Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  He swallows another pain-killer. And out on the street near the Colosseum, a magazine truck delivers a new batch of Italian magazines blaring the headline: “Omar Sharif —The Screen Hero Who Owns The World!”

  Makes you wonder how they get up in the morning.

  Miss U.S.A

  Watching the “live from the beautiful Miami oceanfront Miss U.S.A. Beauty Pageant” last Saturday night on CBS, it must have occurred to most sane viewers that somebody was pulling their legs. Of course all beauty pageants are satires on an American dream as archaic as rose-covered cottages and chicken every Sunday. Yet every year the most beautiful (and, one suspects, psycho-sexually disoriented) archetypes of the female species line up on some drafty stage somewhere (usually by an ocean) and exhibit their Clairol hair and their Gardol smiles. They run for Miss Everything.

  In an age when the creeps and the freaks seem to be running the show, the old-fashioned American dreams make their claims for survival. And in some bizarre way, remind themselves of their own existence.

  The Miss U.S.A. Beauty Pageant was like a cattle auction. The only difference is that the winning cow gets a movie contract. You know what that means. Miss U.S.A. invariably ends up as a topless waitress serving cigars in the background of a Rock Hudson flick. Gives her something to tell her grandchildren. And, in its own way, I suppose it’s as valid as telling them, “See this scar under Granny’s eye—got that beating up a cop in front of the Columbia chemistry lab.”

  This year, the pageant looked like a skit from New Faces. Sponsored by an underarm deodorant, the 51 contestants were so beautiful they all looked exactly alike. (Beauty queens are like Chinese.) So to make them stand apart, somebody had the bright idea of parading them around a platform in Halloween costumes that looked like they were sewn together at the last minute by each girl’s Aunt Tillie.

  The idea obviously was to represent some aspect of the contestant’s home state. I didn’t mind the ones in blue jeans and kilts and monkey fur so much, or the flappers and Scarlett O’Haras, or Miss Washington dressed like an Alpine mountain climber, but things got icky for poor Miss Montana, with pickaxe and miner’s helmet. Miss Nevada looked like a cash register. Miss Massachusetts got drowned in an ugly floor-length black Pilgrim gown, Miss District of Columbia wore a miniskirt made out of an American flag (which, even in this madhouse era, must have offended someone other than myself).

  Poor, dear Miss Tennessee was pinned into an LP hillbilly record with a big hole through the middle to expose her bust-line, another unfortunate girl came out as a whole life-size Christmas tree with a star on top of her head, and my favorite wore a billboard which looked suspiciously like an “Eat at Joe’s” sign. She must have been from Brooklyn. There was not one all-American Negro girl on display, and even Miss Hawaii came from Boston.

  After Paul Anka screeched his way through a chorus of “I Wanna Be a Yankee Doodle Girl, Cause 68’s a Yankee Doodle Year” about three keys beyond his range or ability, Miss U.S.A.’s answer to Bert Parks came out and introduced himself as Bob Barker. Everyone clapped a lot, like they had actually heard of him or something, then June Lockhart told the girls that “only 15 of you ever get to the swimsuit and formal evening gowns, but each and everyone of you is already a winner.”

  The Fabulous Fifteen were marched out from their slots in the lineup while the other losers smiled bravely through salty tears. Then Bob Barker asked the Fabulous Fifteen questions. This was the most hilarious part of the show and I doubt if Mel Brooks could have written it better.

  Miss Connecticut was interested in astrology, “but I'm not sure it’s valid.” “I’m a Sagittarius—what about me?” asked Barker. “Frank—giggle giggle—Sinatra’s a—giggle giggle—Sagittarius too—giggle giggle.” (I saw doom waiting in the wings for Miss Connecticut.)

  Miss Alabama, a busty physical type, said she loved diving from high diving boards. “I jes’ do some back flops and then some other stuff and you know. You c’n do anythin’ with a sweatshirt on.” “Why a sweatshirt?” “Cause it keeps ya from stingin’ when ya hitcha back.” Miss Nevada was a prelaw student dancing in a Las Vegas nightclub. Miss New Mexico sounded like Eve Arden and wanted to be a female James Bond. Finally, Miss Maryland, a dental assistant said, “I love my work except for the ones who bite.”

