… O! Are you men of stones?
Had I your tongues and eyes I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever.
We are now set firmly in Greek tragedy. The end is sublime. His going is swift. For a second, he hallucinates that she is still alive before him and his last breath comes as he cries out ecstatically:
Do you see this? Look on her,—look—her lips—
Look there!—look there!(He dies.)
BECAUSE OF SOME FABULOUS NOTICES, we brought it to New York and Lincoln Center. The run was exciting and more than satisfying, short enough that Perry Zimel in Canada; Pippa in London; Andrea, Carter Cohn, Lisa Gallant in LA; and the long-suffering Lou Pitt—tous mes agents provocateurs—had not forgotten me. Screenplays continued to arrive at the doorstep. Syriana; The New World; Must Love Dogs, with the lovely and talented Diane Lane; Alexander, with that Irish imp Colin Farrell; a charming bit of froth called Man in the Chair; and Inside Man. Faithful Russell Crowe continued to ask for me in his pictures (Gladiator, which I didn’t do, and Beautiful Mind, which I did). I have recently worked with some wonderful directors—Ron Howard, Oliver Stone, Steve Gaghan, Terrence Malick, Lord Richard “Dicky” Attenborough, Michael Schroeder and an ever-loyal Spike Lee.
“Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass.” The dying Lear.
My daughter never stops working as well. She was a superb St. Joan in Anouilh’s The Lark, born to play it, and just as marvellous though entirely different as the girl Alma in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. The New York Times stated: “Alma Winemiller is the old maid’s old maid. And Amanda Plummer is all over her like a swarm of drugged Southern bees in this heartfelt and heart-wrenching new production.” I watched her closely through Summer and Smoke, and I noticed something that only happens to the rarest of champions. Like Roger Federer on the tennis court, she too makes no sound as she moves; her feet never seem to touch “the boards.”
And speaking of “the boards,” what do I do after Lear? It really is a farewell of sorts. But life goes on, doesn’t it? There are all those ageless comics hanging about, Volpone, for one, Falstaff perhaps, or Gogol’s government inspector, Malvolio—and all those wonderfully rich Molière characters. Then there’s the melancholy Jacques, not to mention old Prospero, and as a last resort, perhaps Methuselah or, God knows, even God. No matter what I do between, the stage always beckons and gets me every time. I suppose it’s because there are no tedious retakes, no endless waiting, no cutting-room floor upon which I can end up. Once on the stage, we are thrown to the lions, no barrier comes between us and the mob; everything is exposed, dangerous and now. Since the burning of the Globe, Cromwell’s locking of the doors, the Restoration riots, right up to the overwhelming invasion of twentieth-century technology, the theatre has always seemed in jeopardy. Everything now is made too literal, too easy—the power of suggestion is all too often forgotten. A painted moon can tell more stories than a real one and I swear that when all the effects and robots and holograms have been exhausted, and we poor thespians have been replaced by clones and digitized out of existence, there will still be an empty stage somewhere waiting for someone to make an entrance in order to satisfy human nature’s insatiable need to work its imaginary forces. I take some comfort in that.
A WORD OR TWO, BEFORE YOU GO is a one-man pastiche I put together a good many years ago. It lasts about an hour and a half on the stage, there is no intermission and people go home afterwards hopefully wanting more. I’ve never earned any money from it because I mostly perform it for charities such as World Literacy or to help artistic endeavours in need of financial aid. It is simply about my own personal journey through literature—literature that I have loved and treasured since I was a mere boy. I perform selections from plays, poems and novels and link them with autobiographical anecdotes and interludes. The works I have chosen are silly and sad, sacred and profane. They range from Winnie the Pooh to the Bible, from Lewis Carroll to Rudyard Kipling, from Shaw, Wilde and Byron to Shakespeare, Jonson and Blake, from Swinburne, Melville, D. H. Lawrence to Leacock, S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, from Chesterton to W. H. Auden, Rostand to Nabokov—every writer who has stirred my imagination and marked my passage.
