The next day, I sent her the article and a few days later I received a note from her in which she told me that she couldn’t find herself among the different types of troubled actors I’d encountered and writing that perhaps the greatest problem she’d had during the course of her career was that Bette Davis had gotten all the parts she felt should have come to her.
After reading that concern, I was reminded that we had met before in 1976. I was appearing as a talking lizard in Edward Albee’s Seascape at the now-defunct Shubert Theater in Los Angeles. Word came back that Miss Young was in the audience and after a visit with Deborah Kerr, our star, she would like to say hello. I waited a full forty-five minutes in my dressing room before she appeared in my doorway, said something like, “Lovely,” and drifted away.
“Was she with Deborah all this time?” I asked the stage manager.
“Oh, no,” he said, “she was in the costume room. She asked to have your lizard costume laid out on a table and she took a big piece of paper and copied the patterns on it and wrote down all the colors.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “she’s always been very interested in clothes and is going to design a gown just like it.”
Loretta spent her last years married to the great costume designer Jean Louis and living in Palm Springs in splendor. She had married him, according to Ronnie, to “protect his fortune” from others. He died first. She remained devoted to the Catholic Church. My friend Carol Channing lived nearby, saw her often, and said that even while dying she was still ethereally beautiful.
The Iron Butterfly, as she had been nicknamed in Hollywood, fluttered her last, and gently passed out of existence at the age of eighty-seven. No doubt welcomed into the arms of her God, whose name she had never spoken in vain and whose forgiveness she must have sorely wanted.
Her daughter passed away just this year and the sad story of her mother refusing to admit to the world that she’d actually birthed her and Judy’s pain and suffering over it, stands as a testament to a woman who, it would seem, valued artifice and religion far more than the love and comfort of her own child.
ROGER VADIM
Somewhere around 1967, I was in Rome and invited by my friend, actor John Phillip Law, to visit the set of his new film, Barbarella. He was shooting it with Jane Fonda at the Cinecitta Studios, directed by Roger Vadim and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. John and Jane, both at their most beautiful and fuckable, were floating high in the air on harnesses. He was playing an archangel with giant wings, and Jane, hot as a pistol in a skintight something, was clinging to his half-naked body.
I had, at that point, never been on a movie set and the atmosphere seemed to me incredibly casual and easy. There was much wine being poured, great camaraderie, and a total lack of tension. I don’t ever remember hearing Vadim call action or cut. At the end of the afternoon shoot, John dropped the wings, and Jane left with Vadim, her lover and soon-to-be husband. As we were driving back to Rome for dinner I said to John, “I had no idea a movie set could be so relaxed. Is it always like that?”
“No,” he said. “We ran out of film early this morning and Roger didn’t want Dino to know, so we were just pretending.”
Some twenty years later, Roger was directing me in an extremely explicit love scene opposite the exquisite Rebecca de Mornay. It was the 1988 remake of And God Created Woman, a huge success in the late 1950s starring the French actress Brigitte Bardot, directed by her soon-to-be husband Vadim. This time there was film in the camera and he wanted Rebecca and me to do it his way.
I had seen the original film while at college, and it is impossible to explain how overwhelmingly erotic that now rather tame picture was to young men. Brigitte Bardot, an erection machine of epic proportions, never spread her legs wide for the camera but offered herself up to it with delicious humor and mystery. Most college boys, myself included, found her to be the single most masturbatory fantasy among an admittedly heavy arsenal of choices. Her breathtaking loveliness was made more desirable by Roger’s appreciation of how important fantasy and imagination are in the art of engendering real sensuality and passion.
That day Rebecca and I were to do one of our three sex scenes. After the lights were arranged, everyone was asked to leave the set so it was just the three of us and the cameraman. My motivation in the scene was to perform oral sex on Rebecca, as she sat atop a pool table in a recreation room in my character’s mansion. Lots of wine and we settled in to a hard day’s work. As my mouth moved down Rebecca’s throat, across her breasts, onto her belly, and my tongue gently slid across her thighs toward her vagina, I could feel Roger’s breath on me, just off camera, urging me onward.
“Yes, Frank, yes that’s it. Caress, caress, soft kisses. Now tease it! Tease it! Take your time. Yes it’s good—you like it, don’t you? Now licka de pussy! Mmmm!”
Most of the time, sex scenes (which are thankfully no longer required of me in films) are exhausting and a bore to perform. They are usually self-consciously shot and crowded with makeup people, lighting guys, clapper boys, and the script girl reminding you when and how you faked your orgasm. Roger would have none of that.
Our faux ménage-à-trois continued through the rest of the day and several more, as Roger photographed me going down on Rebecca, she masturbating me in a Jacuzzi, and the two of us acting out sexual intercourse on a fur carpet in front of a roaring fire. Through it all, Roger never left our sides, urging, taunting, pushing us further and further. He wanted delirium. He wanted transcendence. He wanted orgasms. Sort of like a swimming instructor teaching you all the different strokes that can get you to shore.
