The Sheila Variations

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The only tribute you need to read.

"She got the idea all right."

Martha Vickers, a young pretty actress, was damn unforgettable and creepy as the sociopathic thumb-sucking nymphomaniac in The Big Sleep. How on earth did THAT get by the censors??

There's a really cute story about her and the filming of The Big Sleep - I came across it first, I think, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. But the anecdote also shows up in a couple of Bogart biographies - the story was told by multiple people - all of whom witnessed it, so I guess we can assume that something along these lines occurred. I just love everyone involved in the following anecdote. I love it for the kindness shown to her, but also that it really does reveal the mystery of what is called "acting". You don't just need to draw from your own experiences. That is a misunderstanding of what acting is - and you can definitely see it when certain actors attempt Shakespeare, and what they do is try to drag, oh, King Lear down to THEIR level, where it can be understood by them. How can I "relate" to Macbeth? How about I try to just imagine what it was like for HIM? This is obviously way easier said than done, but this anecdote about Martha Vickers is a small slice of life showing that you don't need to just draw on what you yourself have experienced. If you have an imagination, you can play anything.

Good for her for just going with it. She could have been mortified, humiliated, and damaged. But first of all - these big macho guys all treated her quite nicely, despite the obvious, uhm, fact of her inexperience ... they did not shame her ... and second of all ... she obviously just listened, took it in, "took the coaching", and went forth and played that part to the best of her ability. She's terrific.

So here it is:

Howard Hawks had an idea for one of the scenes - where Marlowe (Bogart) comes into the house, and finds Vickers sitting, all dressed up in the empty house - drugged out, sexed up, in the aftermath of some sexual event. Marlowe can immediately tell that obviously some kind of porno photo shoot had been going on. And Marlowe comes upon her, she is high on drugs, and completely out of it. Anyway, Hawks had an idea for this scene (which ended up not making it into the movie - no wonder, with the censorship of the day!): He wanted Vickers to simulate an orgasm, as she sat there, looking up at Bogart. He wanted her to be in that quivery zone where you basically don't even need physical contact to "get there" - he wanted her to be the kind of woman who lives in that state.

So Hawks asked her to do so. He gave her this piece of direction in front of Bogart, Regis Toomey (who plays the DA - wonderful stolid character actor), and a couple of other people, members of the crew, etc. You know, moviemaking has a mystique about it but there is also a no-nonsense quality to it that I find refreshing.

Hawks said, "Sweetheart, what we want here is for you to simulate that you're having an orgasm."

Martha Vickers asked, "What's an orgasm?"

Nobody spoke. Nobody knew what to do. They all just stood there, awkward as hell, stunned to silence. Hawks, Bogart, and Toomey - grown men - standing there with a teenage actress - who was asking them (in all innocence) what an orgasm was. Dead silence. Hawks called a 10-minute break. (hahahaha) I mean - what else could you do? Hawks then pulled Toomey aside and asked Toomey to please go and "explain to Miss Vickers what an orgasm is". I love that Howard Hawks, supposedly the most macho guy in the universe, couldn't bring himself to go explain it to her - he had to have someone else go do it.

Toomey, who apparently was a good-natured fellow, married with a bunch of kids, the product of a strict Irish Catholic upbringing, gamely went over to Martha and explained to her what an orgasm was. (Wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

Toomey said later to Bogart, "The girl didn't know anything. I asked, 'Are you a virgin?' 'Uh yes.' 'Do you know what an orgasm is? Mr. Hawks wants you to be having an orgasm here.' 'No, I don't know what it is.' 'You don't know what an orgasm is?' 'No.' And so, dammit, I explained to her what an orgasm was. And she got the idea all right. Howard liked the scene very much."

"She got the idea all right."

Bless you, Martha Vickers! And bless you, Regis Toomey!

After that, it became a huge joke amongst the three men.

Hawks would say to Toomey, "If I ever have to explain an orgasm to anyone again, I am calling on you." And Bogie would laugh and laugh like a madman.

Clip from The Big Sleep below, of the scene in question. Seriously: this young actress who led a protected innocent life - gives a HELL of a performance.

Brave.

Essence

Pretty faces.

Kay Francis as a platinum blonde!

Some of my faves there. Sylvia Sidney, too. They're all so individual, aren't they? You would never mistake Clara Bow for Barbara Stanwyck. It would be impossible.

There can be a sameness to the up-and-coming starlets today - because creating a specific persona is not what is in vogue now. What is in vogue now is versatility: I'm a gorgeous young starlet, yet watch me play a limping Inuit from the 15th century! Now watch me play a rumpled itinerant fruit-picker from 1935! Now watch me play a jacked-up crack addict in Seattle!

Awesome! Great! But WHO exactly ARE you?

No reason to be angry at the trend of today (more on this theme here) ... it's just a trend. Like any other trend, it will pass. I find it more interesting that that is what is in vogue now, as annoying as I sometimes find it. The thought seems to be: If you are an actress, then you should be able to play everything. A silly-putty nose and CGI can fill in the gaps in your work. But you can see in the results of this kind of work (phone call for Cate Blanchett) - not everyone can play everything, nor SHOULD everyone. There is something to be said for knowing what your essence is - and playing THAT. Those actors still exist. Mickey Rourke. Gene Hackman. Ewan McGregor (when he's used well). Gena Rowlands. Susan Sarandon. Jeff Bridges. Actually, I'd put Angelina Jolie on that list. Kurt Russell. I wrote a bit about this "essence" thing in my review of Ben Marley in The Cold Reader. Anyone can learn a dialect. There are tutors for that. But there are no tutors to help you understand and bring out your own essence. You either have it or you don't.

So looking at compilation of pretty faces from the past, what I am most struck by is each woman's individual essence. You would never mistake one for the other. It's like a fingerprint. Wholly itself, a snowflake unlike any of its sisters. A mark made by one particular hand in indelible ink.

Wonderful performance

I've been looking for a quote from the actor in question - where he talks about the breakthrough he experienced in playing this part - but I have yet to find it. It's in a book I have - one of thousands, which I can't locate.

When I find it, I will post.

In the meantime: wonderful performance. Seen in the context of the rest of his career, it is nothing short of remarkable.

Uhm ... Tallulah?

How you doing?

You need to ... talk about anything? Or ... are you all set?

Because frankly I'm a little concerned.

The eyes have it.

I find myself unable to look away from them.

Gena Rowlands, in Opening Night:

That first entrance in "Stagecoach"

Girish's fascinating post about "narrative synthesis" includes a discussion of John Wayne's first appearance in John Ford's Stagecoach, one of my favorite "first appearances" of all time.

Make sure to read the whole thing, but Girish writes:

John Wayne's first appearance in the film, unusual because it takes us by surprise, forsaking Ford's customary style for a second by dollying in for a close-up, the camera not even able to maintain perfect focus as it lunges forward.

It is that slight flaw - the camera blurring out for a bit because it moves in too fast - that truly makes this one of the most memorable moments in American cinema.

Not to mention the fact that John Wayne was not yet a movie star when he made Stagecoach, although he had been working in films for quite some time by that point. Stagecoach was his breakout, and seriously - with his first appearance in the film, it is not hard to understand why.

If I tried to break down what he was doing in these 2.5 seconds, I could probably write 20 pages about what I see. But ultimately, what he is doing is simple, open, unbelabored, and free. It doesn't look like work, it doesn't look planned. It looks real.

What he had as an older man in his later roles, he has here, before he was even known, before his "persona" was set.

His essence could not be killed, manipulated, or cheapened. And (most interesting to me) it was there from the beginning. It didn't NEED stardom to bring it out. He had it already. He happened to become a star, but here he is - in his first appearance in Stagecoach, not a star yet ... and it is all there already. Everything that would carry him through his long career. His personality, his machismo, his handsomeness, his unselfconsciousness with gesture (nobody beats John Wayne in that department- nobody), and then - with that last little spontaneous change of expression as the camera pulls right into his face - the vulnerability. It still has the power to take my breath away, what he does in that last second. Like - what?

He had a gift for this stuff. He knew (on some level beyond words, I'm sure) in that moment: "Okay, the camera is at point-blank range now - so don't keep the face closed, don't act, but also don't hold back, open open open it up ... "

Whoosh - open, sesame.

It's a gut-level understanding of what a closeup is. Watch how he does it.

And it is the vulnerability that makes John Wayne the slam-dunk that he is. Without it, those moments we love so much (the closeup in the trading post in The Searchers, the last moment in The Searchers with his arm crossed over his chest - uhm, the whole effing performance in The Searchers) would not be possible. The toughness, the stoicism, the man-of-action, the bold gestures ... all of those things are essential to explaining his appeal. But that small glitch of vulnerability, humanity - that comes at the very end of that first closeup in The Stagecoach - still surprises me, and still makes me think: Who the hell is this guy? I want to see more.

With that particular blend of qualities, he was (or "is" - because doesn't he still seem so alive? Look at that little breath he takes there at the end) as rare as they come.

The closeup in Stagecoach always reminds me of this beautiful paragraph from Peter Bogdonavich's book Who the Hell's in It: Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors, in the essay on John Wayne:

To me, Duke had always seemed slightly out of breath, as though he hadn't yet caught up on the last twenty years, not to mention the last twenty minutes. Both [John] Ford and [Howard] Hawks truly loved him, of course, and even knowing him a little, as I did, it was pretty difficult not to like him. All this, and a lot more, obviously communicated itself to the public -- still the top American star more than seventy years since his beginning. His visual legacy has defined him as the archetypal man of the American West -- bold, innocent, profane, idealistic, wrongheaded, good-hearted, single-minded, quick to action, not given to pretension, essentially alone, ready for any adventure -- no matter how grand or daring; larger, finally, than life or death.

First appearance in Stagecoach below. It's subtitled - but I chose it because it hones in on the closeup itself - the moment I'm talking about. One of my favorite moments in American cinema and it lasts maybe 2 seconds long. That's all it takes.

John Garfield

You ask why?

Boy rocks the house, that's why.

His debut in Four Daughters is one of those moments in American cinema - a sea-change - a new kind of acting coming to the forefront ... the full fruition of it being Marlon Brando in Streetcar in 1951 - but Four Daughters was in 1938. He is shockingly modern. He would fit in to any movie today, about the crumply rugged unshaven anti-hero. John Garfield strolls into that movie, unselfconscious, without any of that old-school gesture-y vaudeville style (not to knock it - it's just different) - and he is an emissary from the future. He is what will come. He's not even the lead, and the movie doesn't quite recover from his absence. (My review of this terribly under-rated and very difficult to find film here.)

UPDATE: Found the clip of his entrance to Four Daughters on Youtube. Exciting! Added the clip below. Tell me this guy isn't a movie star. He's an unknown when he enters, an unknown actor, but he sure as hell doesn't act like one. He's a star.

If you ever see that it's on anywhere, I highly recommend it, if for Garfield's debut alone. I go into his career in that link as well, something I'm very familiar with, due to my long-standing passion about the Group Theatre (an ensemble company in the 30s, which produced, oh, you know, lightweights like Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Franchot Tone, to name a few).

Garfield, hounded by the HUAC, was harassed into an early grave, something that I mourn, even though - you know - it has nothing to do with me - because I don't believe he had "the" role yet. The one we all would remember, the thing that would make him immortal. He had been good in things - he's usually good - he was the only good thing in Gentleman's Agreement (well, besides Dean Stockwell, of course, who strolls away with every scene ... acting poor stiff Gregory Peck off the screen), he was smoldering and terrific in Postman Always Rings Twice. The role would come. I totally believe it would have come.

Let's not forget that he was first choice to play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway (he turned the part down). Clifford Odets wrote many roles just for "Julie", and it's just one of those terribly sad what-ifs in Hollywood.

He was so good. A palpably masculine and strong leading man, unselfconsciously sexy - no preening - and - very important, I think - a certain ethnic stamp on him which gives him a different kind of authenticity in the world of golden boy leading men in which he operated. He seems like New York. You can tell he is local. So many stars seem to come from nowhere. They have indeterminate accents - they have worked hard to get rid of their local ones, Southern, New York, Midwest, whatever - to flatten it out into that mid-Atlantic cadence favored by news anchors everywhere. John Garfield could never be from anywhere other than New York. He still has the stink of the street on him. You can feel the rattle of the subway, the taste of the corned beef sandwich, the glitz, the gleam, the filth ... and to have all of that in 1938 is no small thing. It came naturally to him.

Four Daughters is most interesting to watch because it is the new acting style up against the old. Two totally different worlds. Now I am not a Method acting snot. I couldn't care less about how you get there, and there is much in the old-school style that is wonderful and precious. There is nothing like a scene played immaculately and perfectly by Ronald Coleman. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, basically. He's exquisite. But John Garfield has a mess about him. He smokes, and even his cigarettes look hand-rolled. He lets long pauses happen between lines, he smirks and sneers ... and everyone is off-balance just by being in his presence. That "style" of acting is so in vogue now that it is hard to remember what a revolution it really was, and in Four Daughters you can see the whole thing - side by side with the old-school. The daughters are all wonderful, the other characters ... nobody's a stinker, it's not like Garfield is the only "good" thing in it.

But he is definitely something new, make no mistake.

Some photos below.

I love him, and I am basically bummed at what won't be and what will never be. He was terrific.

I have officially lost it

I was talking with Joe about Oliver (of course), and we were laughing at how we're partners-in-crime in this obsession. It's so enjoyable to talk to another obsessive.

And so, in line with that, Ron Moody has suddenly been on my mind (because yeah, that's normal.)

I have been thinking about Ron Moody. Ron Moody was huge in my childhood. Not as huge as John Denver or Lance Kerwin, it is true, but it was close. Of course he has a credit list from here to Woonsocket, but to me, he's always just Fagin, that's it. I can't see him as anything else.

Since I have been thinking about Ron Moody, I remembered yet another highwater-mark in my obviously deprived childhood (where I spent most of my time hovering over the TV Guide looking for re-runs of Orphan Train and Skyward). It was a Christmas movie starring Benji.

You know. Benji.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember Benji. Benji was huge. He was no Rin Tin Tin, it is true, he was no Lassie, but he was close.

And in 1978, Benji - with some of the cast members of the original hugely successful Benji movie (which my parents had taken us to) - had his very own Christmas movie. As a matter of fact, what are the odds, the movie is called Benji's Very Own Christmas Story. All I remember about it is this:

Benji and his sidekicks travel to a magical icy land where Kris Kringle is real. And ...

That's where my brain stops.

I do remember there was a cast of thousands, as well as musical numbers, and Ron freakin' Moody played Kris Kringle. I was only a tomboy pipsqueak when the Christmas movie came out, but I was already deep into Oliver obsession at that point, and could recite to you Ron Moody's resume, if asked. Sadly, no one ever asked. I'm still waiting.

But it was so much fun for me as a kid to see this actor, whom I only knew from one part, live it up in this other part, and I remember there was one giant production number, with Kris Kringle skipping through his ... village? workshop? torture chamber of death? "It puts the Benji in the basket?" I have no idea ... with crowds of people thronging behind him and they are all singing about ... Christmas? Wrapping paper? Scandinavian coke-whores? ... no idea ... but I LOVED the number as a child, and, true to form, huddled up against the television screen with a tape recorder, so I could capture it.

I clearly should have been in an institution.

I suppose I could look at it in a positive way. VCRs were far in our family's future. I was way ahead of the curve.

And so, yes, what of it, I used to turn on my tape recording of this number from BENJI'S VERY OWNCHRISTMAS STORY (for God's SAKE), and act it out in my room, pretending I was in the movie, or in the world of the movie at LEAST, or maybe that a role was added - for a small freckled tomboy of a SIDEKICK for Ron Moody ... and I would be so engrossed in all of this that I wouldn't hear my mother calling me to dinner.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about Ron Moody and Benji in years, until the last couple of days, and so a quick click on Amazon made me see that yes, unbelievably, Benji's Very Own Christmas Story is available on DVD (excuse me. And Skyward is not? That's bullshit, people. I'm dead serious), and you can purchase it for $5.99.

Naturally I bought it immediately.

I need to watch that big-ass musical number again and try to imagine my way back into my child-self and remember what the fuss was about.

It seems vitally important for some reason.

This is for Mitchell

Because I enjoy making Mitchell cry.

Ledger

I didn't like Dark Knight. I thought it was a mess. I didn't like individual elements and I didn't like the whole either. It's not that I didn't "get it", or that I was "afraid" of its implications. The fanboys have been rabid dogs about criticism of their baby, so I know all their arguments. No, it's not that I quivered in my seat afraid of what I was actually seeing, and its power, and therefore have to "attack" it. And I'm not attacking it, anyway. I just didn't like the movie, boys, chillax. More than anything, I felt it was incompetent. That was the weirdest thing about it, for me. A day after I saw it I could barely remember it. I've loved all the Batman films, so this was strange to me. But whatever, it's a movie, you can't win 'em all.

However, Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is one of those rare rare things ... what I would call a "performance for the ages". I knew the second I saw the first scene with him in it that he was as good as everyone had been saying, and even better. The second you saw him, you couldn't imagine anyone else in the part (even though we have seen many many actors play that part). He took it to another level. A vision of apocalyptic chaos, with something truly great underneath it: a philosophy. This was a man devoted to chaos, yes, but what made him truly frightening was the thought behind it. He knew what he was doing. He wasn't a giggling lunatic rubbing his hands in glee (although he did that, too). He was a calculating thinker. That was where the fear came from, for me. It is difficult to suggest such a thing when you have that crazy makeup on your face, and you are required to say these "ba-dum-ching" pun-filled lines, which could add up to the impression that you think everything is a big "joke". What was extraordinary about the performance, and it has stayed with me, was that yes, he thought it all was a big joke, and no, he found none of it funny. There wasn't a shred of compassion in him, he was of a Ted Bundy-like nature - a cold-blooded killer, who not only enjoyed death and destruction, but enjoyed making people squirm beforehand.

I have been watching Heath Ledger for a long time. He had an interesting trajectory. With Knight's Tale, the marketing component for that movie took over the entire experience. It was one of the most promoted movies I can remember. I was sick of it before it hit the screens. And who was that blonde hottie and why am I supposed to care? It was overkill. But then I saw the movie, and it was a lot of fun, and he was adorable in it. A real hunk, you know?

The bossy insistence of the marketing campaign did not seem to affect his career. He seemed to choose carefully what he would do next. The next film he appeared in was the low-key three-person Monster's Ball. I couldn't believe it was the same guy, first of all. He was wonderful in that movie. Heartbreaking and taciturn - a throwback to male movie actors of old. There was something stoic about him, but he managed to suggest the deep wells of loneliness in this guy. It was a very touching performance. That was when I got excited about Heath Ledger. I felt I was looking at a true talent, as opposed to what the Knight's Tale marketing team wanted me to see: the Next Best Hot Thing. He was more than that.

Now he was somebody to really watch.

Lords of Dogtown was the next film I clicked into with Ledger - I hadn't seen Four Feathers, or Brothers Grimm, and in Lords of Dogtown, he is nearly unrecognizable to what I had seen before. There's almost a Dude-esque quality to his look here, all California beard and sunglasses, and the comparison to Jeff Bridges is deliberate. Jeff Bridges is my favorite living actor, and one of the things that Bridges, handsome, masculine, and without a doubt a movie star, can do is disappear. Like nobody else. This is not the current fetish of accents, weird walks, and "chameleon" tricks, which I find facile and ultimately shallow. Today I play a German-Latvian witch doctor, tomorrow I play a steel magnolia from Alabama with a cleft palate, and the next day I play the imperious Queen of Siberia in 300 A.D. Look at my skill!! It is what is being congratulated now, in acting, and acting - as a craft - goes through phases and developments just like any other craft. The days of big star PERSONAE are gone, where people like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, et al, brought their star power to whatever role they did, always recognizably themselves, but marvelous to watch. No tricks. Nowadays, it is something else that is recognized as "good acting", and I have feelings and opinions about that, but whatever, it's the trend.

But Jeff Bridges disappears. These are not tricks, these are not skills. Whatever work he does (unlike most of the people being celebrated for this kind of stuff today) is completely invisible. His transformation is total. He submerges his personality entirely and something else emerges. Who knows how he does it. How is irrelevant. I mention Bridges because it is rare that a man that handsome has a career like the one he has. His sex appeal is undeniable, and obviously in his prime he played roles that capitalized on that - Against All Odds, Jagged Edge, Fabulous Baker Boys. But what he was actually doing in those parts was always way more subtle than your basic beefcake hottie fucking the gorgeous movie actress. I go into that in the piece I linked to above (especially in my comments on Fabulous Baker Boys).

When I saw Heath Ledger in Lords of Dogtown I was completely delighted by him. An old-fashioned word, but a propos. I just enjoyed him so much. Who was that guy? Not just the character, but HIM. He seemed to really get a kick out of acting, and not only that, but he had great skill. Skill that was (as I mentioned above) relatively invisible. He submerged himself, in all his young golden-boy handsomeness, into whatever part he was playing. There seemed to be very little ego in him. The JOB was the thing for him, not the celebrity or the sex symbol thing. That's rare. The pressure had been on him from the beginning to fit into a certain pigeonhole - hot new young actor - and the choices he made continuously bucked against that. Good for him. Knight's Tale, as cute as it was, could have ruined him. But he (and I am imagining he got a lot of advice telling him what to do, what to choose, what to play) did what he wanted. He took it down a notch. He got everyone's attention, with the billboards on every bus for Knight's Tale, and then immediately following, he took his career in a quieter more independent path. I thought that was really cool. Brave.

Then came the juggernaut that was Brokeback Mountain. I had a lot of feelings about that one going in, due to my love of the short story (I wrote about that here). I don't think its an exaggeration to say that that was one of the greatest short stories I have read in the last twenty years. It knocked my socks off. I read it when it first came out, in The New Yorker, and it almost made me nervous, as things usually do when I realize I am in the presence of not just greatness, but something mythic, something truly important. I felt that way when I read Mary Gaitskill for the first time. It's a rare sensation. That story came out in 1997, but my admiration for it was still vibrating through me when the movie came out. And although Ang Lee was at the helm (I thought that was a good, if not obvious choice), and I liked both Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger - I got nervous. What would they do to it? I feel a sense of ownership towards that story, in the same way I do towards all works of literature that pierce me to my core. It took me years to see John Huston's "The Dead", because I felt I just couldn't bear to see it outside of my own head. (I loved the movie, by the way). I refused to see The Shipping News, because the second I heard they cast Kevin Spacey as Quoyle I realized which way the wind was blowing, what interpretation they were going to put on it, and I thought: Not on my fucking watch. I won't see that movie on principle. If they had cast John C. Reilly, I would have gone to see it, even though I would still have been nervous about what they had done to that precious book I love so much.

So I had all of that going in. Parts of Brokeback Mountain, the story, were with me word for word. I reread it before seeing the movie, trying to strengthen myself. Even if the movie was bad, it still wouldn't touch the story!

Watching that film was an odd and incredibly emotional experience for me. First of all, the story is 30 pages long. How do you make a two-hour movie of that? Well. They took entire parts of it word for word, first of all. They didn't change a damn thing, in terms of what those two men said to each other. And what they did add (details of Jack's marriage to the Texas rodeo queen, fleshing out what is suggested in the story) was just right. I felt they honored the original work, especially in how those two actors played the scenes. What the story manages to convey in 30 pages is nothing less than breathtaking. You feel like you have been sucker-punched by the last line. What Ledger and Gyllenhall played here was twofold: the stoic unreflective nature of both of these men. They are like the animals they watch over. They bear it (in Ledger's best line - "we just got to stand it.") But they also play that this, out of nowhere, is love. It's awful. It's truly awful. There is nowhere to put such love, it fits in with no kind of life, and there are no options out of it. "We just got to stand it." Both of them NAIL that very difficult balance throughout the film. It is that that gives the story its power (well, and Proulx's off-the-charts writing), and without it, you'd just have a prurient fuck-fest. The context surrounding these men is as important as their love. Ang Lee directed that with delicacy, I thought, and sensitivity, not being too on the nose. There is the scene at Thanksgiving where Gyllenhall has to keep getting up to turn off the television, and his wife's father keeps getting up to turn it back on. It's a wonderful scene, truly tense and awful, evocative of the entire life of humiliation and emasculation this guy has experienced. It's enraging. (This is one of the scenes that is NOT in the book, but it just goes to show you the adaptation was spectacular).

For me, it was Ledger's movie, through and through.

As I wrote in my piece about him when he passed away:

It is one of the more visceral performances of recent memory. You could smell the nicotine on the edges of his fingers, you could smell his sweat. This was not a man who spoke much, felt comfortable speaking ... and any time he did open his mouth to speak, it was as though the vocal cords took a while to realize: "Oh ... we're doing this now? We're talking?"

Jim Emerson wrote about Ledger's portrayal of Ennis:

Rare is the performance that can honestly be called a "revelation," but that's what it felt like to watch Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain." Not only did he bring iconic life and nuance to the existential loneliness of Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn but complex (and conflicted) character, but for such mature work to spring from the teen-idol star of "10 Things I Hate About You" and "A Knight's Tale" was... well, revelatory itself -- the astonishing revelation of a suddenly, fully developed actor who, in the superficial juvenile parts he'd played previously, had given little indication he was capable of such moving depth and clarity. Ledger emerged as if from a cocoon, gleaming with promise and flexing his wings.

The performance was revelatory in a lot of ways. It was revelatory in what he was able to suggest, with very few lines, it was revelatory in its raw passion and silent suffering, and it was revelatory about manhood, in general. I mentioned it being a "throwback", and these are some of the things I have said before when I've written about Rourke, or Jeff Bridges, or Russell Crowe.

Brokeback Mountain relies on the cinematography of the gorgeous haunting landscape, as well as the sound of the wind whistling through almost every scene. You can feel the coldness of the mugs of coffee in their hands, and the scratch of the cold logs they sit on. The script is spare, and that is right. But none of it would have worked without Ledger's quiet suffering stoic presence. It was not a put-on, it was not contrived. I did not feel that he lived now, for example. Heath Ledger was obviously an early 21st century man, that's his time and place ... but in Brokeback Mountain, no way on EARTH was that guy "now". He does this with no tricks, no disguise.

The strangest thing about this is that when you saw him in interviews, and in person, he's really just a gangly skinny little guy. I was always amazed by how slight he seemed in person. That picture of him skateboarding at the top of this post makes him look like a teenager, not fully grown up yet.

But he seemed much bigger in Brokeback Mountain. Not because of weight gain or anything artificial (he might have had a bit of padding there at the end, to suggest middle age). His size came from his presence, and that is really what I mean when I talk about him being a "throwback". The old-time movie stars, creating personae that they would play in every movie, were huge because of their presence. Humphrey Bogart was a pipsqueak who had to stand on a damn BOX in his love scenes with Ingrid Bergman so that he seemed taller. But who had a bigger presence than that guy? And he didn't have to manufacture it, or pump it up. All he had to do was show up. He plays chess in the first time we see him in Casablanca, the camera moves up from the board, and there he is.

Pow. Gets you right in the gut.

Heath Ledger, with every squinting suffering quiet moment in Brokeback Mountain, has the power of the old movie stars. Jake Gyllenhall, although wonderful as well, does not. He has a bit more of a stretch to seem middle-aged (although he does a nice job - you can see the work, but it's okay, it's an okay job) - and he also has to play a character who is more chatty, restless, and emotional. He does all of that.

But it's Ledger's movie. The misery he endures, without a complaint, quiet, gritting his teeth, turning his wife over when he fucks her so he can't see her face, leaning against the trailer wall, head down ... not saying much, not revealing much ... but God, revealing everything. Marvelous. If our hearts don't break for him, then none of it will work. Jack is more of a wild-card. We don't worry as much about him, for some reason, even though he is the one more willing to flirt with danger. Ledger shows the heart of his character, a heart cracked open by love, something he almost resents and wishes would go the hell back where it came from.

It is an iconic performance, referencing us back to the giants of movie stars back then ... when the power of your presence was what made you a star. It is also an amazingly generous performance. He did not protect himself. He turned it all inside out, so we could see.

I had been watching him for a while. I was strangely proud of him for that performance. I felt to myself, watching it, "Wow. Holy fuck. Good for you, dude. Good for you."

Taken in context with the rest of his roles, it was obvious that we were looking at a giant talent.

The kind of talent I find lacking in today's current trend - of more showy actor-y parts (and nothing against many of those performances - I do love a lot of them ... it's just that I have a fondness for the other kind of acting). Ledger has presence. Which again, was so funny, because he almost had NO presence in person. But that's just the mark of his talent. His weirdness and passion and suffering went into his work. He didn't wear it on his sleeve as a regular man.

Before The Dark Knight came out, some stills had been released, and some photographs taken while filming.

The images were startling, terrifying. What the hell was going on with Heath Ledger? It was amazing to see, and I know for me it got my hopes up to see the movie. Jack Nicholson as The Joker made an indelible impression, what a wacky performance, but suddenly, with one backstage view of Ledger filming the movie, all that was swept away. He looked demonic. Not just because of the makeup, but because of the dead cobra-light in his eyes. It was powerful. This character had obviously infiltrated him. You could see it in those stills.

I know he had problems during filming. He was insomniac, and he made a couple of mentions about how playing The Joker had disturbed him, made him manic (small wonder). His exhaustion shows in the role. Not that he seems tired, on the contrary, but that he seems on edge, at the end of his rope, with the manic clarity that sometimes comes when you can't go to sleep, and it's suddenly 3 in the morning, and you have to get up at 6:30 a.m., and all kinds of horrible thoughts start catapulting through your mind, about the world, your life, your disappointments, your lost dreams. I've had those moments. He doesn't just nail such an energy, he plays it from the inside out.

It is a deeply unsettling performance. For me, it tipped the balance of the whole movie. Again, the fanboys have an answer for everything, and shriek, "BUT THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT." I don't think so.

Regardless, he is not just riveting - but inevitable, awful, relentless, with not a shred of conscience. We are so used to seeing "villains" onscreen, who are supposed to embody these anti-social things, but really just come off as cliched. The closest comparison to what Ledger did in Dark Knight is Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, although, thinking about it more, I would say that Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter is also close to what Ledger was getting at here. You do not reason with these men. You do not reason with a cobra. You kill the cobra. That's your only option. There are forces of anarchy on the planet, and it is best to recognize them for what they are, not rationalize them away, or try to "understand". The thing is: if you truly understand, then you know what you must do: obliterate that force as quickly as possible. Understanding does not always mean empathy. Sometimes it means resolve.

Heath Ledger is out of this world in that movie. He, as an actor, obviously tapped into something so primal and real that it made it down into his cellular structure. You cannot see an actor there - and with a part like The Joker, that is so difficult! It's all artifice and jokey lines. But he is truly frightening, especially when he gets quiet and "thoughtful".

The thing that is so great about his performance, so above-and-beyond anything else that is in that movie, is that it has a chilly inner logic to it, and that's the worst part of all. If The Joker just thrived on chaos, then we could perhaps condescend to him, like he's a silly (albeit dangerous) child, who needs a Time Out, and desperately. But Ledger is playing a man with a philosophy of life, far far stronger than those on the "right" side, who spout vague platitudes about justice and order, but who can't even come close to the level of belief that The Joker has in chaos.

He trumps everything.

Ledger, in a slamdunk, is not just acting here, he is embodying an idea - and boy, the pitfalls to be didactic and obvious are everywhere. He avoids all of them. His moments of grief, when tears stream down his face, are grotesque, commedia dell arte gone deeply satanic. The mask is so complete that he has internalized it. There is no differentiation between the face and the man.

How he accomplished all of this I will never know, but I chalk it up to his giant talent, which was already on display, and his power of imagination. What an imagination. He could dream his way into that? What else could this man do?

And so I sit here today, and I just find it odd and sad that he is gone.

A young man.

But he's left an impressive (albeit too short) body of work. I mourn now what I won't get to see. I mourn what won't be.

He was the real deal.

A young slim man in a hoodie skateboarding through Brooklyn.

Katharine Hepburn: Her work ethic, her courage.

This is an old piece that I wrote for House Next Door, but I have a lot of new readers, and I can't seem to write much these days ... so perhaps you all would enjoy it.

Katharine Hepburn: 5 for the day.

The magnificent Agnes Moorehead

An in-depth appreciation of Agnes Moorhead (shame on me for forgetting to put her on my list) - and a great interview with Charles Tranberg, the author of I Love the Illusion: The Life and Career of Agnes Moorehead . Not to be missed. Here is a juicy excerpt.

[Moorehead] had actually recalled years later meeting a very precocious Orson Welles as a boy at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. When she began working with Orson something kept nagging at her–where have I seen him before. Welles was very young still–only in his early twenties and then when thumbing through LIFE magazine she saw a picture of Orson as a child and knew then that was the boy she had once met years before at the Waldorf-Astoria. Himan Brown told me how Aggie and Orson had met later on. Aggie was doing “The Gumps” in New York and the program which was on just before “The Gumps” was this young man with a wonderful voice reciting poetry–it was Orson Welles! Orson would watch “The Gumps” and was fascinated by Aggie. He later said many times that he considered her the best actor he had ever worked with. But he knew that when he launched the mercury theater that he wanted her to be part of it–and she was–the most prominent female member of the Mercury players. It only made sense that when Welles went to Hollywood and made “Citizen Kane” that he would find a part for Aggie. He did as Kane’s mother. It was a small part of only five minutes in length but it was one of the most memorable sequences in the picture and anguished performance as a mother giving up her son because she realized that she and his father couldn’t give him the kind of life he deserved is one of the best in the film.

(The full scene can be seen here)

I also very much liked this comment from Moira, the interviewer:

In reading some of the comments by Aggie’s colleagues about her working methods in building a character, they seem to indicate that she was quite meticulous and specific about her detailed characterizations though she was, as Welles pointed out in an interview once, very willing to accept direction. I’ve noticed that in films such as The Stratton Story, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and Johnny Belinda, when she plays sympathetic farm women, she is constantly working to do something very specific in a scene, tightening the jars on some fruit that have just been canned, knitting, baking bread, or fingering the scarf that Belinda has come home with after her visit with the doctor. She often does this in such a way that she is also making a non-verbal commentary on the action, and telling more about her character than the words of the script indicates about her concerns, attitudes and the action.

Yes, yes, and YES. Easier said than done.

Definitely go read the whole thing.

20 Favorite Actresses: part 2

If I had to choose, here are my favorite performances of my 20 choices - the performance may not be what they are most famous for, but that's no matter.

Gena Rowlands: Opening Night
Barbara Stanwyck: Ball of Fire
Sissy Spacek: Badlands
Isabelle Adjani: Camille Claudel
Catherine O'Hara: Waiting for Guffman
Rosalind Russell: His Girl Friday
Hedye Tehrani: Half Moon
Marilyn Monroe: Don't Bother To Knock
Madeline Kahn: What's Up, Doc?
Ingrid Bergman: Notorious
Diane Keaton: Something's Gotta Give
Rachel McAdams: Slings and Arrows, season 1
Carole Lombard: My Man Godfrey
Sanaa Lathan: Love and Basketball
Joanne Woodward: Sybil
Julie Christie: Shampoo
Charlotte Rampling: Night Porter
Kate Winslet: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Meryl Streep: Postcards From the Edge
Maggie Cheung: Actress

and the 21st:

Jean Arthur: Only Angels Have Wings

The "Byron from Brooklyn"

There is a new biography out about Marlon Brando, the "Byron from Brooklyn") (even though he was from Nebraska): Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, by Stefan Kanfer.

Review of the new book here.

I've been dying to read the book and have already flipped through most of it, while standing up, various times at Barnes & Noble. Hopefully, it will counteract the petty bullshit that was Peter Manso's biography (my rant about that here)

20 Favorite Actresses

Where does my heart lie? The meme going around now is 20 favorite actresses. Please go here to see the compilation of links as well as Nathaniel's choices.

I had a hard time with the "all time" part of things because I am obviously not an "all-time" kind of girl ... However, it was fun (and difficult) to narrow the list down. Surprisingly difficult. I didn't worry about the count, just went about choosing my girls and finding photos and when I went to tally up I had over 30.

Regardless. Here is where it stands, at this moment in time.

20 of my favorite actresses in no particular order:

Love these women:

Gena Rowlands, Barbara Stanwyck, Sissy Spacek, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine O'Hara, Rosalind Russell, Hedye Tehrani, Marilyn Monroe, Madeline Kahn, Ingrid Bergman, Diane Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Carole Lombard, Sanaa Lathan, Joanne Woodward, Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep and Maggie Cheung.

And can't I please add just one more??

Jean Arthur.

But what about Bette and Joan and Agnes Moorehead and Christine Lahti? What about Patricia Arquette and Lili Taylor? What about Katharine Hepburn? What about Judy Davis?

Let it be, Sheila, let it be.

Other lists:

My New Plaid Pants Emma Thompson - argh - how could I forget her??

J.D.'s list

El Gringo Argh - Holly Hunter!!

Nick's Picks some of my favorites there too

Peter Lovin' the love for Maggie.

Glenn's list

Flickhead's most awesome list leading off with Adjani

Jeremy's list - great images

Ivan's list - I am in love with his. Let's hear it for Jean Arthur

CelineJulie's list

Ed's list makes me wish I could add to mine, although we do have a lot of overlap

Ted's list - some of my favorites there too! That picture of Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson made my day.

Cullen's list He has included Jennifer Coolidge which is enough to make me love him forever

Here is Alex's awesome list

I love Tommy's list - lots of funny ladies, who I think sometimes get short shrift, totally unfairly!

