“That’s the way it’s gonna be, Frankie. You got the bigger hand last night. It’s your show, and I’m gonna look like the gracious star giving it up to the new guy. Now get the fuck out of here and let me get dressed.”
So on she sailed, took her bow, turned, and flung both her arms out to the wings and presented me with a giant smile to the audience. There was no price to pay in our friendship, and a valuable lesson to be learned in how to understand and survive the playing field.
We then took the play to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York where it was only moderately well received, but enough to keep us in the safety of an institutional theatre for a limited run.
Acting with Annie was another valuable lesson for me. Prone to the theatrical as I was, she helped by example guide me to a deeper, more truthful performance. She played for moment-to-moment honesty, never a gesture or a line reading just for its theatrical value only, and she had an unerring sense of comedy, nursing every laugh she could find. There was, however, one moment in the play that she played with her eyes oddly placed. Somewhere in the second act, when it becomes clear that young Will is going to leave Anne for good, she says to him a line something like: “I love ya, Will. Don’tcha know that? I love ya.”
Annie played it with heartbreaking honesty every night, her voice quivering, eyes welling with tears, standing about two feet from me. But she resolutely never looked into my eyes, rather focused deeply on the second button down of my shirt. I never asked her until well after we’d closed why she’d done that, and when I did she said, matter-of-factly:
“Oh, that’s about where Mel comes up to on you.”
The play closed, having been personally quite successful for me, and she sent me a note at the final performance that read: “Congratulations Frankie. You’ve arrived! Now you’re just another banana in the bunch.” Her pragmatic advice did not stop there. When I was in Paris making a movie, I wrote to her jokingly that I was the toast of the town. She responded by telling me that too often a piece of toast can become a pile of crumbs. And when I was particularly miserable on another project, she wrote this: “Don’t be afraid to fall on the floor and cry when you’re unhappy, Frankie. Someone will pick you up. And if nobody’s there, eventually you’ll pick yourself up.”
Annie and Mel owned a townhouse on West 10th Street in New York, and my girlfriend and I lived in a four-flight walk-up on 61st Street and Third Avenue, for which we paid the exorbitant rent of $70.04 a month. For the next few years we lived a best friends’ life between the two places; daily phone calls, long late night visits to each other’s homes, takeout, endless games of Scrabble, cards, charades, and trips away to exotic beach locations. They willingly climbed the four flights to our modest rabbit warren of an apartment, and we made an equal number of visits to their luxurious Village townhouse.
Annie was enjoying great success during this period, with several TV specials, starring roles in films, and, of course, her signature performance as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate.
Pure coincidence caused us to rent a house together in Los Angeles while she was shooting that film. I was cast in The Devils, the first production of the just-built Mark Taper Forum at the Downtown Music Center in Los Angeles, and the four of us took a house on a street in Beverly Hills called Bunting Way. Mel came out on weekends while he was editing his first movie, The Producers, and it was in that house that I began to see patterns in Annie’s behavior that would rule her life and that she seemed never able to conquer.
Most evenings she, my girl, and I had dinner together after her day’s shoots and before I would leave to do my show. Those meals were filled with set stories about the young Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, and Mike Nichols.
“Mike’s giving them most of the attention. He knows I don’t need it, but the kids are really nervous. Dustin’s got a lot of balls. Scared shitless but he’ll try anything. Mike stuffs a handkerchief in his mouth to keep from laughing at him and ruining a take, but I don’t think he’s that funny. We did a scene where he’s gotta come over and kiss me impulsively. I’d just taken a puff on a cigarette, and Mike said: ‘Hold in the smoke while he’s kissing you and blow it out after he lets you go.’ I thought it was a stupid idea, so I just blew the smoke out thinking, ‘This is a stupid idea.’ ”
One night she said: “Well, Dustin’s not that nervous. We did the scene in bed and he was as hard as a rock . . . Short Jewish guys.”
“By the way,” I asked, “does Mrs. Robinson have a first name?”
“Yeah,” she said without hesitation. “Queenie!”
Toward the end of the shoot, Annie had an accident on the set during the church scene. Doctors were called, an ambulance arrived and it took her back to the Bunting house. Up the driveway she came, ambulance lights blaring, with Mike and Dustin behind in another car. Both jumped out looking terrified and worried. As she was being carried upstairs to her room, Mike told me that she had fallen over backward while shooting that day. X-rays were taken, pills dispensed, and she took to her bed for a few days.
It would be an event that in one form or another took place on most every project Annie did through the years. It was her back, or her throat, or her legs, and always there would be panic, pills, tears, and bed rest.
One night at the Bunting house, I saw her give in to those fears in a profound way. Arthur Penn stopped by to say hello, and we sat in the living room talking until Annie returned from the set. When she arrived, still in Mrs. Robinson’s makeup, looking just gorgeous, she joined us. She made a drink and launched into a description of the scene she had just shot. It was the hotel bar, where Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin meet clandestinely and then go upstairs to a room.
At about 11 p.m., the phone rang in the den. I took it.
