Dropped Names

by Frank Langella

  There could be no greater teacher in the world on how to play Noel Coward than George C. Scott. With flawless timing and a supreme intelligence, he had little or no time for psychological motivation and less for actors with no technique. He could do any speech brilliantly at once and felt you should be able to as well. While he often resisted the urge to show you how to do something, his natural aptitude would sometimes take over and he’d just burst forth into action. Playing any part, he would be seamlessly brilliant and hilarious. Then he’d sit back down, light a Lucky, have a beer, and look at you with the expression of a bored child prodigy whose mother had made him take piano lessons when he’d much rather have been out playing stickball.

  George was so gifted and so self-destructive that his career gave rise over and over to the theory that great talent needs a kind of madness to flourish. If that were true then every alcoholic, overweight, or strung-out actor would be a candidate for greatness, but few can ever hope to breathe George’s rarefied air. If fury and rage were his calling cards as an actor, fear and insecurity seemed to dominate his day-to-day existence. As time went on, I would see the haunted stare come over his face, and know that he would be gone within moments. He’d throw some money on the table at a restaurant, or pick up his bottle at rehearsal and go, leaving you uncertain you would ever see him again. He did disappear during rehearsals for a few days, but came back deeply apologetic, scrubbed clean, sober, and brilliant as ever. Having rolled to the bottom of his particular hill of hell, he had gotten up, cleaned off the debris, and was once again climbing back up.

  He was seductive and flirtatious with Jill but slightly cool and aloof with a character actress named Lisa Kirk who was causing problems with the costume designer Ann Roth. Lisa refused to wear the period dress made for her but rather insisted on wearing a 1950s gown designed for her nightclub appearances. The dress Ann created was breathtaking and she was understandably hurt and angry that Lisa wouldn’t wear it. She went to George and threatened to quit if he didn’t back her up. George did nothing about it, seemingly afraid of Lisa’s particular brand of temperament. This was a man whose legendary battles with wives Colleen Dewhurst and Trish Van Devere, and a tempestuous affair with the feisty Ava Gardner, were show business history. Watching him run from any confrontation with Lisa marked the beginning of my suspicions about his tough-guy image.

  Design for Living was a huge hit and he was delighted at our success, coming back from time to time to tinker. When you’d hit a home run, no one was more enthusiastic than George. In rehearsal he had been like the coach on the field, up and pacing, saying the lines with you, throwing his fist in the air and shouting, “Yes baby—that’s the big laugh!” He did the same thing during the performances he attended. I could see him in the lighting booth above the stage, prowling around like a tiger in a cage, laughing and applauding when it was going well, standing stock still in a cloud of smoke when it was dying. One night, I less than delighted him and unwittingly risked the celebrated fury.

  Raul and I were in the middle of a scene onstage in which his character, Leo, discovers that mine, Otto, is having an affair with Jill’s, Gilda. Having spent the night with Gilda, Otto is dressed in Leo’s pajamas. At one point I mistakenly called Raul by my character’s name, Otto. There was that tiny beat when you know a gaff has been made and you either sail past it or run with it. Raul and I settled on a little sprint. He looked at me and in a mock Tonto voice said,

  “No! Me Leo. You Otto!”

  The audience got it and began to laugh. Raul did not break, nor did I, but I couldn’t resist saying when the laughter stopped:

  “Are you sure, dear boy? I am, after all, wearing your pajamas.” Big laugh again and this time Raul and I joined in.

  My dressing room was one floor below the stage level. I raced down to make a change, stopping first to use the bathroom. Dropping the pajama bottoms to my ankles, I stood at the urinal and immediately felt a hand on my right shoulder. It whirled me around and another hand came up onto my left, holding me still. It was George—red-faced, angry, and drunk.

  “What the fuck were you two clowns doin’ out there? There’s no excuse for that behavior. Jesus Christ, Frank—don’t do that again.”

