My old school chum, John Lynch-Staunton (John V), now a VIP and city councillor and pro-mayor, reintroduced me to Montreal. It was a revelation—truly our belle epoque! Mayor Jean Drapeau’s expensive dream had given my hometown an international status and glamour that would attract tourism for years to come, but its proud citizens are still paying for it to this very day. Early rumblings from the Separatist movement were providing a contrapuntal rhythm to this atmosphere of jubilation. Not unlike the clash between Egyptians and Romans in our play, the long-suppressed differences between les Français et Anglais were beating at the door to be let out. This had already brought to light a splurge of new writing—poetry, music and song in the quasi-revolutionary mode of both languages—a highly tense but exciting background to a World’s Fair. These local poets voiced their beefs, some discordantly, some eloquently in small clubs, cellars or boîtes from the bowels of the city. Sean, John V, myself and anyone who cared to come along would pay them a visit and then invade the many strip joints which were enjoying a thriving renaissance as they jostled with each other for supremacy.
Polly and her usual contingent led by her son Toby and his wife, Alice, came to see the play. She was aging, of course, but her vitality had not diminished in the slightest. I returned the compliment by paying a lone, nostalgic visit to my old family haunts at Senneville on the Lake of Two Mountains—a last bastion of gentility. I could sense with an ache that it was slowly giving in to time. I could almost hear it, like a long wistful sigh in a quiet room. But the city, on the other hand, was gathering strength—the strength of resolve. It had a drive to it now—an angry one perhaps, but one that was to signal the arrival of a dramatic change waiting just around the corner for Quebec and for the country.
Polly in old age
Well, the time had come to leave. The play from which I had learned so much was over. Zoe Caldwell’s unforgettable performance was never seen beyond the border. If there is any tragedy attached to the play, that was it. Of course, everyone knows she has gone on to win most of the honours her profession can bestow. Her amazing stage career has made its considerable impact on three continents. She has excelled as Medea, Lady Hamilton, Miss Jean Brodie, Tennessee Williams’s Gnadiges Fraulein, Lillian Hellman, Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, and a rich collection of portraits both classic and modern. She has won four Tony Awards and a fifth which she shares with her husband, and she has been honoured by Elizabeth II. But, to me, her most beguiling and inspired gift to the theatre was Egypt’s Queen. It is sad that the rest of the world has been deprived of that glory, but the heavens surely witnessed it and so did I. As I flew down to New York, I could not keep from my ears, as I still can’t to this day, the keening wail that came from somewhere deep within her as she held my dead body in her arms and rocked me back and forth:
Antony and Cleopatra
The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My lord!
O wither’d is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fall’n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
I would have gladly died many times over each night just to let those words and this great artist who spoke them wring my heart.
WITH ONE FOOT in Manhattan, I joined the old gang Ed Flanders, George C. Scott, et al., especially Le Robards! As Antony would have said, “Call to me all my sad Captains. Let’s have one other gaudy night!” I also had to arrange a meeting between my new film agent from CMA (Creative Management Associates) and the guide and custodian of my life, dear Jane Broder. Jane was clearly upset. She didn’t object to someone taking over my movie future. After all, she had become fond of Kurt Frings, who had always treated her with respect, but she liked not at all the smooth-talking, shiny-suited David Begelman who in the midst of his power plunge slyly inferred he intended taking over completely. He was coldly civil to Jane, but it was evident he could not have cared less for her revered place in theatrical history. Most people tended to forget that Miss Broder was a highly trained lawyer who, when faced with any sort of altercation or debate, could usually win hands down. She waited for some time in silence and then, unable any longer to countenance Mr. Begelman’s lofty diatribe and his grandiose plans for my future, lit into him with full artillery blazing. He at once became Uriah Heap, wringing his hands apologetically, with an unctuous attempt at servility. She made it abundantly clear that the theatre was her domain and no one must cross it. So, for the moment, a truce was declared, and the three of us shook hands. After he left, Jane had a little weep; “I don’t trust that man, honey—watch your back!” Her instincts were to prove correct, for some years later he was found guilty of using clients’ money to pay his gambling debts. While he was my agent he had always been most courteous but soon brushed me off and put me in the care of his partner, Sue Mengers—une histoire unto herself—but that’s another book.
