Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  For Finney the joy of Annie was getting to know John Huston, one of his favourite directors. He claimed that he’d seen more films by Huston than anyone else. It was the beginning of a firm friendship between the 45-year-old and the 75-year-old, the latter a bizarre choice to direct this slice of American slushy mushy apple pie. But Finney was also an unlikely Daddy Warbucks, the bullet-headed, bald, billionaire sugar daddy who becomes surrogate father to orphan Annie during the Depression.

  Finney went straight into Annie on the back of Shoot the Moon. He told interviewers he needed to get back into making movies:

  I think I probably did this run of films because I know how much it helps if you do a bit, however easy you are in front of the camera. Stage and film work use a totally different set of muscles. And acting anyway is like being a fighter – once you’re back in the ring, you’re also back in the gym.

  Columbia Pictures gambled £30 million in the hope that Annie would lure families to cinemas. It all started in 1924 when a cartoonist offered the New York Daily News a strip called ‘Little Orphan Otto’, featuring a boy with frizzy hair. ‘Looks like a pansy to me,’ said the publisher. ‘Put a skirt on him and call it Little Orphan Annie.’ So it was that little 1-year-old Annie and her dog Sandy were born, all alone in the world until taken in by Warbucks.

  In 1977, a musical adaptation opened on Broadway, winning twenty-two major awards, including seven Tonys by the time the film started to roll on 29 April 1981. Producer Ray Stark offered his view of the story, ‘Annie is basically a love story between a little girl with nothing but the courage to dream and an adult with everything except someone to share it with.’

  The quest for Annie took two years. Casting directors scrutinised more than 20,000 photographs, interviewed 8,000 children and auditioned another 550 on videotape. Eventually the search was whittled down to several girls, among them 9-year-old Aileen Quinn, already a familiar face on commercials. English choreographer Arlene Phillips, famed for her creation of Hot Gossip, was responsible for the song and dance numbers.

  At Columbia’s Burbank Studios a million dollar tenement was constructed, based around the orphanage. It was a four-storey street, designed to allow filming from any angle; it took five months to build. The other major location was the cavernous home of Warbucks. Nothing short of a mansion would do and the ideal place was found in New Jersey. It was the former home of the president of F.W. Woolworth, built on the site where Woodrow Wilson’s summer White House had once stood.

  Finney had sung before, notable for his Motown contract as well as in Scrooge, but he also had to dance for Annie:

  I was very self-conscious when I started the dancing rehearsals. My partner was, much of the time, Ann Reinking, who is a terrific dancer and I kept thinking I’d break her legs while trying to get the tango right. The whole thing was new stuff to me. I had to shave my head twice a day because by lunchtime there’d be a five o’clock shadow. My bonce, being all virgin soil, burnt terribly and I had to wear a beret. Anyway I felt quite rude and naked sitting there bald. I tried wearing a wig on set but nobody knew who I was and when I went off-set bald everybody thought I was into martial arts. I also found myself assuming a sitting position rather like Yul [Brynner] like a king on a throne. People would come up to me and murmur to me how good I’d been on stage the night before in, I presume, The King and I.4

  Finney was clearly nervous about the dance routines. Elaine Kaufman, owner of one of the city’s most famous – and star frequented – restaurants, Elaine’s, remembers a frantic call from Finney on the eve of an important number:

  He says, ‘Elaine, darling, you’ve got to help me. I’ve got this big number before the cameras tomorrow – I’m Daddy Warbucks singing and moving all over the place but I’m not ready.’

  ‘So, what can I do?’

  ‘Singing’s not my strong suit and I need to rehearse.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. With you and all your waiters.’

  ‘Albert, this is a restaurant. We don’t rehearse.’

  ‘If you don’t do this for me, you’re all poofters.’

  Elaine recalls, ‘So he takes the recorder from his pocket, turns on the music for “I Don’t Need Anything But You” and he rehearses, me as Little Orphan Annie, would you believe? Got all my waiters to dance up and down around the tables with him.’5

  Finney certainly gave it his all. Aileen Quinn, who stayed friendly with Finney, recalled:

  One of my favourite memories of him is [Finney] learning to really sing for the first time. He did that beautiful version of ‘Maybe’… As he was taking singing lessons on the set, I can remember him with a cigar out of his mouth and going ‘la la la la la la la,’ pause, ‘la la la la la la la’.

