As fate might have it, the actor playing Renfield, who had never missed a performance, was out sick, and his understudy had acquitted himself admirably.
“It was an understudy,” I said. “I thought he did very well.”
“I want to meet him.”
I asked my dresser to fetch the young actor. Richard poured another drink as I continued wiping off the residue of my makeup and Suzy made small talk with my wife, who’d come to get a look-see. The three of us did not talk nor were we offered a drink.
A knock at the door and in came Sam, the understudy.
Richard did not rise. Sam came up to meet him, excited and nervous.
“Marvelous,” Richard said. “I’m doing Lear on Broadway next season. I want you to play the Fool.”
It was, of course, going to be a great story: Understudy Catches Burton’s Eye! On to Stardom! I knew the actor playing Renfield was going to be miserable when he heard of it, but Sam might, after all, become the Shirley MacLaine of the 1977–78 Broadway season. Shirley had been raised from Chorus Girl to Movie Stardom after going on for the star in the musical The Pajama Game.
After he left, I asked Richard a question that may have been close to the last words I uttered for the next two hours. As the level of liquor lowered in the bottle, he began a series of reminiscences about Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, and other theatrical luminaries, and then launched into reciting lengthy sections of Dylan Thomas. By the time the bottle was near empty, so was my brain. The sonorous voice, now slurring its words, had succeeded in numbing and stunning me. Could anyone, I wondered, be so unaware of what a crashing bore he had become? There sat a man approximately fifty-two years of age, looking ten years older, dressed in black mink, with heavily applied pancake, under a tortured, balding, helmet of jet-black dyed hair, grandly reciting tiresome poetry.
It was well past 1 a.m. when the night watchman knocked on my dressing room door. The first and only time he’d needed to do that in the year I played Dracula.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Langella, but I’ve got to shut down the lights and close up the theatre now.”
I was still in my robe and slippers, and as I managed to quickly change into street clothes, Richard launched into yet another poem. Suzy and my wife had long since dried up on small talk and were sitting stupefied on the couch, facing straight ahead. As I grabbed my coat, they leapt up, and we all four made our way out of my dressing room. The ladies preceded us through the dimly lit backstage toward the street, no doubt aching for a nap in the backseats of our waiting limos. When Richard and I got to about center, he stopped, lifted up the rope slung across the back of the stage and headed toward its apron.
Although terrified that he might recite a monologue from some obscure Irish play, I nevertheless ducked under the rope and joined him at the edge of the stage. And there we stood, staring out over the empty house, the standing lamp dead center reflecting on one of the most famous faces of the era. A once young Welsh buck primed to take Olivier’s crown, now looking more like a successor to some aging Italian fashionista about to present the best of his collection; and, in the glow of the single lamplight appearing even more surreal than he had in my dressing room.
He seemed melancholy and pensive. A colleague, I thought, anxious to return to the boards as the great King Lear. I had never forgotten his brilliant performance as King Arthur in the musical Camelot, and his early promise as a major force in the English theatre. Maybe his return as Lear would be a way of undoing the last two decades of debauchery, booze, lousy movies, and Elizabeth Taylor, his second and third wife, I thought. He stared intently out into the dark.
“How many seats in this house?” he said.
“About eleven hundred,” I answered.
“Hmmm,” he said. “Can’t gross enough for me.”
Then he turned, walked upstage, and we proceeded out the door.
Only a few die-hard fans were waiting for us, as, Richard, ignoring them, moved quickly to his car, tossed back a “good night,” and was gone.
He did not win the Oscar that year. Or ever, in fact. Richard’s inevitable descent began in earnest with his meeting and marrying Elizabeth. The Welsh boy had climbed to the top of a ladder on rungs covered with money, fame, sex, booze, and all the other slippery slop of our profession. He clearly loved it all, and it was tragic to watch him slide slowly down and eventually disintegrate.
