Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “At first I simply refused to get out of bed. I hated everyone and wanted to die. They treated me like a child. I was forced to say the alphabet. I had to learn all over again how to spell and how to say dog and cat and hello. I tell you, I was a vegetable, that’s the only word for it. But something happens to you, I guess. You just accept what has happened to you and you get stronger and stronger. Everyone was so kind. Mildred Dunnock and Betsy Drake took care of my children before we left California for England. I went to a swimming pool in a military hospital every day to learn how to use my limbs again. People donated their time, and it was all free. I never had to pay for anything but my leg massages and my therapist. And I don’t know what I’d do without all the insurance we had through Actors Equity and the Screen Actors Guild. We can’t get sick again, any of us. We’ve used up all the insurance. I wore a cast and my legs were held in by big leather braces until recently, but now I’m fine. Working in this movie and being back in New York again, seeing all my old friends, has done more than any braces could do. It has proved to me I can carry a work load again. I don’t take any medicine or pills and I even drink better than I used to.” A wide grin breaks out like a June morning. “And I love cocktails. I love martinis and old-fashioneds, but I love martinis the best. I also smoke too much, but I can’t stop. I once had a doctor who couldn’t stand cigarettes and he always warned me and lectured me about smoking. He died of lung cancer two years ago and he didn’t even smoke. I tried to quit once, for an entire week, and I cried for seven days. The first thing I remember when I woke up from the operations was seeing this blurry figure looking out the window smoking a cigarette. It was Roald. I didn’t even know who he was, but I reached my hand out for his cigarette and now he says that was the first sign he had that I would be all right. Now I just try to carry on with my life as normally as possible. I have to dance in the movie and although they wouldn’t let me see the rushes, they tell me I was fine. Do you have a light?”

  They were calling her for makeup. Melvyn Douglas was arriving at three to say hello. It was a busy afternoon and time to leave. “My darlin’, my darlin’, listen to me and remember something. All of these rotten things that have happened to me have certainly changed my outlook on life. But I look around me at all the crime and the terrible things people do to each other and it makes me wonder if the world is going straight to hell. If only I could tell people how lucky they are. I’ve learned to love people and life again and I’ve learned there is definitely something bigger than all of us up there or out there somewhere that keeps us going. I am not Joan of Arc of 1968 and I sure as hell don’t want anyone to think I’m a martyr. I’m opinionated and sassy. They tell me Ronald Reagan may get into the White House. If that happens, I swear I’ll give up my citizenship. I hope the last has happened to me for the rest of my life, but my point is I had to have a severe blow to make me learn how to care all over again, after I had forgotten how. That’s the one thing I got out of all this. I don’t think I will ever forget again.”

  Outside, green buds were poking out on the grimy trees growing out of the dirty cement. Grips and electricians and even the tired studio cop guarding the warehouse entrance chatted gaily. A warm breeze blew the skirts of the girls in their spring dresses. Maybe I’m crazy, but it looked like people were smiling. And why not? Patricia Neal was back. It was a lovely thing to smile about.

  Zoe Caldwell

  “I don’t give a tuppence of crap for being a star,” says Zoe Caldwell, who whether she likes it or not, has suddenly become one. Why? Because in spite of her attempts to hide from her own success, she is so remarkable in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that the public will have it no other way. What’s more, she would have been a star a long time ago if she’d only stayed in one place long enough.

  Like Porgy, she’s been on her way for years. Word would sift down from places like Manitoba about her Mother Courage or Saint Joan. People would bring back paeans of praise for her Ophelia in Minneapolis or her Cleopatra in Canada. Everywhere people would grab their programs, run their fingers along the cast list and remark: “It says her name is Zoe Caldwell, but who is she?” Broadway almost found out when she briefly replaced Anne Bancroft as a demented, hunchback nun in The Devils in 1965 and later dropped by for a few days in 1966 to pick up a Tony for her waspish Southern society columnist in Tennessee Williams’ ill-fated Slapstick Tragedy. But then, in typical Caldwell fashion, she went off to Niagara-on-the-Lake and got lost again playing Shaw. That’s the way she is. And now that she’s back and Broadway’s got her (as they used to say in the ads for Clark Gable-Greer Garson movies), people are still wanting to know: Just who is Zoe Caldwell?