  I said I was sorry, but it was really funny and we just got carried away.

  “Well don’t be. Let them be carried away for Chrissake. Come on man. Respect the illusion.”

  George was unaware that I was continuing to relieve myself on his shoes as he ranted and raved at me. Once my body caught up to the shock of his wrath, it shut down and I stood there trapped before his anger. He exited as quickly as he had entered. Later that night, as I regaled Jill with the story, she assured me he was totally unaware that I had rained on his tirade. She said he had come into her dressing room afterward, thrown himself onto the couch, and said laughingly, “I just scared the shit out of Frankie.” Well, not quite. But close!

  George sometimes took me to Gallagher’s Steakhouse on West 52nd Street for lunch or for a late supper. A drink was put in front of him after he sat down and we always had steak with corn or mashed potatoes. If he didn’t like an actor his criticism was sharp and astute.

  I had worked recently with one whose star was on the rise. A street-smart wise guy and Actors Studio devotee. I mentioned his name.

  “An asshole,” said George, “a talentless fucking asshole. The guy wouldn’t know syntax if it came up and bit him. You need brains to be an actor. What the fuck is he?”

  He was more incredulous than angry. Mystified that someone with so little skill could be succeeding in the way this actor was beginning to.

  “It’s not acting!” he said. “It’s just fucking attitude. The Method is a crock of shit.”

  Often the talk fell to women. Never vulgar or boasting, he would say matter-of-factly, “I had ’em all, Frankie,” and of his celebrated passion for Ava Gardner, all he ever said was:

  “Ava almost killed me.”

  George had a passionate love for great writing and great ideas. His was a delicate, fragile sensibility. This was a man of letters, courtly and polite. Truly a man’s man—but not for the reasons he had become so greatly admired. At odds with his own image as a raging bull, he was nevertheless scathingly critical of anyone in therapy, referring to them as “weaklings” and “cowards.” When I told him I’d been in and out of therapy most of my adult life, he said: “Well you’re a coward and a pussy. Why the hell do you need someone else to use as a crutch? Suck it up!” I decided not to bring to his attention the fact that he was a drunk. If he did scare the whole world, as Mike Nichols had once said, I had come to realize that he scared himself most of all.

  One afternoon between shows, George came into my dressing room carrying a drink. Having heard I was planning to do a production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall (a fictionalized story of his life with Marilyn Monroe) he said: “Jesus, Frankie, that play’s a disgrace.” When I told him I was intrigued by its questions of where the guilt lay, he looked at me witheringly and said:

  “What the fuck do you mean? Arthur is guilty. He can rationalize all he wants. He’s a selfish son-of-a-bitch. I hope you have better luck with him than I did.” He was speaking of an unsuccessful production he’d done of Arthur’s Death of a Salesman many years earlier. Arthur’s passive-aggressive style and somewhat imperious demeanor must have driven George crazy.

  Three years later, when we sat down across from each other on that MGM flight, he was noticeably older, sadly disheveled, and clearly in crisis. He had no desire to reminisce about Design for Living and little curiosity about others in the company we’d shared. Why he said what he did next may have been the liquor, or the intimacy of our surroundings, or a desperate need to be known. It may also have been because I asked the right question at the right time.

  “George, if you hadn’t become an actor what would you have chosen to do?”

  “Be a writer,
” he said. “But I can’t write.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  An extraordinarily long time passed before he answered me. Still holding on to his chess set and staring out the window, he turned and said in a voice clear and true:

  “If I had any balls, Frankie, I would spend the rest of my life sitting at the bedside of real men in veterans’ hospitals playing chess all day long.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” I said.

  “Why the fuck would they want to be bothered by some faggot actor?”

  There sat a man of indisputable masculinity and power, frightened that war veterans might find him feminine and soft because he liked to play chess. It was my turn to be silent. There was a quality in George so desperate for a comfort you felt you could not provide, that it inhibited you from making any effort. He closed his eyes, leaned back, and went to sleep.

