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Dropped Names

Page 4

by Frank Langella


  The assistant director then announced there’d been a glitch in the camera and they’d have to go again.

  “Right away, people,” he said. “It’s twelve minutes to the break. We can do it.”

  Celia was up and to her first mark immediately. She could have said that the scene was too emotional and complicated and she’d prefer to do it again after lunch, but she didn’t. It was reshot and the camera was perfect. Celia was not—less powerful, less emotional. They got it one minute before the break.

  Susskind came over to her.

  “Brilliant, darling,” he said.

  “Is there any way you could use the first one?” Celia asked. She knew she hadn’t nailed it again.

  “I’m afraid not,” Susskind said. “It’s one long shot, no cutaways, and we had a bumpy camera.”

  “Bad luck,” Celia said and headed to lunch.

  The following year I was making my film debut in Mel Brooks’s The Twelve Chairs and was in London rehearsing. Celia lived in a place called Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. I called and she immediately invited me out for the weekend. I was not prepared for the beautiful country estate and large property she owned with her husband Peter Fleming, brother of the famous Ian Fleming, scion of a banking dynasty and author of the James Bond books. I began visiting Nettlebed often, loving the beautiful countryside and damp English weather. Peter did all the English country gentleman things. Coming in from a ride in jodhpurs, his dogs floating around his legs, standing at a roaring fire and banging his pipe bowl on the mantelpiece.

  My room overlooked a courtyard with a stone wall surrounding it, and I could see the tops of the heads of people whizzing by on their bikes. One tall thin man came careening past every morning at roughly the same time, fine white hair billowing in the cold wind.

  “Oh, that’s Alastair,” Celia answered when I inquired at breakfast who he was. “You should meet him. Lovely actor.”

  “Alastair Sim?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Alastair Sim was most famous in America as Scrooge in the classic English film A Christmas Carol and I had seen him once on the stage in a light British comedy and found him to be extraordinary. He had been Mel’s choice for the lead in The Twelve Chairs, but turned it down. The part went to Ron Moody, Fagin in the musical film Oliver!, a much less charismatic actor.

  I never did meet Mr. Sim, but love a story Celia told me about him.

  “One day, I was pulling into the courtyard in the pouring rain,” she said, “and I could hear the phone ringing. I’d just been to the market and I had quite a lot of bags with me. I came round to open the boot, the pelting rain flooding over my hat and into the bags. One bottom began to break and I was trying desperately not to drop the eggs. Still the phone kept ringing incessantly. Bloody hell, I thought, go away. I got everything in the kitchen on the counter. I was soaked and furious. The phone did not stop. I picked it up and shouted into it:

  “ ‘Hallo!’

  “ ‘Celia? Alastair here. Darling, I just saw you in the market. You were marvelous!’ ”

  It was from Celia that I got some perspective on what it was to be a working actor and to live a full family life. She loved to ride around her property in a Land Rover and would often take me with her. One afternoon as we were bouncing along she told me she’d been offered a play in New York.

  “Johnnie and Ralphie are doing it.” (Gielgud and Richardson, of course.) “I’m to be one of the four characters. It’s called Home.”

  “Why don’t you want to do it?” I asked.

  “Oh, darling. It’s just when all my flowers will be blooming.”

  Years later I saw her perfect performance opposite Maggie Smith in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and called to congratulate her.

  “Smashing part,” she said.

  In the winter of 1978, I was again in London shooting Dracula at Shepperton Studios and I received a message from Celia. I immediately rang her up.

  “Come out for the day—bring your new wife.”

  I agreed, but cancelled at the last minute because of a 5 a.m. set call the next morning.

  “Is it because you’re now a bloody film star?” she said.

  One afternoon she came into town and we had tea at the Savoy Hotel.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Doing Hamlet! Having a go at Gertrude. I’m afraid it’s a disaster. The avant-garde bohemian approach. Greeting the audience in half makeup—utter rot. Oh well,” she said, sipping her tea, “nothing to do but carry on.”

  Many years later, after Celia had passed away, I was performing in New York opposite the great English actor Alan Bates in a Turgenev play entitled Fortune’s Fool. One night at supper I told him the story about Celia and the disastrous Hamlet.

  “Oh, I know that story very well,” he said. “I was her Hamlet.”

  He then proceeded to tell me his fondest memory of Celia:

  “She was quite right. It was a tiresome approach. I remember one day our director said,

  “ ‘Celia, I think that scene could be a bit more moving.’

  “ ‘More moving?’ Celia said. ‘Right.’

  “She then proceeded to devastate us into floods of tears. When it was over she looked at him and said:

  “ ‘You mean like that?’ ”

  DOLORES DEL RIO

  We did not meet or speak. And certainly did not touch.

  It was the summer of 1956. I was eighteen years old, still a virgin, away from home for the first time as an apprentice at the Pocono Playhouse in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It would not be the summer I would lose my virginity but it would be the beginning of my appreciation for a kind of female that until then, I had no idea existed.