Here is Jonathan's list - he focuses on character actors. Great stuff.

Brad Davis: Raw

Brad Davis gives one of the greatest-of-all-time leading man performances in Sybil, as Richard Loomis, the single dad living across the apartment alley from Sybil. Iconic.

In 1959 The Bolshoi Ballet came to New York for the first time. John Martin, the NY Times dance critic had this to say about their performances:

The impact of the Bolshoi has been overwhelming. And it will be something of a calamity if we ever allow ourselves to recover.

Well, Brad Davis' impact on me as Richard Loomis was (and still is) overwhelming and it, too, would be a calamity if I ever recovered. I remember sitting once with Mitchell in some public place, of course, and I casually threw the name "Richard Loomis" into whatever point I was making, and Mitchell spontaneously burst into tears. "You can't just spring Richard Loomis on me like that," Mitchell sobbed. "I need time to prepare."

I am hard pressed to think of a more gentle charming and effective performance than Brad Davis in Sybil. It could have been terrible, schmaltzy. A single dad who puts on mime makeup at night and does street performance? Horrible. But my God, is he good. Without him, the film would not be as effective (although Joanne Woodward and Sally Field and of course the magnificent Charles Lane can't be discounted). I cannot imagine any other actor in that part. Nope. Cannot be done. Marvelous work.

His performance as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express shows his versatility, although there is always, in Davis, an underlying sweetness and vulnerability. He is not hard, although his body is the lean pit-bull body of a compulsive athlete. His soul is soft, his emotions accessible ... He's like James Dean but without the neuroticism. He is a man, a good-looking man, he could never play ugly (his face reminds me of Michael's, my Michael's) - but he is able to suggest 100s of subtle emotions with no words, rage, helplessness, love, shame, fear ... He is one of the most fearless of actors. I miss him to this day. His involvement in gay projects was frowned upon back then, it was thought he was wrecking his career. And in a way, his advisers were right - because his career never really bounced back from Querelle (love that movie) and all of his stage work with gay playwrights. The gay vibe was against him, despite his spectacular acting. Retarded. It's a shame - so much about Brad Davis is a fucking shame.

I saw Midnight Express when I was in high school and it seared me to the bone. I also saw Sybil in high school and fell madly in love with Richard Loomis. As in: the man haunted my dreams, even more than Jake Ryan did. I wanted a Richard Loomis. If I could meet a Richard Loomis, I felt that my life might turn out okay.

His work in Midnight Express is intense from the first moment and never lets up. The opening sequence in the airport in Istanbul is nervewracking. He is so panicked and freaked out that we, the audience, are. We want to tell him to wipe the sweat off his face, take off the creepy sunglasses ... but Billy Hayes was reckless, stupid, and couldn't hide his emotions if you paid him. At least that's how Brad Davis plays it. In the film he is called upon to show humor, grief, rage, physical pain, softness, vulnerability, and it is one of the most physical of parts. He has to leap and fight and writhe on the floor. Brad Davis' body, and his athleticism, is one of his finest assets. He was not a careful actor. He was not a buff dude who spent hours in the gym. (Or who knows, maybe he was - I'm talking about his film persona now). He is a man with a natural grace and beauty, and his strength is used carefully. He is a slight man, wiry and thin, but when he is crossed or angry he can unleash a cyclone. He throws himself into the physical scenes in the same way that William Holden did in his best roles - another great athlete/actor (I wrote about that aspect of Holden here). It is not about showing strength, or throwing a punch that will land and crush your opponent. It is not about displaying your perfection, your muscles, your alpha male personality. It is about being able to throw your body into the fray, with no fear, with trust that it will come out the way you want it to come out ... and also with a dancer's knowledge of how and when to let go. When to keep your control and when to lose it. Brad Davis knew all of that in his bones.

When he beats up the horrible Rifki in the prison - I have moments thinking, "Jesus, Brad, don't hurt yourself." The physical reality is so unpredictable there that you have no idea what will happen next. Fights aren't, in general, neat, with two guys basically SPARRING. This is a messy chaotic scene, and Davis loses himself in it, doing whatever he needs to do to torture Rifki. He's knocking sinks over, slamming his hands on pipes - Davis does not protect himself physically. He throws himself into the requirements of the scene. It ends, of course, with him biting out Rifki's tongue and spitting it out into the air, then writhing around, covered in blood, laughing and screaming and talking to himself, still whirled up in the chaos of his moment. It is one of the truly great mad-man moments in all of cinema. Not once do I feel him "acting". Not once do I feel him aware of the camera and yet - even in the midst of all that is going on in that last blood-soaked moment - Brad Davis the actor is aware that the camera is moving in closer and - just when the camera hits its final resting point - Davis' thrashing stops and he stays still, chest heaving, staring off into the distance, as if trying to remember who he used to be. That's an actor in control of what he is doing, even in the midst of being out of control. He knows when to let it go so the camera can catch the final revelation. It is all done in one take. That is up to Brad Davis to make that flow and work. He has to go from thrashing and laughing and licking up the blood on his lips - to quiet and stern and horrified. He does so without once calling attention to a big actor moment.

He is fantastic.

One of the raw-est performances in American cinema. The movie has its cheesy elements (I do not like the music, and I wish the gay relationship had been handled with a little more grit and reality and not so much soft-focus ... it's a lovely moment but the movie kind of cops out with it, treating it in almost a music-video fashion) ... but Brad Davis is riveting.

A great performance.

It is Richard Loomis I will always love Brad Davis for, but he is unforgettable here as well. Raw.

Carole Lombard Double feature

last night at the Film Forum.

8 p.m.:

9:45 p.m.:

It did my heart good to see that both shows were sold out. The line was down the block, and last night was a pretty bitter windy night, so to see the throngs huddled up in front of the Film Forum for a Carole Lombard double feature gave me hope for humanity! The old things do not have to die, or suffer in obscurity. They can LIVE forever! I had gotten to the box office as early as I could and scored two tickets, for me and Jen. We met up at a wine bar around the corner, and had some bruschetta and some wine, crammed in in the tiny joint, a buffer of warmth against the cold. Then, tickets clutched in gloved hands, we walked over to the theatre to start our double feature. I've seen both films (although never on the big screen) and Jen had seen neither so I was SO EXCITED for her to experience them. I was lucky enough to score ourselves spots in line close to the front, and just in time, too because people were POURING into that line from every direction. There was an altercation in line. A rowdy group of 22 (or so) year-old boys were behind us, and one dropped his soda and it splashed all over my calves. They all burst out laughing. No apology, nothing. Jen said to them, "An apology is in order." The guy looked at me and said, "I did apologize." Okay, sociopath, how can you say that with a straight face? I said, "Morons." and turned away. Graceful, Sheila, good work!! So basically we were in a fight with people in line. I hate it when that happens. Sorry, boys, it ain't my fault you weren't raised right and don't know how to say, "Oh my gosh, miss, I'm sorry!" It's called good manners. You should try it some time. But we all moved on, and it didn't ruin our night. Jen was getting hot about it, angry, and I was like, "Jen, these people will NOT ruin this night for me!" She stopped, and said, "Okay. Got it. You're right." And then we all were fine.

The place was packed. Sold out. Again: so exciting! Carole Lombard is not forgotten! Or who knows, maybe some of those people had never heard of her before, and this was their first taste of it. That's exciting, too!

The movies just HIT. They WORK. People were HOWLING with laughter at John Barrymore ("I close the iron door on you!" LIke - what??) ... but the real star of the night was My Man Godfrey, which started, after a 10 minute break, at 9:45. What a movie!!

It starts out strong and never lets up.

William Powell is a movie star of the highest order. From the first second you see him in that city dump, with his 5 o'clock shadow, and the intensity of his eyes, you can't look away from him. He does his close-ups the way actors of today do close-ups. He is timeless. He does not have a "style" of acting, he does not come across as old-school ... he comes across as nothing short of real. Not to mention sexy, and powerful and deep. Of course we are supposed to be seeing him through Carole Lombard's wacky eyes from the beginning and she falls in love with him instantly - and so we do, too. Powell plays that perfectly. This is a man with secrets, with regrets ... but we don't know what they are until long into the picture. But he's playing it from the start. God, isn't he something else? MARVELOUS actor. He's got sex appeal, too. It's those eyes.

Carole Lombard basically falls apart over the course of the movie. She is just so into him and she doesn't know how to behave because of it. But there she is, her eyes following him across the room, just DYING because she loves him so much. It's so touching but also so funny. Even in the scenes where she is not the focus, you can see her in the background, trembling with repressed feeling, staring longingly at William Powell. She just plays it so right. She does not sacrifice reality for the comedy - and yet she is never less than 100% HYSTERICAL. In their one-on-one scenes, she can barely concentrate on what he is saying because she is too taken up with drinking him in with her eyes. You want to slap her out of it. FOCUS, Irene ... FOCUS. But she can't! She's in love!

My Man Godfrey perfectly captures the sort of manic-family genre that was so popular in the 1930s, with scripts like The Man Who Came to Dinner and Philadelphia Story and You Can't Take It With You. EVERYONE is insane in these scripts. The family is made up of a bunch of lunatics and eccentrics, and they all wheel through their large houses, following through on every impulse, pursuing their myriad obsessions ... creating a cacaphony of lunacy and hilarity. You can't get a moment to think in such a household. There isn't time. People run in and out of rooms, they suddenly stop and make inappropriately sincere and insane comments, they ruminate on the meaning of life and then immediately skip off to lunch ... and this is all happening with multiple people at the same time. My Man Godfrey is a runaway train of NOISE and dialogue that never lets up. It is relentless.

The audience at the Film Forum last night (yes, obnoxious 22 year olds and all) were HOWLING with laughter from start to finish.

Jen and I at one point were pretty much writhing in our seats (and the seats are really really thin at the Film Forum, none of this super-size seating ... so once you're there, you're kind of trapped, like it's an airline seat) ... tears streaming down our face ... particularly because of Carlo, the "protege", played by the "mad Russian" Mischa Auer, who lives in the house with the family. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. A melancholic and yet manic Italian, who does an ape impression that goes on for what feels like 10 minutes - it gets to the point where everyone in the room is screaming and talking at once, and in the background, you can see Carlo, STILL GOING, being an ape all over the parlor, leaping up and grabbing onto two doors and hanging there in the middle ... as the rest of the scene goes on around him. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life and I found it difficult to recover. I was still laughing about him three scenes later, it kept coming back to me, and I would find myself in tears all over again. We LOVED Carlo. I mean, come on, who doesn't love Carlo?

A brilliant movie, with not one weak note ... featuring strong performances from everyone. Everyone is at the top of their game.

But in the center of it circle William Powell, with his strong serious face, and Carole Lombard, with her undone-by-love stare ... and it's one of the greatest romances on the screen.

Beautiful night. One of those nights when the city itself - meaning New York - seems to have a sense of camaraderie. We were all in it together, there at the Film Forum, for our double feature ... and we, for that brief couple of hours in time, became one. I love nights like that.

The whole movie is on Youtube - and the Carlo scene can be seen in the clip below - at around the 2:30 mark.

I am still laughing.

A 50-year marriage: "Laughter and lust"

3 photos (below the jump) from the extensive Vanity Fair slideshow made up of photos from Patricia Bosworth's personal collection. Patricia Bosworth is a playwright and author, longtime member of the Actors Studio, and biographer of Montgomery Clift - excerpt of her magnificent here). There are two images in particular that really struck me: the one of Newman and Woodward putting their handprints in the cement outside of Grauman's ... You can see how the faces around them are vaguely serious, maybe even bureaucratic ... but the two of them are howling with laughter. It almost seems to be a private moment. Speaking of private moments: the second image in the slideshow I love with the passion of a burning supernova - is the two of them dancing together at home. Goofballs. But look at the fun they're having!

Bosworth's article about Newman in Vanity Fair can be read here. Small excerpt:

The first time I saw Paul Newman he was dancing with Marilyn Monroe. It was the summer of 1959 at a noisy Actors Studio party in New York’s Greenwich Village. I had just passed my audition and was being introduced to everyone as a new member by the Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, one of the Studio’s heads.

Nobody was paying me much attention—understandably, since they were all watching a barefoot Marilyn, in a skintight black dress, undulate around the living room with Newman, lithe and sinewy in chinos and T-shirt.

They seemed to be dancing with such rapture; they both kept changing rhythms and sometimes they walk-stepped to the beat. They didn’t dance for very long—maybe three minutes—but what a hot, pulsing three minutes it was! They broke apart, Marilyn gave a giggle and a curtsy, and Newman bowed and moved directly past me through the crowd to get a beer.

Speaking of the Actors Studio, there is also a link in the slideshow to one of my favorite pictures of Newman ever (it's one that shows up in many of the books I have at home) - the one of him in class at the Actors Studio, 1955.

Advice:

"If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you."

-- Paul Newman

"It's their rink, it's their ice, and it's their fuckin' town. But tonight we got our fans with us!"

Kim Morgan, in her typically great way, remembers Slap Shot.

A pure sports film, Slap Shot encompasses all aspects of the game: It’s about the team, it's about the coaches, it's about the towns, it's about the politics and, with almost transcendent gusto, it's about the dirt. Hilariously vicious dirt that boasts some of cinema’s most toxic lines -- lines I can’t repeat here. And it boasts the greatest use of that Maxine Nightingale song -- a tune that shouldn't be allowed in any other motion picture ever again. I can only picture cold busses, booze, rust brown flairs, Newman's fur trimmed leather jackets and Strother Martin while hearing this song -- and that's how it should be.

David Edelstein shows ...

... yet again ... why he is one of my favorite writers out there.

Newman didn't use those eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable.

Paul Newman as "Hud"

Read Edelstein's whole piece.

Indelible Ink: Paul Newman

My tribute is now up at House Next Door.

Life's a hustle

It's been a long day. To tell you the truth, I feel a little bit drained, and beaten up. Exhausted, yet kind of nervy and alert. My worst possible combination.

So I'm going to watch:

Tribute not up yet. We're working on it ...

I have immersed myself in Newman tributes today (including this one - with which I have a personal connection ... not to mention the fact that Newman's hot salsa is the only kind of salsa I buy). It makes me crazy to see so many of these movies again. I haven't seen Cool Hand Luke (according to the barflies in Cheers "the sweatiest movie ever made") in years ... or Butch Cassidy or Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (a personal favorite, as excruciating as it is). So I pulled out The Hustler tonight. Not only is Newman in it, but Jackie Gleason is one of my favorite people to ever walk the planet. Humphrey Bogart said that acting (good acting) should be "six feet back in the eyes". No matter what Gleason did - comedy, drama, farce, or variety shows - it was "six feet back in the eyes". He just makes me happy, that's all. To know he existed. He seems rather impossible, doesn't he? But there he is, a force of nature. I walk by his semi-silly statue every day outside of Port Authority in Times Square, and while I look upon it as kind of like the Rocky statue (like: let's not pretend it's Michelangelo's David, mkay?) - it still makes me happy to see it. Because it's a daily reminder that such impossible creatures as himself did actually walk the damn planet.

The Verdict - "Maybe, maybe …"

Marvelous appreciation of one small moment in The Verdict by Stephen Metcalf.

But the scene I kept coming back to sets up the whole film. It's hardly noticeable. Newman is intent on bedding a fellow barfly played by Charlotte Rampling. He buys her dinner the night before voir dire, and for the first time in the film, we come up close to Newman's face. The deep-set mask of middle-aged failure softens. Watch Newman here, ye who would be actors; study him. Where does this come from? "See, the jury believes. The jury wants to believe." The lines are almost inconsequential. But Newman is giving us evidence that Galvin is still alive. "It is something to see. I have to go down there tomorrow and pick out 12 of them. All of them—all their lives—say, 'It's a sham, it's rigged, you can't fight city hall. But when they step into that jury box … you just barely see it in their eyes. Maybe, maybe …" Rampling leans imperceptibly forward. "Maybe what?" And Newman exhales—just a little—putting a lifetime of defeat into that exhale, and suddenly Frank Galvin is talking about himself. "Maybe I could do something right."

To tide us over ....

... until my tribute goes up on House Next Door.

East of Eden screentest

James Dean: "Kiss me."
Paul Newman: "Can't here."

Paul Newman screentested for the role of Aron, James Dean's goody-two-shoes older brother in East of Eden. Dean was already cast. Newman was up-and-coming, trying to find his spot in the increasingly huge shadow cast by Marlon Brando (and in certain photos he looks uncannily like Brando). Needless to say, Newman was not cast in East of Eden - but here's the screentest.

I find the dynamic fascinating to watch. And Newman's laugh - that sort of devilish masculine laugh - was something he wasn't asked to use in his acting for, oh, the first 15 years of his career. He was in the 1950s tradition: the angst-y Method-y emoting school of acting - which is all well and good, but it wasn't his thing. I mean, it was - in that his work always has a disciplined and focused sense of character and motivation - and his creation of physical stimuli (drunkenness, his broken foot in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or heat - Long Hot Summer, Cat) is 100% in the Method tradition. But that laugh ... that laugh of a bad boy up to no good, but he's so charming about it you forgive him everything ... that is HIM ... and it wasn't until the 60s and 70s that he got a chance to really let loose. No more angst. Just cool (sometimes icy) guys, with rakish rebellious personalities sans angst. These guys weren't rebellious in the 1950s tradition, of Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild Ones ... the lone angry individual against an establishment interested in convention above all else. These guys were rebellious in a more free-wheeling cocky way, guys who fucked, drank, drove fast, swore, ate voraciously, burped, connived, charmed, manipulated ... He played men who were true to their own natures. It took him a while to find that dynamic, and to find the roles that would let him express it ... believe me, it was there in his earliest roles - but the style of acting was different, and the expectations put on him were different.

He would never be "another Brando". He didn't need to be.

Just being Paul Newman ended up being more than enough.

Newlyweds

20 some-odd years ago, I ripped a page out of some magazine which had a photo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on it. It's a photo of them when they were newlyweds. I think I was sitting in a dentist's waiting office when I saw the photo and I grabbed it then and there. I still have it. It is STILL taped to the inside of my closet door - and has been, in whatever apartment I live in, wherever I have hung my hat over the years ... It's just an image I adore, there is something indefinable about it ... calming, logical, comfortable ... I just like the two of them so much, too ... so this obviously staged yet still somehow natural and breezy morning-at-home shot has a feel of reality to it, of a caught moment.

I am shocked I was able to find it online - it took some digging, but there it was.

I'm working on a larger tribute piece for Paul Newman right now - for this actor who will be sorely missed - not just by me, but - judging from the 50 pages of comments at the BBC site - from fans around the world. He was truly loved.

Rest in peace. And my thoughts go to his wife, his kids, his friends, his colleagues ... everyone who knew him.

And so let's look back at them then ... just married ... two young actors starting out together.

I have looked at this photo so often and so deeply that I feel I can smell the eggs he is cooking. I want her pants. I love that kitchen. The photo still speaks to me. It's not static. It's a world. It's alive. I can hear the clatter of the pan of the stove. I can feel the affection between them, yet look at how they are separated - doing different things. It's an atypical kind of shot ... rather remarkable. Not just because it's him who is cooking ... but just the attitudes of both of them ... their connection and yet their separate-ness.

It's one of those photos that cajoles you to join it ... and then makes you envious that you are not there ...

And, for me, it keeps telling a story. Maybe that's why I like to have it around.

Recently, Paul Newman was asked the secret to his long marriage. He gave what I consider to be the best answer I have ever heard on that particular topic: "Laughter and lust."

Interesting that the word "love" didn't show up at all. Laughter and lust. My kind of guy.

Rest in peace.

The Books: "A Lotus Grows In the Mud" (Goldie Hawn)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn

I have Annika to thank for making me pick up this lovely book. I want to give it to all my friends - mainly my women friends, because so much of what she has to say is her perspective on being a woman, and negotiating career/family/kids/romance ... but there is much to satisfy anyone here, anyone who is a fan of her work. But for me, the real gold of this book (and you can tell by the unconventional title that she chose) - is her more philosophical sections, where things in her career dovetailed with things in her "real" life ... or where her romances went sour, and she tried to figure it all out ... or issues with her father, or being a child ... It's a deeply honest and beautiful book. Not all that well-written, I suppose, but it is so genuine that that just does not matter. It feels to me like she wrote every word, and that she thought about every word. She has something to share. It's not just about what she has learned, but what she feels she has to pass on, as a woman with experience and some mileage in the highest echelons of Hollywood. This book put me into a trance, almost. It made me go inward. I felt reflected in it, I felt "seen", and I also felt an acute sadness and loneliness that I am where I am right now. But her book made that all seem okay. She's all about the mess, she's all about the journey itself ... nothing is too neat, and she always (to me, anyway) seems to be fully alive - whether she's giving an award at an awards show, or chatting on the red carpet ... She just seems like a person. Now what is it about her - the go-go dancing flower child of the 60s - that could survive, and so well, in such a cutthroat atmosphere as Hollywood? That is the surprise of her story. That is what makes her unique. So many other little go-go dancing flower children made 1 or 2 movies that fit into the mood of the time ... and that was it. Not her. Look at the longevity. It's remarkable. I loved the book.

I am not often in a gentle mood ... and by gentle I mean: being kind and loving to myself, forgiving, open ... I am a much harsher person, and I cut myself on my own sharp edges. Annika reported that this book had made her cry - and she had also done a big Goldie Hawn Festival on her site ... so on a whim one day I picked it up. I have always adored Goldie Hawn - I have a long history with her ... which I'll get to in a minute. Hawn doesn't seem concerned with "how" she should be writing her book. It's not quite chronological. She has tiny chapters in between the bigger chapters with anecdotes pulled out of her life - people she's met, things her father said to her that really made an impact - little stories and life lessons. She doesn't start with "I was born a cold dark day", she barely writes it in a linear fashion ... she does tell a story, it's not just "Here's how awesome I am, look at all my wisdom, let me talk in milk-drenched platitudes AT you ..." Maybe a more cynical reader would see the book that way, but I didn't at all. It really struck a nerve with me. It's one of those books I am actually grateful to have read. It didn't just provide me with insight into Goldie Hawn's journey (which is interesting in and of itself - I've always been a fan) ... it helped me see deeper into my own life. She's so gentle. And like I said, being gentle with myself is almost uncharacteristic for me. My friend David said to me once, "You are a lethal companion to yourself," and he is right. I am a harsh taskmaster, and I cut myself ZERO slack. Even when I should be more kind. I am kind to others, and I do my best to have compassion, but for the most part - I reserve NONE of that for myself. I'm with Annika: parts of her book made me cry. I would put it down after certain sections and find myself crying, my head in my hands, letting the tears come, trying not to judge them (what I do is I immediately search myself for "self-pity" when I cry ... which can be good, because nobody likes someone who is self-pitying ... but sometimes you just need to have a good cry.) Sometimes you need to 'allow' yourself to feel sad about things that are unfair, things you ahve lost ... sometimes you need to let yourself off the hook and not be so ROUGH on yourself. I've talked before about the people who are obsessed with others who "whine". It doesn't matter what your complaint is. If you DARE to shed a tear about your own plight, you're "whining". You're gang-banged, and you shed a couple of tears about it - and people say you are "whining". This is a toxic attitude for me - perhaps because I have a little bit of that myself, I hate whiners ... but when it is taken to the next level, it can be truly dangerous for me. It means I cut myself off from feeling things. This is the kind of voice that is in my own head, and while, yes, it has also helped me to be an upstanding citizen, and aware of my responsibility to work well with others and not be an energy vampire. Being on the watch for "whining" can be good - but all the time? That means you live in a harsh unforgiving world where you can never mess up, you can never give yourself a moment - just a moment - to feel bad, to bemoan your fate, to honestly say, "You know what? This SUCKS." I prefer to have friends who have a bit more give in them .. they help me balance out my own starkness. They help me be loving to myself. They help me to stop and smell the roses.

I just re-read what I wrote, and it occurs to me that my response - the fact that I am writing about myself and not Goldie Hawn - is perhaps a great compliment to the book. And I think that that was Hawn's goal. She writes a lot about her relationships with men, and men in general. She has some unconventional attitudes, ones that reflect my own ... and she writes about it in such a loving thoughtful way ... it never comes off as proselytizing. Much in her relationship with Kurt Russell has to do with constantly letting him go. Freedom is a big deal to her. The two of them have each other, they are a true team ... but he's a wild boy, and she's a bit wild herself ... and neither of them feel the need to stay joined at the hip. They take vacations separately (something I will definitely do when I am in a couple - I'm so independent and I need a ton of solitude just to stay balanced. Charles and Anne Lindbergh always took one vacation a year separately. They did things together as a family - but then there was one vacation where she went her way, he went his ... They did not enjoy the same things for leisure time, and it took a while of struggling - of her mainly being unhappy and not doing what she wanted to do - before the couple worked it out - and so Anne would go sit in a shack on the beach for a week and write in her journal and take long walks, things her husband found unbelievably boring, and he would go climb around lava pools in Hawaii ... and then they would come back together. Monogamy can be stifling (to some people). Hawn feels that way, too. She doesn't believe that human beings are naturally monogamous - and that her relationship requires a lot of breathing space to continue to work. I love her attitude. It's very comforting to me ... because I've said things like "monogamy can be stifling" before and it is as though I have said, "I enjoy boiling little puppies." Goldie Hawn has made her own way, and it seems to me that she has come to a point in her life where her choices make sense to her. I mean, you see pictures of the two of them, or you see them together at awards shows - and there's a glow there.

In the book she writes that one of the things she and Russell like to do is to get on their bikes, no plan, no map, nothing, and just go ... for hours ... letting themselves get totally lost ... maybe stopping for a swim, getting back on, sometimes being lost for hours ... letting it go. To me, it's a nice metaphor for life itself - that it is the journey that is the most important.

Goldie Hawn describes her earliest years in New York, when she got jobs as a go-go dancer. She would show up at random bars, there would be basically a box in a corner of the bar - she would stand on the box, and go-go dance for the customers. This led to some pretty sketchy situations, and she was a true innocent. At least in terms of experience. But she also had a good head on her shoulders, and two parents who had raised her right ... so she wasn't one of those little waifs who get lost in the Big City with no home to go to ... She lay in her apartment, with cockroaches racing across the wall (she could hear them clicking all through the night - so gross), tears streaming down her face, but she also could call her mother and tell her how frustrated she was, or scared ... and her mother would give her advice. Hawn is a family kind of person.

I have always been a huge fan of her acting. I first became aware of her in her heyday - with movies like Foul Play (God, I LOVE that movie), and Seems Like Old Times (adore it!) and Private Benjamin - which was, in a career of many turning points, a huge turning point. Hawn was Executive Producer. She is a pioneer. The clout that she had after Private Benjamin (not just because the movie was a smash hit and she got nominated for Best Actress - but because of her producer experience) was massive. Now the woman already had an Oscar, she won one early on in her career for Cactus Flower:

She had had a diverse resume - television and movies and TV specials ... she was a beloved American star, but "Executive Producers" were mainly men. This was an unprecedented deal. It was so exciting, at the time. There is a glass ceiling, make no mistake - but much less so now, and part of it is because of Hawn's breakthrough in that arena ... it was a big cultural moment; women in Hollywood, blah blah blah ... and the fact that the film was so successful in every possible way - really opened the doors for other women.

Because of her blonde cutesy attitude, she was often underestimated (also, because of her dance background) - but very early on there were a couple of key people who saw something in her - perhaps a kookiness, a true comedienne was in there ... and so she got a leg-up over the others. And things began to happen. It was (and still is, I guess) a rather messy career. That's one of the reasons I like it. I still feel her in there. She doesn't seem overly managed - she never has. And a film like Seems Like Old Times - put her where she needed to be - it's kind of a throwback to the screwballs of the 1930s, and if there's anyone who I think would "fit" back then, it would be Hawn. She is so. so. funny. But she also can be touching, vulnerable, angry, embarrassingly dizzy (her saying to Eileen Brennan in Private Benjamin: "See, I did join the army, but I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms." She says that ridiculous line without breaking a smile, without winking to us the humor ... It's just so damn funny.)

She's a lovely actress, someone I truly admire, and my only regret is that we don't see more of her. She's due for a Diane Keaton-esque role, a la Something's Got to Give. I would love to see her come back out into the forefront, where I think she belongs. I'm also pleased for her that her book was so successful.

Like I mentioned earlier: when I read it, I was in a gentle mood ... or perhaps it helped put me into a gentle mood. It made me think about my own life, the angels I have met - those who helped me, believed in me ... and how such people are always with me. It made me think about my boyfriends, and what I want from a man, my dreams, basically ... and it made me really think about my own role in all of this ... how important perspective is. Crucial. It is not often just what happens to us in life - but how we choose to interpret it - that makes the difference. Hawn is a person who needs a lot of quiet alone time, sitting and writing in her journal. It helps her equilibrium. I related to that as well. I love her, what can I say.

The following excerpt doesn't have anything to do with her career, but it does show the feel of the book, its point of view and attitude ... and it's really why I cherish the book.

I'm so glad I read it. I've given it to a couple of girlfriends as gifts ... I pick it up and leaf through the pages and feel, again, a gentleness of mood come over me. Don't be so hard on yourself, Sheila. Try to be a little more kind to yourself. Look at your motives, take the time to ask the questions ... be rigorous with yourself, but don't be unkind.

Here is the excerpt. Goldie Hawn is maybe 18, 19 years old ... she is living in New York City, working as a go-go dancer, and kind of scared all the time. She's still just a teenager ... her parents trust her, and have faith in her ... but she is not sure if she will be okay. Her go-go dancing has brought her to some pretty sketchy venues. What will it all be for? I just love the story she tells here, and how she tells it.

EXCERPT FROM A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn

Talking to my mother on the telephone later that night, I am in my kitchen making a piece of toast. "I dunno, Mom," I say, pulling a plate from the cupboard as I rest the telephone in the crook of my neck, "maybe I should just come home. I mean, New York is great and everything and I love my new apartment, but I think maybe it's time to come home."

Watching the toaster to make sure it doesn't burn the bread, all of a sudden the lights go out and the line goes dead. The toaster glows red but then fades. "Mom? Mom? Mom? Are you there? What happened?"

It is pitch-black. Putting down the telephone, I peer out the window and gasp when i see not a single light in any of the windows across the street. Only the car headlights illuminate the street. Feeling my way to the cupboard under the sink, I retrieve a flashlight and wander through my apartment and into the hallway. All my neighbors are standing around.

"What happened? Why did all the lights go out?"

"We dunno. Do you have lights?"

"No. Is there a fire? Did something happen?"

"Looks like the whole block's out. I can't see a light on anywhere."

"Oh my God, the elevator! Is someone stuck in there? I can hear shouting."

I run downstairs to the lobby and find Ernie the doorman lighting a candle.

"Ernie, what happened?"

"Looks like a blackout. The whole of New York is out. It's inky out there."

"I think someone's stuck in the elevator," I told him.

"I know. I just called the fire department."

I walk out into the street and look around in wonder. I have never been in a blackout before. Looking up, I realize that the Empire State Building is in darkness, something I have never seen before.

Wandering back into the lobby, I see Ernie has been joined by others from our building. They are listening to a transistor radio. "What's going on?" I ask.

"It's a massive blackout, honey," a woman tells me. "It's affected the whole northeast coast, right up into Canada. They reckon there are thirty million people in the dark."

"Oh no! Do you mean there are people trapped in buildings?"

"Yes, honey, right up in the Empire State Building."

"Oh my God!" I cry, my hand to my mouth. "I told two strangers to go up there tonight."

"And on the subway," Ernie pipes in, his ear to the radio.

"None of the stoplights are working, so the traffic's at a standstill," a man I don't know tells me.

I go out into the street again, craning my neck to look up at all the buildings shrouded in darkness. Everyone seems so calm. The people who live in my building are all talking to each other for the first time. Jilly's is crammed with strangers sitting around candles, talking and sharing and connecting. Nobody can get home, so they have just stopped where they are. It feels like we are on the safest island in the world, and all of man's foibles, all our anxieties, aggressions and fears, have melted away for one night.

"Isn't this awesome?" I tell Eddie, the dry cleaner.

"Sure is, Goldie. I've lived here all my life and I ain't seen nothing like this."

"Isn't that old Mrs. Krokovitch?" I say with surprise, pointing to a grey-haired woman standing talking to someone else across the street.

"Oh my God, you're right!" he says. "She hasn't unlocked that front door of her apartment in ten years. Wow, this night is really something!"

I run back up to my apartment to find my roommates drifting in from their auditions or from Phil Black's dance class. They are half giddy and half hysterical.

"Did you see the moon?" asks Anita.

"I know," says Susan. "I've never seen it so big."

"And how about the stars?" says Roberta. "It feels like I've never seen them before."

We run around and light the candles as more and more friends arrive on our doorstep. "Okay, I guess the party's at our house!" I laugh as I bring some glasses in from the kitchen.

"Well, you're the only people we know who live in a three-story walk-up!" Eddie cries, holding up a bottle of scotch as he waltzes in.

We finish lighting the candles, relishing their flickering light. Someone strums on a guitar and another rolls a joint. My front door is wide open, and, suddenly, standing there are the two guys I met in the dry cleaner's earlier this morning.

"Hi, Goldie! Sorry to crash this party," they say in unison.

"Hi! Oh, thank God you're okay! Come on in, this is great. I thought you might be stuck at the Empire State."

"We didn't get there yet," one says. "And 888 Eighth Avenue was the only address we knew in the whole city!"

"Welcome!" I say, and happily fix them a drink.

Other friends and strangers arrive with bottles of liquor or tins of food. People empty their refrigerators, and they bring transistor radios so we can listen to some music. We create our very own nightclub - partying together by the golden glow of candlelight.

I stay up all night, chatting and laughing with my two new friends. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, we share joy and friendship, touching and laughing and telling our secrets. We have no judgment, no history. We are just three people, united in the moment and enjoying the freedom of it. They don't push themselves on me, or try to take advantage. We have a closeness and an honesty that completely restores my faith in humanity.

At dawn, I eventually crash. I wake to find these two guys I have only just met sleeping on my pillow. My apartment is littered with people still making love or staring out the window, marveling at the tentative first light of morning. Reaching out, I switch off the table lamp, which tells me the power is back on. The blackout is over; the moment has passed. But this beautiful, magical experience, this perfect night, will forever mark my heart.

The Books: "My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor" (Alec Guinness)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor, by Alec Guinness

I know some people were disappointed by this book because there doesn't seem to be much in it. It's just a year in the life of Alec Guinness, his diary entries from his 82nd year. So not much is going on. He has lunches with old friends, he goes to mass and writes about the sermons (he was a devout Catholic), he and his wife enjoy their pets ... sometimes he goes in to London for public appearances ... he comments on the news a little bit ... So I think some people felt the book to be a little thin.

I loved it. I love to read people's diaries, though - it's one of my favorite kinds of books ... and when you read someone's diary, you have to let go of looking for a narrative. You have to succumb to the everyday ups and downs we all experience, that may seem random, or chaotic. It's interesting to me that Guinness chose to publish a book this way ... with such an incredible career, I would love to hear more about it (from his perspective) - his working life, how he worked on a part, his experiences with different directors, all that - but this is not the book for that. I guess I knew that going in, so I wasn't disappointed.

My Name Escapes Me is also honest, in a really refreshing way. Guinness obviously just handed over his diaries as they were ... and let the not-so-flattering stuff remain. Or - it's not that it's not flattering, it's that it's so honest about himself it sometimes is like a punch in the stomach. "How I regret myself so often," he writes. He writes about his Catholic faith, the masses, his contemplations on Holy Days. He seems to really be hard on himself at times (he's rude to a woman sitting next to him in church for whatever reason and he is so upset about his behavior he has to write about it later in his diary: "I feel like I ruined Palm Sunday for both of us.") I love that kind of honesty. Wow.

So while I would love to read, you know, a real biography of the man - this is a quiet intellectually satisfying read ... and you get glimpses of who Alec Guinness was as an actor. He's not sure if he will ever act again (at the time of this diary) - but there are moments when thoughts about it start percolating up again. It's like he can't help it. Someone mentions to him a possible opportunity - not even concrete yet - and he can't help it: his imagination starts to go. That's the kind of excerpt I chose. I like to see how it's not even a question of the opportunity being real or not ... that's the whole thing when you're an actor. You have to prepare for an audition and you have to want it. It takes time. You can't just throw it together. I just like how automatic it is for him here in this excerpt ... showing that he has lived his entire life in service to this craft, and there are some things that just come, you don't have to work at it. He has been an actor long enough that he knows the questions to ask about the part (to ask to himself, I mean ... investigative questions) ... and his curiosity is alive and well.

Alec Guinness gave what I feel is one of the best performances by a male actor in the history of cinema in Bridge on the River Kwai. I'd put it up there with any of Brando's greatest moments. And I just love in the excerpt below, how ... even despite himself .... his imagination starts going. He has no other choice.

Look at how he imagines himself into that part. Look at how DETAILED it is. Look at how before-sleep mental meanderings can be some of the most essential work that an actor does. John Strasberg (son of Lee Strasberg) told us in his classes, "Always leave room for dreams. Create a dream-space around the character. Inhabit your own dream."

This is the kind of thing Strasberg was talking about.

EXCERPT FROM My Name Escapes Me, by Alec Guinness

Sunday 19 November

Holy Communion was brought to the house this morning for M. There is always a special good feeling about this; a particular domestic blessing. I was scared the dogs would be unwelcoming with loud barks but they were absolutely quiet.

