Then Al came on, “Hello Frank, what’s up?”
“Well, I’m on my way to the framers to put you under glass, but your signature is all funny and—”
“Where are you?”
“Crosstown”
“Bring it over.”
I hopped a taxi, got out at his townhouse on East 95th Street, was let in by a maid, and met Louise on the parlor floor.
“He’s up in his studio,” she said.
As I climbed to the top floor, I realized I had never, in all the times I’d visited for dinner parties, been to Al’s inner sanctum. And there he sat in his famous barber chair, leaning on his famous wooden table, drawing. The ancient magnificent hands steady and sure and his voice strong and clear.
“Hello, Frank. Let’s see it.”
I instinctively leaned in and kissed him as he put down his pen and patted my hand.
“Nice to see you again.”
He cleared the surface, took my caricature out of its plastic sleeve, and placed it carefully on the desk.
“Well, this is strange.” And with one swift swipe of his thumb he eliminated his iconic signature as if wiping away a fresh coffee stain, and picked up his pen. I flopped onto an old worn couch and watched a little bit of theatre history being made.
So completely certain was Al of his gift and so completely in charge of his powers even still, that the sight of him, sitting at a table he’d sat at for decades, holding a pen in his hand, leaning over and making a simple, basic correction in his work, exemplified the essence of greatness to me. From those now gnarled, brown, blotched hands had come astounding caricatures starting in 1925. Some eighty years of work.
He was born with the gift, of course. Whatever force guided those hands from which flowed a few lines that evoked a smile, a smirk, a depth of persona so powerfully true, it was outstripped by the man himself who just got up every day, climbed the stairs to the top floor of his townhouse, sat down, and did the work. Nothing mysterious, nothing otherworldly or magical.
Part of his genius was his responsibility to and respect for his God-given talent. In his time on earth he recorded thousands of artists, and leafing through the unparalleled collection, there are to be seen so many tragic figures, profoundly gifted themselves to one degree or another but unable to sustain the gift throughout their careers. Al would capture their moment, bringing them a touch of immortality. As I watched him, I thought how uncomplicated and simple it must be in that head. “This is what I do. This is who I am.”
He came to a rehearsal of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter in 1996 and sat sketching me from the audience. Unfortunately, his hearing aid was turned up so high it was wreaking havoc with the sound system. But he was held in such awe that no one on the production staff would ask him to adjust it, so I went into the house and said, “Al, your hearing aid is interfering with Noel Coward’s lines.”
“Oh,” he said, and turned it off. When the dinner break came, I ordered some food and invited him into my dressing room to continue his sketch work.
“Have you got a piece of costume or anything?” he asked.
“Yes, I’ve got a beautiful new silk robe.”
“Okay, that’ll do.”
I put it on and Al sat on the couch, hearing aid back on, and did his miraculous thing while chatting about the current season.
In 2002, I was now comfortably sitting in the study of this great artist, ninety-nine and still at the top of his game. Louise came up with some tea and we all three sat and talked in the late afternoon light. Al asked if there was any banana cream pie left.
“No, darling, you ate the last piece for breakfast. Let’s take a picture,” she said. And I stood over Al with my newly signed and inscribed piece of history in my hand, which I treasure more than the other works of his I own, because I knew then it was going to be the last he would ever do of me.
As I was preparing to leave I said:
“You know, Al, I have a dear friend who’s older than you even.”
“Oh. Who?”
“Tonio Selwart, the actor. He’s a hundred and five.”
“Oh, dear Tonio. How is he?”
“Well, he lives alone now. Ilsa, his lady, died about forty years ago. He’s totally blind, but gets up every day, bathes, combs his full head of beautiful pearl gray hair, puts on a crisp white shirt and his hand-made vintage Valentino jacket, and sits by his window. I try and visit twice a month.”
Tonio had had some minor success as an actor as a young man in Europe onstage and had one good role in a film called The Barefoot Contessa, starring Ava Gardner, in 1954.
“Will you give him my love?” Al said.
“Why don’t I call him?”
“Oh yes, do.”
Tonio’s phone rang and rang. I was about to hang up when his fragile but beautifully modulated voice said:
“Hello.”
“Tonio. It’s Frank.”
“Francesco. Cara mio. Come stai?”
“Bene, grazie, mi amico. Guess who I’m sitting with?”
“Who?”
“Al Hirschfeld. He wants to say hello.”
“Oh dearest Al. Put him on.”
I handed the phone to Al and retreated across the room, and for the next ten minutes these two men of 105 and 99 laughed, reminisced, and vowed to get together soon.
When Al hung up the phone, he said:
“How lovely it was to talk to dear Tonio again.”
“When was the last time you’d spoken?” I asked.
“Oh, about seventy years ago.”
I took my precious cargo, kissed Al on the forehead, and made my good-byes. Louise saw me to the door and we made promises to get together soon.
The next day I sent over a large banana cream pie. Louise called.
“Frank darling, Al wants to say thank you.”
“Frank—how did you know it was my favorite?”
“I just took a chance,” I said.
