In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  MY NEXT ASSIGNMENT I learned was to be in Athens. I had always dreamed of going to Greece, so I ran down the Connaught staircase straight to the bar to share the news with Barry over a celebratory drink. “Guess what?” he said before I could get a word in. “The Harrisons are staying in the hotel—and there’s Mrs. Harrison over there on the couch with Mrs. Harris.” I joined the two Welsh ladies who turned out to be the greatest of friends and after several martinis we were feeling very little pain. Morgan rolled in happily primed and in top form. “Let’s have dinner here in the dining room,” I offered. “Rachel, go upstairs and get Rex.” Rachel, who had a head start on all of us, left the room and Liz, Morgan and I waited and waited for an unconscionably long time. Rex finally called down, “Look, I’d love to come, but Rachel is pissed out of her mind—I think we’d better not.” “Oh come on,” I insisted. “We’re having such a good time and it’s been so long.” The three of us went in and sat at the big table in the corner banquette—Table 10. I was in the midst of telling the well-known story of how Mrs. “Kitty” Gilbert Miller had choked to death at this very table (no Heimlich maneuver being offered) when the Harrisons at last made their appearance. Rachel immediately ordered another martini, which Rex snatched from her and put on a side table. “No, Rachel, I told you no more.” Rex, Liz, Morgan and I carried the conversation while Rachel sulked in gloomy silence. She didn’t look in the least inebriated, though God only knew just how much she’d already consumed. We were all so famished we literally attacked our dinner except Rachel who wouldn’t touch any of her food. The evening was proceeding most pleasantly in its rose-coloured way when in an extremely loud voice which ricocheted off the dining room walls, Rachel shouted at Morgan, “You see, boyo, Sexy Rexy here believes he’s the illegitimate son of George the Fifth when actually he’s only the son of a dreary fucking Baptist minister.”

  It was a particularly “old” night, that night at the Connaught—veddy old, veddy British and veddy stuffy. The room fell silent. All one could hear was the rattling of expensive cutlery. Mr. Rose came over and in his quiet, charming way asked her if she wanted anything. “I want another bloody martini—for the love of Christ, boyo.” It was at that moment that Rachel began a series of wolf howls. We had somehow expected this might happen and were prepared for it. Others in the restaurant were not. Some got up and left. As each person glared at our table on their way out, Mrs. Harrison would give another ear-piercing howl in their direction. It was quite hysterical to see Rex trying to make himself invisible. Morgan by this time had totally lost it and I thought he was going to burst he was laughing so hard.

  That wildly macabre evening had strangely signaled a change in all our lives. It would not be long before the warmhearted, loving and talented Rachel had remarried successfully and happily and my good friend Elizabeth was to become the umpteenth Mrs. Rex Harrison.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  GREECE

  The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece

  Where burning Sappho loved and sung

  —LORD BYRON

  On April 21, 1967, came the infamous “Colonels’ Coup” in which the military seized all power in Greece. The army held the opinion that a democratic government and a constitutional monarchy could not together or separately take effective or dramatic measures. The blundering misjudgments of Prime Minister Papandreou, which had led to this coup, subjected the country to seven years of military dictatorship. By so doing he had effectively removed Greece, the birthplace of democracy, from the community of civilized nations. The long history of instability, which had plagued this beautiful country for centuries, once more brought chaos to its people. It seemed they were never to be allowed to rest. All leading Communist agitators were sent to the islands. All artists, journalists and painters were considered Communist and were on the hit list. Although no blood was shed, something was only too clear—Athens was under fire. All shops were shut. There was no telephone service; no telegrams could be sent; there were no buses or taxis. The streets were filled with tanks—all Greece was in mourning for itself.