  For clues, examine this. You go to the interview backstage at the Helen Hayes, expecting Miss Brodie—frumpy, middle-aged, with a layer of tub around her middle, held together with a torn corset, hair in a bun, peering down through schoolmarm spectacles and serving delicately sweetened sassafras tea in dainty blue teacups. Instead, you fall into a whirlwind. Here is this sexy—yes, sexy—dame (34 years old, and you don’t believe it) racing about being photographed by a man with a high-speed camera that sounds like a machine gun going off (“It’s like an adventure!” she squeals), with a soft, girlish complexion and what appears to be 8 pounds of red hair, flying every which direction.

  Sipping brandy and puffing filter cigarettes, she throws her stockinged legs across the end of a pink and green chaise longue and talks a blue streak. “No, I’m not like Miss Brodie, except for one thing. I’ve never been married and I’m most certainly in my prime.” Friendly freckles sparkle across her countenance and one suspects that, hidden away in the dumpy old-maid schoolteacher clothes she wears as Miss Brodie, there beats in Zoe Caldwell the heart of a swinger. She has had five major love affairs, among them an Australian guitar maker and several leading men in the theatre (In 1961, when she was playing Bianca to Albert Finney’s Cassio in Othello at Stratford-on-Avon, she was named corespondent in his wife’s divorce suit). “Darling, you don’t think when I was going to all those places playing all those roles all over the world, I was alone, do you?” Right now she is “very much in love, luv” with Robert Whitehead, the producer of Jean Brodie, and spends her spare time dashing about with a stray cat named Mop in a yellow jeep with a red canvas top between his New York apartment and his Bucks County farm—“75 acres with a lake and an 18th-century stone farmhouse with lots of fireplaces.” Here she glows.

  “My life is happier now than ever before, but not necessarily because I’m at last on Broadway. I don’t think Broadway was ever a goal. I know I’m an actor—will be one till I go—you know, die—and if tomorrow I get a call from Manitoba wanting me to have another go at Mother Courage, I’ll go. My next job is always the one I’m offered. The biggest mistake creative artists make is playing it safe. Is this the right play, is this the right part, is this the right place? It’s the same in life. Is this the right man for me to love on this particular Sunday? I’ve never lived my life like that. I want a child—oh please God, let me have a child— and it will be raised with teddy bears and ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’ and all that, but I don’t intend to plan out its life. I won’t spend my time with mouthwashes and dusting off sofas. I’m a Virgo. Squeaky clean we are.

  “I’ve always taken chances. I began in Australia where there was no theatre. Only two men like the Shuberts who would bring tours over from New York or London. I’ve been a professional since the age of 9, but by the time I was 18 and ready to go into rep, there was no rep. Then a bloke came out from London and started one and I got to do everything from a tour with Judith Anderson in Medea to leads in Major Barbara and Blithe Spirit. It was good-o, luv. But if I had packed me bags earlier and really planned a career, I would never have gotten to play so many roles so young. Then when I went to England, to Stratford-on-Avon, there I was with six years of leads behind me, but all I could get was a contract to do walk-ons. But it never occurred to me to say, ‘Hell, I’m only walking on so I’
ll only make up half me face.’ I was an actress and they saw it in my work. Tony Richardson got me all dressed up exotic-like and blew up a big part for me in Pericles and in 1959 I went back and played the first fairy in Peter Hall’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream and worked with Laughton, Ian Holm, Dorothy Tutin.”

  There was Othello, too. Mary Ure was Desdemona and Paul Robeson was Othello—“a marvelous bloke.” She leaps to her feet and does an imitation of Robeson trying to do improvisations because “Tony Richardson had just come back from America that year and was mad-keen on the Actors Studio and Robeson just jumped up and down and said, ‘Yeah men’ and we all thought we were method actors.