“Come over and have a piece with us.”
“I can’t, Al. But soon again. I promise.”
Seventy days did not pass before he was gone.
ELIA KAZAN
“Does cigar smoke bother you, Frank?”
The legendary Elia Kazan, known to his intimates as “Gadge,” was lying on the floor next to the chair in which I was sitting in the last row during an acting class in Chapter Hall on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall in New York City. I was a member of a group handpicked by him, the Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, and acting coach Bobby Lewis for the Lincoln Center Training Program. There were about thirty of us including Faye Dunaway, John Phillip Law, Austin Pendleton, Barry Primus, and, for a brief period, Martin Sheen. It was 1962.
We were to be the nucleus of a new acting company that would perform at the yet-to-be-built Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. A temporary space downtown called the ANTA would open in 1963, premiering Arthur Miller’s new play, After the Fall, to be directed by Mr. Kazan.
At twenty-four, I was one of the youngest members of the group. I was living with a girl I had met in summer stock, and she sent my photo and meager resume to the casting people. On the day of my audition, I was sitting in one of the window booths of Howard Johnson’s on 46th Street and Broadway, going over my monologue. A few minutes prior to my call time, I left and appeared at the stage door. It would be the first time I was going to be backstage at a Broadway house. There were at least a dozen people before me. I stood in the dark and listened to howling, crying, shouting, and all manner of actorly sounds. When my turn came, I walked out onto the stage and, like a B-movie about getting into show business, I stood near a work light and began a Restoration comedy scene from a play I had performed at school. There were three figures approximately twelve rows back in the dim light of the theatre, watching me. Halfway through my presentation
, Kazan sauntered down the aisle and leaned on the stage’s apron.
“What else have you got, kid?” he said.
“Well, sir, I do know Clarence’s speech from Richard III.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He stayed where he was, leaning on the apron, not more than two feet from me.
I launched into the monologue I had done many times since I had learned it at college. It was my set piece. Toward the last few lines, I fell to my knees intoning Clarence’s desperate plea to the jailor:
“Keeper, I prithee sit by me awhile. My soul is heavy, and I fain would sleep.”
From my knees, I gently stretched out onto the stage floor, as if lying on Clarence’s cot in his jail cell. I remained there, as Kazan turned away from me, walked back up the aisle, leaned over, and began whispering to the other two people who I later learned were Whitehead and Lewis. I could not decipher their whispered conversation but suddenly felt absurd lying on the stage floor of a Broadway theatre, looking up into the flys and straining to hear. So I raised myself back up and sat looking at the empty seats in the balcony, waiting.
Finally Kazan’s voice rang out: “Okay kid, thanks.”
I left the theatre and forgot about it. This was to be a ten-month training program with no pay and no guarantee you’d end up in the first company at Lincoln Center. In other words, a long audition at your own expense.
A few weeks later, on a Friday, the phone rang in my walk-up on 36th Street and Lexington Avenue.
“Is this Frank Langella?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mr. Kazan’s secretary. We’ve been trying to find you for three weeks. You didn’t leave us an address, so we couldn’t send you a postcard.”
“What postcard?”
“You were chosen for the company. If you’re not interested, we have to fill your slot.”
“When does it begin?”
“Monday.”
“Can I call you back?”
A long pause.
“We’ll have to know by the end of the day, Frank,” she said with a fair degree of impatience.
“Okay.”
I called my dad, who agreed to send me a hundred dollars a week for the length of the training program. That, together with my girlfriend’s salary as a nurse, meant I could afford to do it. So I said yes, which meant eight hours a day, five days a week of acting, voice, dance classes, and scene work.
Elia Kazan was all about his cock. He swaggered and posed, flicked his cigar, ran his hand down a woman’s back when he talked with her, and flirted with men in a calculated feline fashion.
He was not present very often during the training program but when he did appear, it was always unannounced and casual. In he would come, lit cigar always in hand, small and sinewy, rumpled and relaxed. The women grew visibly excited in his presence, and desperately preened for his attention; even though he was cohabitating with one of them, Barbara Loden. All the guys wanted to be his buddy. He was, at that time, the legendary interpreter of great playwrights like Miller and Williams and a ballsy handler of equally great actors like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Rod Steiger.
My manner of dealing with Kazan was to be virtually mute in his presence. I would not seek him out as my colleagues did. I would not curry his favor or ask for his advice. I thought I was being less an ass kisser than the rest, but the fact is I was scared shitless and closed off.
He, of course, knew this and baited me every chance he got. But I would not budge. I was polite, distant, and enigmatic.
He began a campaign to break me down. One afternoon I was asked by an assistant to pick up a script of Miller’s After the Fall.
“Mr. Kazan would like you to sit in the audition and read the part of Quentin.”
Jason Robards would be playing that leading role when the play opened the following year, but all the other parts were open. For the next week, I sat in a room with Kazan, Whitehead, and Miller as one by one the young actresses of the day came in to read for the role of Maggie, based on Marilyn Monroe; or for the roles of the mother, a mistress, and the first wife.
