Dropped Names (6 page)

YUL BRYNNER

“N
o pictures with baldy,” Yul Brynner whispered to the press agent who was handling his return to Broadway in his great hit
The King and I
. It was the 1977–78 season and I was starring in
Dracula
at the Martin Beck Theatre, subsequently renamed the Al Hirschfeld. My dressing room was crowded with well-wishers after a Sunday night Actors Fund performance, and one of the many actors in the room was Reid Shelton, who was starring in the musical
Annie
, as Daddy Warbucks. Mr. Brynner was not about to allow himself to be permanently recorded with another cue ball. As far as he was concerned, there was bald and there was BALD.

The King of Siam was dressed all in black with accents of silver: silver belt buckle, watch, ring, etc.

“It makes life simpler in the morning,” he said.

We took a few of the perfunctory photographs and he turned to leave. Such was his aura, that everyone cleared a path, as he silently exited my dressing room, looking neither right nor left.

T
hat season on Broadway was to be immortalized by the first of the extremely successful
I Love New York
campaigns. Yul, myself, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, the casts of
Annie
and
A Chorus Line
, among others, all sang or spoke New York's praises to the catchy new jingle:
I Love New York
. On the day we shot the commercial, Yul, smoking incessantly, prowled the room with his own camera around his neck, advising our director what and how to do anything and everything, demanding and receiving constant attention. He was, at the time, represented by Robbie Lantz, as was I. Robbie had told me one night over dinner of Yul's phenomenal deal and list of perks. Everything from the color of the carpet to the number of tissue boxes to the bottled water was spelled out in great detail, and his salary was astronomical.

“You may be the Prince of Darkness,” Yul would often say to me, “but I'm the King of Broadway.”

His show was enormously successful, sold out to standing room every night. So was mine. When I would run into him at a late-night restaurant, he would consistently ask me:

“How big was your audience tonight?”

“Sold out,” I said.

“Mine, too. But they were
shit
. I would not bow. I gave them my ass.”

The word
I
passed Yul's lips more often than perhaps any actor I have ever known, and it is a pronoun that comes quite easily to most of us.

D
uring that season, New York was hit with a tremendous snowstorm. It was a Monday night, and the theatres were all dark. My phone rang. It was Robbie.

“Yul wants you and your wife to join us at ‘21,' ” he said.

“Robbie, there's fourteen inches of snow on the ground. We're staying home.”

“Yul says he'll pick you up in his car.”

One hour later, our doorman called to say, “Mr. Brynner is here, sir.”

My wife and I came downstairs to find, in the middle of the street, the longest white limousine I'd ever seen. The driver opened the door and we stepped in as if we were entering a small New York City apartment; high ceilings; wide floor space; large, comfortable, plush armchairs in the corners.

Yul was sitting deep in the back of the car, black-clad legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. We made our way to him and sank into a pair of the armchairs.

On the way to ‘21,' the streets seemingly devoid of all other traffic, he demonstrated virtually every gadget the car possessed.

“I had it custom made,” he said. “It comes up on a special elevator at the theatre, so I don't have to go outside after the show and I don't have to deal with the public. The windows are tinted and the glass is bulletproof.”

He picked up a large pair of strobe lights, aimed them at us, and clicked twice, temporarily blinding our vision.

“This is in case blacks attack my car,” he said. “I shine these at them and click many times. They think they are being photographed and run away.”

“If you don't want to be attacked,” I said, “why are you riding around in a twenty-foot-long white limousine?”

O
nce at ‘21,' the mood turned festive. At the door, Yul was greeted like the king he believed himself to be, and we were immediately ushered to our table. To my surprise, the restaurant was full, and the other diners were happy, noisy, and profoundly impressed, as he swept into the room surrounded by obsequious staff members, anxious to please.

Once settled into ‘21''s best corner table, Yul ordered drinks and then told me he would take charge of dinner, ordering everything from appetizer to dessert. It would be an expensive five-course meal and, at one point, I unappreciatively and provocatively said:

“I could have done with just a plate of French fries.”

