Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “I never do publicity,” says Warner. “James and Simone and Vanessa are all deluged with interviews on this trip, but I told them before I came over from London I would not waste my time being interviewed. I think interviews are boring.”

  “Well, the people at Warner Brothers are such idiots,” says Signoret, “they have my entire schedule all mixed up. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be right now, but now that Mr. New York Times is here, I suppose I might as well do the goddam interview. Let’s all go up to my room.”

  “I don’t do interviews,” says Warner, “so you go up alone and I’ll join you later.” Already it’s turning into a day to be grateful for small favors.

  Inside the room, Signoret throws the keys on the desk and kicks off her shoes. “So what is America coming to? I guess we’re going back to the McCarthy witch-hunts under Mr. Nixon. This is the first time I’ve never been allowed on TV in this country. Two years ago I won an Emmy and now they won’t let me work because I refused to answer their stupid questions in order to get a visa. I have what they call a ‘B-2 visitor’s permit,’ but I have been refused an ‘H-1 work permit.’ Most Americans have no idea of the insulting questions you have to answer to work in this country. ‘Are you a homosexual?’ ‘Do you take drugs?’ ‘Are you planning to kill the President?’ My dear, if I was planning to kill the President, would I say yes? It’s The Crucible all over again. They have always suspected me of being a Communist here, anyway, because during the war I worked as a typist for a pro-German newspaper in Paris. I could have become a collaborationist, I suppose. I had no conscience in those days. But I didn’t. I was never a Nazi, but many of my friends were Nazis. I was never a Communist, either, but I was thrown in with people who were rightish, leftish, everything—and we were always signing peace appeals and taking stands against things the American government didn’t like. So they make me sign all sorts of insulting papers now in order to work in America. I will not do it. It’s a question of pride. I choose not to be insulted. If they want me to work here, it’s their problem. All it means to me is that now I won’t have to go on TV and talk to Mr. Merv What’s-His-Name. Now that I know I don’t do TV I don’t have to look good, so I think I’ll booze it up.”

  She calls room service and orders a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin, a bottle of whiskey, two bottles of Scotch, a bottle of brandy, and lots of ice. “Let’s have a drink while we wait,” she says, pouring a Scotch into a bathroom glass. It tastes like toothpaste. “Now what do you want to ask me?”

  “Well, about The Sea Gull …”

  “It all started when I made The Deadly Affair in London for Sidney Lumet. James Mason, David Warner, Harry Andrews, Sidney and I all got along so well that we said, ‘Let’s do a Chekhov one day.’ People are always saying that, but Sidney is the first director who ever lived up to his word. One year later he called me in the South of France and said we’d do it and this past summer we all went to Stockholm and did it. We accomplished it all through a horrible selfishness and an enormous bath of love. The twelve people in the cast had the most incestuous love affair I’ve ever seen. Everyone was in love, from David Warner, who is 27, right up to that phony old baroness, who is 73—all laughing together, crying together, moved by the same things. We didn’t just go to work and then go home to the hotel at night. We lived together in each other’s rooms, ate together . . . suddenly The Sea Gull became Hamlet and I was Gertrude, David was Hamlet, Mason was Claudius, Vanessa was Ophelia . . . we were like children playing a game and we played it that way in the movie. Why do people take LSD? To travel, see colors. Well, to us, playing Chekhov was a trip. I don’t sleep with women, but I loved Vanessa Redgrave so much that I took her home with me to Paris and she stayed a week at my house in the country. We couldn’t bear to be separated. It all sounds like crap, but for once it’s all true.”

  Is she satisfied with the final result? “This woman I play, this Arkadina—she’s a bitch, the kind of woman I detest. But bitchery is something I know about. I’m no saint. I also know how to play older women. I am one. And I’ve lived, my friend. I never look at anybody but myself in my films. All actors are like this. The others, who say they don’t look only at themselves, they are liars. But this is the first time I ever looked at the other actors. That sounds like crap too, no? You will write it and it will sound like crap. That’s why I hate interviews. Let’s have another drink.”

