In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer

  Then a return trip to New York for Mike Nichols’s Wolf, with a spectacularly effective Jack Nicholson whose charm could melt an iceberg in one moment but in the next could exit Planet Earth swifter than an arrow from the Tartar’s bow. He has my undying respect as a riveting screen presence almost unmatched and I would like to have been a friend, but his gregariousness was a particularly private one and he clearly preferred to keep “Narnia” as his permanent address. In Wolf, I played the gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer’s wealthy father and in one scene was required to lose my temper and slap her in the face. Gazing into those deep limpid eyes of hers, I was so hypnotized, my expertise at faking a slap utterly deserted me and I let her have it with full barrels—one of the worst days of my life.

  After a couple of trips to Rome to shoot some diabolical sci-fi flick whose name thankfully escapes me, it was back to California for 12 Monkeys, a Terry Gilliam film starring the excellent Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. I was Brad’s dad. God bless Terrence—that multitalented zany old whiz kid who was so nice to my daughter and who keeps asking me to work with him in films that never seem to be made. Don’t stop asking, Terry; I’m available.

  My director in Dolores Claiborne, an intriguing story which starred Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, was the quick-tempered but richly gifted Taylor Hackford, a jazz afficionado and superb filmmaker, whose particular expertise was conjuring atmosphere which gave each story he filmed its own potency and meaning. I got along with Taylor well, but I will always be jealous of him, for he married one of my favourite ladies, a woman for all seasons and certainly one of my most admired actresses, the invincible Helen Mirren.

  However, for me, the most rewarding of all these activities was performing alone with symphony orchestras on both sides of the pond in a new concert version of Shakespeare’s Henry V set to the music of Sir William Walton. This was the brainchild of the celebrated British conductor Sir Neville Marriner, and we presented it with the symphony orchestras of London, Minneapolis, Washington and Neville’s own orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with whom we recorded it for Chandos Records. Neville had started his career as a violinist and had actually played violin with the London Philharmonic under Muir Matheson’s baton in the original Walton soundtrack for Laurence Olivier’s great film. Neville is now probably the most recorded conductor in the world, full of mischief and fun, and he and his wife, Molly, who runs his life with the precision of a fine Swiss timepiece, are, I am thrilled to say, my cherished friends. I also performed this work with other conductors—among them Michael Lankester, an old cohort, for the Toronto Symphony and Leonard Slatkin with the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. It is a feast! I get to speak all the best speeches in the play; I get to play all the best parts—Henry, Chorus, Duke of Burgundy, Exeter, Pistol, even a speech of Falstaff’s taken from Henry IV, Part 2. The beauty of it all is that I don’t have any changes. I do it all in black tie and smoking jacket. Perhaps one day I’ll slip into drag and play the French Princess as well.

  My appetite whetted for more of this new and attractive venue, I solicited Lankester’s aid; we both put together concert versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the music of Felix Mendelssohn, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with the music of Edvard Grieg. Michael arranged the scores, and I the words. We premiered both versions with the Toronto Symphony. Peer Gynt was exciting but still very much a work in progress. The Dream, however, was ready to go anywhere it chose. Years later, I would do The Dream playing Oberon, Puck and Bottom with Sir Neville at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony and at Carnegie Hall, reunited with the boys and girls of St. Martin.

  If all this makes the bulk of the decade look overcrowded, it most assuredly was. My career custodian, the ever-faithful Lou Pitt, my comrades at ICM, and Perry Zimel had done masterfully and deserved a much-needed break. Though the traffic of my work seemed to have piled up bumper to bumper, there was still time for my beloved canine pack “back at the ranch.” For, naughty and bouncy as they were, their very presence, like a friendly hypodermic, never failed to blow all tensions to the winds.