His elbows on the table, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he signaled to the waiter.

“Bring Mr. Langella a plate a French fries,” he said, spitting out the words as if he was saying “a plate of shit,” “and send a large plate of French fries to every table in the room.”

Soon, giant silver platters of French fries were pouring out of the kitchen, much to the delight of the patrons, all of whom waved one at Mr. Brynner in gleeful gratitude. Yul did not touch a single one at our table but constantly encouraged me to finish them all up. I had been suitably one-upped.

“What are you going to do after
Dracula
?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “We should find something I could direct you in.”

He then rambled on about his acting experiences, his youth, his conquests, his triumphs, and his memories of celebrated people. He talked of his house in France, his box office grosses, his daily routine, and even his sleeping habits. While listening to him, I reminded myself not to succumb to the actor's habit, in social occasions, of talking only about himself.

When, at last, he landed on a story of an incident involving his son, Roc, I leaned forward in anticipation of some fatherly advice. It seems Yul had been renting a house. Roc, an infant at the time, was in a baby carriage on its lower level, above which was a four-sided balcony with two sets of stairs leading down. While Yul was upstairs taking a nap, the house suddenly caught fire and was up in flames in seconds. Yul came out of an upper-level bedroom, looked down, and saw that Roc's carriage was surrounded by flames. He saw, too, that the only way to reach his infant son was the one staircase still standing but in danger of collapsing. He raced down the stairs, grabbed Roc out of the carriage, raced back up before the stairs crumbled, and ran out of the door to safety.

“How awful for you,” I said. “It must be a great bond between you and your son.”

“I never told him about it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Why should I?” he said. “It was
my
experience.”

T
hat season, I would often see Yul at award shows, social functions, and actors' benefits. Carol Channing was also appearing that year in a revival of
Hello, Dolly!
and I was seated several rows behind him at her opening. He had his black coat neatly folded across his lap during the opening number. Moments before Carol's first entrance, I watched him pass it to his wife. Just as Carol's Dolly Levi appeared stage left, sitting on a trolley, holding a newspaper in front of her face, Yul leapt to his feet and began wildly applauding. The rest of the audience followed suit, so that by the time Carol's trolley had stopped and she had lowered the newspaper, she was already facing a standing ovation. The next day, the then popular columnist Earl Wilson, who had been sitting across the aisle from Yul, wrote this headline:

“The King Welcomes Dolly Back to Broadway.”

No mention of the Prince of Darkness.

Y
ul possessed a steely and unique sexuality women found extremely appealing, and he certainly enjoyed and bragged about his prowess. And indeed, no one smoldered or walked across a stage or a screen like him. He was a one-of-a-kind star, singular in appearance and original in voice, who knew what he had. Never far from a full-length mirror, he maintained his aura assiduously. What he had left in 1978, and indeed what he would trade on for the rest of his career, was
The King and I
, and he played it till the end. After his death, a commercial appeared, made by him less than a year before, warning us not to smoke. He still looked incredibly handsome, and was at that point in his life doomed to continuously play the one major chord in his minor arsenal.

One night, as I sat in my seat, ready to watch Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in an Actors Fund performance of
The Gin Game
, there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Yul. It was a few days after we had shot our segments in the
I Love New York
commercial.

“How did your piece go?” he asked.

“Oh, it was fine,” I said. “We got it in one take.”

“Well it was just you alone.”

“Yes,” I said.

“My whole company came out in the snow to support me,” he said.

“I almost didn't do it in one take,” I remarked. “The smoke from the fog machine almost made me sneeze, but I managed to get the line out.”

Yul looked at me imperiously and said:

“Smoke? I didn't allow smoke!”

RITA HAYWORTH

I
t is 2 a.m. and I am alone in the dark with her again.

