Dropped Names (26 page)

“D
o you have any brothers or sisters?” Brooke once asked me.

“One of each,” I told her.

“I loved being the only child,” she said. “I got it all!”

DEBORAH KERR

“D
o you suppose she might agree to see me?” I asked the young man across the table at a dinner party in London sometime in late 2006. He had introduced himself by telling me he was a relative of Deborah Kerr, a woman to whom I owed a profound apology. “I'm not certain,” he said. “She's not always able to comprehend, but she has spoken of you fondly over the years and I'll try.”

I was appearing in London that season in a play entitled
Frost/Nixon
and enjoying the social scene. That particular night I was deep in conversation with the diminutive Judi Dench, the Mighty Mouse of English actresses with a keen, delicious presence, a ready laugh, and a seductive demeanor. I stayed late, not wanting to lose a second with her, but found time to scribble my number and give it to Deborah's relative.

“Please try to convince her to see me,” I said.

D
riving home in the early morning hours I thought of Deborah and of my boorish behavior toward her some thirty years earlier. Before our first meeting, she had shown me a simple act of kindness and professional generosity she needn't have, and during the course of the six months or so I spent in her company, I did not repay it in kind.

The year was 1974 and she was to star in the Edward Albee play
Seascape
on Broadway. Edward offered me the role of Leslie, a lizard who comes up from the sea with his young wife to teach an aging couple, having a day at the beach, that life is worth living. The husband has gone dead of soul and his long-suffering wife is trying to convince him not to give up on the glories of the here and now. The husband would be played by Barry Nelson, a charming second-string leading man in films of the 1950s, and my wife was to be played by a young, gifted actress named Maureen Anderman.

Seascape
was to be my Broadway debut. The starring roles were Deborah's and Barry's. Maureen and I were clearly supporting players. But I had stubbornly and arrogantly promised myself I would not appear on Broadway until I could go there as a Star above the title. The producers said no. Edward said no. I passed. Deborah said yes. She did not know much about me but later I was told she had said, when asked if she would allow me to have billing with her and Barry over the title:

“If Edward wants him to play the role and the billing means that much to him, well of course.”

T
he first company meeting took place in Edward's posh New York apartment. I was the last to arrive. She was standing by a window, holding a drink and chatting to someone; and when I came into the room, which was occupied by fewer than a dozen people, she smiled radiantly, put down her drink, and came toward me.

“Hello, I'm Deborah. I'm so very pleased to meet you.”

She was an exceptionally lovely fifty-four. Beautifully tailored, her hair a soft blonde, complementing her perfectly featured face; her milky white skin practically devoid of makeup.

She had retired from films in 1968, publicly declaring that she no longer could abide the prevalent sex and violence, and was now exclusively devoting herself to the theatre. She lived with her husband, Peter Viertel, in Klosters, Switzerland.

Nothing much happened at the party. Edward gave a brief speech. We made small talk and went our separate ways. The first rehearsal was to be in the next day or so. As I was preparing to leave, again Deborah came over to me.

“I'm so looking forward to our working together,” she said.

“Well I'm going to be spending a lot of time leaping around you as a lizard,” I said.

“Oh but you're young, darling. You're young.”

Edward had given me a long piece of driftwood he'd collected near his house in the Hamptons. “It's Leslie's stick,” he said. “You can bring it up with you from the primordial ooze.”

F
rom the first day of rehearsal to the play's closing performance, Deborah Kerr was a model of professionalism, poise, and discipline. Never less than polite and accommodating, generous and available, she endured a series of hardships and setbacks during the run of the play with grace and style in her stoic Scottish nature. I was a total pain in the ass. Strong willed and stubborn.

On that first day after we read the play, Edward as director/author told us he'd decided to make a cut.

“Take up your pencils,” he said dryly. “Go to Act Two—cut it.”

“The whole act?” I said.

“Yes.”

“But that's the main reason I wanted to do the play,” I said.

“It's gone. We don't need it.”

Deborah silently and resolutely did as she was told and we read through the play again. Edward was right.

Unfortunately it didn't and couldn't save us. We rehearsed for three weeks, played Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, came into New York for two months, then Los Angeles for eight weeks, and it was over and out. Approximately a six-month gig, in which I missed opportunity after opportunity to avail myself of Deborah's singular and exemplary character.

She never once disagreed with Edward in rehearsal. Whatever he suggested she did without question or pause. If she didn't like the note, she never let on. “Oh yes of course,” she said often and politely. And onstage she delivered a beautifully intelligent, perfectly modulated performance. I, on the other hand, was selfishly involved in my own performance, stubbornly resistant to Edward, and somewhat callous in my behavior toward her.