  MY POLISH COZ PIGGIE, who had been eating us out of house and home, had at last bought her own house down the street nearby and, during our occasional absences, gallantly continued her role as “la gar-dienne principale des chiens.” This politically correct, somewhat dreary decade had been good to her as well. In 1990, she had the honour of performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the world premiere of the recently discovered lost Piano Concerto no. 3 by Franz Liszt. The Abbé Liszt had most likely left the score lying about the house, and the cook had stolen it to wrap the fish in—who knows? The work was aptly called “Opus Posthumous,” and although it didn’t hold a candle to his other concerti, nos. 1 and 2, it was nevertheless a huge coup for the lucky pianist who would first play it in public.

  For Piggie, justice had been served. Since she was something of a Liszt specialist herself, the honour had fallen into the right hands. But that wasn’t all—she was on a roll and she found the time to come up with an inspired idea. Why couldn’t a number of celebrated pianists get together and perform the classics (for expenses only) in the most obscure and distant hamlets to people who had never had the good fortune to hear or see a live concert? So she began in her native Canada. She approached five of the country’s top internationally known pianists—Angela Hewitt, Angela Cheng, Marc-André Hamelin, André Laplante and Jon “Jackie” Kimura Parker—who all gave a resounding yes! So depending on availability and some private funds that Piggie helped raise, off they sped, each his or her separate way into the frozen north and such isolated places as Portage la Prairie, Squamish, BC; Wainright, Alberta; Iqaluit; Baffin Island and more and more, farther still to the tip of the compass it seemed, presumably to benefit musically starved penguins. There were five of them, and Piggie made six, so she christened the enterprise quite naturally Piano Six. The success of the venture grew each year and since then it has become Piano Plus, for it now includes famous singers and other instrumentalists as well. For founding this culture-spreading troupe and for her own role as a musical ambassador for Canada, Piggie was at last recognized and honoured by her grateful country.

  Yes, in our immediate circle we were all doing nicely, thank you, but there was a sameness about my lot that was gnawing at the vitals. Financially, there were no complaints. I was regularly bringing home the bacon—enough to build a new pool house, erect stone walls, buy something in Florida and keep the dogs in steak tartare. But I had fallen into a dangerously comfortable rut—I really wasn’t going anywhere at all when suddenly something yanked me from my quicksand onto more solid ground.

  Rescue had come in the form of two familiar figures who had made a considerable impact on my youth, the notorious John Barrymore, one of the great Hamlets, a bel idéal of actors, and the feisty, pugnacious doyen of hard-core TV journalism, Mike Wallace; the former a dissipated but potent phantom, the latter still dangerously alive. Between the two, my career was elevated to another level entirely. I was promoted, rediscovered and winched onto the top deck, eager to hoist anchor and set sail at last, into the third and final act of my life.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  MY ACT III

  Seated at his favourite table in the old Sea Hag, a restaurant in Depoe Bay, Oregon, the author and playwright William Luce had managed to exile himself as obliquely far west as he dared so that he’d become not only reclusive but exclusive. His choice of abode was so remote, so tucked away, it was out of bounds for homing pigeons. In fact, he might have easily disappeared off the face of the planet had not e-mail been invented. Bill was an old hand at writing one-man shows. He’d had terrific success with a graceful one called The Belle of Amherst on the poet Emily Dickinson, and another, Lucifer’s Child, on the writer Isak Dinesen, both penned for Julie Harris. He also wrote Lillian, a fascinating take on the romantic and political side of Lillian Hellman for Zoe Caldwell, whose performance came as uncannily close to that fiery lady as an
yone might choose to. I am one of the few people left alive who knew Lillian Hellman and I can vouch for that.

  Zoe’s husband, Robert “Ratty” Whitehead, had produced it for her in New York and Luce and he had gotten on well. So one day Bill showed him an early draft of yet another one-person play on the great John Barrymore. Ratty told him that if he took out all the usual well-known Barrymore stories and started afresh, it could have a future. He also told him I would be ideal to play the “Great Profile.” I was sent the new and latest version—I loved it. It was funny, extremely Barry-moresque, a trifle lightweight, perhaps, and it needed work. Nonetheless, Bill Luce had caught the old soak right down to his booze-ridden socks. I was dying to do it—this could be a nest egg.