  This, plus Finney’s habit of putting bottle caps under his loafers to practise his tap routine, thoroughly charmed Quinn. ‘He was, like, in it to win it … so adorable.’ Quinn also revealed how when she was sleepy between takes, Finney would tickle her knees to keep her awake when they were sitting in the back of the Duesenberg.

  Was Annie worth it all? It would be nice to say it was, but the film bombed big time, failing to break a bad run from Huston. ‘Misguided opening-out of a charming stage musical based on the comic strip which is basically a reversal of Oliver Twist. Some of the best moments have been discarded, the dancing is ponderous, the acting distinctly uneasy, and the choice of director stupefying. None of it works at all,’ said Leslie Halliwell.

  Finney’s one-pitch, bellowing performance is a little indelicate. He simply didn’t convey tenderness well at this point in his career. With time, and when his features cracked, he could convey vulnerability beautifully. In Annie, however, he is simply too explosive. When Warbucks screams, ‘I love money, I love power, I love capitalism!’ it’s difficult to believe he’ll ever change. Only towards the end, when he is separated from Annie, does he invest a little softness into the part which, as has been observed, seems like an all-out impersonation of Huston.

  Finney, as always, was a hit with his co-stars. Carol Burnett remarked of him, ‘He’s charming. He makes you think you’re the only girl around. But I certainly never took him seriously. And I don’t think he expects you to take him seriously.’ And, perhaps most importantly, Finney and Huston got on marvellously. Both shared a passion for fine wine, consuming bottles of Dom Pérignon and Mouton Rothschild 1959 at a restaurant called Fromagerie to which they were constant visitors.

  Finney’s other great activity during Annie was attending the races. Not that he ever gambled huge amounts. ‘The most I ever bet is $2,000, but generally, considerably less,’ said Finney. ‘And I don’t believe in simply betting. One prefers a knowledgeable gamble.’

  As always, Finney enjoyed talking to everyone, cherishing even short exchanges. One particular encounter showed that Finney was not just making small talk but had his wits about him. Executive chef Jack Stierer takes up the story:

  As a Captain in the Continental Room at the world-class Rancho La Costa resort in Carlsbad, California I certainly had my chance to serve a number of celebrated personalities – from golf and tennis superstars to Hollywood household names to movers of industry. But one such experience I always remember as being unique: the day I served Albert Finney both lunch and dinner at two different venues some 20 miles apart.

  La Costa was a union house, and when the racetrack in Del Mar (also union) opened for the seven-week summer season, many of us signed on and moonlit there during the day. In other words, in addition to evenings in the Continental Room, our standing gig, and exhausting work, we reported to the race track six mornings a week at 9 a.m. and waited on the Turf Club tables until the last race at 4 p.m. This was a breakneck schedule, but we were young and willing to blast through the seven weeks for the perks, the tips and the prestige.

  Plenty of celebrities took tables at the Turf Club. I can remember brushing shoulders with Desi Arnez, Dustin Hoffman, Kim Novak and more. But I was especially thrilled when Al
bert Finney sat in my station one day. He was on a break from the filming of Annie and all but unrecognisable with his shaved head for the role of Daddy Warbucks.

  After lunch was served and the first few races run, the pace of service became relaxed and I was needed only for the occasional drink order during the late afternoon. At one point Mr Finney approached me, off to the side rail in my starched white Eton jacket, and we started to chat … about the horses, the area, his current film project. Quite a conversation ensued until finally he returned to his box, and I to my other diners’ needs.

  Once the last race was in and our checks closed out, off we dashed. Twenty miles up the coast from Del Mar to Carlsbad and a quick change and we were in our places for the evening dinner service at La Costa. Imagine my surprise, then, on seeing Albert Finney’s name down for a party of six in my station!