  Ten years later, in 1996, he was playing a character based on Clarence Darrow at the Royale Theater on Broadway in Inherit the Wind. I was in the audience and we were due to have supper together after the performance. Onstage he was still powerful, commanding, and even quite funny in Act 1. But when the curtain rose on Act 2, there was a different man standing there. He seemed disoriented and barely audible.

  Then it happened. That silence on a stage, unlike any other, when you know an actor is in deep trouble. It’s not just that perhaps they’ve forgotten the line. It’s the sense they give you that they have forgotten where they are. He put his hand out to the young actor standing next to him, Garret Dillahunt, with whom I had worked, whispered something, and they began to move toward the wings.

  “I’m so sorry. So sorry,” he said to no one in particular as he was being escorted offstage, Garret’s hand under his elbow. “Please forgive me.”

  I went back afterwards hoping I’d find him resting but he’d been taken home. I stayed for a while, said hello to Garret, and chatted with George’s costar Charlie Durning. “Too bad,” he said, “I love the guy.” He did not return to the production and died alone in a motel room in Westlake Village, California, less than three years later at the age of seventy-two.

  I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that George C. Scott was a genius because that’s what he was. This powerful compelling artist, this warrior, was a fragile, sensitive man who, I think, would have much preferred to spend his life writing poetry and playing chess with war veterans. When I think about it, the last words that he ever uttered from the stage: “Please forgive me,” are heartbreaking in their poignancy. His violent rages and brutish behavior were legendary, but for reasons unknown to the rest of us, it was clearly not our forgiveness he needed most, but his own.

  LORETTA YOUNG

  I never knew who I was going to find sitting at the counter of the small bar in the home of my friend Ronald Neame, the cameraman turned producer/director of so many wonderful films of the 1930s and ’40s. He had been a collaborator of Noel Coward and David Lean and became most famous for directing The Poseidon Adventure, the film he liked to say gave him his Fuck You Money. He collected “the old dames” as he called them; actresses like Glynis Johns, Maureen O’Hara, and the great film editor Anne Coates. On this particular night in the early 1990s, on the stool close to the wall at the bar sat one of the greatest of the great dames, the legendary Miss Loretta Young.

  The moment I saw her, I instantly looked up to see if Ronnie had set up a special key light for that stool. So remarkable was her aura and her beauty, you automatically felt that you were standing on the dark side of the camera watching her through a flattering lens. She was in no way theatrical, did not seem to be playing for attention, but radiated, almost more than anyone I have ever met, the aura of a Movie Star.

  She had her hands gently wrapped around a glass of wine and was quietly talking to Ronnie, who was behind the bar. As his wife introduced me to the other guests, I caught her briefly glance at me.

  I shook hands with them, all the while trying to find my way into her light.

  “Loretta, this is our good friend Frank Langella. Be careful or he’ll bite your neck.”

  One of Ronnie’s social gifts was his ability to drop a credit of yours when introducing you to give the conversation a starting-off point. He was, of course, referring to my Dracula role onstage and in film. He might just as well have said:

  “Be careful, or he’ll slap your face.”

  Miss Young turned slightly, lifted her beautiful hand, and said in a polite and vaguely dismissive manner:

  “Hello, how are you?” then lowered her eyes and returned to Ronnie.

  I’ve never known a beautiful woman, either intimately or as a friend, who was unaware of her beauty and who wasn’t in some way a slave to it. But Miss Young wore hers like a halo: radiant and definitive; as was her staunchly Catholic faith. She was dressed impeccably in something soft and feminine with an elegant print. Small, almost fragile earrings, the appearance of minimal makeup, her hair, colored to a pale shade of grayish brown and styled simply, was pulled back in a small chignon. She was at that time somewhere in her late seventies, breathtaking, with a kind of ladylike sexuality I found very attractive.