Yesterday evening Keith Baxter for dinner, who bravely risked my attempt at an Irish stew. It was O.K., but hadn't enough white pepper. Always difficult to know what to drink with it. Whiskey, for preference, I think, but I didn't offer that as Keith was to drive home. So we settled for champagne throughout the evening and it worked admirably. Not what you could call Potato Famine fare.

Keith asked me what my reaction would be if offered Friar Laurence in a production of Romeo he is thinking of. I said, which is sadly true, that I'd be fearful of being able to learn so many lines; also that the long speech the Friar has at the end, when he tells the assembled cast and the audience all that they have witntessed in the past two hours, is very tedious. I have seen weary actors trying to look interested and astonished at all the revelations and failing desperately. However, after I had gone to bed I had one of my somewhat insane fancies.

In a half-awake state I saw Fr. L. dressed correctly (for once) as a Franciscan, entering with his cowl pulled over his head. According to the lines it is first light, pre sun-up, and he is alone. He might appear as a rather sinister figure - Death perhaps, with a pruning knife instead of a scythe. He carries, of course, his osier basket of wild flowers and herbs. He starts with the rather pretty speech, in rhyming couplets, about the good and baleful properties of various flowers (and curiously enough, of stones) before he is joined by Romeo. He doesn't see Romeo to begin with but, picking up a flower, says, 'Within the infant rind of this weak flower / Poison hath residence and medicine power.' The speech ends with the words, 'Full soon the canker death eats up that plant,' and Romeo says, 'Good morrow, father!' Laurence acknowledges this with a blessing, 'Benedicte.' That is the moment, I think, when he should throw back his cowl and appear as the ordinary man he is. (I have written to Keith suggesting half a dozen actors who would be revealed satisfactorily, rather than me.) There is more to the part than I had realized.

In today's Observer is a large photograph of a youngish man wearing pyjamas and looking sleepy. No explanation. After some thought I realized it was a still of me in the film of Priestley's Last Holiday.

A few days ago, somewhere, there was an equally large photo from the dismaying A Passage to India. Again it was me, in Hindu garb, and underneath it said it me as Aziz. Not at all. Aziz was played by the admirable, young, handsome Indian actor Victor Banerjee. It seems the only press photographs we can rely on are of the Princess of Wales in gym work-out clothes. Aziz, of course, is a Muslim.

Wednesday 22 November

To London yesterday for a day and a night. Matthew came down to hold the fort here. Bank, a haircut, household shopping. Lunched alone at Wilton's, wolfing an excellent Sole Colbert.

In early evening to a friend's flat where I made my long overdue confession to a holy ad illuminating priest. It was a memorable experience which gently sponged away all my recent irascibility, anxieties and spiritual turmoil. Perhaps kneeling at a dining-room table is more relaxing than the upright coffin of an elaborately carved confessional. It would be good to think that from now on I shall spread only sweetness, light and understanding, but I fear I know myself too well. The bad habits of a lifetime, when tackled head on, seem only to bend, not break.

Dined with Alan B. National Gallery talk and wonderment over the palace drama which has riven the nation - in my opinion into the knowing and observant quarter of the population on one side, and the moist-eyed lovers of popular entertainment on the other. It is a series that is likely to run and run.

Thursday 23 November

A grey day. I have been thinking about Friar Laurence; or, rather, not about Fr. L. in particular but more to do with the prescience Shakespeare shows in some of the plays. Is it deliberate, accidental or wholly unconscious? Probably just the way his mind worked. In Macbeth, of course, it is deliberate. The first encounter with the witches contains an evil prophecy; their appearance brings to the surface his vaulting ambition, which possibly he hasn't fully recognized until then.

In Antony and Cleopatra, at the beginning of the play, the Soothsayer tells Charmian's future by reading her hand. He says, 'You shall outlive the lady whom you serve.' Charmian's comment on that is, 'O excellent! I love long life better than figs.' At the end of the play the Clown brings Cleopatra a basket of figs in which are nestled the asps which will kill her, and a few minutes later will kill Charmian.

I like to think the same actor played the Soothsayer and the Clown. It would make a good double, as well as working on the audience's unconscious memory of figs and death.

The Books: "It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here" (Charles Grodin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

I consider this to be required reading for young actors.

It's so good on so many levels, but particularly good for young unknown full-of-hope actors. It's not just an autobiography. It's not even a How-To book, because if anyone has had an unconventional and, at times, very difficult career, it is Charles Grodin. But it is a Must-Read. I think definitely for actors it's a must-read - but anyone interested in the business, and how it works (not how it appears to work, but how it actually works) - should also read it as well. The ups and downs, the callous decisions, the annoying co-stars (I love the chapter entitled "Breakthrough: I don't accept an apology from Anthony Quinn") - the craft itself - working on the SELF, as an actor must do ... at the same time that you are trying to survive in a pretty brutal business. The book addressees all of these issues like no other. I think it should be handed out to actors in scene classes, or put on "suggested reading" lists of freshman-level acting classes. I read it from the cloister of college, where I was highly successful, and the thought of taking that out into the real world was exciting ... but scary, too. Grodin's book, on some level, says back to young actors, "Yeah. You should be scared. Toughen up, toots. Harsh world out there." But it doesn't JUST have a cynical tone to it (which is a huge turn-off) - it also is an honest look at his own journey, finding his way, leaping at opportunity when it knocked - but also missing some key opportunities for such and such reasons. Grodin also is notorious for his temper, and obviously his sense of humor - which often got him into trouble, when someone didn't get the joke. But he wasn't afraid to be disliked ... that's one thing ... and yet at the same time, he NEEDED to be liked, in order to get his projects done. The classic dichotomy.

Grodin doesn't just describe his own experiences - he then turns each one into a little "teaching moment" (sorry, don't really like the Oprah terminology but in this case it can't be helped) ... Moments in your life where you realize, through the mess and chaos, there are actually are lessons to be learned - but God, sometimes isn't it difficult to figure out what the hell lesson it is?? Grodin shows that there is a choice involved. You can choose a lesson that empowers you, or you can choose one that makes you bitter and self-righteous. Sometimes Grodin chooses one, sometimes the other - as we all do ... and he is unafraid to call a spade a spade. There are people who were unkind to him starting out. Not even big-wigs at the time - just your basic casting agents, agents in general ... saying horrible things right to your face with the utmost carelessness: "We're looking for someone sexier ..." Whatever, things that go right for the jugular. How do you keep your confidence up in the face of that?? It takes some serious mental maneuvering ... it really does. You have to decide to make sense of it, rather than be victimized by it.

Grodin doesn't come off like he has an ax to grind, or like "look how mean everyone was to me - yet I STILL made it!!" ... It's an honest look at the brutality of the business - and how people can say the most outrageous things and you have to somehow just survive it. Like the story he tells about the party celebrating the fact that the Broadway smash hit Same Time Next Year - which Grodin starred in with Ellen Burstyn - had been bought up by a producer and was going to be made into a movie - and Grodin asked the playwright's wife why the playwright wasn't there, and she replied blithely, "Oh, he's off meeting with Actor X who we are really hoping will play your part in the movie." !!! Unbelievable. Grodin reports this story, and it was years ago, but he obviously never forgot it ... He forgives the playwright's wife for her callousness (which he did not believe was malicious, just unthinking) ... but says he still, to this day, kind of "ducks" when he sees her, afraid of whatever zinger she might throw his way. Grodin reports these stories honestly, you can still feel the emotion behind it - he's not all Zen about these things and that's one of the refreshing (and most human) things about this book. He also behaves in an unexpected way - and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it backfires ... but there are great lessons in all of that for any young actor. Grodin admits that his humor sometimes doesn't go over well ... but then there are people like Mike Nichols who say of Grodin, "He's the funniest man I've ever met." (Grodin was actually cast as Benjamin in The Graduate, but it ended up not happening - Grodin blowing that opportunity for various reasons. Grodin, forever afterwards, was always nervous whenever he saw Dustin Hoffman, even if Hoffman was just walking on the beach. Grodin always believed that any sighting of Hoffman anywhere meant that Grodin was about to be fired.)

So. Who are you going to believe? Which interpretation do you go with? Or can you be okay with the fact that some people just won't "get" you? Grodin's entire career seems to have been about that. Some people will "get" you, others won't ... you have to keep working anyway.

The title of the book comes from an anecdote during the filming of the disastrous 11 Harrowhouse. Grodin's career had exploded (in a good way) with The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May.

I don't think Grodin got one bad review for that film. He says that people still come up to him on the street and talk to him about that movie. Anyone who asks him for an autograph, even now, still say, "I loved you in The Heartbreak Kid ..." So awesome, right? He hit the big time! Yay! But this is why this book is so important: the next movie he did was a movie called 11 Harrowhouse and it very nearly killed his career for good. You would have thought he would have the pick of the crop ... but no, things dried up immediately. To quote Heidi Klum, "One day you're in, the next day you're out." But anyway, the title of the book comes from an experience he had during filming 11 Harrowhouse. Just a year before, Grodin had become a big star, a hot new actor, desirable, wanted, praised.

Candy Bergen and I were filming the movie 11 Harrowhouse in a castle outside London. We were sitting in a room off the main hall where the cameras were being set up. After a few minutes an Englishwoman appeared. I don't know who she was, but she acted as though she had a duchess-or-something title. She said, "Did someone ask you to wait in here?" "No," we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: "Well, it would be so nice if you weren't here."

A master of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching of any given story ... Grodin turns these mainly unpleasant memories into "teaching moments", as well as a revealing memoir about his own development. We learn sometimes by watching others. There is no such thing as a done deal. Grodin thought he had it in the bag with The Heartbreak Kid and while that film will probably be what he is remembered for (that and Midnight Run) - that's not all there is. There were TV specials (including a highly controversial one with Simon & Garfunkel), late-show appearances (he was notorious), directing, plays ... Grodin figured out early on that he would not be happy just as an actor. The point was to stay in the business, by any means possible.

The book is quite funny, and there were times it made me laugh out loud. Any young actor, too, will recognize himself ... in the descriptions of the early days of Grodin's career in New York, taking classes with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, and trying to get cast in something - the whole obsession with headshots ("Did you get your pictures?" "I'm getting my pictures...." "I like my pictures." "Can I see your pictures?") is just so dead on ... so universal ... and there are also moments where Grodin makes mistakes (many many moments) - like the time he disagreed with a bit of Roman Polanski's direction during the filming of Rosemary's Baby. Or the time he refused to accept Anthony Quinn's bullshit (in my opinion) apology. The time he almost got into a fistfight, defending Marlo Thomas' honor and reputation from a heckler who told her she should be "ashamed" of herself and that her father "would be ashamed".

I liked the VOICE of the book, too. It's cynical, sure, but there is a lot of warmth there, too.

It's an act of generosity, this book ... and I am grateful I read it when I did in my life. It was a dash of cold water, in many respects - but at the same time, Grodin doesn't condescend, he doesn't roll his eyes at someone who wants to "do this" as a career - He's not a know-it-all. He makes fun of himself (his stories of working with Robert DeNiro are HYSTERICAL) - but he's also interested in passing on what he has learned.

I found this book to be invaluable at a time when I really really needed it.

A must-read.

The excerpt below has to do with Grodin's experience directing Lovers and Other Strangers on Broadway in 1968.

EXCERPT FROM It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

As much as I feel for the actors' discomfort in auditioning, the people putting on the project have so much time and effort invested in it that these auditions become necessary to try to avoid making mistakes. The exception to this, of course, is if you're hiring someone to do something that everyone involved has seen him do before. I say "everyone" because in most plays everyone has cast approval - writer, director, producer, and, sometimes, the star. It's not that easy to get everyone to agree on anyone. I believe that casting is everything, and if you don't have the right actors, all the writing and directing in the world won't do it for a play. Fine comedy actors, in my opinion, must be as good at serious acting (reality) as they are at comedy. Because of those demands, this is a relatively small group of people.

Lily Tomlin (who has won a Best Actress award on Broadway) likes to tell the story of her audition for me. When she finished, I asked her if she'd ever acted before. She was crushed, she said, and ran to a phone booth to tell a friend how terrible she must have been. I always remind her that the reason I asked her that was because she had been recommended to me by the director of a musical review (Sandy Devlin, the musical stager from Hooray) she was in, and I thought she was a musical performer, even though I thought she gave a good acting audition. But, whatever my rationale, I inadvertently was as insensitive to Lily as others had been to me.

In any event, we ended up with a magnificent cast.

Eventually, the first day of rehearsal finally came for the play, which was called Lovers and Other Strangers. There were a lot of people gathered on the stage that day: ten members of the cast, many of whom had distinguished themselves in other Broadway shows; four or five understudies covering all the parts - also excellent people, any of whom could play the parts they understudied unusually well; of course, the writers, Renee and Joe; Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler; the producer, Stephanie Sills; top scenic costume and lighting designers; highly experienced stage managers; a number of assistants - a lot of people. I started to welcome everyone, and suddenly was acutely aware that all eyes were on me. I wanted to tell them how excited we were to have them all, and how I saw the play and all that, but I realized I was very, very nervous. I had learned how to deal with rejection but now I had to learn to deal with having authority - which also, unexpectedly, was nerve-racking. I had auditioned and approved every single member of the cast, but now, sitting there in front of all of them, I realized that many in the company were older and more experienced than I was. My directing experience consisted of one show that had run three weeks. (I couldn't go around telling that costumes-were-stolen story to everyone I met.) As soon as I realized my voice was shaking, I shifted gears and switched my speech to a short introduction of Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler, a short, extraordinarily warm woman with a lisp and a lot of guts, who always enjoyed making a statement. Mrs. Wechsler basically said how happy we were to have everyone there and how we all felt that, with hard work, we could have a success - pretty much what I would have said if I could have spoken.

Lovers and Other Strangers dealt with love, romance, and marriage. I don't know if it was life imitating art, or what, but as soon as this company got together, all kinds of romances broke out. I gave notes after each rehearsal. Sometimes one of the performers would be able to leave early because I had said all I had to say to him. His lover would sit there fidgeting, looking furiously at me to give her notes and let her get the hell out of there and into the arms of love. All the romances were topped by Renee and Joe calling me to a private meeting one day to tell me they were expecting.

We opened in the fifteen-hundred-seat Fisher Theater in Detroit to rave reviews and sellout business. It was a complete triumph. The papers were raving about Renee and Joe, and even me. Renee's mother told some of the movie people from Hollywood who had descended on us in Detroit that we wanted five hundred thousand dollars for the movie rights. When they looked faint, she whipped out a rave review from Variety and read the entire thing to them as they stood and nodded and looked increasingly nervous.

The road to Broadway was not entirely smooth. It was concluded at some point prior to the Broadway opening that one of the young women in the cast should be replaced. I was the only one against it, yet it was considered my job, as director, to tell the young woman. It seems unfair now; I should have said to the others: "You want to fire her? You tell her." I didn't want the job. But some kind of tradition was being followed, I guess. When I did walk over to the actress, it took me so long to get to the point that she thought we were just having an idle chat. As I got closer to saying what I had to say, I started to develop chest pains, which turned out to be tension. I had to lie down. She got me a glass of water, and as she was trying to calm me, I told her she was fired. It was doubly difficult for me because I couldn't tell her how much I disagreed with the decision and how good I thought she was. I thought that would be disloyal to the others. I know she felt like lying down herself, but she kept applying cold compresses. Two days later, the whole section that the young, talented actress had been in was cut from the show, and two additional actors had to be let go. But it was certainly easier to be dropped from the show because the scenes you were in were cut. Personally, I don't believe in firings unless it significantly affects the show. And I'd venture to say that more than the overwhelming majority of the time it doesn't. This time it didn't.

We finished our highly successful run in Detroit and prepared to move to Broadway. The stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York was considerably smaller than the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit. When we moved the scenery to the Brooks Atkinson, it seemed that our four large sets would come rolling in and out on tracks that were awfully close together. I went to the head stagehand and said, "Are you sure there's no chance at all that these sets could sway a bit, and one coming in quickly could hit one going out quickly?" He stared at me as though that was the dumbest question he'd ever heard. When I persisted, saying, "Forgive me, it's my first Broadway show, and I just don't know about this," he said, "Kid, I've been in this business thirty-five years. Trust me." Always being an optimist, I did. When we started to preview, the sets regularly crashed into each other. Starting right there, until the present, I became kind of an optimistic skeptic.

When we opened on Broadway we got the biggest laughs I'd ever heard in the theater; they were like thunderclaps. In spite of that, the play received mixed notices. The New York Times loved it, which is supposed to be enough; but there was a certain amount of vitriol on the other side. The phrase "Neanderthal theater" sticks in my mind. The play was bold and maybe a little ahead of its time in the sexual-humor department. So, alongside the people screaming with laughter, there was a certain group heading up the aisles in the middle of the evening. The questionable sexual dialogue - and that's all it was: dialogue - represented far less than 1 percent of the play. The biggest laugh of the evening came when a woman turned to her husband in bed and asked demandingly: "Are you gonna make love to me or not?!" The man thinks a second and says, "I owe you one." It was the biggest laugh, and also a line that offended a lot of people. It neither made me laugh nor offended me. I was a much bigger fan of Renee and Joe's nonsexual humor, which was 99 percent of the play.

Business was in trouble from the start. We'd had the theater on what's called an interim booking, meaning another play was booked into the theater six weeks after us (my old friend Dustin Hoffman in a play called Jimmy Shine);and since we had the money to move it (it would have cost twenty-five thousand dollars), we felt we should. The movie rights had been sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Today, that would be equal to a million dollars. The writers got 60 percent of that, and the production 40 percent, which meant that the production had a hundred thousand dollars from the movie sale. Business increased from the first week to the sixth week by 150 percent. We had tried everything to keep going. The actors went around to the various ticket brokers and asked them to do what they could to steer people to the show since the brokers had liked it. I spoke to other producers who had loved the show in an effort to get them to take it over. Joe Bologna and I would stand in front of the theater where our Times review was blown up and comment, as though we were passersby: "I hear it's very good." A few people overheard us and bought tickets. Renee and Joe rounded up about fifty relatives and gave them money to buy tickets. They formed a line. We said to our general manager: "Look, we've got a line!" But Renee and Joe ran out of relatives before that plan could work. None of our plans worked. Heartbreakingly to all of us, the play was allowed to close when our six-week booking was up.

I felt very strongly that the producers should have spent the twenty-five thousand dollars and moved Lovers and Other Strangers to another theater. We had more than doubled our business from the first to the sixth week, we had a rave review from The New York Times, and, most significantly, the show, overall, was loved by the audience and had great word of mouth. A lot of people felt that if it had moved it could have run for two years. Its longevity possibilities, I believe, were proved in that it still is being performed regularly, some twenty years later, all over the country in amateur and stock companies.

Those people responsible for the money always feel they have total control and owe no explanation to anyone, even though in this case most of the money was raised, of course, by a series of backers' auditions performed by Renee, Joe and me. I've always resented this autocratic attitude of "money people". I think that when people work very hard for the better part of a year for little money, they are owed every chance and consideration. While, conceivably, by trying to go on running, money may be lost, work and effort going down the drain to me is worth more than money. The producers had actually wanted to close the play sooner, but I did some figuring, and got Renee and Joe to join with me (against the advice of their business manager) to indemnify the producers against any losses they might incur to finish out the six weeks. We would be responsible for any losses, and also share any profits. We ended up making eleven thousand dollars in profits for the remaining weeks. Recently, I was at a gathering, and one of the producers (a nonvisible one at the time of the play who had raised less than half the money and been influential in persuading Stephanie Sills to close the show) came up to me, introduced himself, and said: "I put up the money for Lovers and Other Strangers." I controlled myself for a moment, and the politest response I could come up with was, "Well, not all of it." He seemed taken aback. I wonder what he would have felt if I'd told him what I really thought of him.

I've always been proud of the successful movie that was made out of the play and of how the play continues to be done regularly all over the country to this day, and probably will for the rest of our lives.

In praise of Sanaa Lathan

Wonderful actress. Fluid, emotional, easy on the eye, funny, deep, unconventional in some of her responses, she creates characters - and very specifically - she does not repeat herself - and you also don't catch her working. It looks easy. I've been a fan for some time (my writeup of Love and Basketball is here). I saw Something New last night and fell in love with it, and with her specifically. She's the kind of actress your heart goes out to. You want her to succeed. You want her to be happy. This is the kind of thing all great romantic female leads have - from Irene Dunne to Marilyn Monroe to Kate Winslet. You worry about these people a little bit - they don't seem self-sufficient, not completely anyway ... and so your heart goes out to them, you hope for them, you invest. It's a rare kind of contract between an audience and an actress ... and not all romantic female leads can pull it off. I think it's somewhat intuitive ... it's a thing that cannot be taught. Whether or not you agree with my choices of female romantic leads is not really the point. The point is that when you are an actress in a romantic film, and you are the lead, it is crucial that the audience want what you want, that they leap into the action (in their hearts) and root for you ... as though it were a sports film. Sanaa Lathan has always had that, and I will look forward to seeing her work for years to come. I'd like to see her hit the big-time, although her last couple of years have been pretty damn spectacular, what with movies and a Broadway hit ... She's a damn fine actress. The character in Love and Basketball, the fiery-tempered tomboy, is nothing like the uptight vaguely sad and yet driven career woman she creates in Something New. Not the same person. I love to watch her work. Her face, even with that scar on her right cheek, maybe even because of the scar, is made for the movies. It's a very beautiful face, but human, open, itself. Emotions are not strived for, or sought after ... they are experienced organically. You don't catch her pushing. Ever. She goes through the gamut of emotions in Something New, and although the movie itself has some issues (mainly with the direction) - the acting, across the board, is a delight. But it's Lathan's movie, and I'm happy for her.

I'm a fan.

What can I say, I'm invested.

Romance

In keeping with the book excerpt today.

I love this photo so much.

One of my "happy place" posts was about Carole Lombard. Love that lady. So did he. Gable did eventually marry again (twice, actually!), but he had it put in his will that he would be buried beside Lombard. Thankfully, his last wife, Kay Williams, was apparently a sensitive (and sensible) lady who totally "got it", knew that Lombard had been the love of his life, and whatevs. Clark would be buried where he wanted to be buried. And that was beside Lombard.

Their faces here. Yum!!

The Books: "Clark Gable: A Biography" (Warren Harris)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

Warren Harris also wrote a book about the romance of Carole Lombard and Clark Gable (she famously said once, "Lord knows I love Clark, but he's the worst lay in town ..." Ha!) ... and so now Harris has taken all of that former research and honed in on Gable. Within 1 or 2 pages, I felt a familiar pang of disappointment, realizing that despite the nice matte-cover, the well-done production of the book - it wasn't written well. It's amateur hour. I am not aware of a big serious biography out there about Clark Gable, and I had hopes for this one. But nope. He uses the word "umpteenth", for example. Time and place, Harris. Time and place. This isn't supposed to be the rantings of a fanboy. Put your "umpteenth" away. He describes conversations as though he were there. At one point he says, "Gable blanched" at some bad news. That's a description. You can't do that. You weren't there. Unless it's a quote from someone else, you can't say "Gable blanched". Or, you CAN, but then you certainly lose MY trust as a reader. You're making shit up, sir. He also reports rumors. "Rumor has it that ..." No, no, no. Joan Crawford very well may have had an abortion due to getting pregnant by Gable, or a few abortions, who knows, but don't set it up with "rumor has it ..." Do your legwork, Mr. Harris. That's your job. Get quotes from people to confirm or deny. Don't just repeat the rumor. Bad form. It's kind of a bummer, because I really wanted to like the book. I liked the information, but I didn't appreciate the writing at all. It didn't make me MAD like Peter Manso's axe-to-grind style, it's relatively harmless, and hell, I can enjoy a good fangirl ranting with the best of them (Cooper's Women, anyone?) - but this book was packaged to look like something else. Unlike Cooper's Women, it has pretensions. It doesn't hold up.

Gable's origins are a little bit unknown - many of the details lost - even his birth certificate is wrong. I think he was even listed as a girl. And the date and time were wrong. It's indicative of the difficulties in putting together a picture of Clark Gable's childhood. He had a lot of sadness as a boy - his mother died, there was some wrangling over religion - the two sides of the family fighting over baptisms and the like, and Clark Gable (which probably wasn't his real name at the time) got a little bit lost in the shuffle. He seems to have been a mixed bag. He was great with cars and machines, loved working on them. He had ears that stuck out to here. He was shy.

Gable actually got his start in stock companies - he had no experience, he was a teenager, and needed to make some money. He learned his craft on his feet. He didn't even know it was a craft, until he encountered some pretty damn fine actors in stock ... who showed him the way. Or he learned by observing. As he filled in, and started to grow into his tallness (although his ears always stuck out) - women started to take notice. There are a couple of quotes in the book from colleagues and directors - basically saying that his sex appeal couldn't be denied - he walked onstage and you could FEEL the reaction in the audience. (Which makes Carole Lombard's quote about him not being a good lay even more interesting. He had grown up basically sleeping with prostitutes, that was his experience ... and Lombard understood that, she had had plenty of sex, she knew he was no good, but that he was a good man and that he loved her.) He was never quite the same after her untimely death.

But back to his sex appeal: It was electric, and visceral - what went on between Gable and an audience (particularly a female audience) - and it was only a matter of time before Hollywood beckoned.

The stories about Gone With the Wind are well-known, the stuff of legend, so I thought I'd pick an excerpt having to do with something a little bit earlier in Gable's career - either Red Dust with Jean Harlow (her husband of, what, one day? killed himself while filming Red Dust, or maybe just after wrap) or It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert, one of my favorite movies of all time. Ironically, the Best Picture From the Outside In series is going on now - (that's where two film critics and writers "screen and compare two best pictures from either end of Oscar's 80 year timeline until eventually we meet in the middle in the 1960s several months from now") - great idea, right? I've been really loving it. So the latest installment is It Happened One Night, Oscar- winner in 1934 and A Beautiful Mind, Oscar-winner in 2001. Quite a jarring contrast, no? I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who was annoyed by Beautiful Mind but that's another post entirely. I LOVED reading the thoughts about It Happened One Night, and so I pulled out the book today and knew I had to choose an excerpt dealing with the filming of that classic.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Clark Gable: A Biography, by Warren Harris

A Hollywood legend claims that Louis B. Mayer loaned Clark Gable to minor-league Columbia Pictures as punishment for the problems he caused during Dancing Lady, but that's not true. Between his illnesses and his suspended salary, Gable had been "punished" enough. It was simply a business deal that benefited both studios. MGM had no project of its own ready for Gable, and it also earned $500 per week by charging Columbia $2,500 instead of the $2,000 he received at home.

Undercapitalized Columbia couldn't afford a large contract roster like MGM, so president Harry Cohn was always borrowing stars for the "A" releases that he produced to upgrade the studio's image as a factory for cheap programmers and short subjects. While borrowing Gable for Night Bus, Cohn also took MGM's Barrymore for Twentieth Century. From Paramount he obtained Claudette Colbert for Gable's costar and Carole Lombard for Barrymore's.

To Gable personally, going to work at Columbia probably seemed like punishment after the posh comforts of MGM. He remembered the small sstudio in drab central Hollywood from his struggling actor days. He used to frequent the nearby intersection of Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, known as "Gower Gulch" because shoestring producers came there daily to hire extras and bit players for westerns.

According to Frank Capra, who would be his director for the four weeks of the Columbia loan-out, Gable had to fortify himself with booze before he could face reporting to the studio. When Gable arrived for a script conference, he called him "Mishter" Capra and said, "I've always wanted to visit Siberia, but why does it smell so bad? And why ain't you wearing a parka?"

Infuriated, Capra said, "Mr. Gable, you and I are supposed to make a picture together. Shall I tell you the story, or would you rather read the script yourself?"

"Buddy, I don't give a shit what you do with it," Gable replied.

Capra saw that Gable was too intoxicated to reason with, so he simply handed him the script and escorted him to the door. As he left, Gable started singing the old saloon favorite "My Gal Sal".

Once he'd sobered up and read Night Bus, Gable decided that it wasn't any worse than some of his MGM scripts. Ironically, the original short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams had once been optioned by MGM after it was first published in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine, but when the studio decided to pass, Harry Cohn purchased it for five thousand dollars for Capra and scriptwriter-partner Robert Riskin.

Due to a recent flurry of bus movies, including MGM's Fugitive Lovers and Universal's Cross Country Cruise, Cohn ordered Capra and Riskin to find a more provocative title. The It in It Happened One Night could really stand for almost anything, although the neuter pronoun had been widely used as a euphemism for sex since the Middle Ages.

Retaining only the shell of the original short story, Robert Riskin wrote a script that started or at least perfected the genre known as screwball comedy. A hot-tempered newspaper reporter, just fired for impertinence while on assignment in Miami, heads back to New York by bus to find a new job. Sitting next to him and traveling incognito is the runaway, spoiled-bitch daughter of a millionaire. Daddy has posted a ten-thousand-dollar reward for her return, so it's not long before the reporter recognizes her and realizes his good luck. Besides collecting the reward money, he can also write a juicy story about her and sell it to the highest bidder. To make sure that others don't recognize her, he persuades her to leave the bus and to travel the rest of the way to New York by hitchhiking on the back roads.

Much of the script was left open to suit the improvisational style of Frank Capra, who had learned the ropes by creating visual gags for Hal Roach and Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers and who had done his first feature directing the silent comedy star Harry Langdon. Since joining Columbia in 1928, Capra had directed nineteen comedies and/or dramas. From his first collaboration with writer Riskin on The Miracle Woman in 1931, his films had become increasingly laced with social comment that championed the ordinary citizen and moral goodness.

Gable had met Claudette Colbert during his Broadway period; she was an established stage star by the time of his debut in Machinal. He also knew that she was a lesbian in a sham marriage with gay actor-director Norman Foster, so he never tried to make a pass or to entice her into the temporary dressing suite that Columbia gave him.

"Clark had a ball making the film," Frank Capra remembered. "He was playing himself, and maybe for the only time in his career. That clowing, boyish, roguish he-man was Gable. He was shy, but a lot of fun with people he knew. He was very sensitive about those goddamned ears, but he made jokes about them. After a shot, he'd ask, 'What'd they get - an ear?' He didn't look like anyone else. It was not only physical. He had mannerisms that were all his own: ways of standing, smoking, and a great flair for clothes. Whatever came natural to him, I let him do it."

"Gable, I believe, idolized Capra," said the director's longtime sound mixer, Edward Bernds. "Gable's initial hostility was gone by the time we started, which was with a night scene at the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Los Angeles. Gable very quickly became friendly with the crew. I think he found that with Capra, picture making could be fun."

The story builds to a scene where Gable and Colbert must share overnight accommodation in a one-room tourist cabin. Colbert's actual reluctance to undress in front of the cameras gave Capra the idea for the "Walls of Jericho", a blanket hung from the ceiling to divide her bed from Gable's. While undressing behind the blanket, she drapes some of her clothes and undies on it, which turned out sexier than if she'd actually revealed herself.

As Gable stripes down in the same scene, he removes his shirt and has nothing on underneath. In real life he never wore undershirts, so he didn't want to be bothered with one for the film. Capra went along with i.

During the filming of the "Jericho" scene, Gable and Capra pulled a prank on Colbert. The director called her over to Gable's side of the curtain with "We've got a slight problem here. Clark wants to know what can be done about it." When she came around, Colbert found Gable under the bedcovers, smirking, with a large bulge rising from his crotch line. He'd taken a prop kitchen utensil and positioned it under the blanket.

"Awww!" Colbert laughed. "You guys!"

In his handling of Gable, Capra erased the dividing line between hero and comic. He gave Gable routines that were usually reserved for slapstick comedians. Gable teaches Colbert how to dunk a doughnut and also how to thumb a ride. She does him one better by sticking out a shapely gam and getting a passing car to stop immediately. The audience could laugh at the hero as well as admire him.

The thirty-six-day filming ended just before Christmas and cost $325,000. "Clark and I left wondering how the movie would be received," Claudette Colbert recalled. "It was right in the middle of the Depression. People needed fantasy, they needed splendor and glamour, and Hollywood gave it to them. And here we were, looking a little seedy and riding on our bus."

The Books: "The Salad Days" (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

The Salad Days, by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

The first of his two autobiographies, The Salad Days takes us up to 1941. His second book has to do with his extraordinary experiences during WWII, and I have not read it, but I very much want to. The Salad Days is a self-portrait of a charming, intelligent, honest man ... not all that ambitious, but born to Hollywood royalty, and learning his craft as he went. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was not the swashbuckling giant that his father, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was, but he was tremendously handsome, and had a nice career. (A long one, too.) He played small roles, starting out in the silent era, and then graduated to supporting parts. Meanwhile, he was married to Joan Crawford (or "Billie", as he called her) and focusing mainly on his personal life, and negotiating the sometimes difficult relationship with his famous father and his young stepmother, cinema giant Mary Pickford. Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Mary Pickford were really our first major movie stars - and in a way, just because of the time and the place, they were more famous than anyone had been on earth, ever. At least in terms of being instantly recognizable, due to this new-fangled medium called the "motion picture". Stardom was able to jump a notch in power, a couple of notches ... so that these people, who lived in that time, has worldwide cache of a level that the stars in past generations couldn't have even dreamed of. I mean, Ellen Terry was a huge stage actress - does anyone outside of theatre buffs know her name now? (Here's a quote from her, and some photos, for those who are interested.) We know John Wilkes Booth's name, but not because of his acting! Could you pick Eleanora Duse out of a lineup? These people were huge stars of the stage. But with motion pictures, actors joined the realm of the pharaohs, and they lived accordingly. Much of the money they made was not taxed (at that time), so the lifestyles were even more extraordinary than they are now. It was the Wild West of filmmaking. Pioneer spirit. Excess. Only one or two huge stars. They were a different breed.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. grew up with his mother (who had gotten sole custody when she and Fairbanks, Sr. divorced), and his father had gone on to the greatest success possible in Hollywood, marrying America's sweetheart Mary Pickford. Fairbanks, Jr. was famous as a child, merely because of who his father was. Fairbanks and Pickford lived in a giant mansion and I suppose the name of the mansion reveals that the whole socalled currentday trend of calling famous couples as a blend of their two names (Brangelina, etc.) is nothing new. They lived in a mansion called Pickfair.

Based on nothing but his last name, Fairbanks was given a contract, and he started making pictures. It had to have been difficult, to have a father who was the most famous actor in the world - well, him and Charlie Chaplin (who was also his business partner). Fairbanks (Sr.), Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffith formed United Artists in 1919, an extraordinary act of business acumen - and that studio flourished until it was brought down by the debacle of Heaven's Gate in 1980. The history of that particular studio, and its collapse, is one of the saddest in Hollywood (a book was written about it: Final Cut : Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists - an incredible book). What a loss. But Douglas Fairbanks and his colleagues had created it to get more creative control, first of all, and also to control the distribution of their films. Brilliant. They were far-seeing people. They were not just in it for the momentary flash of glory. These people saw the future - which was in distribution (and still is today) and did what they could to get some control. It's so rare to find artists who are also excellent businessmen/women ... and those four were.

But, sadly, here I am talking about Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. when this post is about JUNIOR'S book! Typical. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. had to deal with that his whole life. He even shared his father's name! How could he ever compete?

The most charming thing about Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (and I mean charming in the best most true sense of that word) is that he did NOT try to compete. He liked the good life, yes. But he liked it for the right reasons. He enjoyed nice things. He had a great sense of aesthetics, not just in how he dressed and behaved, but in how one should live his life. The Salad Days describes a world that no longer exists. A world of ocean liners, and white linen suits, and cocktails before dinner, and elegant manners, and a kind of bemused acceptance of the foibles of others. He was a gentleman to his core. He was married to Joan Crawford (the marriage did not last) but years and years later, when Mommie Dearest, the smear book to end all smear books, came out, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was quick to say how biased it was, and that was not the Joan Crawford HE knew. He was old-school. You are a gentleman. You do not bitch and moan about the ladies in your life. You treat your wife with kindness, and perhaps she exasperates you, and perhaps you do not understand why she has to have an entire room filled with bottles of moisturizer, but you do not make yourself undignified and unmanly by bitching, and you do not speak of her with contempt. You do not speak of anyone with contempt ... that's what good manners means. It is more important to comport yourself with dignity and grace, and try to have a little compassion, even for someone who might have hurt you, betrayed you, whatever. He stood up for her, in the crazy aftermath of that book's release, and I think that's pretty classy.

They were a young couple together. Glowing and beautiful. This is one of my favorite photos of them. It might be one of my favorite photos ever.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was in Gunga Din with Cary Grant, and it was one of his most successful pictures. Grant offered him the part (Grant was another one of those rare actors with an acute business sense) ... Grant had admired Douglas Fairbanks Senior tremendously and had modeled much of his own behavior after him. The casual bon vivant glow, the easy grace, the immaculate wardrobe, the commitment to physical fitness, all of that ... he had seen in Douglas Fairbanks Sr. something he wanted to emulate, something he - a poverty-struck Cockney boy - was not born to. He had to imitate it (which is one of the most extraordinary things about Grant: his entire thing was a persona created out of wholecloth ... but it seems completely natural. He seriously has no peers). But anyway, due to his great regard for Fairbanks Jr.'s father (who died in 1939 - the same year Gunga Din came out) - he thought it would be wonderful to act with the son. The ridiculous results are one for the ages. Fairbanks, Jr. did not have the silent-screen swashbuckling melodrama of the father. But he did have a spectacular body, a rakish energy, and he was pretty much up for anything. Is there anything more fun than watching those three guys race around India and Afghanistan in Gunga Din??

