Elf's Progress

Michael Dunn is a dwarf. At the age of 30, he stands 3 ft. 10 in. with his socks on and weighs 78 lbs., if you include his eyeglasses. Dunn is also an actor and a singer. His talents in both areas are considerable.

Dunn dazzled Broadway a year and a half ago with a bravura performance as Cousin Lymon in Edward Albee's adaptation of Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe. He spat Henry Miller-authored obscenities in the 1963 Spoleto Festival production of Just Wild About Harry. He plays Karl Glocken in the film version of Ship of Fools, which premieres this week. He is the comic-villain Mr. Big in an early episode of Get Smart, a promising new TV series due in September. And just to prove that acting is not all he can do, he has been filling a Greenwich Village nightclub with his booming baritone.

Parabolic Process. The son of an engineer, Dunn was born with two dislocated hips. "By the time I was four, I realized I would be a dwarf," he says. And when he was five, the trouble was diagnosed--chondrodystrophy, a rare form of nonhereditary dwarfism believed to be caused by a chemical imbalance during gestation. Undaunted, Dunn terrified his parents by tearing off in hot pursuit of a normal childhood. He did not quite get one, but he managed to break his nose playing football and his leg ice-skating, and he almost drowned when, at ten, he jumped off a 36-ft.-high diving board before he had learned to swim.

Fortunately he was abnormally bright and abnormally talented. He entered the University of Michigan at 15. Illness forced him to seek a more salubrious climate, however, so he transferred to the University of Miami, where he ran the school magazine, acted in plays, became a cheerleader, and earned part of his tuition by singing in a nightclub.

After graduation, Dunn briefly considered becoming a missionary ("A young man feels he has to serve") and entered a Capuchin monastery. He describes his religious experiences as "an intellectual process, probably of parabolic shape." After six months he decided he could not accept the dogma and left.

Rare Air. But from the first, his real interests had been musical. He hoped to be a pianist until the disease slowly crippled his elbows and wrists. He had, however, a naturally good voice, with sound, deep resonance for a man whose body was so small. With only a minimum of concern over the problems his size would present onstage, he decided to make his career in show business. "It's what I do best," he explains, "and I knew I could always make a living at it."

Like most starving young beginners, Dunn supported himself with odd jobs, including one as a sports rewrite man on a daily paper, another as a hotel detective. (He is an excellent shot with small arms; large guns tend to fire him rather than the bullet.) Gradually, acting jobs began materializing. He played jesters, fools, a cop and a vaudeville performer off-Broadway, made his first Broadway appearance as the insides of a robot in How to Make a Man.

His current nightclub act includes Artist-Actress Friend Phoebe Dorin. Cavorting and clowning on two custom-built circular stepladders that help equalize their heights, the two jolly up the Upstairs at the Duplex, a pair of gleeful grigs. All they do is sing a selection of spirituals, ballads, medleys and specialty songs--all of their own arranging--but they do it with a purity of sound and spirit that in nightclubs is as rare as fresh air.

No Choice. Acting is now Dunn's main concern. He points out that there are many non-dwarf roles he can play, including all the fools and jesters in Shakespeare, as well as real personages tailored to his own dimensions, such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Charles Proteus Steinmetz. His next Broadway part will be Kermit Raphaelson in Edward Albee's adaptation of James Purdy's Malcolm, due this fall.

Professional limitations are minor compared to the trials of private elf life. Most distressing to Dunn is the weakness of his legs and hips, which cannot support him without pain or carry him more than half a block without agony. On the theory that "physically I can't compete, but my head is my edge," he has applied science and industry to all the awkward aspects of living. He can drive a car, fly a plane ("I have a sense of machines as an extension of myself"), and is a strong though not fast swimmer. He is well versed in self-defense, once broke an assailant's leg with a well-placed kick. Socially, he finds most people "are extra friendly, sometimes out of embarrassment." That, he feels, is their problem. He tries to help them over it.

Dunn is matter-of-fact about his dwarfism. "Remember," he says, "I was born this way. There was nothing to adjust to. My life has been just like everyone else's--finding out what you can do, what you like to do, and doing it." He scoffs at any hint that his high dive into life has been in any way courageous. "There wasn't really any other choice, except to be a vegetable. My reason for living is not that I'm brave, but that I like to be alive."

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