The Woman in Black

by Erik Tarloff

  Chance and I were embarrassed about it all, but I guess it must have looked cute. My mother, with whom I was having practically no contact, somehow saw it in Paris and wrote to tell me how adorable the two of us looked. She was thrilled to discover I was dating Chance Hardwick, something I had not shared with her. But she knew who he was, which told me something about how famous he had become. Many of my friends saw it and were excited for me, for all the wrong reasons, and I would sometimes now get stopped in supermarkets and places like that. People would ask if I was the girl who was dating Chance Hardwick. Sometimes they even asked for my autograph. [laughs] But in addition, I started selling more paintings. That this might be the result of our affair becoming known did not even occur to me, but I now could see why people were willing to pay money for public relations consultants. Publicity can make a big difference. It validates, no? Confers…legitimacy.

  Irma Gold

  The Judas Kiss was such a monster hit that when Chance told me he wanted to take a long break before his next picture, I didn’t feel I could argue with him. Or needed to. Not this time. He could afford to take some time off. He was an established star now. More than that. He was a superstar. Plus, I didn’t think there was much doubt that he, and the picture, would get plenty of recognition when awards season rolled around. People weren’t going to forget him.

  He seemed very drained when we had this conversation. Depressed, tired, maybe even a little fed-up. Which was odd, since he’d just done this great movie, he’d been great in it and was garnering all sorts of raves from the critics, he was rich, he was famous, he was widely respected by his peers in the industry. I mean, what more could a guy want? Well, genius is mysterious, isn’t it? Geniuses are wired differently, maybe, their emotions work differently from other people’s. Temperament is a mysterious thing, and it can enable great work and also take you down deep, deep rabbit holes. I just wish I’d realized at the time that he was going through a real crisis. I wish I’d known how serious this depression of his was. I’m not sure I could have done anything to help him, but at least I would have tried. Instead, I had this cavalier attitude, like he was being something of a self-indulgent child but he’d been such a good boy up to now I was willing to allow him to brood.

  The one bright spot in this conversation was when he said he thought he might want to do a play. Refresh his theater chops. It was the only time he seemed even slightly animated, when he told me that. So I thought to myself, “Fine, go ahead and do it if you think it will make you happy.” [sighs]

  Mark Cernovic

  I invited Chance to meet me for lunch at this Cuban place I liked in Culver City. Funky, noisy, crowded, but the food was good, and it had the additional benefit that we wouldn’t be surrounded by industry types. For the conversation I had in mind, I thought it would be better for us to meet away from the Executive Office Building and far from our colleagues.

  See, I had a proposal for him. We’d worked so well together on The Judas Kiss, and we’d gotten along so great on a personal level—I’d go so far as to say we’d become good friends, although it wasn’t always easy to be sure where you stood with Chance—and we seemed to see eye-to-eye on creative issues, so I suggested to him we ought to consider forming our own independent production company, maybe under the Metro umbrella. It would give us more artistic control and also guarantee we’d see a lot more money if our pictures were successful. We could develop our own projects, projects that interested us, working with writers and directors we trusted. I was picturing something along the lines of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. That was my model. It just seemed like a great idea. More autonomy, more profits. I thought he’d jump at it.

  But he didn’t. He said he wasn’t sure what his future plans were, he wasn’t sure where he’d be in the next year or what he wanted to do with himself. He was nice about it, he said he thought under other circumstances it would have been a great plan and he thought I’d make a great partner, but he was rethinking everything about his life and career, so it wasn’t the right time for that kind of commitment.

  Of course in retrospect this all seems pretty ominous. Was he already contemplating ending his life? Was that what he was talking about, however indirectly? I’ve pondered that question for decades now. Tortured myself with it. Wondered if there were warning signs I was too obtuse to notice. Wondered if there was anything I might have done to prevent what happened.

  Gil Fraser

  Ever since he started work on The Judas Kiss, we’d barely seen each other at all. Whenever I called him he kept the conversation brief, and whenever I proposed going out and grabbing a bite or bowling a couple of frames, he said no, he just didn’t feel up to it. I got the feeling that…well, I wasn’t taking it personally. I thought he must be going through a bad spell. It happens. It can happen even when to the outside world it looks like you’re riding high.

  But then he called me out of the blue and after a few preliminaries he asked me a very unexpected question: Had I read much Shakespeare? So I said I’d read some in college but not since. And he asked me if I thought I could play Shakespeare. And even though I figured he was asking for a reason, and it might even involve a potential job, I thought I should answer honestly since we’d always been straight with one another. So I told him no, while I thought I could probably play the attitudes all right, I had a notion the diction was outside my skill set. It’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses, you know? And while it’s good to challenge yourself creatively, it’s not so good to bang your head against a wall in order to prove how game you are.

  And he said, “Yeah, I’m afraid you’re right. Good call, Gil. I’m disappointed, but thanks for being upfront.”

  It was a few weeks later that I heard about Richard III. No regrets, though. I mean, aside from how things turned out, that surely wouldn’t have played to my forehand.

