In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

by Christopher Plummer

  With this sad fate hanging over our heads like a shroud, I added a lot more anger to Iago as we embarked on the final trip to Broadway and the Winter Garden Theatre. James was onto his third Desdemona. The first two had fallen into the usual trap of playing her as an ingenue. But this time, fortunately for us, it was Dianne Weist who came on as a real woman, mature beyond her years, sensual, proud and passionate. Her presence lifted the production to new heights—she was stunning. But after the New York opening, she departed and a brave young actress named Cecilia “CeeCee” Hart brilliantly replaced her and became in life the next Mrs. James Earl Jones. Also stunning was the Cassio given fresh life by an extremely adept young classical actor by the name of Kelsey Grammer, who would soon reach his destiny as a huge star of the small screen.

  James Earl Jones was a wonderful Othello, particularly in his handling of prose. He made the voyage into jealousy and homicide crystal clear. He also had great authority. But somehow, for some reason, he had made the decision to restrain and underplay the great moments of surging poetry. Having played the role so often, he had begun to over-analyze it. James Earl owns all the equipment that can let him fly if he wants to, and he decided not to use it. Sadly, in my view, he denied the sweeping romance of the play. Zoe Caldwell had rapped my knuckles till they bled, so I opened with a new Iago, much more contained, less “hammy” and as good old John Simon confirmed—at last, terrifying. Walter Kerr, who had championed me in the past, did so once again as did Frank Rich in The New York Times. Perhaps starting out as the bad boy pays off!

  Othello was a hit! Shakespeare on Broadway? Doing business? Unheard of! James Earl received marvellous press, deservedly, ditto all the actors. The play won the Tony for Best Revival, and the Weisslers could at last put children’s theatre behind them—they were on their way. Neither James nor I ever dreamed that one day they would become richer than Croesus and just about the most successful producing team in New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo or wherever.

  I THINK THAT Broadway season of ’81–’82 was almost my favourite because the Plummer family was so well represented. My offspring, Amanda, had opened in a play not far from the Winter Garden called Agnes of God with a tornado of a performance that flattened everything in its path. But for a brief visit to London when she was eight, I had not set eyes on my daughter all those years in between. It was not intentional, of course; our separation was more than anything geographical. She had dropped out of many a fine school and college, had broken free of her mother and was now firmly established in our wacky profession. In Agnes of God she played a deranged young novitiate obsessed with the belief that the blood of Christ ran through her veins. Amanda attacked the role and filled it with such a frenzy of intensity, one marvelled how she could repeat such an exhibition night after night without inflicting serious damage upon herself. Elizabeth Ashley and Geraldine Page, wonderful artists in their own right, were her coplayers, but the evening was without question Amanda’s.

  Not too long before, Fuff and I had seen her memorable New York acting debut as Josephine in A Taste of Honey. She had proved in that piece alone that she possessed the rare and inexplicable gift known only as pathos. She was funny and touching and she received her first Tony nomination for that intriguing and charming performance. Watching her, I saw nothing of myself, except perhaps a facial similarity, poor thing. I didn’t possess her kind of talent—nothing she did or suggested seemed familiar to me; none of it had come from my genes, nor from her mother’s, except Tammy’s croaked gravelly voice she made use of so well. She was indeed unique. And now, at Agnes of God, sitting in an audience I didn’t know was there, she succeeded in frightening me to death. It was not my daughter up there on that stage but a perfect stranger—nothing of me in her at all. There have been very few performances that have made me forget I was in a theatre. Ruth Draper’s monologues, Ruth Gordon in The Matchmaker, Helene Weigel in the Berliner Ensemble’s Mutter Courage, Bobby Morse as Truman Capote, Nigel Hawthorne as C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands and Amanda as Sister Agnes. She has occasionally been described as a mannered actress; she is not always easy to watch. She can make an audience uncomfortable because she has the guts to stick to her guns and never compromise, but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. In Agnes of God she radiated such ecstasy one moment and such terror the next with no visible bridge between, I knew my “Manders” had greatness in her and I envied her like I’d never envied anyone.

