Dropped Names

by Frank Langella

  Film sets, particularly on remote and distant locations, can be anything from warm, collegial good times to lethal, tension-filled bloodbaths. Without the familiar surroundings of home, family, and routine, these shoots can become a breeding ground for heightened drama, soaring libidos, and neurotic behavior. Ours becomes a polarized, not altogether homogeneous collection of crazy loners. At night, doors are closed tight and the cast mostly isolates. On this set, a lot of the crew, a mix of American and hard-bitten Mexican wranglers, hit the seedy whorehouses regularly. There are torn-up hotel rooms, hallways reeking of marijuana, heavy bar bills, and drunken brawls at 3 a.m. on the barren streets.

  Rita and I drift toward each other like two boats on an unfamiliar sea, torn free of their moorings. We could just as easily have floated in opposite directions, but real life is now reel life and on movie locations, personal relationships are less often chosen than grasped at. Rita grasped at me and I chose to take her on. The twenty-year difference in our ages suited the unreality of time and place. Each of us wanted something from the other and neither of us much contemplated motive or consequence.

  A ritual began. Dinner most nights in her rooms. She buys dozens of candles, lights them all, and puts them on every surface, including the floor. I start a fire and pour the wine. And we sit by the open window, our elbows resting on the low wooden sill. Three stories below is the main street of the town, brightly lit, dusty, dirty, and noisy. She wants to make another deal.

  We will count trucks. All trucks passing by her window going left to right are mine. All going right to left are hers. Whoever has the most trucks by dinnertime gets treated. I stay with the wine but she graduates to bourbon. Dinner is served on the floor and we eat to the cacophony of noise from the street. Her hair is washed free of the day’s set and spray, her face polished clean of makeup, her dress a plain white caftan thrown over her naked body. She crosses her legs, barely touches the food, and talks and talks. Mostly about men. Shards of these ramblings stay with me.

  “He found me when I was a kid. Brought me to L.A. What the hell did I know? I went along.” Of another she said, “Oh Christ, he beat me bad. Then he skipped. I had to sign with Cohn [Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures] for another seven to pay off the debts.” Of Orson Welles she said, “He tried to help me to be a great actress, but he always needed money.” And Prince Aly Khan: “I didn’t want to live nowhere where they kiss the hem of your skirt. I mean, what is that, for Chrissakes? Two guys laying on top of each other outside my bedroom door so I couldn’t get out. I didn’t want to be no fuckin’ princess anyway. So I went to the old man. He liked me and I said to him, ‘Just give me my kid and let me out of here. I don’t want anything.’ ” And then she says, “Geez, they were always around. Husbands, boyfriends, lawyers, managers, press agents—the bosses. Where the fuck did they all go?” Her voice is tinny and high, almost childlike; until she picks up the telephone and says in movie-star timbre: “This is Miss Hayworth. Would you please send up another bottle of bourbon.”

  When it becomes late and she has had enough of it, she flings her head back, hair flying about her face and, in the candle’s light and fire’s glow, once again becomes the Goddess. She knows I am looking and she holds the pose, lowers her head, tucks in her chin, raises her eyes to mine, grabs my hair, and says, “Don’t stare at me, baby. You can see me in the movies.”

  We will be seven weeks on this turbulent sea and no other boats take notice of ours or even float past—none but Mitchum’s. A man whom very little escaped. As regards Rita and me, he becomes my one and only confidant. We never discuss their past together nor does he offer any wisdom or make any judgment. He would just listen, and then say: “Frankie, it is what it is.”

  But one day he comes to me and says: “Listen pal, we’re never going to finish this fucking picture if we don’t get your girl to work on time.” Mitch, Rita, and I had our own local drivers and each of them regarded the harrowing ride along narrow unfenced mountain roads as challenges to be met with daredevil speed. Mitch slept through his rides and so did I. But Rita, who is terrified of all moving things, makes her driver go at a snail’s pace and often arrives at work an easy hour or more after everyone else. So Mitch comes up with a plan: “Look,” he says. “Let’s the three of us ride together. You sit up front and we’ll put Rita in the back with me.”

