One such socialite who became my close friend was a statuesque, handsomely structured figure of a woman called Dorothea. She had an entrancing smile and her prematurely greyish-white hair, which was closely cropped, had a stunning effect on the natural beauty of her face. When she spoke it was in low musical tones, but because she was by nature shy, she didn’t speak too often—she just looked wonderful and laughed a lot. Dorothea loved a good time more than anyone. I can’t forget the image of her perched on the hood of my Jag—a noble figurehead on a ship’s bow, sweater rolled up, magnificently bare-chested, laughing into the night wind as we drove hell for leather down New York’s one-way streets in the wrong direction.
The Disenchanted was playing at the Cort Theatre. Many a night we sat in Jason’s room discussing battle plans. Unanimously we agreed that if we systematically destroyed our separate theatres we wouldn’t have to show up anymore. Whether it was to pay homage to the wild rip-roaring twenties of the Fitzgerald era or whether we were just simply Disenchanted with our lot remains a mystery, but we started with Jason’s dressing room. Windows, Jason, Dorothea and myself, reviving the old “get rid of the ugly furniture” gag, one by one we passed pieces out the window onto the street below—I believe we also did the same with the carpet. It was, of course, a most satisfying experience, everyone doing his part, except Dorothea who just stood there laughing. When the room was finally emptied of everything but the bare walls, Windows for tradition’s sake helped lower us one by one through the window and, grateful for a good job done, we groped our way down the street and into the night. I’m positive the old management is still looking for us.
To further relieve the monotony, I rented a house near Weston, Connecticut, by a running stream so that cast and friends could live it up on summer weekends. Ray Massey owned a marvellous old country house and some forty acres on nearby Honey Hill Road. The property had belonged at one time to Lawrence Tibbett, the great Metropolitan Opera baritone of yore. Its main living room was a converted barn with high ceilings and a minstrels’ gallery. Dorothy and Ray, who nicknamed me “Ignatius” (from that old dirty limerick Roddy McDowall had taught me), kept asking me out on days off and at last I gratefully accepted.
Ray, my staunch and loyal friend, in his crow’s nest as God, me below as the Devil
Ray drove me after the show that night in his dignified old Rolls-Royce and the moment we arrived I was introduced to Bungie—“Ignatius—Bungie! Bungie—Ignatius”—one of the greatest dog friends I ever came in contact with. He was an oversized Golden Lab and quite the stubbornest and most adorable of canines. Gregory Peck had given him to the Masseys as a present and no better present could any man give. That night, after Bungie and Dorothy had retired, Ray cracked open the grand old malt and we played darts rather shakily till the early hours of morning. I woke up in a huge four-poster bed to find Ray standing at its foot attired in full business suit, complete with vest and watch fob. I thought he looked a little pale. “Where are you off to, Ray?” I said. “I thought we were going to sit by the pool all day. Look out there how beautiful it is.” “Last night Pat Hingle fell down an elevator shaft, and he’s on the critical list.” Then Ray paused, looked longingly out at the sun-drenched day and said the most typically actorish thing, “And Gol darn it, we’re going to have to go in and rehearse.” He didn’t mean it; it just came out that way, but of course he was the first to visit Pat and continued to do so at least twice a week from then on.
Hingle had been at a party the night before, and when he left, the very overcrowded elevator he was in got stuck between floors. Feeling no pain and dying to play the hero, Pat volunteered to save the day. Just below the floor of the lift was a small opening. Pat was convinced he could crawl through it and go for help. On the way through, however, the raincoat he was wearing caught in the cables. Attempting to wrench it free, he slipped, grabbing the cable with his hand to save himself, but in the process his little finger got torn off. Letting go because of the pain, he fell at least thirty-eight feet into the machinery below. It was a mercy that he was inebriated for he fell loose and though he broke a lot of bones and was seriously concussed into the bargain, he was still miraculously alive.
Ford Rainey went on as his understudy and James Daly took over permanently, but it wasn’t the same. We missed Pat’s stoic magnificence in the role and his contagious Texan charm. Our little sessions in Ray’s dressing room at intermissions and after shows when his dresser poured endless drinks for all of us, continued as usual, but there was a hole where Pat had been.
