Authors: Frank Langella
C
oral Browne was an actress better known for her personality than her talent. Although gifted, subtle, and stately, she outstripped her performances on stage and screen with her personal wit and sarcastic tongue, aided and abetted by her equally witty husband, horror film star Vincent Price.
I met her in the winter of 1978 while living in London filming
Dracula
. She was close to my good friend, the British theatre designer Carl Toms, and he arranged several evenings at the famous Garrick Club, where Coral held forth in high style.
A handsome woman, always impeccably dressed and made up, she focused on maintaining her looks to the end. With a voice that cut like a knife and a laser look that burned through you, you didn't want to be on Coral's bad side. Even though, thanks to meticulous plastic surgery, there seemed to be none. We settled into our table, ordered drinks, and she began:
“Who's in your picture, darling?”
“Well, Olivier.”
“Darling Larry. I adore him. From a distance.”
“And Donald Pleasence.”
“Oh, God. He's a
handkerchief
actor. He'll take out his bloody handkerchief and blow his nose whenever he gets a chance or worse eat a bag of Sweeties during your best scene. Whatever you do, don't get in a
two-shot
with him.”
O
ne of the most legendary stories about Coral involved the American columnist Radie Harris, who courted and wooed the English stars through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s with long, flattering tributes in her column “Broadway Ballyhoo” in the
Hollywood Reporter
. Several times a year, Radie, who had a bum leg, walked with a cane, and wore a brace, entertained them all in her suite at the Savoy. She would plant herself in a comfortable chair, unlock the brace, lean the cane next to her, and hold court. The story goes that Coral walked in to find Radie surrounded by the likes of John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Oliver, and a bevy of simpering sycophants. She observed the scene and declared in a loud full voice, “There she sits, with all of London at her
foot.
”
But my personal favorite, and the most famous, was about a phone call she once made to a director early in the morning on the first day's rehearsal of a Shakespeare play.
“I'm very upset.”
“What is it Coral dear?”
“You haven't asked Phillip to be in our play.”
Phillip was Coral's husband at the time.
“But Coral, darling. We're all cast. There's no part for him.”
“Oh, yes, there is. Get the script. Turn to page sixty-four. You see halfway down, there where it says:
“ âA Campânear Dover.' ”
So casual was the wit, and so delightful the delivery, it often flew by in a flash. As we were departing the Garrick Club one evening a very short man came up behind us and tapped her on the shoulder. “Coral, darling,” he said, “you haven't looked at me all evening.”
She peered over her shoulder, gazed down and said, “You think I've got eyes in my ass?”
C
oral and Vincent, whom I only had the pleasure of briefly meeting once, were, I'm told, irrepressible together. Courageous realists who during their later years, had found a beautiful rapport and friendship. Vincent was by her side all through her illness and at her death at the age of seventy-seven.
When she was close to the end, Alan Bates told me he called to speak to her and Vincent said:
“I'm so sorry. She can't come to the phone. She's just gone to confession. And she's going to be a
very
long time.”
W
hen actors don't like each other, it is usually with a vengeance, and Colleen Dewhurst did not like me.
As I was coming out of a colleague's dressing room backstage, Miss Dewhurst was coming in and fixed me with a stare little short of contempt. She sailed past without a word and I asked my companion if I had imagined her coolness.
“Oh no,” she said, “pure hatred.”
What, I wondered, could I have done?
C
olleen was popular with other actors and they generally grouped around her at theatrical gatherings. One year she was seated backstage watching a Tony Awards ceremony on closed-circuit TV with lots of people I knew. I walked over and sat down next to her. But she stiffened, said not a word to me, and eventually moved away.
I tried again one evening in 1982. I was playing Salieri in
Amadeus
at the Broadhurst and Colleen was playing in
The Queen and the Rebels
next door at the Plymouth. The walls of our stages backed up to each other.
During the second act of
Amadeus
, Salieri has a long, quiet monologueâpin-drop timeâand every night at precisely the moment it began, I would hear Colleen let out a blood-curdling scream next door and storm through some dialogue. No matter how I timed my monologue, her screams always hit at exactly the quiet moments for me.