  Early mornings become a struggle of manipulating Rita into a broken-down jalopy and laying her down on the floor of the backseat. Mitch tosses a blanket over her as she pulls her floppy sailor hat down past her eyes. I then hop in the front and off we go. These rides become a hilarious routine of Rita laughing and screaming at the top of her lungs, with Mitch stretched out on the backseat outshouting her, singing Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, exactly as written in perfect pitch, while a non-English-speaking driver careens close to the narrow road’s edge as wildly as he dares. When we reach the location, I get out and Mitch and I lift Rita from the floor, remove the blanket, pull up her hat, and calm her down. “Cheated the old Grim Reaper again,” he says and saunters off to his trailer.

  On set, Rita continues to be a nightmare for everyone. There is not a shred of temperament, not a demand, not so much as a hint of cruelty. Rather it is like watching a schoolgirl desperately trying to learn her timestables and unable to get past the twos. Very little sympathy is shown for her. It is assumed she is a drunk and is boozing in her trailer. No one, including Mitch, reaches out to help her. So little was known then of her disease that even I regarded the panic and terror in her eyes as the neurotic insecurity of a fading star.

  In all her scenes, large placards are put next to the camera and her lines are written out in huge block letters. It becomes an agony for her to try to hold on to what little she can, and an embarrassment to face each daunting day. But she does face them, and she does make it through. Her pride and happiness at the smallest of her achievements is pitifully touching.

  The nights are another kind of hell for her. She has climbed into my boat and I come to see I have set a dangerous course for which I am woefully unprepared. There are stretches of time when the mist in her mind clears and she is very much with me. But often she desperately clings, weeps, and talks in words I cannot understand and it is not always my name she calls out in the dark. When at last she sleeps, I leave her and go back to my room. There is, sadly, never a time when we awake in the same bed.

  Our film comes to its predictable end and on our last night, with my bags packed and waiting in my room, late in the candlelight I say the words I know she wants to hear. An easy lie to tell. The next morning at dawn I abandon her and fly back to real life.

  Months pass. I am in L.A. and guiltily decide to call her.

  “Hi baby,” she says, as if it had been only a moment since we last spoke. “Come on over for lunch. You gotta meet my savior. He’s gonna make me a star.”

  Her house is somewhere up behind the Beverly Hills Hotel and she greets me at the door, again in a long white caftan. As usual, free of makeup, hair unkempt, happy to see me. Clasping my hand in hers she says, “You’re the first. Come on, I’ll show you around.” We go from room to room and through the windows she points to property she used to own. “They sold it off,” she says, “husbands or agents—I can’t remember.” On the walls, where paintings once hung, only faded patches remain, hooks still in place. “That one’s on loan,” she lies. “That one’s out being cleaned.” It is a barren, empty shell of a house, sparsely furnished and lit, with only one picture left on the wall of her living room. It is over the fireplace, a gigantic black-and-white charcoal drawing of her in the glory days. As we enter her messy and cluttered bedroom she closes the door, comes into my arms, and kisses me. “Stay with me tonight, baby. I need a man to be with me.”

  Out on her patio we are greeted by an absurdly tan fellow with patent-leather hair, gold rings, a gold ID bracelet, and a gold watch. He is wary and suspicious.

 
; “There he is! My savior,” she says.

  They hug and giggle and she kisses him full on the mouth.

  “He got me the cover. The goddamn cover. Esquire. And he’s got plans. Wait till you hear.”

  We sit down to lunch at a barely set glass-top table on the patio. Plastic plates, paper napkins, a pitcher of water. An angry young Spanish girl brings out a tray of cold cuts, a loaf of white bread in a stack, and a large bowl full of lettuce. There are bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise on the table. During lunch, Rita’s mood turns sullen and morose. She sits quietly, bent over her plate. She has kicked her shoes under the table and a butter knife dangles listlessly in her hand. Her savior regales me with stories of his future plans for her. A film in Europe, a book deal, photo spreads for a magazine, a TV show, Carson wants her. Rita is listening hard, her face staring down into her lap as he praises her legendary beauty. “Look at her,” he says. “Look. No surgery and still gorgeous.”