He stumbled on for another seven years, divorced the Suzy, married a Sally, toured in a play with La Liz, and revived Camelot. Sam the Understudy was denied his chance at playing The Fool, and Richard The Star never ascended to Richard The King.
YUL BRYNNER
“No pictures with baldy,” Yul Brynner whispered to the press agent who was handling his return to Broadway in his great hit The King and I. It was the 1977–78 season and I was starring in Dracula at the Martin Beck Theatre, subsequently renamed the Al Hirschfeld. My dressing room was crowded with well-wishers after a Sunday night Actors Fund performance, and one of the many actors in the room was Reid Shelton, who was starring in the musical Annie, as Daddy Warbucks. Mr. Brynner was not about to allow himself to be permanently recorded with another cue ball. As far as he was concerned, there was bald and there was BALD.
The King of Siam was dressed all in black with accents of silver: silver belt buckle, watch, ring, etc.
“It makes life simpler in the morning,” he said.
We took a few of the perfunctory photographs and he turned to leave. Such was his aura, that everyone cleared a path, as he silently exited my dressing room, looking neither right nor left.
That season on Broadway was to be immortalized by the first of the extremely successful I Love New York campaigns. Yul, myself, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, the casts of Annie and A Chorus Line, among others, all sang or spoke New York’s praises to the catchy new jingle: I Love New York. On the day we shot the commercial, Yul, smoking incessantly, prowled the room with his own camera around his neck, advising our director what and how to do anything and everything, demanding and receiving constant attention. He was, at the time, represented by Robbie Lantz, as was I. Robbie had told me one night over dinner of Yul’s phenomenal deal and list of perks. Everything from the color of the carpet to the number of tissue boxes to the bottled water was spelled out in great detail, and his salary was astronomical.
“You may be the Prince of Darkness,” Yul would often say to me, “but I’m the King of Broadway.”
His show was enormously successful, sold out to standing room every night. So was mine. When I would run into him at a late-night restaurant, he would consistently ask me:
“How big was your audience tonight?”
“Sold out,” I said.
“Mine, too. But they were shit. I would not bow. I gave them my ass.”
The word I passed Yul’s lips more often than perhaps any actor I have ever known, and it is a pronoun that comes quite easily to most of us.
During that season, New York was hit with a tremendous snowstorm. It was a Monday night, and the theatres were all dark. My phone rang. It was Robbie.
“Yul wants you and your wife to join us at ‘21,’ ” he said.
“Robbie, there’s fourteen inches of snow on the ground. We’re staying home.”
“Yul says he’ll pick you up in his car.”
One hour later, our doorman called to say, “Mr. Brynner is here, sir.”
My wife and I came downstairs to find, in the middle of the street, the longest white limousine I’d ever seen. The driver opened the door and we stepped in as if we were entering a small New York City apartment; high ceilings; wide floor space; large, comfortable, plush armchairs in the corners.
Yul was sitting deep in the back of the car, black-clad legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. We made our way to him and sank into a pair of the armchairs.
On the way to ‘21,’ the streets seemingl
y devoid of all other traffic, he demonstrated virtually every gadget the car possessed.
“I had it custom made,” he said. “It comes up on a special elevator at the theatre, so I don’t have to go outside after the show and I don’t have to deal with the public. The windows are tinted and the glass is bulletproof.”
He picked up a large pair of strobe lights, aimed them at us, and clicked twice, temporarily blinding our vision.
“This is in case blacks attack my car,” he said. “I shine these at them and click many times. They think they are being photographed and run away.”
“If you don’t want to be attacked,” I said, “why are you riding around in a twenty-foot-long white limousine?”
Once at ‘21,’ the mood turned festive. At the door, Yul was greeted like the king he believed himself to be, and we were immediately ushered to our table. To my surprise, the restaurant was full, and the other diners were happy, noisy, and profoundly impressed, as he swept into the room surrounded by obsequious staff members, anxious to please.