  It was into this tension and gloom that I first set foot in the City of Truth. I was to play the role of Oedipus Rex on film in a brand-new English version of the old classic by the celebrated poet, Paul Roche. This might be viewed as an absurd contrast to the serious goings-on around one and yet the timing of it could not have been more ironic. Here on the one hand was the blinded King Oedipus forsaking his throne and fleeing to the wilderness and there, on the other, was the present King Constantine, also throneless, fleeing to Rome.

  After spending one heavy ouzo-drinking night with Donald Sutherland (who was to play the Chorus Leader) at the old Hotel Grande Bretagne, I shook the dust of occupied Athens from my heels and was driven the six or seven hours’ journey to Ioannina at the far end of the country where Greece borders on Albania. We were to shoot the entire film at nearby Dodoni in one of the very oldest and smallest amphitheatres in existence. It nestled itself against a hill of wild grass and a kind of rough gorse, its stone seats in ruins and at all angles as if earthquakes over the centuries had dislodged them. Unlike its tourist-ridden counterparts, it was neglected, sad and alone, an occasional olive tree bravely growing out from the seats and wildflowers everywhere. It was achingly beautiful and my very favourite theatre in the world. When it wasn’t raining in Dodoni, which was rare, there was always an ominous little black cloud hanging above it—a presentiment of Fate. It wore its little cloud proudly like a cap. There is a wide belief that when the Oracle first arrived in Greece, it went straight to Dodoni, but realizing it did nothing but piss with rain there, it picked up its skirts and moved on to Delphi.

  Oedipus the King, presented by Universal Pictures, was the ambitious brainchild of producer Michael Luke, the brother of Peter Luke, who had so successfully produced my “Hamlet at Elsinore.” Michael was an extremely bright, knowledgeable and comfortable sort of Englishman with a deep mellifluous voice who couldn’t quite conceal a number of interesting complexities which simmered just below the surface of his normally cool demeanour. A slight example of this was that he and his attractive family all lived in a house on the Dashwood estate in West Wycombe, just outside London. The estate sits on a steep rolling hill and gives the impression of great rural peacefulness as if Constable had painted it. Yet who would believe that in the nineteenth century Sir Francis Dashwood, England’s premier baronet and Satan worshipper performed Black Mass rituals of every known variety, supposedly including human sacrifice right there on the grounds in the family chapel? I’m not suggesting for a moment that dear Michael Luke ever even contemplated devil worship, but his choice of residence, one must admit, is oddly intriguing. More evidence of the quirkier side of his imagination lay in the extraordinary group of genuine eccentrics he had gathered together for the fray—one Duncan Grant, the famed painter and a last survivor of the Bloomsbury Set; the great Greek designer Madame Vaglioti (who made me a wonderful snake belt); my old acquaintance Count Friedrich Ledebur to train the Greek horses which were as tiny as ponies; the country’s premiere tragedienne, Irene Pap-pas, who was to play my mother, Jocasta, but couldn’t because as a fierce protestor of the new regime, it was imperative that she leave the country before she was thrown in jail. Add to this a host of Greek poets, composers, painters, famous or infamous, whom Michael had hired as extras. He had spirited them away from Athens so they could hide behind their cowls lest overzealous military police might recognize them. The local farmers allowed them to sleep in their fields at night, where they drank wine and ate goat cheese, grateful and happy to be free. If you lifted a cowl or two, by God, if it wasn’t Argirakis or Theodorakis or others of their ilk, a considerable collection of celebrities disguised as suppliants. So when I spoke my opening lines to the kneeling multitudes, “Children of Cadmus,” etc. I was in reality addressing the crème de la crème of Greek intellectual society.