  She raises her head, tosses back the once luxurious mane, stares at him, her smile wide and radiant. “Have some salad,” she says.

  “No, love, I’m fine.”

  “Aw, come on, you want some salad.” She lifts her leg, the caftan rolling back to her thighs, exposing her, and puts the heel of her foot into the large plastic salad bowl, then pushes it under his nose.

  “Take some,” she says. And he does.

  I leave the table with a made-up story about an afternoon meeting and she follows me out to the car. “You can’t leave, baby. I gotta have a man with me.” She again comes into my arms and kisses me. “Let him think it,” she says. “Let him think we’re together.” I open the car door, get in, roll down the window; she leans into me. “What do you think of my savior?” she asks.

  “Rita, be careful. He doesn’t seem like the most honest guy—” But she cuts me off, her voice soft, low, and modulated. “Frankie, he’s all I got.” I am never to see or speak with her again.

  Several months later there she is on the Christmas cover of Esquire, looking like a waxen image of herself, smiling and confident, her arms wrapped around a Santa dummy, once more facing a lying camera. None of her savior’s promises come true and he fades from her life, as did almost every man she ever knew. As did I. Our film is an embarrassing disaster and the last movie she ever makes. Her physical body passes out of existence on May 14, 1987, but Rita’s essence had faded from the frame long before.

  Tonight, almost forty years after I left her life, there she is in black-and-white on my television screen. And the camera’s lie is actually welcome and soothing. Her beauty is staggering. Her sultry voice, her body, the way she moves close to a man, the sway of her hips as she drunkenly belts out “Put the Blame on Mame” stop time and obliterate what had been our reality. Her acting is honest and true. A thoroughbred, desperate to be taken seriously, cursed with a divine beauty, who could not find a man to desire that beauty as only a part of the whole woman.

  Near the end of Gilda, it seems she has lost Glenn Ford forever because he believes her character is what she has been pretending to be: a loose woman out for a good time with as many men as she can find. Feeling profoundly alone and misunderstood, sitting at a bar, shyly smiling at the bartender, her face full of loss and vulnerability, she is hauntingly lovely. The bartender asks: Would you like, perhaps, a tiny drink of Ambrosia suitable only for a Goddess?

  In the movie’s final moments, the villain is killed and the lovers reunite.

  “Let’s go home,” Rita says to Glenn as they face a new sunrise.

  Those nights we spent together in Mexico, she’d say:

  “Put all the lights out, Frankie, and open the shutters.”

  And by the light of candles and fire, she would once again become the legendary beauty who had obsessed and haunted my young imagination, swaying and dancing for me.

  “Stay with me, baby. Stay with me tonight.”

  I never shared a sunrise with Rita Hayworth; and I did not try to save her, nor could I have. The best I was able to do was take into my arms someone no longer any of the things she had once been: Movie Star, Princess, Goddess, or Gilda. Just a 54-year-old courageous and gentle woman named Margarita Carmen Cansino, one of God’s lost souls, clinging in the night to a man whose name she could not remember.

  LAURENCE OLIVIER

  He had decreed it would be Larry and Frankie. Or to be more precise, as he would pronounce it: Frankay!

  It was the fall of 1978 and I thought I’d better get it over with. Break the ice. The seventy-one-year-old legendary Sir Laurence Olivier was to play Van Helsing to my Dracula in Universal’s remake of the 1931 classic. I walked down to his rooms in a drafty castle in a place called Tintagel in the south of England. His door had a piece of white paper taped to its upper center. L. Olivier, it read in handwritten black letters. I knocked.

  “A moment please,” came a male voice. Seconds later, its owner, a tall, thin, reedy man who appeared to be just shy of one hundred, opened the door a sliver. “Yes, please?”

  “I’d like to introduce myself to Sir Laurence,” I said. “We’re going to be working together.”

  “Oh, Mr. Langella. Of course. Do come in.”