  Amanda, preparing to unleash the furies

  WE SAT JUST A FEW SEATS from each other on the aisle waiting to receive our Tony Awards. When her name was called I held my breath. After all, you can’t possibly have father and daughter win the same year—that would look ominously like nepotism. She got everything else as well—the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle Award and many others. They threw the book at her and so they should have. I have never been so thrilled.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  EAST WEST NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET

  If you drive several blocks up from Sunset on Wetherly, you’ll come upon St. Ives Drive. It’s a pretty street, and the house we were looking at, at the suggestion of Connie Wald, was set on several different levels down to the pool and on to the gardens below—not a large place but inviting. It had been built in the twenties so the trees were fully grown and the undergrowth prodigious. It had at least four avocados, some lemon and orange trees, and a mass of eucalyptus and bougainvil-lea, which almost covered the house. I had first met Constance Wald with Ray and Dorothy Massey. Connie was the sister of Barron Polan (whose home we had rented in Connecticut) and she had married and widowed the late Jerry Wald, a well-known Hollywood producer. She lived in a New England–style house in the flats of Beverly Hills and, since her husband’s death, had thrown herself into her favourite hobby of being an exceptionally warm and popular hostess. She, like my wife, was a wonderful cook and entertained constantly.

  It was there at her home that Fuff and I met a great many of Hollywood’s Old Guard: Gloria and Jimmy Stewart, “Rocky” (Mrs. Gary Cooper), Billy Wilder, Greg and Veronique Peck, Loretta Young, Irene Dunne, the Jule Stynes, and when they weren’t there, the Lew Wassermans. It was there we met Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale and renewed our acquaintance with Dominick Dunne, his lovely wife, Lenny, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer and Joseph Cotten. Connie had a talent for collecting people and she went out of her way to be kind to us. She had known the previous owners of the house on St. Ives who had gone back East to their original home in Grosse Point. “The house is for sale. Why don’t you get it? You need to be here a lot, you know.” Connie could be most persuasive. Thus began our bicoastal life.

  We spent the best part of five years commuting between LA and Connecticut, but our stay there, which at first had been most pleasant, was now becoming rather listless and a little odd, to say the least. In all that time, I hardly worked at all; there were some television programmes directed by one of my favourites, Boris Sagal, a TV adaptation of Michael Cristofer’s Shadow Box with Joanne Woodward, directed by her husband, Paul Newman, and a popular miniseries, The Thorn Birds, with fellow Canadian Daryl Duke as director but very little else. Lou Pitt, my ever-diligent agent, simply shrugged his shoulders helplessly. LA, I was learning, was a place to visit only—do your work, have fun with your friends and get the hell out. Because if you stay permanently, and you’re not flavour of the month, it begins to take you for granted. I got the impression that if one lived as far away as Siberia or Antarctica, it might prick up its ears and show some interest. Even so, I enjoyed having the gardens improved and installing redbrick walkways winding through them, and redoing the interior of the house, supervised by a very agreeable builder named John Kulhanek, of whom we became very fond. However, there was something uneasy hovering in the air—odd warnings and omens were subtly making themselves known. Then, on a balmy, peaceful Saturday morning, where nary was heard a discouraging word—it happened.

  House on St. Ives Drive

&n
bsp; I was seated on the toilet in my bathroom reading, as was my wont, when I heard someone close by say something to me. It was a little voice, a girl’s voice, very faint. I knew it couldn’t be Fuff, for she was in the kitchen at the far end of the house, and it wasn’t the wind whistling through the heating ducts because there was no wind. I froze and lis-tened—there it was again—a small muffled voice crying, “Daddy.” But it didn’t sound quite human. There was a metallic ring to it as if it were coming down a long tunnel. I left the room and went up to the kitchen. “You didn’t call me, did you?” I asked Fuff. “No, of course not.” “But I just heard someone—” “Yes, I know,” she broke in; “so did I.” “All the way up here, it’s not possible. All right, then, what did it say?” “It was a girl’s voice saying ‘Daddy.’ It’s happened before when you were away.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Because I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to worry you.”

