Appropriately the summer we met in 1965, Raul was playing Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera, trying to be heard above the swoons that wafted through the audience and out onto the grass surrounding the theatre.
We spent only a few times together during that period and never shared the stage or an apprentice to my knowledge, but went about working our own territories.
It would be twenty years before our friendship began in earnest, when in 1984 George C. Scott cast us opposite each other and Jill Clayburgh in Noel Coward’s Design for Living in New York. That was when I fell.
As we walked back to my apartment after the first day’s read-through of our play, neither of us doing well in films at the time, he said:
“I’m living on loans.”
We each had a wife, two children, and a mortgage. We ate something at the kitchen table and talked about the play. My wife was not at home at the time, and in the back of the apartment my kids were laughing and playing in their rooms with a sitter. They were then three and one.
Somehow the conversation turned to underwear.
“I hate boxers,” he said. “There’s too much material.”
“Well, I don’t like briefs anymore,” I said. “Too confining.”
“Oh, well, I found these great ones. Not loose like boxers. They’re like a bigger brief with a pouch. Come on, I’ll show you.”
So into the bathroom we went and he dropped his pants and displayed them. They were indeed tighter than boxers, but lower on the thigh than briefs and designed with a comfortable and sexy pouch.
If he had already sensed I had a crush on him, he was completely unself-conscious and unbothered by our somewhat homoerotic moment. He may as well have been showing me a new tie. As he left my apartment, he said:
“I want us to be friends.”
“Me too,” I said.
Design for Living was a big hit. During its run when we got together with our families, Raul landed somewhere on a couch, glass in hand, like an immovable stone Buddha, as the rest of us ran around preparing food, wrangling the kids, or cleaning up. His one contribution to the fray would be to hold out his arm, proffer his empty glass, confident that someone would fill it, and return to his leisure. Our children climbed all over him as if he were a human jungle gym and he was a wonderful pied piper until he’d had enough.
“Merel,” he called to his wife, “take them away.” And they were pulled off him like so many cuddling kittens. It was during that time I nicknamed him “Principessa.”
At least four nights a week, Raul and I went out alone together after the show and we usually ended up someplace where he was King. The maitre d’ and the waiters would race around doing his bidding, and constantly filling his glass. Bottle after bottle of wine would be consumed followed by a good grappa or port. And at some point, he would rise up and sing, full voice, in his glorious tenor/baritone, to the delight of the stragglers.
Nothing of importance was ever discussed. I stayed sober. He got drunk. He was resolutely closed to any discussion of his addiction and there was no doubt in my mind that had I suggested he stop, our time together would have ended. When I finally got him home he would say at the door most nights in that irresistible accent:
“Good night, I love you—you are my boyfriend.”
Merel was always up, took him from me and put him to bed where he would remain late into the day. When the play closed, the nightly ritual ended but we stayed in touch.
On a Friday morning one winter weekend he called:
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“You want to come to the farm with me and Barry? Just us.”
“Sure.”
So a few hours later Raul, myself, and our great friend Barry Primus drove to Raul’s farm in upstate New York. Barry, who still, as of this writing, remains a close and dear friend, is an irrepressible guy with a compulsive and infectious personality that usually sets the tone for any gathering. And we three had a bachelor weekend of delicious relaxation.
“There’s no food in the house,” Raul said. “We better stop and get some sandwiches.”
“Take me to the supermarket,” I said.
“I don’t know where there is one.”
We asked around and found it. Raul peered into the market in wonder.
“This is great.”
We never bathed, nor made a bed or left the house the entire weekend. But it was clear to me that I would have to be the wife. Neither Barry nor Raul had a clue in the kitchen.
I cooked the entire weekend. When the dishes finally ran out I said:
“Raul you wash. Barry you dry.”
Standing at the sink, singing opera at the top of his lungs, he stopped and said:
“You know, Merel wants me to get her a dishwasher, but I’m not going to. This is fun.”
Soon his career took off with Kiss of the Spider Woman, for which his costar, William Hurt, won the Oscar. Raul told me that one day in rehearsal, Hector Babenco, the director, asked him and Bill to switch roles as an experiment. It became clear each would be better suited to the other’s part. “But Bill,” Raul told me “knew he had the greater role and resisted the change.”
“I should have played his part,” he said, “but I couldn’t have done it.”
“Why not?”
“It would have been impossible for me to play a maricón.”
His Puerto Rican background would have made his playing an openly gay man unacceptable to his family. But he was genuinely happy for Bill when he won the Oscar for his performance.
It was during this period that Raul fell under the spell of Werner Erhard and the est movement, something I found hilariously absurd. Another guru, another fad appealing to emotional masochists. Following a visit one afternoon to Erhard’s backstage dressing room after watching him perform, I spoke vehemently on the way home about what a charlatan I thought he was.
“All I know,” said Raul, “is that the more money I give him, the more money I earn.”