One night it stopped.
“Did Miss Dewhurst's show close?” I asked the stage manager.
“No.”
At that time, there was a restaurant on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street called Downey's. On matinee days you could find Colleen, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, Jason Robards mostly sitting by themselves in one of the round red booths, reading and eating before heading back to their dressing rooms for a nap.
So I took a chance, stopped at her table, and told her my story as she politely stared up at me.
“And now your screams are all gone. What happened?” She thought a moment and said:
“Oh yeah. I stopped! I was doing it fucking
wrong
for the last three months,” and returned to her salmon.
I
t was the last of several attempts I'd made to engage her. I am not thin-skinned, but it's easier to deal with someone's antipathy when you know the nature of the grievance. Although I do remember asking a young actress once why our director seemed to dislike me.
“You showed up,” she said.
In Colleen's case I had no clue and no mutual friend to intercede. So I accepted her animus and figured we'd never work together or know each other personally; sad, because she was a colossal actress and all her pals adored her.
Colleen's ex-husband George C. Scott was directing me in
Design for Living
at New York's Circle in the Square Theatre in 1984. During a note session in early previews, he said:
“Colleen's coming tonight.”
I told him my story. He seemed little interested.
After the show, George came back and said:
“Her agent says you're an asshole.”
Colleen was represented for many years by a theatrical agent whom, at the beginning of my career, I had unfairly fired. He had a legitimate grievance against me and had obviously poisoned Colleen's mind.
“What did you say, George?”
“I said, âSo what?' ” He laughed.
Obviously he said more than that because flowers arrived the next day and a break-a-leg telegram on opening night. Thereafter she was the warm and caring woman I'd often heard about and with whom I would be lucky enough to share a memorable evening.
It was at an all-night gabfest in Houston not too long afterward when we'd both been asked to perform at a gala in honor of Arthur Miller. In my hotel suite Arthur, Colleen, Tony Lo Bianco, Mildred Dunnock, Robert Foxworth, Liz Montgomery, and I were gorging ourselves on hundreds of shrimp, roast beef sandwiches, french fries, mountains of dessert, and cheap champagne provided by the benefit committee.
It was enough food for thirty people, but actors are insatiable when it comes to free food, and by 3 a.m. we'd eaten everything but the paper doilies on the restaurant trays and Colleen had drunk enough champagne to christen a fleet of battleships. We all smoked in those days, and gossiped viciously. Fewer smokers today, but vicious gossip is eternal.
Colleen was our bitch leader. Dressed in bright red harem pants, tight at the ankles and billowing up to a flowing red top, she looked like a giant red pepper on stiletto heels. As the food disappeared into her mouth, hosed down by the champagne, she held forth on the dirt of the day. Hilarious vivisections of personalities and careers. I suspect the character of any actor who can't fling this kind of mud from time to time and was certain I had most likely been so vivisected by her at one point, and might be again. Grateful as I was for a curtain having been dropped between us, I knew it could just as easily be raised once more.
Arthur and his wife, Inge Morath, the photographer, left early. My wife went to bed and one by one people drifted away. It was now just Colleen, me, and her then boyfriend, Ken Marsolais, remaining. There was no more to eat, we'd systematically destroyed every reputation in the business, but she was still cooking. Ken wanted to go. She reluctantly got up, sucking on her cigarette, and staggered into the marble foyer of the suite toward the door, where she gleefully spotted a bowl of nuts on the hall table. She scooped up a huge amount, tossed back her head, flung them into her mouth, and in a second out they flew across the foyer and down the far wall onto the floor.
“Agggg!” she screamed. “It's
potpourri
!”
We collapsed into the kind of hysterical, from your guts bellowing that took on a life of its own, causing us to gasp for air, hold our stomachs, and roll around on the marble floor like drunken idiots for ten minutes. When actors lose it, they lose it bigtime.
C
olleen and I were never intimate friends, but I was grateful she'd overcome her prejudice toward me and from then on, whenever I saw her it was free and easy. One evening I asked her how she was enjoying her reign as president of Actors' Equity. She stared hard at me and said: “Big fucking mistake.”