  She lights up a Marlboro and flicks the ashes all over the Plaza’s imitation Versailles rug. “I started out playing whores. I’d rather have played a pharmaceutical student, but it was all I was offered. The minute I felt the label, I quit. Then after I won the Oscar playing that Mrs. What’s-Her-Name in Room at the Top all I was offered was middle-aged women who seduce young men. I don’t go to bed with boys young enough to be my sons and I won’t play them. So I didn’t work much after that. But I enjoyed doing it that one time. It wasn’t the greatest book ever written, but it was a damn good story. I said to myself, ‘It won’t make any money,’ so I asked for a fee instead of a percentage. That was the biggest mistake of my career. If I had accepted a percentage of the film, I’d have enough money to make my grandchildren rich. After that, I got offered mountains of scripts in Hollywood, but they were all things Bette Davis didn’t want to do 20 years ago! I didn’t feel the need to be a Hollywood star. It’s all right—the sun is nice and it’s nice to have a car sent for you each morning—as long as you don’t do crappy pictures and work with crappy directors. I worked with Stanley Kramer on Ship of Fools there. He’s no Jean-Luc Godard, but he knows it. The truth is, I don’t work much because I have a husband and a marriage I have to hold together. We’ve had stormy periods but we must be doing something right, because we’ve been together 18 years.”

  Signoret is 47, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. In 1947, while working as a movie extra in Paris, she married Yves Allegret, a director. Two years later, she met Yves Montand, whom she married in June, 1960, shortly after her divorce from Allegret. The marriage has often been heated enough to make headlines, “but only when we are separated. Don’t ask me about Marilyn Monroe. I’ve had a lifetime of Marilyn Monroe. That happened while we were apart. Now I never take a job during a period when Yves is working. It creates a split. Recently I played Lady Macbeth on the stage in London and I was so miserable being away from him that it was a disaster. The reviews were so horrible I couldn’t even read them. We shot The Sea Gull in only 27 days, so I wasn’t away long. Now Yves will do On a Clear Day You Can See Forever in Hollywood with Streisand, and I will stay home and play the actor’s wife and enjoy myself. There are people in Paris I wouldn’t have a cup of tea with. Hollywood is no different. It just has more idiots that anyplace else, that’s all. It’s not my place and I don’t have to belong. I’m a passenger in transit there. I have no secretary, no maid, no dresser—my only entourage is the bellboys at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In France, my home is a country house in Normandy. Instead of going to Maxim’s every night with four mink coats, I have everyone to my home. We show 16-millimeter movies, musicians rehearse there, writers come and write there. Resnais wrote La Guerre est Finie there. It’s that kind of house. In Paris, I also have an apartment which used to be an old bookstore.”

  The door opens and in comes a preacher from Dallas who teaches a religious cinema course in a Baptist seminary. Do you love it? He has tried to interview Signoret earlier in the day, but his tape recorder broke. Now he’s back. Signoret is bored. “Just say Sidney Lumet has no talent, I hate him, I hate Chekhov, the woman I play is a crook, Vanessa Redgrave is a cute little actress, David Warner is a spoiled brat, the whole thing has been written by a phony baroness, and I did it all for money.” She winks and pours another Scotch. The preacher looks as though he has been slapped, but he smiles to let her know he has enjoyed this moment of actressy eccentricity.

  The interview continues for half an hour, then Signoret rolls up her sleeves as though she is about to tackle a hard day�
��s wash, and says: “Look. I have no problems with religion. I’m a complete agnostic and I don’t believe in God. Life after death is bull and the principle that we should live a certain kind of life in one place because it will prepare us for another life somewhere else is ridiculous! There’s no mystery, no heaven, no life hereafter. For others maybe, but not for me.”

  The preacher from Dallas flees as though he has just seen the devil himself. Signoret licks her chops, turns on her sinister smile from Diabolique, and says, “Now. Where were we?”

  Another question is forming when the door opens again, admitting David Warner, who informs Signoret they are all due in an hour at the apartment of Tony Walton, the Sea Gull set designer and ex-husband of Julie Andrews. “Merdel Merde! Those idiots at Warner Brothers have not sent the car around and I can’t get anyone on the telephone.” She dials Warner Brothers. “Hello, dear,” she says to the operator, “let me speak to the publicity department . . . what do you mean, they’re all out? Are they all sick or still out to lunch? This is Miss Signoret . . .S-I-G-N . . . what do you mean, they’ve all gone home? (Covering the phone.) Do you believe it? Not a soul left in the whole office. Hello . . . yes, I need some money and a limousine and . . . what do you mean, who do I know? They want to know who I know. What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them who you know. . .”