Fairbanks, Jr. had a wonderful time on that picture, was very proud of it - and remained friends with Cary Grant until the day he died.

Check it out. Here are the two old friends with then-president and former acting colleague Ronald Reagan.

Amazing. The sweep of 20th century motion pictures embodied by two white-haired gents.

The Salad Days is an entertaining, gentle read ... He has no illusions about himself, and yet you also realize, as you read it, that you are in the presence of a thoughtful intelligent person, a man who is able to tell his own story without seeming gaga about his own life, an honest gentleman. In white linen and bucks. Ready to put on his swimming trunks and do a perfect dive into the blue swimming pool. A cocktail on the nearby table. A glimpse of an America - pre World War II - that is gone for good. A time-machine this book is.

It's not just wonderful for the show-biz anecdotes, but because it's really nice to hang out with him for a while. He's a lovely companion, a trustworthy guide.

Here's an excerpt involving his wife "Billie" and other matters.

EXCERPT FROM The Salad Days, by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Neither Billie nor I had much opportunity to settle down in the conventional sense; we both worked too hard and hectically. Never, before or since, have I known any other professional who expended more personal energy on self-improvement courses and on her relations with her fans and the press as did the girl known as Joan Crawford. With one or two really dear friends from Kansas City, she kept up a loyal handwritten correspondence. But if she decided that some particular fan was consistently ardent and devoted enough, or if someone in the studio made a voluntary slave of himself for her (as some certainly did), they were favored by her frequent thoughtfulness and extravagant generosity.

Inclined as she was to exaggerate in so many ways, Billie went about physical fitness in typical fashion. She went to dance classes (when not filming) once or twice a week, took swimming lessons and daily exercises and massage. The cubes of ice she rubbed over her body were always as handy as her face creams and cosmetics. She did not have a notable sense of humor, and was memorably indignant when anyone pulled one of her famous legs about this routine.

She had a chosen few favorites among the members of the press with whom she shared confidences, knowing just how far they would go in printing them. Sometimes her pet fan-magazine writers submitted their articles in advance so that she could amend them if she chose. She paid fake-friendly obeisance to Louella Parsons, the shrewd and vengeful syndicated movie columnist for the then-great Hearst chain of newspapers. But then so did most of Hollywood, including me.

"Lolly" Parsons had been a friend of Marion Davies in Chicago, long before Marion had gone to New York and found her most loyal and magnanimous patron, the press titan William Randolph Hearst himself. Everyone - and no contrary voices were ever raised - loved Marion personally, although her films never quite caught on. She was delicious, irreverent, and generous. There were some who liked Hearst and some who admired him, but almost everyone feared him. His power in those days can hardly be believed in these. I recall my father once asking him, "Tell me, W.R." - as he was called by those who knew him - "now that you've got your own film company for Marion, and your own newsreels are shown everywhere, why don't you concentrate your energies more on motion pictures? That way you can have a worldwide public, instead of just the city-to-city fame that comes from journalism."

Hearst thought a moment and then, in his high, piping voice (so strange coming from that towering giant of a man), answered, "Well, Dough, I have thought about it but I've decided against it. Movies aren't that powerful, really. Why, you know, you can crush a man with journalism but you can't with motion pictures."

When Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, the brilliant, fictional story of Hearst, he was virtually blackballed from the American film world his talent graced so well.

Warner Brothers, once a quickie company and now nouveau-riche because of their successful pioneering investment in sound movies, took over First National (and me with it, of course). My total credits for that work year of 1929 amounted to six pictures. As indifferent as the Crawford pictures had been, mine were several notches lower. MGM at least mounted their trash well. Warner Brothers didn't; most were just mediocre. I did make one picture that, though not very good, may be of some interest to movie buffs. It was called The Forward Pass and it was a football story, with myself as the quarterback hero and Loretta ("Gretch") Young as the heroine. It so happened that I was a fervent fan of the USC Varsity Football team and felt no honor could be greater than to be allowed to watch practice or visit a fraternity house. Many directors and producers who were also fans did what they could to help the USC athletes get summer jobs to help pay their tuition (that should indicate how long ago all this was). And that was how we happened to hire the whole USC football team to be the "school team" in The Forward Pass. Most of them were nice fellows who were unimpressed by movie people. When the cameraman began to shoot, the players thought it great fun to rush through my so-called protective linemen and, instead of letting me run with the ball or pass as rehearsed, to crash into me, set me down hard on my backside, pile up on top of me, and then apologize. The director, Eddie Cline, was in on their joke and thought it fun too. So did everyone, except me. It was summer, it was hot, and I was not prepared for such rough going. But I knew if I so much as cried, "Ouch!" I'd never hear - or feel - the end of it.

Two of the fellows on the team were friends of mine, one a quarterback, Marshall Duffield, and the other a huge guard, named Marion Michael "Duke" Morrison. Three years later, I got Morrison a job in another picture of mine called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he was to have one spoken line, perhaps his first. As one of my fight trainers, he came in while my gloves were being tied on, slapped me on the back, and said, "You okay, boss?" I nodded and he exited. Morrison decided to stay in films, but under the name John Wayne.

It is impossible for me to recapture the degree of happiness or compatibility that existed between Billie and me that first year or so. I should say we were both sufficiently imaginative so that, inasmuch as we firmly decided we would "damn well be happy..." we were. This is not to suggest, however, that we were content - which is, of course, a more important state of mind and more impervious to passing influences.

There are accounts that after our marriage the atmosphere at Pickfair reverted to the marked chill Billie had caught the year before. It was said she was tense and unhappy whenever we went up there and that I had been neglectful of her when my father asked me to join him and his friends for a game of "DOUG" or a steaming first, meeting her at the house later.

Dad and Mary had been away again (he was beginning to make occasional trips alone) but had now returned. He was deep into the production of The Iron Mask, a sequel to The Three Muskateers, with another chance to play D'Artagnan.

I admit there was a discernible coolness emanating from "the Big House on the Hill" and invitations were few. Indeed, I myself was rarely relaxed there. I often felt I was "on sufferance" and I do remember Billie being occasionally uncomfortable about it. But as the outside world was not aware of this, she did not seem to take it with any real seriousness. There was certainly no outright unpleasantness between my father and me, but there was no great warmth either. Some said that Dad's fetish of youth made the reality of my marriage to a spectacular young star a disturbing factor. He and I hardly ever discussed personal or family matters. Nor did he seem to know or care much about my professional progress. Usually our conversation was limited to sports and the news.

It may well be that I have up to now been a shade too "understanding" of my father's variable feelings toward me. Perhaps, in balance, I have been too impatient with my mother's overdemonstrative devotion. Probably, because Dad had been my "hero of heroes", I overlooked many slights and rebuffs noted by others just because I didn't want to think they had happened.

Putting myself in Dad's shoes, I could see that, despite Mary's poise as wife and hostess and her shrewd business acumen, he preferred her public image of a little girl. Dad had created a child-bride for himself. He was always a very jealous man, and Mary and her world were the principal targets of that jealousy. He never let her sit next to anyone else but him at any dinner table. Nor could she dance with anyone else. He had built his career on a vision of himself as the ever-young champion. I belonged to him reluctantly - biologically, if not financially or emotionally. But I was by now physically bigger than he and becoming fairly well known to a new generation, so he couldn't exactly shake me off, or hide me.

Dad was never overtly unkind or unfair. Only rarely did he openly show anger or irritation - and then, with cause. He tried hard to be a conventional father but just couldn't quite bring it off.

He could not have enjoyed hearing Billie's frequent talk about having children. In fact, I never quite believed her. She often claimed she had had two miscarriages, but I had done some medical snooping that indicated nothing of the sort had happened. As she frequently voiced her fears that child-bearing might affect her figure, I suspect that was the real reason she never had children or her own. I was still too young to give it much thought. There was plenty of time for fatherhood and I was certainly not averse to it.

Nevertheless, the hint of a grandchild in the offing would not have been warmly welcomed by my father at that time - nor, I suspect, by Mary either. They enjoyed a status in the world's imagination that is totally inconceivable and incomparable by today's standards, and it was their serious business to keep it that way. I may have been uncomfortable in the private role of an unwitting threat to all of that, but I never realized the full extent of my influence on their lives until I heard family talk of it many years later.

In 1929, Billie made four pictures and none quite measured up to the best of the six she had made the year before. Our Modern Maidens (the one I was in too) was the most successful, though Untamed, late in the year, brought a splendid young actor, fresh from New York theater, as her leading man. Robert Montgomery and I became great companions and would share many agreeable adventures over the next dozen years. In order to get better stories and better parts, Billie carried on as hard a battle with the front office as she could without getting into trouble. She was too much in awe of Garbo to be jealous of her, but she made no bones of her jealousy of Norma Shearer, who was unquestionably given most of the plums. Since Norma was the wife of Irving Thalberg, boss of production, there was little Billie could do except grouse and protest, discreetly, to the press.

I have read that Billie tried to work single-mindedly at her career but found it difficult because of my insistence on a more "social life". Though reluctant to dispute the views of a revered person who no longer can rebut my rebuttal, I must say that that is so much rubbish. Billie let nothing stop her admirable though humorless dedication to professional advancement. It was useless to remind her that such other star actresses as Mary, Garbo, Gish, Hayes, Fontaine, or those younger ones who came later, like Hepburn, Leigh, and Davis, hardly ever bothered to curry favor with producers, directors, critics, columnists, or groups of fans. They learned their trade thoroughly, allowed their personalities full professional exposure, exploited their best qualities, and generally stayed away from all the circuising. Billie Cassin lacked some of the natural magic of some of her peers. Yet by dint of bloody-minded determination, intelligence, and guts, she invented Joan Crawford - and in that guise she stood proudly as an accepted equal to the best of all the others.

Although I doubt if she ever heard of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater or "the Method", she was one of a group of motion picture actors who really believed that to play a happy scene once must first get into a truly happy mood. For instance, she could not believe that Lynn Fontaine might feel physically dreadful yet be able to perform high comedy with supreme and subtle wit. Nor could she believe that a great actress like Helen Hayes could consciously reduce audiences to uncontrollable tears while she thought about having a juicy steak sandwich after the performance. Joan relied more than most silent movie actresses on the "mood music" created by a small two- or three-man combo that was, in those days, a regular part of a company's production crew. Her great saucer eyes could spill over with tears at the first chord of "Humoresque" or whatever sad incident she chose to think of at that moment. She was so very canny about the great size of her eyes that not only did her makeup carefully exploit them but in a picture she almost always tried to hold her head down and look up so that they looked even larger.

The Books: "Are You Anybody?: An Actor's Life" (Bradford Dillman)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Are You Anybody?: An Actor's Life, by Bradford Dillman

One of the side effects of being obsessed with Dean Stockwell is that you suddenly find yourself needing (yes, needing) to buy the autobiography of Bradford Dillman, who starred with Stockwell in 1959's Compulsion (a movie I wrote about here) - just in case Stockwell was mentioned Dillman and Stockwell were not friends. As a matter of fact, they didn't get along. Stockwell had done the play on Broadway with Roddy McDowall (post about that here) - and McDowall was not asked to do the film (not because he wasn't good, but because the studio had a contractual obligation to Dillman, so they put HIM in the project) - and apparently Stockwell was, how you say, less than gracious to this interloper!! (In a beautiful moment of dovetailing narratives, McDowall, years and years later, would play a part on Quantum Leap in the final season ... when Al is threatened, by a moment in his past, to no longer be in charage of the project in the future ... and suddenly Roddy McDowall shows up to help Sam Beckett - played by Scott Bakula - and Bakula is like, "Where's Al???")

But is a small connection between Stockwell and Dillman any reason to buy an entire book, Sheila?? Well, yes, it is. Obsession follows its own pathways. Just find a used copy on Amazon for 20 cents and grab that sucker up.

I think Compulsion is terrific (not perfect, but a terrific psychological thriller, quite daring in the context of its day) - and while I think Stockwell far outshines Dillman (who does a lot of maniacal laughing - "indicating" that he is crazy) - somehow the pair ends up working. There's a scene where Orson Welles interviews the two boys after they have been arrested. Stockwell is chain-smoking, pacing in the small cell - but it's not "actor" pacing. It's not cliche. He is pacing because he has so much nervous energy that he must move. He's cranky. Welles asks questions that seem to imply that Stockwell's character might, uhm, not be into girls (it's 1959, so it's subtle and coded ..."No girls?") ... and Stockwell is sliced open, psychologically, in that moment. Meanwhile, sitting over on the windowsill, is Dillman, at first cocky and assured, and you can already feel how the boys are separating ... Dillman's character leaving Stockwell's out to dry. "Sure, I've got alibis ..." croons Dillman. So while some of Dillman's work here seems "showy" to me, and unnecessarily so, it ends up working for the character. He's also a "showoff" - that's his whole thing. He's a big phony, a liar, a con artist, and a manipulator. One of those Ivy League boys who had everything handed to them ... and so, because things were so easy, he ends up having contempt for the whole world. Dillman really does play that well. I think Stockwell is riveting, however ... and acts Dillman off the screen.

(If you haven't seen Compulsion, I highly recommend it.)

I bought Dillman's autobiography on this slim-pickins basis. But it's actually a hoot. I loved it.

Dillman has 3 kids, was married to the same woman for 40 years (an actress - who passed away a couple of years ago), and - very much like his character in Compulsion was being bred for upper-class greatness when he horrified his family by deciding he wanted to be an actor. Like so many other people at that time (early to mid 50s) he gravitated towards the Actors Studio. That was the place to be. It was the kind of work that everyone wanted to do now. Everyone wanted to be Brando. It seemed like if you took 1 or 2 classes with Lee Strasberg, perhaps you could BE Brando?? No? Maybe?? But it was also a place to study, to get serious about your craft outside of the public glare, to stretch yourself, etc. etc. Dillman was no dummy. He knew it was the place to be.

He had his big break on Broadway, where he appeared as Eugene Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (a very famous production, with Jason Robards and Fredric March). Another weird Stockwell connection: when the play was finally filmed, Dean Stockwell played Eugene, the role Bradford Dillman had originated on Broadway. Ouch. But regardless, that was a big big moment for Dillman - in 1956 - being in this huge hit show, that won accolades left and right, prizes, literary and theatrical - the production was a sensation. Fredric March (who played James Tyrone) took Dillman under his wing a bit, mentoring him, teaching him about the business. And Dillman's career was off and running.

He was being groomed for stardom - but as so often happens in this life - he didn't quite make it. His "star" slipped very quickly. He had been in big important projects, and then a couple of years later ... not so much ... However, Dillman kept working, and was involved in some pretty cool films (look him up!) as well as appearing in guest spots on every television show known to man. He had a recurring role on Falcon Crest, for example. Dillman's career was LONG. I love guys like Bradford Dillman. They're the ones who were "disappointed", by perhaps not becoming as famous as their peers ... but who kept at it. I know so many people like that, and it's truly inspiring to me. Stockwell was one of them for many years. He has famous as a child, famous as a young man - and then dropped so completely off the radar as a man in his 30s and 40s that he finally moved to Taos and got his real estate license. Couldn't make a living. He didn't count on David Lynch resurrecting his career, and he didn't count on being more famous at the age of 50 than he ever was as a little kid. Love that! Dillman remained good-looking and dapper, perfect for shows like Murder She Wrote and Love Boat, and despite his good looks there was always something a little bit ... sketch about him ... which worked in his favor. It worked in his favor early in his career (that character in Compulsion is the epitome of "sketch") and it worked in his favor later. He could play the dashing shallow man accused of murdering his wife, and you thought, yeah, that guy probably did it, and he'll probably get away with it. You can have a nice career playing things like that!

Now let's talk about his book. There probably isn't one serious word in it. Sometimes it feels like he's writing a How-To book for young actors. He dispenses advice on how to deal with criticism, or how to concentrate on a busy movie set ... and yet at the same time, it's NOT an advice book, it's also just a long compilation of funny anecdotes about his famous co-stars ... So it's a mixed bag. But some of his anecdotes are so hysterical ... and you still get the sense that Dillman was like, "Can you believe how lucky I was that I got to work with so-and-so???" Not in an obnoxious way, but like a little kid gets excited. I find that kind of non-seriousness very refreshing, and also, as I've mentioned, I'm a sucker for an awesome anecdote.

For example, he recounts this famous anecdote, one of my favorites in Hollywood lore:

In The Greatest Story Ever Told [John] Wayne was cast as a Roman captain who visits the scene of the Crucifixion and says, standing at the feet of Christ, "Truly this was the son of God."

Director George Stevens was riding a crane when the actor stepped in for a take. Wayne said, "TrulythiswasthesonaGod."

"Cut. Duke, let's remember you're talking about Jesus here. You might want to take the speech a bit slower."

"You got it, George."

Take Two. The Centurion says, "Truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."

"Cut. Duke, not reverent enough. Let's try it again, and this time give us a little awe."

"You got it, George."

Take Three. The superstar says, "Aw, truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."

Now why Dillman is relating this anecdote that has nothing to do with him is unclear to me. The book is full of stuff like that. It seems to me that he is relaying the story because it pleases him, and I don't know, seems like a good enough reason to me.

So although there is little to no Stockwell in Dillman's book, I had a lot of fun reading it. You'll see why in the CHATTY excerpt below.

First of all, he relates one of my favorite anecdotes ever about Robert Mitchum, and he also relates a story about Orson Welles. Neither Stockwell nor Dillman had good things to say about Welles' behavior (his acting is another story) ... by that point in his life, Welles was a big mess in terms of his personal life, could only work on certain days on the month because he couldn't be in America for longer than that time due to tax problems ... so he would sweep in, be a total nightmare, sweep out, leaving everyone to ... clean up, basically. Stockwell, who had been in the business forever by that point, although he was a young man, always felt that kind of bullying was unnecessary. There was always a trickster element to Welles ... and you can see it operate here, in a less than benign manner.

If you like a gossipy book (well written), full of anecdotes about all the greats - with little to no segue between anecdotes - they serve no POINT, they are just amusing stories... I would recommend Are You Anybody? It's a lot of fun.

Oh, the places you've led me, Dean Stockwell.

EXCERPT FROM Are You Anybody?: An Actor's Life, by Bradford Dillman

For the past fifty years Robert Mitchum has been captivating filmgoers with his sleepy demeanor. He was the first actor to be jailed for marijuana, and it's no state secret he's enjoyed a cocktail or two in his time. But his toughness is no pose.

Before beginning a film with him, Henry Hathaway, a director acknowledged as a card-carrying sadist, felt impelled to explain himself.

"Listen, Mitch," he said. "I got this thing. Sometimes I get a little excited, call actors names and cuss them, but I want you to know it's nothing personal. It's just me."

"I hear you, Henry," Mitchum replied. "I know how it is. I've got this thing, too. See, whenever somebody calls me names or cusses me out, I haul off and bust him in the mouth. Nothing personal. It's just me."

Yet few know what an intelligent, articulate man Mitchum is, how charming he can be. He's also a prankster. When I worked with him on location in Hong Kong, our director was hearing-impaired. In the briefcase used for transporting his script he carried several hearing aid battery replacements. We'd rehearsed a scene in an office, we were doing Take One, I'd fed Mitch his cue, when he mouthed his response. No sound.

"Cut." The director was pounding his ear. "Damn," he said, removing the device, opening his briefcase to install a fresh battery. "Okay, let's go again."

Take Two. I give the cue, Mitch mouths his line.

"Cut." The director pounding his ear anew. "Who makes these things, anyway?"

It took four takes for him to realize he'd been victimized by an imp.

The imp struck again during a scene in the lobby of the Hotel Peninsula, he and I seated at a table. Normally spectators keep a respectful distance as they observe the moviemaking process, but a blonde plumper spilling out of her pink pants suit couldn't restrain herself. Between takes she rushed over and did a five-minute number on how Robert Mitchum ruled her life, how jealous he made her husband, how her friends teased her about her crush. It went on and on, the actor grunting occasionally before pretending to nod off.

The lady's moving lips were right in his ear when Mitch jolted awake. Feigning shock, he thundered, "Suck what?"

**

Orson Welles was a genius. In my judgment Citizen Kane is the greatest motion picture ever made, and I told him so. Its innovations will be copied by filmmakers to the end of time. He transformed the medium forever.

Welles' experience in radio taught him to "hear" a scene. When he directed he was as much conductor as filmmaker, asking his actors to overlap one another in such a way that only pertinent dialogue emerged. Out of seeming confusion he created clarity.

Orson was also a creative bully. I worked with him twice, in Compulsion and in a movie where he, Juliette Greco and I each played two roles. It's called Crack in the Mirror.

During our weeks doing Compulsion, Orson was cordial and helpful, but evidently he neither anticipated nor appreciated that Dean Stockwell and I would earn critical acclaim to equal his.

When we began shooting Crack In the Mirror in Paris he was laying for me. The plot involves a love triangle at two levels. The first is a wealthy older barrister whose wife is having an affair with an ambitious young lawyer. The second is an older laborer whose wife is having an affair with a young punk. After the latter two conspire and kill the laborer, they are prosecuted and defended by the upper-crust attorneys.

The dual roles required special makeup. As the lawyer my hair was sprayed blond. As the punk I inserted plugs to expand my nostrils and my hair was ironed into tight dark curls. Orson noted the difference daily; depending on the schedule, he either called me "Blondie" or "Curley". More than once he ruffled the carefully sprayed hair or ironed curls in what was purportedly a good-natured gesture. But it required time to repair.

Orson did his own makeup, working from a makeup box that must have dated back to his days at the Mercury Theater. Inside he had all his paints and putty noses, an unsanitary mixture that caused my fastidious makeup artist to sniff and whisper, "C'est une boucherie." A butcher shop.

One early morning, seated side by side in makeup, Orson remarked, "You seem damn cheerful this morning."

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I'm pumped up. My wife's arriving from California today."

Orson put down his powder brush to study me. "You're kidding. You're married?"

"Sure."

He snorted.

"What about it?"

"Well," he said. "No offense. I always thought you were a fag."

I looked to see if he was joking.

He wasn't.

I gave some sort of light-hearted response but I was badly upset. My stomach churning, I went downstairs to the soundstage. As I walked on the set it hit me: I was about to play my most important scene in the movie.

And he knew it.

More than a courtesy, it's important when doing coverage on a scene that an actor give off-camera dialogue to the person performing his close-up. The eye contact is essential. On opening day Welles demonstrated his despite by waving me away. "Stand over there," he directed. "Get me a gobo." A lighting stanchion was set in my place. Unseen, I fed him his cues.

But bullies are usually cowards, and Orson was no exception. I cherish Darryl Zanuck's story about sitting with Welles in a restaurant, listening to an ongoing diatribe about the injustices done the director by some studio executive, how much he hated the man, what he'd do to the swine if he ever saw him again. A waiter interrupted to present a card. It was from this selfsame executive, inviting Zanuck to join his table for a drink. A feisty, combative man, Darryl showed Welles the card, then went over to the table, listed a bottle of champagne from its bucket and doused the villain with its contents. Triumphant, he turned to Orson for applause.

Welles had vacated the premises.

**

Frequently, live TV shows were rehearsed in a ballroom on the lower East side, a few doors away from Ratner's, an outstanding Jewish restaurant. When I was rehearsing There Shall Be No Night I ate there almost every noon.

I was impersonating the son of Charles Boyer, one of the most charming men I ever knew. Tempted as he was, Charles would never agree to join e for lunch because he was fearful of being recognized. As Gallic sex symbol he'd had some unfortunate brushes with overheated ladies.

One day I had an idea. "Charles, if you'll forgive a rude suggestion, I think you'd be perfectly safe to join me if you'd, ah, leave your hairpiece behind."

He must have been hungry because he wasn't offended. Instead he put the toupee aside and we marched arm in arm over to Ratner's, where we were seated at a table in the middle of the room. Delighted with the menu, Charles ordered a sequence of specialties, beginning with the chicken soup. He was delighted, too, that his disguise was so successful no one had given him a second look. I was congratulating myself when I glanced over his shoulder to see a large, beaming woman rush across the room, homing in on him from behind. Charles was about to bring matzohs to his mouth when she crushed him in a linebacker's embrace, causing the spoon to fly, inundating him with soup.

Hugging him, she cooed, "Cholly, Cholly. Take me to the Kezbah!"

**

Before he became an actor Burt Reynolds was a stuntman. In his early TV series he liked to be seen participating in a lot of action because it was what he did best. In those days, he wasn't much of an actor. But as one series led to the next he became more confident, more magnetic.

I was a guest on what he thought would be his swan song, present the day his show Dan August was canceled by the network. "That's it," said Burt. "I'm dead. This is the third horse I've had shot out from under me. I'm history."

The problem was, he'd never been given the chance to flaunt his sense of humor. But after he posed for a male centerfold and appeared on all the talk shows to jest about it, he built a whole new career as a lovable, laughable guy.

In praise of Len Cariou

One of the reasons I love bloggers who write mainly about film is that (unlike in the print-world, you don't have a word count, and you don't have to focus on only the "new" or the "fresh") we can pretty much write about what we want to write about. If I want to devote 4 months out of my life to ONLY writing about Dean Stockwell, I can do that. And you know what? If you build it, people will come. Sure, you lose people along the way, but who needs those people anyway? You write about what you love - people will show up. The right kind of people. True passion has triumphed! Long live Dean Stockwell!

To my point:

Jonathan at Cinema Styles has a generous and in-depth post about Len Cariou. You may not recognize that name, but you definitely know the guy. And theatre-goers definitely know him.

I loved The Four Seasons when I was a teenager - it's been years since I've seen it but many of the scenes remain almost word for word in my head. ("Shalimarrrrrr? Thank you!" "Danny ... are you telling me that you are afraid of your underwear?" "MY WIFE'S ITALIAN!!") I think I first saw it at Mere and Jayne's house. Those were the days when you had to RENT a VCR in order to see a movie! So we would choose verrry carefully what we wanted to see. What's Up Doc was a favorite. I remember watching Fame on one of those fun sleepover-movie nights. And The Four Seasons - a great ensemble piece, with some first-rate acting.

Anyway: go read Jonathan's post. It's a great tribute to an under-rated really solid actor.

The Books: "James Dean: The Mutant King" (David Dalton)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton

I described my obsessive-compulsive response to seeing East of Eden here in this post about Carroll Baker. James Dean was the first. He was the first time I went off the edge into obsession - at least in a way that I now recognize. I had been obsessed with things before ... but with James Dean, I went to work learning about him. That was a first. I could not believe my eyes. I had to know more. I had to know everything! The Mutant King was in the library where I worked, and I devoured it. Much of it went over my head, but not a hell of a lot. It's quite a good book, and THE book I would recommend for anyone who wants to know more about James Dean. It does not take a cynical eye towards his talent, it is not trying to turn him into a gay icon, it does not have an axe to grind - it does not fall into any of those traps of biographies ... But it does attempt to explain the "myth" of Dean, and where that all came from (besides his dying at the age of 24, I mean). David Dalton is not afraid to speak about that myth in a serious way, and there are sections of the book that almost feel like literary criticism, or film theory, or an art-critic's in-depth analysis of one particular image. Dalton "goes there". There's a whole chapter about James Dean's face and how he, as a young unknown actor in New York, learned how to be photographed. It was a process with him - and you can see the stilted good-boy smile results of his early photos, as compared to the iconic images of him in the ripped sweater (taken before he was famous):

Dalton analyses the transformation, taking an objective eye - trying to see what exactly it was that had changed in James Dean, in terms of him allowing his soul, his interior, to be showed by the camera. This is not a surface "he was born on a cold dark day" type of book. This is analytical.

Dalton also delves into each one of James Dean's films, and puts together as full a picture as is possible of each experience. First of all, he interviews everyone. You get to know people who were in Rebel Without a Cause who barely had lines - but they were in crowd scenes and have good stories to tell. So you learn about the shooting of each film, on an almost day-to-day basis. But Dalton also analyzes the films themselves. He calls out certain moments, and speaks of their symbolism - but also speaks of how such a moment (Dean with the milk bottle in Rebel, for example) added, later on, to the Dean myth. Dalton looks for the small gesture that reveals psychology, and points it out. It was QUITE an education for me, as a 13 year old kid ... to look at movies in this way. I had seen East of Eden and it blew me away. From Dean's first entrance on the railroad tracks, I could not look away. I didn't know what I was seeing, I couldn't analyze it - I just knew that every moment just killed me. I wrote about it extensively in my diary. (Here, here, here ... that's just the tip of the iceberg!) I remember tears streaming down my face the first time I saw the scene when James Dean tries to give his father all the money - it is such an unexpected moment ... The father (played by Raymond Massey) rejects the gift. He doesn't just reject the gift, he rejects the son. (You know. The ol' Cain and Abel story). And Dean's response ... It could have been conventional, a regular old scene of betrayal that we have seen a thousand times ... but Dean, always a master, even at a young age, at gesture ... takes it to the next level. He picks up all the money and tries to give it to his father, his father rejects, Dean starts to fall apart, he's moaning and whimpering ... his father is even more embarrassed ... and Dean sort of gently falls into his father's chest, pushing the bills at him, as they fall to the floor ... It is a deep swoon of grief, truly mortifying to watch ... and apparently Massey was horrified by the scene. It works. His embarrassment is real, Dean's Greek-tragedy level of betrayal is real ... I just couldn't believe it when I first saw it.

David Dalton picks apart each film methodically. He backs up his theories with quotes from the actual players. For example: the red jacket in Rebel, and what it meant ... and how deliberate that was on Nicholas Ray's part. Here's how Dalton writes, it's a good example of the feel of the book:

Color plays an important thematic role in Rebel, as it does in all of Ray's films: the purple and gold in Party Girl, the red and green in Johnny Guitar and the red and blue in Rebel - the blazing red of rage, passion and fire, and the cool blue of space and isolation. The tones are raw and the combination as abrasive as adolescence itself.

Ray's use of color has been described as apocalyptic, "une palette en feu" as a French critic called it. The colors in Rebel change like banners, symbolizing the evolution of the characters.

"I started Jimmy in this neutral brown and he graduated to the blue jeans and red jacket," said Ray. "And Natalie graduated from the gauche red in the beginning to a soft, pink sweater. When you first see Jimmy in his red jacket against his black Merc, it's not just a pose. It's a warning. It's a sign."

Often, biographers focus on the details of the life. That is all well and good. But they neglect to look at the work, and how it adds up, and how it explains why we need yet another biography of, say, Cary Grant. It's interesting, Cary Grant's business acumen, his seriousness about money, his ability to negotiate for himself ... but without understanding what it was that made him such a giant movie star ... or without attempting to understand, the book can feel tepid. (There are a couple of Cary Grant biographies that short-shrift the acting. I know it's difficult to talk about acting. It's difficult to describe why something is good, or why a performance lasts. But it seems to me an essential job of anyone taking on a subject such as Grant, or Bogart, or Dean.) David Dalton works on multiple levels. He digs into the details of Dean's short life, he analyzes what it was that was striking in him as an actor, he looks at what it was in the performances that added to the myth that came up later on ... and then, he just flat out analyzes the films themselves. The Rebel Without a Cause chapter is as good as any "director's commentary" track on a DVD. It is its own "special feature". Any fan of the film (or anyone who's interested in film analysis) should check it out. It's one of those things where you think, "Yeah, yeah, I did notice that in the film ... but I wasn't aware how much THOUGHT went into it ..."

Dalton doesn't just keep his focus on the details of Dean's life. He analyzes, and you only realize how rare that is when you read a lot of other actor biographies, which tend to focus on the off-screen shenanigans. I've never been interested in that stuff ... only in how all of that impacts the work. The Mutant King stands alone, in my opinion. It could be taught in any film appreciation class. It makes you see things. It was a revelation to me as a teenager. It changed how I looked at films. It helped make me serious about them.

My thoughts about James Dean have changed over the years. The impact he had on me did not last past adolescence, although I still love those movies. Elia Kazan, who directed Dean in East of Eden, said that he always felt that Dean was a "sick kid". There was something wrong with him. Self-destructive, yes, but also manic, depressive, wild highs, crushing lows ... His friends sensed this in him too. He was not developed as a person. He was competitive as an actor, much of what he did was attention-getting (and that's not a bad quality in an actor, it's actually a job requirement!) - and because of a mixture of lucky breaks, chemistry with a camera (which cannot be taught), and innate ability - Dean surged ahead of the pack. He wasn't well-liked. Lots of people found him annoying, childish, and nearly impossible to have a conversation with. Who knows who he would have developed into, had he lived. I would have been VERY interested to see. I think he had something innate, a true gift ... but was he in control of it? In the way that Marlon Brando (his arch rival) was in control of his? I'm not sure. We'll never know, I guess.

One of Dean's big breaks was in the Broadway play See the Jaguar in 1952, with Arthur Kennedy:

Dean played a boy who had been locked in an icehouse for the majority of his life, and finally emerged ... a neophyte Mowgli-type, uncivilized, feral, unbearably sensitive ... He apparently was magnificent, and I would have loved to have seen it.

Instead of choosing an excerpt about one of Dean's three movies, I decided to choose an excerpt having to do with See the Jaguar.

EXCERPT FROM James Dean: The Mutant King, by David Dalton

See the Jaguar begins as a young boy about sixteen, who has been kept locked in an ice house all his life by his mother, wanders out for the first time and stumbles into town. His only connection with the outside world is a note his mother gave him before she died, addressed to the town's good-hearted teacher: "Dear Davie Ricks: This is my son Walter that I hid from all the meanness of the world ... Maybe I was wrong to hidden him this way - maybe I was right. But I loved him dear and didn't want for hurt to come his way."

Dave takes a look at this boy and says, "I've always wondered, if I could see it new what would it look like?" And Wally, says, stretching out one hand to the bigness, "You can't touch nothin'."

Director Michael Gordon said, "He can't understand why everything is not within his grasp. To be someone who's discovering that for the first time was what Jimmy could do. He was able to use that magical quality, that as if I were, and make it happen to himself."

Jimmy had no trouble learning the part of Wally Wilkins. But since he was tone deaf, he found it practically impossible to sing the little song which Alec Wilder had composed for the show. "Rehearsals helped him with his acting, but nothing could help him with the singing," Bill Bast said. Bill and Dizzy spent long torturous hours going over it with Jimmy and would often hear him in the middle of the night moaning it over and over again, trying to get it right:

I won't cry in the daytime.
I won't think of Ma.
I'll think of her at night time
And cry then.

Other than this, Jimmy seemed delighted with his role. He fit the part perfectly, and the producer and director were behind him. But during out-of-town tryouts a story circulated that Jimmy pulled a knife on someone during a rehearsal.

"In Hartford, the ruckus began during the rehearsal of the third act," said Michael Gordon. "The tension during that scene was pretty high and Jimmy took out after a prop man. I was sitting down in the audience. I jumped up on stage because there was a commotion, but by the time I got there it was all over. I think Jimmy actually pulled a switchblade on the guy, but I never did find out."

Arthur Kennedy, who played the benevolent Dave Ricks, later told writer Ed Corley that Jimmy had pulled a knife, the same switchblade Jimmy had bought with the money Nash had given him for glasses. "Kennedy supposedly took the knife out of Jimmy's hand," said Corley, "and broke the blade, with stern instructions 'not to pull any of that crap in my show!' Jimmy, who was impulsive rather than violent, may have been relieved the matter was taken out of his hands and his 'number' had a quick resolution."

When See the Jaguar opened in New York, Jimmy felt as if it were the first Broadway opening night in history.

"His feet never touched the floor," said Dizzy Sheridan, who went with Jimmy to Sardi's for the opening-night party. "He just flew from table to table, talking, laughing. I watched people's eyes pouring adulation all over him; they loved him.

"But it was a very crushing night for me. We left together, we wanted to be together, but he was staying at the Royalton that night and after we got upstairs they called and told him he couldn't have a woman in his room. So we ordered something to drink and then he walked me downstairs and put me in a cab. I had the feeling that things were starting to move for Jimmy and I would never be able to catch up. I saw him two or three times after that and then I left for Trinidad."

Reviewers found the play obscure and silly, "a contrivance of jejune symbolism." The critic for the Daily Mirror said, "The advance notices spoke of this play as an allegorical western without a horse. Come to think of it, maybe that's what was missing." The reviewers pretty much agreed that the plot was torn between forthright story and lofty parable that it was completely unsuccessful in both.

But James Dean was recognized for his wraithlike portrayal of Wally Wilkins: "overwhelming as the boy from the ice house" ... "played the part with sweetness and naivete that made his tortures singularly poignant" ... "makes childish young fugitive believable" ... "adds an extraordinary performance in an almost impossible role ..."

It's revealing to look at the photographs of him as Wally Wilkins. Although the character so closely matched the conditions of his own life, he has created an inner character who has his own face. It's not just the way his hair is combed down, but his expression, the aperture of his eyes, his loose jaw and open mouth. Jimmy has regressed here some five years, just as he later aged himself over twenty years for the part of Jett Rink in Giant.

Jimmy's growing restlessness, his taking things to the edge and his inherent sense of fatalism are expressed in an interview he did with Jack Shafer for a New York radio station the Sunday night before See the Jaguar opened.