  “Then Michael Langham rang me up when I was at the Royal Court in London and said a girl at Stratford had become pregnant”—she roars approval at the thought of anyone becoming pregnant at Stratford—“and could I play Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost and I went straight back and worked with Paul Scofield and Kate Reid and then went to Toronto to do a telly with Sean Connery and while I was there another bloke rank me up and asked me to come to Manitoba. I didn’t even know where the hell Manitoba was, but I went. Most of my career has been just saying yes to blokes on the phone.”

  When she went home to Australia, she found herself “out of tune with my own country,” took off on a vagabond trip up the coast in an old car, ran out of money, got caught in a cyclone, and hocked everything to get to Minneapolis. “I just said, ‘Yes, I’ll come’ on the phone—I’m not very good at signing me name to contracts, but if I say I’ll be there, I’ll be there. So when I arrived, I discovered Equity didn’t want me because I was an alien and for the first six weeks of rehearsals every time there was a union meeting they’d hide me. Even Bob Whitehead’s cousin Hume Cronyn voted against me. But they finally let me in and I had a marvelous year playing Three Sisters and The Miser and then I got that old ding-ding danger signal that things were getting too cozy and I went back to Canada and did a very second-rate tour of little country towns where people buy tickets and never come, you know, like people who pay $20 to the Cancer Fund to rid themselves of guilt. I was miserable.”

  Back to Minneapolis for starring roles in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Way of the World and Lord knows what else. Then she moved in with the Cronyns in Manhattan and understudied Anne Bancroft as the nun in The Devils and one night, when the star wrenched her back, Zoe went on and for the performances that followed audiences went wild. “It was good-o, luv—I’d walk up Fifth Avenue and watch myself in the store windows. One block I’d be me and the next I’d be a hunchback nun trying to have an orgasm”—she walks around the dressing room like a hunchback. Then Alan Schneider offered her Slapstick Tragedy. She played the society columnist like a cross between Hermione Gingold and a pelican, won lots of praise, then disappeared again.

  “By this time I was already living with Bob Whitehead, so we took off after I did the Shaw festival in Canada and picked up the Arthur Millers and toured the Caribbean for eight months with the Cronyns. It’s the first time I ever enjoyed leisure time and just had fun. Once in London, when I was out of work, I got so neurotic I got a job as a mother’s help, scrubbing pots and making breakfast. I also got a job in a pickle factory. Acting is what I need to spend my excess energy on, to make me a good member of society. Without it, I’d probably become sort of nymphomaniac or whatever kind of maniac presented itself. I’ve never been to an analyst. Actors who need psychiatrists are simply not doing enough acting.”

  Nobody is more surprised about her success as Jean Brodie than Zoe herself. “Actually Bob wasn’t keen on me for the part. It was the playwright Jay Allen, whom I’d met through Bob, who convinced him. I was sitting around the kitchen table one night helping them think of the right star and suddenly Jay said, ‘I know who could play Brodie,’ and we both said, ‘Who?’ and she said me. I had seen Vanessa Redgrave twice in the role in London—I know her quite well—and it seemed absurd. She’s beautiful and I’ve never been pretty. People used to say, ‘Give Zoe an ingenue and she’ll give her stoop shoulders and glasses every time.’

  “But I liked Brodie and that is my only requirement. I like her so much that every night I strip down stark naked and start becoming Brodie from scratch—I pull at my hair here, twist it a bit there, get the feel of her shoes. I couldn’t play any part I didn’t like. If I had a thing against blondes, I couldn’t play a blonde. There are no parts I can’t play—Nazis, Lesbians, nuns—I’d like them all. One thing I’ve never done is play myself. I’d like to play a modern girl now, a part I could create. I’d love to go to Arizona and make a western movie. I don’t know how to ride a horse, but I could learn. Oh, the trouble I’ve had with agents who want me to be a star. I will not appear in the Players Guide because they don’t know how to label me. Ingenue, leading lady, walk-on—I’ve done them all. One woman came to interview me. ‘What kind of actress are you?’ she asked. I thought for a moment. ‘Character,’ I said, ‘I’d have to say a character actress.’ ‘Does that mean you never get the man?’ she said.” Zoe grabs my shoe and falls back on her dressing-room chair, convulsed. “Well, I got the man when I played Cleopatra and I was sexy as hell in that, luv.”

