking lot. It is one in the morning, then two, and Spacey, an arm's length away has not stopped talking, not for a moment - even while stripping off clothes (his middle-aged nerd costume for the upcoming film American Beauty), he continues to talk, right down to his white, tight T-shirt. Even in his underwear - more so in his underwear - Kevin Spacey, at thirty-nine, has the old-fashioned elegance of a character out of a '40s play : a prizefighters body with a mind on top. He is telling the story of how Eugene O'Neill made him (both a criminal and an actor) when he was twenty-five. He is letting you know why, this year, he has postponed a multi-million-dollar-film career with momentum, in order to bring O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh to Broadway.

He starts at the time of the theft, in 1985, when he was young and hungry and he wanted the part of the older brother, Jamie, in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was starring Jack Lemmon and coming to New York in the then-not-so-distant future. He wanted it more than anything. He'd even gone so far as to study the text for six months, but to no avail - the casting people wouldn't let him audition, because he was worse than nobody.

"I was the coffee boy," he says. There are free weights scattered across the trailer floor, and a copy of The New Yorker opened to a story by Jay Mclnerney. "Well," he says, still offended. "They wouldn't have me in their big Broadway production - no goddamned way." He sniffs.

As the chilly Southern California night wears on, you, too, sling your coat over a box, unbutton your sweater, take off your shoes, and fold your legs under you. Spacey follows your movements like a cat : You slump, he leans; you lay your head down, watching him, he stretches his legs in your direction. A few hours before, when he first greeted you, Spacey took your hand in his fist, and, instead of just shaking it, pulled it in toward his chest. Then, while making small talk, he looked into your face - tilting his head, this way and that - with such curiosity that you thought he might lean forward and smell you. This is a man in love with people, seductive and easygoing, much more like Jack Vincennes, celebrity crimestopper, from L.A. Confidential, than the serial psycho-killer John Doe in Seven, or the Satanic gimp / snitch Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects (for which Spacey won an Academy Award in 1996).

In fact, outside, earlier, it seemed to be Spacey's job, apart from acting, to be the guy who made everyone feel good : In the same five minutes, he fixed the bright-red brim on the hat of the script girl, put his hand on the director's shoulder, and lifted a teenage actress so that she was laying sideways in his arms. When Annette Bening, who plays his wife in American Beauty, stepped away from Spacey as he approached her, he said, "Hey, hey!" grabbed her collar, pretended to slap her, and then pulled her close.

But back when Spacey was the coffee boy, he was reputed to be a little Iess nice (two commonly reported stories about him are that he burned down his sister's treehouse in the San Fernando Valley and got thrown out of military school after hurling a tire at someone). What he lacked in self-control, though, he made up for in determination: He'd dropped out of Juilliard at twenty-one and, not wanting to wait tables, had gone down to the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater, knocked on the doors and, like Dorothy in Oz, asked to see the legendary producer, Joseph Papp. Papp invited the young man who dreamed of having a career like Spencer Tracey's or Henry Fonda's into his office, heard his "sad enough, but not too sad story," and gave him a job in the stock-room. There Spacey happily handed out pens and pencils, answered phones, and eventually became a production assistant for Papp.

It did not matter to the people casting Long Day's Journey that Papp had seen Spacey in an "Off Off Off Off Broadway" play eight months after hiring him and, the next day, called him into his office and fired him. (Papp did this, despite the fact that the boy had no money, and was cleaning hallways in his apartment building to cut the rent, because he knew he should be acting, not getting comfortable delivering coffee.) It did not matter to them that four months after Papp let him go, Spacey snagged the role of Liv Ullman's son in Ibsen's Ghosts on Broadway. It did not matter that he understudied for all but one of the parts in David Rabe's play Hurlyburly (including Mickey, the yak-haired sociopath he played in the film thirteen years later). He even got a small part as the punk who robbed Meryl Streep's group therapy session in Heartburn. None of it mattered when it came to the people whose job it was to cast Long Day's Journey. And for that, and other such early snubs in the theater world, Spacey grew a chip on his shoulder.

