In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane

  Drink off this potion … Follow my mother!

  It was only the f he had trouble with after all—it was hardly enough to mar his career—no real grounds for early retirement, but when the phrase escaped his lips, a flood of Freudian connotations of the most suggestive nature were at once let loose upon the poor, unsuspecting public. For Bill, cursed as he was with impeccable diction, could not conceal the enormity of his boo-boo:

  Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, Drink off this potion … Swallow my mother!

  Hideous jealous toad that I was, I lay back against the pillows, blowing kisses at my cast, my smug face wreathed in a smile of petty and repugnant victory!

  I CAN’T REMEMBER whether it was Shlegel, Hegel or Bagel who said, “Hamlet is a tragedy of thought inspired by a continual meditation on the dark complexities of human destiny calculated to call forth the same meditation from the minds of the audience.” It matters not, but it was damned good stuff anyway, even if it didn’t offer much practical assistance. Then I rather took a fancy to that old poet laureate, John Masefield’s view:

  Life who was so long baffled only hesitated … Revenge and chance together restore life to her course, by a destruction of the lives too beastly, and of the lives too hasty, and of the lives too foolish, and of the life too wise to be all together on earth at the same time.

  Then there was my favourite of all humourists, Professor Stephen Lea-cock, who simply clarified the entire thing:

  “Hamlet” is not to be confused with “Omelette” which was written by Voltaire.

  I suppose the real story is of a great and fearsome action imposed upon a gentle, thinking soul who might indeed be perfectly fit to perform it but whose wisdom renders him impotent. At any rate, no matter what precept you follow, Hamlet remains a dilemma, a universally challenging dilemma. Most think of him as a sort of Everyman, that there is a Hamlet within all of us. But all of him in all of us? Hardly. Very few of us could ever be as cultivated, refined, noble or scholarly. Neither could we be as polished or courtly, nor as remote from the world as he until the world made itself known to him and kicked him in the chops. The big obstacle the actor faces when he walks onto the stage as the Dane is that the audience already has its own preconceived notion of what its Hamlet should be. The time is very out of joint for any Hamlet who falls into the trap of whining; it is extremely hard to avoid—Hamlet on the surface seems to whine a lot:

  HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.

  ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

  HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,

  wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

  Of course, this is meant to be witty whining but it’s whining, like it or not. And then from the very start—concerning the world in general:

  HAMLET: ’tis an unweeded garden

  That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

  Possess it merely.

  Himmel! He kvetches a good deal! Shakespeare must have intended these carpings to be sincere philosophizing sans malice, otherwise our protagonist would garner nothing but irritation from the reader or spectator. Hamlet, therefore, surely must view life with both an academic’s insatiable curiosity and a student’s innocent wonderment. Although abounding in sardonic humour, he should remain at all times above cynicism! There needs always be present a generosity of spirit. No matter how fond the world is of corrupting itself, Hamlet must always support it as a miraculous creation. Michael Langham had a wonderful suggestion that before each critical pronouncement, I should think the unspoken thought—“Isn’t it extraordinary?”—then deliver the line so that even Hamlet’s death phrase, “The rest is silence,” becomes a scholar’s very last revelation of discovery and wonder.

  One thing is certain—you sure have to win ’em over when you first appear or you’re dead! How on earth do you achieve that? It’s a cinch! Break your foot—and—wear a cast! It worked! The second I limped on, by God, I had wrung their sympathy. They instantly pitied me. Even as the season went on and my foot was perfectly healed, I still insisted on wearing my cast! Oh, yes! I wasn’t taking any chances. I was cruelly snapped back to reality, however, at summer’s end by the school matinées! What a shock! Children of a certain age are, to put it mildly, merciless—the hideous fiends—and when there are a lot of them together, they instantly become a lynch mob. They certainly had no time for my indulgences, no room for pity in their hard little souls.

  There are two facts children refuse to put up with in the theatre—love and death. They don’t believe in them; they want no part of them. So, of course, there were just as many cat calls when I didn’t kiss Ophelia as when I did. What’s more, when the King, Queen and Laertes are all lying prostrate spread out across the stage, dead, can you imagine the merriment and joy with which this was greeted? And a few moments later when Hamlet says softly to his friend Horatio, “I am dead,” the entire mob of hoodlums fell out of their seats hooting with laughter. But that’s not the end of it—poor Hamlet doesn’t give up! Once again he persists in informing those around him who are still standing that he is dead, and finally, just before he actually does leave this world, his last heaven-sent speech begins most unfortunately with the words, “O I die Horatio.” Of course, by now audibility was no longer possible for a roar of thunderous proportions that could be heard in the next town exploded in the new auditorium, drowning all further dialogue. As far as we Danes were concerned the rest was indeed—silence.

  It was one of the final run-throughs before the opening. I have always been paranoid (still am) of strangers wandering into rehearsals, asked or unasked. On this day I noticed a man sitting all alone about halfway up the aisle. I stopped after the first scene and asked Michael to come down to the stage. “Could you please ask that person to leave,” I said rather grandly; “his presence throws me. I find it impossible to concentrate.” “Why don’t you come and meet him,” suggested Michael gently. He brought me over to a most imposing and distinguished-looking black man of middle age. “May I introduce Duke Ellington,” said Langham politely with a triumphant gleam in his eye. My jaw dropped. “He is composing a jazz scenario on Hamlet and is watching our rehearsals to get some ideas.” I couldn’t believe it! I retired backwards down the aisle, bowing and scraping as I went.