Once settled into ‘21’’s best corner table, Yul ordered drinks and then told me he would take charge of dinner, ordering everything from appetizer to dessert. It would be an expensive five-course meal and, at one point, I unappreciatively and provocatively said:
“I could have done with just a plate of French fries.”
His elbows on the table, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he signaled to the waiter.
“Bring Mr. Langella a plate a French fries,” he said, spitting out the words as if he was saying “a plate of shit,” “and send a large plate of French fries to every table in the room.”
Soon, giant silver platters of French fries were pouring out of the kitchen, much to the delight of the patrons, all of whom waved one at Mr. Brynner in gleeful gratitude. Yul did not touch a single one at our table but constantly encouraged me to finish them all up. I had been suitably one-upped.
“What are you going to do after Dracula?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “We should find something I could direct you in.”
He then rambled on about his acting experiences, his youth, his conquests, his triumphs, and his memories of celebrated people. He talked of his house in France, his box office grosses, his daily routine, and even his sleeping habits. While listening to him, I reminded myself not to succumb to the actor’s habit, in social occasions, of talking only about himself.
When, at last, he landed on a story of an incident involving his son, Roc, I leaned forward in anticipation of some fatherly advice. It seems Yul had been renting a house. Roc, an infant at the time, was in a baby carriage on its lower level, above which was a four-sided balcony with two sets of stairs leading down. While Yul was upstairs taking a nap, the house suddenly caught fire and was up in flames in seconds. Yul came out of an upper-level bedroom, looked down, and saw that Roc’s carriage was surrounded by flames. He saw, too, that the only way to reach his infant son was the one staircase still standing but in danger of collapsing. He raced down the stairs, grabbed Roc out of the carriage, raced back up before the stairs crumbled, and ran out of the door to safety.
“How awful for you,” I said. “It must be a great bond between you and your son.”
“I never told him about it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Why should I?” he said. “It was my experience.”
That season, I would often see Yul at award shows, social functions, and actors’ benefits. Carol Channing was also appearing that year in a revival of Hello, Dolly! and I was seated several rows behind him at her opening. He had his black coat neatly folded across his lap during the opening number. Moments before Carol’s first entrance, I watched him pass it to his wife. Just as Carol’s Dolly Levi appeared stage left, sitting on a trolley, holding a newspaper in front of her face, Yul leapt to his feet and began wildly applauding. The rest of the audience followed suit, so that by the time Carol’s trolley had stopped and she had lowered the newspaper, she was already facing a standing ovation. The next day, the then popular columnist Earl Wilson, who had been sitting across the aisle from Yul, wrote this headline:
“The King Welcomes Dolly Back to Broadway.”
No mention of the Prince of Darkness.
Yul possessed a steely and unique sexuality women found extremely appealing, and he certainly enjoyed and bragged about his prowess. And indeed, no one smoldered or walked across a stage or a screen like him. He was a one-of-a-kind star, singular in appearance and original in voice, who knew what he had. Never far from a full-length mirror, he maintained his aura assiduously. What he had left in 1978, and indeed what he would trade on for the rest of his career, was The King and I, and he played it till the end. After his death, a commercial appeared, made by him less than a year before, warning us not to smoke. He still looked incredibly handsome, and was at that point in his life doomed to continuously play the one major chord in his minor arsenal.
One night, as I sat in my seat, ready to watch Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in an Actors Fund performance of The Gin Game, there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Yul. It was a few days after we had shot our segments in the I Love New York commercial.
“How did your piece go?” he asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” I said. “We got it in one take.”
“Well it was just you alone.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My whole company came out in the snow to support me,” he said.
“I almost didn’t do it in one take,” I remarked. “The smoke from the fog machine almost made me sneeze, but I managed to get the line out.”
Yul looked at me imperiously and said:
“Smoke? I didn’t allow smoke!”
RITA HAYWORTH
It is 2 a.m. and I am alone in the dark with her again.
