In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  King John will never be a crowd pleaser simply because its main line is obscure, and the enigmatic central character (in our production wonderfully played by Douglas Rain) can wrest little sympathy from the audience. I confess I prefer A. A. Milne’s more touching nursery rhyme concerning poor unpopular King John, who, finding his Christmas stocking always empty, climbs onto the roof and leaves a message for Santa propped against the chimney:

  I want some crackers,

  And I want some candy;

  I think a box of chocolates

  Would come in handy;

  I don’t mind oranges,

  I do like nuts!

  And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife

  That really cuts.

  And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,

  Bring me a big, red India rubber ball!

  ONE GLANCE AT Romeo and Juliet and there can be no doubt as to the identity of its author. Here is Master Will in all his youthful glory—the surges of poetry and passion that erupt on every page are there for all to see. The story is built on many tragedies, Mercutio’s being one—the man of dazzling promise, reckless humour and mercurial imagination. It is this shimmering imagination, his greatest gift, that lifts him to the clouds but because he is without love he cannot pierce them. The two youngsters overtake him in this, for the very enmity and violence that engulfs them creates a love so overwhelming it whisks them through the clouds toward the many suns and moons it has invented for them.

  Julie Harris, in her thirties, was of course technically too old for Juliet, but because of her will-o’-the-wisp appearance, her celebrated vulnerability, her tiny features, her plaintive voice and her youthful vigour, there were moments when she could have passed for fourteen. Her reaction to drinking the Friar’s potion was to me the highlight of her performance. Her hallucinations were vividly terrifying and appallingly real. When she saw Tybalt’s ghost—so did we. Watching her face as the drug possessed her, we knew that, for a moment, she had looked into Hell. It was a remarkable rendering. Bruno Gerussi was a loving and desperate Romeo and Kate Reid, in one of her finest characterizations, pulled out all the stops as the Nurse. Padded to the eyeballs, she transformed herself into this rotund, moonfaced duenna, coarse, vulgar, big-hearted and caring—Falstaff as a woman.

  Mercutio dies early in the play. Ralph Richardson, when he played the part in the thirties, famously remarked, “The biggest problem with Mercutio is to stay sober from the time he dies till the curtain call.” Hear! Hear! I eventually solved this by simply not taking a curtain call, but I enjoyed having a go at this wonderful creature, particularly his dueling sequence, which in our production was most spectacular.

  As the season dragged on, Memory Mellons got the wanderlust and frequently disappeared without explanation. Although she always came back, there were still great gaps of time when I was without a security guard. My friendships with Kate, Pat Galloway and Julie H., of course, kept me going, but they were involved in their own lives, and gradually I fell back into the rut of parties and deep booze-ridden sleeps. After one particularly heavy night, I awoke to find my right hand was totally numb and fast asleep. Normally that wouldn’t have fazed me in the least, but when at five o’clock in the afternoon it was still asleep I began to worry. A local doctor told me I had what is known as Saturday Night Paralysis. Rummies and Bowery bums frequently fall prey to it by sleeping heavily in one position on a nerve, in my case the radial nerve, which is then deadened for a fairly lengthy period of time and can become permanently paralyzed. They gave me some archaic exercises such as picking up pins off the floor. Talk about limp wrist! I couldn’t shave, run my hand through my hair, drive my Invicta, nor, for that matter, fence. I loved my duel—so determined to save it, I found that by guiding my helpless right hand with my left I could simulate the movements to good effect, gathering speed as I practiced it night and day. I even got to like it better than the original choreography. People would comment on it afterwards: “What a great idea for Mercutio—a unique fencing style for a unique fellow.”

  Kate, both bawdy and touching

  The visits continued—Jason and Betty Bacall had tied the knot and on his night off from Toys, he brought her up, bless him, and we had a blast. The ever-faithful Polly again arrived with the usual Senneville contingent following like a train behind her. I also cheered up considerably when Memory came back, looking cuter than ever, this time smoking a pipe. Robert Goodier, who had made an eloquent and noble impact in the double roles of Chorus and Prince in “R and J,” one night near the season’s end, feeling a little the worse for wear, spoke the last two lines of the play with his usual resonance, but with a slight change of text:

  For never was a story of more woe

  Than this of Romiette and her Julio!