  Well, he and his group were seated and I proceeded to confer with him on the wine selection. He was looking at me quizzically, but out of context, and, now in a black tuxedo, he didn’t seem to know me from earlier in the day. I returned with the wine, and poured for the table, and only then, returning the bottle, did he take another, closer look at me and say, ‘I say, didn’t you serve me lunch today?’6

  Finney went on a three-city 3,700-mile promotion tour for the film when it came out in 1982. For Finney, a man who likes to do the work and then disappear, the tour was laborious. But he went through it like a pro despite his disdain for publicity. On one occasion, however, attending yet another premiere in Dallas, he grew restless: ‘I will go to the theatre and I will leave before the film starts. What I want to do is have a good dinner, and what I do not want to do is sit through that movie yet again!’

  The publicity people later caught Finney, as good as his word, tucking into a hefty dinner of scallops, calf’s liver and wine. Finney now had the beginnings of a double chin and an expanding waistline but the passing years didn’t worry him:

  I don’t yearn for how I used to look. I don’t think I’m particularly handsome. I think maybe I’m attractive. I remember with Tom Jones being very concerned to tell people that I was not just another pretty face, and that’s why I took all those character roles. Why I played Luther on Broadway, for instance. All those character roles were perhaps an overreaction to being treated like some kind of sex symbol.

  On the publicity tour Finney was seen cheerfully blowing smoke up the nostrils of anti-smoking fanatic Herbert A. Allen Jr, the investment banker who was also chairman of the board of Columbia Pictures. ‘The habit of a filthy animal,’ snaps Allen, fanning away smoke.

  ‘I smoke because Picasso smoked. And because Hitler didn’t,’ replied Finney, but it was all in jest.

  A magazine profile noted that Finney was ‘pliable and amiable up to a point but that point is ringed by electric wire’. As ever, Finney stressed his determination to go his own way:

  One of the terrible things about the sense of permanence is that you’re not open to possibilities. I find possibilities very pleasurable and sensual and exciting. … What I do is resist seeming to be one thing. I may be deluding myself, but there is a sense of the rogue and vagabond, the strolling player, seeing what comes up – where do I want to go next, how do I feel. It actually means I don’t have to fit within society, into a particular mold. I like the sense that one might still be surprised by life.

  And Finney was about to surprise audiences with a magnificently observed portrayal of stage crucifixion that, by rights, should have won him an Oscar.

  16

  STOP THAT TRAIN!

  Once he’s assumed the disguise, he’s a different man.

  Tom Courtenay (as Norman) on Finney (as Sir).

  We don’t like to think of actors’ deaths, but when a great star finally takes to the celestial stage, news bulletins tend to run a valedictory clip showing the performer at the peak of his or her powers. For me, Finney’s finest moment on-screen comes when he issues a thunderous, even volcanic, command that halts a departing train in The Dresser.

  Acting students would do well to study this thumbnail illumination of character. Courtenay – breathless, prissy, effeminate, begging and pleading – is pushed aside like a poodle yapping at someone’s heels as he reasons with the driver. Then we catch sight of Finney as Sir, surrounded by his luggage-laden players, striding briskly and proudly, stick and chin thrust forward, clearing a path. When Sir raises his stick and brings the wheels of the train screeching to a halt with a stentorian roar – ‘Stop that train!’ – Finney is fleetingly showing what this great actor was before old age debilitated him.

  It was just as well that Finney was still living in London, not Hollywood, because The Dresser might not have come his way. By 1982 he was sharing a mews house with Diana in Chelsea. Diana had knocked down some walls while Finney had been away and redecorated the house, painting the living room apricot. Visitors noted few theatrical mementoes. Instead, photographs from their trip to Macchu Piccu in 1979 lined the mantelpieces.

  Finney liked to live well but, unlike other stars, had resisted moving to America. He felt that London offered him the ideal balance between theatre and film:

  It’s much easier in England than America. London is the centre for theatre, film, television and radio. In America, the theatre and the movie industry have two different centres. An actor has to make a decision where to live. If he wants principally to be a stage actor, he stays in New York. But then if he wants to try movies, he has to move his family 3,000 miles. We don’t have that problem in England.