O
n my television set tonight, in the black-and-white movie
Gilda
, Rita Hayworth is seducing Glenn Ford, heartbreakingly refuting the old adage “the camera never lies.” It is close to forty years now since last we were together and the woman I had known in real life is, for me, still the single most tragic example of how far from the real person an image can be.

She was a Goddess onscreen, about as desirable a woman as any man could want—perfection in feminine allure. From the moment I saw her, she haunted my imagination. And from the moment we met in the lobby of a small hotel in the tiny town of Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1972, until her death from Alzheimer's disease fifteen years later, she continued to haunt it, eliciting a far more profound emotion than lust.

My agent at that time, David Begelman, had talked me into a Western titled
The Wrath of God
—aptly named—to be shot entirely in Mexico. It would star Robert Mitchum, with Rita in the “and” position, set off in a billing box at the end of the actor credits. She was by then finished in pictures and the word was that Mitch had insisted on her, possibly for old times' sake, the rumor being they had once had a tumble or two.

Mitch would play a runaway priest. I would be the town's despot, who swears revenge on all priests for murdering my father, and Rita would be my mother, a God-fearing matron who never lets go of a set of rosary beads. What was I thinking? Well . . . I was thinking:
Rita/Gilda.

And, here she is, tiny and scattered, standing in front of me, a rain hat on her head. She shoots out her hand and smiles. “Hey, I know you,” she says. “I've seen ya in the movies. You're gonna be my son.” I spout all the clichés: how excited I am to meet her and work with her, etc.

She tears off the rain hat, frantically runs her fingers through the once-lustrous auburn hair, now shorter and more sparse, shakes it out, pulls at it, and whips her head back and forth in an exaggerated “no,” flailing her hands in the air as if shooing away an army of flies.

“Oh, cut it out. Cut it out,” she says in a high-pitched, impatient tone, jamming the hat back on and fleeing the lobby.

O
nce on the set she is a total pro. Ready to go, eager to do her best. But the lines won't come. No matter how hard she tries, she can't retain the simplest phrase. In our first scene together, I approach her at prayer in a church and ask, “Why are you here?” Her line is “Because God is here.” But she can't do it. Take after take she is unable to retain those four words. Oblivious to the rising tension and unkind remarks from the crew, she presses on. “Let's do it again,” she says. “I'll get it.”

Finally a man is laid down on the floor at her feet. Action is called. I ask, “Why are you here?” he whispers, “Because God is here.” Then immediately Rita says, “Because God is here.”

“Cut. Print. We got it,” slurs Ralph Nelson, our director, and the crew bursts into cheers and applause. Rita beams like a little girl who's just been crowned Miss Snow Queen, completely unaware the cheers are jeers. At lunch, as she rests in her trailer, the jokes about her are lewd and cruel and for years after, I too would be guilty of reenacting the scene for friends at her expense.

A
t about 5 p.m. on our first day off, the phone rings in my room. “Hey, it's Rita. Do you wanna eat?” Thirty minutes later we are sitting in the hotel's tiny restaurant. “We'll be friends to start, okay? Dutch treat on dinners. One night you, one night me. Deal. Let's have red wine. Just two glasses each.” After the first one she asks me how old I am. I tell her: 34.

When dinner is over we walk through the chilly, dirty streets and she gathers her black-fringed shawl close around her shoulders, slips her arm into mine, and forgets my name. “Oh yeah, yeah, Frank,” she says. “You'll be Frankie. I love Frankie. Not Sinatra. The guy was never on time.” We pass an open-air market and she insists we buy fruit and cheese to keep in our rooms. “Just to have, you know, for the ghosts.”

As we walk back toward the hotel holding string sacks of food, she clings to me, her arm tight in the crook of mine, our bodies finding a rhythm, and she whispers words I cannot understand. When I see her to her door, she leans up to chastely kiss me good night and says: “Do me a favor, baby: don't ever call me Mother.”