  For that one glorious slip of the tongue, we will love him forever!

  Julie Harris’s Juliet cradling Bruno Gerussi’s Romeo

  Noises off and murmurs from London across the pond began to come my way. Tyrone Guthrie wanted to produce me as Hamlet on the West End. He was already negotiating with the great French tragedienne Edwige Feuillère to play the Queen when a severe heart attack of his cancelled the project. A young Peter Hall, who had taken over Strat-ford-upon-Avon Warwickshire and turned that theatre into the Royal Shakespeare Company, asked both Langham and me to come over and join their season. Things were happening—we were running out of time. I had to get back in the action, back to the Great White Way and P.J. Clarke’s to find out what the world was up to. My steering hand had now recovered, so Windows and I brought the Good Ship HMS Invicta back safe and sound, and there was the First Lady of the Admiralty Jane Broder waiting for us. A four-gun salute to Jane—she’d arranged a space, all was well. She now had become an expert on antique automobiles. “You should put it on blocks, honey, when you’re not using it,” she announced with great authority and, adjusting her veil, she added, “Oh—by the way, I have another offer for you!”

  THE WINDS OF CHANGE had almost blown the fifties clean away, and the western front was starting to undergo open-face surgery. Castro had taken over Cuba; in Canada, the stalwart and courageous Prime Minister Lester Pearson had been replaced by the far more radically minded Pierre Trudeau; in the United States John F. Kennedy and his clan were closing ranks and the Age of Aquarius was about to dawn. Political satirists who had graduated from San Francisco’s hungry i, such as the nonsubversive Mort Sahl, no longer had a right-wing establishment they could attack—only zanier creatures like Lenny Bruce survived by taking satire on to a wider, more universal route of conscience. With the dawn came the invention of panty hose heralding a whole new age where sex would openly dominate politics for years to come. This was the time when the greedy television giant Cyclops continued to swallow everything in its path, including a grateful me, who, God knows, always needed the money!

  The offer Jane had mentioned came from Hallmark Hall of Fame’s prize director George Schaefer, who for years had shown me nothing but the sincerest kindness and loyalty. The piece on this occasion was Anouilh’s Leocadia, or Time Remembered. I was to enact the leading male role, Prince Albert; the family ward and my propre amoureuse was to be Janet Munro, a delectable tomboy of an actress from Britain who had enchanted audiences in the Disney film Swiss Family Robinson. Offscreen Janet and I teamed up successfully as a couple of playful brothers under the skin; there was an impish glint about her that was most appealing. Now sat expectation in the air as we both waited for the late arrival from London of my aunt, La Duchesse, played by none other than that most sublime of actresses, Dame Edith Evans.

  In walked this wonderful white-haired lady in her vigourous seventies wearing a Second World War RAF bomber’s jacket and huge fur winter boots. Her face, which shone with a certain open-eyed spiritual innocence, was far from beautiful—one eye drooped rather comically and quizzically below the other—yet there was a beauty about her nonetheless which Ken Tynan had once described as “tilted and slightly askew.�
� Here was a lady who in 1917 had shared the music halls with Ellen Terry and who had helped William Poel revitalize and revive the open Elizabethan stage. Here was the grande dame for whom George Bernard Shaw and James Bridie had written plays. In 1922, Edith had made theatrical history as the definitive Miss Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World, and from the moment she walked onstage as Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest she owned the part for eternity.

  The experience of playing opposite her was inspiring and whimsical both. This big-boned, lopsided figure of a woman surprised one with her consummate grace. Her acting touch was as light as gossamer and she made everything look so easy—oh, so easy. Her supreme instrument was her voice—it could do anything; she is known to have said that once she got a beautiful word in her mouth, she couldn’t bear to let go of it. How lucky I was to be able to marvel at such close range not just at the faultless execution of her craft, but at the immense joy and abandon which accompanied it. That old lady was and still is the youngest actress I have ever worked with.