  His other reason for staying in the UK was that he felt that, in America, a commercially successful film brought untold pressures on its leading actor:

  In America, there’s pressure to stay on the treadmill and follow up a movie with a more successful movie. That’s impossible of course. Nobody’s career has ever continued to go upward and onward without a few backward steps. The graph of any life fluctuates. All graphs go up and down. Look at the great acting careers in England – Olivier and Gielgud and Richardson. They’re working actors. They don’t worry that they shouldn’t do theatre or television because they’re movie stars. Picasso didn’t paint a masterpiece every time he stepped up to the easel; sometimes he just did little sketches, but he kept working. That’s how Richardson, Olivier and Gielgud feel. If they’re not doing a movie or play they’ll do a television play or radio play, just to practise their craft. It’s tougher to do that in America.1

  Finney remained determined to control his own destiny. By now he had had the same agent since the sixties, but he saw his agent’s role as strictly to negotiate a deal, not recommend a script:

  He’s a friend as well as an agent. But I don’t look to him for advice in creative matters. I’m not saying he’s not allowed to speak. But his function is to take care of business. My function is to decide which way I’m going and choose the script I want to do. I’ve never been ‘handled’ in that way. I’ve been making my own decisions for twenty-five years.

  And living the way he wanted.

  Food and drink were always important to Finney. In 1981, Rolling Stone magazine was invited into Finney’s home:

  Sunday dinner at Albert’s place was an elaborate affair. Now setting the white marble-topped dining table, meticulous as ever, a pride of careful movements, wiping a wine-glass that looks fragile beside his imposing frame – economical gestures from an unextravagant man, Diana emerges from the kitchen. Albert arranges the last plate and snubs out a Marlboro. A switch from Bloody Marys to wine. It is dinner at the Finney household.2

  It all seemed rather pleasant. Rolling Stone continued:

  Four people consume an elegant fruit course, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, greens, vegetable purée and bottles of Orvieto, Bordeaux and champagne. Caramelised pears appear and disappear. Then, biting off the end of a fine Havana cigar, Albert excuses himself and descends to the basement, where he sprawls out upon a black leather couch to digest his meal before the TV, which was replaying the big footba
ll match at Wembley between Liverpool and Tottenham.

  Finney had always been interested in sport, especially his beloved Manchester United. He was a regular visitor to Epsom to inspect his horses, driving himself in a blue-grey Mercedes sports car. Finney also enjoyed watching cricket, especially with his close friend, Julian Holloway. Golf was another favourite. In 1983, he partnered Lee Trevino on International Pro-Celebrity Golf. Peter Allis recalled that Finney ‘was not a great golfer but that he loved the game’, noting also his great sense of fun.3

  Ken Bowden, one of the programme’s behind-the-scenes organisers, recalled Finney’s friendliness and lack of vanity:

  At the time of his appearance for us, Albert Finney was one of the world’s best, busiest and most highly acclaimed actors, but there was no misunderstanding the singularity of his personality as a famous person. He was, in a nutshell, at all times the least ‘starlike’ star any of us involved in the shows had ever encountered.

  Most striking to me was Finney’s clearly genuine lack of even an iota of the self-absorption – the ‘me, me, me’ syndrome – so innate to the bearing and behaviour of the majority of super-successful and/or ‘celebrated’ people. Out of genuine interest I recall asking him more than once about some element of his work, but the response was always a dismissive wave of the hand and a turn to either a non-personal subject that had engaged his interest, or an inquiry or a comment related to his questioner’s life or thoughts.

  Those of us who came to know him that week found this depth of interest in whomever he happened to encounter, regardless of what some might call ‘station’ in life, especially fascinating. Invariably, one completed a conversation with Albert Finney with an overpowering sense that the lives, styles, and perspectives of whomever he happened to meet were vastly more interesting to him than his own. Which, of course, I quickly realised, must surely have been a major contributor to his stunning range of thespian ‘personalities’. Whatever the fount of that characteristic, however, it surely made the man a joy to be around.4