F
ilm sets, particularly on remote and distant locations, can be anything from warm, collegial good times to lethal, tension-filled bloodbaths. Without the familiar surroundings of home, family, and routine, these shoots can become a breeding ground for heightened drama, soaring libidos, and neurotic behavior. Ours becomes a polarized, not altogether homogeneous collection of crazy loners. At night, doors are closed tight and the cast mostly isolates. On this set, a lot of the crew, a mix of American and hard-bitten Mexican wranglers, hit the seedy whorehouses regularly. There are torn-up hotel rooms, hallways reeking of marijuana, heavy bar bills, and drunken brawls at 3 a.m. on the barren streets.

Rita and I drift toward each other like two boats on an unfamiliar sea, torn free of their moorings. We could just as easily have floated in opposite directions, but real life is now reel life and on movie locations, personal relationships are less often chosen than grasped at. Rita grasped at me and I chose to take her on. The twenty-year difference in our ages suited the unreality of time and place. Each of us wanted something from the other and neither of us much contemplated motive or consequence.

A ritual began. Dinner most nights in her rooms. She buys dozens of candles, lights them all, and puts them on every surface, including the floor. I start a fire and pour the wine. And we sit by the open window, our elbows resting on the low wooden sill. Three stories below is the main street of the town, brightly lit, dusty, dirty, and noisy. She wants to make another deal.

We will count trucks. All trucks passing by her window going left to right are mine. All going right to left are hers. Whoever has the most trucks by dinnertime gets treated. I stay with the wine but she graduates to bourbon. Dinner is served on the floor and we eat to the cacophony of noise from the street. Her hair is washed free of the day's set and spray, her face polished clean of makeup, her dress a plain white caftan thrown over her naked body. She crosses her legs, barely touches the food, and talks and talks. Mostly about men. Shards of these ramblings stay with me.

“He found me when I was a kid. Brought me to L.A. What the hell did I know? I went along.” Of another she said, “Oh Christ, he beat me bad. Then he skipped. I had to sign with Cohn [Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures] for another seven to pay off the debts.” Of Orson Welles she said, “He tried to help me to be a great actress, but he always needed money.” And Prince Aly Khan: “I didn't want to live nowhere where they kiss the hem of your skirt. I mean, what is that, for Chrissakes? Two guys laying on top of each other outside my bedroom door so I couldn't get out. I didn't want to be no fuckin' princess anyway. So I went to the old man. He liked me and I said to him, ‘Just give me my kid and let me out of here. I don't want anything.' ” And then she says, “Geez, they were always around. Husbands, boyfriends, lawyers, managers, press agents—the bosses. Where the fuck did they all go?” Her voice is tinny and high, almost childlike; until she picks up the telephone and says in movie-star timbre: “This is Miss Hayworth. Would you please send up another bottle of bourbon.”

When it becomes late and she has had enough of it, she flings her head back, hair flying about her face and, in the candle's light and fire's glow, once again becomes the Goddess. She knows I am looking and she holds the pose, lowers her head, tucks in her chin, raises her eyes to mine, grabs my hair, and says, “Don't stare at me, baby. You can see me in the movies.”

W
e will be seven weeks on this turbulent sea and no other boats take notice of ours or even float past—none but Mitchum's. A man whom very little escaped. As regards Rita and me, he becomes my one and only confidant. We never discuss their past together nor does he offer any wisdom or make any judgment. He would just listen, and then say: “Frankie, it is what it is.”

But one day he comes to me and says: “Listen pal, we're never going to finish this fucking picture if we don't get your girl to work on time.” Mitch, Rita, and I had our own local drivers and each of them regarded the harrowing ride along narrow unfenced mountain roads as challenges to be met with daredevil speed. Mitch slept through his rides and so did I. But Rita, who is terrified of all moving things, makes her driver go at a snail's pace and often arrives at work an easy hour or more after everyone else. So Mitch comes up with a plan: “Look,” he says. “Let's the three of us ride together. You sit up front and we'll put Rita in the back with me.”