Jimmy showed up at the interview with his glossy Golden Mentor paperback on the Aztecs and startled Shafer by talking about Aztec sacrificial dramas, a people who sang under torture, a culture where suicides were sacred beings and had their own heaven and patroness, Ixtab, goddess of the rope:

"Well," he [Jimmy] somewhat reluctantly explained. "I've always been fascinated by the Aztec Indians. They were a very fatalistic people, and I sometimes share that feeling. They had such a weird sense of doom that when the warlike Spaniards arrived in Mexico, a lot of the Aztecs just gave up, fatalistically, to an event they believed couldn't be avoided.

"Like the Arab philosophy of Kismet?" I [Shafer] asked, "what is written, is written?"

"And for them, the arrival of the Spaniards was written!" Dean went on, his enthusiasm bubbling to the surface. "They had a legend that their god Quetzalcoatl had predicted they would be conquered by strange visitors from another land."

"Well, no wonder they were fatalistic about it then," I [Shafer] said. "But what's this about your being fatalistic, too?"

"In a certain sense I am," Dean admitted. "I don't exactly know how to explain it, but I have a hunch there are some things in life we just can't avoid. They'll happen to us, probably because we're built that way - we simply attract our own fate ... make our own destiny."

"I think I'm like the Aztecs in that respect, too. With their sense of doom, they tried to get the most out of life while life was good; and I go along with them on that philosophy. I don't mean the 'eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die' idea, but something a lot deeper and more valuable. I want to live as intensely as I can. Be as useful and helpful to others as possible, for one thing. But live for myself as well. I want to feel things and experiences right down to their roots ... enjoy the good in life while it is good."

In the Journal American, the reviewer ended his story with the advice that "if you want to 'See the Jaguar' - you had better hurry." The play closed after five performances.

The delectable Jean Arthur

A montage. I love that site so much. What awesome photos she finds.

I'll always love Jean Arthur for Talk of the Town and Only Angels Have Wings - and I love her even more knowing that she had terrible stage fright and a lot of insecurities. Wonderful comedienne, I think.

And she and Cary Grant SIZZLE in that late-night bar scene in Only Angels!!

Hot!

The Books: "Cooper's Women" (Jane Ellen Wayne)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Cooper's women, by Jane Ellen Wayne

Okay, so this is not an "important" biography. It's not a biography at all, really. It is a list of Gary Cooper's many conquests, written in a chatty movie-magazine style, and I'm not gonna lie: I ATE IT UP. Jane Ellen Wayne has made a career out of writing books such as this one, and they all have titles like: Gable's Women, Crawford's Men, etc. etc. What cracks me up about Cooper's Women is that Wayne blithely reports word for word conversations, as though this is a novel, and even though the conversation happened in 1925, and it probably didn't happen exactly the way she reports it, at least not word for word, she doesn't care. She is going for a chatty as-though-you-are-there feeling. This is the kind of book that the stars themselves probably hate. BUT, at the same time: Wayne is the ultimate fan. She LOVES these people. Yes, she wants the dirt on them, but it is only because she loves them so much. It is vaguely psychotic, as most fangirl ravings are (I should know), but it is essentially kind. Also, frankly, I'm desperate for information about Gary Cooper and as far as I'm concerned, he has not been given his due - in terms of having a giant serious biography written about him. There are a couple of folks out there who haven't had that "treatment" yet, and I live in hope. Joan Crawford, anyone? I know there's a new one out about her, which I haven't read, but from what I've heard it is also not "serious". Come on. Let's slay that Mommie Dearest ghost. She's a great American actress. Her work deserves to be looked at seriously.

Same with Gary Cooper who was the biggest star of his day, and, actually, any day. He was the top box office star for YEARS. Cary Grant, no small shakes himself in the stardom department, had a funny theory about Hollywood and stardom being like a crowded streetcar. Peter Bogdonavich asked Cary Grant to elaborate. Grant said:

Becoming a movie star is something like getting on a streetcar. Actors and actresses are packed in like sardines.

When I arrived in Hollywood, Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Warner Baxter, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and others were crammed onto the car. A few stood, holding tightly to leather straps to avoid being pushed aside. Others were firmly seated in the center of the car. They were the big stars. At the front, new actors and actresses pushed and shoved to get aboard. Some made it and slowly moved toward the center.

When a new "star" came aboard, an old one had to be edged out the rear exit. The crowd was so big you were pushed right off. There was room for only so many and no more.

One well-known star, Adolphe Menjou, was constantly being pushed off the rear. He would pick himself up, brush himself off, and run to the front to fight his way aboard again. In a short time he was back in the center only to be pushed off once more. This went on for years. He never did get to sit down.

It took me quite a while to reach the center. When I did make it, I remained standing. I held on to that leather strap for dear life. Then Warner Baxter fell out the back, and I got to sit down.

When Gregory Peck got on, it was Ronald Colman who fell off.

The only man who refused to budge was Gary Cooper. Gary was firmly seated in the center of the car. He just leaned back, stuck those long legs of his out in the aisle, and tripped everyone who came along.

When Joan Fontaine got on, she stood right in front of me and held on to one of those leather straps. I naturally got to my feet, giving her my seat. Joan sat down and got an Academy Award!

hahahaha Isn't it funny and interesting the perception of Gary Cooper, as the most settled-in star at all? He really was.

His career spans decades. He got his start in silent films, playing extras in cowboy movies. There was no indication that he had any gift for acting. But he knew how to ride a horse. Then came a "big break" - in a scene that ended up getting cut - in The Winning of Barbara Worth, starring Ronald Colman. Now: I'm interested in the story because it seems to me to be the birth of the actor here. Who knows what was going on in Gary Cooper. Who knows what his dreams were (hello. That's why we need a big biography, thanks.) He had already lived quite an interesting life at this point, and he was still a young man. He had been taken under the wing by some countess, basically, who showed him the fine life, and the taste of good things, she taught him how to dress, and perhaps even how to fuck. Cooper always had women who wanted to help him. And if you see photos of him, even hanging out at his house, he always looks immaculate. Not in a dandyish way, just elegant, masculine, beautiful. He had been taught. But what else did he want out of life? Did he dream of being a star? It's not clear. He had wandered quite a bit before landing in Hollywood. So this story - of everyone on the set of Barbara Worth suddenly realizing that that EXTRA was actually an actor - and a better actor than any of them put together - gives me goosebumps. Oh, and that anecdote came out of Scott Berg's biography of Samuel Goldwyn, so I think it's a leeeeetle bit more reliable than Miss Wayne's book. I'm just sayin'.

Jane Ellen Wayne's book deals indirectly with Cooper's career. She's more interested in his girlfriends. Cooper slept with everyone. He was married, and never got divorced - and she ("Rocky") sounds like an amazing woman in her own right ... She gave Cooper the stability he yearned for, a beautiful home, a safe haven ... but he was not faithful. Somehow, the marriage worked. No judgment. When you read Patricial Neal's autobiography - you ache for Neal, who considered Gary Cooper to be the great lost love of her life. I mean, you ache for Neal in so many ways ... God. It's like God sent down wrath upon her life or something ... Like: ENOUGH. This woman has had ENOUGH. But you can tell how haunted she is by Gary, and the entire book ends with her and Gary Cooper's wife going to lunch ... finally, after so many years, after his death. Kind of extraordinary. Some of the women Cooper messed around with were basically party girls like Clara Bow (they were a notorious couple), and others were more serious - but the serious ones were the ones that got burnt.

This is so not like me to discuss an actor's personal life like this - forgive me. It's because I'm talking about a book called COOPER'S WOMEN, for God's sake. I read it in desperation because Cooper is one of my favorites, and there's not all that much out there.

So here I am babbling about his Little Black Book of fuck buddies. (shaking my head in shame). It is indicative that none of these women - not even Patricia Neal - has anything bad to say about him. Clara Bow, in her nursing home, near the end of her life, said something like, "He was the nicest man I ever met." I mean, people have long long memories ... and Gary Cooper had one of the best reputations in Hollywood, just as a working man - and also as a Lothario. Women didn't "turn" on him. They remained loyal, remembering him as kind and sweet. Also, let's face it. Dude was hot.

One of Gary Cooper's big breaks was in William Wellman's Wings, in 1927, starring Clara Bow. Gary Cooper is not the lead, but he makes an impression.

I chose an excerpt today from Cooper's Freakin' Women that deals with Wings. I very much like Cooper's generosity, in retrospect, towards his two male co-stars. Now that's class.

EXCERPT FROM Cooper's women, by Jane Ellen Wayne

But Cooper's riding and roping were once again interrupted because Clara Bow could not live without him for very long. He was the only man who could satisfy her in bed. Their reconciliation presented only one problem for Clara, and that was Gary's desire to marry her. She tried to discourage him by admitting she couldn't have children, " 'cause I don't have all my parts down there." Clara pouted. It wouldn't be fair to him, after all. He was the kind of fellow who deserved a family. Cooper didn't change his mind about Clara, but they were no longer inseparable.

At this time, 1927, Paramount was going all out with a $2-million budget for Wings, a World War I aviation spectacular with Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, both beginners with only three movie credits. The cast was all-male until Lasky decided it was crucial that he feature one woman. For box-office insurance he chose Clara Bow. Her contract allowed her the right to refuse any script she didn't like, and Wings was one of them.

"It's a small part," she told Lasky. "Who needs it?"

"Wings is a man's picture, granted, but you'll be outstanding as the only woman, and we'll give you top billing."

Clara snapped her gum and smiled coyly. "You trying to boost Rogers?"

"Frankly, yes."

"Arlen, too?"

"Maybe. We hope so, of course."

"Gary's had more exposure."

Lasky felt a headache coming on. "What are you trying to say, Clara?"

"I might consider doing the picture if Gary's in it."

"He's not finished with The Last Outlaw and I have another Western lined up for him."

"Gary and me or nothin'!"

"Swell ... "

Cooper wasn't unhappy to be out of the saddle. He wanted to travel to San Antonio and see the Alamo, anyway. Besides, he'd have the chance to work with Arlen. Another incentive was having Clara all to himself far away from her Chinese Den. The more he thought about it, the more he looked forward to the idea. As for Miss Bow, she couldn't get enough of Gary and hoped to change his mind about marriage. Her addiction to him was enough without bringing in the white picket fence, two-car garage, and baby carriage.

Twenty-nine-year-old rookie director William Wellman was assigned to the airplane epic. A former pilot, actor, and Foreign Legionairre, Wellman later became famous for his direction of A Star Is Born, Call of the Wild, The Story of G.I. Joe, and Battleground, to name a few. Wings was Wellman's first major accomplishment. Years later he recalled: "Clara was in her glory. She was the center of attention and the only woman on location. She and Cooper took off when they weren't working, but when Clara was filming she divided her time between Arlen and Rogers and Cooper, who was jealous as hell. There were others 'in her tent', too. Her timing was unique. Clara was concerned, however, when she found out her boyfriend, Victor Fleming, was directing a Western nearby. She managed to keep him happy, too, but didn't like seeing Coop and Vic becoming good friends on the set. Fleming was a man's man and I'm sure they were discussing hunting and fishing. Clara seemed more at ease when Vic returned to Hollywood."

In Wings Cooper had only one major scene. "I played the veteran flyer," he explained. "Dick and Buddy were cadets. The camera picked me up munching on a chocolate bar in their tent. I kinda salute, throw the half-eaten candy aside, and take off for some test flying. I'm killed, but all you see is the shadow of my plane. Then the camera focuses on the unfinished chocolate. I always give credit to Arlen and Rogers for their swell reaction to my death. They made me a hero."

Wellman shot the scene and was satisfied. Cooper was stunned when Wellman yelled, "Cut and print!" the first time around. Richard Arlen recalled, "Coop's mouth actually dropped open. I think he ran through it with such ease expecting to do it again." Wellman was surprised when Cooper came to his tent later that day to plead for a retake. "I didn't know the camera was rollin' and want to do it again," he asked.

"It was perfect," Wellman said. "What's the problem?"

"Well, ya see ... I mean ... well, I was pickin' my nose ..."

"You rubbed your nose two or three times with your thumb."

"No, sir. I was ... uh ... pickin' my nose."

Wellman laughed. "You go right on picking your nose and you'll make yourself a fortune."

Years later, Wellman tried to describe the effect Cooper had on the scene. "I think one is born with it," he said. "Gable with his ears had it. Bogart lisped, but he had it. Tracy wasn't handsome, but he had it. They all played themselves, mind you. If Cooper was clumsy or mumbled or picked his nose, it didn't matter. Like the others he had what I call motion-picture personality. I wish someone could describe this chemistry. These guys became top stars and made millions."

Wings won an Oscar for best picture the first year of the Academy Awards, 1927. Warner Brothers received a special one for The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture, which revolutionized the industry.

Charles "Buddy" Rogers became popular for a short time, but was not the leading man Paramount expected. Richard Arlen was established and Gary Cooper received some fan mail. Clara Bow as an ambulance driver was adorable in uniform, but none of the major players were acclaimed. The Literary Digest said it was a fine picture largely by virtue of its success in reproducing scenes of actual combat in airplanes.

The Books: "Montgomery Clift: A Biography" (Patricia Bosworth)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Montgomery Clift: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth

I consider this book to be a high watermark in entertainment biography. I find myself comparing all other biographies to this one. In a similar way that Ron Chernow did with Alexander Hamilton, and David McCullough did with John Adams ... Patricia Bosworth does with Montgomery Clift. The book came out in 1978 and there hasn't been a big thorough biography of Clift since, because ... why bother? Bosworth dominates. This is not a smear book. It is not revisionist. It is not only focused on one thing (Clift's homosexuality - you know how so many books have one point to drive home and every story has to somehow dovetail into that point?? Bosworth avoids that) ... It is the story of a life. Told elegantly, with great compassion, but without avoidance. Clift's life was a tormented one. At the end, he was almost a recluse, drinking himself into oblivion, and cruising the docks of New York City for "trade". Rough trade. Alongside of this was Clift's brilliant early career, when his virtuosity stunned pretty much everyone who knew him. Bosworth is a member of the Actors Studio, a place Clift worked. At the time this book was written, many of Clift's contemporaries were still alive, and Bosworth had great access to them. Many of them are her friends, so they obviously trusted her to do the right thing by Clift, and therefore felt free enough with her to not gloss things over. Clift was deeply loved. He had lifelong friends, people who stood by and watched helplessly as he drank himself to a premature death. His acting speaks for itself. One need only to see what he was able to do in The Misfits, when he was already a wreck of a man, to know that this man's talent was transcendent.

The book is not an easy read. I have to admit that as we approached his final years, I began to be glad that it (meaning the book, meaning his life) was near the end. Enough pain for Montgomery Clift. Let him rest now. Let him just rest. Enough pain. It was like animal suffering, a deep chord of agony that ran through him ... and finally became unbearable.

He didn't make a lot of movies. Maybe 17 movies? But his debut was in Red River with John Wayne, and he played the lead of that film - so Clift hit the ground running, in his career. No one who knew him was surprised. He had done plays in New York where people still remembered, years and years later, little moments he had, great gestures ... and were able to recall, to Bosworth, with detail, performances long forgotten, from plays he had done in the 1940s. Amazing.

The details of Montgomery Clift's accident in 1956 are well-known. He left a party at Elizabeth Taylor's house, and, on the curvy drive, crashed his car into a tree. His entire face was basically ripped off, he had lost many teeth, all the bones crushed in his face - he nearly died. The recovery process was agony, and Clift probably never went a day in his life since that accident without some level of pain. His face had to be reconstructed. The before and after look of Montgomery Clift is so jarring as to take your breath away.

He had permanent paralysis in some areas, the side of his mouth, his eye was different ... and, more than all of that, he had lost the ease of his face, the flexibility, not to mention the extraordinary beauty. Even as a young boy, people would stop Montgomery Clift's mother on the street to exclaim over his beauty. This was no small part of his acting career, let's remember. To see him as a young man in Red River or Place in the Sun is to see something exquisite - not just his looks, but his looks add to the whole package. He's a wonderful actor. Brando always considered Montgomery Clift to be his only real rival.

Clift never really "bounced back" from what happened to his face. He couldn't recover. Now there had already been "issues" - there had been issues from the day he was born, just with the type of family he was born into, and the kind of expectations placed on him by his mother. Who knows what was going on inside Montgomery Clift half the time (and one of the best parts about Bosworth's book is that she doesn't speculate) - but it is known that Clift's mother raised her children (3 of them, if I'm recalling correctly) as though they were to the manor born. They were raised preciously, like small tsaritsas and tsarinas ... even though that was not their lifestyle at all. But their mother, boy, that was one strong-willed woman. And from an early age, the earliest, Clift got the message that whoever he really was would not be okay with this woman.

And so he split himself off. It's quite tragic. There was the Mamma's Boy, and then there was the guy cruising for rough trade. His homosexuality was not something he accepted. He was not like, say, Tennessee Williams, who never really hid who he was (and paid a price for it, often, in bashing incidents everywhere he went). Montgomery Clift (according to Williams) didn't really like Tennessee Williams, because Williams was "out" and Clift wasn't, and it made Clift uncomfortable. The two sides of Clift would NEVER be reconciled. He could not integrate. It was far too threatening.

I happen to think that it is that very split within him that makes him so riveting as an actor. It is not our health that always makes us good actors or writers or painters. It is the fucked up-ness that needs to be treasured, or at least not feared and rejected. (More shades of Ellen Burstyn's "shadow side" workshop). In Place In the Sun he plays George, a social climber (more ruthless than most), who is able to insinuate himself into the upper echelons on the strength of his beauty - rich people always want beautiful people around - and also through lying, deception, and cool calculated manipulation. It's weird, because his beauty was of a soft pin-up boy variety. He wasn't like, say, Marlon Brando - who was sexy ... Clift was beautiful to the degree that his face became a mask.

And Clift was a smart enough actor to either use the mask if it was right for the character, or completely ignore it - as though his beauty were just a freak of nature, don't pay any attention to it. Not all beautiful actors can do that. Many of them trade on their beauty - they don't know how to live any other way. They are congratulated for what they look like, and so they continue to perpetuate the situation. And hell, I don't feel bad for them, people can make a lot of money that way! But Clift was a psychologist, he could adjust his persona. In Red River it's not at all about how gorgeous he is. He's rough, cocky, arrogant, and most of the film is action scenes, or fight scenes, his beauty is not dwelled upon. It's just an accident that the guy looks like that, so we get over it and forget about it. But Place in the Sun makes a FETISH of his beauty - because HE does, as a character - and so do all of the other characters, who are duped by this horrible sociopath. He gets a pass - he gets in the door - because of his face, and Clift understood that power, and was able to use it in that role.

Bosworth, unlike Peter Manso, does not have a contempt for the actor's craft. She just gets the anecdotes, and let them speak for themselves. She does not add snarky comments. People were relating stories about, oh, the day Clift played his death scene in From Here to Eternity and how even crew members cried watching it. He was so so good.

The man had demons. He was dogged by tragedy and internal agony. When he was allowed to let it out (like in Judgment at Nuremberg), the results are shattering. But Clift's behavior in his final years was such that it's almost like you can feel him thinking, "You know what? I've had enough of life. I'm outta here."

A Hollywood press agent who knew Clift in the late 40s had this to say:

To survive being a star in Hollywood like Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper, you have to be sensitive and ruthless, humble and arrogant. Monty was sensitive. Period.

Bosworth's book looms on the landscape of entertainment biographies. It's the best of its kind.

Place in the Sun is a movie that Mike Nichols says he always watches, ritualistically, before going to work on a new picture. He watches it because he considers it to be that rare thing: a perfect movie. Perfect in construction, themes, execution, acting, set design, mood ... It reminds Nichols, every time he sees it, just how specific he needs to be.

Here's an excerpt about the filming of that movie. Bosworth refers to Clift throughout as "Monty", and somehow it doesn't bother me at all here, in the way it did in Manso's book about Brando, with Manso referring to Brando as "Marlon".

But Bosworth is a far superior writer. She weaves in quotes from people who knew Clift, who were there, with her own narrative - and it feels seamless. It's a great book. Any book that ever comes out about Clift from now on must reference this one.

EXCERPT FROM Montgomery Clift: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth

Monty worked with such highly charged concentration and intensity as George that he would often finish a take drenched with sweat. "That's the worst part about acting," he told Elizabeth Taylor. "Your body doesn't know you're acting. It sweats and makes adrenalin just as though your emotions were real."

Throughout much of the filming he was tense and preoccupied. Believing Dreiser's tragic killer was essentially sympathetic, he played him with his head cocked to one side and drawn back like a turtle. "He's the kind of a guy who has some charm, but basically he conceals and dissembles about everything," he said. "He's tacky and not that bright," Monty told Robert Ryan, "but he's overwhelmingly ambitious." Motivated by the passion to make money and make it big in society, George, Monty felt, was also a quintessential mama's boy. "He has no style, no sophistication." In the film, Monty demonstrates that when he makes his entrance into the big party where he meets Angela (Elizabeth Taylor), his ideal woman - the rich, spoiled, pampered woman he's dreamed about. Somebody asks him, "Are you having a good time?" and he answers with a perfect blend of shyness of hostility - "How should I know? I just got here."

With Mira Rostova at his side, Monty worked out every beat in every scene in restrained and poignant detail.

In almost all his movies, "Monty, like Garbo and Brando, had the extraordinary faculty for giving you a sense of danger," recalled Richard Burton. "You were never quite sure whether he would blow his lines or explode."

Before completing the interior scenes at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, A Place in the Sun shot for two weeks on location at Cascade Lake, Nevada, as well as Lake Tahoe. It was near the end of October; the Sierras were so cold that snow had to be hosed off the trees and melted from the ground before Monty and Elizabeth Taylor could shoot their scenes lakeside.

Most of Monty's free time was spent conferring with Mira Rostova or arguing over interpretation with George Stevens. Stepherd Strudwick, who played Taylor's father in the film, recalled, "Monty came over to me after a disagreement with Stevens, shaking his head wearily and saying, 'I'm right, I know I'm right, but it doesn't make any difference to them. I'm right and I'll keep saying I'm right."

He was referring to Shelley Winters' approach to her role. "She played it all wrong," he told Judy Balaban later. "She played her tragedy from the minute you see her on screen. She is downbeat, blubbery, irritating." (Earlier, Monty had fought to get Betsy Blair the part, believing her wistful, sweet quality was better than Winters's pathos.)

He pleaded with Stevens to at least redirect Winters in the remaining scenes so that she would appear more sympathetic. If she was made more appealing it might also make the romance between himself and Taylor more bittersweet. Now, he said, the picture was very much off kilter.

Stevens told Monty he was being too sentimental. Alice Tripp, Winters' character, was supposed to be drab and pitiful, and Shelley Winters was being just that, and giving a marvelous performance (some say the best in her career).

Later, Stevens told the American Film Institute, "The thing that interested me most about Place was the relationship of opposing images ... Shelley Winters busting at the seams with sloppy melted ice cream ... as against Elizabeth Taylor in a white gown with blue ribbons floating down from the sky ... Automatically there's an imbalance of image which creates drama."

Because he wanted such imbalance visually as well as emotionally, Stevens was hardest of all on Elizabeth Taylor, who'd never really acted before. He demanded constant retakes of her scenes with Monty, and when he couldn't get the results he wanted he would argue or bait her until Taylor, unused to criticism, flared up angrily.

She had just completed The Big Hangover with Van Johnson and was being costumed for Father of the Bride on weekends, so she felt under particular strain. Also, her mother, Sara Taylor, was chaperoning her so relentlessly she could rarely be alone with Monty for whom she felt a growing attraction. Occasionally she would sneak into his dressing room, presumably to run lines with him while Mira Rostova held the script. But often she would lounge in a chair chewing gum loudly and complaining about her mother whom she called "a large pain in the ass".

Monty sympathized but he invariably changed the subject to A Place in the Sun. What did she think of George Stevens as a director? Why had she decided to play Angela Vickers and, more important, how did she see her as a character? Was she sweet, quiet, voluptuous, innocent?

"It was my first real chance to probe myself," Elizabeth Taylor wrote later, "and Monty helped me ... It was tricky because the girl is so rich and so spoiled it would have been easy to play her as absolutely vacuous, but I think she is a girl who cares a great deal."

Together they went over their roles, with Monty guiding her into the nuances, the objectives of the part. Angela wants George Eastman more than anything, he would say, but she is perfectly confident she will possess him - she is always confident. Just let the character unfold within you - keep thinking of this girl, and then she will suddenly grow and bloom in front of the camera.

Sometimes Monty would demonstrate by acting the part of Angela Vickers himself. He always had authority when he performed, and when he mimed a woman, he could almost conjure up a smoldering female essence. (Michael Billings, in his book The Modern Actor, says, "There is an androgynous bisexuality that underpins great acting." During most of his career Monty made the most positive and creative use possible of his femininity.)

His commitment to his work "affected Elizabeth almost physically - like electric shocks," wrote her biographer Richard Shepherd. "[Monty] gave of himself in a scene to such a degree that soon she began to respond in kind and the chemistry they produced eventually illuminated the screen like heat lightning."

Their memorable first love scene (shot entirely in close-up with a six-inch lens) is a record of how they responded to each other on film. Taylor is achingly tender and maternal; Monty presents a tantalizing paradox of a cool facade hiding great inner passions.

Stevens rewrote the dialogue for that particular scene at two in the morning. "I wanted the words to be rushed - staccato," he said. "Monty had to let loose - he was so enormously moved by her. Elizabeth must be compelled to tell him how wonderful and exciting and interesting he is all in the space of a few seconds ... Anyway, it had to be like nothing they had ever said to anyone before."

When Stevens handed her the new dialogue, Elizabeth looked at it and said, "Forgive me but what the hell is this?" Stevens told both of them to memorize it, then they'd rehearse and shoot, but when filming he wanted them to hurl the words at each other as fast and compulsively as possible.

"Elizabeth dissolved when she had to say 'tell Mama,' " Stevens recalled. "She thought it was outrageous she had to say that - she was jumping into a sophistication beyond her time." But Stevens insisted on that phrase. He wanted to create a mood that was at once primitive and basic, "a kind of preordained meeting."

When he edited the scene he did not use a movieola. Instead he set up two projectors and viewed the reels of Monty's close-ups and Taylor's close-ups simultaneously on a projector screen which covered an entire wall, then spliced the film in such a way that the camera seemed to roll from Monty's face to Taylor's face "thus creating a tempo - with the thing in which as fast as it could be said it was said. Monty had that kind of emotion - he got all steamed up," Stevens said. Taylor dissolved when she looked at him and spoke. "I wanted to get the feeling of them both being totally lost in each other."

What one finally sees on film is the almost jittery sensuality of the young lovers as they circle each other verbally, then swoon into a passionate embrace.

The Books: "Lessons In Becoming Myself" (Ellen Burstyn)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Lessons in Becoming Myself, by Ellen Burstyn

In less than a decade, Ellen Burstyn was nominated 5 times for an Oscar (for The Last Picture Show, The Exorcist (speaking of The Exorcist ...), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Same Time Next Year and Resurrection) and won one Oscar (for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore). That's a helluva good run. One of the best in the business. Then, of course, in 2001, she was nominated for an Oscar again for Requiem For a Dream. Her work in the 70s and 80s helped define the new cinema, the independent spirit, the breaking down of the boundaries of the old studio system. She WAS 1970s film, in many ways.

She's nominated almost any time she acts - including the controversial nomination for her 14 seconds of screen time in HBO's Mrs. Harris in 2006. Remember that? People were upset - like: how on earth could only 14 seconds be worthy of a nomination?? It was the talk of the town for a good 2 weeks. Burstyn made no statements about it for a while. After all, it wasn't her fight. If they wanted to nominate her, how is that HER fault? Finally, she did make a statement, and it's glorious:

I thought it was fabulous. My next ambition is to get nominated for seven seconds, and ultimately I want to be nominated for a picture in which I don't even appear.

hahahahahahaha

She's also co-President of the Actors Studio, an organization which she has always been highly involved in - Lee Strasberg adored her, and pretty much clocked what he saw to be her issues as an actress immediately. But I'll talk about that in a minute.

I took a 4-day acting workshop with Ellen Burstyn about 10 years ago. There were about 30 people in the class - a huge class - but the way she set it up and organized it (it was impeccable) we all had a chance to work, and get feedback from her. Nobody was stiffed. We all got our shot. She had obviously thought long and hard about what she wanted to do in such an intensely condensed time period, and it WASN'T scene-work. It was an extremely unconventional acting class, like no other I have ever taken before or since. She was magnificent as a teacher. It was not "Oooh, here I am The Guru" ... she had things to impart to us, and then - when it came time for each one of us to get up and work - she honed in on each student specifically, with eyes like laser beams ... seeing right into who we were. It was not generalized (as a lot of acting classes can become, with the same comments given to different people - one-size-fits-all). She did not say to me what she said to the guy across the room. Because she saw in us different things. Basically, she's a person of deep and also relaxed focus (that's one of the things that really struck me about her - her level of relaxation - without EVER seeming "mellow" or indifferent) - and when one person was up in front of the group working, her entire consciousness was focused on that person. It was amazing - to be in that spotlight for 2 minutes, or however long it was I was up in front of the group. It was almost embarrassing. You would finish working, and there would be a long long silence, as she would look up at you, thinking, thinking, thinking ... It wasn't a dead silence, it was FILLED with anticipation and thought ... The whole room was riveted. Because this was an intensive and there were so many people in the class, she couldn't spend 25 minutes on every person, analyzing them - it had to be about 10 minutes per person ... That's hard to do. Hard to be specific enough in that small amount of time, and also difficult to make the comments something the students will take with them, things that will elevate the students' understanding not only of their own process, but of who they are, for God's sake. THAT'S a good class. And person after person, Burstyn was able to do that. It was extraordinary. We were all on the edge of our seats. We would watch another classmate work (and these weren't monologues or scenes - it was a different kind of thing she was having us explore) - and then we'd all sit there, quiet, aware of her, sitting in her chair, always wearing bright deep colors - reds and purples and deep greens - thinking, pondering, staring up at our classmate ... choosing her words very carefully. She said a couple of things to me, after I worked, that I have never forgotten.

She was an incredible teacher. And why she is incredible is because she has such good eyes for it. She also loves other actors and has very little envy. Her energy during our class was that of shining JOY at seeing actors do well, grow, be brave, face fears. It's a strange thing - to feel safe and yet courageous at the same time - but that's what she created as a teacher. The class was not, as I mentioned, an acting class, where people got up and did monologues. It was an exploration of each actor's "shadow side" - the part of us we do not want to admit, or we avoid, or we say to ourselves, "OTHER people are like that - NOT ME!" Burstyn said, "When you catch yourself saying things like that, pay close attention. You're coming close to your own shadow side." In order to be fully expressed as an actor, then the "shadow side" must not be avoided. Nothing can be avoided. You can't judge certain attributes as unworthy of you. You have to be willing to experience the full spectrum. I had never quite thought of it in that way before, but Burstyn's class represented a slight shift in how I thought, not just about acting, but also about my own ambivalence and sometimes hatred of a certain individual - who, during the course of the class, I realized represented my "shadow side". I mean, she was also a full individual in her own right - but she was symbolic to me. Exploring that side of me that was her was excruciating, at times. But such worthwhile work.

Ellen Burstyn has four rules of acting. 4 things that you MUST do:

1. Show up.
2. Pay attention.
3. Tell the truth.
4. Don't be attached to the outcome.

I fluctuate on which one is the most difficult - but often I think that it's flat out #1 that is the hardest. But "showing up" is what you MUST do - and that doesn't just mean getting to rehearsal on time, but showing up, with all your talent, openness, creativity, fearlessness, self, fears, whatever - at your disposal. There are those who WANT to "show up" but honestly can't. That's what separates the talented from the not-talented.

But certainly #4 is one of the most challenging things of all - not just in acting, but in life in general. I have not mastered #4 at all, and it is a lifelong journey, I suppose. I am terribly bad at it. Most of my broken hearts have come from not having a grasp on #4. And I can feel it in me: it will happen again.

But not being attached to the outcome - in acting - is especially essential. It is that which creates fearlessness, it is that which sets an actor free. Having an idea about how to play something is great. But do not ever be attached to the outcome. Life is more mysterious than that. You can't expect anything. The DOING must be enough. (My college acting teacher used to talk about "the reality of the doing" - which helped actors ground themselves. What are you actually DOING? It helped you get specific).

Anyway, those 4 days of workshop left me with a lifetime of lessons, which is why I'm talking about it so much.

Her autobiography, which came out last year, is a real actor's book. She obviously has had much success at the highest echelons of Hollywood. I mean, 5 nominations in less than 10 years. You know. She's one of the anointed. BUT alongside of that, has been her rigorous training - she STILL is in training, she still does workshops of plays, and teaches, and moderates at the Studio (another once-in-a-lifetime experience - watching her handle that room ... You just hold your breath, waiting to hear what she will say).

Her relationship with Lee Strasberg, famous acting teacher and creator of/head of the Actors Studio is well-known. Burstyn had been a model in her early 20s, with some success in television, commercials and variety hours and the like. She was beautiful. Burstyn is quite honest about how vain she was (and still can be) - which is one of the reasons why I think her performance in Requiem For a Dream was so shattering to watch. Talk about shadow sides.

The vanity of that character became so acute that it was indistinguishable from self-loathing (something that I think is quite common). And her vanity about her looks - and dropping some weight for her big television moment - is something that Burstyn, as a model, and a beautiful young woman, understood intimately. It may seem easy to play something so close to yourself, but it is not. That's why Burstyn has her students work on "shadow sides", because we all have blind spots - and it is usually in our blind spot about ourselves that we find the gold mine. You don't act from anywhere else but there. It is the most truthful part of us, because it is the part we are ashamed of, that we hide, deny. Bring it out into the light. Let's let that sucker breathe. Easier said than done. Anyway, Lee Strasberg, within one or two sessions of working with Burstyn, could sense her shallowness as a human being, and could sense her vanity. Burstyn said to us, during the workshop, "Let's not forget. I was a pretty silly girl. I got by on my looks, and that's the truth." Strasberg recognized that in her - that defense mechanism - and went after it. Many actors resent such intrusions. Who the hell does he think he is?? But careful: when you hear a voice like that, make sure it's a REAL voice, that is on the side of growth and health ... as opposed to the shadow side protecting itself, not wanting to be revealed. Burstyn took to Strasberg's teachings like blood to a vampire. He saved her from what could have been a rather conventional career. Burstyn was a pretty girl, a flirt, who was used to having things come to her. (That is not to say she was a happy person. Her childhood was a sad one, it's just that once she hit puberty, her looks blossomed - and things started to just come easily to her, because of her beauty). Strasberg threw a wrench in that particular journey and Burstyn is forever grateful - because he gave to her a sense of her own power, first of all - but ALSO: a sense that she was more than her face, AND that certain emotions which did not really fit with being a pretty girl (rage, grief, need, envy) - needed to be explored and released. Just because she was pretty didn't mean she wasn't deep. Believe it or not, this was a revelation to Burstyn at the time. She flourished under his teaching.

So that's the excerpt I wanted to choose today from her lovely autobiography. A real actor's kind of excerpt. Nothing to do with fame, or her famous co-stars, or her most popular roles, or shooting The Last Picture Show ... but beginning her work with Lee Strasberg, and discovering, basically, who she was.

Also, as an aside: she told the story about the actress playing Joan of Arc in our workshop, and it's one of my favorite anecdotes ever. Having sat through years of classes in sense memory (and not really "getting it", let's be honest) ... I read that anecdote and think: Yup. If you're GOING to use that technique, then you had BETTER use it in that particular way. Otherwise, it's just an exercise and who the hell cares about that.

This is not the time or the place to go into sense memory. Or who knows, maybe it is, but I'm going to the beach today and I don't have time to go into it.

Any actor who has taken beginning sense-memory classes will recognize those early exercises described by Burstyn. Creating the cup, the glass of juice ... using only your sensoral apparatus. Training your concentration.

More to say about Burstyn. All I can say is: I was nervous to read this book, because I have such high regard for her ... and I also wasn't wacky about the title, which seemed rather generic - BUT: it's a lovely and honest book, and it really is about her lifelong journey in becoming herself. It's not been a neat life, and her trajectory has been full of fits and starts ... and her honesty about herself is not only refreshing, but totally inspiring.

(I also have Ellen Burstyn to thank for bringing the word "entelechy" into my consciousness - a concept she brought up continuously in the workshop).

Here's the excerpt. Ellen and her husband Neil Burstyn signed up for a class with Lee Strasberg.

No pressure, Ted (haha), but I would love to hear your thoughts. I know you have them!!