The routine was the same. Virtually every actress came through the door petrified and gave stiff, self-conscious performances. In each case, Kazan would get up, pass by me, often squeezing my shoulder, then crouch down next to the actress and whisper quietly in her ear. There were literally dozens of them during the course of that week, and to each of them he whispered conspiratorially, holding their hands, asking questions, referring to some little secret he knew about them, often stroking their hair, patting their knees, or caressing the backs of their necks. I stayed three feet away and watched them, utterly mesmerized. Through intimate and intense mindfucking, he watered all those parched flowers and brought them into full bloom.
Some gave magnificent new readings; others limited, but better versions of their first try; and virtually all of them had emotional breakthroughs. The tears shed during those five days were oceanic. He was relentless in his search for their Achilles heel and was heartless in his desire to get what he wanted from them, for himself, and for the play.
Barbara Loden, his mistress, ended up playing the leading role of Maggie, and eventually became the next Mrs. Kazan. She was my very first taste of rampant favoritism. She was not altogether untalented, but certainly unqualified to play the role.
At the end of the last day of those auditions Kazan asked me to stay late. With everyone else gone, he said:
“Frankie, tell me what you saw this week. Who did you like and why?”
I launched into a critique of each actress as I remembered her, and he walked around the room, looking out the window and puffing on his cigar. He did not respond to anything I said. When I was done, he sat up close, knees to knees with me:
“I want you to do something for me, Frankie. I want you to come to my office every day from now on and bug me. Hang out there. Let me know you’re around. Ask me to watch a scene. Beg me to do something. Make yourself a real pain in the ass.”
“Oh, Mr. Kazan, I can’t do that.”
“Well you’re not going to make it if you can’t do that,” he said. “Think about it.” And he left the room.
I would like to report that I even thought a little about Kazan’s request. But such were my defenses and youthful arrogance that I simply dismissed them out of hand. I couldn’t see beyond what seemed demeaning to me to his real purpose, which was to get me to want something desperately enough to fight for it and to reveal something of my inner emotions.
Close to the end of the training period, when I told my girlfriend I didn’t think I was going to be picked for the company, she sat me down and told me this story:
“He called me up one day.”
“Who?”
“Kazan.”
“What did he want?”
“He asked me to come and see him in his office and not to tell you about it.”
“What do you mean? Did you go?”
“Yes, I wanted to meet him.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to know all about you. He asked about your family and your upbringing. He asked me if I ever thought you had been molested as a child. I told him I didn’t know, and then he asked me if you were a great lay.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Does he fuck you hard? How many times do you fuck in a week? Does he make you come? Is he hung?’ ”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him everything. He made me feel safe. It was just the two of us talking about you. He really likes you a lot and thinks you have so much inside that you’re unable to let out.”
“Did he make a pass at you.”
“Yes, but it felt like a test.”
“Would you have fucked him?”
“Probably.”
“What happened
?”
“He thanked me for coming to see him and asked me never to tell you ever. But if he’s not going to pick you for the company, fuck him.”
I did not confront Kazan. I did not know then what to make of his questions. More than angry or hurt, I was flattered and somewhat perversely titillated by his interest in me.
A few days later, we all sat in a small anteroom, outside Chapter Hall, at the end of our ten-month program. Each of us would be brought in, one at a time, to be told our fate by Kazan, Whitehead, and Lewis. I remember Faye Dunaway, at the time close to Bob Whitehead, beaming as she came out of the room. Barbara Loden sat holding hands with Crystal Field, who would go on to become an iconic off-off-Broadway figure. Barry Primus walked out and said, “I’m in. I’ll wait for you downstairs at the drugstore.”
People came out, hugged and kissed each other, or rapidly made for the door, depending on what they’d been told. Then came my turn. Kazan was lying on the floor, resting on one elbow. Bobby Lewis sat on a straight-back chair. Bob Whitehead behind a foldout table. Bobby was looking sheepish and embarrassed and I knew instantly I was not going to be invited to join the company. It was left to Bob Whitehead to tell me how much they admired my abilities, but felt I was not quite ready. Kazan sat up and leaned very near, almost like a lover, his mouth very close to mine:
“You’re a mystery, Frankie. You won’t let me in.” I left the room and the building, ending ten months of intense study and work and went downstairs to meet Barry.
There was, at that time, a drugstore on the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue where members of the group would often meet. I came in, sat down, and said to Barry somewhat in shock: “Kazan told me he liked my work, thought I would do well, but wasn’t going to take me.”
“Why?” Barry asked.
“He said: ‘Frank I don’t know who you are and I can’t work with someone if I don’t know who he is.’ ”
I did not recognize Kazan’s statement then as the gift it was. Fifty years later, I do profoundly understand his efforts to crack open my shell. And his rejection of me most likely helped to plant the seed for my much-needed journey of self-discovery. Of course, his motives had to be somewhat self-serving, but they were true to his method of working with actors, a profession he honored and understood more than most directors. He knew that greatness in acting cannot be reached until the actor himself is willing to tap the rage and pain inside him and mold it into art.
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