Early mornings become a struggle of manipulating Rita into a broken-down jalopy and laying her down on the floor of the backseat. Mitch tosses a blanket over her as she pulls her floppy sailor hat down past her eyes. I then hop in the front and off we go. These rides become a hilarious routine of Rita laughing and screaming at the top of her lungs, with Mitch stretched out on the backseat outshouting her, singing Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, exactly as written in perfect pitch, while a non-English-speaking driver careens close to the narrow road's edge as wildly as he dares. When we reach the location, I get out and Mitch and I lift Rita from the floor, remove the blanket, pull up her hat, and calm her down. “Cheated the old Grim Reaper again,” he says and saunters off to his trailer.

On set, Rita continues to be a nightmare for everyone. There is not a shred of temperament, not a demand, not so much as a hint of cruelty. Rather it is like watching a schoolgirl desperately trying to learn her timestables and unable to get past the twos. Very little sympathy is shown for her. It is assumed she is a drunk and is boozing in her trailer. No one, including Mitch, reaches out to help her. So little was known then of her disease that even I regarded the panic and terror in her eyes as the neurotic insecurity of a fading star.

In all her scenes, large placards are put next to the camera and her lines are written out in huge block letters. It becomes an agony for her to try to hold on to what little she can, and an embarrassment to face each daunting day. But she does face them, and she does make it through. Her pride and happiness at the smallest of her achievements is pitifully touching.

T
he nights are another kind of hell for her. She has climbed into my boat and I come to see I have set a dangerous course for which I am woefully unprepared. There are stretches of time when the mist in her mind clears and she is very much with me. But often she desperately clings, weeps, and talks in words I cannot understand and it is not always my name she calls out in the dark. When at last she sleeps, I leave her and go back to my room. There is, sadly, never a time when we awake in the same bed.

Our film comes to its predictable end and on our last night, with my bags packed and waiting in my room, late in the candlelight I say the words I know she wants to hear. An easy lie to tell. The next morning at dawn I abandon her and fly back to real life.

M
onths pass. I am in L.A. and guiltily decide to call her.

“Hi baby,” she says, as if it had been only a moment since we last spoke. “Come on over for lunch. You gotta meet my savior. He's gonna make me a star.”

Her house is somewhere up behind the Beverly Hills Hotel and she greets me at the door, again in a long white caftan. As usual, free of makeup, hair unkempt, happy to see me. Clasping my hand in hers she says, “You're the first. Come on, I'll show you around.” We go from room to room and through the windows she points to property she used to own. “They sold it off,” she says, “husbands or agents—I can't remember.” On the walls, where paintings once hung, only faded patches remain, hooks still in place. “That one's on loan,” she lies. “That one's out being cleaned.” It is a barren, empty shell of a house, sparsely furnished and lit, with only one picture left on the wall of her living room. It is over the fireplace, a gigantic black-and-white charcoal drawing of her in the glory days. As we enter her messy and cluttered bedroom she closes the door, comes into my arms, and kisses me. “Stay with me tonight, baby. I need a man to be with me.”

Out on her patio we are greeted by an absurdly tan fellow with patent-leather hair, gold rings, a gold ID bracelet, and a gold watch. He is wary and suspicious.

“There he is! My savior,” she says.

They hug and giggle and she kisses him full on the mouth.

“He got me the cover. The goddamn cover.
Esquire.
And he's got plans. Wait till you hear.”

We sit down to lunch at a barely set glass-top table on the patio. Plastic plates, paper napkins, a pitcher of water. An angry young Spanish girl brings out a tray of cold cuts, a loaf of white bread in a stack, and a large bowl full of lettuce. There are bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise on the table. During lunch, Rita's mood turns sullen and morose. She sits quietly, bent over her plate. She has kicked her shoes under the table and a butter knife dangles listlessly in her hand. Her savior regales me with stories of his future plans for her. A film in Europe, a book deal, photo spreads for a magazine, a TV show, Carson wants her. Rita is listening hard, her face staring down into her lap as he praises her legendary beauty. “Look at her,” he says. “Look. No surgery and still gorgeous.”