EXCERPT FROM Lessons in Becoming Myself, by Ellen Burstyn

At that time, 1964, Lee was holding his classes in a studio behind Carnegie Hall. You signed up for two classes a week - one exercise and scene class with lee and one scene study class with his wife, Paula. Lee asked for a commitment of at least six weeks because he felt it took that long to understand what the classes were about so that one could make an informed decision on whether or not to continue. He was right. The first weeks I didn't understand the classes at all. Several actors would work at the same time. There was one guy who was obviously being a chicken picking at food (turned out it was a pigeon). Another girl was looking close up into a mirror, singing to herself in a sultry way and crying. Another older woman seemed to be taking an imaginary shower and rubbing soap between her legs. One guy was on his hands and knees doing something I couldn't understand, but it was obviously very moving to him because he was crying like a baby. The whole lot of them looked crazy to me. I wanted to laugh out loud. I looked around the room to see if anyone else was suppressing a giggle as I was. Everyone was dead serious. I couldn't imagine what any of this had to do with acting. Then Lee brought the exercise to an end and criticized each one as though what they were doing made any sense at all. I was baffled. I would have left the class right then, but I had made that promise to stay for six weeks. I attended the scene study class taught by Paula. She was a short, heavy, fair-skinned, red-headed woman in a black muumuu. The scenes didn't seem all that good to me and I didn't quite understand her comments afterward. She praised things I didn't see and seemed to criticize the very things that I thought looked pretty good. I just didn't get it. But I thought before I left I ought to give it a go, so I signed up to do an exercise for Lee and a scene for Paula. The fist exercise everyone was asked to do was to create whatever you had for breakfast, a cup of coffee, a glass of juice, whatever you normally drank every morning. I was a coffee drinker at the time, so I went to work at home creating my imaginary mug. When I felt I had it, I got to be one of the five crazy people up there. I sat in my chair and held out my left hand and imagined a cup sitting on it. With my right hand I traced the rim of the cup. I let my finger move down the handle until I could define its shape. Then slowly I wrapped my fingers around the handle and tried to lift the cup off my left hand into my right hand. But when I did, I lost the whole thing. The cup had no weight. Damn! I had to start all over, holding the cup with my left, bouncing it gently up and down. yes, there's the weight, I can feel it. Now I can feel the rim again. During all of this, the other four people were going through various intensities of sobbing, sighing, laughing, and grunting. I never took my eyes off the cup. After about twenty minutes, in my peripheral vision I saw Lee sitting in the front row, lifting up the five-by-seven white cards with an actor's name on each and going through them until he came to the name he was looking for. Then he said, "Ellen, keep on doing what you are doing, but just answer my questions."

There was a pause and I felt the focus of the room shift to me. I tried to continue concentrating on my cup, but I began to get a little nervous. What was he going to ask me?

"Do you ride horses?"

Oh man, this was from left field. Where was he going with this one?

"I used to," I answered, still trying to feel my cup, which no longer had coffee in it. I tried to get it back.

"When you rode, did you ride well?" he asked, seemingly innocently.

"Pretty well," I said. "I used to own my own horse."

"Well," said Lee with the precision of a surgeon. "You don't have to ride that cup."

I paused. My hands remained poised, but they trembled. What had he just said? I looked at him. My exercise was over, but I found I couldn't drop my hands. The cup had become too real. I had to set it down on an imaginary table. My heart was pounding. I looked at him. He said to me gently, "What would happen if you made a mistake?"

Tears rose. What was happening to me? I was losing it. The room got deathly quiet. He said in the kindest way, "Go on, make a mistake!"

I shattered, broke, chunks of my mask, my persona fell to the floor. My bare skin, or what was under it, was exposed to the air for the first time like the pink skin under a peeled scab. He pierced me with his gaze. He saw me. He knew me. He gave me permission to make a mistake. And I would not be punished or beaten. I could risk something. Anything. I might even risk not pleasing him. He said it was okay. I could be whatever I am. I could ... I could ... He said that I could even ... be ... myself. I cried for two weeks.

I didn't know what to do. I had learned survival techniques - how to please, how to be charming and cute, to split from what was painful, to dissociate from what I didn't want to feel, to hide behind a persona that worked for me. Now Lee was telling me I didn't have to do any of that anymore. Lee's genius, and he was a genius, was that he could say what his X-ray vision perceived, in words that had deep meaning only to the person he was addressing. I don't know if what he said to me had meaning to anyone else in the world, but those words were like a sword of truth that pierced my heart and opened me to a new world. I just didn't know what do instead. I tried explaining this to Neil.

"Well," Neil said softly, "maybe you can just consider that personality you built to be a temporary thing, like a crutch, and now you can put it down because you don't need it anymore."

I stopped crying. That's it, I thought. I don't need it anymore. Now I'll find out who I am without all of that.

And that began my new life. Lee told me that the first step was the willingness to make a mistake, to suffer the humiliation of daring to risk, to grow. I just had no idea how terrified I was not to be perfect. "Addiction to perfection," Marion Woodman, the famous Jungian analyst and writer, would teach us later. I had it. And it wasn't that I thought I was ever perfect or anywhere near it; it was that I thought I should be perfect, but was so far from it that I needed to hide the fact. I felt that I was just plain wrong. Essentially wrong, bad, unacceptable, shameful. That was really it. I was ashamed of myself. And that's what had to be hidden. That's what was behind the mask. And somehow by telling me that I did not have to ride that cup, he freed me. By telling me that I could make a mistake, he communicated to me that there was not some mark that I was required to hit and it was unacceptable to miss. He was telling me that I didn't have to pretend anymore. People say, "But isn't the point of acting to pretend to be someone else - to submerge yourself and just become the character?" The answer is a paradox. You cannot move your persona from yourself to the character's without first locating yourself, and from that site you make the move. If you are hiding not only your self, but from your self, you don't have a chance for a true creative impulse.

Lee discerned something in me. Something that I formed many years before. A way of coping with my situation at home, a way of dealing with my sexuality and my talent. It was a way that was not truthful. When my mother said, "Pick up the rug, Edna, and do your tap dance," dutifully I did. I did my tap dance for my mother's friends. And I was still doing it. This was what the voice meant when it said, "I don't want it." It didn't want me to go on tap dancing anymore. In Jeff Corey's class, I had begun to ascertain another way. This is what I came to Lee to learn. I thought it was another way to act. He quickly let me know it was another way to be.

This was when I finally had the answer to the question I asked in my art class when Don Brackett tacked up my drawing on the bulletin board. It had come from a true creative impulse, not from a desire to please or to get a good grade.

For our first scene in Lee's class, we were to choose one that was "close to us," "not a stretch," "a simple scene". So without a trace of irony, I chose Joan of Arc. I don't remember the scene at all, just that I felt I understood Joan hearing voices. She heard two. I had heard one. I'd heard it twice. So that was why I felt the role was "not a stretch". After the scene, Lee chastised me for my selection and at some point asked, "Can you hear something we can't hear?" I was leaning forward, my elbow on my knee, chin cupped in my hand. I nodded my head, thinking of the voice that had spoken to me. Lee said in a surprised tone, his voice rising a bit, "You can?" Suddenly, his question put me in doubt. I mean, I could hear something when it spoke to me, but he meant now, right now. I listened. The class was still.I could hear only the sound of the air conditioner. I listened further. I detected a sound just behind the air conditioner, another sound, almost like white sound or the sound behind sound. I had just got there, just heard it for the space of a second, when I was interrupted by Lee saying, "Ahhh, but that's different." That's all I remember of this incident, but it etched itself into my actor/artist's knowing. I did hear something different. I hadn't moved. My chin was still cupped in my hand. Nothing had changed but the quality of my listening and he saw it! He could see me hear! Now, that not only taught me something about him and how precise were his powers of observation, it taught me something about the level of reality that an actor must create onstage. "The voice" that had spoken to me was a memory that helped me to understand Joan, but that was in the past. I had to hear something now, in the present, onstage. It didn't have to be St. Michael or St. Catherine or even my "voice". It just had to be something real, active in the moment, and then that would be seen, communicated, and experienced by the audience. There is an engagement - I would later feel it as a communion between the actor and the audience - that requires an active doing in the present moment of time. Yesterday's memories are not active. They must be brought into the senses and enlivened in the present. That way, the witness can "see me hear". It was a great lesson.

Another lesson comes to mind concerning Joan of Arc. In the early seventies at the Actors Studio in California, a visiting actress from England who was not a member had somehow gotten working privileges and was playing Joan in a scene from The Lark. She was not an accomplished actress and she played Joan like a cheeky bird. It was painful to watch. After the scene was over, she and the other actor pulled up chairs and waited expectantly for the praise of the master. There was a moment of quiet, then Lee addressed the girl. "Have you had any training in sense memory?"

"Yes." She nodded her head, her pretty blond curls bobbing up and down.

"Could you create a candle for me?"

"Right now?" she asked innocently, even happily.

"Yes, right now," said Lee, also seemingly innocently.

She used her hands to define the shape of the imaginary candle. When she thought she had it, she looked at Lee sweetly and smiled.

"Is it lit?" he asked.

"No." She pouted.

"Light it," Lee instructed.

She went through the motions of lighting a candle, put down the matches and looked at Lee, pleased.

"Hold one finger over it," he said.

She did.

"Can you feel the heat?" he asked.

She nodded vigorously.

"Now lower your finger into the flame and hold it there."

Her smile dropped.

"That's right," Lee snapped. "She put her whole body into the flame. Now you think about that before you ever play Joan again."

We never saw her again.

Neil did a scene for Lee and it was brutal. At one point he dropped his keys accidentally on purpose. He made a point of looking surprised before he picked them up. I don't remember now what that was supposed to signify, but it was something Neil liked and he must have thought it was something Brando would do. After the scene, Lee lit into Neil. At one point he said in a very stern voice, "What are you doing? You drop your keys on a particular line. You bend to pick them up on another line. That kind of acting went out forty years ago." Afterward Neil said, "I was thinking, Gee, is this as bad as I think it is? I'd almost talked myself out of it being that bad until after, when people started coming up to me and saying things to make me feel better. Then I knew it really was that bad."

I never thought of Lee as being cruel, as others did. He was very truthful. When your ego prevented you from hearing the truth, Lee was willing to cut through your ego. Years later when I was teaching, I said to Lee one day, "Sometimes when I'm teaching, something will occur to me to say, but I know it will hurt the person's feelings and I hesitate to say it."

Lee answered, "You must be like a surgeon. When a surgeon has to cut, he doesn't say, 'Oh, this is going to hurt.' No, he just cuts." And he made a chop with his hand. That's what I saw him do. Cut through the defenses of a person. Did he succeed? Not always. Many times he did. But only if the person, the actor, was willing to move beyond his ego-defended ignorance and really learn. I have discovered that the only position from which one can learn is the position of not knowing. From there you say, "Teach me." Then the teacher can teach. I was blessed to be able to stand in that place. Whatever are the ingredients of that blessing, I don't know.

In keeping with the Brando theme of the day:

Clip below of the famous taxicab scene in On the Waterfront.

A couple things to keep in mind:

1. In the closeups of Steiger, he wasn't even talking to Brando - Brando had left to go to his shrink. Steiger had done his closeups looking at Kazan. You would never know.

2. Please notice Brando's stress in the famous line; "I coulda been a contender ... I coulda been somebody". It is usually imitated incorrectly, people thinking they remember the line right - but they do not. They're actually imitating DeNiro DOING Brando, in the terrible (wonderfully terrible) scene at the end of Raging Bull. But Jake LaMotta gets the stress wrong - and people imitate THAT instead of the original. It is similar to "Play it again, Sam" - a line that never occurred in Casablanca, yet people somehow feel that it did. The On the Waterfront line is imitated with the stress put on the wrong syllable. The way Brando's line in On the Waterfront is imitated is: "I coulda been a contender ... I coulda BEEN somebody ..." but that's not how it is said by Brando in the film. Not at all. Watch where he puts the stress. And tell me, I dare you, how it could have been improved upon. It is so much more poignant, and unexpected and, ultimately, tragic - where he chooses (and yes yes yes Brando CHOSE - he was no dummy) to put the stress. (And what do you want to bet that DeNiro CHOSE to put the stress on the wrong syllable, to underline the point that Jake LaMotta just doesn't "get it".)

3. When his brother pulls the gun on him - the way it was written was to have Brando react - in a fearful manner. To be shocked and frightened, and say the following lines from that urgent and panicked emotional state. Brando just knew it was wrong. He couldn't say why. He tried to express himself to Kazan. "If my brother pulled a gun on me ... I wouldn't be all ... " He just knew it wasn't real. Kazan said, 'Okay - so show me how you would do it?" They played the scene. Steiger pulled the gun. And Brando's response - now an indelible moment in American cinema - came flowing out naturally. The sorrowful look, the almost "shame on you" glance he gives his brother - the regret, the loss, shaking his head, gently putting his hand on the gun, gentle, gentle, like, "No, no, you're my brother ... no ..." Brando always chose relationship over abstraction and that stunning moment is the best example I can think of. Kazan said later, about that most celebrated scene, "What other actor, when his brother draws a pistol to force him to do something shameful, would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress? Who else could read, 'Oh, Charley,' in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy, and suggests that terrific depth of pain? I didn't direct that; Marlon showed me, as he often did, how the scene should be performed. I never could have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it."

And lastly, please notice:

4. Brando, as we discussed earlier, taped his lines to the top of the cab roof, so he could glance up at them, for reference if he ever got lost during the scene. You can even catch him doing it. But it couldn't matter less. All of it flows, everything is part of the same objective, the same emotional action.

To this day, he has no peers.

Manso would have us look at the clip below and snicker - as though the mystique is somehow lost because we know Brando was reading the lines off the walls and ceiling.

What a shame.

The Books: "Brando: The Biography" (Peter Manso)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Brando: The Biography, by Peter Manso

Peter Manso has an opinion about Marlon Brando, and it colors this entire book - which is 10,000 pages long - so that's a long time to stick with a writer who has a low-level (sometimes high-level) strain of contempt for his subject. I do not share Manso's contempt - even for Brando's quirks of personality, his selfish side, his womanizing, his bad parenting, his naive politics, the list goes on and on ... Brando led a long life, checkered with questionable behavior, and some outright tragedy (that business with his daughter) ... but I seriously don't care about any of that. Or - I care, because it's interesting, and he's an interesting topic - but knowing about his flawed personality does not take away from his work as an actor, or his giant reputation. And I don't like a book that takes that tone. The problem here is a matter of tone. You may not feel that Brando is that good as an actor. But you had better make a damn good case for it - and it had better not be "Well, he was a womanizing asshole". If that is your reasoning, then you certainly won't mind if I don't take you seriously.

It is difficult to talk about genius, and it is difficult to analyze from whence it sprung. But Manso doesn't seem to be interested in that. He does get all the good anecdotes - things I have read before in other people's biographies and memoirs ... but they are sidelines to the freak show that was Marlon Brando's actual life (in Manso's opinion). There's a fine line to walk here, and many biographies are unable to do it. But then you look at the great ones - Richard Ellmann's book on James Joyce, Scott Berg's book on Lindbergh, David McCullough's book on John Adams ... and you can see the difference between those books and Manso's. I prefer a more even hand. I prefer a book that doesn't have an axe to grind. I am also not interested in fanboy rantings, which is bigotry of its own kind with its own blinders - but I certainly think that Brando deserves better treatment. Don't misunderstand me: I am not talking about judging him, or weighing in with ponderous opinions about his behavior, his politics, his trainwreck of a personal life. I don't care what some biographer JUDGES. There is quite a lot to "judge" (if you go for that sort of thing, and I don't) in the life of James Joyce, Charles Lindbergh, John Adams. They have personality foibles, flaws, they were men of great ego and sometimes vanity ... but nevertheless, it is the WORK that made them who they are ... and the biographies I mentioned above always seem to keep that in mind. They are not "neat" subjects - a human life never is ... but the biographers put them in their context, and do their best to surround them with the world they were living in ... so that their behavior is more easily understood. And then there are things that are just bad ideas, we all have had bad ideas in our own lives ... and those need to be treated with the same even hand. I'm not saying we can't judge John Adams for the Alien & Sedition Act but, as always, there is a deeper level of conversation surrounding that event - and if you don't "go there" as a biographer, if you sit on your lofty soapbox and condemn ... well, I, as a reader, lose interest. Because you know what? You're just some stupid guy writing a biography. Your SUBJECT will outlast you, no matter WHAT you write about him ... your impulse may be to tear him down, and sometimes a book succeeds in that goal (look at Mommie Dearest) - but I still believe that the subject, no matter her awful behavior or bad ideas, will outlast the smear-books. And THAT is something that some biographers cannot abide. I do not like those kinds of biographies. I like it when a subject is given its due. Peter Manso's book, which is enormous, came out with much fanfare - although Marlon Brando published his own autobiography in anticipation of what he felt Manso's book would do to his reputation ... and it did sort of steal the thunder of Manso's giant epic. The books were always mentioned together, they were always referenced in tandem ... Brando beat Manso to the punch by a couple of months, which is smart ... and while his thrown-together book is not all that good, it did manage to adjust the conversation that Manso was trying to start. It provided context. From the real guy. Good for Brando.

I read every word of Manso's book but there was a pettiness to it that is truly odd - I think of petty as being something small, so it's weird to read a book this long that ends up just feeling petty. For example, there's an anecdote about a scene in The Godfather where Brando had cue cards placed all over the set, out of camera range, so if he forgot his lines he could glance up and see it. He had done the same thing in the famous taxicab scene in On the Waterfront, which is one of the greatest pieces of acting ever done by an American actor. It was his process. Did having cue cards mean he was lazy? Or that he was somehow a faker? That he had "put one over" on the American public by not memorizing his lines in the taxicab scene? But look at the result! If NOT memorizing your lines looks like THAT, then please. Let's not memorize lines anymore. Manso does not understand that, and is interested in tearing down the myth of Brando. "You liked that taxicab scene? Did you know he was reading his lines off of cue cards on the ceiling??" My response is: "Yeah. So?" Everyone works differently. Creativity is not NEAT. Brando didn't sit down and memorize lines. Especially not in films - where it was so easy to just have lines taped out of camera view. He explained to Coppola that he had been doing this cue-card thing for a long time and that it helped him feel more spontaneous. Manso then makes a bitchy comment - something like, "How cue cards would make him feel more spontaneous, Marlon never explained ..." Like; Manso: are you an actor? Are you Marlon Brando? The man just explained his process. You may puff-puff on the sidelines how silly and unprofessional it is - but excuse me for saying: what the fuck do you know? I think your subject deserves more respect than that. Marlon Brando felt that having the lines taped around him, out of camera view, helped him relax - he wouldn't have to worry about memorizing, and he could glance up and see the words, which would put him right back where he needed to be. His process was always a flowing kind of thing. It was not rigorous (although it could be) ... it was intuitive. Lines were the LEAST of Brando's magic. Anyway, it's not that it's not an interesting conversation: Brando using cue cards ... it was Manso's bitchy little rejoinder afterwards that pissed me off (and the book is full of stuff like that).

The end result is that I start to feel defensive towards Brando. I start to talk to Peter Manso, as I read, like: "Dude, he was just working on his PART .. that's how he worked ... " But no. Everything was a weapon to Peter Manso to be used against Brando. I don't like that. Who cares if he taped his lines to the ceiling of the cab in On the Waterfront? He's Marlon fucking Brando. If that helps him, who are you to be a little bitch about it? If you don't understand that everyone has a different process, then I certainly can't explain it to you ... but that element of the book was VERY annoying.

Oh, and another annoying thing which I think tips Manso's hand: He always refers to Marlon as "Marlon". Most biographers maintain a sense of professionalism towards their subjects and refer to them throughout the book by their last name. McCullough refers to John Adams as "Adams". Ellmann speaks of "Joyce". Manso doesn't seem to believe that Marlon Brando deserves that respect. It gives the book a too-intimate feel, even spread out over 5,000 pages. Just call him "Brando", Manso. Come on. It won't kill you.

I sort of suffered through the long passages about his personal life - which Manso was very interested in, because Marlon was, you know, a terrible boyfriend, a womanizer, a compulsive sex freak, kind of amoral in his dealings with others, and a general MESS. Manso, again, was looking at all of that with a jaundiced eye, and while I can certainly understand that (I remember when Michael was reading the book when we were first dating, and he said something to me, like, "God, Marlon is such an awful person - it's making me feel really bad!") - I am more interested in what it was in all of that that contributed to who he was as an artist, OR - I am more interested in all of that just as the facts of the case. These are the facts. Just present them, please. Your prudey moralizing does not at all add to the book. It took away, in my opinion. So Marlon was an asshole as a boyfriend. Yeah, but have you seen On the Waterfront?? Who the hell cares? Marlon Brando was a giant actor who changed the way we judge acting. He was ALSO a terrible boyfriend and a mess, personally. BOTH are true. One does not cancel out the other. (This is a fight I've had on my site countless times. For example, in my Lana Turner tribute, someone said he didn't care for Lana Turner because she was "slutty". Yes. She was slutty. Have you seen The Bad and the Beautiful? Have you seen how good she could be, given the right material? Slutty/Good actress. Can't both be true? There is an interesting conversation to be had about Turner's reputation as an actress - what she is remembered for, and what she is NOT remembered for - and there is also such a thing as personal taste, and maybe Lana Turner is not everyone's cup of tea - there's an interesting conversation to be had about THAT as well, but to lead off with the comment that she was "slutty" ... I don't know. It's just a very boring conversation to me.)

Marlon Brando is a GIANT figure, and of course - giant figures just BEG to be torn down.

I began to realize, maybe 200, 300 pages in, that this was a smear book, and to not read it as anything else. Don't look for balance. There is none.

As always, I am in it for the ANECDOTES - and in a book of this length, no stone is left unturned. Manso appears to have interviewed everybody. Despite the fact that the focus of the book was on Brando's asshole personality (who cares??) - there are some great stories told. One involved Brando, pre-fame, in an acting class run by Stella Adler. She gave the students an improvisation: you are all animals in a barnyard, and suddenly you look up - and see a nuclear bomb is coming down to hit you. Adler's point was to free the actors up, physically ... to make them embody animals (always a great exercise for any actor - and many great performances have been based on animals - DeNiro said he thought of "crabs" when he was creating Travis Bickle, the sideways way they move, how they never ever appraoch anything head on ... Interesting - but that's just one example. Animals are great fodder for actors!) - and Adler wanted them to not just sit around Oinking like a pig but to be the animal ... and then, once that was established, to be the animal in a panicked situation. Total change of situation. Well, the improvisation began, and the students began to race around the room - clucking and mooing and baahing - and basically freaking out because they were about to be incinerated by a nuclear blast. And Adler looked over and Marlon, who was playing a "hen", sat on his egg, legs haunched up beside him, clucking, and preening his feathers, completely oblivious to the chaos around him. He would check on his egg, settle himself down again, cluck a couple of times, stretch his "wings", cluck some more ... Adler asked him later what was going on, and why he didn't react to the impending apocalypse. Brando said something like, "A hen doesn't understand nuclear warfare. A hen doesn't know what a bomb is. She has no consciousness of what all of that would mean." Brando would never be a jester. He would never do anything on command. His sense of truth was rock-solid, and he wasn't being willful or difficult with Adler ... it's just that he could not be forced to play a game when he had a deep problem with the truth therein. Adler LOVED that about him.

She said, in regards to Marlon Brando, "Sending Marlon Brando to acting class was like sending a tiger to jungle school."

She watched him cluck like a hen, oblivious to the nuclear bomb coming at him, and saw his genius. He was only 19 years old at the time, maybe 18. But she saw it then.

I am not calling for a fanatical DEFENSE of Brando, either. I am asking for an evenhanded examination - in the same way that Berg took on his controversial topic with Lindbergh. For many people, Lindbergh's pro-German anti-war attitudes are enough to cancel out the good will he had generated during his flight in 1927 and his baby's kidnapping. I happen to not agree with that. The guy is an interesting man, sometimes infuriating, but always interesting - and every single bit of it deserves to go into a biography, to get the fullest portrait possible of this 20th century figure. But without the moralizing shaking-of-the-finger of the biographer, sitting at his comfortable 21st century laptop, separate from the events that try men's souls.

Manso had an axe to grind with Brando.

I think Brando deserves better.

Here's an excerpt about Brando playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. I love the stories surrounding this film because it just messes with anyone's pre-conceived IDEAS about Brando. He worked on that part. He had John Gielgud read out the part of Mark Antony into a tape recorder so that he could imitate Gielgud's immaculate scansion. He spoke in iambic pentameter, learning how natural that rhythm is - and how IT shows YOU where to put the stress. And he obeyed. He obeyed the larger commands - of "how" to do Shakespeare, and how to breathe, and speak, and pause - the thought is IN the line Brando, a master at subtext, was able to submit to the demands of this kind of work - and I happen to think he's great as Antony. So did Gielgud.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Brando: The Biography, by Peter Manso

While his personal life seemed chaotic, in front of the camera he continued to give the impression of being "very relaxed," even though he was coming up on his real test as a classical actor: the forum scene. His weekend preparation had been so extensive that he even took the unusual step of reading the scene with Houseman, explaining his discoveries in a state of excitement. Recalled the producer, "Suddenly he had discovered that with a dramatist of Shakespeare's genius and in a speech as brilliantly and elaborately written as Antony's oration, it was not necessary nor even possible to play between the lines, and that having in his own mind created the character and personality of Antony, he must let Shakespeare's words carry the full flood of his own emotion from the beginning to the end of the scene."

It was a denial of Method "subtext", which might well be equated with Mankiewicz's joyous insistence that he was simply doing the job at hand. "I realize now that you've got to play the text," Brando had said. "You can't play under it, or above it, or around it, as we do in contemporary theater. The text is everything.

As the scene began, the crowd listened to Mason's Brutus, showing every evidence of being swayed. When Marlon entered from the wings carrying Louis Calhern, six feet five and heavy, he placed the boy of Caesar at Brutus's feet. "Friends, Romans, countrymen ..." he began. The crowd, made up of 250 extras, spontaneously interrupted, not allowing him to go on. He started again, only to be interrupted, and Mankiewicz, who had primed the extras to interfere, now shouted at him, "Get mad!" In his saffron-colored toga, Brando began again.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," he leaned into it, as the extras fell silent. The speech went on unbroken for its thirty-four lines, Brando's voice rising like a torrent until reaching its climax. With the director's "Cut!" nobody moved. Then from every corner of MGM's stage 24, the crew burst into applause.

"I felt a fucking chill go up my spine," Mankiewicz recalls. "It was the greatest moment I have ever felt as a director ... It's what made [my] whole career worthwhile."

By shooting "tight", with alternating close-ups of Marc Antony and individual faces in the mob, Mankiewicz gradually accelerated the rhythm of the suspense. For Gielgud, the strategy seemed senseless, especially when Marlon's voice started to go.

"They would photograph [Marlon] for a couple of days in the taxing speeches of the forum scene," said Gielgud," and then he would lose his voice and be unable to work. They would fill in time by filming the extras, taking a lot of shots of faces in the crowd responding, then Brando would recover and come down to the studio to do another speech. I imagine that the director hoped he could put it all together in the cutting room, but Shakespeare is too big for that."

Mankiewicz was already off his tight shooting schedule, but even Houseman, who as producer was ultimately responsible for production delays, continued to marvel at Brando's forbearance. "During that long week of shooting," he explained, "he went through his speech over and over, without once losing his energy or his concentration. When he faltered or flubbed a line, he would stop, apologize, compose himself, and start afresh."

The Books: "Bogart" (A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax

Now this is what I call a biography! I am not sure why it took so long for Bogart to get his due, but I suppose that's the way. After all, I'm still waiting for a good biography of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, just to name a few. Sometimes it takes a generation or so to re-discover someone, the narrative about that person changes. Perhaps during their lifetime they were well regarded but their star faded ... and there's then a re-discovery process. Or perhaps during their lifetime they were NOT all that well regarded and it is only with time that we, the public, can see just what a giant impact they had. Bogart was a huge star during his lifetime, but in the 60s his star faded a bit - with the advent of the "new Hollywood" ... he was seen as part of the old guard, perhaps ... not "cool". To cinephiles and movie buffs, of course, he was always important and beloved. In the late 50s, the famous Brattle Theatre, a movie house in Cambridge Massachusetts, started a tradition of showing Bogart films during final exams - a tradition that, I believe, continues today. Students, eager to escape the stress of finals, would show up for double-features, dressed as Bogart, they would chant the lines of Casablanca or Maltese Falcon in unison, keeping the flame alive, even after he had passed away. There was always a certain cult-ish feeling about loving Bogart. He did not have the movie star glitter of, say, Cary Grant - whose status could never be denied, not when he was alive, not when he was dead. It's not that Bogart was an acquired taste. It's just that his films, even years after they came out, somehow avoided quaintness, or kitschiness. And Bogart embodied a type of man who was growing unpopular at that time, in the full height of the Beat movement, the bohemians, the start of the folk music coffee house culture, and Flower Power. Bogart, in his tie, trench coat and fedora, would have sneered at such silliness, perhaps, but would never have shown "the kids today" any contempt (unlike some of his contemporaries). There was a staunch individuality at work in Bogart that tapped into something at the time ... it was a throwback, sure ... a look at simpler days (not better, just simpler) ... and it was refreshing. Every young man hopes that, in the moment when it counts, he will be able to behave as selflessly as Rick did in Casablanca. In that moment on the runway in Casablanca, he embodies what we most hope for ourselves, he shows us how we would so like to behave, if given the chance. Things like honor and self-sacrifice are never out of fashion.

Roger Ebert writes, in his review of Casablanca:

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

It totally makes sense that if you want to let off some steam during finals week, you would be hard pressed to find a better activity than going to watch Maltese Falcon with your stressed-out classmates. Because Bogart can show you how to be strong, how to suck it up, how to do the right thing, even if it hurts like hell.

I'm talking about him as an actor now - the parts he played - not the man himself. The line is often blurred. Bogart the man was hardly a self-sacrificial uninvolved wry-grin type of guy. Those were PARTS that he played, and brilliantly - but they were PARTS. The fact that we all are so convinced that that is who he was (a man we do not know) is just a testament to his talent. In reality, there were deep wounds in Bogart, deep insecurities - about his relationships with women, about his looks, about his standing at the studio (his contract was never up to par with his peers - he was very much taken for granted and taken advantage of on that score) ... and the fact that he could so step into these cool guys, the guys who don't lose it - but the guys who, you know, deep down, feel deeply and feel things forever (he plays characters with long LONG memories ... "The Germans wore grey, you wore blue ...") just shows how good he was, as an actor. He shows that you can feel things that deeply without sacrificing manliness - that is one of Bogart's greatest assets. That you can be sexy and smouldering - even when you have a lisp and you are a good FOOT shorter than your leading lady ... gives us all hope. If you want to see a completely rare side of Bogart - and one that I feel is closest to his actual character - I cannot recommend Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place enough. I reviewed it here. It is Bogart's best performance, in my opinion, and he revealed things in that movie that he had never revealed before and was never asked to reveal again. It is ugly. An excruciating performance. Full of insecurity, rage, envy ... and quiet smouldering bitterness. I believe that that performance is not as well-known because it messes with our idea of the "Bogart persona (tm)" - and it mucks up his mythical status as the tough guy willing to do good in a world that will not congratulate him. In In a Lonely Place, he also plays an outsider - like all of his great parts - but as we watch the film, we slowly realize that there is a REASON this guy is an outsider, and it's not just because the world doesn't appreciate him, and he's awesome and everyone else sucks ... It's because the guy is a douchebag, a coil so tightly sprung that he is the kind of guy you slowly back away from at a party, because you don't want to be trapped by him. He's the kind of guy that you, as a woman, hope you don't date ... because he will never ever let you go, and he will become creepy at the first sign of trouble. It's a brilliant performance, completely under-praised, I think - nearly forgotten. What a shame. See it!

He was a complex bag, Bogart. An actor I truly love.

Sperber and Lax have pulled out all the stops in this massive book. It is an exhaustively researched TOME ... and in it is everything about Bogart you would want to know. There will be more books written, of course, but they will have to reference this one. No stone is left unturned. It's not all that elegantly written, and it relies heavily on cliches in the language - but I'm in it for the information. It is a giant important biography, and a book I recommend for any film-lover's library.

The excerpt below has to do with the filming of Casablanca. And so, to prepare us ... here is the first shot (besides his hand signing the bill "OK - Rick", I mean) we get of Bogart in the film.

Iconic.

EXCERPT FROM Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax

The lines of dialogue now so familiar trickled in during the weeks of rewrites: "I told you not to play that song!" ... "Here's looking at you, kid" ... "If you do, you'll regret it, maybe not tomorrow" ... "Of all the gin joints in all the towns all over the world, she walks into mine." To the members of the company, it became a daily ritual of learning, discarding and relearning pages, and tempers - Bogart's included - frayed to the breaking point.

His part was the longest, his load of constantly changing dialogue the heaviest, and the cool demeanor of the early weeks gave way to testiness. Bergman recalled him returning from lunch hour breaks spent arguing with Wallis. There were also arguments with Curtiz, although disagreements with the talented but temperamental Hungarian were unavoidable on even the smoothest-running films. Curtiz stomped about in riding boots and ran his set like an autocrat, his demeanor seesawing between marzipan charm and outbursts of temper in obscenity-laced broken English. This was their fourth picture together - the last had been Virginia City in 1940 - but the first in which Bogart played the lead. He was more assertive now than when his name had been below the title. "Bogie was certainly short of patience with Mike," Lee Katz said. There were, however, "no pyrotechnics". Bogart just quietly bristled, at times turning and walking off to make his point. Before Leonid Kinsky's first scene as Sascha the bartender, played one-on-one with Bogart, Curtize was overwhelming the Russian actor with minute instructions when "Bogie just looked at him and said, 'Please, shut up. You can't tell Leonid what to do.' And that was that."

Katz was a Curtiz assistant going back to 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. "Mike drove most of his actors crazy. He was from the European school - full of dolly shots and twisting cameras and what have you, very complex on camera moves. So he had a habit, usually, of watching the camera more than the actor. And the actor would realize it." Five years earlier, during Kid Galahad, Bette Davis had stopped in mid-scene and snapped at Curtiz: "Mike! Watch me! Stop watching the camera!"

But Curtiz was a master craftsman whose broad range can be seen in two of the films he made in 1942: the brilliant musical biography Yankee Doodle Dandy and the melodramatic Casablanca. He was particularly strong as an action director, and his simple lesson to a younger colleague of how to stage a mob scene with only twenty extras is a classic. Put ten on each side, he said, and then have them run across - "They'll make such a mess!" From his days as a silent-film director he also knew when words were superfluous and how to convey character with a look, a lift of an eyebrow, a nod.

A nod made, according to the screenplay directions, "almost imperceptibly" by Rick is a turning point in Casablanca. It signals the orchestra to play "La Marseillaise" and the start of an ensemble scene in which Rick's singing refugee patrons, their backs straight in reclaimed dignity, drown out the German soldiers singing "The Watch On the Rhine." Although it is Henreid, as Victor Lazslo, who commands the cafe orchestra to play the anthem, it is Rick's silent assent they wait for.

The stirring sequence is unmarked by a single line of dialogue, and it marks the hero's return to the battle. "Do it with a full scoring orchestra," Wallis told music director Leo Forbstein, "and get some body to it." The scene was an emotional moment for the company, many of whom had relatives in the concentration camps or dead in the gas chambers. Madeleine LeBeau, who played the layabout Yvonne, had fled France with Marcel Dalio, whose mother was still in Paris, hiding in a basement as Jews were rounded up. Dan Seymour stood at the back, watching the crowd. "I could see their faces. They were crying" A close-up fixed on LeBeau, her voice heard above the rest of the singing. The displaced citizens of 1942 were singing the hymn of the citizens of 1792 and another German invasion. The original script directed the German officers in Rick's to sing "The Horst Wessel Song", the anthem of the Nazi party, but "Horst Wessel" was under copyright, and copyright infringement - wars and Nazis notwithstanding - was still a violation of international agreement. Such an infringement, Warner lawyers said, might possibly endanger export of the film in such neutral countries as Argentina, where pro-German sympathies ran high.

In mid-July, seven weeks into the shooting and with only two scheduled weeks remaining, the basic problems in the script were still unresolved. At one point the latest scenario sent out the night before was recalled the next morning by J.L. himself, amid sharp differences about the story's outcome. Every writer favored keeping the ending of play, in which case Rick would lose Ilsa; but the studio wanted the conclusion dictated by Hollywood convention. "Conferences were taking place all over," Howard Kock said, "arguing about it, with the studio pretty heavily on the side of, We've got Bergman, we've got Bogart, why aren't they going to be together?" The only principal who didn't much care one way or the other, Julius Epstein said, was Bogart, who was only "worried that he wouldn't get to the boat on weekends."

There were only problems: Even if Ilsa did leave with Laszlo, how did they get her to go? Have her turn and run? Not convincing. Lois Meredith had been virtually dragged away. Casey Robinson's brainchild was a quick clip to the jaw, immobilizing the heroine, and then moving her out. But what happened to Rick? Was he arrested?

"Toward the end," Epstein said, "there was chaos - no ending, no knowing what was happening." Bergman appealed to Koch, "How can I play the love scene when I don't know which one I'm going off with?" Curtiz, Koch added, wore a hangdog look and was openly worried. "He kept wanting to talk about it. You could see it in his expression." He took his frustrations out on the actors. After one outbreak too many, the gentle Kinsky started to walk off the set, swearing never to come back. Curtiz, for once, was immediately apologetic. "We have no ending for the picture," he said, by way of explanation. "Everyone is nervous."

On July 17, with production almost a week behind schedule, the cast assembled for the airport scene. Stage 1 was enveloped in a fog created by what Warner Publicity would describe as "more than half a million cubic feet of vaporized oil." (Because wartime security precluded outdoor location shots at night, it took innumerable requests, meetings, and red tape to be able to film the one inserted shot of plane motors revving up.) In the background on the soundstage, a painted cardboard cutout, creatively lit, served as the plane to Lisbon. "The outline of the Transport plane is barely visible. Near its open door stands a small group of people." Actually, it was a group of small people; midgets from Central Casting gathered on the runway to provide the proper scale.

