Dropped Names

by Frank Langella

  I was the first to leave the production for a prior commitment. Jill followed a month later, and Raul stayed on until closing. For a year or more afterward Jill and I stayed in contact and managed some long lunches and a few late night telephone calls. But an incident so small and petty; a series of unreturned phone calls not worth the ink to explain, caused us to drift apart. I will forever regret the loss of those irretrievable years.

  In the early days of our start-up careers, she said to me: “L.A. is not for me. Racing all over the place holding little bits of paper with the names of people I’m supposed to impress. They’re going to have to come to me, baby.”

  And when they did, she handled the good years beautifully. Not for her the photo layouts with legs spread wide and breasts pumped high. Not for her the public confessions of illness, self-promotion, or mock humility. She was also one of the few women I have ever known who could, when it was suggested we go somewhere, just get up, grab her bag, give her hair a quick toss, and head for the door. That funny, fun-loving face, the ready smile, and the intelligence, made her a spectacular and sexy package. A package kept all the more desirable by its hidden contents.

  One year before her death, I found a nine-minute tape of Jill, Lily, my former wife, and our two kids on a visit to Raul’s farm in upstate New York. It was made on Memorial Day 1984. We had traveled there supposedly to run lines, but the scripts stayed in the car, never opened. Raul, his wife, Merel, and their two sons were waiting for us. We barbecued, rode motorbikes, and talked mostly about our children. I made a copy for Jill, sent it and received this note from her:

  Dearest Frank,

  Thank you so much for sending me that DVD. I approached it with a certain amount of trepidation, knowing it would be painful as well as beautiful and touching. I was not wrong. To see our faces! Our children’s! My son had not yet been born. And Raul—so heartbreaking! Ahh! It also brought back the fantastic time we had together—weren’t we going to open a bar like Bar Centrale? And how little I wanted to act at that time, being so consumed with Lily. You were both very kind to me when my heart was always so far away from the work. Thank you.

  I hope you are happy!

  Love, Jill

  I didn’t answer her note. I’ll get to it, I thought. There’s plenty of time.

  NORRIS CHURCH

  Norris Church moved slowly across my country lawn in the early fall of 2010, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, and I was instantly drawn to her; simultaneously regretting it would be the first time we’d meet.

  It was a party to celebrate my new house, attended by some thirty people or so. She arrived last on the arm of her son, John Buffalo, by the late Norman Mailer. Rail thin, a lovely silk bandana wrapped across her forehead and spilling over one shoulder with Native American jewelry around her neck and wrists and dressed in slacks and an elegant beige blouse, she tentatively moved toward a lawn chair and John carefully set her down there.

  I understood immediately how irresistible she must have been to Norman. I leaned over to greet her, and she looked up, took my hand, and said:

  “Oh Frank, thank you for being so kind to John. He needs a father now.”

  John had played in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, an Oliver Stone film I’d done a year earlier. We’d had a chance to get to know each other somewhat in New York, and later in Cannes, where the film was shown out of competition. When I asked if he’d like to come up that day, he told me he’d be in Provincetown with his mom and could they both come by on their way to New York.

  “It’s going to be a long ride,” he said, “and she can use the break.”

  “Of course,” I said. “She can have one of the guest rooms if she likes.”

  Throughout the afternoon, Norris engaged freely with everyone there. She remained, for the most part, seated on the wide-armed straw chair John had set her in, ate sparingly, but seemed anxious for human contact. When I could, I sat with her and she spoke of turning their family house in Provincetown into a retreat for writers. Then she spoke of her sons and of the storm that was Norman. Her ability to draw you in and appear peacefully at ease despite her infirmities made her an irresistible presence. In a very brief time, I knew what Norman had found—a woman of immense inner strength who seemed not the kind to back down or cry “poor me.”

  Toward the end of the afternoon, I was walking a few guests to their cars and when I turned back to the house, she was standing alone, looking at the unfinished garden only just begun by my daughter, Sara, earlier that spring. I walked over to her and she said, “This is going to need a good deal of tending to.”