There is some controversy now over the fact that Spacey, one of the producers of Iceman Cometh, which opened at the Brooks Atkinson theater on April 8, is charging $100 a ticket for Orchestra seats. But Spacey doesn't care. He says, "That's fuck-you money for all the people who don't want to do plays in New York." lceman Cometh, the story of Hickey, a periodic drunk, who comes to Harry Hope's no chance saloon to try to save the lives of his deadbeat friends, is four and a half hours long, which puts it into overtime every night. Though the show will only run for thirteen weeks, it will cost $1.5 million dollars minimum (this is according to co-producer and friend Emanuel Azenberg, who also produced Lost in Yonkers, for which Spacey won a Tony in 1991). Spacey is not looking for a profit, he says. Instead, he's looking to show people that it's possible to do great theater and not lose money. Mainly, the $ 100 ticket will enable him to set aside a hundred tickets a night for students, who will pay $ 20 for the opportunity to sit in the front row and watch what has been purported to be one of the greatest theatrical performances of the century. (The show ran in London for fourteen weeks and between Spacey and the director Howard Davies won the Olivier award, the Evening Standard, and the London Critics Circle award.)

Six months after having been told to give up hope of ever performing in Long Day's Journey Into Night, Spacey read in The Village Voice that Jonathan Miller, the director, was slated to give a lecture at Alice Tully Hall. "I thought, That's the week he's going to be in town auditioning," Spacey says, sitting up. "That's why he's here." And so, seeing Miller's lecture as his last chance, the ambitious coffee boy bought himself a ticket. "The place was pretty packed," he says, "and sitting next to me was a very, very elderly woman who was asleep. She was slumped over, and half-gone - had been, pretty much, from the beginning." Though Spacey is telling this story very accurately, acting it, really, so you feel like you're not only there, but you're him, alone and desperate in the big hall, he's got that glint in his eye - like he knows the secrets of the universe and finds them pretty funny - that would be his trademark, if he were a Iesser actor, and unable to drop trademarks when necessary.

"And, uh," he says, and turns to you, and lays his arm across the top of the couch so his hand is reaching for you. "This is a horrible story, by the way," he says. "I'm just letting you know that this was a horrible moment, but it simply had to be." The creases that run down his cheeks deepen, and the lamplight sparkles in his eyes.

The first time Dean Devlin, co-writer / producer of Independence Day met Spacey, the young actor had just won an award for his performance as Iago at a competition comprised of seventy-three Los Angeles high schools, including Chatsworth, where Spacey first felt the effects of applause ("I did something right?!" he remembers thinking).
"Kevin knew he was going to be a big star," says Devlin, one of Spacey's oldest friends. "And he had no patience to wait for it to happen - he was just going to do whatever he could to be part of that world." Devlin gives an example: "Have you heard the famous Studio 54 story?" he asks, giggling.

In 1980, the story goes, Spacey took Devlin (then AI Pacino's chauffeur) to Studio 54, where no one could get in but the famous or unusually beautiful. Spacey, who Devlin says hated the idea that they could he "kept behind ropes," pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and, while doing a Johnny Carson imitation, told the bouncer at the door that he was on the list. "I'm thinking to myself," says Devlin, Is Kevin crazy?! They're not going to think he's Johnny Carson! Finally the guy goes, 'All right, what's the name?' and Kevin goes, 'Carson - Kevin Carson. I'm Johnny's son.' And the guy, to Devlin's amazement, let them in. "That's why it was so much fun to party with him," says Devlin. "Because you always knew Kevin would lead you into some cool adventure. He would just figure out a way to maximize the experience."

"So I looked down," Spacey says, going back to Alice Tully Hall and the sleeping old woman, and Eugene 0'Neill. "I was thinking about how to get to the director, and sticking out of the elderly woman's purse was this invitation to a cocktail reception in honor of Dr. Jonathan Miller, right on this night, right after this event. And I looked at her, and I thought," he waits, and with stunningly false sympathy, says, "You know - she's tired." Spacey pauses for a moment, staring into space, mulling over his rationalization for how it would be okay to take advantage of an old woman. "She's not going to go to the party," he says then. "And even if she is going to go, she's probably Miss Moneybags, and she probably knows everybody there, and she probably doesn't even need the invitation. So I" - he hesitates here, while you lift your head up off your arm - "I very quietly..." he reaches down into the old lady's dutch bag, and gingerly plucks the invitation from its safe place. It hangs, in midair, between his index finger and thumb. 'And so," he says.