  From that moment on, more things began to happen, mostly on the staircase outside our bedroom and in the guest room at the bottom of the house, which was always clammy and cold, even on the hottest day. There were lots of little noises, sometimes tinkling mechanical laughter very near at one moment and far away the next, little feet scurrying across the roof above our heads at night. It’s got to be some sort of animal, a squirrel, perhaps, I thought, but those footsteps were unmistakably human. “People are going to think we’re mad if we tell anyone,” said Fuff. “Nobody’s going to believe us.” Then one day a mason working on the brick paths heard the little voice too, so for the moment our sanity was not in question. However, we said nothing—we did not want to lose our Mexican help who were superstitious at the best of times. One of the men arrived one morning with his dog, an Alsatian, who all day long behaved most strangely, growling constantly, his hairs standing straight up on end. We never saw either of them again. There was also the morning when Fuff and I were having breakfast on the roofed-in balcony. I had my back to the house and she was facing it from the opposite side of the table. Suddenly she turned the colour of ash. “I just saw something float straight into the mirror.” “What?” I whispered. “Oh, it was just some thick smoke, but it had a definite shape to it and it went right through that mirror behind you.” It took a while for the colour to come back into her cheeks.

  One weekend we decided to go to Catalina for a break. We’d carefully locked up the house, particularly making sure the glass doors opening onto the top balcony were properly secured. The masons would be working below in the garden on Saturday and we wanted to take precautions. When we got back on Monday morning, the foreman was already waiting on the front doorstep as jittery as they come. He told us they had barely begun work when doors in the house started to slam, especially the glass doors—making a terrible racket. The sound of slamming continued and he said he thought maybe we had not gone to Catalina after all and were having the most appalling family squabble. Embarrassed, he nevertheless decided to investigate and found to his utter amazement that every door in the house was tightly locked.

  That was it! We called the previous owner in Grosse Point and told the whole story to him. “Ah,” he said calmly, “that would be Phoebe, our daughter. She used to play on the stairs outside our bedroom. One day she had a bad fall, developed a blood clot that was so serious it eventually killed her. She was only six years old.” His tone of voice suggested that there was nothing unusual about it, that it was inevitable. We also told John Kulhanek, and he suggested we have the house exorcized. He said he knew a cop who had contact with a lady psychic who occasionally worked with the police. We got the number and Fuff called her and told her we needed her help urgently, that we were being haunted, but she told her nothing else. The lady psychic agreed to come and the moment she stepped inside the house her eyes lit up. “Ah,” she said with a long sigh. “It’s a child. Oh, there’s nothing to worry about. There is nothing malicious here. She’s a happy child—she thinks you’re her parents. She’s trying to reach out to you so she shows off by playing her old games. But she is willful. Children can be difficult. You must be firm with her. Just keep saying, ‘Phoebe, we’re not your parents. Go away—you’re free—go away now, don’t be naughty.’” Fuff thanked her and asked her what it was like working with the LAPD. “You’d be surprised how these tough macho skeptics start to crumble and shake when they see books and objets d’art flying about the room of their own accord,” she told us. “But don’t worry, I’ve made a few converts!” And she was gone.

  We must have looked silly—two grown people addressing the empty air in raised voices, “Now Phoebe, behave. We’re not your Daddy and Mommy—go away.” But it worked, temporarily; for the next few weeks the house was silent. We missed little Phoebe floating around in space, confused, puzzled, not knowing where to go. But we at least knew where we were going, and it was out. Phoebe would have to wait for the next occupants. We put the house on the market and went back East.

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TEMPTED to call our house in Connecticut, which is on Wampum Hill, “Big Heap Wampum,” but my dear wife talked me out of it. She’s probably right. It was good to be back in the much more real world where not everyone talked showbiz talk and ratings, where there were actually other things in the world to discuss. Also the southern California weather was almost too perfect on a daily basis—sunny, dry. As the majority of starlets are groomed to look exactly alike, so is the climate. Everything in life there seems to use the same plastic surgeon. One can tire quite easily of too much lushness. What did Fred Allen once say about Hollywood? “It’s a fine place to live—if you happen to be an orange!” Here in the East, there are rougher edges—you can dig deeper, get your feet wet. The four seasons were important to me—I’d been raised on them. My background music would be Sibelius rather than New Wave. I was a northerner through and through.