  “I know” I said. “It was so beautiful a month ago but Sara isn’t here enough to see to it and I have a black thumb.”

  A tall woman, almost my height, she turned toward me, took my hand, and put it up to her chest. We stood in silence for a few moments and then she said: “It’s not going to be much longer now. Look in on John for me, would you?” Her eyes welled with tears and she put both her hands on my shoulders and lowered her head. We spoke not another word for a long while as she fought to regain her composure.

  “Why don’t you both stay tonight? The guest room is very comfortable. My daughter’s in the other one, but John can bunk in the den.”

  “Thank you, but it’s better for me to be home in Brooklyn, close to my doctors.”

  When they left and the house and grounds were cleaned up, Sara and I played our traditional game of Scrabble and she went to bed.

  There is no question in my mind that had Norris stayed in my guest room, I would have visited her there, gotten into the bed if she’d let me, and held her in whatever fashion she needed. Her still magnificent beauty, her intelligence and warm persona, her tears, her cancer—even the death knell sounding—were, it felt to me, legitimate grounds for intimacy.

  The next day I called John and asked him if I might take his mother out on a date. “Go for it, man,” he said. I would not have the privilege, however. Her decline was rapid and she died that November at only sixty-one, from the cancer she had valiantly fought for eleven years. Sara’s garden eventually had to be abandoned; it too withering and dying at far too young an age.

  SUSANNAH YORK

  She was sitting alone at a corner table in a restaurant bar close to a theater in the south of England, having just attended a performance of a play in which I was appearing opposite Joan Collins. The play was entitled Moon over Buffalo, on tour in preparation for a London run. The production was tacky, on the cheap, and a calamity for all involved. Not exactly a toe-tapper, it shuffled into town in 2002, presumptuously played the Old Vic, disintegrated, and dissolved into a compost heap out of which nothing remotely positive blossomed. To be sure, it was, as an experience, no bed of roses.

  In 1969, Susannah York had been nominated for an Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but refused to attend the ceremony because she said she hadn’t been asked if she wanted to be nominated in the first place. A misguided young starlet at the time, clearly never going to be a Hollywood player. But she was so luminous a screen presence that she managed to share the early 1960s with that other staggeringly pretty English rose, Julie Christie, before joining the pile of former film beauties no longer young men’s fantasies.

  This once lovely English girl lifted her head when she saw me, reached out her hand, and said: “Oh, Mr. Langella, I so enjoyed your comic timing.” It was as warm and sincere a compliment as she could muster; a sweet and gallant effort to find something positive to say. And I was instantly drawn to her sad, sad eyes and fragile demeanor.

  She had been escorted to the performance by my friend the English producer Duncan Weldon, who had asked me to join them for supper. He was nowhere to be seen at the moment, most likely somewhere being insincere to my costar. So I slipped in next to her and said: “Thank you, but I’m afraid there’s no hope for this one.” She gave me an enigmatic tentative s
mile and looked down at her hands.

  Thirty-three years after Horses, now in her early sixties, her hair unkempt and grayish, she was instantly heartbreaking. The same lost-lamb expression was still there. But gone the voluptuous beauty, the young, firm body, and the promise that awaited in her sensuous mouth and clear blue eyes. Now, her thin, bony fingers were wrapped around my hand as she graciously and sincerely held forth on the things she thought positive and fixable about the production.

  Duncan, who had indeed been chatting up Joan, joined us, and we ordered a light supper. I don’t recall her drinking or even eating very much. She seemed a broken and sad woman who in no way was trying to maintain the ravishing beauty that had once been; and not asking, either, for any homage to be paid. At least ten years younger and looking ten years older than Joan, she seemed grateful for a night out and a friendly talk. A generous, curious, and nurturing dinner companion.