  For some reason, Bill had granted the rights to a couple of novice producers (husband and wife) from the Midwest who weren’t sure of me at all, hoping for bigger fish (movie-star fish) to take the bait. So I was put on hold while they shopped around. Stacy Keach, who had originally commissioned Bill to write the piece, now having found religion, had given up on it. O’Toole passed, stating he didn’t want to play another drunk, and several most unlikely candidates from the film world were either too frightened to tackle the subject matter or too terrified of appearing on a stage for the first time in case they might fall off.

  I was getting fed up, so I began to bully Bill: “Why did you go with these wets?” I said ungraciously. “Let’s get someone else to produce it. If we wait any longer we’ll all be too old.” So Bill got on the phone and told them I was his choice and that they were going to need to raise a lot more money for an advertising budget if this thing was going to work. Naive to the end, they said they would hang up and think about this seriously and that they were very disappointed. Well, I wasn’t going to wait, so I begged Garth Drabinsky and his company Livent to buy them out, produce and promote the show themselves. Garth, who had now established himself on Broadway as some sort of modern-day David Belasco, saw its potential and agreed. Finally, when Gene Saks, the perfect director for the piece, and Santo Loquasto, the set and costume designer, were signed on, our ship was ready to hoist anchor.

  The play takes place on a stage where Barrymore in civilian clothes is trying to rehearse his Richard III, for which he was once famous. Now, at the end of his life, destitute and ravaged by time, he is dying to make his comeback. Though of course all this is fictional, it could very easily have occurred. He is constantly forgetting his lines and during these pauses shares with the prompter in the wings and the audience out front jokes old and new as well as reminiscences of his checkered, colourful and bawdy life. If his charm works on the audience, it certainly does not work on the prompter who severely reprimands him and tries to get him back on track. There is a bar onstage which Barrymore has wheeled on so that he can more than frequently pour himself drinks. There is also, of course, a fair amount of Shakespeare to recite, which I always look forward to, devout Bardaholic that I am. Having myself performed Richard III at Stratford, England, and listening carefully to J.B.’s recorded rendition, I took the two performances, mine and his, and shaking them together like a lethal martini, I found the result slipped down quite smoothly.

  We opened in Stratford, Canada, took it to Florida (Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale), had Christmas off and then seriously hit the road in freezing Detroit. All this time we worked like slaves to improve it—even the prompter, played beautifully offstage by Michael Mastro, was forever coming up with good ideas. Bill Luce proved incredibly flexible, throwing out whole chunks of his writing and putting in new stuff without so much as a moan. And Gene Saks was worth his weight in gold. He knew vaudeville and had a built-in comedy sense that was priceless. He not only was a fine comedic actor himself but had directed many an original Neil Simon hit onstage and on screen (The Odd Couple, for one). But Gene also knew how essential it was for the show to have some depth and substance, how vital it was to see the inside of Barry-more, what drove him to self-destruction, and what Brooks Atkinson had meant when he likened his downfall to “Icarus who flew too close to the sun.” We eventually found a certain dark side which was invaluable in tracing a tragic line, particularly his pain when he ultimately realizes it’s all too late and he’s not going to make it.

  The closest I could get to “The Profile”

  The tour took us to Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, Delaware and Baltimore. Everywhere the play was received with great enthusiasm and laughter galore—except Baltimore. That town used to be such fun to play to—I had appeared in many a pre-Broadway tryout there—but now, whether it was the economic slump or God knows what, people went about their business looking particularly glum. There wasn’t a smile in the streets and certainly nothing in the theatre. Lines that were surefire laughs were greeted with stony silence. To add to this misery, one night after the show, the stage manager said, “Your wife just telephoned. She’s on the line—it’s important—something about the dogs, I think.” My heart sank as I heard her voice saying shakily, “Little Toadie died tonight. She came into the room where I was reading, looked at me with those sad eyes, staggered a little, then wagged her tail. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you silly thing?’ I said. I didn’t realize she’d come in looking for me. Then she fell into my arms and let out her last breath.” I went back to my hotel room and howled all night long. In fact, I cried myself to sleep for weeks afterwards. I no longer had trouble bringing on tears when I broke down near the end of the play. I just had to think of Toadie, and they came in floods.