According to Azenberg, Spacey, at the time of the invitation-lifting and subsequent cocktail-party crashing had a serious "reputation for messing around." This must have been one reason why the Long Day's Journey casting people, also at the party, had steam coming out of their ears as they watched Spacey (having had a few drinks), take Kurt Vonnegut's place at Miller's table. The director, apparently, after Spacey had introduced himself, asked why a young man would come to such a lecture (the subject being "The Afterlife of Play's), and Spacey replied using only two words - "Eugene 0'Neill." Then he told Miller the story of the past six months, and pointed out the villains fuming at the bar. Miller looked at the determined young actor in front of him, then at the casting people, and then wrote his hotel number on the paper tablecloth, and tore it from the whole.

Azenberg, who met Spacey for the first time when, a few days later, he came in to audition for Long Day's Journey will not say what kind of "messing around" he had a reputation for, only that in order to secure the role of Jamie, Spacey had to agree to give his "word of honor" to be "a good citizen." This probably included no more mail-thievery, and no more taking advantage of vulnerable women and / or bouncers. Spacey shook hands on it.
"About ten years ago," Dean Devlin says, "Kevin really became comfortable with himself as an artist, and it really became much more about the art. And even when things really started happening for him, he still didn't turn away from the work. A lot of people could win an Academy Award, but I don't think their next choice would be to go to England and do the stage performance of our generation."

Around the time that Spacey was shunned by the Long Day's Journey casting people, he was having another, similar problem: director Howard Davies wanted him to play Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway. (The original Valmont was about to head home to England.) But the Liaisons producers, too, were against hiring the young unknown. Davies was so angry at the producers' decision, according to Spacey, that he shut down Les Liaisons Dangereuses altogether. Ten years later, Spacey's wheel of fortune turned again.

"A little over a year ago, a producer from London, who I'd been talking to about doing a play, called and said, "What about Iceman Cometh, with Howard Davies directing?" Spacey's jaw drops. "I was like, 'You fucker! You fucker!' I mean, first of all, it was so compelling to finally work with Howard. But then Iceman. Iceman. Jesus Christ - I'm not ready for lceman."

But, as Dean Devlin says, Spacey likes to do things people think he can't. "lt's much more interesting," Spacey says about acting, "when you're not on solid ground." And, in fact, when Spacey reread what might be 0'Neill's greatest - and most difficult - play on the flight over to England weeks before rehearsals were to begin, he felt like the floor had dropped out. "I literally thought, 'What the fuck have I gotten myself into? Fuck me, ooooooo - I'm really not ready for this.'

"But somewhere around the second week of the play's run at the Almeida," says Spacey, looking back to this time last year, "Howard and I sat down together, and I said, 'I can't...'" - he puts his hand over his heart - "'I can't picture this ending. They'll always be making movies, and I'll always be happy to participate in the ones that I believe in. But this is only going to happen once. I think I have to stay: This is where my heart is.'"

Spacey lifts himself up onto the kitchen counter. His feet, in white socks and leather slippers, hang down. He says he can feel himself changing - becoming stronger, more connected - and he knows it's because of his decision to do Iceman Cometh. He says he won't read reviews anymore. He doesn't want to know what other stuff is attached to a project he's considering. He won't ask what character he's being offered, until after he reads the script. Instead, he wants things to "wash over him," like they once did, when he was young, and loving plays (and life) for their own sake. He doesn't, anymore, want (or need) to use anything - scripts, plays, people - to advance his career.
What about lceman is doing all this? you ask. Spacey tilts his head, then, and smiles at you, and holds his arms out at his sides, wide. "I'm happy," he says.

The sun hasn't quite started its ascent, and Spacey walks you to your car, parked under a street light. He takes your hand. "See you in New York," he says. And then he turns, and walks, in his slippers, out of the light and into the last hours of darkness.