I kept hammering him about the negative aspects.
“I just don’t see what you see,” I said.
“That’s because you see where you’re at,” he barked.
In the early 1990s I moved my family to L.A. and Raul and I drifted apart again for a time. But we had begun a telephone ritual that we kept up until his death. My phone would ring no matter where I was and it would be Raul.
“Do you know what I said today?”
He was calling me from halfway around the world on a film location.
“What?” I said in earnest anticipation.
“I was on a horse and I had to say to Mel Gibson, ‘Get out of town or I’ll kill you!’ ”
Then I would tell him some ludicrous piece of dialogue I had uttered.
And he would start laughing helplessly in his little-boy giggle, “Oh, that’s great,” and we’d hang up.
One night he appeared backstage at a play I was doing at the Music Centre in downtown Los Angeles. My boyfriend was back and we picked up as of old. At dinner he did not drink, ate very little, and was less than communicative. As I was driving him back to his hotel, he said:
“Stop the car, fast,” quickly got out and became sick on the sidewalk. As he was bent over, his hands on his knees, I rubbed his shoulder and said:
“Was it my performance?”
“Something I ate.”
I called the next day.
“I’m great,” he said.
Again time passed. In 1994, I was preparing to leave for Malta to start a film. One day the phone rang.
“I’m here. Come and see me.”
At eight o’clock that evening I drove to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and had dinner with the ghost of Raul Julia. He was probably less than one hundred pounds, pale, weak, and subdued. Barry Primus joined
us and while we had room service, Raul ate from containers of macrobiotic food. There was no discussion of his illness.
After dinner Barry left and I said to Raul:
“I want to tell you something. A few months ago, I awoke in the middle of the night. I was not dreaming and I was not hallucinating but there were three angels floating over my wife’s head—three amorphous golden creatures who peacefully floated above her for one minute or two and then wafted past me and out into the night. As they sailed over me, one beautiful face looked into my eyes and without words said: ‘It’s time that you believe in us.’ ”
Raul listened in silence—but said nothing. We talked about other things and I left. I knew that he was leaving the next morning at 10 a.m. At 7 a.m. I awoke with a start, got dressed, took down a copy of a book I had bought on angels after my experience, inscribed it to Raul and drove to his hotel. He opened the door and said “Hi” as if he had expected me. I gave him the book—“Great,” he said. We ate breakfast together in silence, then he put down his fork, looked at me, and said:
“I have been thinking about your angel story. I have been thinking about all the people sitting on the mountaintops waiting to see something—anything—some proof. You haven’t got a spiritual bone in your body—but this fucking angel comes and appears to you. It is just great.”
He was up on his feet gesticulating, passionate, happy for me. We embraced, made a promise not to lose track of each other again, and I took him downstairs and put him in the limo. He was sitting on the edge of the backseat as I stood by the door holding onto his hand. I leaned in to kiss him good-bye; he then slowly moved his emaciated body back into the darkness and disappeared from my sight. When I closed the door and turned into the unforgiving California sunlight, I knew it would be the last time I’d see him. We spoke a week later.
“I read the angel book,” he said. “It was great.”
I had only just arrived in Malta to start my film when I learned of Raul’s death. Uncannily, as I hung up the phone his voice was singing out on my tape player. I left my hotel, got a car, and began driving around the city. After parking it I wandered into a large antique shop filled with paintings, and I must have looked at and held up some thirty or forty as the owner told me of their age, period, value, etc. After an hour of this, he said, “I have a sense of your taste now. I have something to show you.” We went to a small room upstairs at the back of his shop and he opened the door of a tall cabinet, stood on a chair, moved aside some books, and took down a large white folder.
“I have had this for four years,” he said. “It requires a special customer. I think this is for you.”
No matter if this was his usual pitch, because as he lifted one side of the folder, I found myself staring incredulously at a painting of a striking Spanish nobleman, beautifully dressed; on his head a large grand hat with plumes and in his big dark eyes an expression of sweet peace. From both his shoulders sprouted a pair of white wings. After some friendly negotiation I bought it and it hangs in my home as I write this.
Unconsummated love between men can be as powerful as any love between a man and a woman; and equally if not more powerful than physical love with either. However passionate and exciting sexual intimacy can be, it does not linger in the mind with the same intensity as does the indescribable feeling of love one human being can engender in another. And there is something to be said for that kind of love’s endurance and the ability to conjure it up more vividly than any remembered sexual pleasure.
Raul Julia’s physical beauty was no match for his ebullient nature and sweet soul. He was a man who loved life, work, family, and friends. And to be one of them was a joy that, in remembrance, makes me wish I did believe in angels.
He was gone at fifty-four. His beautiful wife Merel and two exquisite sons, Raul Sigmund and Benjamin, lost a husband and father far too early. And I lost my best boyfriend.