“Frank. Hi, it’s Mike. Is Annie still up?”
“Yes, she’s right here.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Annie!” I called out. “It’s Mike.”
As she came toward me in the den, I saw a look on her face I can only describe as hostile panic. I gave her the phone, quickly left the room, and closed the door.
A few minutes later, she came out in a rage.
“Jesus, fuck. The fucking film got destroyed and we gotta do it again. They’re still set up. I gotta go back. Fuck.”
She grabbed her drink, went to her bag, fished around for a pill bottle, took out two Valium, and chugged.
“I’m not gonna be able to get it again like I did.”
“Sure you will,” Arthur said. “Forget what you did and do it fresh.”
“What the fuck,” she said. “Mike’s only watching Dusty anyway.”
She sat down in an armchair to wait for her car, and spat out a series of slights she felt she’d endured during the shoot and then began to sob uncontrollably, like a little girl who’d been told by her mother to stand in the corner before she could explain that whatever had happened was not her fault. Arthur, who had seen her through two plays and that Oscar-winning performance in The Miracle Worker, was brilliantly sympathetic and comforting. The car came, she went, reshot the scene, and the result was and is superb.
Annie would again work with Mike and George C. Scott in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes for Lincoln Center, a role for which she was totally unsuited, and again she would cover her anxiety with an imperious disdain. My girl, whom Annie managed to have understudy Maria Tucci, playing her daughter, told me that at the dress parade, as Annie stood on the stage in full regalia, nobody was paying attention. Finally, in a thunderous voice, she shouted out across the footlights, “Well?”
There was a deafening silence and Mike said:
“I’m not sure about your eyebrows.”
“Yeah!” she said, “I know. They’ve held me back,” and stormed off.
As the years passed, Mel’s career zoomed higher. He won an Oscar for The Producers, but
Annie had not gone with him to the ceremony. When his name was announced, she called our apartment in New York from their house in the Village.
“Oh Jesus, Frankie,” she said, “he won. I was scared he wouldn’t. I couldn’t face it.”
In 1969, she accompanied Mel to Yugoslavia, where we shot his second film, and my first: The Twelve Chairs. She was a great and loving pal throughout the shoot, warming my feet in the dressing room when I’d come in from the cold, watching dailies, giving great notes to Dom DeLuise and me and generally keeping everybody’s spirits up. I had ended the relationship with my long-term girlfriend before filming began and Annie mothered me through an on-set affair.
The Twelve Chairs and A Cry of Players also ended my working relationship with Anne and Mel. But our friendship continued on for another twenty-four years. In that time they became fabulously wealthy, holding on to their house in Fire Island, buying another beach house in Malibu, an apartment in New York, and building a magnificent seventeen-thousand-square-foot home on La Mesa Drive, one of the most beautiful streets in Santa Monica. I married in 1977, had two children, and Annie gave birth to their one child, Max. A huge phalanx of assistants, nannies, gardeners, and secretaries looked after their every need.
Lifestyle was now a dominant factor in her life. A multitiered garden, trips to London (“Max needs silk underwear,” she’d laugh), and purchasing fine art became all-important to her. She ventured onto Broadway with not much success in William Gibson’s Golda and other plays, but the conditions had to be perfect, the roles central, and the director and other actors needed to pay homage or she’d fly into a rage, at one point famously throwing a full cup of coffee at an actress who’d disagreed with her. Everyone, she felt, was either intimidated by her, jealous of her, or not talented enough to keep pace.
One day, she called and asked me to come over and read a Shakespeare play with her.
“Olivier wants me to join some company he’s forming,” she said.
We read it out loud and she grew increasingly irritated.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “I just don’t get it.”
Finally she took the script, tore it in half, and flung it across the room.
“Fuck it. No way I’m doing this shit.”
The narcissism did not abate as she grew older, and her need to control her environment became more and more stultifying to me. One night in a Malibu restaurant the dam broke. It was 1991; I’d moved my family to Los Angeles earlier that year. We fell into a reminiscence of our time in the 1960s, and the fun we’d all had at the Bunting house. I started to tell my wife the story of the late night phone call from Mike Nichols, Annie’s anger, then fear, and her drowning two Valium with a glass of Scotch. I pointed out how wonderful Arthur Penn had been with her, and how she’d gone back to the set to do the scene perfectly again. There was complete silence as I spoke, and Annie stared at me incredulously, storm clouds gathering. The sound of the waves outside were then muted by her furious explosion.
“That never happened,” she said. “What the fuck are you talking about? It never happened!”
The voice was gaining in power and volume.
“Annie,” I said, still easy, “Arthur was there. You went back to the set and did a great scene.”
“It’s a fucking lie, Frankie,” she said, and flung her napkin across the table into my face. “I know it probably makes a great story for you to tell your friends, but . . .”
And all the years of accommodating her rages finally overwhelmed me, and I said, in full voice, like a bad movie when other diners stop and stare, things I shouldn’t have said, ending with a bitter insult that was out of my mouth before I could censor it:
“And it’s not even a good story I tell to my friends, Annie. Nobody cares about Anne Bancroft stories anymore.”