  The untouchable was the magnificently beautiful Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. She was touring, as stars did in those days, from summer theatre to summer theatre, playing one-week engagements to full houses of audiences anxious to see the glamour, allure, and mystery celebrities of today no longer possess. No TV talk shows then for the incessant dismantling of self. If you wanted to see Miss Del Rio you had to watch her movies or venture forth of a summer’s evening. She was the first great star into whose orbit I ventured for a period of time, and my first lesson in style, behavior, and elegance.

  Miss Del Rio’s costar was a formidable old broad named Lili Darvas, a well-known character actress and widow of the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar. The play was Anastasia, soon to be a film starring Ingrid Bergman and Helen Hayes, along with Yul Brynner as an opportunistic fortune hunter. Miss Del Rio played the title role of a twenty-four-year-old woman searching for an identity she believed made her a part of the royal family of Romanovs, and Miss Darvas played the suspicious Grand Duchess of Russia, her supposed grandmother. At the time, Miss Del Rio was fifty-one, and Miss Darvas fifty.

  My job that week was prompter. I was positioned stage right in a small booth that had a narrow slit through which I could see the actors onstage. I held a flashlight while sitting on a high stool, the script on my lap. I never needed, in the course of their eight performances, to shout out a line to either of them. So I turned the pages, kept track of where they were and mostly watched their interplay. Few memories of the actual performances stay with me, except the absolute precision and repetition of their choices, down to the smallest gesture. What does remain are the circumstances surrounding those two and a half hours.

  During that summer, most of the touring stars appeared around the theatre somewhere during the day. Miss Darvas was ever-present. She arrived at lunchtime and ate with the rest of us.

  “Will we see Miss Del Rio?” I asked.

  “Darling! No! She doesn’t leave her accommodations. Never on this tour does anyone see her in the daytime. She travels alone in her Rolls-Royce with her lady-in-waiting from theatre to theatre an
d only comes out for the performances. Her shades are always drawn in her rooms to protect her skin from the light, and she lies in a bath of milk.”

  I was mesmerized by this story and by Miss Del Rio’s reported meticulous daily and then nightly routine.

  Each evening at about fifteen minutes before the curtain went up, the audience already mostly seated, Miss Del Rio’s car, tinted windows tightly shut, drifted down the driveway and circled to the back door of the theatre, close to the stage entrance. She emerged fully dressed in her first-act costume, completely made up and breathtakingly beautiful. Her driver held an open parasol over her exquisitely coiffed jet-black hair and her lady-in-waiting preceded her up the wooden steps, making certain there would be no one in her path as she disappeared into the dark of the theatre. A special carpet had been laid up the steps and across the backstage to protect the soles of her shoes and the hems of her costumes and a private area had been set up for her in the wings, which consisted of three flats bracketed together to form a small cubicle with a table and chair inside. On the table sat a mirror, a flask of water, a crystal glass, the script, a small light covered by blue plastic, and a few basic makeup items for touch-up purposes.

  I watched every night, hidden, next to the backstage door, as she sat down, smoothed out her dress, and folded her hands across her lap. When the stage manager called Places, I moved to my spot in the prompter’s booth.

  Miss Del Rio never left her cubicle between scenes but returned there for her costume changes, which were executed immediately; after which she sat back down to wait for her next entrance. She never once went into a dressing room or used a bathroom but spent both intermissions sitting calmly and quietly. We were told never to approach her and, certainly, never to speak with her.

  During the act breaks, I was drawn to her lair like a cub looking for its mother. I obeyed the rules but did get what I hoped for. As I slowly passed by, I received a faint nod of the head and a warm smile. No word ever left her lips, other than onstage, where she spoke in a measured, slightly accented, beautiful voice.

  Her final confrontation scene, with Miss Darvas as her grandmother, dramatically staged with Miss Del Rio on her knees, holding Lily’s hands as Lily wept, calling out, “Malenkia, my little Malenkia,” was exquisitely played by both.

  Curtain, applause, and more magic to come.

  Each actor came forward, center, took a bow, Lily being the last, and then exited, leaving an empty stage. A wait of approximately five seconds. The two center doors upstage opened, and out came Miss Del Rio in a stunning white flowing gown over which hung an equally beautiful soft and voluminous long white coat. She floated to the apron of the stage, a radiant smile on her face, and sank into a deep curtsy as the applause swelled; then rose, arms outstretched, and beckoned the rest of the cast back out for a company bow. She and Lily were then left alone, bowed to each other and the audience, and Lily once again left, leaving Miss Del Rio alone in a spotlight.

  By now I was out of the prompter’s box and hovering by the back door of the theatre in order to watch my favorite ritual of the night: the sight of Dolores del Rio moving toward the French doors of the set, the audience behind her, then turning with a radiant smile to face them, bow once more, take the handles, and close the doors just before the curtain hit the stage. The house lights were very slowly timed to coincide with her next actions.

  In the dim backstage light, I watched as her attendant lifted the voluminous trains of her gown and coat and followed behind her across the carpet. Her driver, standing by the door, arm outstretched, took her hand, brought her down the steps, and put her into the waiting Rolls-Royce, its engine already humming. The yards and yards of material were pushed in and gathered around her, the backseat looking like a mass of cozy clouds. Her attendant moved to the front door and the mysterious lady was transported down the driveway, into the summer night, away from the theatre before the audience stopped applauding and the houselights were up full.