Her dressing room was impeccably in order and always smelling of a lovely fragrance that wafted onstage with her. Her assistant and companion, a woman named Hazel, was a no-nonsense broad who tended to Deborah's needs in a fiercely protective manner. It would take me at least thirty minutes to wriggle out of my lizard costume and wipe off my elaborate makeup, and in every town we played, I would pass by her dressing room and hear Deborah and Hazel in gales of laughter sharing a bottle of champagne. I rarely stopped by or entered her universe.

Once we were in New York, her dressing room was visited by the Greats of the era. In and out would pass the likes of Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, John Gielgud, Helen Hayes, Irene Worth, Katharine Hepburn. On one glorious afternoon, Greta Garbo was quickly ushered into Deborah's dressing room, and Edward was summoned to meet her. He told me that in the few minutes he was in the room, she said to him: “Oh Mr. Albee, I did not know I was going to meet you. I have nothing prepared to say.”

H
ere is what I most remember about the Lady Kerr (“Rhymes with Star,” as her early press releases would state):

She was coming down the stairs of our theatre out of town, slipped on some wet stuff, sailed on her back through a plate glass door, was rushed to the hospital, given multiple stitches and painkillers, and played the show.

S
he longed for more personal and helpful direction, but realized early on she was not going to get it, so she did her work and played the show.

T
he reviews were mostly respectful and dismissive. No major accolades for her, no nominations or kudos, but she played the show.

S
he had an obstreperous, inconsiderate, and selfish young leading man but she played the show.

O
ne stormy winter night in Washington the company gathered at someone's apartment for a late night supper. She sat, legs tucked under her by the fire. I was sick as a dog with the flu and she spent the evening bringing me tea and honey, feeling my forehead, and tucking blankets around me. She was no less sick than I, but she played.

A
t each stop on the road, expensive gifts arrived from Saks or Neiman Marcus with sweet handwritten notes and when I was nominated for a Tony, an exquisite pearl-handled cane awaited me in my dressing room with a bottle of champagne and a note: “Bravo, darling.” I didn't respond.

On our opening night in Washington, a party was given for the cast and crew. It dwindled down rather quickly and there was just a handful of us standing about in a huge reception room at the Eisenhower Theatre. Deborah was drunk. Very drunk.

“Come dance with me darling,” she said. She took my hand and instructed the pianist to play “Shall We Dance” from
The King and I
, one of her many hugely successful films, and round and round we went, faster and faster, her laughter rising to an uncharacteristic, almost uncontrollable pitch, and then suddenly her eyes welling with tears, she shouted:

“Six fucking nominations, and I never won.”

B
eautifully gowned one evening in New York she was nervously moving toward her car and I toward the subway.

“The car is taking me to ‘21,' darling. He can drop you home if you like and come back for me.”

On the way to the restaurant, she was nervously tightening her pearl earrings and pulling on her long white gloves; her elegant full-length dress was dotted with hundreds of small beads.

“I can't be late,” she said to the driver.

“Who are you meeting?”

She mentioned a name I did not know. “He's one of the largest investors in the English theatre and I'm thinking of doing a revival in England next year.”

“Relax. He'll wait.”

“Oh, darling,” she said, “they don't wait long anymore.”

By the time the play was winding to a close in New York and the producers had secured a booking in Los Angeles, Deborah had lost patience. She was never less than polite, but her dressing room door was no longer open to me.

And who could blame her? Even my then agent, Eddie Bondi, gayer than gay, of the William Morris office said to me one night: “Honey, they love your work! They love your looks! But they
hate
your personality!”

Also looking after me in L.A. at the time was a young man, straighter than straight, five years my junior, and coming up fast in the agency business. He called one morning and asked to come over to my hotel. I remember we sat on the floor in my tiny room and he said: “A group of us are leaving William Morris. Come with me.”

I decided to stay with Eddie and missed the opportunity to have my career looked after by the young Ron Meyer, who helped the CAA agency rise to historic power and is currently the head of Universal Studios. Still close friends after thirty-five years, he no longer needs to sit on hotel room floors; but, he does allow me now and then to grab a seat on his private jet.

The night before we were to close in Los Angeles, I missed one performance in order to fly back to New York for the Tonys. The play and I were the sole nominees. I won. And when I flew back for the last show there was a magnum of champagne from Deborah waiting in my dressing room. At the wrap party, as she was leaving, Deborah put her hand on my arm and managed a “I'm so sorry we didn't do better, dear. But how lovely for you,” and she was gone.

It would have been lovelier had I been less involved with myself and more attuned to my costar. These days, I give self-involved young actors a profoundly wide berth when I work with them. Tunnel vision is the nature of the beast, I suppose, and I'm not altogether certain it is completely unavoidable.

A
year or so later, she had an even worse failure in a play by David Axelrod. It closed after only a few performances and I ran into her in L.A. at a star-laden Swifty Lazar party only days after the debacle.

“Hello darling,” she said. “How are you?”

She was none too steady on her feet.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Oh dear. Well, you know how much I'd been hoping we'd do better with Edward's play and then I took this one and my instincts were to work on it first, but we rushed into production, and now it's gone in less than a week.”

