Dropped Names (7 page)

She raises her head, tosses back the once luxurious mane, stares at him, her smile wide and radiant. “Have some salad,” she says.

“No, love, I'm fine.”

“Aw, come on, you want some salad.” She lifts her leg, the caftan rolling back to her thighs, exposing her, and puts the heel of her foot into the large plastic salad bowl, then pushes it under his nose.

“Take some,” she says. And he does.

I leave the table with a made-up story about an afternoon meeting and she follows me out to the car. “You can't leave, baby. I gotta have a man with me.” She again comes into my arms and kisses me. “Let him think it,” she says. “Let him think we're together.” I open the car door, get in, roll down the window; she leans into me. “What do you think of my savior?” she asks.

“Rita, be careful. He doesn't seem like the most honest guy—” But she cuts me off, her voice soft, low, and modulated. “Frankie, he's all I got.” I am never to see or speak with her again.

S
everal months later there she is on the Christmas cover of
Esquire,
looking like a waxen image of herself, smiling and confident, her arms wrapped around a Santa dummy, once more facing a lying camera. None of her savior's promises come true and he fades from her life, as did almost every man she ever knew. As did I. Our film is an embarrassing disaster and the last movie she ever makes. Her physical body passes out of existence on May 14, 1987, but Rita's essence had faded from the frame long before.

T
onight, almost forty years after I left her life, there she is in black-and-white on my television screen. And the camera's lie is actually welcome and soothing. Her beauty is staggering. Her sultry voice, her body, the way she moves close to a man, the sway of her hips as she drunkenly belts out “Put the Blame on Mame” stop time and obliterate what had been our reality. Her acting is honest and true. A thoroughbred, desperate to be taken seriously, cursed with a divine beauty, who could not find a man to desire that beauty as only a part of the whole woman.

Near the end of
Gilda
, it seems she has lost Glenn Ford forever because he believes her character is what she has been pretending to be: a loose woman out for a good time with as many men as she can find. Feeling profoundly alone and misunderstood, sitting at a bar, shyly smiling at the bartender, her face full of loss and vulnerability, she is hauntingly lovely. The bartender asks:
Would you like, perhaps, a tiny drink of Ambrosia suitable only for a Goddess?

In the movie's final moments, the villain is killed and the lovers reunite.

“Let's go home,” Rita says to Glenn as they face a new sunrise.

T
hose nights we spent together in Mexico, she'd say:

“Put all the lights out, Frankie, and open the shutters.”

And by the light of candles and fire, she would once again become the legendary beauty who had obsessed and haunted my young imagination, swaying and dancing for me.

“Stay with me, baby. Stay with me tonight.”

I
never shared a sunrise with Rita Hayworth; and I did not try to save her, nor could I have. The best I was able to do was take into my arms someone no longer any of the things she had once been: Movie Star, Princess, Goddess, or Gilda. Just a 54-year-old courageous and gentle woman named Margarita Carmen Cansino, one of God's lost souls, clinging in the night to a man whose name she could not remember.

LAURENCE OLIVIER

H
e had decreed it would be Larry and Frankie. Or to be more precise, as he would pronounce it: Frankay!

It was the fall of 1978 and I thought I'd better get it over with. Break the ice. The seventy-one-year-old legendary Sir Laurence Olivier was to play Van Helsing to my Dracula in Universal's remake of the 1931 classic. I walked down to his rooms in a drafty castle in a place called Tintagel in the south of England. His door had a piece of white paper taped to its upper center.
L. Olivier
, it read in handwritten black letters. I knocked.

“A moment please,” came a male voice. Seconds later, its owner, a tall, thin, reedy man who appeared to be just shy of one hundred, opened the door a sliver. “Yes, please?”

“I'd like to introduce myself to Sir Laurence,” I said. “We're going to be working together.”

“Oh, Mr. Langella. Of course. Do come in.”

I stepped into a fairly large sitting room similar to mine and saw a small man, back to me, leaning over a table, fussing with a pair of cufflinks. He turned sharply, upper body still bent, focused on me, then stood ramrod straight. The cufflinks clattered to the table and his arms shot out, palms wide, face beaming. It was a standing-still entrance. I began to cross toward him, but he beat me to it, grabbed both my wrists in an extraordinarily tight hold, and drew me to him.

“Dear boy,” he said, fixing his gaze on me and studying my face as if it were a small-print road map. “Oh yes, of course . . . ”

He let go and began a rapid-fire series of questions about his
frocks.
Did I think this jacket was suitable? Was the collar too tight? “One wants it a bit more loose, I feel. Gives one a fragile appearance.” I couldn't imagine him looking any more fragile. He was at the time suffering from a rare blood disorder, paper thin, a bit hard of hearing, and unsteady on his feet. Other than that, he seemed made of cast iron. A master of deception who, long ago, I sensed, had lost touch with the simple act of just being. The artifice of his persona was, no doubt, long practiced and I knew instinctively that I was in danger. I was in the presence of a predatory animal who had caught me in his sights, and I would need to be on guard for the next several months.