  One could, I suppose, remember her as a lonely older woman, desperate to preserve her beauty, living on illusion and reputation. Or one could see her through the eyes of this virtuous eighteen-year-old, as the epitome of glamour, discipline, and professionalism, exemplifying the magic of Live Theater.

  JAMES MASON

  “Do you still love it?” asked possibly the most beautiful speaking voice I have ever heard, then or now. Original, distinct, and totally unself-conscious, it belonged to James Mason, the actor.

  He and his wife, Clarissa Kaye, sat across from my wife and me at a small round table in the home of Marilyn and Alan Bergman, the married composers of such classics as “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “The Way We Were.” It was the early 1980s. Scattered around at other tables were Tommy Thompson, the writer; Roddy McDowall, the actor; and Georgia Brown, the singer.

  I still remember Mr. Mason’s melancholy sadness and the wistful way he held his hand under his chin, his pinky resting on his lower lip as he spoke.

  “Do you still love acting?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I do. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. Don’t you?”

  “Oh no. Not anymore.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “For her,” he said, glancing at his wife. “She wants it.”

  “Well, I find it very exciting still. I particularly like being onstage in front of a live audience.”

  “Well, don’t let me stop you,” he said in the perfectly modulated British style that gives no hint of opinion.

  He was, to my mind, an absolutely marvelous actor whom I had never once seen give a bad performance. He is breathtakingly perfect as Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita—funny and tragic. The same in A Star is Born opposite Judy Garland and particularly wonderful in Marlon Brando’s Julius Caesar—the perfect combination of truth and technique. He also had an androgynous sex appeal that made him seem languorously available to both genders.

  That night at the Bergmans he had about him an air of bemused resignation. I can still see him clearly, smaller than I had imagined, and appearing to me deeply disillusioned and fatalistic. When in the future I would watch him onscreen I was always impressed with his natural intelligence and uncommon grace, but could always spot that hint of sad resignation. A look of bored complacency that put me in mind of three other wonderful actors with whom I had equally brief but similar encounters.

  In the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel sat Peter Finch in the late 1970s, Oscar nominated for his brilliant performance in Network, appearing desperately unhappy as he barely shook my hand and accepted my congratulations. He died only two months before winning it.

  Sitting in a greenroom with Jack Palance before taping a Charlie Rose interview, he talked of nothing but his horses and told me he regarded our profession as a meat market in which, if you hang in long enough, you get lucky.

  “It’s not the actor that wins,” he said. “It’s the role.”

  A gentle, polite, and soft-spoken man also nominated for an Oscar late in his career and winning it in 1991.

  And sitting a few seats away from me at the Oscar ceremony in 1998 was James Coburn, who won that night for his marvelous performance in Affliction. When he returned to his seat, I said, “How do you feel, Jimmy?”

  “I just want to go home,” he said, rueful and exhausted.

  In all three men I sensed a light gone dim, a fatigue of the spirit. It was what I’d seen in Mason that night at dinner. He never achieved the great stage stardom of Laurence Olivier or the great film stardom of Marlon Brando, and he never won an Oscar. But if Peter Finch, at sixty, Jack Palance, at seventy-seven, and James Coburn, at seventy-four, are any indication, it doesn’t appear it would have lifted his spirits all that much.

  RICHARD BURTON

  Richard Burton, a Welsh actor looked upon in his youth as the successor to Laurence Olivier, received his sixth Oscar nomination, for his performance in the fil
m Equus, on the morning of the day the phone rang in my apartment in New York. It was Robbie Lantz, our mutual agent calling. The year was 1977.

  “I’ve organized tickets for Richard and Suzy to come see you in Dracula tonight. Do you have any liquor in your dressing room?”

  “No.”

  “I think it would be a good idea to get some.”

  After the performance Richard arrived at my door with wife number three in a floor-length gown over which she wore an even longer white fox coat. Richard was wearing a black mink car coat and very heavy deep orange makeup. His fine hair was dyed and teased in an effort to make it look thicker and him younger, but succeeded only in aging him further. Behind him, crowding the hallway to my dressing room, was an enormous group of photographers.

  “It was quite a problem keeping the audience’s attention on the stage tonight,” I said, as the flash bulbs popped. This was pre-digital time.

  “You managed quite well,” he said, in one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century.

  My dressing room at the Martin Beck Theatre on West 45th Street was large and spacious, rare in Broadway houses. So in they swept: Richard, Suzy, and the entire group. More photographs as Richard said:

  “You know, I was nominated for the little fella today.”

  “Yes, congratulations,” I said, knowing of course that Robbie had seen this as a great photo op for both his clients.

  After the press departed, Richard sat down at my dressing table and turned in my barber chair to face the room. My dresser offered drinks from the bottle of Scotch she’d gone out to buy before the show, leaving it next to him on the table. I grabbed a hand mirror, sat on a straight-backed chair and began the nightly ritual of removing my makeup.

  “Who was your Renfield tonight?” Richard asked.

 

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