  She is tough on herself: “When critics say I am all technique and no warmth, they are sometimes right. What all those people at the Actors Studio need to do is learn some of my technique and I need to go to the Actors Studio. I have a lot of power and a great technical facility. I am never worried that I will lose my strength, but I have to watch my technique or it will push my character off the stage. I did that on opening night. I lost all my saliva and started out on such a high, forced level that I distorted Brodie. When I insult my own taste, it doesn’t matter how many people tell me I’m marvelous, I bloody well know I’m not.”

  But about that success: after all these years, won’t a four-figure weekly salary change a girl? “Money! Hah! I have no fur coats, no money in the bank, nothing I can say, ‘Look, there’s a bit of security.’ Look, luv, I used to furnish my whole apartment for 50 bucks at the Salvation Army. Now I shop at Bloomingdale’s. But there’s not much difference in the junk you get at the Salvation Army and the junk you get at Bloomingdale’s except the junk at Bloomingdale’s costs more.”

  It’s time for her to start stripping down to the nude to create Miss Brodie again. “A STAR . . .” she roars, halting me at the door with a voice that is half Jean Brodie, half Thunderhead, Son of Flicka. “I don’t think I am a star! But if I ever become one, I think I could cope.” She grins so widely that three wrinkles appear in the middle of her pretty nose. “And if I ever had to, I could go back to the Salvation Army next week.”

  Stars Fell on Alabama—Again

  Selma, Ala.

  Saturday night in Selma, when the stink from the paper factory settles over the town like fallout, is usually the loneliest night of the week. Nothing much to do. Some folks go down to the Rotary Club meeting, others wait for the picture show to open at eight o’clock. The teenagers ride up and down Main Street waving to their friends. Moths hang around the street lamps. Folks drink a beer and go to bed early.

  But tonight is different. The movie people are in town and there hasn’t been this much excitement since the murder of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo put Selma on the map. The movie people are here shooting Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and although most people in Selma have never heard of Mrs. McCullers, her novel, or the film’s star Alan Arkin, they’re out in groups, hanging around street corners, listening to the LSU-Alabama football game on their transistor radios, and waiting for the action to begin.

  A few blocks from the now-famous Pettus Bridge, the spot on the Alabama River where the peace march from Selma to Montgomery was halted two years ago by state troopers throwing tear gas, the movie company has set up headquarters for its ten-week stay in an old B.F. Goodrich tire store next to the bus depot. Here Robert Ellis Miller, the director, is finishing his blackberry cobbler. “Frankly, we were wor
ried about coming to Selma,” says Miller, picking a blackberry seed from his teeth, “after the unsavory reputation of the past few years. But once he learned this was not a film about racial problems, the mayor said, ‘It will give us an opportunity to show the rest of the world we’re not a bad town.’ We’ve had no incidents, nothing but cooperation. I think most of the people here are ashamed of what happened. The fire department even sent over a giant new 85-foot-high snorkel crane to shoot over the top of the Ferris wheel in the carnival scene. The Coca-Cola people flew down a Sprite poster in their company jet for a scene in an alley. The local people are playing roles in the picture and they are marvelous—the boyfriend of Mick Kelly is a part-time fireman I found at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He had to do a love scene with a 60-man crew looking on and he did it. The biggest surprise is going to be Sondra Locke, the 17-year-old girl who is playing Mick Kelly. This girl is phenomenal. I think she’s been in the business 30 years, she knows so much about acting.