Bidding Jane farewell that day, I joined my favourite posse to do the rounds once more—from the East to the West Side. One night at Frankie and Johnny’s in the bar at the back manned by that most generous of drink pourers, Cappie, Jason’s and my date was the young Faye Dunaway. To show off, I brought my sword cane along with me, made of shining black ebony, sleek and sinister. The blade, slim and elegant, was subtly decorated with encrusted swirls and scriptures embedded in Toledo steel—a thing of true beauty. So, I remember, was Miss Dunaway. The tiny bar sat only six in a very tight pinch. We were all merrily into the evening when an obnoxious little man seated alone at the far end began making abusive remarks about Jason’s and my long hair (I had grown mine for Antony). “Must I sit here and listen to this garbage,” he slurred, “especially coming from two useless faggots with long hair?” He burbled on, accusing actors in general of being homosexual vermin and gutless as well. In heroic defense of my fellow artists and with the noblest of swashbuckling gestures, I unsheathed the narrow sword in a flash. With that single movement, I accidentally pierced him in the neck. It was a perfect draw. D’Artagnan himself would have envied my skill and accuracy—no question, but no one could have been more surprised than I. The nick was minuscule, had drawn some blood but was hardly serious. The miserable creature, however, made much melodrama of it—demanding towels to stop the bleeding and a host of napkins with which to measure the wound. “Call the police!” he screamed at Cappie, and turning to me the varmint yelled, “I’ll get you for this, I’ll put you away, you son of a bitch! Have you ever heard of the Sullivan law? I’ll put you inside, you miserable faggot freak!” After an assassination attempt on the mayor of New York in 1911, the Sullivan Law was passed which made it an imprisonable offense to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. Cappie took me aside. “He could do it, you know. This guy’s a shyster lawyer in the city. He’s always causing trouble. But he’s so drunk, the bastard, he’ll forget about it. Don’t worry. I’m not serving him anymore. By the way, we love what you did!” The others at the bar and some of the waiters who’d witnessed the incident gave me a round of applause. Feeling on top of the world again, we kissed Cappie good night and I and my two musketeers—one tall beauty in her hunting mode and one scowling fugitive from the dark world of O’Neill—swept from the door, free once more to sniff out Philistines and rid the world of bigotry.
Well, Faye the Huntress soon became Faye the Screen Goddess and dear Jason, whose passion for the night remained unaltered but whose life was to take on an awesome transformation, kept on being wonderful in a host of plays and films. All over the map, the scenery was beginning to shift; the seeds of change had begun to sprout. People were now markedly different—the baby boomers were preparing to invade society in swarms; money now belonged to everyone and anyone, especially the untutored; sophistication in everything was getting rarer and rarer—subtleties and nuance were no longer recognized; in the theatre the straight play was more than ever being outmaneuvered by the musical, the extravaganza—stuff t
hat was easier to take. In fact, it became more than evident as we stared across the footlights that English was no longer the first language.
Back home in London, then the center of the cultural revolution, things were slowly winding down. At one party, crowded with pop stars, actors, aristocracy and a considerable amount of nudity, screaming became the main theme of the evening, cruelly illustrating the desperation of a creative era now turned dysfunctional and crumbling. The hostess’s living room was decorated, walls and ceiling, in a startling William Morris print depicting a jungle of thick interweaving vines. Sean Kenny had somehow managed to climb up the wall and with a lot of frantic nail scratching was trying to fight through the vines in order to get into the wallpaper—a crude enactment of Saki’s famous short story. That was my last image of that crazy, gifted young genius. He must have got through, though, for soon after he left this world. I wager he is safely ensconced on the other side of the wallpaper, peeping through the vines, laughing at the rest of us.