On my television set tonight, in the black-and-white movie Gilda, Rita Hayworth is seducing Glenn Ford, heartbreakingly refuting the old adage “the camera never lies.” It is close to forty years now since last we were together and the woman I had known in real life is, for me, still the single most tragic example of how far from the real person an image can be.
She was a Goddess onscreen, about as desirable a woman as any man could want—perfection in feminine allure. From the moment I saw her, she haunted my imagination. And from the moment we met in the lobby of a small hotel in the tiny town of Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1972, until her death from Alzheimer’s disease fifteen years later, she continued to haunt it, eliciting a far more profound emotion than lust.
My agent at that time, David Begelman, had talked me into a Western titled The Wrath of God—aptly named—to be shot entirely in Mexico. It would star Robert Mitchum, with Rita in the “and” position, set off in a billing box at the end of the actor credits. She was by then finished in pictures and the word was that Mitch had insisted on her, possibly for old times’ sake, the rumor being they had once had a tumble or two.
Mitch would play a runaway priest. I would be the town’s despot, who swears revenge on all priests for murdering my father, and Rita would be my mother, a God-fearing matron who never lets go of a set of rosary beads. What was I thinking? Well . . . I was thinking: Rita/Gilda.
And, here she is, tiny and scattered, standing in front of me, a rain hat on her head. She shoots out her hand and smiles. “Hey, I know you,” she says. “I’ve seen ya in the movies. You’re gonna be my son.” I spout all the clichés: how excited I am to meet her and work with her, etc.
She tears off the rain hat, frantically runs her fingers through the once-lustrous auburn hair, now shorter and more sparse, shakes it out, pulls at it, and whips her head back and forth in an exaggerated “no,” flailing her hands in the air as if shooing away an army of flies.
“Oh, cut it out. Cut it out,” she says in a high-pitched, impatient tone, jamming the hat back on and fleeing the lobby.
Once o
n the set she is a total pro. Ready to go, eager to do her best. But the lines won’t come. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t retain the simplest phrase. In our first scene together, I approach her at prayer in a church and ask, “Why are you here?” Her line is “Because God is here.” But she can’t do it. Take after take she is unable to retain those four words. Oblivious to the rising tension and unkind remarks from the crew, she presses on. “Let’s do it again,” she says. “I’ll get it.”
Finally a man is laid down on the floor at her feet. Action is called. I ask, “Why are you here?” he whispers, “Because God is here.” Then immediately Rita says, “Because God is here.”
“Cut. Print. We got it,” slurs Ralph Nelson, our director, and the crew bursts into cheers and applause. Rita beams like a little girl who’s just been crowned Miss Snow Queen, completely unaware the cheers are jeers. At lunch, as she rests in her trailer, the jokes about her are lewd and cruel and for years after, I too would be guilty of reenacting the scene for friends at her expense.
At about 5 p.m. on our first day off, the phone rings in my room. “Hey, it’s Rita. Do you wanna eat?” Thirty minutes later we are sitting in the hotel’s tiny restaurant. “We’ll be friends to start, okay? Dutch treat on dinners. One night you, one night me. Deal. Let’s have red wine. Just two glasses each.” After the first one she asks me how old I am. I tell her: 34.
When dinner is over we walk through the chilly, dirty streets and she gathers her black-fringed shawl close around her shoulders, slips her arm into mine, and forgets my name. “Oh yeah, yeah, Frank,” she says. “You’ll be Frankie. I love Frankie. Not Sinatra. The guy was never on time.” We pass an open-air market and she insists we buy fruit and cheese to keep in our rooms. “Just to have, you know, for the ghosts.”
As we walk back toward the hotel holding string sacks of food, she clings to me, her arm tight in the crook of mine, our bodies finding a rhythm, and she whispers words I cannot understand. When I see her to her door, she leans up to chastely kiss me good night and says: “Do me a favor, baby: don’t ever call me Mother.”
Dropped Names Page 5