  We opened in New York. What a feeling! It not only smelled of success—it was a success. For press and public alike, it went right across the board. No place like New York for success. After the audience had dispersed on the first night, I found myself alone on the empty stage of the Music Box, that most intimate of theatres, and the feeling was overwhelming. Suddenly, everyone who’d helped was beside me, somewhat out of focus. Bill Luce; dear Gene Saks; Santo; Natasha Katz (who did the lighting); Michael Mastro, the loyal prompter; the stage crew headed by Michael Farrell; Sue, the production stage manager; and Robin, who took her place for the rest of the run; Garth, beaming, surrounded by henchmen. There they were, a staunch little family group, all standing about looking slightly drunk—a strange glow about them. Then Garth’s party at “21” (he had taken over the whole building) where I was seated next to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., that elegant, rakish fellow, who always managed to see every play I was in. He had known Jack Barrymore well, told some extremely wicked stories about him and happily endorsed my portrayal.

  Gene Saks—actor, director, friend and wit

  All through the run, stars and celebrities from LA, New York, London, Washington came backstage to pay their respects—prime ministers, ambassadors and I think just about everyone in Actors’ Equity, Screen Actors Guild and Spotlight. Robin made a list of them each night and pinned it on the notice board. It looked like a glorified Who’s Who. If I wasn’t so conceited already, it might have gone to my head. One matinée, Robin informed me that Elaine Barrymore would be out front. Elaine had been Jack’s ultimate spouse, the one whom the rest of his family had spurned as a social climber and gold digger who’d taken advantage of a man at the end of his rope. Well, whether true or false, she was the last lady to have known and loved him, after all. I was shaking with nerves so I made damn sure that the opening few lines would sound exactly like him. For the first ten minutes I put on my best Bar-rymore impersonation; then I relaxed for the remainder of the show. When she came backstage afterwards, she paid me the best compliment I could have wished for. She said simply, “My God, how Jack would have loved to have gone on the town with you!” She came to see it all over again a few days later and presented me with the handwritten love letters she and Barrymore had sent each other—I treasure them still. They are loving, passionate and funny. She was actually a very funny lady indeed, and I could see why he’d loved her and needed her so desperately. Apart from their obvious physical attraction for each other, she’d
made the old ruin laugh.

  What I’d thought was going to be a modest but distinguished run of twelve weeks or so turned out to be almost nine months! And that only because I’d decided to quit at the risk of my sanity. Garth yelled at me, “The winter months are already building. We could do this for another year!” And we could have at that, but I wasn’t a machine and for the moment I’d had enough. When it closed, I couldn’t stop thanking people over and over again, but it was the ghost of Jack Barrymore I needed to thank most. His was the image I’d fallen for when I was a youth of fourteen, which had propelled me toward the theatre I loved in the first place, and Diana, his daughter, who had worshipped him—dear, kind, sad, loving Diana who had been so good to me so long ago—it was for her in a way that I’d done it; how badly I needed her approval and how I wished she’d been there to see it. I hope she might have been proud.

  THE SCREENPLAYS that now came my way were worlds apart from the “money pics” I’d been occasionally wallowing in. Funny what a hit play will do for one—this was a real shot in the arm. One that stood out above all the others was a story by Eric Roth about the man who blew the whistle on the cigarette companies, Professor Jeffrey Wigand. The film would eventually be called The Insider. Two industrious ladies—my new friend and agent Andrea Eastman, and an astute casting director—convinced that I portrayed historical figures with a certain accuracy (Kipling, Wellington, Roosevelt, Nabokov, Barrymore) had fought bravely for me to play Mike Wallace, who had figured so prominently in the exposé and eventual capitulation of the tobacco industry.