And I was gone, out into the Malibu night. My wife chased after me as I found our car and had to endure an hour of ranting on the drive home. When we arrived, the phone was ringing. It was Annie and her apology was typically non-introspective and self-serving.
“I’ve been going through a rough time lately,” she said.
I was unsympathetic, getting off the phone as quickly as I could.
Our friendship never fully recovered. In 1995 I sold the house in California, divorced, and moved back to New York. Annie and Mel loyally came to every play I was in, saw every movie, and endured some inappropriate love affairs, but that night in Malibu was a death knell for the thirty years of intimate togetherness.
And when the death knell of cancer sounded inside her body, she managed to keep it a secret from most of her friends. She did not reach out to me in her final years, and I was unaware of the extent of her illness until one afternoon in June 2005 when my phone rang. I was shooting a film entitled Superman Returns, and living forty miles outside of Sydney, Australia, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a friend calling.
“I’m really, really sorry about Anne Baxter,” he said.
“What do you mean,” I said.
“Oh, I mean Anne Bancroft. She died.”
After we hung up, I opened the French doors to the patio and walked out listening to the Pacific, remembering the night thousands of miles across it in Malibu that I had thrown away a close relationship with a woman who could be so funny, warm, and smart, but a friend I could no longer endure. Any relationship in which one party feels even the slightest sense of diminishment had become for me a relationship not worth enduring. I did not so much regret my decision to pull away from her ultimately corrosive aura as I did bemoan the demons that held sway inside her; they becoming the friends she most listened to and believed.
I have never asked Mel if Annie found some respite during her illness in her final years. I’m not certain I want to hear the answer.
MAUREEN STAPLETON
Implicit in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is the notion that physiognomy is destiny.
By her own admission, Maureen Stapleton was fat and homely and needed to “become somebody else” to survive. The somebody else she would become in her first film, Lonelyhearts, would be a fat, homely woman. It was 1958. She was thirty-two and she would get an Oscar nomination for her performance. Already a star in the Broadway theatre by 1950, playing Serafina in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo, another fat, homely woman, this time in love with a truck driver, she won a Tony for her performance.
In Mo’s case, the Wilde reference was sadly prophetic, but she was not someone for whom I ever felt sorry. She was tough, funny, shrewd, talented, unsentimental, and not without sex or love. She married a guy named Max Allentuck, had two kids, a ten-year affair with the eighty-year-old Broadway producer/director George Abbott when she was in her forties, and married again after that. A lusty Irish lass.
She finally, after four nominations, won an Oscar for Reds in 1982, but “so what,” as she was fond of saying of just about anything. Famous for her fear of flying, she almost didn’t get that Oscar, needing to get to the location in Europe by boat and back.
We were never close friends, despite the many times I spent in her company. There would invariably come a point when she passed into a place that I found repellent and I slipped away from the party or the actors’ hangout. She did not inspire in me the need to protect or save her; but more the desire to take her by the shoulders and shake her like a beer can until it exploded. Had I tried it though, she most likely would have attempted castration.
Ditzy though she may have appeared, she was nobody’s patsy.
When a young actress kept upstaging her in a play’s previews, she did nothing. One day when a friend who’d been to see the show mentioned it to her and asked:
“What are you doing about it?”
She replied, “I’m killing the cunt with kindness.”
And she could be outrageously and irreverently funny.
At a wrap pa
rty for the movie Bye Bye Birdie, which would introduce the luscious eighteen-year-old Ann-Margret to the world, she sat through a bunch of speeches from the director, producers, and studio heads paying tribute to her and costars Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh. All of them spent an inordinate amount of time praising Ann-Margret’s talents and predicting a stunning future for her. Mo got up to the microphone and said: “Well, I guess I’m the only one here who doesn’t wanna fuck Ann-Margret.”
My personal favorite is a drunken ride home she had with the agent Milton Goldman. Openly gay and openly alcoholic, he was a mainstay in the New York theatrical community. The story goes that on a rainy night in winter, they were returning from an event, drinking heavily in the back of a limo and singing Irish folk songs at the top of their lungs. When the car door opened at Mo’s townhouse, they tumbled out into the gutter laughing hysterically. As the driver picked them up, put Milton back in the car, and dropped Mo at her door, she is reported to have called back to him:
“Milton, I love you! If you ever want to fuck a woman, I’m your man!”
I had my own drunken rainy night with her as well, which did not end with much hilarity.
We shared a stage at the New School one evening discussing various approaches to acting for an invited audience. She was totally sober and brilliant. Her basic advice: “You gotta mean it baby.” No artifice, no method or system. Just be honest and do it. And she resisted all attempts from a questioner to idealize her or the profession. A good, solid, talented woman who could not be drawn into preciousness or mystery. “I’m a worker,” she said.
We were deposited in the back of a limo. It was pouring down rain, the traffic was brutal, and we both needed to be dropped far uptown.
“Geez, I’m not gonna make this ride, Frank. Hey, driver, around the corner is a place I know. Pull up there.”
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