  I learned of her death while watching a 2011 awards ceremony. Sweeping across the stage came an actress also once voluptuously beautiful and precisely Susannah’s age at the time of her passing. “Doesn’t she look great?” my companion said. But as the camera closed in on her stretched-to-the-breaking point features, self-consciously styled and dyed hairdo, false breasts, and magnificently gowned seventy-two-year-old body, I saw a flash of her aged hands as she opened the envelope. I remembered with sadness Susannah York’s equally aged hands in mine; but also with deep respect the fact that she had allowed herself to remain, after all, still recognizably a woman.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  Never mind that the President of the United States was going to be placing a medal around her neck the next evening as a Kennedy Center honoree. And never mind that her fellow honorees were at their tables, happily surrounded by family and friends. Elizabeth Taylor was sitting glumly at a State Dinner in Washington, D.C., in 2002 accompanied by what appeared to be a professional handler.

  I watched closely as she sat disinterested in and disassociated from her surroundings.

  The ceremony that evening was to be hosted by then Secretary of State Colin Powell. Before it began Elizabeth got up and moved slowly out of the dining room. As she walked tentatively through a vast empty space toward the restrooms, I decided to get up and follow her. She was leaning heavily on a cane, her handler holding her other elbow as she took very small, almost baby-like steps. I came up beside her.

  “Hello, Elizabeth. It’s Frank.”

  “Oh, hi, baby.”

  “How are you?”

  “I can’t wait for this shit to be over!”

  It was finally over for Elizabeth in March 2011. On the morning of her death I went searching for and found the pashmina scarf she’d given me on our last night together almost exactly ten years earlier. It was approximately six feet in length, a deep rust color, with gold trim, and had embroidered on one corner in minute gold thread the maker’s mark: AS1893. Elizabeth’s mark on me, however, would be far more indelible.

  It was impossible to get the better of Elizabeth Taylor. She could be slowed down, thrown off course for a bit, even brought to tears, but she could not, ultimately, be bested in the arena where it really counts—the courage of one’s convictions. Doubt played no part in her psyche. She was exceptionally certain of herself and no outward setbacks—weight gains, garish dress, bad performances, ill health, sublime to ridiculous husbands—could slow her train. There was nothing modest about Elizabeth. She had a divine arrogance and would not take “No” for an answer even if the word were spoken directly into her face. She heard it only as “Not at the moment.”

  I stepped into her ring with the full knowledge that one or the other of us might land on the ropes occasionally. But how foolish of me to assume this titled heavyweight was ever going to hit the mat.

  We met secretly. It was 2001. I had just ended a five-year relationship and she was free of her last husband, Larry Fortensky. “I think you will like each other,” a mutual friend said to me at dinner in New York. “She is lonely, needs someone who won’t be afraid of her.”

  “What exactly is it I would be afraid of?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, that she’s Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “Is that all?”

  I would be working in L.A. starting the following week and a dinner was arranged. “Just the two of us,” I said. “Just her, no bodyguard, no assistant, and no dog.”

  Elizabeth agreed. Eight o’clock. Quiet place on the Strip.

  “And she can’t be late.” Which was like asking Stevie Wonder not to be blind.

  My instincts for self-preservation were by this point in my life well honed, and I asked our friend to let me know on my cell phone when he and Elizabeth would be pulling into the driveway of the restaurant.

  “Elizabeth has a favorite booth. They’re holding it for us. They’ll take you to it.”

  “Nope, call me when you’re in the driveway.”

  “All right.”

  At ten minutes to ten, my cell phone rang.

  “Frank, where are you? Elizabeth’s in the booth. She’s waiting.”

  “How long has she been there?”

  “At least ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be right in.”

  Why I thought riding around or sitting in my car for an hour and forty-five minutes was better than sitting in a restaurant for that length of time I don’t know, but it felt as though it would give me some measure of control over her. Exactly what Siegfried’s Roy must have thought about that tiger.