Everyone's nerves were in tatters. "Rick is not just solving a love triangle," Robinson argued to Wallis in a memo. "He is forcing the girl to live up to the idealism of her nature, forcing her to carry on with the work that in these days is far more important than the love of two [but the problems of three] little people." Rick became the deus ex machina, setting all things right: "You're getting on that plane with Victor."

The whole scene depended on Bogart's delivery. It was a four-page monologue with brief interruptions, rewritten for the third time in three weeks and shoved at him the night before to memorize. For Bogart, who learned his lines mornings on the set because he couldn't concentrate at home, it was a double burden, and the last traces of his patience gave way.

The disagreements surfaced over lunch, the specifics vague after half a century. Bogart had one idea of how to play the scene, Curtiz another. Warner publicist Bob William watched as "they wound up shouting at each other - but Curtiz was the kind of guy you would shout at anyway." Unit manager Al Alleborn reported "arguments with Curtiz the director and Bogart the actor." After two hours Alleborn, in desperation, roused Hal Wallis from his bungalow and brought him back to be the peacemaker. An hour later, the disputes broke out again. Only then, Alleborn recorded, did the parties "finally decid[e] on how to do the scene." The lost time was entered on the production report as "Story conference between Mr. Curtiz and Mr. Bogart."

When the cameras did roll, the magic was back:

"You're saying this only to make me go." "I'm saying it because it's true ... You belong with Victor ... If that plane leaves the ground and you're not on it, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life ... I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world ... Here's looking at you, kid."

It was time for the suspension of reality, no questions asked, including the one of how Bogart had managed to put on a belted trench coat while presumably keeping his gun on Rains. Wallis and Koch had solved the problem of getting Bergman away by having Henreid step into the picture - "Are you ready, Ilsa?" But it was the lovers' scene, and it remains the benchmark for renunciation.

Bogart, Huston once said of him, wasn't especially impressive face-to-face; but when the camera rolled, something happened, an almost noble quality took over. The takes of Rick and Ilsa's farewell required several days. Bogart concentrated on Bergman's shining face, his dark eyes made darker still by the black-and-white photography. Arthur Edeson's lighting emphasized the still-boyish profile, and what emerged on the screen was intensity, energy, and magnetism - the requisites of a great movie actor.

_______

Bogart finished August 1, the others two days later. There had been a few remaining scenes to shoot and some retakes. Wallis asked Bogart for "a little more guts ... more of the curt hard way of speaking we have associated with Rick. Now that the girl is gone, I would like to see [him] revert." Rick's fate following Strasser's death was resolved with Renault's laconic, "Round up the usual suspects." According to the Epsteins, the line had just come to them in a car one night as they rolled along Sunset Boulevard.

Still, it was hard to let go, and it took outside forces to wrap the film. On August 3, two days past the new projected closing date, Bergman, called to the telephone, let out a shriek. For Whom the Bell Tolls was definitely hers and Paramount wanted her on location immediately - that night if possible. Warners was already well over the limit of her commitment. Wallis pleaded for another two days, but Al Alleborn had a better idea. Stop the picture. Tonight. Look at the assembled footage and find out if retakes were really necessary. Wallis agreed, and Casablanca was closed out.

The final fade-out, however, remained in question. Rick's closing rejoinder to Renault would be recorded in a sound studio as a wild line and later inserted into the soundtrack as the two men walk off into the fog. Long after the close of production, Wallis, dissatisfied with every suggestion, dithered over various versions, one of them being, "Louis, I might have known you'd mix your patriotism with a little larceny." He was intent on just the right punch line and on August 21, he finally had it: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

With all the talented writers working on the script, it was the producer who came up with the line. "That's Hal Wallis," Casey Robinson said years later. "He wrote that line, and it was marvelous. It was inspired."

It was Wallis, too, who decided on the documentary-style opening - the spinning globe and the black track of the refugee trail dissolving into a montage of masses on the move; the narration was modeled on the popular news series The March of Time and spoken by a radio announcer from the Warner Station KFWB. The overall effect of tying the film romance to the larger sweep of world events had a payoff that no one could foresee.

The Books: "Humphrey Bogart" (Nathaniel Benchley)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Humphrey Bogart, by Nathaniel Benchley

Benchley and Bogart were friends, so this 1975 biography is not a critical study, not an objective look at Humphrey Bogart, but a loving portrait, at times too loving to hold my interest. I bought this book for the pictures it includes. It's out-of-print now, but I found a copy of it on a table outside a second-hand bookshop for 2 dollars, and bought it immediately. The photos are not your basic family snapshots, and stills from famous movies. The photos are woven throughout the book, some of them taking up entire pages, and many of them you probably have never seen before. They are marvelous photos, so this book could almost be considered a coffee-table book. Christmas cards sent by Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot - his notorious third wife (their relationship was so volatile they were known as "the battling Bogarts"), drunken blurry shots of the two of them making out and wrestling on the couch, early photos of Bogart in tennis whites - these are personal photographs, not "public domain" pictures compiled by a biographer. Benchley knew Bogart. He probably put his own photos throughout the book. Benchley is already a well-known writer, so the book is not bad - and it has that gift of knowing the right anecdote to choose to prove your point. It's chock-full of anecdotes. Many of them have now passed into myth/legend, whatever you want to call the Bogart mystique (his lisp and how he got it, the whole Gerber Baby rumor, and more) ... and it is not clear how much is true, how much is embellishment, or how much is just memory playing its tricks. It doesn't really matter, in the end, I suppose. There's something vaguely unsavory in a book like this - a friend trading on his relationship with a famous person - but since it's not a smear book (I'm looking at you, Christina Crawford), it doesn't quite fit into that category. It's a loving "here's what I remember" portrait, as well as a pretty damn thorough examination of Bogart's journey to the top: the roles he got, the reviews, the setbacks, the battles with the studio, and - most startlingly - how Bogart's persona changed. That's one of the most interesting things about him as an actor.

He became famous playing Duke Mantee, the villain in Petrified Forest - first on Broadway and then in the film. Leslie Howard, who had played his part on Broadway and was already a big star, said he would not do the film if Humphrey Bogart didn't reprise his role as well. Pretty damn generous, I would say (although his behavior as producer of the play was not quite as generous).

Humphrey Bogart as Duke Mantee

It is hard to overstate the sensation Bogart made on Broadway with this role - but that's the excerpt from Benchley's book I chose - so I'll let it speak for itself. It was not Bogart's debut. He had played small parts on Broadway before - but his reputation was as the youth sashaying into the parlor saying things like, "Tennis, anyone?" He played pampered prep-school boys. Fascinating. So he was not unknown to Broadway audiences, but nothing could prepare New York for what he did in Petrified Forest. Seems like a theme in Bogart's life - the shifting personality, the experimentation with what he was good at, what would "hit" an audience, the public's perception changing as he took on deeper and better parts ... Bogart saying, "Tennis, anyone?" ? Hard to imagine now.

But that's what I want to talk about: the development of Bogart's persona and how it changed. Petrified Forest launched him into the realm of serious Hollywood players. Duke Mantee was truly bad, a scowling hovering psychopath. He's riveting in the film. He seems like an emissary from the future - if you look at the way other "villains" were played at that time. Bogart is unredeemable, in the film, but you can't take your eyes off of him. He has a five o'clock shadow, another oddity - in a day when people appeared more cleancut in films, even poor people, bums ... Bogart worked hard on that part, creating him from the ground up - how he walked, how he talked, how he DIDN'T talk, body language, gesture, the costume ... Bogart owned that role. After Petrified Forest, he began to play villains. Let's count the times he was killed by Edward G. Robinson, shall we? He played sidekicks - like in The Roaring Twenties, with Cagney as the lead (I adore that film - the whole phrase "Don't bogart the joint" - while obviously referring to Bogart's ubiquitous hanging cigarette - also always seemed to me to have as its reference the scene in Roaring Twenties in the foxhole, when Bogart hogs the shared cigarette ... But let's move on) ... Bogart did not move on to play leads after Petrified Forest. He was second lead. He was a bad guy. He always died in the end. He was in movies with names like San Quentin, King of the Underworld, You Can't Get Away With Murder, Racket Busters, Crime School - typical Warner Brothers "ripped straight from the headlines" fare. He was shot in glorious 1920s style rooms, and would stagger to the couch, or fall down the stairs. He was a bootlegger, a conman, a thief. He was expendable. We might cry when Cagney died (as I always do, when I see his spectacular death scene in The Roaring Twenties - perhaps my favorite death scene of all time), but we didn't really care when Bogart died, because he seemed so immoral, so ... well, like he was asking for it. It's interesting to see all of those "in between" movies in the decade of the 30s, like Bullets or Ballots and others, when Bogart is playing second-banana. It makes me realize that his stardom, his giant mythic stardom, was NOT a done deal. It was not in the cards from the beginning. I mean, look at the guy. He was short, balding, with bad teeth, and a LISP, for God's sake. Is that a leading man?? Well, no, it wasn't. Not at first. He was not being groomed for that, and it was not what the public accepted him as. His Duke Mantee made such a huge impression that Bogart could have had a whole career, playing villains, and hypnotic bad guys ... but look at what happened. Look at how the career shifted! Amazing! It was subtle, but a couple of parts paved the way for Casablanca, which launched him as a leading man. In High Sierra, he plays Roy Earle, another villain - yet this time with the soft underbelly that is (and can be) so compelling to audiences. You rooted for him (in a way that you did NOT root for Duke Mantee). John Huston wrote the screenplay for that film - and - the same year was given a directing opportunity, his first, with The Maltese Falcon. Bogart, having already gotten to know Huston on High Sierra, decided to take a chance with the untried director (something Huston always appreciated) - and the result is historic. I think it's one of Bogart's best roles, and in it - we can see the other persona really start to be developed: the wry-faced cynical guy, with a deep mother-lode of strong moral character within (but it's never anything he'd want to be congratulated for - as a matter of fact, he'd rather you not notice it at all) - who ends up doing the right thing, even though it means he'll lose the girl. What a departure from Duke Mantee!! So exciting: I love to look at a career and see the fortuitous turns it takes - turns it didn't HAVE to take. It just as easily might NOT have happened. There are no guarantees. Bogart was not guaranteed to be a star and his journey is full of accidents, coincidences, and giant leaps of faith. I love it.

His Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon solidified his position as a valid leading man - despite the lisp and the balding nature of his head - and the roles he got after that in the next year - in Across the Pacific and Casablanca just dug him in deeper as one of the most interesting and compelling movie stars working at that time.

Later in his career, he could "experiment" again - in films like The Caine Mutiny and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and create characters on the verge of going mad, men so full of conviction, greed, paranoia, that they become unhinged from reality. He's terrific in those kinds of parts as well.

Nathaniel Benchley's book is just the tip of the iceberg, and as the years have passed, Bogart's reputation has just grown, so there are more books, more biographies, more critical studies.

But they sure don't have the awesome photos that THIS book has!

The excerpt below is about Bogart's playing of Duke Mantee on Broadway, and how - for one season - it became THE play to see. Kind of like Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens last year. That performance was an EVENT. It wasn't the play that was being hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread - it was her work in particular. That's what happened in 1935, when Bogart first stepped onto the stage as Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Humphrey Bogart, by Nathaniel Benchley

When Humphrey Bogart walked onstage as Duke Mantee there was a stir in the audience, an audible intake of breath. He was a criminal; he walked with a convict's shuffling gait, and his hands dangled in front of him as though held there by the memory of manacles. His voice was flat and his eyes were as cold as a snake's; he bore an eerie resemblance to John Dillinger, to whom killing a person meant no more than breaking a matchstick. Sherwood's summary of Mantee in the stage directions described Bogart perfectly: "He is well-built but stoop-sholudered, with a vaguely thoughtful, saturnine face. He is about thirty-five, and, if he hadn't elected to take up banditry, he might have been a fine leftfielder. There is, about him, one quality of resemblance to Alan Squier [the hero]: he too is unmistakably doomed."

The play opened at the Broadhurts Theatre on January 7, 1935, with Leslie Howard starring as Alan Squier and Peggy Conklin as Gabrielle Maple, the heroine. (For those interested in trivia, the part of Boze Hertzlinger, which had almost been Humphrey's, was played by a youth named Frank Milan.) The story, briefly, tells how Squier, a wandering intellectual, meets and befriends Gabrielle in an Arizona roadhouse, and sees in her some of the dreams he had once had as a youth. Mantee, fleeing the police, comes on the scene as the incarnation of ruthless violence, and makes hostages of everyone in the roadhouse. Squier signs over his life insurance to Gabrielle and then gets Mantee to shoot him, so that Gabrielle can have the money to go back to her mother's homeland in France. That is overcompression of the most radical sort, but any explanation short of printing the entire script would be of little help.

The critics threw their hats in the air. Brooks Atkinson wrote that "Robert Sherwood's new play is a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as the motorized guerrilla," and Robert Garland said that "Humphrey Bogart is gangster Mantee to the tip of his sawed-off shotgun." The play, clearly, was in for a long run.

Humphrey had had one bad period in September, before rehearsals started, when his father died. Things had been getting progressively worse; Dr. and Mrs. Bogart had moved to Tudor City, and with the almost complete disappearance of his practice, he had taken up the periodic job of ship's doctor on cruise ships or small passenger liners. He died in the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled in New York, leaving approximately ten thousand dollars in debts, which Humphrey paid off out of his eventual earnings from The Petrified Forest. Humphrey had a deep affection for his father, and his death at this time, and in these circumstances, was a particularly jarring blow.

But once rehearsals were under way, he put everything else behind him and concentrated on becoming as convincing a gangster as possible. He walked, talked, and lived Duke Mantee; he wore a felt hat with the brim turned down, he talked out of the side of his mouth, and he built a set of mannerisms to go with the character. There are very few shows that don't have some sort of trouble or conflict prior to (and sometimes after) opening night, but Hopkins had chosen his cast well. A short, round, brown, slightly bowlegged little man, he quietly mesmerized the actors into doing what he wanted, and since in many instances he had intuitively cast them against type (as in Bogart's case) the results were often electric. He told them that he collected casts the way other people collect books, and that this was the perfect cast; there was not one person in it he'd think of changing.

Another case of the intuitive casting was that of Ester Leeming, who played a small part as Paula, the Mexican maid. When Hopkins picked her (a simple nod was his usual method of selection) Sherwood said to her, "It's lucky you can speak Spanish. The only Spanish I know is 'patio', and I learned that in Hollywood." As it turned out she couldn't speak Spanish, so she went to Berlitz and took a cram course untnil she could swear convincingly in the language - which she still can do to this day.

Their first night in front of an audience was in mid-December at the Parsons Theatre in Hartford, and there were two things that astonished the company. One was the amount of humor in the script - lines took on a new meaning, which they'd missed in rehearsal - and the other was the literal gasp that went up when Humphrey made his entrance. Dillinger was very much in the news at the time, having recently escaped from prison, and to some people it seemed that he had just walked onstage. The prison pallor, the two-day's beard, the gait, the mannerisms - everything about him was menacing, evil, and real. The company was to hear that gasp every night throughout the run, but the first one was the one they still remember. They went on to Boston, where they opened Christmas Eve, and then to New York in January. They played until June 29 of that year.

For two reasons, Humphrey disdained the use of makeup. The first was that the desired effect of prison pallor made makeup unnecessary, and the second was that to fake a two-days' beard would be obvious. His was his real beard, and he kept it trimmed during the week with electric clippers, thereby becoming one of the earlier electric shavers. After the Saturday night performance he would shave, singing and lathering himself and having a grand old time, and he would come into Miss Leeming's dressing room, which adjoined his, and spread his good cheer around with a lavish hand. She remembers him as being generally quiet and gentle, and scrupulous in his behavior to the female members of the cast - a trait that was by no means shared by the star.

The play could have run for a much longer time, but Howard grew weary of playing it. He had enough muscle with the producers (he was a coproducer with Gilbert Miller, in association with Hopkins) so that he could forbid anyone else to take his part, and also to prevent its going on the road. Warners had by this time bought it, and Howard announced that a road tour might hurt the box office for the picture. So they closed the end of June, while still doing booming business; Howard went home to England, and the others went looking for jobs. One of those who felt the disappointment most keenly was Howard's understudy, Kenneth MacKenna.

One of the good things Howard did, however, was to say that he would do the picture only if Bogart played Mantee, and he was as good as his word. Warners had Edward G. Robinson under contract, and saw no sense in using someone they'd already had a few unspectacular dealings with, so they blithely announced they were making the picture with Howard and Robinson, and with Bette Davis playing Gabrielle. Humphrey, understandably upset, cabled the news to Howard, and Howard cabled Warners that without Bogart he wouldn't play. They gave in, and Humphrey was signed to another Warner Brothers contract. His farewell to the stage was a summer of stock in Skowhegan, Maine, where he did such plays as Rain and Ceiling Zero while waiting for the shooting to begin on The Petrified Forest. He was a quick study and a perfectionist and he had each part letter-perfect, playing one while rehearing another.

The film version of Sherwood's play was remarkably similar to the original, with only a few obligatory outdoor shots and some tinkering with the dialogue to make the difference. (In the play, Gabrielle tells Squier: "My name is Gabrielle, but these ignorant bastards call me Gabby," a line which until recently would never be allowed on screen.) The screenplay was by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Davis and the director was Archie Mayo; of the original company, only Bogart and Howard and one minor player remained.

In Hollywood it is a truism that a person is as good as his last screen credit, and having scored as a gangster Humphrey was immediatley cast as another. The picture was Bullets or Ballots and Humphrey played a character named Nick "Bugs" Fenner, who in the last reel kills and is killed by a hard-boiled sleuth, played by Edward G. Robinson. In his first two years at Warners he made twelve pictures, in eight of which he was either a gangster or a criminal of some sort, and in four of which he was killed. In one he was sent to prison for life, and in one other he and Robinson repeated their double-killing routine. Exactly two, Marked Woman (with Bette Davis) and Dead End, were what might be called superior pictures, and one, Isle of Fury, was so bad that he pretended not to remember ever having made it.

The Books: "Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi" (Bob Woodward)

Welcome House Next Door readers! This is my archive of entertainment biography (I've just started, as we can see from where we are in the alphabet). I plan on doing a post a day from each book on my shelf, which should keep me busy to, oh, about 2011. If you keep scrolling down this page, you'll see the other excerpts - one from Carroll Baker's autobiography, and three (one, two, three) from Lauren Bacall's three autobiographies.

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward

Probably one of the best drug-ridden entertainment biographies ever written. At least it's one of my favorites. Bob Woodward is out of his element here, but it suits him, I think. What I like about it is that he takes his investigative journalism chops and uses them on the entertainment world (and its hangers-on). It's quite a compelling portrait. It's thorough, it's tough - and he was given carte blanche from Judy Belushi, John's wife, to tell the whole story, as he found it. He encountered no roadblocks from her, or those Belushi loved. A couple people refused to talk to Woodward (DeNiro being one of them), but for the most part, the floodgates opened. Woodward was able to delve deep, and his investigative methods led him to some pretty unsavory places. At the end, Belushi had alienated many of his friends, and was hanging out with bottom-feeders, some truly frightening people. After reading Woodward's description of Belushi's chaotic last night, you just want to take a shower and detox YOURSELF. How did this topic come to Bob Woodward, a writer who focuses on Washington and politics? He opens the book with:

In the summer of 1982 I received a call at The Washington Post, where I work, from Pamela Jacklin, a sister-in-law of John Belushi, who had died of a drug overdose three months earlier. She said there were still many unanswered questions surrounding John's death, and she suggested I look into it. John Belushi was not a natural subject for my reporting; I had concentrated on Washington stories and knew very little about his show business world - television, rock and roll, and Hollywood. But I was curious.

Curiousity (and his reputation, of course, as a writer) was all he needed. People were willing to talk to him because he was so, well, "legit". Whatever he would write, it wouldn't be a smear, and it also wouldn't be a smarmy tell-all. It would be an examination of someone who, in a very short time, had become positively beloved by the American public - someone who was, at times, infuriating to his friends and loved ones, but always beloved. That's one of the main things you get when you hear the stories, and when people still talk about him now. How much he was loved. He was also admired, he had a genius for improvisational comedy which still sets the bar for others. People still talk about his old skits at Second City, and how unbelievable it was to see him at that raw time in his life, when he was fearless, disgusting, and hilarious. Like many comics (and I speak from experience, having dated a few - in fact, a good 10 years of my life was taken up with dating ONLY improvisational comedians from Chicago, Second City and Improv Olympic boys. That was my romantic genre. Insane. But anyways) - like many comics, he also had the desire to be taken seriously. Belushi's idol was Brando. He felt that if he were given the proper material he could do something like that, too. I think that's one of the reasons why he was such a crazily effective mimic (uhm, Joe Cocker?) He LOVED those people. His imitations came from love on a fanatical level. He didn't just want to imitate them, he wanted to BE them. There's the great story about when Belushi sang WITH Joe Cocker AS Joe Cocker, and how freaked out Belushi was by it. He was scared. Would Joe Cocker be insulted? Didn't he know how much he LOVED him? Belushi had no fear as a performer. He had plenty of resentments and opinions, however (he hated the "fucking bees", for example) ... thought they were stupid.

And his pairing with Dan Ackroyd unleashed something in him that had not been seen yet. Belushi, in sketch comedy - at Second City, and in groups in New York - had a way of strolling into a scene going on, saying one line, bringing down the house entirely, and walking away with the show. 10 people could have been onstage, but the audience went home babbling about Belushi. He was a star. Many of his fellow performers resented it - but at the same time, what're you gonna do - say to someone, "Stop being so good, please"? But with Ackroyd, he found a soulmate, a "straight man", a perfect foil. They became a duo, very quickly, understanding and anticipating each other, each as quick-minded as the other. In a way, his skits with Ackroyd REALLY set Belushi free.

Del Close (an important mentor to John Belushi and, well, pretty much anyone who came through Chicago improv at that time) taught at Improv Olympic when I was living in Chicago - but he had started out at Second City. He was famous.

Just the track marks on his arms were famous. He'd show them to you and growl about the glory of shoving a needle in your arm. He was an old-school off-the-charts reprobate, and an improv genius. He took my flame at the time under his wing (see what I mean? They were all improv boys) - recognizing his genius, wanting to pass on the torch. To Close, improv was a religion, a way of life, a way of looking at the world. I remember sitting in the audience at Improv Olympic show - watching said flame perform with his group (they were called "The Family" and were famous to us Chicagoans ... I still remember lines from those shows ... It was 6 guys, most of whom are now famous on a pretty giant level ... And these guys were so quick, so smart, so in tune with each other's rhythms, that you would forget at times that this thing was improvised. You didn't have that situation, with other improv groups, where maybe one person is the stand-out, one person is the funniest, and the others take on supporting roles, or try to be AS funny as the funniest and it falls flat. The Family did, to this day, some of the best improv shows I have ever seen in my life -shows that were not just hilarious (although they were that) - but thought-provoking, moving, mind-bogglingly brilliant ... Here's an interview with Miles Stroth, one of the members of "The Family" - about his years at Improv Olympic, and Del Close.

I'm mentioning Del Close so much because the excerpt below involves his relationship to Belushi.

Belushi was tough. He could be unmanageable. He had a giant ego, but it also seemed to cover up his flaws, his fragility and vulnerability. The early years of SNL are now the stuff of legend - with Belushi basically LIVING on the office floor at 30 Rock ... doing drugs nd sleeping off benders on couches ... and then going out to do the show. It was the wild west of television, very difficult to remember now - because it has become so "establishment". Old-fashioned word, but come on, those folks were anti-establishment ... the drug jokes, sex jokes, the crap they got away with ... They were renegades. The first season is what is most interesting to me, because it was before people were REALLY paying attention. I remember that season, I was a kid, and it was past my bedtime, but I was allowed to stay up once and watch it. Steve Martin was hosting. It was insane. I remember it feeling dangerous. Just the fact that it was LIVE. There was an edge to what was going on there.

Belushi catapulted to stardom, and had his ups and downs ... movies that missed the mark, and movies that hit a zeitgeist moment and still stand as anthems of the age. On July 28th of this year, Animal House turned 30 (which means I am a withered crone, basically) - Dennis over at Sergio Leone has a huge post about it (not to be missed) - actually, he had been doing a whole series of posts - that's just the tip of the iceberg - if you're an Animal House fan (and if you're not, I have to say, what the hell is wrong with you) - go over to Dennis' and start to click around. So fun!! Anyway - movies like Animal House and Blues Brothers are ones for the ages. Generations who never saw Belushi and Ackroyd do their bit live on Saturday Night love that movie. It works. It "hit".

Belushi was frustrated with not being offered Brando-like roles, he was best friends with Robert DeNiro and truly thought he should be in projects like that. But it was not meant to be. He was the funny guy, the samurai, the blues brother, the fearless improviser. In a way, it's probably a blessing that he wasn't on the show NOW - because his "bits" might have been "franchised" out of existence. Stuff was given a chance to breathe then (at least that's how it seems - I know the experience of WORKING there was absolute mayhem) ... but if you think about the Lisa Lubner character (played by Gilda Radner) and her boyfriend Todd (played by Bill Murray) ... those sketches were not at all ba-dum-ching experiences. There was no catchphrase (although Bill Murray screaming "NOOGIE" comes pretty close). It was character driven. Scenes were allowed to have many elements, sentiment, sadness, anger ... and yet they were also hilarious. The Lisa Lubner/Todd skits are my favorite in the entire SNL canon.

As the excerpt below shows, Bob Woodward, despite the fact that Hollywood is not his scene, and the business of actors is not his gig, was able to ask the right questions in order to get the answers he needed to tell his story. What was it about Belushi that was so striking? What exactly? WHY was he so funny? WHY did he stand above his peers? Woodward, in interviewing Del Close, obviously had an ear for the good anecdotes, the revealing "secret" (the moment Belushi tells the truth to Del, and the look he gives Del in the aftermath) ... that makes Belushi, as a person, come alive.

He emerges as more than his addictions, more than just the cliched too-much too-fast story - he emerges as a true talent. Someone who was conscious of what he was doing, although it might have LOOKED off-the-cuff, had perfect pitch when it came to audiences and what would make them laugh, and also had that underlying sadness and loneliness which is so much a part of 99.9999999 of every comedian I have ever met. It's a hypnotic mix. (And one I, personally, find almost impossible to resist.)

The book could have been completely overshadowed by the ending, because we all know how John Belushi died. But Woodward also manages to capture the wild freedom and joy of those early days, in Chicago and New York, and just what it was Belushi was really like, in those tiny theatres of 40 or so seats, with thunderclaps of laughter greeting his every move.

One of my favorite anecdotes in the entire book, one that has stayed with me, is the story of Betty Buckley, then a young singer performing in the Broadway show Pippin, coming to see an improv sketch show called Lemmings, which John Belushi was in. She was absolutely stunned by his brilliance on stage. She had never seen anything like it. She didn't know John, she didn't go up and speak to him afterwards, nothing ... she just walked off, amazed by what she had experienced watching him. A week later, she got a group of friends together, and brought them all to see Lemmings. She hadn't been able to stop talking about "this guy John Belushi" and what a revelation he was. And that night that her friends were there, Belushi was coked out of his mind, phoning in his performance, basically blowing it off. He was already, then, a self-destructive person who didn't have that "No" valve in him. People around him were doing drugs, he did drugs, whatever, it wasn't a huge deal. But to Buckley it was. Especially if it affected your work. Her friends were saying to her, "How can you think this was funny?" or "That guy? You brought us here to see that guy?" Disbelieving. Here is what happened next, according to Woodward:

Buckley got up and went backstage. She had never met Belushi.

As John walked by, Buckley grabbed him by the shirt with both her hands and threw him against the wall. She introduced herself and said she was in the musical Pippin, which had been a sensation on Broadway for more than a year.

"I'm in a long run, too, and I know it's difficult to give night after night. People come to see you and you blew the show off ... There are those of us who appreciate it. Do it for us."

John's face lit up. He said he understood. They talked for a bit. Buckley was amazed that he didn't tell her to get lost, that he was big enough to take the criticism.

"I'll be back and bring my friends again," she said.

Several months later Buckley met John at a party. He threw his hands in the air as if he were afraid she might grab him again.

"You remember?" she said.

"How could I forget?"

Yes, Belushi was a drug addict, irresponsible, self-destructive. But to me, that lovely anecdote, and not just his willingness to take the criticism - but his eagerness for it, because it sounded like truth to him - and then his joking reference to her grabbing him later ... to me, that is all I need to really know about John Belushi's character.

The excerpt below is from Belushi's early years as an improviser in Chicago.

EXCERPT FROM Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, by Bob Woodward

Del Close, a thirty-six-year-old former Second City actor who had directed some of the revues in recent years, came back in 1972 to put together the forty-third revue, the 43rd Parallel. Close didn't care too much for Sahlins's highbrow instincts, and he was attracted to John immediately. John was in italics and the other cast members were in regular print. They were comedians, John was the one human being; they were playing parts and characters, Belushi played real people. Belushi's presence revived Close's feeling of the old days - the Beat Generation, drugs and the vital Lenny Bruce era - nastiness, fuck-you, sick-comic daring.

"How is it that you look so totally relaxed on stage and so in command?" Close asked him.

"Because that's the only place I know what I'm doing," John replied. The communication was so truthful. John worked his eyebrows and gave Close a lecherous look, not sinister, but boyish and honest, as if he'd confessed. Close, a thin, fierce, former stand-up comic, had a small mattress-on-the-floor apartment across the street from Second City. He had been a heroin addict and had had dependencies on speed and Valium at various times. His current problem was alcohol, but he relished his narcotic past, and he wore his track marks from the needles like a badge of honor. The marks confirmed his status as an outsider, the precise quality that he wanted to impress on the show. Actors comprised an alien subculture; they were supposed to spokesmen for outrage. Second City was supposed to be picking at society's scabs.

Close saw an instrument in Belushi - a trainable, ticking, bad-boy time bomb.

Close had known Lenny Bruce, who had died of a heroin overdose in 1966. Close had once gone with Second City's founding director, Paul Sills, to see Bruce perform, and afterward Sills had told him, "If you can ever find out what Lenny is taking, by all means do it." Drugs were central to the outlandish performances Close wanted. Belushi didn't need to be convinced.

"Lenny Bruce," Close told John one night, "took his work seriously. You have no idea how seriously he took it, pinned his entire life on it. And he had courage, not just through the drugs, but in his art." How long do you think Lenny could go without a laugh? Once he went nearly twenty minutes and then pulled nine trains of thought together. The audience laughed at the same moment like a snap of a sheet, not only a laugh for the jokes but for the brilliance and for the release of tension.

Close found John a most unusual student; he didn't need to be taught to relax or to be spontaneous. His timing was exact. John approached his skills as if they were simply a personality quirk, so Close undertook to teach John structure. That meant more complex material.

Close believed that the most complex subject for a comedian to handle on stage was death. First he guided John in parts calling for him to deal with the death of someone else. In one skit. John plays a taxidermist who brings his fiancee home to meet his parents. The parents are stuffed. John is meant to appear quite natural, to wear an expression of "What did you expect?" The fiancee is, of course, horrified. When she realizes she is next, she calls the police. John leaves the stage and returns with a stuffed policeman.

Close instructed him that the object was to end the sketch with a scream rather than a laugh. And he wanted the scream to be so loud it was a laugh. John carried it off.

For the 43rd Parallel, subtitled "Macabre and Mrs. Miller," John developed an angry, hip comic character of the early sixties modeled on Close. On stage, he predicts his death. ("And by then the needle will be in my arm and I'll be six feet underground, and there'll be nothing you can do to stop it.") Often he died on stage. Close taught John that the dying had to come unexpectedly; it had to be a surprise.

Marlon Brando, whom John had mimicked when he was still a schoolboy, became increasingly a role model. He'd seen On the Waterfront (1954) a dozen times, and he loved everything Brando played. Flaherty could see that John was thinking of himself heading in that direction, the next Marlon Brando. Judith Flaherty felt that John was right to see in Brando a style that fit him - encompassing both courage and range, the young, unjaded Terry Malloy to the burnt-out, wise Don Corleone of The Godfather.

John explained to a reporter for Tempo at Chicago State college how one imitation led to another: "Well, what I did, I happened to see Brando in a picture called Reflections in a Golden Eye in which he played a homosexual. Not long afterwards, I saw Capote being interviewed on TV and I suddenly realized, 'Hey, Brando was doing Capote!' Now if Brando can do Capote and I can do Brando - well then, I can do Capote."

* *

In the spring of 1972, after John had been at Second City for fourteen months, Chicago Daily News writer Marshall Rosenthal interviewed him. "Obsessed with Marlon Brando, John Belushi polishes off a slice of pizza, stuffs the greasy napkin into his cheeks and becomes The Godfather," Rosenthal wrote.

"The Brando character, in fact, runs through much of Belushi's hilarious impersonations at Second City, but it never overtakes him because beneath the macho-Mafioso pose always beats the vulnerable heart of a hippy-dippy chump ... Belush has only to step on stage to get laughs."

Rosenthal quoted John: "But a funny thing happens at Second City. A year after you're there, you start to get this fear that you'll die there, and you start wondering when you'll leave."

Rosenthal concluded:

"The pizza had turned into specks of sausage and cheese scattered in the deep-dish baking pan. We step across Wells Street at 3 a.m. to have the last beer at the Earl of Old Town. Folksinger Ed Holstein is on stage, and he calls to John, 'Hey, Valachi, c'mon up and do your Brando!' Not too reluctantly, Belushi ambles on stage, takes a long swig of draft beer, and says, 'I could'a been a contendah ....' "

The Books: "Baby Doll" (Carroll Baker)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Baby Doll, by Carroll Baker

When I was about 12 years old, I first saw East of Eden, around the same time that I saw Dog Day Afternoon, a movie I didn't really understand (why was he robbing the bank again? Who was that guy he would talk to on the phone? What operation was he going to have?? I don't understand!! Isn't he married too? WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?) but which rocked me to my core. I had never thought much about acting as a craft. I knew what I liked, I loved movies, I loved playing make-believe, but it was the one-two punch of East of Eden and Dog Day Afternoon that made me think to myself: I want to know more about acting. How did James Dean DO what he did in that movie? How did Al Pacino DO that?? There had to be a secret, a trick, a magic elixir. Those two performances raised the bar for me, in terms of performances, but they also said to me: There's a big world out there, outside of ABC afterschool specials and Disney ... Go out there and learn about it. I worked as a page in a local library, and so I went to their entertainment biography section, in the back, up against the outer wall. When it was slow in the library, I browsed in that section. (I also peeked at the pictures of Joy of Sex, but that's another post entirely.) Al Pacino was more difficult to research (in lo, those long-ago pre-Internet days), but James Dean was everywhere. I had a method to my madness. I took out each book on the shelf, and checked the index for references to James Dean. (I'm a librarian's daughter, I know my way around).

I was not the Movie Trivia Goddess persona that I am now ... so I was probably looking for references to James Dean in the back of Mary Astor's autobiography or a biography about Theda Bara. NO MATTER. It was methodical, and I actually did come up with a lot of great information that way. I would flip open said book to the page, and read whatever anecdote was there about James Dean. That's how I learned about him, piece by piece. I learned about his motorcycle, his bongos, his probable bisexuality, I learned about Pier Angeli, and his insecurity around Marlon Brando, I learned that he wore glasses, I learned that he was roommates with someone named Martin Landau who took some phenomenal pictures of him, I learned about Elia Kazan for the first time (and I called him "Gadge" in my head, because everybody else seemed to), I learned about the Actors Studio ... and then somehow (the details are lost) I learned that Al Pacino was part of this Actors Studio as well ... so I needed to know more about THAT. What was this "studio"? Where was it? I always think of those feverish research moments in the library when I consider that later, many many years later, I would go to sessions at the Actors Studio, in a church on 44th Street, same place it's always been, and sit in the balcony, and watch people work, watch Harvey Keitel moderate, or Lee Grant, or Estelle Parsons ... I auditioned three times to get in, and kept telling myself, "Harvey Keitel auditioned ELEVEN TIMES ... don't give up hope!" The place oozes with atmosphere and ghosts. Marilyn Monroe worked on that "stage", doing a scene from O'Neill's Anna Christie, as onlookers (only members of the Studio are allowed in to watch) hung off the balconies. Ellen Burstyn has worked there. Everyone I admire has worked there. And I would have moments, walking up the stairs to the balcony of the "church", to find a seat, and think of my 12 year old self, huddled in the back of the library, learning about this place in my desire to know everything there was to know about James Dean and Al Pacino. Amazing.

I met Kazan once - at an Actors Studio function no less ... and he was very much far-gone by that point, almost completely deaf, but I stared at his face as I shook his hand, and I found myself trembling with what that man has meant to me, what he provided me (and continues to provide me) and how I set myself the task as a kid to learn about this man. What was it? It's rather an adult concern, isn't it ... I wasn't doing my best to learn about my Fisher Price toys, or about Lance Kerwin ... although I loved those things, too. But Kazan was someone I knew I needed to study. Why? I was speechless when I met him, and I could sense that anything I would say would probably be lost. He was too old, too deaf. But God. What a fucking honor.