A Word or Two is something I can perform in my dotage—the only taxing thing being memory—but as long as I still have my voice I could even read the whole damn thing. If there must be a theme or purpose to the evening, it is twofold: to make parents aware that they must encourage their children to read in this nonliterate world, as I was once when in my swaddling clothes; and to salute and pay tribute to my calling—a profession that has treated me for the most part with kid gloves, allowed me to indulge and has been, let’s face it, quite honestly, my education. It has taught me music, poetry, painting and dance; it has introduced me to the big bad world outside; it has made me face rejection; it has taught me humour in its blackest and gentlest forms; it has made me think; it has even taught me about love. It has shown me the majesty of language, the written word in all its glory, and it has taught me above all that there is no such thing as perfection—that in the arts, there are no rules, no restrictions, no limits—only infinity.
As the years pile up, it is strange how one’s memories careen back further and further. I can see the old Airedale walking by my baby carriage more vividly now than ever before. I can see my mother’s laughing face as she picks me up, holds me above her head and shakes me. The memory of the suffocating rubber mask over my nose and mouth when I was a tot in some hospital room and the sickly smell of ether has never deserted me, and I can hear still with awful clarity the ear-piercing cries of that poor child down the hall from me who was in such pain and the dreadful silence that followed when they rolled his bed away.
Even one’s dreams become retroactive. Everything that occurs takes place in the settings of one’s youth, all the participants disguised as people from one’s early days, now long gone but temporarily granted life for the duration of the dream. Even your first dogs come back to talk to you, whisper advice, share gossip. When the last pylon of the huge Trans-Canada Highway bridge was driven mercilessly into what little remained of Polly’s island on the Lake of Two Mountains where I grew up, and when Polly died not too long after, I began to have a recurring dream which haunts me still.
It begins with the sound of water lapping against the wooden frame of an old white scow by the docks. Across the water through the mists is the vague thin outline of a distant quay. The scow is now moving silently toward the quay. The mists part and there is the island at last. A great blue heron languidly rises from some hidden inlet and disdainfully passes overhead as I step down from the wharf and make my way up the path. A sculpted St. Giles cradling a fawn stands in stone by the rushes at the entrance to a small bridge. Now I am leaning over the little bridge, long a familiar habit, staring down at the giant lily pads that carpet the black waters below. Even at the height of day no light intrudes—it is always dark and peaceful here under the tall elms, still as a cathedral. I leave the bridge. My pace quickens and everything becomes brighter as I move up the hill towards the house. The wind gets up—the house flies by—once again there’s the scent of cut grass and heliotrope—the trees are bending away from me, waving me on. I am gliding swiftly over the long sloping lawns down to the point and in the distance through the branches the light shimmers, and as lake and sky meet it is hard to tell which is which. My feet touch the ground. For the longest moment I stand transfixed by the wonder of it, just me and the island, my breath catches and all that can be heard is the soft exhalation of a sigh that comes like another wind from so far off that no matter how long I search, I am never to find the secret of its source.
SOMEONE ONCE SAID—it had to have been Nöel Coward in one of his withering putdowns—that “man consistently labours under the delusion that he really matters!” But it becomes necessary to have certain delusions if one is to compete in our overcrowded profession and more than overcrowded life.
Orson Welles, the Marquis de Sade, Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and John Barrymore, each in his own way took life by the throat and forced it to its knees. I wish like hell I could have done that. I don’t pretend to own a speck of their reckless or daring—but, damn it, I think I gave it the old college try. The desire was always there, still is, so is the ambition.
How lucky I have been to have made the acquaintance of such an extraordinary collection of vagabonds from both halves of the twentieth century, a century that allowed me to know its Old and New Testa-ments—the vanished grace of an era that can never return and the new mechanized age of enlightenment where Science, changing its colours more swiftly than Earth hurtles through space, is, indisputably, king. And how fortunate that the same century sent such remarkable women to show me the way—my mother “Belle,” who gave me a soul; Polly, who made me a romantic; Jane, who tried so hard to keep me in touch with quality; Amanda, who made me proud; and my last and final wife—Bob Taylor, Reggie, Roo, Erp or Little Fuff—she of a thousand names who has been, since I first set eyes on her, my true strength.