  “Elizabeth, Frank. Frank, Elizabeth,” said my friend. She raised those violet eyes, gave me a broad smile, took my hand, and pulled me down into the booth, as our mutual friend discreetly departed.

  Not much of our first conversation stays with me. It was the usual first-date stuff. But a small incident gave me a clue into the modus operandi of a woman who had pretty much ruled the world and the men in it since she became a star at twelve years of age.

  We were seated unobtrusively in one corner. The restaurant was dark and near empty. A man sitting alone across the way got up to leave and saw her. He came up to the table and began an obsequious tribute; not pushy, impolite, or even gushing. But he was vociferous in his praise and rather loquacious.

  Elizabeth was charming to him, smiling and warm, but at the moment he’d gone around and passed Go once too often, she slowly moved her hand over to mine and, putting her thumb into its center, gripped it with enormous strength. It was the gesture of someone saying, “Help me, please. I’m not sure I can survive another moment of this.” And it brought out the Tarzan in me. The Big Bad Tiger was going to eat my poor little Jane and I had to protect her.

  I nicely shut the guy down and he moved away, whereupon she turned to me with a “My hero” expression that could have brought her a sixth Oscar nomination.

  Round 1—Elizabeth.

  Outside on the street, standing next to her open car door, she moved into me, took both my hands, looked up, and said:

  “We will see each other again.” I would defy anyone hearing her speak that sentence to categorize it either as a question or a declaration.

  I rode back to my hotel, thinking what a great dinner companion she’d been; funny, curious, immediate, and unpretentious. And she really loved dirty jokes. They couldn’t be vulgar enough for her. I liked her very much. I liked her regular everyday girlishness. She’s probably mellowed, I thought, and just needs a friend. I can handle that, on my terms.

  Round 2—Frank.

  My phone was ringing as I opened my hotel room door.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this my little angel?”

  I told her at dinner that my name at one time had an apostrophe as in L’angella. Meaning little angel.

  “Hi Elizabeth.”

  “Would you like to come over to watch the Oscars at my house next week? There’ll be lots of people he
re you’ll know.”

  And I heard myself say, “Yes. Thanks.”

  Round 3—a draw.

  I arrived on time for Oscar night, but it seemed the guests had been there for a while already. José Eber, her hairdresser, a man I instantly liked, and who I knew genuinely loved and cared about Elizabeth, was the only person in the room I recognized. It looked as if someone had called Central Casting and said, “Send me two dozen people who don’t belong at an A or even B list Hollywood party.” They were a motley crew of friends of her housekeeper, someone’s cousin, some agent’s secretary. All obviously lured there in order to be able to say they’d watched the Oscars at Elizabeth Taylor’s house. None of them appeared to know each other and were hanging out in little groups of twos and threes, holding their buffet plates and talking quietly as if they all had just viewed the deceased.

  Two large comfortable chairs were set in front of a giant television in the living room. I was told one of them was mine and I sat down in it. The rest of the seats were scattered about significantly behind. The others took their places and for the next two hours we watched in silence. Not a sound from the gathered mourners. There was the occasional trip to the buffet table to reload and José would disappear upstairs during commercials, but for the most part it was some thirty people waiting for Godot.

  In the third hour, José came into the living room and said to no one in particular, “She’s coming down.” And moments later, Elizabeth appeared just as someone on the television was saying, “And the winner is . . .” She was in a beautiful floor-length caftan, hair black and big, jewelry costume-gaudy, and lips a flame red. She came directly toward me, took both my hands in hers, put her face up for a kiss, looked deeply into my eyes, and said:

  “Will you be my date tonight?”

  A can of Red Bull was placed on a table next to her chair and she sat down, faced the TV, reached across the tiny divide, and took my hand. She never once looked at or acknowledged her other guests, or paid much attention to the television set. No one behind us spoke after her arrival. Not a word. Like a group of supernumeraries on a film set, they remained stony silent as if in fear of possible expulsion, no doubt.