For myself—I just went along with it all. I didn’t harbour much self-respect. My family’s correctness and high standards had made me want to be the bad boy always, convinced it made me more interesting and would bring me more attention. I was sadly deluded. Oh, I was proud that in the theatre I had at least learned the power to command, but once offstage my real existence had little in it to write home about. I suddenly saw there was nothing particularly original about me. I lived off the foibles of others—a resigned chameleon, if you will. Nothing much to recommend, I was in serious trouble. Barry the Bartender was kept busy watering my drinks. I was disappearing in a cloud of self-incrimination.
And so were the vanishing sixties, the last symbol of carefree life in the twentieth century. I was just about to go down with the ship when, to the rescue came, out of thin air and in the nick of time, a graceful angel, an angel of mercy with a soft beauty, a caring soul and the wisdom of Solomon, who pulled at my heartstrings and without my knowing it, at once took charge. Her appearance instantly broke a recurring dream that had plagued me most of my life but which now made complete sense. In it, I am the incubus fighting my way through bile and slime; something incredibly heavy is pushing down upon my face. I can breathe no longer, I’m suffocating, life is slipping away. Then far above a light begins to shine through and with one terrifying heave I am released. Some kind nocturnal monster has retched and spewed what’s left of me out into the brilliant sunlight and like some beached flounder I land with a joyous slap onto the warm and welcoming white sands. Another temporary reprieve? No! This time I had been truly spared.
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A LIGHT IN THE WILDERNESS
As I write this from my house in Connecticut, I look across the room at the lady who has been, for the past forty years or thereabouts, my partner and my life. Heavily engrossed in her reading, she does not look up. She is as beautiful now as she ever was. How can I begin to write about her—about us, even? We are too close. She has seen through me from the beginning, for pity’s sake—as Hamlet might say—she has plucked out the heart of my mystery. After all our time together will I never be able to impress her as I would wish?
“Help me,” I plead. “Take me back, in your own words, to the time we met.” She looks up. “There must have been something about you. And oh yes, we tumbled into bed and all that, but I didn’t like you very much. I thought you were the most conceited prig—the way you ponced about in that big convertible of yours. And you drank far too much—but there was something, I suppose …” she trailed off, couldn’t think what it was and went back to her book.
We met in County Kilkenny, Ireland, on a film called Lock Up Your Daughters, a Restoration romp which was trying to match or even surpass the successful Tom Jones. It didn’t! My friend Peter Coe directed. It was his first feature and it had an impressive British cast, ranging from Hugh Griffith, Glynis Johns, Georgia Brown and Susannah York to Ian Bannen, Tom Bell, Pat Rutledge and the two Roys—Dotrice and Kinnear—all very much in demand at the time. The script was a hodgepodge—a mess with too many characters and too many subplots. It desperately needed a central figure like Tom Jones, an anchor whom audiences might care about and root for.
I played Lord Foppington, a character taken directly from The Relapse, John Vanbrugh’s famous play—surely the campiest popinjay in the rich gallery of Restoration buffoons. He changes wigs as he changes clothes in every scene—the wigs becoming higher and higher as the film progresses—the last one so high it is impossible to pass through doorways. I helped embellish my role by lifting dialogue straight from the play and had the most enormous fun with all this foppery, but it had little or nothing to do with the film. One day before I check out, I’d love to play that absurd ageless pantaloon on the stage.
Elaine Taylor, my future partner and my life
My lady, Elaine Regina Taylor, or “la belle Elaine” (the first of a long list of nicknames) played Susannah York’s maid with the required poitrine showing most daringly from her décolletage. Elaine was not only a beautiful young English actress, she was a damn good one. Half Irish from County Wexford and the other half from the borough of Westminster, she had red hair, freckles, a pert nose and looked just as delectable in miniskirts or hot pants. She also had a brain, was well read and startlingly astute for her twenty-two years; in fact, she was miles ahead of me on all counts—I should have been quite humbled and I was. To say I was also hopelessly smitten would be the understatement of my life.