  When it was all over and we were saying our farewells, I told Dame Edith I’d been asked to become part of the Royal Shakespeare Company that next season. Like a little girl starting out on her career, she blurted out, “Oh goodie! Do come—I’ll be there too.” And then they drove her to the airport all bundled up in her RAF gear. I’d like to think when she got there she disdainfully waved aside the brand-new passenger jet in which she was to travel first class and insisted instead on the rough and ready comforts of a good Ol’ Spitfire or Mitchell bomber!

  “WHERE’S JASON?” It was Betty Bacall on the other end of the line. She’d taken the words right out of my mouth. “Have you seen Jason?” she repeated in that deep, sultry voice of hers. But there was an urgency behind it. This was a dialogue that would take place more than frequently between Betty and myself, and I’d invariably end up the volunteer in search of Captain Spaulding, the African explorer. I certainly knew all his favorite haunts, so it wasn’t difficult to find him. Even before I got there I could hear through the swinging doors that gruff croak of his which resembled a soused grackle:

  The Red Socks were jamming at Fenways

  Every girl was an Irish Colleen—

  Poor Betty was concerned, but it was all very harmless really; he just loved to spread himself around. When I found him I would sit with him and join the fun, forgetting entirely the reason for my mission. Together we drifted away the nights just as all my chums were drifting away the rest of the decade, the last Golden Age of theatrical New York. We had left loads of lost time behind us and an abundance of folly, but the years had not been wasted—we’d worked as hard as we’d played. The boozy and smoke-ridden fifties had established us, taught us our craft; out from their fumes had emerged a splendid lineup of young talent who for years to come would form the bulwark of America’s theatre.

  The older generation of artist had left us something glorious to aspire to. They were the last of their breed. The directors I had been fortunate enough to work for—Komisarjevsky, Elia Kazan, Tyrone Guthrie—were the greatest of their day; also the crusty McClintic and the scholarly Langham had helped immeasurably to ease my growing pains. Each of them had taught me how to hold a stage, carry an evening, orchestrate the grand roles and never to become the slave of caution. With rapt attention I had attended the classes of Eva Le Gallienne and Harold Clurman—Eva, the brilliant purist; Harold, the aggressive, energetic master, surely one of the finest critics and theatre analysts of his or any other age. I had observed the dour and awesome Lee Strasberg conduct his Actors Studio sessions with the solemnity of a High Lama, but in his home discussing music I have seen him become a boy of twelve bubbling over with excitement as he proudly showed off his vast collection of priceless recordings. I bore witness to the once precocious prodigy Orson Welles as King Lear on television, and later in the theatre watched while Orson directed Orson as King Lear.

  And no theatrical experience of mine could exceed the Berlin Ensemble season masterminded by that tiny giant Bertolt Brecht, who single-handedly rid the stage of elitist indulgence and brought it back to the marketplace. At the White Horse Inn, a disciple among disciples, I have sat at the same table with Dylan Thomas, listening to that tousled genius, permanently pickled, hold forth on any subject in that deep Welsh organ of a voice—his normal conversation as rich and pungent as his poetry. I thrill to the memory of Thornton Wilder bending my ear, a man who, as Tyrone Guthrie once described him, might easily be mistaken for the local country doctor if one hadn’t known he’d already claimed classic immortality and was fluent in several patois of Chinese. I had proudly known and worked with the last actress-managers of their day and on my fast-growing résumé, I could now boast that I knew an aging sprite of unparalleled energy called Edith Evans, the greatest female exponent of the art of high comedy in our language.

  Me and the supreme Dame Edith Evans in Time Remembered

  Music too, a permanent part of my consciousness, had treated me to some very special live memories; watching tiny Edith Piaf taking command by merely standing still and relying on a sound that could rattle the tumbrils on their way to the Bastille; I had seen the magnificent Björling, the magnetic Callas, the celestial Tebaldi; I had watched Toscanini tear his passions to tatters; I had even seen Rachmaninoff once when I was too young to spell his name; and I had by now quite convinced myself that one twilit evening on a beach in Malibu, the great Jascha Heifetz had played to me alone.