  “Hello . . . I know Kate Hepburn . . . and the woman who owns the Algonquin Hotel . . . and George Cukor . . . no, no, merde! . . . he doesn’t work in the legal department . . . he’s a director!” She slams the receiver down. “Idiots!” This is followed by a great deal of excitement over sending a telegram to Vanessa Redgrave, whom they plan to join in Hollywood in a few days, and which I have to write, since Signoret insists actors cannot spell. Then she goes into the bathroom and begins to wash her hair. The interview seems hopeless. I pack up my pencils.

  “Tell Mr. New York Times to stay as long as he likes,” she yells to David Warner from under the soapsuds. “If I didn’t like him, I would’ve thrown him out a long time ago.”

  I leave where I came in. “Actually,” says Warner, tossing his bangs as the door closes, “I never give interviews myself. I made that perfectly clear when I left London. No interviews, I said …”

  Patricia Neal

  Patricia Neal sat on a big yellow blanket in an old chair with the bottom falling out of it and grinned. Watching Patricia Neal grin is like tasting ice cream for the very first time. There is no grin like it anywhere. It starts casually, down deep inside where the clockwork is, winds its way slowly up, catching on around the lips, then pauses, connecting along the way with some part of the brain that thinks sunny thoughts, and finally breaks wide open, letting in the world or the room or wherever she happens to be when she’s grinning, and everybody feels at home. In a life full of minus signs, it’s been a big plus, that grin.

  “Mind you, I wasn’t always this happy,” she said in her tiny dressing room in the back of an old warehouse on West 26th Street where she was between shots on The Subject Was Roses, the first movie she has made since she suffered those three hideous near-fatal strokes three years ago. “When I recovered from nearly dying, I hated life. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I hated the nurse, I hated my husband Roald Dahl, who had to do all the housework and take care of all four of the children, I hated God, I lost all contact with religion, I really resented everything and everyone for letting me live to be a vegetable. I hated life for a year and a half, then I started learning how to be a person again and now I’ve loved life for a year and a half. And I love it a lot.”

  She waved a goodbye kiss to Pat Hingle, an old friend who had dropped by for lunch served in plastic bags and paper cups, then sat down again and lit up a menthol cigarette. She was wearing an orange dress and an old brown sweater thrown over her shoulders and her hair was tied up in a brown scarf. It was a far cry from the glamorous days on Hollywood movie sets when she was the hottest thing since peanut butter, but only one thing seemed important: Pat Neal was working again. The illness has left her with a slight limp and when she speaks the words form slowly and sometimes get twisted around her tongue like bacon around a fork, a fault she covers up by becoming veddy British (“married” comes out “maddied,” etc.). Otherwise, she’s the same staunch, valiant head-held-high lady she always was. Maybe better. A new strength has crept in where an elegant Kentucky-born, Tennessee-bred softness used to reign. “Coming back to New York was my husband’s idea. I didn’t choose this film, he did. You know, Frank Gilroy wrote it for me to play on the stage, but it came at the time when my little daughter Olivia died and I was too upset to do a play. But they held out for me when it came time to do the film, waiting to see if I would be well enough to do it. So Roald just signed me up without even asking me if I wanted to do it and now I’m glad he did, because I think it’s the best film I’ve ever made. I think I like it even better than Hud or Face in the Crowd, which are my other two favorites. And I tell you, being back in New York is the best therapy in the world for me. I was pretty scared, let me tell you. I didn’t know if I could do it or not. I can’t learn lines anymore. They just go right out of my head. My illness just wiped out my memory. I didn’t even know my husband’s name when I came to, or the names of any of my children. I still can’t remember the names of most of the films I was in or the names of people I worked with. I remember everything that ever happened to me in my life, even the things I’d like to forget, but the part of my brain that was injured is the part that remembers names. Oh, I remember The Fountainhead and The Breaking Point, but not the others. People come up to me and say, ‘I just loved you in The Hasty Heart, and I say, ‘Let me see now, which one was that?’ In The Subject Was Roses I have one four-page scene of dialogue where I talk to myself. It was very difficult. Valerie, my companion from Great Missenden, my village in England, came with me. At home Roald had six or eight friends a day dropping in from the village to help me with my lines, and now when I forget, Valerie helps me. She is one of the people who helped me most. She started me playing bridge again and she came with me last year when I made a fourteen-minute speech for brain-injured children at the—oh damn, I can’t remember the name of the hotel.”