As a teenager in the Welsh National Theatre, she had begun acting onstage and on both the big and small screens. Over the years, she found herself playing opposite such impressive luminaries as Bette Davis, Marcello Mastroianni, Sir Ralph Richardson, Donald Sinden, to name a few. She had a delightful singing voice and appeared in several musicals, one with the British star Dora Bryan, and on screen with Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence. Ballet had also managed to fill her dance card. She was knee-high to a grasshopper when she danced opposite the great Anton Dolin in Swan Lake and others, as well as Roger Quilter’s musical play Where the Rainbow Ends at London’s Festival Hall in which she played Will-o’-the-wisp. Dolin was St. George and the Wicked Dragon was the eccentrically theatrical Michael MacLiammoir. I had always been fascinated by this English imposter who posed as the most Irish of the Irish. “And what about Michael?” I asked, dying to know. “Oh, he was so over the top, camp, funny, witty—an utter diva! The Wicked Dragon took more time getting into his street makeup than his stage makeup. He was no spring chicken, but he finally would emerge looking twenty years younger with long flowing hair and an opera cloak swirled about him—the reincarnation of Lord Byron who, of course, he was convinced he was.”
Along with the bleeding toes and the grueling workouts, ballet was beginning to disenchant her. So to amuse herself and the rest of the cygnets in Swan Lake while they obeyed the required choreography by pirouetting offstage in one direction, she would grand-jeté off in another. Dolin, who was fond of her, turned a blind eye, but she didn’t stay too long.
LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS was produced by Columbia Pictures and David Deutsch. David, his wife, Claire, and her sister, Tita Wilson, were to become lifelong friends of ours. Claire was a serene beauty, Tita was glowingly attractive and enormous fun. With Glynis Johns in tow, darling whimsical Glynis, we did everything together.
We all stayed in one big rambling house called Kilkenny Lodge where we threw supper parties almost every other night. We would often pile into my dreaded green Mercedes with the top down and tour the countryside—Waterford, Galway, Kerry. We even drove as far as Connemara, with its red chalk hills, and then back in Dublin we would devour splendid dinners at the old, now long-gone Russell Hotel. Elaine and I would go pub-crawling with Tita—a hopeless and unconvincing chaperone. There was a small but enchanting castle just outside Dublin, which had belonged to King John in the eleventh century (one of his many stopovers, no doubt). Part of its land boasted a famous salmon fishing river. I
learned that the whole package was for sale, at the unbelievably low price of eleven thousand pounds. I wanted to buy it without hesitation but “Mademoiselle E” put the kibosh on it by simply saying, “What about central heating?”
I had more fun playing bits of Lord Foppington from The Relapse
The mad Welshman Hugh Griffith had arrived with his long-suffering wife. They had taken a house just outside Kilkenny. Hugh had already waited a week without having been called to work—a very dangerous situation indeed. I warned Peter Coe and told him the story of how Hugh had travelled all the way from Wales to Tahiti to begin work on Mutiny on the Bounty with Brando and Trevor Howard. The production committed a huge boo-boo by not using him right away. It was a full two weeks before he was finally scheduled to work. He had been sent his call sheet the night before and everyone was there on set the next morning waiting for him to appear.
The whole morning went by—no Hugh. A posse of assistants were sent to search for him, starting with his hotel—no Hugh. They scoured the island—no Hugh. They looked in every bar—no Hugh. At last, at about three in the afternoon, they found him in a tacky little hut on the beach boasting only one room with a bed in it. There was Hugh, bollocks naked, dead drunk, his arms around two grizzly old Tahitian prostitutes, also starkers. “Mr. Griffith, you’ve got to come with us now—you’re on! We’ve wasted a whole morning waiting for you!” “But I can’t possibly work today, lads,” he slurred indignantly. “Why not?” they demanded lamely. Hugh buried his face between four huge heaving breasts and mumbled, “It’s the time change, the time change.”
In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Page 53