  FEELING A TRIFLE SMUG that so far I hadn’t done too badly, I found myself walking in the direction of no. 14 Bank Street. I had not seen Tam for some time now nor, for that matter, little “Manders”—a visit was more than due. It would be pleasant to share a jar or two and recapture old times. I also longed for my old bed. I rang the bell and a face that definitely wasn’t Dessa’s appeared in the doorway. The new maid was informing me in no uncertain terms that Bank Street was no longer my address and that all my belongings had been sent to the Algonquin Hotel. In a daze I made my way to the old “Gonk.” The bellhops greeted me with mischievous knowing grins on their faces and even the normally jolly maitre d’, Robert, came out of the Rose Room and stared at me as if he’d seen a ghost.

  I took the elevator up, turned the key in the lock of my new abode and stood there struck dumb. Tammy had with evil humour picked the smallest room in the hotel: all my things were piled up in cartons on the bed and on the floor—there wasn’t an inch left in which to move. I couldn’t help feeling I’d deserved it—that justice had been done! I looked at this collection of rubbish strewn about me and I started to laugh. Was this all I had to show for myself? Were these few pathetic items my worldly goods? I was thirty years old and had amassed nothing but junk? By the time I’d stopped laughing I had made up my mind.

  Doth Fortune play the huswife with me now?

  Old I do wax and from my weary limbs

  Honour is cudgelled …

  To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal.

  —PISTOL (HENRY V)

  I left everything where it was—I quit the hotel—I sought out Jane—I handed in my green card. I blew a kiss to my lost twenties—waved good-bye to America—and determined to follow Dame Edith’s little Spitfire on its flight path to London, I climbed aboard the first big Iron Bird I could find.

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE MIASMAL SIXTIES

  Here’s your damn uniform! Go and make it yourself, you bloody Colonial!” This abrasive outburst came from Maurice Angel of Angels, London’s celebrated military costumier. From the wings of the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, he had just hurled the offending unfinished jacket onto the stage right smack at my feet! We were in the midst of our first dress rehearsal of Much Ado About Nothing. Once more I was playing Benedick and my leading lady this time was one of England’s finest light comediennes, Geraldine Mc-Ewan. Humiliatingly, I was the only member of the company without a costume. I had complained at a
ll the former dress parades that mine still didn’t fit and I suppose Mr. Angel had never been spoken to like that by a mere actor, so consequently he had seen red and gone quite berserk. Noel Willman, a civilized man of exceptional intellect and directorial talent who was playing Don Pedro, stopped the run-through, strode to the apron and demanded of Peter Hall (the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new boss) that he request an immediate apology. “This behavior is most unprofessional, insolent and beyond belief insulting to a visiting artist!” I was overwhelmed! Dear, mild-mannered, gentlemanly Noel, furiously standing up for my punctured dignity, God bless him—I would never forget it.

  Peter Hall had taken over the Much Ado production from Michael Langham, who one day in rehearsal went into serious convulsions caused by a nasty polyp that had to be removed. He was forced to be hospitalized for some time and suddenly I felt deserted, for Michael and his wife, Helen, had so kindly smoothed my way onto foreign soil and now I was to be truly on my own. But I liked Peter—he was young, just a couple of years my senior, and had a boyish charm that was most reassuring, so I slowly began to feel more at home. Here I was a “bloody Colonial” playing the most attractive leading parts that season in the country of Shakespeare and Milton. I was indeed fortunate and was beginning to have a good time despite a mild patronizing resentment from certain quarters that clearly showed how insularity can breed contempt. I had every reason to be cocky and if cockiness and arrogance were to be my defense, then go to it, I said to myself with all guns blazing! At every local pub I visited I had such wicked fun adopting the harshest North American Midwestern twang. People would actually come up to me and say with customary British tact, “How could you possibly play Shakespeare with a ghastly accent like that?!” “Just wait, you fools,” I thought to myself.