  Benny Ludlow

  I had a gig at this little club in the valley, and one Friday night Chance came in to see me. Didn’t tell me he was coming—I woulda been happy to get him comped, but he just showed up unannounced. I had a great set that night, thank God. Good sized crowd, the act clicked. Sometimes it does, sometimes not so much. And I could hear Chance laughing out there in the dark, which was nice.

  Afterward, we went out for a drink. And he started quizzing me about stand-up. About what it was like physically, about how I prepared emotionally, about what it felt like to score, what it felt like to bomb. What did I do with my hands? Did I ever ad lib? How did I time the laughs? Some personally probing questions, some mainly technical questions. And I tried to answer, and the questions kept coming, and I finally said, “Christ, you’re not thinking of becoming a comic, are you? ’Cause I don’t recommend it.”

  And he said, “No, no, this is just research, Benny.”

  I never did find out what that meant.

  James Sterling

  Chance hadn’t seemed excited or enthusiastic about much of anything in months. We didn’t see a lot of each other during the time he was filming The Judas Kiss or in the immediate aftermath, and those rare times we did, he seemed dour and down. But when he came to see me this particular day, he seemed pretty upbeat for a change. A nice change.

  He said he wanted to run an idea past me. He’d been thinking about Richard III, he said. And he thought, while the play itself is of course terribly dark, Richard himself needn’t be, at least not till the end. Things are going great for Richard and he’s having fun. In fact, according to Chance, he’s almost a comedian. He’s dealing with the audience like a stand-up, taking them into his confidence, relating to them on this personal, amusing level. He’s amusing himself and us. And Chance thought it would be interesting to play it that way, inviting the audience in to laugh along with him at the chaos he’s wreaking and the way he’s outmaneuvering everybody and the way all his nefarious schemes seem to be working out. So I listened, and then told him I thought it was a valid idea, and an
interesting one.

  “Great,” he said. “Would you be willing to direct?”

  I was taken aback. I thought he’d simply been trying out an interesting notion on me. But he made it clear he was thinking of mounting a stage production locally. And I have to admit I was intrigued. I started in the theater, back in New York. I always felt it was my natural home. And directing a play—it was something I hadn’t done in decades. Since my student days. And to direct an actor as gifted as Chance Hardwick! My God, what an opportunity.

  So that’s how that production got going.

  Bruce Powers

  No one used the expression “non-traditional casting” back then. There was no need to, since no one had thought of the concept. It simply didn’t happen. You might do an all-black production, although that would be a novelty unless you were doing something like that Marc Connelly play, what’s it called, The Green Pastures. But to cast an African American actor in what was traditionally a white role in the middle of a largely white cast, that just wasn’t done. I don’t mean frowned upon, I mean completely unheard of. Nobody thought of the concept even in order to reject it. But as usual, Chance was ahead of his time.

  When he phoned me and asked how I felt about Shakespeare, did I have much experience with him, had I read much of him, I said yeah, I had taken a Shakespeare class in college and had done several Shakespeare scenes in acting classes. So then he asked me if I might be interested in playing Clarence in Richard III. At first I thought he was joking. I said, “First you have to tell me how a colored guy might get to fifteenth-century England. And find himself at court.” And he said, “You let me worry about that. Do you think you can do it?”

  Hell, I knew I could do it.

  James Sterling

  We assembled a strong cast. People were thrilled to do live theater, especially Shakespeare, and they were thrilled to be working with Chance. Also, I’d like to think they were pleased at the prospect of working with me. We did find a lot of our people from among my former students, which no doubt helped. But I only recommended the best of the best.

  The only one to turn us down flat was Dolores Murray. I don’t know why. We wanted her for Lady Anne. She would have been terrific, I believe. And you’d think any actor worth his or her salt would have walked on hot coals for a chance like this. But Dolly, without giving a reason, said she wasn’t interested. Chance was powerfully disappointed, that I can tell you. Well, c’est la vie.

  I guess a lot of people with twenty-twenty hindsight would say she was prescient.

  Bruce Powers

  Rehearsals went well. They were lots of fun. Jim and Chance generally agreed on what the production was supposed to be—Jim was inventive with the staging and especially attentive to the lighting, which proved to be an interesting factor. He spotlit Chance during the soliloquies. It was almost as if Chance was performing a solo set in a nightclub. And Chance was really laugh-out-loud funny in some of his scenes. Full of mischief, you know. Eyebrows raised in delight at his own deviltry. It was almost enough to make you forget how evil the character is as you laughed along with him. And then it would suddenly be brought home to you, so you’d feel almost like you’d had a hand in the awful things the character does. You felt dirty for enjoying it, which is, I think, part of what Shakespeare was aiming at.

  I loved doing it. They can’t take that away from me. Despite everything, I’ll go to my grave thinking it was a terrific production and a terrific piece of theater, and I’m proud to have been associated with it.

  George Berlin

  It was after Chance had become a really major star, after The Judas Kiss, that I got a note from him. I was shocked. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left college. Of course I’d been following his career from afar, but we’d had no contact. Zero. Nada.