  Frances Hyland’s most exquisite Ophelia to my Hamlet

  A year or so went by before Ellington’s wondrous pastiche came out on LPs. It was called Madness in Great Ones with Maynard Ferguson playing the meanest, maddest trumpet in my memory and is dedicated to our Stratford Festival and my Hamlet. What a piece! I treasure it to this day.

  LANGHAM’S PRODUCTION was romantically conceived, somewhat static, but always highly intelligent and crystal clear. There were also some fine performances in it but the one that was to attain true tragic heights was the Ophelia of Frances Hyland. I have never yet seen a finer rendering—it was a privilege to be on the same stage. As usual when witnessing something rare, the public was not quite sure how to react but they nevertheless went away—shocked and much disturbed. The press were more certain. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, drained of all superlatives, simply called her Ophelia the finest of the century. She seemed to have all the qualifications, the looks, the grace, the emotion and the range to cope with that subtle and tricky exercise. A rare piece of porcelain, infinitely breakable, I was afraid to hold her—she was so tender, so brittle, yet no one was fooled for a moment that within that frail little body beat a heart as big as an ocean.

  Frannie also had a big voice for such a little throat with an enormous range at her command. It was at the conclusion of her agonizing outpouring for Hamlet, “O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” that Frances chose to collapse. She spoke the passage exquisitely and most musically with not a vestige of self-concern. Upon reaching the line, “That unmatched form and feature of blown youth/Blasted with ecstasy,” her voice moved into a di
sturbing upper register as if stifling a scream and on the last syllable of the word “ecstasy” it snapped, culminating in a long soaring glissando as though a bow had brushed across a broken string. I stood offstage each night, marvelling that only such a prodigious technique as hers could produce consistently the same extraordinary freshness.

  Later in the play, there was an ecstasy in her madness that is quite unexpected—startling; in fact if anyone should have been “blasted with ecstasy” it was Frances. This Ophelia had long since left us revelling in her very own newly discovered world, happy beyond measure—such a giving little soul—and one can only surmise that she went to her watery death, not with the violence of some deranged harpy but with the same delicate precision with which she lived her short life, just one last duty she must perform. “Drowned,” echoes the Queen much later, “drowned.” And we were—in our own tears.

  Some scientists, wacky or not, insist that without doubt, sound is preserved through the ages; that the air around us is filled with centuries of encapsulated voices; that one day we may be able to hear the Gettysburg Address, Oscar Wilde delivering his witty lectures, Napoleon rallying his troops or even the Sermon on the Mount (God, I hope it’s not dull). Perhaps because I want all this to be true, I am inclined to believe in it. If we had performed Hamlet in the tent, I fantasize that the sounds we made (rude or otherwise) would have disappeared forever through the open flaps, but that in the new building with its solid four walls they too might very well have found a permanent home.

  Sometimes when I visit Stratford I sit all alone in Tanya’s beautiful empty theatre. I stare up at the dome and if I concentrate very hard I can almost hear the voices of my actor friends who have created such memorable moments there; and above them all, Frannie’s voice—“like sweet bells jangled out of tune, and harsh” as it chases across the ceiling, trying to escape, but the building won’t let it. Like some devoted guardian of precious memories it holds her in bondage for eternity, proud of its prisoner. If it has done nothing else, it has served its purpose.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EVERGLADES AHEAD

  The only snakes I know are on Madison Avenue.” The man in charge of reptiles was expounding his intimate knowledge of their habits sexual or otherwise and lecturing us on the docility and sweet naturedness of the slithery creatures. It was a swelteringly hot day in a large dilapidated room at the famous old Rod and Gun Club which stands in the swamps of Florida’s Everglades and we’d been firmly requested to listen to this fellow. He was in a shirt of indescribable filth open to the navel, had several days’ growth of beard, smelled of something so disgustingly pungent it could only have been snake piss and was wearing, what he obviously considered the height of fashion, an enormous live boa constrictor wrapped several times around his neck.

  We were all there to film Budd Schulberg’s Wind Across the Everglades, which soon would be affectionately known among us as “Breaking Wind Across the Everglades.” “We” were the cast and a motlier crew has never been assembled under one very badly leaking roof. These were the players: MacKinlay Kantor, the novelist; Tony Galento, the wrestler; Sammy Renick, the welterweight; Burl Ives, the folk singer; a Seminole Indian called Billy One-Arm; and Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper. The only actual actors in the film were Peter Falk in a small role, Pat Henning, George Voskovec, Howard Smith and me.

  Budd, a loyal friend

  Budd Schulberg, “O Jephtha, judge of Israel” had, in his mind, justly metered out his two sentences, one to me, the other to Jason Robards. Mine was the young Audubon official whose mission was to roust out egret hunters, the somewhat colourless leading juvenile of this fated film; Jason’s was to play Manley Halliday in The Disenchanted later on Broadway, the assignment I had really coveted and would have much preferred. I believe Jason won a Tony for playing my part—blast his hide!