  Our caretaker, Dick Garrity, a movie buff, and his family were now living in the little house I’d had built about fifty yards from ours. He’d just bought a puppy from the pound for five dollars. He instantly christened it Briggs. “But, Dick, didn’t you notice?” I said. “It’s a girl.” “That’s quite simple then,” he responded. “We’ll call her Briggie.” So, like my wife, who had so many nicknames, Briggie would now answer to Brigitta, Brigadoon, Doonie, Doonbug, Dooners, Fluffy Puppy and Little Fox. She was a pretty dog, a cross between a collie and a shepherd which promises intelligence and loyalty and softens the look of both breeds. Fuff and I loved dogs with a devotion bordering on obsession, so she swiftly became our dog, much to Dick’s relief. It didn’t take long before we were surrounded by builders again. I’d bought the place for a relatively modest price, considering it was so private and only an hour from Manhattan—and with fourteen acres of attractive, slightly rolling countryside. But when I had the place properly surveyed, I noticed the surveyors were spending an inordinately long time doing their thing. They had told me it would take a couple of days, but at the end of the first week, I noticed their truck was still there, but there was no sign of them. “They’re way into the woods somewhere down yonder,” said Dick, who never stopped speaking in movie dialogue (would I ever escape it?). I shouted into the far distance, “What are you doing down there? That’s a nature preserve!” “No it ain’t, sir,” the surveyor shouted back. “This is your property and we still have further to go.” Out of breath, I caught up with them. How many acres did you buy this for?” “Fourteen,” I said. “Oh no, sir, you’re already closer to forty!”

  Fuff, Briggie and I celebrated our windfall that night. At least back then it was a windfall—the property taxes were in no way as severe as they are now. We added on to the house, chopped off what had been the servants’ quarters and turned it into a huge kitchen-cum-parlor. Here my bride came into her own. I knew she excelled in the culinary arts, but I had no idea just how fantastic a chef she was. As a youngster she had seriously taken a long Cordon Bleu course so she’d had a head start, but it was her instincts as a cook that made her so consistently good and so
versatile. Every night there was a surprise on the table and that continues to this day. She can serve up authentic Italian, French, Greek, Mexican, Indian and the best of good Ol’ English—you name it; it’s difficult to stump her, and she’s always so eager to learn.

  One springtime, I was standing by one of our stone walls at the top of the hill when a big beautiful blond golden retriever jumped up onto the wall and threw his arms around me. Every day he came to pay his respects. He had no visible owner, but we could sometimes hear him barking in the distance as he was doing his rounds at various people’s houses. I’m sure he knew everyone in the neighbourhood and they him. They’d feed him hors d’oeuvres at drink time—God knows how many cocktails he’d consumed. He was a complete hobo—a bum! But oh so beautiful. The only thing wrong with this great baby with the wicked smile was a nervous flinch if anyone raised an arm too quickly. He was also wary of brooms and rakes. I learned later that the wife of his onetime owner used to severely beat him and abuse him early on in his checkered career. But he had taught himself to rise above his misfortunes and was generally a happy laughing dog and the biggest coward when it came to the smallest things, shirking even the bare rudiments of animal responsibility. But it was quite obvious he had fallen head over paws for Briggie. Briggs was now a full-grown lady with a gorgeous stripe down her forehead. The golden stayed all summer, sleeping outside the kitchen, rain or shine, waiting to catch a glimpse of her first thing each morning. When she was in heat and male canines would appear out of the woodwork for miles around—Dobermans, bulldogs, labs, dachshunds, even overambitious Chihuahuas, he would gallantly see them off and in some cases fight them till they bled—he was one powerful Lothario. On sultry summer days we could see the two of them lying under a tree, just staring into each other’s eyes.