  My third Oedipus, this one in Greece

  Also on board were the a
ctors of Greece’s National Theatre to play the Chorus, with Donald, as I mentioned, as their leader. Quel coup!! An irritating habit of dear Donald’s, which drove us round the bend as well as kept us amused, was his constant low-key mumbling—effective in certain screen roles, but in Hamlet and Oedipus hardly suitable. Fortinbras speaks the noble lines, “Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,” etc. As this is the very last speech in the play, it is rather important it be heard. In Oedipus the job of the Chorus Leader is to explain the plot and then tell us what is to come, desperately important to be heard, I would say—but in both cases, all one got from Donald was a distant rumble. Of course, he fixed it in the looping room later and all was fine, he was wonderful, but on the set he had caused a few palpitations of the heart. That wondrous player from Ireland Cyril Cusack was the Messenger and the old Shepherd who brings the final truth to poor Oedipus was enacted by the endearing Roger Livesey (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going), he of the whiskey voice who could charm the pizzle off a Thessalian bull! The urbane Richard Johnson from the Royal Shakespeare made a splendid Creon, Lilli Palmer replaced Pappas as my mother and lastly Orson Welles played the blind seer Tiresias as if he were Othello, Macbeth and Charles Foster Kane rolled into one. How spoiled could a young Oedipus get?

  My friend Philip Saville, who had been such a help with my Hamlet, was once again my director. He arrived as dashing as ever on the arm of young Diana Rigg, then the star of The Avengers. They looked like a pretty serious item. To further pamper me, the “powers that be” had given me an assistant to be at my beck and call. She was twenty or thereabouts and her name was Bambi. Apart from being generous, tremendous fun and immensely smart (she spoke Greek fluently), Bambi was pretty easy on the eyes. She had a very sexy face and her long thin legs seemed never to end—that illusion further enhanced by the shortest of miniskirts. When she would stand over me at breakfast awaiting instructions for the day, it left next to nothing to the imagination. Philip got quite stroppy with her and told her to wear something less revealing as she was distracting the entire crew. Bambi just smiled that innocent smile of hers and fortunately for us didn’t trouble to make the change. I thought Philip had spoken rather out of turn as he and Diana never stopped spooning whenever they got the chance.

  Something had happened that perhaps was far from helpful to the production. Whether the magic of the location had softened us and made us lazy or perhaps our hearts weren’t in it, I don’t know which, but our playing was far from cohesive. There was no unity, no feeling of ensemble. As a result, we all gave our own performances—some very intimate and filmic, others, mine particularly, excessively theatrical, a stage rather than a film performance. Also Philip was determined to keep it all very simple and stark—quite rightly—but for some reason he didn’t cover the scenes adequately and his cameraman, a very gifted fellow indeed, Walter Lassally (who had shot Never on Sunday), had his own opinions as to how it should all look, so they never really got along at all, which was disastrous. However, there were many adventures to undertake offscreen, away from the work, many towns to explore and the exquisite surrounding country just waiting to remind us of its history.

  As we had some time off, I took the ferry with Bambi across the Aegean to a very special island that is still floating around in my head all these many years later. We had come upon a temporary paradise—we had discovered Corfu.

  Kerkyra, the proper name for Corfu, is Italianate in appearance, hardly Greek at all. It is abundantly verdant, a sea of greenery between tall cypresses, more restful to the eye, for there the sun beats down less ruthlessly than on the other islands. The town of Kerkyra nestles at the foot of a huge hill which makes up the island and the countryside beyond the town casts a sad and haunting spell that is quite indescribable. Well, perhaps not quite. Lawrence Durrell in his Prospero’s Cell describes it all quite magically. I knew I would visit there, so I read it beforehand and was convinced that Corfu could never live up to Durrell’s description of it. I was wrong. The steep hills that dizzily drop to the Aegean are covered in olive groves—the trees leaning at an almost 45-degree angle grow out of the cliffs bending over like Sirens, waving you down to the waters below. It is spellbinding. Yes, one could easily envision Austria’s beautiful empress taking her daily exercise, running at high speed as was her custom through the olive trees, her nuns following her at a distance—a group of frantic blackbirds trying desperately to keep up.