  It was a short note. But hand-written, so it really did come from him, not some assistant. He just said he was going to produce and star in a production of Richard III at a theater in LA, and that immersing himself in the play made him think of me. He said he wanted to thank me for giving him time and attention and encouragement during a period of his life when he needed all of those. So that was a huge surprise—it would never have occurred to me to think he even remembered who I was—and it was also the sort of thing that makes teaching seem like a worthwhile enterprise.

  James Sterling

  We got butchered.

  They called the production pretentious, inane, sophomoric. One critic even called it flatulent, whatever that means in this context. They said Chance was mannered, ridiculous, clueless, totally out of his depth. They made fun of the casting of Bruce, saying it was a cheap stunt, which I think offended Bruce deeply. Hell, it offended all of us, reducing that fine actor to his race and nothing else. Oh, they were vicious.

  Part of it was just that usual thing, that journalistic thing of building someone up and then feeling the need to take him down a peg. It was Chance’s turn. “We can kiss you, but that doesn’t mean we can’t kick you when we feel like it.” He’d received nothing but raves for years, he was riding about as high as an actor can ride—deservedly so—and maybe there was a general sense in the industry that it had gone far enough for the time being, he might be in need of a good whupping.

  And doing Shakespeare—I mean, that’s just flat-out asking for it, right? An actor known for his performances in the demotic, as you might say, playing ordinary Americans, country boys, roughs, suddenly having the gall to assay a classical role. One of the great classical roles, with a tradition going straight back to Burbage. And a royal! So their judgment was clouded by their prejudice. They simply couldn’t see how good he was. They probably didn’t care in any case, but I’m willing to bet they weren’t able to even notice. They went in with an attitude and they came out with the same attitude. Nothing they saw in between was going to have any effect. They’d been lying in wait. They could have written their reviews in the afternoon before they went to the theater.

  But I don’t think it was only that. Pardon me if this sounds paranoid, but I’m 100 percent sure politics played a role too. The Times and The Examiner were both right-wing papers in those days. The Examiner was a Hearst paper, need I say more? And although The Times mellowed a bit after young Otis took over, back then both papers were red-baiting, reactionary rags. So they treated the casting of Bruce Powers like it was a deliberate thumb in their eye. They were still fuming about his being cast in The Judas Kiss, of course—and of course their reviews of that picture criticized him just for being him, if in a roundabout, oblique way. But Chance’s casting him again, and in Shakespeare, no less—hiring a black man who was also a known lefty to play a British peer who speaks in blank verse—this gave them a golden opportunity to unload for both transgressions, and they took it. Boy did they take it. And then there was me, a blacklisted actor directing. And of course by now Chance was known to have liberal politics, so he was a ripe target for them too, even though he’d never been much of a radical. In retrospect, I can see we were basically asking for it. And they went about their task with glee. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter followed the lead. It was as if they’d all got the same memo.

  So listen. You could question things about the production. You could take issue with the concept behind it, you could say it was too cute or too clever or too extrinsic, too imposed upon the text, if that was your honest feeling. And my direction no doubt had its weak spots. I’m not claiming I did a perfect job, although I flatter myself it was damned good. But regardless, any objective observer would have to agree that the performances were all terrific, and Chance—once you grant him his basic choice—was about as brilliant as anyone I’ve ever been privileged to witness on the stage. But none of that helped. Those reviews doomed us. We closed after five performances.

  Bruce Powers

  We had a closing night party in the theater. It was a pretty down affair, as you might imagine. The only moment I really remem
ber—we all had a lot to drink that night, so the whole thing is a bit hazy—but when Chance entered from his dressing room, having cleaned off his make-up and changed back into street clothes, we all rose up to give him a rousing ovation. There were quite a few tears, too. Everybody felt it had been a great show. We felt we’d been fucked over by the local critics. They did a hit job on us. And we were just in awe of Chance’s talent. Not to mention his guts.

  Gil Fraser

  I had lunch with Chance a couple of weeks after Richard III closed. At the Polo Room. Fancy-schmancy, right? Well, he could afford it now—he insisted on paying, of course—and it was one of the few places in town where he could be pretty confident about not being mobbed. People are cool about celebrities there, deferential and discreet. That’s part of what you’re paying for.

  I had to wash my best pair of jeans to look semirespectable, so that was a pain. I would’ve been just as happy at the Hamlet. You should have seen the way the staff fawned over him! It was quite a display. Seriously. I half-expected the waitress to give him a blowjob while he examined his menu. I said to him, “So this is what it’s like to be a star.” He just gave me his notorious twisted smile.

  But for all that, it turned out to be a very somber meal. I’d seen him down before, but never quite like this. I tried to cheer him up, I told him to ignore the Richard reviews, everybody gets bad reviews, plus there was all that extraneous political shit, and besides, critics hate it when an artist steps out of the pigeon hole they’ve stuck him in so they take it out on the artist. I told him I admired his Richard III—I’d already told him the same thing opening night, and I meant it both times, but it seemed to need repeating here—and I praised his movies and told him I thought he was a lock on the Oscar that year and…you know, I tried to be a good friend and a supportive colleague.