IDA LUPINO
Standing alone in the center of the frame as the camera pulls back at the end of the 1955 film The Big Knife, Ida Lupino is pleading “Help! Help! Help!” She was that rare actress who exuded not only a strong sexuality but a fierce intelligence and a kind of dark magic that, for some reason, never resulted in major stardom, but left an indelible impression on the viewer. She reminded me of the phrase often used about special actors, “Too good for the room.” Miss Lupino was a first-rate Hollywood pioneer who had been only the second woman to be welcomed into the Directors Guild. And I was very excited at the idea of working with her.
In 1976, a beautifully dressed, heavily perfumed woman wearing a hat and a pair of white gloves walked into the rehearsal hall. Introductions were made as the actors gathered round to read the Tennessee Williams play Eccentricities of a Nightingale, which would be receiving its television premiere. During the reading, when it came time for her character to speak, that familiar husky, whiskey-sour voice resonated around the room and back came my memories of so many of her performances in films during the 1940s and ’50s.
The body was thicker now, the voice even deeper, and there was a pained fragility in those huge, keen, alert eyes. Her mind, however, was razor sharp, and her instincts infallible. She gave a clear, decisive, powerful reading, and I was thrilled to have her playing my mother. Our director treated her with distant politeness and pro-forma efficiency. She needed to be loved and nurtured. And she needed patience and guidance.
Miss Lupino’s character was that of an overly possessive, genteel southern woman made of the kind of stuff used in the pillars of the Greek Revival houses to which she often referred—a fair description of the actress as well. She had a reputation for knowing her craft and taking no nonsense. One could not imagine her facing any crisis with either sentimentality or tears.
When you’ve been at the game as long as she had, you develop a keen instinct for survival and she intuitively knew at the end of our first reading that she was in trouble. Her probing, incisive questions were not greeted with the excited interest they should have been, and her bullshit meter was so sensitive she knew that, rather than deal with her searching mind, our director was going to shy away from her in an impatient, self-protective manner.
What she needed more than anything else was confidence and support. I saw nothing of the diva-like, demanding sensibilities I’d found present in the more passive-aggressive younger actresses I’d worked with. She did not try to ingratiate or charm or behave in any way that said, “Oh, help me, please. I’m just a fragile flower who needs to be loved.” I found her admirable, brave, and enviably independent of mind. She was no longer “the money” on any project in which she was involved, but had joined the ranks of distinguished older names, valueless to the “suits.”
In 1976 Miss Lupino was fifty-eight years of age, and she was put together in the way that heavy drinkers, particularly women, organize themselves: impeccable hair, makeup, clothing; a tidy house of cards. But, as the first few days passed, the structure began to weaken. She was perfectly behaved, gently polite, but it was clear that she was going to have trouble remembering her lines and repeating her moves. She was, however, in my eyes, going to be worth every second of the care and extra time she would need to build her confidence, completely understand her character, and play it without an ounce of concern for appearing sympathetic or likeable. And she was, I thought, going to be a glorious bitch in the part. Her character’s obsession was her son. This was a mother who wanted no one near her boy; and because most of her important scenes were with me, she focused all of her attention in my direction.
“Sit by me, honey,” was her opening line on days two and three.
But as our producers and director grew more impatient with her measured delivery and investigative journey, her survival instincts sniffed out animus; she became skittish and slowly lost confidence. At the end of the fourth day, as I walked her to her car, her gloved hand in mine, she turned to me just before getting into the backseat, the m
akeup too heavy for sunlight, and said:
“They’re gonna can me, honey.”
They did fire her. And when I placed a call to offer my condolences she did not return it. She most likely felt there was nothing to say and preferred to take her lumps in silence.
Miss Lupino’s need was of no interest to our director and his producers. When I asked them why they had let her go, they said: “Oh, she’s brilliant, but we just don’t have time for her.”
It is generally true in my profession that a faulty camera or an incorrect prop will often be given more attention and time than a worthy actor in need. And also true that idiot actors who come on the set stoned or drunk with petty or moronic demands are far more indulged than ones who calmly ask intelligent questions. Management likes to feel superior to actors and Miss Lupino’s searching mind was clearly intimidating to them.
What a shame a tiny bunch of cowards didn’t have the patience to look after a first-rate artist crying out for help.
DAVID BEGELMAN
David Begelman had been my agent for about a year in 1972 and had brought me next to no work. I say “next to” because he did bring something that might as well have been no work.
One evening a script arrived in a chauffeur-driven limousine to my small house in Wilton, Connecticut. “From Mr. Begelman,” said the driver, handing me a brown manila envelope with a handwritten note inside from David.
“This is The One,” it said. “The film really begins on page 25.” He had placed a large paper clip there where my character entered, with another note from the film’s producer slipped beneath it, which read as I recall:
David,
Bob Mitchum and Rita Hayworth are so hoping Frank Langella will agree to be in this film with them.
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