  Barker, a real all-around charmer, replied: “Next time I see you you’ll be all scarred up.” I tell you the show had class.

  While they were hustled offstage to get into their swimsuits for the next relay, June Lockhart faced the viewers with the astounding news that: “It’s amazing what the girls want to do with their lives. They all want to get married.” Then she admitted several want to be movie stars and one might like to try brain surgery. “Their handwriting runs from chicken track to pure undecipherable, and one girl even misspelled the name of her own home town.” Dear June. June tells all.

  Then they showed topless baby pictures of four girls (What about the other 11? Didn’t they have tops?), followed by the “parade of bathing beauties,” in which the girls wore identical Catalina swimsuits designed to give them the uniform appearance of underwater concrete statues in an old Esther Williams movie.

  Then last year’s Miss U.S.A., a has-been already, stepped out to the White X in tears, and when the applause died down, said: “Did you ever see a llama sneeze? I did. I counted the raindrops in Waikiki, slept in a log cabin, climbed the Space Needle, and saw Disneyland. I even met a Green Beret. All I can say is thank you and goodbye.”

  But it wasn’t over yet. We had the annual “super extravaganza number” to get through, with all the girls tap dancing with canes like paraplegics doing an old Virginia Mayo number. In the evening gown competition, there was so much chiffon (Purity of spirit, you know, goes hand in hand with Pepsi) that I almost cheered for one flowered print.

  While they broke for a mouthwash commercial, June Lockhart asked the home viewers to get a pencil and jot down their own favorites: “See who’s the best judge in your family.” In the apartment where I watched the show, there was a mad dash at this point for the hot hors d’oeuvres, while I made a mental note to vote for the girl in the flowered print.

  Ten girls were eliminated fast after the tap dancing. (I lost sight of the girl in the flowered print—dark horses go fast.) The five finalists were Blue Ribbon stock. They had to be brilliant, witty, philosophical, feet-on-the-ground, and gorgeous in 10 seconds, as they stepped into an isolated soundproof booth, like the one Daisy Clover went bananas in, to answer the Big Intellectual Question of the year: “As a spokesman for the Younger Generation, what is the best advice you can give to people your own age?” The dancer from Las Vegas said, “To thine own self be true,” and I crossed her off my list. The others looked at Heaven, and thanked their mommies and daddies. Miss Washington, bless her hide, said, “Do your own thing.” My vote was in.

  After a commercial in which a woman gave beauty advice to all the women in the audience who would never get within 300 miles of Miss U.S.A. or any other pageant by taking a bath in a tub of hot milk and putting cucumber slices on her eyelids, a voice-over talked solemnly about Duty and Honor while the old Miss U.S.A. made her Farewell Walk as an accordion played what sounded like a funeral dirge. Oh, yes. Miss Washington won. I’ll be watching for the big cigar scene in the next Rock Hudson flick. Don’t forget, I knew her when.

  Albert Finney

  Smoking cigars in his sock feet and roaming restlessly around in his elegant suite at the Plaza before the opening of Joe Egg like an enormously likeable caged bear, Albert Finney looked outwardly disarming. With rumpled clothes, tousled red hair and freckled white skin like crushed cornflakes in a bowl of milk, he was a walking reproduction of an unmade bed. Rather like Tom Jones, in fact—a yoke and an image he has learned to live with. But behind the boyish grin things were obviously going on: thoughts, decisions, self-doubts and a search for identity in the face of wealth and celebrity which had taken him along a road of soft shoulders and detours ahe
ad.

  A search which had kept him away from Broadway for four years. “Between Luther and Joe Egg there just wasn’t anything I wanted to do. That’s not a cry of desperation. But I have to respond to what I’m doing or I won’t do it. And it had to be something more important than just ‘Tom Jones is back.’ I think this play is it.” It’s a comedy with music about a man trying to decide whether or not to murder his own child, a kind of spastic vegetable with epileptic fits, to save his marriage. A kind of euthanasia with rhythm, which, even for Finney, is pretty controversial. “It’s not a black comedy, though. The spastic child just happens to be this couple’s hangup. It could represent other hangups in society. I’m not worried about critics. One can’t live his life worrying about them. The only critic in London who really panned the play was Harold Hobson and I happen to know he is crippled, so perhaps it was too personal for him. But I think it’s healthy to treat a so-called taboo subject openly, honestly, without sentimentality. And here in America there is the whole Lenny Bruce tradition of comedy, so I think the audience can take it.”

  Finney himself has a 9-year-old son, Simon, by actress Jane Wenham, whom he divorced in 1961. “He’s normal, thank God, and I see him often. But when he was born, I felt no relation to him. He didn’t need me. To me he was just a little thing who cried too much and needed changing too often. Romantically, I had expected more, but I was uninvolved until the first time he recognized me. Now if a doctor had said to me then, ‘I think he may be retarded’—a mongoloid—that’s when you say, ‘What would I do?’ I think I would seriously discuss the possibility of euthanasia, putting it to sleep forever. I wouldn’t want my marriage or a relationship to the woman I love to have the extra burden of sustaining a hopeless life dependent on us. And that is what the man I play in Joe Egg faces.”

  The play was an accident. The independent production company which Finney and his partner Michael Medwin formed eight years ago had just produced his new film Charlie Bubbles (which Finney also directed) and he was busy editing it when Medwin phoned him about Joe Egg, which Medwin had seen in Glasgow. Finney never got to see it, but Kenneth Tynan was also trying to buy it for the National Theatre’s repertory, so they acted fast, beat Tynan to the draw, brought it to London, and it was a hit. By the time they were ready to export it to New York, the star of the show, Joe Melia, couldn’t leave because his wife was having a baby, so Medwin suggested Finney play the part. “Now I’ve been trying to convince people a long time that I don’t want to do anything but direct movies. So I said, ‘I’m retired, I just want to sit in my flat overlooking the river and think about directing my next film.’ But I read it again and the part was so good that I said yes. But only for ten weeks. I don’t want to get bored.” He grinned. “The last time I was here my Luther contract was for four calendar months, and it was up on January 23, 1964, a Thursday night. I remember it well. David Merrick had asked me earlier to do an Actors Fund benefit and I said sure, but when the time came for me to leave the show, they told me Merrick had scheduled the benefit for some date in February! I guess he suspected my ego was so big that I’d stay in the play another month just to perform for all my friends on a Sunday night.” When did he leave? “January 23, 1964, a Thursday night, right on schedule.” He roared. Then: “Maybe you shouldn’t mention that story, because if you print it, it will only perpetuate the myth of David Merrick.” He roared even louder and his mouth turned into a happy trapezoid.

  So we got only 10 weeks of Albert Finney. During which he also unveiled Charlie Bubbles, a film about which he was even more concerned than Joe Egg. “If people don’t like the play, it’s no skin off my nose. But Charlie is my film. If they reject that, they reject my feelings, my attitudes toward life and everything around me. The incidents in it are not autobiographical, but the feelings are.” Curious, since it is a film about a man so trapped by success that he is no longer able to feel anything but inertia, while Finney seems to be living life to the hilt. “I wanted to explore a mood and make you feel it moment by moment instead of talking about it or signboarding it. For the last four years I’ve made a lot of money. But I don’t feel anything. I want people to question their own lives, find out what their real values are. It started as a 32-page outline by Shelagh Delaney and we worked together night and day. It took a long time to make. Now I wonder if people will be bored. I get bored in Antonioni films, and maybe if I saw Charlie made by anybody else, I’d be bored by it, too. But it’s like abstract art. You must put faith in your own reactions. I never used to talk about myself. I didn’t want people to know about me, except through my work. I never did things like the ‘Tonight Show’ for that reason. But if people go away understanding this film and responding to it, then they’ll know a lot more about Albert Finney.”