Roger was not a particularly good director but I enjoyed his company and his sexual obsessions. I found his devotion to physical pleasure honest and exciting. He gave you the impression that if you were to knock on his door in the middle of the night, he’d accommodate any desire you might wish to indulge. He had with him at the time a very pleasant dark-haired woman, whose name I cannot recall but who seemed to love and understand him. There were explicit stories about Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve, three women, beautiful yes, but more importantly each unmistakable from the other and each a total original in looks and personality.
In his still thick French accent, which I found highly provocative, he held forth on womankind and sex in general. What was so much fun about him was his total immersion in and great amusement about the attitudes of the American male regarding it. He saw absolutely no reason for a male to outgrow discussing how one woman makes love as compared to another; or the size of her breasts or the tightness of her vagina. He did not see it as anti-female. Ungentlemanly, perhaps, but certainly not anti-female. I can still recall a 3 a.m. conversation in my trailer in which he suggested we make separate lists of our top ten blow jobs from famous women and then compare them as to expertise, duration, and repeat vendors. Again, ungentlemanly but definitely not anti-female. Women are certainly not shy about comparing male performance or penis size, and don’t consider it anti-male. Only recently I was sitting in a makeup trailer listening to my world-famous costar telling her young makeup girl the best way to pleasure her boyfriend during oral sex with the artful use of her finger. This luscious lady would have enjoyed my conversations with Vadim as much as I did.
Roger’s devotion to Bardot, Fonda, and Deneuve as women, and to their careers, was total and fully committed, and he managed while doing it, to retain his easy masculinity. After one of the marathon sex scenes, Roger and I ended up at the hotel bar where we were shooting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, once again, the topic was sex:
“You Americans are all pussy-whipped,” he said. “You’re afraid of your women; you’re afraid of their passion. Women only want one thing. They want to be desired. And it’s when we no longer desire them that they want our balls on a platter. I’d rather die fucking them than live being fucked by them.”
And why wouldn’t he? H
is taste was exquisite. The women he chose were not eye candy, airheads, or interchangeable generics. Secure enough to partner with strong, individual women, he set an example as a man who could love beauty, brains, talent, sex appeal, and strength in one woman.
When Roger passed away at the age of seventy-two it was heartening to see his former wives and lovers attending his funeral. There they all were, most likely fondly remembering how much he had desired them. For however long the relationships with each of them lasted, he had been clearly doing something right.
JOHN GIELGUD
I was hoping for a morsel of wisdom. Looking forward to being in the presence of a great actor who would impart to me a revelation or two and perhaps even see in me a little bit of his younger self.
As a teenager, I had worshipped John Gielgud’s voice and manner and his clear, precise, intelligent delivery of Shakespeare. So much so that I locked myself in the attic of my family house in New Jersey and listened to him deliver Clarence’s speech from Richard III dozens of times on the recording of the 1955 Laurence Olivier film in order to eliminate the Joisey in me. It was, in fact, my delivery of that speech that got me into the Lincoln Center Training Program, among thirty other aspiring actors, headed up by Elia Kazan in 1962 as preparation for that company’s first season.
So I was very excited when Kazan announced that the great Johnny G., his nickname in theatrical circles, would be stopping by to speak with us one afternoon. On the day, I got myself dead center in the front row of the folding chairs lined up in Chapter Hall on the eighth floor of the Carnegie Hall building on West 57th Street. “You,” I imagined he would say, “I see something in you!”
In he came, impeccably dressed in tweeds, loafers, and a crisp white shirt and tie. Sonorous is the word often used to describe his voice, and indeed it was. But his mellifluous drone eventually sent me into a heavy-lidded semi-coma, and I prayed he would not focus on my nodding head and blinking eyes. For well over an hour, Sir John seemed totally indifferent as questions were asked about motive, intent, inner life, or even style and technique. By the end of his time with us, I was left with the impression that he wished he’d not said yes to Kazan and that his approach to acting was a simple and perfunctory “Just get on with it.”
Afterward he showed no interest in milling around or greeting us, but stepped off the little platform that had been placed for him, shook Kazan’s hand, and passed through us as one might a group of lepers when spotting, in the distance, the last boat leaving the island.
Having sat through his enormously successful one-man show, Ages of Man, when he toured it several years earlier in my college town of Syracuse, New York, and been dazzled, I was now dashed by his remote demeanor and lack of passion. But he was, I thought, an old man of fifty-eight then and probably beginning to lose his marbles. Well, they bounced around merrily for another thirty-eight years, finally rolling to a stop and shutting him down at the age of ninety-six in 2000.
Sir John grew up in the English tradition that prized, above all else, clarity and precision, presenting the text to the audience beautifully pronounced. Over the course of his lifetime I saw him in a number of plays and films. And with the years he grew more honest in his work. That is to say he appeared more honest. His performance in Home, opposite Ralph Richardson, was superb in its minimalism and quiet intelligence. And, of course, he won an Oscar for playing Dudley Moore’s butler in Arthur, a part that must have taken him all of thirty seconds to nail. After fifty years of playing all the great Shakespeares and other classics, he must have found that win hilarious, adding to the Brits’ natural disdain for the Americans’ misguided worship of a posh accent.