My frenzied 12-year-old "James Dean Index Search" led me to Carroll Baker's Baby Doll. James Dean was in the Index quite a bit, so I took the book home with me and read it in a night. I was 12 years old. It's rather a salacious book, at times ... lots of sex, and infidelity, and smooching with someone named Ben Gazzarra ... and then there's a section of sexual frigidity, and unhappiness, a nervous breakdown, I guess ... I can't have understood much of it. Or, I might have understood it, but I know that I also understood that this was a book for grownups. No matter: I was in it for the acting anecdotes and the stories about James Dean. Carroll Baker did not disappoint. I didn't even know who she was then, and I had not yet seen Giant, although now I knew I HAD to, but her autobiography is a big juicy tell-all, not just of her sexual escapades (and actually, to be fair, she didn't have that many - it just FELT that way to a 12 year old reading it) - but of her colleagues. I ate that shit UP. She was in Giant, of course, but I had never heard of her most notorious role - in Baby Doll, a strictly Actors Studio production if ever there was one. Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Carroll Baker, and Elia Kazan directing. It would be a long time before I actually got to SEE Baby Doll. I was very familiar with 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (excerpt here), the short Tennessee Williams play that the film is based on. The tour de force scene between Flora (turned to "Baby Doll" in the film) and the vengeful Vicarro is well-trod ground in scene classes across the nation. It's a perfectly constructed scene: two strong eccentric characters with battling objectives, a power struggle, and an eventual rape. Great stuff. I've played "Flora" in pretty much every acting class I've ever taken. It's just one of THOSE scenes.

I think I finally saw Baby Doll in college. But by that point, I had memorized most of the scenes, having heard so much about them - not just from her book but from Elia Kazan's masterpiece of an autobiography, which I read as soon as I could get my hands on it ("Oh, this is the scene on the swing ..." "Oh, this is the scene in the crib ...") that I felt like it was already a known movie to me. And there she was: Carroll Baker, the woman who had written the autobiography that gave me such good information back when I was an OCD kid!

In a funny and sometimes peripheral way, Carroll Baker's book was really my "way in" to that world I wanted so much to be a part of. She described the Studio to me, the rehearsals for Hat Full of Rain (a big hit which started as an Actors Studio project), the way the movie studio worked, what it was like in the commissary, what it meant to try to play a part ... what did you need to draw on? If you had a personal arsenal, how would you know which weapon to pick? People like Kazan helped actors with that. Kazan would want you to draw on yourself, he was that kind of director, but he also was unafraid to get personal: If he knew you, and knew your issues (with your mother, father, with sex, your ex-husband, whatever) - he would pull you aside, and whisper something to you that would trigger a response that was perfect for the scene. Many people hated that kind of intimacy in working, it seemed manipulative and too personal - but of course Kazan got the results. Carroll Baker was a young actress at the time of Baby Doll, and had only done two movies before that one (one of which was Giant).

Baker had devoted her time to studying at the Actors Studio, it was THE place to be at the time (mid-1950s) - not just for the opportunity to work on scenes and get involved in projects, but for the networking possibilities (a word I despise, but whatever, let it go). Baker didn't want to just be famous. She wanted to be good. She worked hard. She was a pretty serious person, actually. Dare I say humorless? And some of the stories (at least one in the excerpt below) show that being too serious, or too eager to be "good" can lead to a kind of paralysis when the time comes to actually get up and do it. Carroll Baker knew that. Without the part of "Baby Doll Meighan" the rest of her career wouldn't be possible. It is what she will go down "in the books" for. Baby Doll was a notorious movie. It's really quite bizarre, and I highly recommend it, if you haven't seen it. Kazan loved it. Tennessee Williams' play is quite tragic (although the actual title is: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton - A Mississippi Delta Comedy). Shades of Chekhov - who called all of his great plays "comedies" and would splutter with rage at the interpretation director Stanislavsky would put onto them at the Moscow Art Theatre. Why is everyone so dreary? Why is the mood so sad? Doesn't he know this is a COMEDY? It's an interesting view of comedy, more complex than what we are accustomed to. How can a play about a big rough boob of a man married to a woman who is obviously mentally disabled, who sleeps in a crib - grown woman! - and who has one desire in life: a neverending supply of Coca Cola ... and the big rough boob of a man burns down his neighbor's cotton gin, in order to boost his own business, and then - in the climax scene - allows said evil neighbor to rape his wife, so that they will be "even" ... how can such a play be a "comedy"? Is Tennessee Williams insane? But I do think it's important to remember that "comedy" is in the title, when playing those characters - don't lose sight of that! And Kazan didn't either. Baby Doll, the movie, is a delightful weird little romp, whimsical, amusing, with slapstick elements, people running around the house, slamming doors, etc. The rape is soft-pedaled - and becomes more of a mutual seduction (and there are elements of that in the play as well ... Flora likes being raped, she enjoys being hurt). Kazan saw the whole thing as funny. "Baby Doll" is not a tragic nitwit. She's an adorable little creature, who is unfortunately manhandled by her ridiculous husband (played by Karl Malden in the movie) - and finds a playmate, a fun and silly playmate, in the vaguely sinister yet sexy neighbor Vicarro (played by Eli Wallach). Vicarro does not come across as strictly a predator in the film. He is hot for her, yes, and he looks at her and thinks, along the lines of Rhett Butler, "This woman needs to be kissed ... and often ..." But it doesn't become violent, you don't weep for "Baby Doll". You're actually happy for her that she found someone who "gets" her, who doesn't make fun of her or make her feel stupid.

Baby Doll caused a shitstorm upon release. The Catholic Church condemned it. Morality groups across the nation began screaming at the tops of their lungs. The billboard in Times Square, stretching an entire city block, was Carroll Baker, in a "baby doll" dress, lying on her side in her crib, sucking her thumb. It was perverse! I love it!

It put Carroll Baker on the map, forever and always. And in a funny way, her career never recovered. She was NOT a sexpot ... her sensuality was a more subtle and pained thing, perfect for Tennessee Williams ... I'd have loved to see her play Blanche Dubois (excerpt here), or Princess from Sweet Bird of Youth (excerpt here). If she had been born a decade later, she would have flourished in the burgeoning independent film movement in the late 60s and 70s.

As it was, in the 50s, she became un-place-able. Because of that billboard, because of the controversy surrounding the film, she was labeled as "sexy", and she had a very hard time in more conventional sexy roles. It wasn't her "thing". It didn't come naturally to her. But that didn't matter. She had become pigeonholed very early, and she could not get the parts she wanted to get, she could not escape the shadow of that billboard to save her life.

The movies she was in became less and less worthy of her, although there is much to recommend some of them. The Carpetbaggers is very good (with a couple of famous scenes - the chandelier, the nude scene at the mirror) ...

She also got a key part in How the West Was Won, which she says was her favorite movie ever, and her best working experience. She and Debbie Reynolds became best friends, and remain so to this day.

Then came Harlow in 1965. Baker was cast as Jean Harlow.

It was an unhappy shooting, nobody knew what they were doing, it was thrown together at the last minute, and very sloppy. Baker, the "good" actress who had been trained well, did her research, took it seriously, tried to embody Harlow (although, frankly, she is terribly miscast) - and the results are not bad (I've always liked watching Baker act, it's a pleasure) - but certainly not good. The playful sexiness of Jean Harlow had nothing to do with who Carroll Baker is, was, or could even embody. She looks uncomfortable. It's just not "right". Not every actress can play everything. It made matters worse that only a month before the release of Baker's Harlow, another movie called Harlow was also released, starring Carol Linley. Terrible timing. Despite that fact, Baker's Harlow did better at the box office than Linley's Harlow, but it wasn't enough to save the film from disaster, or to save Carroll Baker from taking the fall for its failure. She eventually was let out of her contract at Paramount, after a messy ugly battle.

If you look at Baker's IMDB page, you can see a two-year gap after Harlow. Work dried up. Carroll Baker ended up moving to Europe, and working there, primarily - she could get jobs, probably way more interesting than what she was struggling for at the studio ... and she could regroup. She worked in France, Spain, Italy. Over two decades passed. Her American career was over. She did stage work. She got married (for the third and last time - they stayed married until his death last year).

And I remember this well: Suddenly, in 1987, a movie called Ironweed came out. I was in college at the time, deeply engrossed in my own acting training, and we were all insane to see this movie - with two of our collective acting idols playing off of each other - Streep and Nicholson. Mitchell and I went to see it together. There is one scene where Nicholson's character goes home to visit his long-suffering wife, who has "let her husband go", because he has become a bum and a drunk. It is a haunting scene, full of silences, and broken dreams ... it's one of the best scenes in the film. When I think of Ironweed now, I think of Streep singing in the bar, and also the scene between Nicholson and his gentle plump wife, who still loves him, you can tell, but how do you love someone who has decided to leap off the grid? Her tragedy emanates off of the screen, and she never says a word. The dead baby is IN that scene, never referred to, but hovering between them. Great stuff. When the credits rolled at the end, I felt a jolt when I saw "Carroll Baker" go rolling by. I don't know - I have this connection to her ... I associate her with being young and eager and discovering who I really am. That was what was going on in those library shelves ... I was discovering and embracing who I really am, who I am NOW. There is much in my childhood that does not feel connected at all to who I am now ... but that? My research, self-directed and self-perpetuating? It doesn't matter that I was only 12 years old. That girl is ME. So ... ohmygod ... Carroll Baker? Was that THE Carroll Baker? The photos in her autobiography came to my mind, her delicate pretty face, the small mouth, the tall forehead ... That was her! That wife in Ironweed was her! I hadn't thought about Carroll Baker's career in a long time. Her book came out in 1983, before Ironweed, and it ended with her being satisfied with her European acting career and her stage work. But there she was ... I was so, weirdly, HAPPY for her. Not just happy that she was back in a high-profile picture again - but that she was so damn GOOD. I thought she should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Yes, her screen time is not very extensive - but Beatrice Straight won the Academy Award for Network and she had much less screen time than Baker did!

Beautiful scene, and I felt somehow invested in it. Yay for Carroll Baker, I thought to myself, like some sort of lunatic.

Ironweed did not resurrect her career into something more steady. She wrote novels, she appeared in lots of television, and you know what? She's still out there. I don't know what she's doing, but, as always, I hope it is interesting, and I hope she is okay with it. Her book "pointed the way" - it showed me the kind of life I wanted to have - one that was about work, and collaboration, and theatre.

There are many better autobiographies out there. But Baby Doll is the one I most cherish.

Here's an excerpt - from the shooting of Baby Doll. Kazan liked to shoot on location as much as possible - so for Baby Doll the entire cast and crew went down to Mississippi, and holed up there for a couple of months, shooting everything in and around that particular town.

Carroll Baker had had a nice small part in Giant and she did a good job.

But Baby Doll was a lead. And this was no ordinary picture. This required acting chops. Bravery. A sense of safety mixed with courage. It's a weird movie, I don't want to paint a picture of it that is not accurate, but it's fun. It stands alone in Kazan's canon, that's for sure. It is mostly unclassifiable - Wallach is awesome in it, Malden is hysterical and awful - and you cannot take your eyes off of Carroll Baker. I like, too, in the anecdotes below, how open she is about how "green" she was an actor. You get more ease with more experience ... but she wasn't there yet. This was her chance, her big break, she knew it ... and so she tossed herself into it with an earnestness that is touching to me, even as it shows her inexperience.

EXCERPT FROM Baby Doll, by Carroll Baker

Gadge was earthy and completely approachable. He made everyone involved in the project feel like a full participant. His crew would have walked through fire for him, because no other director had ever made them sense that enormous satisfaction of being an equal contributor to the whole. On his sets, everyone was encouraged to come forward with an idea. When Gadge had a problem he discussed it openly. For example, the opening shot of the film was of the old Southern mansion. Gadge was concerned that the audience might get the impression of a period piece. It was a gaffer who stepped forward and said, "Hey, Gadge, why not wait until a jet plane flies overhead?" It was a brilliant idea which Gadge jumped at, one by the way which has been imitated many times since. Imagine the feeling of pride that will forever be with that gaffer!

I had a scene in which I was waiting in the open car for Archie Lee. The script indicated that all of the local men standing outside the store made fun of Archie Lee as he exited the store and walked to the car. Because the whole town knew that the marriage had not been consummated and that Baby Doll was still a virgin, the local men were always jeering. Gadge also wanted something visual to hinge the laughter on. He asked Karl and me, "Can either of you think of something that you might be doing? Something that might motivate the jeering?" I said, "My daddy was a traveling salesman, and whenever I used to wait for him in the car, he would always bring me an ice cream cone." Gadge threw his cap down in the dusty street and stamped and hollered for joy. "That's perfect, perfect," he howled. "It will make Archie Lee feel silly and doubly humiliated having to cross in front of the guys with a dripping ice cream cone. It is a perfect childish prop for you. I'll shoot Archie Lee's reactions and those of the crowd as you lick the cone, and we'll have our sexual connotations there, too." Even now, whenever I remember this, the pride I felt at having my idea accepted rushes back to me.

An "activity" suggestion of mine which Gadge went for in a big way was used during the "bathroom scene". Archie Lee stands outside the bathroom talking to Baby Doll through the closed door while she takes her bath. We had naturally thought of the toy boats and rubber ducks for Baby Doll, but I suggested that, during the dialogue, Baby Doll be washing her laundry in the tub along with herself. It was wonderfully tacky. And Gadge also let me wear a funny, unflattering shower cap halfway down my forehead, with my ears sticking out. What joy it was to work with him on the comedy.

The end of that scene, by the way, is when Archie Lee can't contain his lasciviousness any longer, and we see him rush into the bathroom. Off-camera we hear the sound of his splashing into the tub over Baby Doll's howls of protest.

Before leaving for the location I had seen my first pair of Baby Doll pajamas in a New York store window. I couldn't resist the tie-in with my character's name, so I bought them on the spot and took them with me to Benoit. Both Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume designer, and Gadge thought that those rompers were perfect for my initial crib scene. Too bad I had no marketing sense then, because I never requested a cent for having made those Baby Doll pajamas so famous.

Other than the pajamas, Anna Hill and I shopped locally for my clothes. They had to be inexpensive and a couple of sizes too small, as if I had grown out of them. We came across a silly little white-satin pancake hat. The moment I saw that ridiculous hat I went mad for it. Anna Hill agreed that Baby Doll would be pretentious enough to wear a hat, along with her best suit, when going for a drive in Archie Lee's rattling, decrepit, mud-caed car. That satin pancake was the most chic and expensive hat in all Benoit. It cost $12.95, and Anna Hill even went so far as to give Baby Doll a pair of short, white gloves to complete her ensemble during her simple outings. What laughs we had while coming up with one outrageous idea after another! I believe Gadge wet his pants when Karl suggested that Baby Doll would be snotty enough to insist upon riding in the back seat of the old Chevy, making Archie Lee chauffeur her to town.

My most difficult acting scene was the one I call the "pig-sty scene". Although I can't remember any longer why Baby Doll was so upset, the scene called for hysterical crying and then laughter and tears together. I knew that if I was to continue fierce crying and add simultaneous laughter, I would have to enter the scene fully sobbing my heart out. I went behind the barn to do my preparation - hours and hours of preparation! I thought of every terrible memory I possibly could, and although I felt like hell, no tears would come. Finally our cameraman, Boris Kaufman, told Gadge, "I'm afraid we will have to shoot it right now or else postpone it until tomorrow because the light is going."

Gadge came to me and said, "We can't wait for you any longer, Carroll. Never mind. We'll do the scene without tears."

I was so humiliated to have kept Gadge and Eli and all the crew waiting all afternoon, and so frustrated over my lack of ability that while running to my position in front of the pig sty I burst into the most gorgeous, sloppy tears. My feelings swelled and overflowed convulsively into laughter, making it my most effective scene. But alas, the audience will never share that opinion. Flushed as I was with my histrionic triumph, I failed to notice that in the background those squealing, snorting, grunting, groveling, farting little piggies were completely stealing the scene away from me.

Gadge never wanted his cast to be aware of the camera. No technician was to worry the actors about a difficulty with the sound or the lights. Our concentration was given the highest priority. During the camera rehearsals, Gadge went so far as to whisper his instructions to the crew, to protect us from any concern about the technical aspects.

No scene was rigidly plotted, so during a take the camera operator was trained to follow the actors whatever they might do, to be alert for any unexpected movement or gesture, and to guide the camera accordingly. If we begin to edge out of frame and there was a split-second decision to be made, the operator knew that Gadge relied on him not to halt, but to make that decision. At one moment in the "swing scene", my head drifted sideways and hung over the swing nearly to the ground. It was lovely the way the operator caught that spontaneous dip.

Under no circumstances did any of us, in front of or behind the camera, stop or cut a take. Even if we said the wrong line or there was a technical hitch, we continued until Gadge called out, "Cut." He sometimes loved the effect created by a mistake. He often allowed the film to roll after the completion of the dialogue in order to capture some lingering expression or an added thought.

We had a scene on an outdoor double-seated swing where Vicarro seduces Baby Doll. I doubt that Eli and I could have done that provocative, sultry "swing scene" without the thoroughly professional, no-silly-jokes attitude on a Kazan set. I certainly would never had the concentration and courage to allow myself to become so totally passionate, or the security and willingness to reveal the depth of what was happening to me.

Given that ideal working atmosphere, the youthful enthusiasm with which I threw myself into the character, the story, and the relationship, I underwent the emotional confusion often felt by actors. The way I treated sweet, darling Karl Malden must have been intolerable for him. I thought so long and hard about my resentment and physical abhorrence of Archie Lee that I couldn't just turn it off. I'm sure Karl felt some of that attitude unintentionally directed at him. Mildred Dunnock resigned herself to my petulance toward her at one moment and protectiveness the next. I think she understood that for the duration of the film, I was going to relate to her as Aunt Rose Comfort. And gentle, refined Eli Wallach loomed in my imagination as that frightening, callous brute Silvo Vicarro, to whom I was also irresistably drawn. I soon found myself besotted by Eli/Vicarro.

Eli, however, could never quite take me seriously. He forever had a twinkle of understanding in his sparkling, dancing eyes. Whether I was showing an exaggerated fear of him or a scorching fervor, he regarded me quite rightly as an overimaginative, overheated pubescent. But that didn't dampen my ardor or keep me from making a complete fool of myself. I might as well describe how wrapped up I was in the Stanislavski method and how I behaved offscreen during the "unsatisfactory supper scene," because it is no secret any more - thanks to Eli.

In this scene, Aunt Rose Comfort is in the kitchen preparing her unsatisfactory supper, and Archie Lee is at the daft old lady's side, harassing her. Vicarro and I are kissing in the hallway just outside the kitchen. Vicarro and I then enter the kitchen with telltale smears of lipstick on our faces and our clothes askew.

Although they had finished filming Eli and me kissing, and had moved the camera away from us and into the kitchen set, I didn't release Eli. Since we were supposed to re-enter dishevelled and breathless and flushed, I just wouldn't stop kissing him. All through the lengthy dialogue between Milly and Karl, as well as several takes of that scene, I had Eli pinned against the outside wall of the set in an endless, inescapable kiss. Now another method actress might possibly kiss once again, so as to enter in the called-for emotional state, but no halfway preparation for this method actress. I wasn't willing to let one puff of steam evaporate. It was only the cue to enter the scene that saved Eli from being utterly suffocated by my determined and feverish assault.

Eli must have been surprised at first, then curious to see how far I intended to go, possibly a bit flattered, no doubt somewhat excited himself, and certainly amused. The last must be true, because I have never been able to shut him up about this indiscretion. That devil has told that story around the world, and it has been repeated to me by journalists from Calcutta to Chicago, and from Tallahassee to Bangkok. There is no way I can ever hope to live it down.

The Books: "By Myself and Then Some" (Lauren Bacall)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

By Myself and Then Some, by Lauren Bacall

This is an expanded and updated version of Lauren Bacall's first autobiography By Myself (excerpt here). We've got more photos (some really great ones), more anecdotes, more detail ... I suppose as one gets older, one sometimes remembers more about the past. Whether or not it is all true and accurate and fact-checkable is not really relevant. Bacall goes deep into the past, remembering her childhood in New York in the 30s, the shoes, the cigarettes, the smells she remembers, conversations she had ... We have the same stories about meeting Bogart, only more detail. She incorporates material from her second autobiography Now (excerpt here) and then moves on to the present - with her comeback, starting with her Oscar nomination for her touching wonderful performance in the abysmal The Mirror Has Two Faces. She hadn't had a part like that in a long time. And to see her in that film, no makeup, unglamorous ... for a woman of that age, and that reputation ... it was something else. I thought she was terrific. She had always worked, although more in the theatre in the 70s and 80s than on screen - but suddenly, she was in hot properties again, things that got notice: Dogville, Birth ... She was seen on red carpets, she's BFF with Nicole Kidman. Good for Betty Bacall. Her "sunset" years have not been a descent into obscurity. She has just gotten more and more parts, which is rare indeed. By Myself and Then Some covers all of that.

I also love the pissed-off title. I relate to it. She's alone, she's lonely. She wishes for a mate. She divorced Jason Robards in 1969 and since then? She's quite open about her loneliness in all of her books, how she longs for that man beside her, someone to be her companion, helpmate, whatever. At the end of Now, she wonders if it will ever happen for her again, if she will ever find another man. 10 years later, she publishes a book called By Myself and Then Some. It makes me laugh. I know how you feel, Lauren. I really do.

While By Myself and Then Some is full of so many showbiz anecdotes that Hollywood-lore crack addicts like myself will be kept happy and satiated for years to come, I wanted to pick an excerpt from her early years, before she was famous. (I mean, she became an international sensation at age 19, so there's not much time to look at the non-famous years!) One of the reasons I love memoirs and biographies of famous actors is because of those "early years" sections. I love watching how they formulated their dreams for themselves. I love reading about any "A ha!" moments they might have had. I love watching the dawning of the passion that will rule their whole lives. It's also exciting to read about those moments when people realize: You know what? I'm GOOD at this!

Lauren Bacall was a skinny flat-chested teenager, living with her mother in New York. She went to dancing classes and singing classes, and did some modeling, although she never felt she was any good. It was acting that turned her on. She pounded the pavement. She worked as an usher in a Broadway theatre (and actually was so striking that she got a mention in a review of a play ... THAT'S star quality!), she sat around at lunch counters with other actors, hearing about auditions, running around town, reading for this part, that part. Again, Lauren Bacall didn't struggle for long. It was a magazine cover she nailed that got the attention of Hollywood and Howard Hawks in particular, and she never had to play a bit part in a movie (unlike Ms. Marilyn Monroe, and so many others) - she never had to suffer on the sidelines ... Hawks pushed right to center stage. Bacall's story is unique. So many people were put under personal contract and we never hear anything about them. So many of "Howard Hughes' girls" kept on retainer were just foolish teenagers who were a 1940s version of Coco from Fame (that awful scene). Lauren Bacall was picked by the right director at the right time. He did not squander her. He did not take advantage of her. He was very very careful in the first thing he put her in, and who he put her against (Bogart). And when his little creation began behaving in a way he did not approve (falling in love with Bogart), emotionally Howard Hawks cut off from her. He was DONE with her, very pissed off. An interesting Pygmalion relationship there. He felt he created her, and he felt that falling in love was a useless waste of her energy - she should be focusing on creating her mystique, remaining separate, working on her craft ... But to quote the end of What's Up, Doc: "Listen, kiddo, ya can't fight a tidal wave."

But I wanted to choose an excerpt today that was from Bacall's early years in New York, taking classes, modeling, hoping ... for something to happen to her.

Oh, and I also find it interesting (and she has spoken a lot about this) that she has terrible debilitating stage fright. She trembles uncontrollably. Her head shakes (she mentions becoming aware of it on her first day of shooting To Have and Have Not) ... her hand trembles ... it is beyond her control. The "tricks" she performs on herself, to just allow herself to be up there in front of people (head down, chin down, arm down ... ) - are extraordinary, I admire the smart-ness of her coping skills very much ... but lots of people have coping skills and don't become PHENOMS at the age of 19. Her "coping skills" (head down, chin down, look up while head is down so head doesn't shake, arm down, cross one arm over the other) - all of that stuff became her "look", her persona, what she was famous for.

Amazing! What began as a way to stop her head from shaking - became her "trademark". Bacall is smart. She's not just smart as an actress, but she has the other kind of smarts: smarts about herself. And the choices she made only made her seem stronger, more specific, more herself. None of those invented gestures come off as studied, or stiff. It looks like Lauren Bacall is just one cool dame, who doesn't NEED a lot of extraneous movement. When really it all began as a way to deal with nervousness. I love that!

Onward to the excerpt:

EXCERPT FROM By Myself and Then Some, by Lauren Bacall

I continued venting my energy on acting. At the end of the year, students of the New York School of the Theatre performed for parents. I had learned the portion scene from Romeo and Juliet. For weeks I studied it - during class, in school, on the street (why I wasn't hit by a truck I'll never know), at home. The day came and my moment with it. And the shaking started. I got through it, with Mother, Grandma, Charlie and Rosalie, Vera and Jack in attendance. It must have been awful - but what mattered was that I had done it, and that meant I would continue. No stopping me now.

My restlessness with regular school was due to the fact that I wanted to get on with real life - or away from real and on to pretend. I cut classes three times one week - once to go to the zoo, the other times for Bette Davis - and wrote a note saying I'd been ill and signed my mother's name. I always got to the morning mail first, but one morning I didn't. There was a letter from the principal's office saying I'd been out and they'd like to speak with Mother. What a scene! My tears - 'Oh, Mother, forgive me, I'll never do it again.' Mother asking how I'd got away with it. My confession to signing her name to a note. She: 'Don't you know that's against the law? That you can go to jail for that?' What was it in me - why and how was I able to do such things? For a girl who was dedicated to truth, it was most strange. Was it just mischief? Or was it a streak of my father - perish the thought! It reminded me of a time when I was about eleven. My friends and I used to walk through the five-and-ten-cent store. That's what it really was then, you could buy almost everything for five or ten cents. As I had no money, I used to look at all the appetizing items on the counters and imagine which I would buy. On one counter were pencil cases - cheap little pencil cases, but I'd never had one and I wanted one so badly. So badly that I took it. I suppose most kids have done something like that once in their lives - there's so much to see, to buy. And when you don't have the money, so much that is beyond your reach - even a silly pencil case. I went home as usual and Mother noticed the case. She took me by both arms, looked at me, and said, 'When did you get this pencil case?'

'I found it.' Eyes slightly off center.

'Where did you find it?'

'On the street, Mother.'

'You're lying, Betty. It's brand new. Now tell me where you got it.'

My chin trembled - I couldn't help it - I was caught, and frightened of what I had done. 'I took it from the five-and-ten,' in the smallest voice - a voice only birds could hear.

'Well, you are going right back there and return it. And when you return it you are to give it to the woman behind the counter, tell her that you took it, and apologize.'

'How can I ever do that? I'll be punished! Can't I just put it back on the counter and leave?'

'No - you do as I say. Let this be a lesson to you. Taking what isn't yours is stealing - it's against the law. If you return it now, they will do nothing to you.'

She walked with me to the store, went in with me, and quietly stood to one side while I made my confession. The woman took it back, and it was an experience I never forgot - nor was it ever followed by another like it. Facing a situation head on was the only way to deal with anything. I learned the lesson early. My mother gave me a solid foundation. Any little quirks along the way were my own. It was hard growing up. (It's still hard.)

I studied journalism at Julia Richman to fulfill a momentary dream of becoming a reporter. It must have been the result of a comic strip - that and seeing His Girl Friday. Years before when I saw a rerun of Loretta Young in The White Parade, saw how beautiful she was, how brave, how dedicated, I knew I would be a nurse. That is until my first sight of blood and the wave of nausea that accompanied it. The nursing dream became a thing of the past.

All this came from wanting so desperately to be someone - something; to have my own identity, my own place in life. The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them. I was always sure mine would come true - one of them, anyway. Clearly my fantasies resulted from my identification with movies and certain stars. Like the time I had seen Margaret Sullavan in a movie. She was a wonderful actress and I loved her looks. I wanted to look like that. My hair was long - it had been for years. Time for a change. But my mother and grandmother would be furious, so I pondered for days. Finally I decided I'd pondered enough. Time for action. I was to have my hair trimmed. Mother gave me the money. I took off for the shop. I was so excited - I'd leave 86th Street looking like me, I'd return looking like Margaret Sullavan. Thrilling. I sat in the barber chair and told the man what I wanted - I had a small photograph of Margaret Sullavan with me. He looked at me and said, 'Are you sure that's what you want?' 'I'm sure. Cut it all off.' He picked up his scissors and began. One side went and I looked cockeyed. It was awful, but it would be lovely when both sides were done. They finally were. I looked in the mirror. The hair was Margaret Sullavan, all right - very short, just below the ears, bangs - but the fact was still mine. The two definitely did not go together. But it was too late now, there was nothing for it but to go home and face the music. I walked in the door and when my grandmother saw me she gave a horrified scream, as did my mother. 'Are you crazy - cutting that beautiful hair? Whatever got into you?' 'All I wanted to do was look like Margaret Sullavan. I love it - I've had my long hair long enough. I'm not a baby anymore.' But it was awful - I looked hideous and I hated it. But it would grow back - I hoped. Fortunately, it did before I had finished high school. I was an awkward mess anyway, the hair just added to the picture.

Movies were accessible to me, of course - they were the cheapest entertainment form that I knew - twenty-five cents for entry. My exposure to the theatre was almost non-existent, as I could simply not afford it. I was given a very special treat in 1939 - seeing John Gielgud as Hamlet. The combination of John Gielgud, Shakespeare, and a Broadway theatre was almost too much for me. The feeling of walking into a legitimate theatre - the shape of it, the boxes, balconies, upholstered seats, and the curtain with the magical stage behind it. What seemed like thousands of people crowded inside. So this was what a real theatre was like! It lived up to every vision I had ever conjured up in my mind. I reached my seat, program clutched in hand. The house lights dimmed - the chatter ceased - the entire audience was focused on the stage - the hush - the feeling of awe - and the power actors have to affect people's lives while they sit in a theatre. At the rise of the curtain one could feel the expectation, the concentration of everyone in that house. What followed depended on what was given by the actors - they could do almost anything, they could lead an audience anywhere, make them feel anything. The power of it - it was unforgettable. That day I was transported for two and a half hours from my perch high in the balcony. Even the wave of applause that came at the end of each ac did not shake me back to reality. Would I ever come close? Was there any way for me to be anywhere near that good? Gielgud's performance was so affecting that, despite my youth and my inability to understand Shakespeare's language totally, I left the theatre in a complete daze, bumping into people, being stepped on, unaware of where I was. Since then, of course, I have realized that Gielgud's Hamlet was one of the great performances of all time. And I can still see the beauty of that head and his total immersion in his role. It took some time for me to return to my reality.

The youthful curly-haired beauty of William Holden

... as boxer/violinist Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy (1939):

Staring you down.

Just look at that screenshot. Gena Rowlands stops me in my tracks. Time and time again.

There's something jagged in her. Something ultimately unresolved.

Catharsis - in its classic sense - does not exist for her (or for us, in watching her). Because catharsis implies release, ending, or at the very LEAST a breather. Gena Rowlands, in her best and most enduring roles, has no such breathers built into her work. It is not messy or self-indulgent - but she is an actress on the edge (or, should I say, under the influence ...)Her emotions do not line up in easily classifiable buckets: sadness, joy, rage. Everything is mixed up. She cries but you don't feel grief being released. She laughs and you hear only the wince of pain behind it, no joy whatsoever. She expresses anger and all you want to do is burst into laughter at how absurd she is. Things get a little scary. And yet she is nothing less than 100% specific. Ragged edges and all.

And yet again: in her personal life, she would retreat to Connecticut to the home she shared with husband John Cassavetes and live the quietest of suburban lives - raising her kids, disappearing for sometimes years on end, gardening, driving kids to soccer practice, whatever. There was nothing tabloid-worthy, nothing dramatic even, no divorces or car crashes ... Her husband was an alcoholic, but that's certainly not just a famous person's disease - lots of people are alcoholics. The two of them fought like cats and dogs (from day one), but they loved each other, too, and respected each other. She did not yearn for the spotlight, she did not keep her name in the papers. She retreated, making sandwiches and playing in the pool with her kids. Before emerging again to put all of that other stuff she had going on, all of that crazy she had going on ... into her next role. I love that about her. Her pillbox hat and neat upswept hair, her 1960s fur hat, her white gloves and her kids and her dog ... the whole image - compared to what she was able to portray in, say, Opening Night. Holy shit. I LOVE the dichotomy. It is classic Rowlands.

Nobody like her. What is also truly astonishing is that she doesn't only play crazy. Just watch her as the repressed elegant homewrecker in Woody Allen's Another Woman to get the sense of how GOOD she really was. The material dictated her acting. She knew how to dial down the crazy, eliminate it all together, and play that part (to perfection, I might add - it's one of my favorites of all of her roles). I'll let Roger Ebert say what I'm trying to say:

There is a temptation to say that Rowlands has never been better than in this movie, but that would not be true. She is an extraordinary actor who is usually this good, and has been this good before, especially in some of the films of her husband, John Cassavetes. What is new here is the whole emotional tone of her character. Great actors and great directors sometimes find a common emotional ground, so that the actor becomes an instrument playing the director's song.

Cassavetes is a wild, passionate spirit, emotionally disorganized, insecure and tumultuous, and Rowlands has reflected that personality in her characters for him - white-eyed women on the edge of stampede or breakdown.

Allen is introspective, considerate, apologetic, formidably intelligent, and controls people through thought and words rather than through physicality and temper. Rowlands now mirrors that personality, revealing in the process how the Cassavetes performances were indeed "acting" and not some kind of ersatz documentary reality. To see "Another Woman" is to get an insight into how good an actress Rowlands has been all along.

Absolutely.

She's my favorite actress.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous

Over our family vacation - we were all joking about how Jeff Donovan and promotions of Burn Notice were everywhere. Commercials on television, ads in magazines ... Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff. You could not (and cannot) escape. People would open up the NY Times to do the crossword and see Jeff's huge mug staring back at them. Or you'd have the paper opened up, and across the back - a double spread - JEFF!! It became a joke. "Uhm, not sure if you're noticed, but Jeff Donovan is freakin' everywhere right now."

Jeff is my brother's friend - kind of an honorary O'Malley - I've known him for years. He's fun, funny, and loyal. He's beloved by his huge rowdy group of buddies, all of whom have been tight-knit and close for years. And he is really nice to Cashel (who even got to go to one of the screenings of Jeff's films - AND got to ask a question at the QA after the screening!) . So you know what? Being nice to Cashel is all I need to know about a person, as far as I'm concerned. I met Jeff right after Blair Witch 2 came out - which, naturally, did NOT go over as well as he had hoped - although he had a pretty humorous attitude about it - so now, to see him hit it huge with Burn Notice is damn cool.

Last year, you could kind of feel it coming ... I'd be walking down the street and see something like this go by and I'd think: Uhm ...okay ... that was Jeff going by, for God's sake ... I think this is gonna be huge ...

Burn Notice was picked up again for Season 2. Posters have started appearing everywhere - even more intensely since it's now a returning hit - so the subway stations are filled with Jeff, and I see Jeff float by on the sides of busses on a daily basis. One morning I got into an elevator at 30 Rock and nearly had a heart attack because Jeff's enormous face was all over the interior elevator walls - larger than life - a promotion for the show in every single elevator at 30 Rock.

And today I go to my traffic Sitemeter for my blog.

This is what I see.

Jeff. You are now omnipresent.

Congrats.

At long last: William Holden

That project I have kept alluding to over the past 2 or 3 weeks:

My William Holden tribute is up at House Next Door!

Go check it out!

Judy Holliday:

She's so damn brilliant it's almost daunting. I need to write more about her. David Thomson wrote:

The story goes that Adam's Rib was a conspiracy between Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, and Garson Kanin to convince Harry Cohn, the boss of Columbia, that Judy Holliday should play the dumb blonde in the film of Born Yesterday. It is a pleasant memoir from one of the most talented cliques within the movie world. And it is probably based on truth, even if we would be naive to put much trust in benign conspiracies.

The film itself looks set up, especially in that early scene when attorney Hepburn interviews client Holliday. The scene is long, elaborately written, but filmed in one blatantly convenient setup - convenient, that is, for the virtuoso playing from Holliday. She does not simply steal the scene, but plays with it like a cat with a mouse. The effect is the more startling and contradictory in that such technical mastery is emanating from a character ostensibly stupid, impetuous, and imperceptive. Even granted Hepburn's complicity, the upstaging is lurid. There are moments at which Hepburn seems to say to herself, "My, my, what a clever girl you are." Holliday seldom looks at Hepburn. Like a child, she stares away into emptiness, the better to concentrate on herself. Yet, without looking, she dominates, so that Hepburn ends up as edgy and hesitant as the client should be.

Apparently, the "trick" worked and Cohn put Holliday in Born Yesterday (she had originated the role on Broadway). Holliday ended up winning the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday.

Naturally, I recently re-watched Born Yesterday because of, uhm, that project I've been working on.

The famous gin scene below:

One of my favorite moments is when Holden shows up at the door after the gin game, and hands her a pile of books for her to read. She turns to go put them on the table, saying, "I'll tryyyy ..." in that crazy voice ... Please look at the expression on her face as she takes the books. Please notice how Judy Holliday somehow suggests the heaviness of the books - like: I'm supposed to read these??? A book??? What're you crazy?? But it's all done in just a look in her eye - a devastated look - and a slight gesture showing the weight of the books.

And a great spontaneous kiss between them, with no preamble. Don't miss the last moment with the light-switch.

Slam DUNK.

And ... scene!