We discovered that a connecting door joined our two suites, both of which overlooked a lawn leading to the sea. “We can have tea in the morning, dear boy, or a bit of champers after work. Do come in any time.” His arm was tight in mine as he ushered me to the door.

“Oh, it's going to be something, isn't it?” And I was in the hallway again. Ice broken. Already refreezing. Laurence Olivier had the extraordinary ability to embrace and dismiss you in one gesture.

That afternoon there was a first reading of the script. He was in full costume. “Never too soon to break it in,” he said. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and we began. The reading was perfunctory, uneventful, and courteous. At one point he had this line to say: “I shall have to cut off her head and stuff her mouth with garlic.” He turned to our director John Badham and exclaimed:

“I shall need to say that line directly into the lens, dear boy!”

“Would you like to have dinner?” I asked after the reading. His hand leapt up from the table in a gesture of carefree flamboyance as if I'd invited him to bungee-jump with me, and the voice sounded out clear as a bell:

“Why not!”

I came round the table as he pushed back his chair and placed my hand under his elbow. He gratefully accepted my aid, wrapping his fingers round my forearm. But once up and steady, he gingerly preceded me out the door.

The bar of the hotel where we were in residence was dark, mirrored, and opened into a small dining room. Still in costume, he ordered champagne. “Let's start it off right, shall we, dear boy?”

Once several glasses had been downed he seemed to drop ten years and there was a swaggering manner in how he leaned on the bar, gestured, and took a stance away from it from time to time.

“Now you will help me out with this, won't you, dear boy? Help me sex up the character a bit?”

“You're not going to play helpless with me, are you?” I said.

Placid face, steely eyes, champagne chugged. “Cheers,” he clipped out. “Let's eat.” And he sailed quite confidently into the dining room.

Whatever it was we did eat that night, he ate it with immense gusto, ripping hunks of bread, slathering them with butter, shoveling in the meat, flinging down glass after glass of red wine. The early talk was of acting styles. “Your Ethel Merman,” he said. “Your Chita Rivera. They're ab-so-lutely marvelous. That's what you Americans do best. Big, vulgar musicals. I adore them.” The “a-” and the “-dore” were separated by a tiny pause, and the “-dore” was punched out with even more voice.

“We just can't do any of that. I don't mean sentimental shit like
A Chorus Line
. Oh, and your Gwen Verdon in
Once Upon a Mattress
. Fan-tas-tic.” I had a hard time convincing him it hadn't been Gwen but Carol Burnett.

“Now you've had a great success with this in America, haven't you dear boy! All camp and winky-winky, was it?”

Dracula
had indeed been a phenomenal hit on Broadway, supported by the black and white Edward Gorey designs. I launched into a description of how I intended for the film to be played in a Gothic, romantic style, not Hammer Studio camp. I would wear no fangs, I told him. There would be no wolf's eyes, no blood dripping from my mouth.

“Have you read the book, dear boy? You know it's Van Helsing's story.”

It was now 2 a.m. and both Sir Laurence and Larry were stinko. A young assistant appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Langella, I have your per diem with me. Would you mind signing here?” I did and he handed me a packet of my expense money. The young man turned to leave, looked over my shoulder, and realized that the tiny little person in full period costume slumped over next to me was Sir himself. “Oh, Sir Laurence,” he said. “Forgive me. I didn't know you'd arrived. I have yours in the car; do you need it?”

“
Need
it?
Need
it? Of course I don't need it, dear boy. I just like to
collect
it. Go get it.”

Over the course of the first several weeks we had dinner together most evenings and he could be vastly entertaining. The stories poured out of him in well-rehearsed rhetoric. The one constant in his endless repertoire was the actress Vivien Leigh, whom he referred to as “my late wife.”

“I got the call that she was gone, and I rushed over to remove some papers and such before the fuss began. There she was laid out on the bed, dead. I tiptoed through the apartment, almost going ass-over-teakettle to the floor. I looked down and there was a small puddle at my feet, between the bedroom and the bath. She must have gotten up in the night and couldn't make it to the bathroom so she just stood and peed herself. You know, she was a nymphomaniac! And I'm a premature ejaculator! Not a good matchup!”

Q
uick off the mark were certainly not words that could be applied to our film. It was grossly underprepared and the waiting was endless. So the door between our suites stayed open most mornings. In Larry would pad wearing his flannel robe and his velvet slippers, and take tea with me and read the morning papers sitting by the window. I'd sit up in bed, drink my tea, and read as well. Those were the times I most enjoyed him: a silly old English gent who loved to play camp and gossip about anyone and everything. And as the days wore on his stories and his language grew more and more ribald. I slept in the nude but when I heard him stirring I would slip on a pair of boxers and climb back under the covers. And if I needed to dash to the john he'd say:

“Oh, we're not going to have a look at the naughty bits, are we?”