  In addition to her many screen performances that I’d seen, I had religiously watched her successful TV series in the 1950s, The Loretta Young Show, in which at each opening and closing she descended a staircase or swept through a pair of doors, always impeccably groomed and flawlessly working her gowns. In every half-hour segment, she played a different character—plain or fashionable, even Chinese once. Always an intelligent, thoughtful, and proficient actress, her real magic came with her beauty and her focus. She had the gift of conviction and a reputation for a shrewdness as shrewd as any Hollywood mogul.

  Years earlier I had made a TV film in which one of my colleagues was Alexis Smith, the beautiful, statuesque actress who played in dozens of films in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Alexis and her husband, Craig Stevens, invited me to their house on Fountain Avenue in L.A., which they had purchased from Loretta. Alexis described to me how, after they had agreed on a price, Loretta, with a yellow legal pad in hand, walked her through the house pointing out built-in things like Shoji screens and saying:

  “Now, will you be wanting those?”

  And when Alexis said, “Well, yes,” Loretta quoted a price and marked it on the pad. The day Alexis and Craig took possession they drove up to the front door to find that Loretta had left them the two giant peach trees that stood on either side, but had removed the huge terra-cotta pots they’d resided in.

  Once inside they found the house immaculately clean and “the largest grandest bouquet of flowers I’d ever seen on the living room floor, with a magnum of champagne and a note: ‘Hope you’ll be as happy here as we’ve been. Love, Loretta.’ ”

  When Alexis went into the master bathroom she found a hole in the floor where the commode had been.

  “She left me a bottle of champagne,” she laughed, “but not a pot to piss in.”

  If Miss Young was in any way interested in talking with me, she was playing it very cool through the meal, giving most of her time to the man on her left, an old friend of hers, and to the guests across the narrow table. Sitting on her right, I did not press or flatter. I waited.

  It was at dessert that she turned and focused on me entirely.

  “Ronnie tells me you write as well.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would I have read anything?”

  “Well, I recently published an article in the New York Times about actors and their demons.”

  “I’d love to read it. Will you send it to me? Ronnie will give you my address.”

  “Of course.”

  For the rest of the dinner she was mine. Totally attentive, charming, and funny. I was, of course, dying to ask her about Clark Gable, the alleged father of her daughter Judy, whom she had publicly claimed was adopted. But I didn’t go
anywhere near the subject of sex. Not because I sensed she was a proper, uptight lady, but because she created an intimacy between us that transcended it. She never once touched my hand or flirted or made any sort of suggestive remark. It was as if we were at a retreat or a bird-watch, observing and discussing the finer things of life.

  At one point I quoted her my favorite line from the little homilies she read to the audience at the end of her television show. She would always hold a small book in her hand and say something to wrap up the evening. This night it went something like: Mistakes are like knives. They can hurt you or help you depending on how you pick them up.

  She had no memory of it, of course.

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” she said.

  At the end of her TV show, she would gently close the little book, look right into the camera and say, “Good night. See you next week?” Putting that statement in the form of a question seemed to me the essence of her charm.

  I did ask her if the famous story about the collection box on her film Come to the Stable was true. Legend had it that she and Celeste Holm, who were both playing nuns, had decided no one on the set should curse and if they did they would have to drop a quarter in a little box, the proceeds of which went to the church.

  The story was that Jerry Lewis or Danny Kaye or Ethel Merman (depending upon who told it) heard about it, came on the set, walked over to her and the box, and said:

  “Here’s fifty bucks, Loretta. Go fuck yourself.”

  I discreetly asked if there had been that kind of incident.

  “Oh, he missed the point. [I think she said it was Kaye.] Celeste and I were only referring to taking the Lord’s name in vain, not to curse words.”

  We got up from the table and she drifted toward other guests. A beautiful, smart, wily, and deeply religious woman and yet still one could imagine Gable saying, “Come off it, Loretta, and get over here.”