Now another blow hit us, for Ray’s contract was up, and he was off to the West Coast to play Dr. Gillespie in the vastly successful Dr. Kildare series. “There is a young man called Richard Chamberlain in it—most promising,” said Ray. “Where are you going to live?” I asked. “Oh, I’m going to have to sell the house here and live there I suppose,” he answered with a wistful sadness in his voice. I could not imagine Dorothy, Ray and Bungie leaving that beautiful spot in Connecticut. It wasn’t right—they belonged in the East; they were such New England people. “Why don’t you buy it, Ignatius, and keep it in the family?” I laughed hopelessly and bade him good night; I was too choked up to stick around.
Dorothy and I put our heads together and threw him a surprise party on his last night. It was to be in the basement of the theatre and after the show we’d all coax him down there on some pretext or other. It was a huge hit. Ray was overcome—he was much loved by the company. The food was cooked at La Scala and all their waiters came and served it with scrumptious Italian wines and cases of Veuve Clicquot. The whole cast was there, Andy the doorman, Gadge and Molly Kazan, Archie MacLeish, Martin Gable, Arlene Francis, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and David Niven (both old friends of Ray’s), Jason Robards, Basil and Ouida Rathbone (Basil took over from Ray), and wouldn’t you know Pat Hingle was wheeled in. Some thoughtful soul (Dorothy, in fact) had arranged it with the hospital. Last but not least Bungie—Ray couldn’t believe it, the tears gushing down his face. We had rented a barber’s chair and we put Ray in it. Sir Cedric took one side, I the other and together we shaved his beard off—David Niven offering outrageous instructions. Everyone soon forgot why they were there and we had the time of our lives. I swear old Andy, who cleaned up the next morning, was still finishing off the liquor.
Raymond Massey has meant a great deal to me in my little life. He has always been a complete man—no frills, no fuss. From early pioneer stock, Quakers and United Empire Loyalists, who settled in Canada he, like they, steered his course by the Good Book. His prominent ancestors had gained fame and fortune manufacturing farm equipment which they supplied in great abundance to the world (Massey-Harris, then Massey Ferguson). There was no need to turn their weapons to ploughshares for ploughshares were their weapons, the weapons of wealth and power.
Raymond therefore enjoyed the required grounding, a gentleman’s education—boarding school, a commission in the cavalry and chambers at Balliol College, Oxford. Yet there was no side to him. His happiest moments were when he was immersed in his carpentry or reading Trollope or merely exchanging amusing nostalgia with his cronies. As I watched him pack his things from his dressing room, it crossed my mind that this well-read, highly intelligent man, with all his background, could have been anything in life but an actor, a successful banker, lawyer, a captain of industry or, perhaps, like his brother Vincent, a governor general. Of course he would have hated all that and I was relieved, for instead I was sitting with Hamlet, Ethan Frome, Strindberg’s “Father,” Henry Higgins, Black Michael, Prospero, Brutus, Cardinal Richelieu and a host of such warhorses including his touching Abraham Lincoln. He had starred in some groundbreaking British films, Things to Come, A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel. He ran his own theatre in London, the Apollo, where he produced the world premiere of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie; he also directed a young Laurence Olivier in The Rats of Norway, wrote his own plays and even found time to sire offspring of which two, Anna and Dani
el, would be counted amongst the finest actors of the English stage.
With an older Ray and Joseph Cotten
And then one day he found his last leading lady in Dorothy Luddington, a lawyer by profession, whose clear sense of judgment and quick sharp wit kept him for the remainder of his days on the edge of his seat. Together with Tyrone Power, Greg Peck, Martin Gable and David Niven, they formed their own rat pack of which I was a proud member—a mysterious secret society known as IGGUMFOO (IGMFU) which literally means “I got mine fuck you.” It is not quite the Fellowship of the Ring, the Order of Freemasons or a membership at White’s or the Hell-Fire Club, but it is an affectionate nonsense and a bond.
Dorothy, Bungie and Ray are long gone now and I miss them all, but I miss him most—he was very special to me. I have often secretly thought of Ray as the likeliest candidate to play the real-life father I never really knew. But then that would make him too old. No, I shall simply continue to remember him with affection as a warm, talented, extremely lovable, slightly naughty bigger brother.