So one morning, as a gag, I slipped off my boxers under the covers and streaked to the bathroom, then turned at the door and said: “Oh professor, see anything you like?” He howled with laughter, flung his arms in the air, clapped loudly for me and shouted out, “Bravo, dear boy, bravo!” Returning to his newspaper he chose not to look up as I scurried back to the bed.

As yet another workless day stretched before us, a makeup man arrived in my rooms to make a plaster cast of a portion of my chest for the love scene in which I open a vein so Miss Lucy can drink my blood. Larry sat by the window watching the process. When it was done he beckoned me over to him and we sat staring out to the sea. “You know, Frankay, you have a very good chest. I had a lovely chest when I was your age. In fact, one of my fantasies was to be standing on a pedestal in a museum and have people pay to worship my naked form.”

“You too?” I said.

I was forty, still vain, still watched my dailies, and pored over stills.

“Oh, there'll come a time, dear boy, when you'll take a look at yourself in the mirror and you'll just settle. I look like an old trout now and there's nothing to be done for it. Ahhh! Tears before bedtime.”

After our morning sessions, he'd pad back to his rooms, leave the door open, and I'd hear him relentlessly repeating his lines in an indeterminate accent:

I did not hear you come in, Count
, he would say over and over again, with the
Count
slightly extended and broken into two syllables. And finally, when I entered the scene in which he was to say the line, on camera, months later, he turned to me and said it exactly the way I'd heard it dozens of times coming from his room. He could have been playing the scene opposite the March Hare for all he noticed me, and he was gone the moment his on-camera lines were finished.

P
erhaps one of the most ludicrous scenes I've ever played in a film was performed sitting on a horse in the back lot of Shepperton Studios on a cold and rainy afternoon surrounded by bags of garbage. Larry was long gone from the production, so as my horse's hooves sunk into the mud, I acted to an 8x10 photo of him that had been taped onto a wooden stick and stuck into the ground. The horse and I kept sinking lower and lower, forcing my eye-line to change and the stick to be pounded deeper into the ground with each take. When watching the film it is impossible to tell that several months had passed between Larry's close-ups and mine. I was, in fact, so used to acting without him there, that one day as I said a line on the set of the study, I turned in shock when I heard his voice off camera feeding me a cue.

“What's Larry doing here?” I asked Badham.

“The press is visiting,” he said.

B
ut with or without their obsequious presence, Larry was always consistently for Larry. One afternoon we were asked to stand on the balcony of the castle to pose for publicity photographs. We both faced the camera in full regalia, staring intently into the lens.

“Sir Laurence, would you have a look at Mr. Langella, please?” the photographer asked.

“No,” he shot back.

“Mr. Langella, would you have a look at Sir Laurence, please?”

“No,” I retorted.

As we came back inside he took my arm and said, “You know, Frankay, dear. You're a monster. So am I. It's what you need to be to be a Star. But really there is nothing so rewarding as being inside an
ensemble
. Particularly when playing Chekhov. So much more thrilling than giving a Star Performance.” I did not believe or agree with him then, and time has not in the least altered my opinion.

He could no longer, of course, give star performances. His illness and age prevented the sort of theatricality for which he had been lionized. But the monster in the man was still very much alive and I was actually regretful at not having caught him at a time when his teeth were sharp and his claws were out. He was doing
Dracula
for the money, giving it his formidable showmanship, having his tea, and being, from time to time, a delicious old camp.

O
ne afternoon, with his feet up, turning the pages of a big movie picture book, he hilariously commented on some of the performers with whom he had worked.

Of Merle Oberon:

“Dear Merlie. She was always complaining to Willy Wyler [who directed them both in
Wuthering Heights
]
,
‘Willy. Larry's spitting on me.' ‘Well, I'm from the theatre, Merlie dear,' I said. ‘That's what theatre actors do. We
spit
.' ”

O
f Kate Hepburn:

“Fancied herself a laaady, so I'd just say, ‘Fucking cunt' any time I could, and she'd pretend shock. ‘Oh come off it,' I'd say. ‘After all those years of living with Spence you've heard a lot worse.' ”

A
nd once he said of a young actor who'd never quite succeeded and tried desperately to appear straight:

“Darling chap, but he just couldn't hide the Nellie. And you know, dear boy, you've got to hide the Nellie.”

T
he months dragged by and, on his last day of work, I had to drive a stake through his heart, pinning him up against a wall. Most of it was done with a double, but he was brought in for his close-up. John Badham, whose style of direction was pretty direct and pragmatic, was going to take Larry through the shot, as there was no sound required. And it went something like this: