Read Dropped Names Online

Authors: Frank Langella

Dropped Names

DEDICATION

for

Sara

CONTENTS

CAST of CHARACTERS

In Order of Disappearance

PREFACE

I
t began as a fleeting, one-time-only sight gag in an actors' communal dressing room on a dinner break between matinee and evening performances. It was 1991 in New Haven, Connecticut. As indeed it was everywhere else. But a room full of actors at feed is not quite like anywhere else.

As the tin foil gets unfolded and the coffee cups get filled, a freewheeling banter starts up and the decibel level increases in direct proportion to the personalities of the participants. You would think the respite between audiences would be a welcome bit of relaxation, but actors are each other's best audience and when the stories begin, so does the bloodlust, and there comes a race to see who'll get the final call.

In this case, the room was a heterogeneous mix of crusty old vets and as yet history-less virgins to tales of reminiscence. So when one of the old-timers threw out yet another famous name in that casual, “Oh, I'll never forget when the Queen Mother turned to me and said . . . ,” I couldn't resist. I picked up a piece of silverware and sent it clattering loudly to the floor.

“Oops! I dropped something!” I declared. And a ritual was born. Like a pack of wolves let loose on a defenseless critic, the gathered predators got the joke and began to drop names and toss silverware in a frenzy of competitive hilarity. So riotous that the stage manager arrived to see what the animals were up to, and stayed to join in the game.

Inconceivably, I have begun my fiftieth year as an actor. And the opportunity to drop names of the famous, both here and gone, has increased substantially.

But were it not for one fateful morning sitting quietly in my sixth-grade homeroom at Number 3 School in Bayonne, New Jersey, this book, most likely, could not have been written. Our principal, Mrs. Ida Zeik, came in to ask if there might be a volunteer willing to audition for the role of an elf in the annual school extravaganza: an operetta entitled
Lazy Town
. Mysteriously, my hand shot up into the air as if having been yanked there by some divine puppeteer.

In the four life-changing minutes it took me to walk from my classroom to the auditorium, climb the three steps to a platform above the floor level, walk into a dim narrow space I would later learn was the
wings,
wait, hear my name, and walk out onto what I would later learn was a
stage,
I found my calling. I got the part in all likelihood because I was the smallest boy in my class. But on such a minor happenstance careers can be launched. This one moved me quite literally from the dark into the light and I have remained in its warm and comforting glow ever since.

But out of it, in the less forgiving cold light of reality, I have lived my life as many actors have: available and waiting, and often in a sort of emotional wilderness feeling alone and apart.

Five decades in my profession has afforded me the transient company of many remarkable people. This book is about only the famous among them. Like elusive fireflies, they flickered for a time, shone brightly, dimmed, and ultimately disappeared. Separate and diverse individuals as they may be, my subjects have in common the inevitable outcome awaiting us all: to live on only in memories. In this case, mine.

I admit they are most likely prejudiced, somewhat revisionist, and a tad exaggerated here and there. But were I offered an exact replay of events as they unfolded, I would reject it. I prefer my memories.

Don't turn the page if you like your stories spoon-fed or sugar-spread. I didn't always like some of my subjects, and I'm quite certain some of them found me less than sympathetic. There will be a fair amount of forks to the eye and knives to the throat; even a self-inflicted wound or two. I present these people to you, not perhaps as they might have described themselves, or as others might recall them, but as I
perceived
them.

Should you decide to read on, I hope you will find them to be as enriching and engaging a galaxy of human beings as I did. While listed with respect to the order of their passing, they can be visited in random order, with no regard to chronology, status, or billing.

S
o get out your silverware. I'm about to drop a whole bunch of names on you.

FL

MARILYN MONROE

R
emember when everything meant so much? When you felt whatever it was you were feeling had never been felt by anyone else. Remember the yearning?

She was my first. Not bad for a boy of fifteen awaking one Saturday morning preparing for his inauguration.

It had taken a while for me to save enough from my allowance and the birthday dollars from my uncles, which I rolled tightly in a rubber band and hid behind the radiator in my room, but I was determined.

When I had the necessary amount, I adjusted my wings, bolted from my small house in Bayonne, New Jersey, for Journal Square in Newark, and flew, so to speak, on a bus, to the Port Authority Terminal in New York City for the first time.

It was the winter of 1953. Dwight D. Eisenhower had just delivered his first inaugural address. Our borders were safe and we were at peace. But I hardly noticed. Inside my head there were larger issues at stake.

I thought then that New York City meant only Times Square. Somehow I believed that if I went too far north, south, east or west, I would fall into the ocean or hit a mountain. So, I wandered the streets from 42nd to 50th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues unaware of what lay beyond. And equally unaware of what I was looking for. I didn't have much time. If lightning was going to strike, it would have to be by sundown, when I would need to be back home before being missed.

Late in the afternoon as it was growing dark, I was racing back to the Port Authority, disappointed, my head down against the icy wind. Coming slowly toward me on a side street was a long black limousine. When it stopped, the driver jumped out, came around to open the curbside back door, and as he did, put his other hand out, palm up, to block my way so the passenger's path would be clear and undisturbed.

From inside the darkness a white-gloved hand reached out for help and it was given. Then came a face of dizzying beauty, the head slightly lowered to avoid disrupting the spun gold blond hair caressing a white fox collar clutched close to a milky white throat.

As she emerged fully, a long white coat emerging with her like hot steam freeing itself from inside an opened shower door, my heart began to pound. Once fully standing on the street, she let go of the collar, allowing the coat to fall free, exposing a body encased in a full-length skintight gown made of what looked like tiny white pearls seemingly flung at her in wild abandon and clinging to every pore. Around her neck, over her wrists, and on her ears were brightly sparkling diamonds.

She lifted one of her gloved hands, felt for the necklace, and with the other reached for the side of her coat, pushing it back to reveal still more of her. My pulse raced faster. She turned briefly to her right, saw me standing there, smiled like a sunbeam, and said in a soft whisper:

“Hi.”

Then she glided up some steps into a building and flashes of light obliterated her from my sight. I returned to the Port Authority and sat trembling on my bus as it transported me back home.

An indefinable yearning to free myself from a life I instinctively felt was killing my soul had caused me to venture forth that day without guidance or direction; not so much from bravery as from desperation. I was a small, skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses, born into a middle-class Italian family, feeling always as if I didn't belong. As if I were in a prison, incarcerated for crimes unknown to me. At twenty-seven years of age, Marilyn Monroe had, I'm certain, awakened that morning yearning for something she too could not define; a tortured soul that I saw only as a beautiful woman and a Movie Star.

What were the odds of this chance encounter? Had I turned the corner sixty seconds later or had her car caught a light and been delayed it would not have happened. She was my first. Someone existing outside my prison walls. An ineffable creature, stopping for an instant, smiling, looking directly into the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy and speaking just one word. One was enough. Lightning had struck.

CHARLES LAUGHTON
and
ELSA LANCHESTER

“C
ome in, come in. Lovely to see you. Lovely.”

Elsa Lanchester, widow of the actor Charles Laughton, greeted me at the door of the home in Beverly Hills the two had shared during their thirty-five-year marriage. Everything I'd hoped and expected her to be, she was. Wildly eccentric, extremely bright, and wonderfully saucy.

It was the early 1970s. After over a decade of work on Off-Broadway stages in New York and regional theatres around the country, I had begun my movie career with the films
Diary of a Mad Housewife
and
The Twelve Chairs
and I was in L.A. looking to find more work in them.

Miss Lanchester agreed to see me because it had been communicated to her by a mutual friend that I was fascinated with her husband and his approach to film acting. Mr. Laughton had passed away in 1962.

“First tea, I think,” she said, and we settled down in the living room of a house I remember only as English Tudor and suitably shabby. The Brits don't like anything to look new. Furniture must have rips in the upholstery, exposed stuffing, paintings hung crooked, crockery unmatched and properly chipped. The feeling being, I suppose, one is above caring; however self-consciously tattered it appears.

Miss Lanchester settled comfortably onto the couch and talked animatedly about their life in California, her passionate love of gardens, her husband's devotion to the sun, their animals, and the good life his success afforded them. “England is our home, of course,” she said, “but life here, as it is for so many of our expats, is divine. Particularly as one gets older and the bones begin to creak. And, of course darling, there are all the delicious perks Hollywood has to offer. Charles adored them all and, frankly, so do I. Our tiny island could never afford us this sort of life. So many of our friends are here, although I must say Charles preferred not to be part of the English contingent. He was, by nature, an extremely solitary man and cared not to heavily associate with our compatriots. But, including ourselves, dear, I can tell you: nobody corrupts quicker than a Brit.”

Charles Laughton was, to my mind, an extraordinary actor. His particular brand of English hauteur irritated many of his own countrymen, I think, more than the Americans. His performances as Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
and Captain Bligh in
Mutiny on the Bounty
are superb. All the style, technique, and precision of the British actor, but with an ingredient rare in that breed: soul!

My personal favorite is his performance in
Witness for the Prosecution
. Aided and abetted by his wife, it is consummate stage/screen acting—serving both mediums beautifully.

Miss Lanchester spoke of him with love and affection, talking of his deeply sensitive nature, bouts of depression and insecurity.

“I can't do this one. I can't. Must get out of it,” was his usual clarion call of alarm after he agreed to be in a picture. Stories of his threatening to back out of or shut down productions because he couldn't “find his character” were a part of his legend. He eventually showed up to show off and his rather distant and paranoid behavior often amused his fellow workers. Peter Ustinov once said of him:

“There was Charles, lurking about the set, hoping to be offended.”

“C
harles was devastated by bad notices,” Miss Lanchester said. “He would take to his bed in agony, reading them again and again. Finally, he devised a method for exorcising them from his soul. He taught a Shakespeare class here at the house in his studio and he would gather the notices and perform them for his students. If a critic said, ‘Mr. Laughton is pompous,' he would deliver the word with ten times the venom it engendered. He'd act the review with tremendous power and vitriol, exhausting himself and then burn it in a bucket. It was very entertaining.”

We ended a tour of the house in Mr. Laughton's bedroom, not very bright, also suitably tattered, with books by the hundreds. Then on to her room.

“Come here to the window,” she said. “Look out. What do you see?”

“Your swimming pool.”

“Yes. Can you see all four corners?”

“No. Only three.”

“Yes! Only three. There is an area of the pool that cannot be seen from any window of the house. And had you visited when Charles was alive, that is the area in which he would have taken you, suggested you swim in the nude, and then seduced you. That's where he took the beautiful boys. He was homosexual, you know.”

“I'm not that easily seduced,” I said.

“Don't be too certain, dear boy. Charles could be very persuasive.”

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