And suddenly, standing there, surrounded by her peers, who were paying little attention to our conversation, she burst into uncontrollable tears. I put both my hands on her shoulders and drew her to me. Perhaps the first truly unselfish thing I'd done with her, minor though it was.

“It'll be all right,” I said. “Have you got anything coming up?”

“Oh, I don't know darling. I don't know. Peter and I thought maybe—
Rio
!”

D
eborah was afflicted with Parkinson's disease late in her life and struggled on with it, moving from Switzerland to a small cottage in Suffolk, England. Her husband did not join her there, and she died a year after I requested my visit; quietly and gracefully, I'm certain. Had she agreed to see me and known me, I would have apologized for my selfish and obstreperous behavior. But she most likely would have forgiven me instantly and said something like: “Oh, but darling—you were so
young
!”

CHARLTON HESTON

I
t was always fascinating for me to watch Chuck Heston in action—but not, unfortunately, onscreen. He had an original jawline, I'll give him that, and was very well-built. But he possessed about as much sex appeal as a railroad tie and was about as humorless as a CAT scan.

“I just don't feel right,” he was reputed to have said while trying to work out a moment in the film
The Agony and the Ecstasy
.

“
He
doesn't feel right,” murmured Rex Harrison, his costar. “How does he think the rest of us feel?”

C
huck's accomplishments as a great movie star cannot be dismissed, of course. But, aided and abetted by his wife of over fifty years, Lydia, he was under the impression he was also a great actor. He had extraordinary vigor, appearing in film after film opposite movie star ladies for several decades.
Ben-Hur
is a spectacular film in which he acquits himself outstandingly. In one of my favorite films, Orson Welles's
Touch of Evil
, however, he demonstrates just how weak a piece of wood can be.

Clearly, the roles he played—Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid, and most certainly God—got to him. He was fond of beginning his public speeches at various dinners and award shows with:

“Did you like the weather today? I did my best.”

At whatever function one attended, he would greet you as if he were the host.

“Glad you could make it.”

“Wonderful of you to come.”

“Oh you're here. Lydia, look who's here.”

This could be at the Oscars, Golden Globes, or a dinner at someone's house. It was as if he had appointed himself the forever Numero Uno on the call sheet of life.

Always polite and well-mannered, he accented a room like a polished marble floor and was fond of holding forth on the First Amendment and the Freedom to Bear Arms. So endemic to his personality was a certainty of his place on the planet that you tended to look for twisted, thick roots emerging from wherever it was he was standing.

When I rented a house near his one summer on Hidden Valley Road up Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills, his new neighbors were erecting a not-intrusive wall between their properties. Chuck could be seen, at his window or wandering the site, carrying his rifle.

S
ometime in the early 1980s, I was sent a script for the stage, an area Chuck inhabited with the same studied gravitas he brought to the screen. After the first act curtain of
The Crucible
, which he played in Los Angeles, my companion turned to me and said: “Do you think it's possible to make a citizen's arrest?” Not likely. Chuck was on the board of the theatre. At any rate, the leading role in the script I sent along to him was that of an errant priest being hounded by a group of townsmen, then standing trial, refusing counsel, and defending himself in court. Can you say Charlton Heston?

The writer asked me if I'd be good enough to pass it on to him and I sent it with a short note, saying I thought he might respond to this either for the stage or screen.

He wrote back promptly, most likely having just turned enough water into wine for expected dinner guests, thanking me and modestly stating that he would “throw it on the pile.”

A
s the pile dwindled over the years, he carried on appearing in mediocre television and B movies in a bad hairpiece.

On the last occasion I was to see Heston, we were part of a group of actors paying homage to by now
Lord
Laurence Oliver, at Lincoln Center. Those of us who had appeared with him either onstage or film were asked to speak. The house was full, perhaps some fifteen hundred people, and prior to the event, there was an intimate dinner for the guest of honor somewhere upstairs.

“Nice to see you. So glad you could come,” Chuck said at the door.

At dessert time came the clinking of one glass as he held up another. We, the gathered peasants, silenced ourselves, like the rabble waiting on shore before our leader parted the Red Sea.

“Did you like the weather today?” he said. “I did my best.”

He then launched into a ten-minute tribute to his Lordship that basically centered on Chuck's description of what it took to be a great actor.

“When I played . . .” was a familiar phrase. Others I recall:

“Larry, I know you know what it's like . . .”

“One accepts the loneliness of courage . . .”

And my personal favorite:

“Very few share what Larry and I share.”

The check! I hoped.

When it was over, to a polite, restrained applause, the hand next to me was squeezing mine in more than affection. I looked down at the white knuckles belonging to Maggie Smith, my dinner companion, and before she could speak, Tony Curtis said aloud to our little table:

“Doesn't Chuck make great speeches?”

“Oh yes,” said Maggie. “He should never be allowed to do anything else.”