T
ony Perkins was, among other complicated things, gay. He died after a long battle with AIDS in 1992 at the age of sixty, having finally confessed his secret. But I doubt it was a confession that gave him much relief.
He was five years my senior, and a huge rising star when I came to New York in 1960. A total original in looks, voice, and style, he was long, lanky, and offbeat handsome. His performances in the films
Friendly Persuasion
in 1956 and
The Matchmaker
in 1958
are so winning and comically skilled that his signature role of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
only two years later seemed to stunt his potential and most probably sounded the death knell of his promising career. He was only twenty-eight years old and from then on appeared to be living a trapped life. An indelible character he could never shake and a sexual nature he could not celebrate.
I first met him in 1967 in my dressing room at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre when I was playing William Shakespare in William Gibson's play
A Cry of Players
. I was twenty-nine years old. He was thirty-four and on the make. In the acting company of the play was an eccentric guy who had a small role and lived in a teepee he had set up in the Beaumont's vast backstage area. From it came the distinct odor of cannabis and in and out of it went a phalanx of young men.
One night there was a knock on my dressing room door after the performance. When I opened it, there stood the lovely Mr. Perkins, hands stuffed in his pants pockets, hair sweetly messy.
“Hi. I'm Tony. Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
After the usual backstage chat, I said:
“You know, people keep telling me I'm a young you, but I don't think we look alike. Do you?”
We both stood in front of my makeup mirror shoulder to shoulder and stared at each other.
“I don't see it,” he said. “How big is your cock?”
“I didn't bring it with me tonight,” I joked.
We turned and faced each other in silence. There is a way one man stares at another when a sexual encounter may be in the offing that is completely unlike the uncomplicated gaze exchanged with no hint of its possibility. Tony's gaze was profoundly of the former.
“I'm going back to visit Tom in his tent. If you feel like it, stop in.”
T
om's teepee could not hold a candle to the swank New York apartments in which the gay community of the 1960s often gathered. Famous older men in the closet had secret evenings to which all the young meat in New York was invited. The entrance fee meant stripping at the door, donning only a towel, and spending the rest of the evening so attired. An upscale elegant steamless bathhouse at which Tony was reputedly a frequent visitor. He held a unique position, certainly, being both a celebrity and youngish meat.
I always felt in his company that he wanted to be fathered. Even though I was the younger, he related to me like a teenage boy in constant need of approval. His first impulsive question in my dressing room that night in 1967, “How big is your cock?” may have been more than a come-on. In a little boy's mind, Daddy's is always bigger.
Skittish, compulsively flirtatious, and often sexually charged, he seemed always to be flinching from an expected whack to the back of his head.
Sweet or sour; a master game player who was often vindictively cruel, he finally lost his virginity to a female at age thirty-nine, declared he liked it, married soon after, and fathered two children.
As the years passed and his beauty faded, he appeared in awful films, a few plays, and ultimately gave in to his signature role of Norman Bates and lived on the sequels. Anger and bitterness then seemed to be the dominant element in his personality.
A
part from a few social occasions, I lost track of Tony until one morning shortly before his death, in the parking lot of a grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard close to Hugo's Restaurant, a favorite actor's hangout in Los Angeles.
I was loading the car as someone came up behind me.
“Hey.”
I turned and saw what looked to me like a ghostly apparition, a paper-thin, wide-eyed, sallow-faced, walking cadaver.
“Tony, hello.”
He did not speak. He looked over my shoulder into my car, then at me and backed away. It was a terrifying sight. Clearly dying and clearly desperate, he seemed disoriented and lost. Only his familiar crooked grin gave me the sense he knew who he was.
He kept backing away, then turned and seemed to be heading toward his car. Getting into mine I watched him climb the hill behind the parking lot and walk along its ridge. Staring through my rearview mirror at him wandering around in the grass and weeds, I remembered when the world was his oyster and it seemed nothing could stand in his way. A book with such a beautiful cover on whose pages were most likely written crippling and indelible words of shame and guilt.