Faith, I confess, Your Honours, has been hard to come by—in higher things I mean, as in who created the animals and trees and the love that is “strong as death.” No, I’m a bit of a lost soul in that regard, I’m afraid—a trifle shaky. I’ve never quite known what it was that I was supposed to hang on to. I so envy the ancient races their commitment to a faith that has made religion and family one and the same. Yet those same religions have spawned so many wars, so much horror—what price faith now, I say? Gloucester says in King Lear, “We have seen the best of our time,” and he may be right, but I can truthfully confess with few regrets that I have immensely loved and relished my allotted span, and as I creep deeper into the twilight, it is not so much the fear of dying that disturbs me but the sudden awareness that I’ve just begun to live and how dreadfully I’m going to miss it all when I’m gone. If only I might linger on by painting myself into the landscape, so I could always see the beginning of the day. Or perhaps I could just sit forever with Little Fuff and a dog or two besides somewhere on a shore at Polly’s Island and gaze across the dark northern lake till the light finally vanishes behind the distant hills. That would be a particle of faith, surely.
NOT SO LONG AGO, we went on one of our occasional visits to Montreal. It was mid-October, but some leaves were still on the trees in all their colourful glory. From our hotel nestled at the foot of the steep streets, Fuff and I took our usual walk up the “mountain,” Mount Royal, going to the very top near the “lookout” just below the cross and working our way down the different levels. Only a few scattered people were left, but they were scurrying home—it was late afternoon, getting quite cold and the light was disappearing fast. About a hundred yards ahead the old stone wall surrounding the Raven’scrag estate came into view. Suddenly in the near distance, I caught sight of a woman coming up the path by the wall, the same woman I had seen there once or twice before during my lifetime. She was wearing an old tweed suit, a beret and brogues, much in the style of the thirties. She was walking briskly now as if she were late for something. I started running towards her. “You see that woman?” I called back as I ran. “Yes,” came the reply. “I’ve got to find out where she goes,” I said, still running. I was almost upon her, her face was turned away but when I stopped for a second, she was gone. “There’s no door, no gate, just the wall—there’s nowhere she can hide,” I said, trying to catch my breath. Fuff was right behind me now. We both stared at the wall and she said in a very quiet voice, “It’s your mother, isn’t it?” I stopped breathing—I turned and looked at her. It was cold and the streetlights below on Pine Avenue were slowly coming on one by one. Neither of us needed to say a word as we hurried back down the hill.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Courtesy Photofest: 35, 48, 86, 96, 99, 102, 105, 129, 137, 191, 195, 212, 219, 222, 229, 231, 254, 259, 262, 304, 360, 376, 405, 406, 422, 438, 439, 488, 507, 511, 570, 631, 642
Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries, LTD. New York. www.alhirschfeld.com: 608, 617, and 629
© Jocelyn Herbert Estate: 328
George Gale Estate: 529
The Roddy McDowall Trust: 410
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Dutton Children’s Books: Excerpt from “King John’s Christmas” from Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne, copyright (c) 1927 by E. P. Dutton and renewed 1955 by A. A. Milne. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpts from “American Letter,” “An Eternity,” “The End of the World,” and “Years of the Dog” from Collected Poems 1917–1982 by Archibald MacLeish, copyright (c) 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from “September 1, 1939” from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER was born in Toronto, Ontario. He has acted in more than a hundred feature films, and, in addition to performing leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has starred in Great Britain’s National Theatre, the Stratford Festival of Canada and sixteen Broadway plays. He has been nominated for seven Tony Awards and won twice for Best Actor for Barrymore and Cyrano. He lives in Connecticut.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009
Copyright © 2008 Christopher Plummer
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Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2009.
Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2008.
Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Permission to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the book.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Plummer, Christopher
In spite of myself : a memoir / Christopher Plummer.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37312-0
1. Plummer, Christopher, 1929–. 2. Actors—-Canada—-Biography.
I. Title.
PN2308.P497A3 2009 792.02′8092 C2009–900383-X
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In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Page 74