BASIL RATHBONE GAVE, in his own way, a wonderful rendering of Ray’s old role. Even though he was in his seventies, Basil was in fabulous condition, thin, tall, athletic—after all he’d been a world-class fencer all his life. He also had tremendous energy—that old-school energy that is largely missing from the theatre today—and, of course, a glorious speaking voice. He valiantly carried on the Massey tradition—his dressing room was always open to the company and he loved telling stories—but it wasn’t quite the same, it wasn’t as warm. I think it tickled him pink to learn that Nigel “Willie” Bruce (his Watson in the Sherlock Holmes films) was my “coz,” so for a while we got on like a house on fire.
But Ouida didn’t take to me—she hadn’t liked me from the start. She was outraged that my name appeared before her husband’s on the theatre marquee, and she was probably right to feel that. I don’t think he gave a damn—in fact I know he didn’t—but she resented it bitterly and gradually saw to it that Basil and I could never be friends. Sad, but no spilt milk. It’s all over now. They’re gone as well and with them a whole era of Hollywood glamour.
Gone too is the great Gadge Kazan, who lived out his retirement with his books and his demons. His naming of names at the McCarthy hearings must still have plagued him as he gradually slipped into Alzheimer’s. I regret that a man of such scope as a director never attempted the classics. He came close to putting on Othello with Sidney Poitier, even promising me Iago. But it was never done; both Poitier and he got cold feet. What an excitement of riches he could have brought to plays like Othello, Lear, the Greek tragedies and Chekhov, Ibsen or Strindberg. But the finger he so accurately placed on the public pulse belonged very much to his own time. He was far too busy galvanizing the contemporary theatrical scene into a significance it had not known before. He had arrived on these shores a wide-eyed immigrant in a country of immigrants. The language he knew was the rough-and-tumble language of a raw new world and he felt his duty was to paint that world as vividly and honestly as his passion would drive him.
And gone is Archie MacLeish of the light step and the quicksilver mind who lives on forever in his poems. I am never without them. No one knew better than Archie that “a poem should be motionless in time / As the moon climbs.” Long after J.B. had closed, I recorded some of them, and he wrote me the loveliest letter. It is one of my treasures. And then to celebrate his memory years later, Alfred de Liagre asked me to write and perform a solo tribute to him at the 92nd Street Y’s Poetry Center in New York. I was thrilled and honoured, and I think it is one of the happiest things I have ever done. The last thing he ever said to me was, “Be careful crossing the street.”
It was hard to reconcile Archie leaving this world—almost impossible. I think it must have surprised him too; he had always remained so young. “I have the sense of infinity about me,” he once wrote, and he was right—and we expected it of him.
Dying shall never be
Now, in the windy grass;
Now, under shooken leaves
Death never was.
—“AN ETERNITY”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“CALL TO ME ALL MY SAD CAPTAINS—LET’S HAVE ONE OTHER GAUDY NIGHT”
The swan song of the fifties and the birth of the sixties were to me indistinguishable. Two whole years had joined at the hip to become one chokingly overcrowded season. And it wasn’t just me; everyone I knew felt the same need to hold on to a gloriously entertaining decade that was rapidly slipping away. We all must have sensed that New York City’s theatrical community would perhaps never again produce such an abundance of life, that soon its creative juices were to flow less freely and the next ten years would do little else but slowly drift into fantasy and war. So in a kind of panic we began to stretch our beloved fifties to the very limit just to see how much work and pleasure we could squeeze out of them before they became history. We saluted them at every opportunity and nowhere were these celebrations more in evidence than at P.J. Clarke’s on Fifty-fifth and Third.
This already familiar watering hole had been made even more famous by the great Billy Wilder, who had shot his film The Lost Weekend there in the midforties. Owned and operated by that big-hearted, booze-loving, horse-bettin’ pussy cat, Danny Lavezzo, P.J.’s became our sentimental headquarters. It was a regular diversion for the most bizarre assortment of night owls. Dress code was wildly optional—tux, white tie and tails, dungarees, jeans, plunging necklines—even drag. P.J.’s might as well have been my permanent address. Every chili con carne, bacon cheeseburger or London broil (the best in town) should have been accompanied by special P.J. stationery. The front room and the bar often overflowed with team members of the Giants, the Knicks and the Mets, and the tough, wiscracking waiters knew everyone by name and doubled as nannies and bouncers. Of course, there was always “21,” “Cheerios,” Malachy’s, Allen’s, Jim Downey’s, Harold’s Show Spot or distant Harlem, but the infinite variety at P.J.’s never staled and most of us found ourselves nightly homing in on it, like bees to their queen.