  That embraces a lot of things. He can be casual and offhand (When people call him “the new Olivier,” he says, “Tyrone Guthrie told me a long time ago, ‘Don’t try to do it all before you’re 35, after all, Verdi didn’t write Falstaff until he was 75’”), or funny and hip (“I went to see Liza Minnelli at the Empire Room after a night of rehearsal with my makeup still on and she was so great I started crying and then they turned the spotlight on me with the mascara running down my face and I’m sure everybody said, ‘Who’s this Queenie just come over?’”) But always he’s Finney. Albie to his friends. The rough-hewn North Country Lancashire lad whose father, also named Albert Finney, was—and still is—a bookie (“We were always illegal—one week if we had money we’d have a car and chauffeur, the next we’d have to move. No security. Perfect training for an actor’s life.”), who grew up across the street from a racetrack a few blocks from his friend Shelagh Delaney, flunked out of school, got into the Royal Academy where Tynan called him “a young Spencer Tracy,” and ended up a star at 25 in the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He was never ordinary. He smoked cigars since he was 15, read Pogo during interviews, carried all his possessions around in one suitcase, changed his address every two weeks, and once onstage told the audience: “Either you shut up and go home or I will.” Even when he was getting started and needed money he turned down Peter OToole’s role in Lawrence of Arabia because he “didn’t want to become a Hollywood property or spend two years in a bloomin’ desert,” and went off to Glasgow to play repertory for $42 a week instead.

  Four years ago, at the height of his career, he was starring on Broadway to wild acclaim in Luther and enjoying unprecedented movie popularity in Tom Jones. Then, with multi-million-dollar deals offered daily, he disappeared for one whole year without a word of explanation to anyone. The search again.

  “I was told ‘Strike now while you’re hot or people will forget,’ but I just wanted to get away. I figured when I got back I could still work somewhere, even if it was a tiny village in the Hebrides. Acting is a life’s work, a career is a life of exploration, not just a few hot years. Also, being from North Country stock, I’m very suspicious of success. I had suddenly seen success too quickly and I had a fear of how to handle it. And then there was the question of following up Tom Jones and Luther—with what? What do you do next? So I learned how to do nothing. I traveled to Hong Kong, Fiji, Japan, Bangkok, Mexico, all over the bloody world. It was nice not having to clock in and just wander about. I’m not one of those actors like Dirk Bogarde or Peter Sellers, who must be constantly committed or insecurity sets in. When I’m active I’m so intense I cease to communicate. I stop reading books! Too many people were trying to get at me. I became a hot property. You see, this terrible conflict sets in. If you’re a celebrity, you limit your opportunity to surprise people with new facets of your ability. Yet on the other hand, you want to be known or you won’t get a chance at the great parts. I hated that. And not being a Hollywood star I could chuck it all and leave. You can’t do that in America. The cult thing happens quicker here. You’ve got to be successful here or you don’t survive. You’ve got to make a profit or your edges get rubbed off.

  “Anyway, what I tried to do was
interest myself in the things I wanted to do. I just want to make sure what I do is for myself. Live the life I want to live. I’ve tried to protect that right and resist the pressure of cashing in.” (The closest he’s ever come to Hollywood is a day’s shooting on Catalina Island and a week in San Francisco last November on a film called Picasso Summer, about an architect who wants to meet Picasso. Finney hates any mention of it and says, “It had nothing to do with acting. I just did it to meet Picasso and I never got to meet him. All I do in it is walk around and point to Picasso drawings and go ‘Woo, woo’ and fight a little cow with Luis Miguel Dominguin.”) “I wanted to live out my own neuroses. Well, it didn’t work. After five months on my trip, I found myself on an island called Oraietea, an hour and a half by DC-3 jet from Tahiti. I had been there three weeks and all I did was watch the reef all day. If I felt a sudden surge of energy I’d fall into the surf, then climb out and sleep. It was the height of inertia. Then one day I heard a jet and got the same feeling I’d had in New York—I wanted to be on it. I knew I had to start the journey home. However romantic it seemed to be a beachcomber I learned I had to get back to the neurotic society I need in order to function. I didn’t find any answers, only more questions. But I came out of it more convinced than ever that I wanted to be my own man.”