  The deserted white chapels hugging the hills also gave a look of enchantment to the place. I wanted instantly to acquire one and convert its interior into a home—how simple and attractive that would be. We visited the Achillion Palace where the Empress Elizabeth had spent her Grecian summers. Both aesthetic and elegant, it sits, perched on a cliff looking down on Kerkyra below, flanked by tall conifers standing as straight as sentries. Prince Andrew of Greece’s house Mon Repos was also on our agenda. But the other side of the island was my very favourite—Paleokastritsa. At the topmost point of the hill, the little town of Paleokastritsa crowns its summit, its houses painted a variety of joyously vivid colours. There are barely any trees way up there and this jewel of a town is open to the skies—the air is so clear and vibrant, the tiled streets so clean you can eat off them, and the long walk from the hilltop down those thousands of steps yielded views that could catch one’s breath.

  At the foot of the steps lies a little bay sheltered from the sea by two cliffs of rock which we nicknamed “Charybdis” and “Scylla.” Inside these hollow cliffs the seawater is very deep and the stalagmites and stalactites are awesome to behold. Here is some of the best snorkeling in the world. Bambi and I rented a small cottage on the beach from a retired crusty old English army major. We had the whole beach to our-selves—no one was about. We simply indulged our days, mostly nude, swimming and guzzling the crayfish that only Greece seems to pro-duce—the sweetest, pinkest and most succulent ever. It was just the two of us—Robinson Crusoe and his Girl Friday.

  But the time had now come for Oedipus to find the “way where three roads meet” and learn that he had killed his dad and married his mum, poor confused child. So Bambi and I, snobbishly spurning the ferry as being for tourists only, hired a motorboat for the long journey back to the mainland in order to get there in half the time. It turned out to be the most ominous few hours I’ve spent on the water. A huge wind got up at once—the Aegean can be a very treacherous body of water. Not only did we start bobbing up and down in our little craft; the stupid ferry passed us very early on, thumbed its nose at us and left us behind. As we kept lurching back and forth in the boat, the ferry became a little dot on the horizon. It was getting perilously dark when we finally docked beside the “stupid” ferry, which looked so complacent and pleased with itself, we could have kicked a hole in it.

  THE LOCAL PEASANTS ride their donkeys too close to the neck. In fact they even sit on the neck—the same with their horses—so that the neck muscles of these unfortunate beasts are weakened dreadfully. Totally untrained, they were always skittish and nervous. When we got back, I saw that Friedrich was having a devil of a time trying to placate and train these miniature beasts which for the most part were neglected, useless nags that had suffered nothing but cruelty all their lives. I had never seen Friedrich so disappointed and frustrated. As usual, he blamed himself, not the horses. But everyone seemed a little on edge. Walter Lassally, our D.P., was becoming more irascible every day. Philip was exhibiting his customarily amazing gift of patience, but his mouth was starting to form a hard line. Everywhere there was a certain unease; a sense of high tension hung over Dodoni. And then I knew why—someone told me, “Orson arrives tomorrow.” There are many lasting memories, mostly sweet, of the places and the people involved in our little project, but I don’t exaggerate when I say that the memory which had the strongest and most lasting impact on me was of that mammothly talented, cherub-faced magician.

  I had never met Orson nor seen him in the flesh, except from afar when he play
ed Lear in New York, but a few years back he had offered me the role of Prince Hal in his Shakespeare film Chimes at Midnight. Incredibly, I had never been told about it until long after the film had opened. Kurt Frings, my then agent, whose sole interest was making me rich, had turned it down without consulting me, on the grounds that there was too little money in it. “But Kurt,” I said, “I would have done it in a shot. How could you? What must he think of me?!” I told Orson’s daughter Beatrice many years later, “I would have paid to work with your father.” So as the time of his arrival approached, I knew that to vindicate myself, I must tell him the whole story. Orson had already mailed us his version of our script, along with his cuts. Philip and I read them over and they were absolutely succinct, necessary, economical and, in his scenes with me, vastly more playable. That incredible eye and ear of his never failed him.