In the back room, which had its own entrance, no tourists or strangers were permitted. There was always some good-natured Cerberus on duty to screen all oncomers and the big round table by the bar, Danny’s table, the “in” table, was the constant focus of attention. Danny kindly saw to it that I always had a seat, so I’d usually find myself rustling feathers with a gaggle of fast-living, fun-loving geese. My favourites: Elaine Stritch and Ben Gazzara—a new item and a good rowdy one at that—Robards, of course, Jack Warden, Peter Falk, Gig Young and sometimes Rosalind Russell’s husband, Freddie Brisson, that sly, conniving Dane who was wickedly nicknamed the “Lizard of Roz.” On the music side, I’d find myself sitting next to Gerry Mulligan or Stan Getz; the great baritone from the Met, Robert Merrill, or Leonard Bernstein with his serenely beautiful better half—Felicia Montealegre. Several well-known pugilists had adopted it as their second home, as had the odd New York Ranger and, once or twice, baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, with breathtaking Marilyn on his arm.
Other visitations were from the fresh new comedy team of Nichols and May (Mike Nichols and Elaine May), who had taken the town by storm, and the captivating British pair Flanders and Swann, two gentlemen famed for their witty song and patter routine; Mr. Swann—the silent one—and stout Mr. Flanders, who, oblivious to the wheelchair to which he was sentenced for life, merrily tossed about epigrams like so much confetti. Also producers Alexander Cohen and his wife, Hildy, Ratty Whitehead and Morton Gottlieb—writers Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, quelques fois but never at the same table if possible. Ever present was a young Johnny Carson before he ruled the late-night airways and dear Joe Allen, poised to launch his worldwide empire of checkered tablecloths. Shelley Winters with Tony Franciosa would sashay in as would playwright/actor Mike Gazzo (A Hatful of Rain), the great Zero Mostel, comic Milton Berle (when he wasn’t at Toots Shor’s), Sid Caesar, Art Carney, the perennial Steve Allen
and Jules Munshin.
My pal Jones Harris, Ruth Gordon’s son, occasionally brought his famous dad, Jed Harris, producer extraordinaire and the onetime terror of Broadway who, by now, had disappointingly mellowed. The caustic Jonesy, champion of mockery, cunning mixer and first-class trou-bleshooter, had inherited his father’s legendary rudeness. Born illegitimate, he derived a macabre pleasure from playing his bastardy to the hilt. It would have disgusted him to learn we’d found a soft spot in him, that beneath the ice was a warm world smoldering away, anxious to melt the surface but rarely succeeding. I think he enjoyed “slumming” with us theatricals because he was, in many ways, an artist manqué. Quick-witted and stimulating, he kept us, conversationally, on our toes, always taking the opposite view, and he got a particular kick from our irreverent imitations of well-known personalities—mine of Ray Massey and Peter Lorre and Jason’s of Humphrey Bogart and Ralph Richardson.
At the end of that old British film chestnut The Four Feathers, Richardson, blinded in battle, sitting in his London club, tired and alone, despairs that all his favourite Bengal Lancers have perished in the war. At that moment, news arrives that two of his closest comrades from the regiment have survived. Rising unsteadily to his feet he exclaims in a voice that captures the entire Edwardian era and the glory of the Raj in one magisterial inflection: “Peter alive?—and Willoughby??? Pee-tah alaive?—and Willowbay-ay-ay???” As only he could do it, Sir Ralph stretched out the line to infinity and beyond. We got to be quite expert at it and it became a sort of private code between the three of us. Once, when running for my life to catch a plane, an announcement came over the Tannoy: “Would C. Plummer report to the information desk at once. There is a most urgent message for him.” It sounded pretty ominous so I doubled back as fast as I could only to discover it was from the diabolical Jonesy and it read: “Latest dispatch—no need for alarm—Peter’s alive—and Willoughby.” I missed my plane.
In Spite of Myself Page 33