We would cross paths many times over the years and he always greeted me as if we were meeting for the first time. While I no longer held his style of acting in reverential worship, I admired his resolve. He never stopped working. A devoted professional who took the risk of leaving his comfort zone and courageously joined, at one period, an avant-garde production of Peter Brook’s Oedipus in which all the actors were asked to improvise, express their inner souls, and confess their fears. When it came John’s turn to bare himself, he stood up and declared to the gathered company: “We open on Tuesday.”
Unlike his contemporaries Olivier and Richardson, Sir John was exclusively for the boys, and one night found himself in the clink for having solicited a young lad in a men’s room. Prior to his arrival at a rehearsal the next day, the director told the company it would be best to ignore the sordid headlines. When he sheepishly appeared in the doorway, Dame Edith Evans is reported to have sung out:
“John, you’ve been a very naughty boy!”
I encountered him one time in Cairo in 1987 while shooting a film entitled Sphinx—a real stinker.
“Hello John,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m playing the little old man in the shop who gets his throat garroted. Just two scenes with your leading lady [Lesley-Anne Down] and home again.”
I was surprised he’d taken a role so small and teased him about it.
“That’s a lot of traveling just to get your throat cut.”
“Well, dear boy. Someday you’re not going to be pretty any longer and you are not going to be offered leading roles. Take the smaller ones but only on one condition. Make certain they’re effective.” It was an absolutely perfect and prescient piece of advice.
I have often thought of John when working with British directors and actors of his generation or mine, where the love of affect is more prized than emotional truth; sorting out the proper accent holding sway over sorting out the character’s soul. The combining of both approaches is preferable, of course. The acid test, however, no matter the approach, is whether or not the audience believes you.
When I read of Sir John’s death, I remembered my most favorite moment in his company. It was 1975. I was appearing on Broadway, and into my dressing room trooped Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Irene Worth, and John.
They settled into chairs, making complimentary noises; but for the most part John was silent. Finally Annie said:
“Frank, tell John that story about how you used to imitate him in your attic as a kid.”
“Well,” I said, “I grew up in New Jersey and I wanted to lose my accent because I talked like this . . .” I launched into a thick New Jersey accent, using the words coffee and talk as examples. John gazed at me, stony and silent, but I pressed on.
“So I bought the Richard III album and copied you. I walked around my attic doing your monologues thousands of times and when I got to New York, everyone told me I sounded just like you.”
A pause. And then in perfect Gielgud deadpan, he said:
“You’re well over it, dear boy!”
ANTHONY QUINN
“Kneel!” Anthony Quinn seemed to be saying when first we met.
The word did not pass his lips but was certainly there in his demeanor. He was standing behind me on a line moving slowly toward the great acting coach Stella Adler. We chosen many were at the director Peter Bogdanovich’s house for a party in her honor sometime in the early 1990s. Miss Adler sat on a throne-like chair raising her eyes to grace each acolyte as they came up, curtsied or bowed, said a few words of worship, and backed away, leaving the space to be filled by the next B-list ass kisser. I would come to know her better a few years later but I was there that evening just to kiss her ring and eat Peter’s food.
Mr. Quinn was one of the very few major stars in the room. I had never met him before, and no one had briefed me on Quinn protocol. So I made the mistake of simply saying “Hi” as I turned around and saw him. Cold and imperious, he offered a limp handshake and prepared himself for some words of high praise along the order of “It’s such an honor to . . . etc.” But I turned back again waiting for my moment with Her Highness, who clearly outranked him that evening. There were audible huffs and puffs as he e
xited the line, followed by his handler and a cowering Mexican woman, retreating to a nearby appropriately overstuffed chair.
The handler returned to say that I had been rude to Mr. Quinn and perhaps a visit to his throne would be graced with forgiveness. My legs would not carry me there and the night passed without further contact between us.
Several years later I was at a party for my close friend Raul Julia, who possessed the gobs and gobs of appreciation for Mr. Quinn that I sadly lacked. When I arrived he was deep in happy laughter with him, both hands resting on his shoulders. As I approached, Raul gave me a big hug and said: “Tony, you know my friend, Frank Langella?”
Again the imperious look. Again the limp handshake. Picking up where we’d left off, I again said: “Hi,” but no more. And again his immediate exit. For the rest of the evening he sat across from me under a dark cloud of expectation, but I spoke not a word to him. I couldn’t have been more pleased at the consistency of our relationship.
I had one last chance to gain favor on a snowy evening in New York years later after some awards show. Ushered toward a stretch limo to move on to the after party, I was put into a seat facing the rear of the car. The attendant said: “You don’t mind sharing with Mr. Quinn, I hope?”
We settled in. Tony, as I would only dare call him to you, sat in the middle, his handler to his right, the same Mexican woman to his left. What could I do? I didn’t want to let him down. So I bit the bullet, leaned forward, stretched out my hand, and said (you got it): “Hi.” And he didn’t let me down either. Once more the proffered limp handshake and the glum stare. But this time he was denied his exit. We were on the move, and he was stuck with me.
For some thirty blocks we rode along in absolute silence as he stared past the Mexican woman out the window and into the winter night, in what appeared to be a seething fury.
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