  I stepped into a fairly large sitting room similar to mine and saw a small man, back to me, leaning over a table, fussing with a pair of cufflinks. He turned sharply, upper body still bent, focused on me, then stood ramrod straight. The cufflinks clattered to the table and his arms shot out, palms wide, face beaming. It was a standing-still entrance. I began to cross toward him, but he beat me to it, grabbed both my wrists in an extraordinarily tight hold, and drew me to him.

  “Dear boy,” he said, fixing his gaze on me and studying my face as if it were a small-print road map. “Oh yes, of course . . . ”

  He let go and began a rapid-fire series of questions about his frocks. Did I think this jacket was suitable? Was the collar too tight? “One wants it a bit more loose, I feel. Gives one a fragile appearance.” I couldn’t imagine him looking any more fragile. He was at the time suffering from a rare blood disorder, paper thin, a bit hard of hearing, and unsteady on his feet. Other than that, he seemed made of cast iron. A master of deception who, long ago, I sensed, had lost touch with the simple act of just being. The artifice of his persona was, no doubt, long practiced and I knew instinctively that I was in danger. I was in the presence of a predatory animal who had caught me in his sights, and I would need to be on guard for the next several months.

  We discovered that a connecting door joined our two suites, both of which overlooked a lawn leading to the sea. “We can have tea in the morning, dear boy, or a bit of champers after work. Do come in any time.” His arm was tight in mine as he ushered me to the door.

  “Oh, it’s going to be something, isn’t it?” And I was in the hallway again. Ice broken. Already refreezing. Laurence Olivier had the extraordinary ability to embrace and dismiss you in one gesture.

  That afternoon there was a first reading of the script. He was in full costume. “Never too soon to break it in,” he said. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and we began. The reading was perfunctory, uneventful, and courteous. At one point he had this line to say: “I shall have to cut off her head and stuff her mouth with garlic.” He turned to our director John Badham and exclaimed:

  “I shall need to say that line directly into the lens, dear boy!”

  “Would you like to have dinner?” I asked after the reading. His hand leapt up from the table in a gesture of carefree flamboyance as if I’d invited him to bungee-jump with me, and the voice sounded out clear as a bell:

  “Why not!”

  I came round the table as he pushed back his chair and placed my hand under his elbow. He gratefully accepted my aid, wrapping his fingers round my forearm. But once up and steady, he gingerly preceded me out the door.

  The bar of the hotel where we were in resid
ence was dark, mirrored, and opened into a small dining room. Still in costume, he ordered champagne. “Let’s start it off right, shall we, dear boy?”

  Once several glasses had been downed he seemed to drop ten years and there was a swaggering manner in how he leaned on the bar, gestured, and took a stance away from it from time to time.

  “Now you will help me out with this, won’t you, dear boy? Help me sex up the character a bit?”

  “You’re not going to play helpless with me, are you?” I said.

  Placid face, steely eyes, champagne chugged. “Cheers,” he clipped out. “Let’s eat.” And he sailed quite confidently into the dining room.

  Whatever it was we did eat that night, he ate it with immense gusto, ripping hunks of bread, slathering them with butter, shoveling in the meat, flinging down glass after glass of red wine. The early talk was of acting styles. “Your Ethel Merman,” he said. “Your Chita Rivera. They’re ab-so-lutely marvelous. That’s what you Americans do best. Big, vulgar musicals. I adore them.” The “a-” and the “-dore” were separated by a tiny pause, and the “-dore” was punched out with even more voice.

  “We just can’t do any of that. I don’t mean sentimental shit like A Chorus Line. Oh, and your Gwen Verdon in Once Upon a Mattress. Fan-tas-tic.” I had a hard time convincing him it hadn’t been Gwen but Carol Burnett.

  “Now you’ve had a great success with this in America, haven’t you dear boy! All camp and winky-winky, was it?”

  Dracula had indeed been a phenomenal hit on Broadway, supported by the black and white Edward Gorey designs. I launched into a description of how I intended for the film to be played in a Gothic, romantic style, not Hammer Studio camp. I would wear no fangs, I told him. There would be no wolf’s eyes, no blood dripping from my mouth.

  “Have you read the book, dear boy? You know it’s Van Helsing’s story.”