  “The Waldorf,” said Valerie.

  “Oh yes, that big ugly one on Park Avenue. Everyone has helped me. People have been more wonderful to me than I ever dreamed. It sometimes takes a big blow like I got to make people re-evaluate the importance of human beings. On this film alone, I couldn’t have made it without everyone’s help. I love the actors, I love the producer, Edgar Lansbury, I love the director, Ulu Grosbard, I love my hairdresser, who comes from ten miles away from where I was raised in Tennessee. They’ve all helped me over the hurdles.”

  And for Pat Neal, there have been a lot of hurdles. “Listen,” she is quick to point out, “my troubles didn’t begin with these strokes. So many rotten things have happened to me in my life that sometimes I think I was born under a very nasty star. Nobody else in my family has had the miserable luck I’ve had, so it’s not something that runs in my family. I left home when I was 18, and I haven’t lived with my family since, but we are very close. My mother is 68 years old and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. My sister lives in Atlanta and my younger brother is a teacher in—wait a minute, I’ll look up the name of the town in my address book, because I can’t remember—Wimberly, Texas. See? I can remember a lot of things. My father died of a heart attack in 1949. I came to New York from Tennessee and met Eugene O’Neill, who didn’t use me in the play I auditioned for, but he liked me enough to get me into something else and a lot of people saw me there and I got to understudy in The Voice of the Turtle and on closing night I got a telegram to do the Lillian Heilman play, Another Part of the Forest. I didn’t want to do that play, I wanted to do John Loves Mary, which Richard Rodgers was producing. I remember he wouldn’t give me the money I wanted and I got so mad I told him Lillian Heilman wanted me for her play and he just told me to go ahead and do i
t. I love him, but he was the stingiest man I ever met. Anyway, I did the Hellman play and that’s what got me to Hollywood, where I bet you can’t guess what my first movie was. It was John Loves Mary and I was very bad in it. I had been very happy in New York. I lived in an apartment with four friends, then in a fifth-floor walkup with Jean Hagen on Lexington Avenue that didn’t even have a kitchen or a john and we used to take baths a block away at a friend’s house. The happiest part of my life has always revolved around this town. My troubles began when I went to Hollywood. I started going with Gary Cooper and ended up in analysis. When we broke up, I went to a woman psychiatrist in Philadelphia and nearly had a nervous breakdown. Then I ended up in Atlanta and hid out there for six months in my sister’s house and went to a wonderful psychiatrist who saved my sanity and got me in shape to go back to work. I came back to New York and did Lillian Heilman’s play—I can’t remember the name—”

  “It was The Children’s Hour,” said Valerie.

  “Oh yes, The Children’s Hour. That’s when I met Roald. You see, this interview is doing me a lot of good. It’s making me remember. Let’s see. Oh yes, I couldn’t wait to get pregnant, but after we were married I couldn’t have any children, so I went to a doctor who blew up my tubes—well, my darlin’, that’s what they do, you know—women are so complicated—and then they started coming right and left. Now we’re going to stop. No more children. I don’t think I could stand the pain of watching misfortunes happen to any more children. First there was Theo, who was hit by a taxi and we didn’t think he’d live. The poor little thing lived in a critical condition for two years with a tube in his head to drain the fluid from his brain. He’s eight now and he’s going to be all right. He has a hole in his arm and bless his heart, he keeps breaking it all the time. But at least he will live. Then there’s Ophelia, who is 4, and Tessa, the eldest, who is 11, and the baby, Lucy, who was born two years ago during my strokes. We didn’t know if she would live either. My daughter Olivia died of the measles when she was 13 and there was nothing anyone could do. It was one of those terrible fluke accidents. Then my mother-in-law died suddenly. Then I went to California to make a film for John Ford and we had just started shooting when I had the first stroke. I was pregnant with Lucy and if I had not had a husband like Roald I would not be alive today and neither would the baby. He had been discussing Theo’s brain injury with this brain surgeon who was my agent’s brother-in-law. We had met him at a cocktail party, and I remember thinking, ‘I hope he never has to operate on me!’ When I became paralyzed, Roald recognized the symptoms, picked up the phone and called him, and they rushed me into surgery in Los Angeles. Only quick thinking saved me. They didn’t think I’d have any brain left when I got off the operating table.