  Attempting to keep us cool, the ancient ceiling fans creaked away, hopelessly inadequate, as the snake man droned on. He was telling us that as there were to be snakes in the film, we should come over to his shack any time we wished to familiarize ourselves with the little darlings, a huge variety of which he kept in his bathtub. His diatribe finally wound down with the assurance that snakes if you treat ’em right are the safest things around and that in all the twenty years he had enjoyed the privilege of working with them, not once had there been an altercation. Our confidence was hardly bolstered when he waved to us in a farewell salute and there was only one finger on his left hand.

  Budd’s story had painted a potentially atmospheric picture of one of America’s last frontiers at the turn of the twentieth century and, photographically, it could have brought to the screen a kind of desolate beauty. But there were so many eccentrics involved, real and imagined, and the doomlike locale itself which made us feel we had gone there to drown in quicksand, infected everyone with such malaise that there was more drama offscreen than on.

  One of the most affected by this spreading sickness was Nicholas Ray, the director, only he’d already had a head start. He had just arrived from the Libyan desert where he had shot a film with Richard Burton and while there had formed a none-too-savoury alliance with a young girl half Libyan, half French, who, if she didn’t push dope, pushed just about everything else. She was certainly feeding Nick with something for to those on board who had known and respected this gifted man he most certainly was not himself. His eyes were always running, the pupils strangely dilated—he would stare vacantly into space. Half aware of this he began to wear a black patch over one eye so that he resembled that famed rebel director from the recent past André De Toth.

  Nick and his girl were never apart. She stood close to him on the set, never took her eyes off him. One could sense there wasn’t much tenderness there; they seemed shackled together in a love-hate bondage that could only end in despair. I began to liken their relationship to those famous lovers of literature who tragically end their days in the desert. If they too had wished for the same fate, they had come to the right place, for the Everglades offered a perfect alternative setting. The girl had a sexy, pouty look of discontent about her at all times—we at once nicknamed her “Manon.”

  Whenever actors were about to do an important take, Nick would put his arm around them and take them for a long walk. He called this ritual “agitating the essence.” On these instances, he could be at his most pretentious. Only too occasionally would flashes of talent show through and then he was both lucid and helpful. On one such journey, however, just before one of my close-ups, he spoke of my character as if it was Hamlet or Oedipus, flavoured slightly with a touch of Kraft-Ebbing and Kierkegaard. I told him I didn’t think “Bird Boy” or “Buoyed Boway” as the local crackers had dubbed me warranted such depth of scrutiny.

  On another of our endless walks, the camera crew patiently waiting, we must have travelled at least four hundred yards in utter silence before he finally stopped, turned to me and said, “See what I mean?” Things were getting a little scary. Once we caught him describing the action to a bunch of actors who weren’t even present. I needed help. I got it from my good friend B.J., who was again my makeup man or The Powder Puff, as he called himself. B.J. became my surrogate director. Whenever he saw the whites of my eyes just before an offending take he would call out, “You’ll need a little more K-fourteen,” or “K-two moving in.” And while everyone silently waited, he would apply the cosmetic, which of course I didn’t need at all, and whisper invaluable instructions into my ear, literally saving my screen life. Sometimes B.J.’s wacky humour spilled over and when he had no advice to give, he would come up just after they had called “Roll it” and say, “Don’t shoot. Moving in with a bissel spritzel,” and spraying a little sweat on my face, he’d whisper in my ear, “I have this script I’ve written. It’s called The River”—and that’s all he had to say. I would just lose it—completely broken up—gone for the rest of the afternoon.

  Our real director, Nick Ray, had been one of the groundbreakers for the new wave of
filmmaking in America. A disciple of Grotowski in the theatre and Godard and Kazan in film, his attitude toward the cinematic process was keenly European in its approach and his presence on the American motion picture scene was refreshing. He was, in his way, an early exponent of nouvelle vague, or French New Wave. On this film, however, whatever he was doing was assuredly more “vague” than “nouvelle.”

  Nick cut a handsome figure; he was a very sensual man—attractive to both men and women. He was also gifted with a vivid imagination. Some of his photographic setups and angles in Everglades were most interestingly conceived. There was never anything conventional about Nick; he had a touch of the poet about him. But this time around he was not a happy camper. He was also fed up with my own inexperience as a film actor and my sheer arrogance and intolerance toward him. Exasperating though he was, I was far too immature to have compassion for him, so instead I relentlessly patronized him as he in turn would patronize me. Had I not lacked confidence I might perhaps have exercised some restraint. But others were just as bad as I was. B.J., Peter Falk, Bill Garrity, and others formed little “Anti–Nick Ray” cliques, anything to cause trouble. Gypsy Rose Lee kept saying, “I think you’re all acting in the most unprofessional manner!” and would turn her back on us in a huff. She was probably right, but there wasn’t much else to do in swinging downtown Everglades City which in those days was made up of three or four huts, a corner store, one bar, the club and a local jail.